Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "music"

Like many people who work, I have a commute, an unpleasant, unpredictable commute. Some days it’s 22 minutes, others it’s 90. Music gets me through. The radio, more accurately the music—I hate people talking on the radio – blasting through the 10 speakers in my car is my salvation. Let me clarify, not just music but the lyrics married to the music—I hate music without words—is my salvation. Words are my freedom and my salvation. If you’ve read my books, or follow my blog, you will know, for me, words are the thing.

If I was at all musical, I’d have been a songwriter instead of just a writer. Thus, I love songs that tell a story, that paint a picture. Painting a picture with words is what I do—try to do.

I particularly love songs that tell a story. I started out writing short stories so I understand the challenge of telling a story, creating characters and setting a tale in context economically. Neither of my books is very long, and my next release, a novella is an ambitious undertaking, telling the story of man in 12,000+ words, so I appreciate brevity, economy of words.

In this post I will look at the lyrics of some of my favorite songs—some old, some new but all telling a story, painting a picture, economically, with words.

My current favorite song is “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon.

A backless dress and some beat up sneaks,
My discothèque, Juliet teenage dream.
I felt it in my chest as she looked at me.
I knew we were bound to be together,
Bound to be together

She took my arm,
I don't know how it happened.
We took the floor and she said,

"Oh, don't you dare look back.
Just keep your eyes on me."
I said, "You're holding back,"
She said, "Shut up and dance with me!"
This woman is my destiny

I love this line: “A backless dress and some beat up sneaks” it paints a strong picture without a lot of detail but you get a feel for the sort of person she is. "Oh, don't you dare look back. Just keep your eyes on me."—another great line. It allows you to understand where they are in their lives and that she is telling him to forget everything, to stop thinking and just feel.

Watch the video.

Then there is Imagine Dragons’, “I Bet my Life On You:”

I've been around the world and never in my wildest dreams
Would I come running home to you
I've told a million lies but now I tell a single truth
There's you in everything I do
In just four lines you get a couple’s history and a hard learned truth.

Watch the video.

An old favorite is “American Pie” by Don McLean. These lyrics never fail to bring a smile to my face; they are absurd, but vivid.

When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me

Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned

And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died

Watch the video.

And, finally, the brilliant “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Every lyric clearly paints s a specific spot in time, and the sense of frustration: “I can’t take it anymore.”

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can't take it anymore

Watch the video.

As I’ve said, I try to use words economically to tell my stories. Below is a collection of some of my favorite lines. Selections cover everything from a protagonist facing impending death:

Death holds me in its thrall as once the beauty of men enthralled me
I can see death gathering like the coming darkness: a confederacy of shadows, a blackness that is legion
―from “The Cross,” Damaged Angels

To sex—both solitary and coupled:

In the shower, I wash carefully, paying special attention to my asshole. I feel it pucker against my intruding finger. Open. Sucking. Greedy. Full of need. Quicksilver seed scatters. Sown on white tile. Fruitless. Sliding down the drain.

He steps forward. Holds my head between his thighs. A pulse beats against my temple. The masculine scent of him fills my nostrils. My open mouth. Welcoming. The triumvirate of his manhood.
―from “Precious Cargo,” Damaged Angels

To a midnight description of the man who would become my husband to a Winter afternoon.

Caught in a rectangle of lilac light, Val sat in a black leather and chrome chair. Sandy hair, sable soft, crawled like moss over the white rock of his body. He sprawled in the chair, a giant like Gulliver, too large for the room.
Outside, the afternoon had failed. A keening wind mourned the retired sun and kicked at stray sheets of newspaper in its loneliness, making them swirl like angry ghosts. Sheets of silver sleet angled down from the tarnished sky, lacquering the streets with black ice that made a comedy of ambulation.
―from “Intermezzo,” Damaged Angels

Watch the trailer for “Damaged Angels.”

The death last week of Maurice White, who founded Earth, Wind and Fire, made me, like a lot of people sad. The music of Earth, Wind and Fire marked the beginning of my journey to adulthood. Their music is also inextricably tied to my relationship with my freshman roommate Yone, the first friend I ever had. For me, listening as radio stations played their songs back-to-back was more than a tribute to Maurice White, or a celebration of their musical canon. I was listening to part of the soundtrack of my life. This realization got me thinking about the role of music in my life and writing.

