I have a habit of building soundtracks to listen to while writing. Sometimes they’re quite straightforward — I’ll listen to Satie, Debussy, or Chopin when I’m writing anything structurally tricky, because they help me concentrate — but more often than not, I’ll also build soundtracks that put me into a state of mind that helps me to plot rather than write.

These latter sorts of soundtracks can be more raucous, as I won’t be writing while listening to them. In that sense, they’re more like a soundtrack for a non-existent film or TV series. The longest such selection I’ve built is for GOON SQUAD and is, according to Spotify, currently five hours and twenty one minutes long, comprising of 94 tracks.

If you would care to go for a paddle in the sonic ambience of GOON SQUAD, you’ll find the Spotify thingy below. Before you do that, however, I’d like to offer a few notes and suggestions to heighten your audio enjoyment.

Switch off shuffle and repeat. In the best traditions of mix tapes, the listening experience is curated, which is a posh way of saying I didn’t bung these tracks together willy-nilly. They have an order and there are crescendos and diminuendos along the running order.
Don’t study the track listing. Just set it playing and leave it running. Part of the pleasure of this is the occasional sense of “Just what the hell am I listening to here?”  There are oddities aplenty. You can always check later.
There are lots of covers. One of the things about the world of the GOON SQUAD is that it’s like ours, but it isn’t. I like the idea that what we consider the definitive version of a song, isn’t necessarily the same as theirs. A couple of such tracks are also intended as personal or situational themes and multiple versions of particular tracks (with the sole exception of what we would consider the original) appear. Just go with it.
Some tracks chime with specific things from the story, others don’t. Some are profoundly obvious and I don’t apologise for those at all; their absence would be far more grating than their presence.
Some tracks just suggest times and spaces. Manchester’s been pretty busy down the years even without the GOON SQUAD along to complicate things. It was recently shown that Manchester was the most linguistically — and, by extension, culturally — diverse city in Western Europe, with some 200 languages spoken there. It’s a happening sort of place, so don’t expect every song to be in English.

Right, I think you’re all set. Below is a player or, if you have the Spotify client, probably easier to use the SPotify URI link. Hope you enjoy the ride. Please keep your hands inside the car at all times. Off you go…

Spotify URI: Goon Squad Soundtrack