Chris Jones has never read Gary Smith -- and why

that's funny... whenever i wrote at home i ALWAYS had music playing. same with reading books. i remember reading 'compulsion,' meyer levin's book on the leopold/loeb kidnaping-murder case, with 'who's next' playing over and over on the turnstile. it somehow seemed to fuse with the words i was reading.

 

I usually like to write in silence (there's a soundtrack going in my head at all times anyway), but when I do write while music's playing, it almost always fades away. I get focused and couldn't hear a bomb drop, much less a guitar solo.

 

What's fascinating about discussing craft/process is I almost can't imagine writing to music. I've tried and tried, and can't do it. I can occasionally write to something like jazz or classical, or something where the lyrics blend into the background -- Iron and Wine; Radiohead; Band of Horses -- but never stuff I truly love like Ryan Adams or DBT or Wilco. Instead of floating there in my subconscious, it paralyzes me. I can't think of the sentences I want to write, only the lyrics in my ears. Was talking about this very thing to a friend after you published your list of songs to write to, and we were both relieved to learn we had similar hangups about writing to music. He likes white noise and coffee shops. I like silence, and often, the dark. This is going to sound weird as shit, but I don't read aloud as much as I whisper sentences back to myself, almost like a timid prayer.

But Ryan Adams and Jason Isbell and Mike Cooley and Jeff Tweedy have definitely influenced my sentences and paragraphs over the years.

 

You should feel the Raspberries-like tone in some of my headlines.

It's like Eric Carmen himself wrote 'em.

 

Go post on the thread I started, DD. Three of the four names you mentioned are in the OP.

 

So it brings up the question - hold on one second, the guy at the bottom of my page for the ad PRESIDENT REDUCES AMOUNT HOMEOWNERS OWE has the creepiest fucking eyes I've ever seen, but now they've gone back to human again - who are Gary Smith's musical influences? "Alice's Restaurant?"

And I'm in the camp where I can't write if there's singing on the music. Maybe classical.

 

I write in exactly, down to the very last detail, the same way. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing basically became my writing music in college because it was one of the only albums I owned that didn't feature lyrics up front. (By the way, Shadow's second album, The Private Press, actually works even better.) Radiohead would occasionally work, but it depended on how zoned-in I was. Overall, I just preferred no music and really, no sound.

Now, as an editor, I'm even more bothered by noise. My colleagues joke when I shove my thumbs into my ears while editing a story to block out even slight offshoots of conversations, but I can't do it any other way.

 

I wonder if The Smith reads The Jones.

 

That's because behind most great songs is either great writing or great storytelling or both. Springsteen isn't the strongest lyricist in the world, but he's a damn good story-teller. In a four or five or six minute song he can develop a narrative that a lot of us would struggle to tell in 2,500 words. If Hemingway had a band and grew up in North Jersey, he'd be Springsteen. Whether we are journalists or novelists or lyricists or poets, our basic mission is the same: to recreate a moment, or a series of moments, in such a visceral manner that our audience is able to see them and feel them exactly as we ourselves saw and felt. A great piece of writing does not need music behind it because the writing itself is music. And a great piece music does not always need words, because the music itself tells the story. One of my favorite bands in the history of music is Sigur Ros. I can't understand a damn word they sing, but I don't need to, because the music itself is so visceral that I understand what they mean. Take Yellow Ledbetter - nobody knows what the hell Vedder is saying, but nobody really needs to know, because he does such an effective job at using form to tell his story.

Maybe those are the two biggest connections between music and writing: voice, and form. Sometimes form and structure themselves can create more impact than the actual words that are being formed and structured.

Take two of my favorite sentences in literature:

"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’"
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

"Jesus wept."
--The Gospel of John

You could read both of those sentences in a foreign language and still have some idea about the moments they are capturing.

Form is so important in all forms of self-expression, and writing is no different.

"I love you," he said.

"You," he said, "I love."

The words are the same. The message feels different.

During the writing process, I like to create a playlist of songs that evokes the same sort of reaction within myself that I am looking to create inside of the reader, and I will write to that playlist. When you are listening to something from Explosions in the Sky and losing yourself inside of your writing, the keyboard can sometimes take on the feel of a piano, the letters hitting the page like hammers on strings. We hear the word "Voice" thrown around a lot. To me, the biggest fingerprint of a writer's voice is not the words he or she uses or even the way in which he or she structures them, but the rhythm that his or her writing creates inside the head of the reader.

Rhythm, voice, form, structure and, yes, language -- writing shares all of this in common with music. So it makes sense that consumption of one teaches lessons about the other.

 

I'm sorry, but WHAT?!

Springsteen is pretty much universally revered as, with Dylan, one of the two great American songwriters.

 

Three. Even Dylan would insist that Smokey Robinson must be included.

 

I'm with Murph on this one. While not a huge Springsteen fan, I do recognize his talent.

He writes great songs, but that's not the same thing as saying he's a great lyricist.

I don't think he's in Dylan's class as a lyricist, and I don't think most of the public sees it that way either.

He is compared to Dylan a lot, but I'd say that's because Dylan is such a big influence, not because he's as good as Dylan.