Swan Tower

Want to know how the Victorian book is going to end?

Here you go:



So there's a funny story behind this. We're in India, going from (I think) Mysore to Bangalore, and I'm staring out the window listening to music. My iPod's on shuffle, and this song comes up. And the following mental conversation ensues.

SUBCONSCIOUS: We're totally putting this on the soundtrack for the Victorian book.
ME: What?
SUBCONSCIOUS: For the end. Or rather, the Climactic Moment.
ME: Self, we don't know what the Climactic Moment is going to be. Because we don't know how the book is going to end.
SUBCONSCIOUS: It's going to end like this, of course!
ME: It doesn't work that way. We fit the music to the book, not the book to the music.
SUBCONSCIOUS: Uh-huh. That's why the second half of Doppelganger maps perfectly to "Amazonia."
ME: That's different.
SUBCONSCIOUS: How?
ME: Listening to the song gave me plot ideas. You're saying I have to generate plot ideas to fit the song.
SUBCONSCIOUS: Exactly. Now get to work.

The subconscious always wins these fights. I gave it some thought, and realized that of the two-three very vague ways I had thought of ending the book, one of them fit much better with the mood of the piece than the others did -- specifically the last minute. (It's instrumental, if you haven't listened to it yet; hence not really a spoiler.) Odds are rather good that we'll be going down that path.

Now I just have to figure out why the book will end that way . . . .

I'll use my French horn icon because, well, it's what I use for music. But given that I'm talking about Metallica, it might not be the most appropriate choice.

Or is it? You see, this post is about one of my odd collections: Weird Metallica Covers. I'm not just talking about S&M, though since we've brought that up let me take a moment to drool over what happens when you pair a metal band with an orchestra. (The band acquires body and the orchestra acquires teeth. Oh yeah.) No, I'm talking about piano solo, grand harp duet, cello quartet, plus Rodrigo y Gabriela tackling the odd song here and there.

(For the curious: the most frequently-covered song I've got is "One," which clocks in at four and a half renditions, not counting the original. ["Half" because the Rodrigo y Gabriela version segues into "Take 5" partway through.] It's narrowly trailed by "Enter Sandman" and "Master of Puppets," with four apiece.)

Can anybody recommend more of this to me? Or, y'know, odd covers of things other than Metallica. I have a string quartet doing Evanescence, Richard Cheese doing lounge-singer covers of all kinds of random crap (including "Down with the Sickness," which is freaking hilarious in lounge style), Rondellus doing early medieval covers of Black Sabbath in Latin. Techno remixes of opera, shamisen duet of Radiohead -- if it's a weird mashup of instruments or styles, I'm there*. What should I look for?


*(I haven't actually soundtracked any of my Driftwood stories, but in the back of my head, this is what it calls for.)

My parents linked me to this cover of Toto's "Africa" by a Slovenian a capella group (whose great performance is especially marked by its simulated thunderstorm at the beginning), and it made me realize:

I really like good a capella.

And, in parallel with my taste in instrumental music, what I especially like is neither the melody nor the beat, but the stuff in the middle: the harmony, the changing chords in the background, all that good substance. I never really paid attention to that layer of "Africa" before now, but something about hearing it rendered in human voices made it really appeal to me. So help me, o internets: can you recommend good a capella albums that do a lot of that kind of thing? (Not covers of Toto songs; strong and interesting harmonies.)

A surprise phone call tonight from my cousin, who lives in Florida was in the area for various things, suggesting that now might be a good time for the hand-off I had e-mailed him about months ago.

That abruptly, my French horn was gone.

It isn't my horn; it never was. It belongs to my cousin, who played it professionally before giving that over in favor of the bass. And it isn't abrupt. I haven't played with an ensemble since the Lowell House 1812 Overture, Arts First weekend of my senior year; I haven't played regularly since before that. I brought the horn with me to Indiana, where it has sat, unplayed, for six years. I've known that I won't be playing with an orchestra or wind ensemble again. And back in February, I contacted him to say that I should probably give it back.

I don't know how long I had it. They gave me a single horn when we started in sixth grade, because that's how you start off; with the training wheels. Then they upgrade you to the double horn: another valve, another layer of tubing. (Way more heavy.) Did I play a school horn at first? I think I must have, before my cousin gave me the horn he used to play, a Holton that was -- so the story went -- one of three or four played by some famous musician at the Holton factory, but not the one he chose to take. Good enough for him to try, though. More than good enough for me.

Three years of high school, certainly. Three years of college, before I stopped. Probably at least a year or two more than that. Long enough for me to get sentimental.

It isn't the object. It's the admission that I'm done: I may still remember fingerings of pieces long gone, and listen instinctively for the horn line in any piece of music that has one -- why do you think I love film scores so much? -- but I'm not going to play again. I've lost my embouchure, and probably half the abs that used to support me on the high notes. (I used to still have decent abs, even after I stopped dancing, which I think must have been caused by propelling air through more than four yards of brass.)

Why did I pick this instrument? I don't know. My mother always wanted to play it. One of my teachers told us years later that we had all been steered toward it because we had good faces, but that was before the orthodontist got hold of me. I don't recall making the choice.

But anybody who did band in high school knows the types. Me? I'm not a trumpet player, or a flute, a clarinet, a drummer. I am very much a horn player.

It's hard to let go of the symbols and tools of something that used to be such a part of your life.




Dear Mom and Dad: if you get rid of the piano before I get my own, I will cry.

I'm not sleepy yet, so you get another post about writing.

Or in this case, soundtracking.

I've had the habit of listening to specific pieces of music while writing since I got seriously going on what turned out to be my first complete novel. But it's generally been a small number of songs associated with each book: usually about two. (And by "associated" I mean "I listened to them most of the time while writing the book," which does, yes, lead to a terrifying number of repetitions.)

But since coming to grad school and getting involved in the local gaming community, I've picked up a local habit of making soundtracks for games: character soundtracks for the ones I'm playing in, game soundtracks for the one I ran. And I speculated, some time after I started doing so, that one day I might find myself making a proper novel soundtrack.

That day is today. Or rather, that novel is this novel; I knew months ago that Midnight Never Come would be the pioneer in this field.

The reason is obvious: as I've mentioned before, the novel grew out of one segment of that game I ran. I made quite a few soundtracks for Memento, and each segment basically ended up getting ten songs, which meant I had ten songs already associated with the seeds of this story. Not all of them are applicable, of course, since the novel is not identical to the game, but it gave me enough of a starting block that it felt quite natural to create a proper soundtrack for this book.

It's an in-progress thing; I haven't chosen songs for certain characters yet (like oh, say, Deven), and a lot of the "event" tracks are also undecided. But I thought I'd provide a sampler, so that anybody who recognizes these songs will have an idea of the mood of the book. (Mostly you need a good film score collection for this one; I'm not the sort of writer who can use a lot of modern pop music to inspire a sixteenth-century novel.)

( The soundtrack to date . . . . )

Okay, sleepy now. Bedtime.