In my books, I use music—to locate the story firmly in time, or to express something about the characters, or their emotion or mood. In What Binds Us, the signature song for Matthew and Thomas-Edward is Randy Crawford’s “Where There was Darkness,” which describes the gratitude they feel for having, unexpectedly found each other; the song’s lyrics express what they cannot yet articulate to each other and they don’t in fact recognize the song is their shared truth.

In Unbroken, “The Morning After,” the theme song from The Poseidon Adventure informs Lincoln’s character—it’s what gives him strength and purpose. Deliberately there is no music in Vampire Rising. Taking its place is silence and the screaming of mockingbirds. Indeed, there is very little sound save the sound of hatred and violence and religious piety, and beneath that, the steady hum of love.

Growing up we listed to calypso, the Ray Coniff Singers and Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. I remember The Mighty Sparrow’s “The Congo Man,” and “The Girl from Ipanema” which, in my memory, plays in an endless loop in the background of my childhood. Later, on AM radio, we heard Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” and Helen Reddy’s anthemic “I Am Woman.”

It wasn’t until college, though, that I heard R & B, soul, and funk. Freshman year, my roommate, Yone, introduced me to WDAS and Royce Rose and Parliament Funkadelic and the iconic Earth Wind and Fire. This became the soundtrack to my early college years. Later, Prince’s yearning, declarative “I Wanna Be Your Lover” became the anthem of my lonely, yearning self. Diana Ross’ “Upside Down” and Teena Marie’s “I Need Your Lovin’” echoed the sounds of my heart breaking for the first time. And later the Spanish version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” reflected my head-over-heels love for Germain, the first boy who loved me back. And still later, Randy Crawford’s “Endlessly” summarized how I loved him; for years I closed every letter, every card to him with “endlessly,” followed by my name. I never knew if he ever understood what that was a reference to.

Later, after I met Stanley, “This Ain’t no Thinking Thing” by Trace Adkins became “our song.” Later it was replaced by Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” That was the song playing as, hand-in-hand, we walked down the aisle at our wedding. We caught some flak for that from some who said a song celebrating a one night stand was inappropriate but, for us, for me, the lyrics “This ain't love, it's clear to see,” was exactly what we gay and men and women have been hearing from our straight counterparts since time immemorial—hell Lincoln’s journey in Unbroken begins when his parents tell him he can’t fall in love with another boy—the lyrics second part: “But darling, stay with me,” for us spoke of our plea to each other. The world’s disapprobation means nothing as long as you love me and stay with me.

All of these songs—even the ones that remind me of heartbreak and an alienating, painful childhood—come together to form the sound track of my life.

So what about you? What songs are on the soundtrack of your life? Tell me in the comments below.

Check back next Tuesday for Part 2, where I’ll be talking about smell and memory.

I am enamored of pianos—if not simply obsessed with them. It’s one of the few things we don’t own that I’ve always wanted. Even though I’m not at all musical.

I suppose that is one reason pianos always seem to appear in my books.

It is at a piano that Thomas Edward and Dondi’s brother, Matthew first connect in my first novel, What Binds Us:

I was wandering the corridors of that huge house when I passed by an open door. Light and music splashed onto the hall carpet. Someone was playing the piano. I stopped to listen.

“Don’t just stand out there,” the person said. “Come on in.”

So I did. A rosewood concert grand piano held court in the middle of the room. Its elaborately scrolled legs knelt on a Tabriz carpet the color of dreams. Matthew sat in a lyre-back chair in front of the piano. His legs were stretched out and his bare, pale feet curled around one of the piano’s massively carved legs. His hands rested on the pale ivory keys. He stared at me with his grey eyes.

If Dondi was an epilogue, Matthew was a prologue, a promise waiting to be kept. He seemed about to begin. He seemed to be waiting for something. I asked him once, years later, what he’d been waiting for. He surprised me by answering simply, “You.”

“Hi,” I said. “I was walking by and heard the music.” Then, when I realized he’d stopped playing, I added, “Oh, don’t stop.”

He withdrew his fingers from the keys. “You missed tea.”

I had taken one of their cars and driven into the village. I told him this.

“Oh,” he said. “We missed you.”

“That piano is beautiful.”

“It is, isn’t it? It was built by the Steinway brothers in eighteen eighty-eight.”

I looked around the room. The walls were painted a pale gold, the sofas and chairs covered in a pale gold damask. The late afternoon sun’s bounty piled at the windows like bullion. The only real colors in the room were his pink lips and his red silk pajamas.

There is a piano in my allegorical novella, Vampire Rising. In fact it is at a piano that we first meet one of the main characters, the 400 year Vampire, Gatsby Calloway:

It was a room of pearl grays and faded gold damask, dark wood and darker carpets, all shadowed in flickering candlelight. Gatsby was seated at an ebony nine-and-a-half foot Bosendorfer Concert grand piano—the one with ninety-five keys, rather than the standard eighty-eight—which dominated the room. Gatsby himself had a pewter finish: silvery hair swept back, eyes like pieces of ice, pale cheekbones that gleamed. He was cool and pale, champagne in an ice bucket. Playing selections from “A Chorus Line” for a crowd of stalwart admirers, he was radiant in that darkened room. He was gorgeous and charismatic, a charmer of snakes and men.

He looked up and, seeing Barnabas in the doorway, gasped, for Barnabas was as beautiful as he’d remembered: his caramel skin glowed with youth and vigor. His wide, innocent eyes were clear and his dark hair was cropped short; gone was the defiant retro Afro he’d worn in high school. Staring at him, the frisson of lust and love that shot through him caused Gatsby to miss a note, and frown. He bent over the keyboard; his face dipped into shadow, dissolving into triangles of violet and purple.

So I suppose it should come as no surprise that there is, of course, a piano in my new book, In His Eyes, that is played by Micah, one of the main characters in the book. Actually, there are several pianos in the book; each one is as critical to Micah’s life as they are to his relationships. This following passage is one of the most telling in the book, I think.

Instead of going upstairs to Calvin’s room to rest as he’d intended, he found himself drawn into the music room. He sat at the piano and raised the lid. Soon, his fingers were skipping over the keys, teasing and tickling the ivory, to draw out their secrets. The room became filled with the music of his childhood, which, until then, had seemed very far away, lost in the distant past.

Dusk was gathering when he heard the key in the front door, followed by the sound of voices. He stopped playing abruptly when Calvin and another man walked into the music room. The man beside Calvin was dressed in surgical greens. He was diminutive and very light skinned. A thatch of chemically straightened hair lay across his head like roadkill. Though not altogether unattractive, he wore a pinched disapproving expression. His expression, combined with his extreme paleness, reminded Micah of spoiled milk.

“You play very well,” the man said grudgingly.

“I didn’t know you played piano,” Calvin said.

“I do. I have since I was three years old. My saddest memory is standing on my neighbor’s porch across the street, a week after my parents kicked me out, and watching as they had the piano my grandparents bought me when I was six years old, hauled away.”

In His Eyes officially releases on August 1, 2017, but is available for pre-order now.

In my next blog post, I will explore the music that makes up the sound track to In His Eyes.

I’ve talked about this before but I believe every life has a soundtrack. My own life’s soundtrack is dominated by Donna Summer, Grace Jones, and Michael Jackson. Music is a marker—every song can take us back to a specific moment in time, or fix us to the mood we were in when we first heard it. Thus couples always have “our song.”

As I said, every life has its own soundtrack. The same is true, I believe of books. Songs referred to in books, can set a mood, it can also anchor the story in time, just as descriptions of fashion and hairstyles can. All of my novels have soundtracks and my latest, , which releases a week from today (August 1) is no exception.

This post is dedicated to looking at the songs from this book. I’ve included the Chapter headings in which the song appears for easy reference.

60. Independence Day

“Independence Day” by Bruce Springsteen. Each character is different so each has his own taste in music. This song sums up Reid’s inner tumult that leads up to the chapter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKzOH...

83. Dry Kisses

“I’ll Tumble for Ya” by Culture Club. I choose this song for the particular scene it appears it for two reasons—one the song is one of joy. It is a reminder that even in sorrow we can extract joy. The other reason was because the lyrics can be hard to make sense of, much like the action that unfolds along with the song in this chapter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwb9-...

117. Piano

Gershwin’s “Love is Here to Stay.” Micah is a pianist who loves Gershwin. In my post last week, I talked about the role of pianos in the book. When Micah sits down and plays this song we, the reader, glimpse something we hadn’t quite seen before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zq7w...

135. I Am the Man for You, Baby

“I Am The Man For You Baby” by Edwin Starr. For me this was a sweet moment shared by two characters. It had a perfect nostalgic and hopeful feel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_yyf...

138. You Are My Friend

“You are My Friend” by Sylvester. I’ve always loved Sylvester’s version of this song. It’s joy, it’s gratitude, it’s acknowledgement. As people, we don’t always see what is right in front of us and this is true of the characters in this book as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryPpi...