Building Out a Book's Mood Through Music

It's a gorgeous Tuesday afternoon in Waialua, and I'm relatively certain I just accidentally drank a few ants alongside my coffee shake. Occupational hazard of a day writing outdoors on my lanai.

(Haven't you heard? Nature exposure is scientifically proven to be dose-dependent—meaning the more you're outside, the better you feel. So are kissing and kindness, but I will not be engaging in the former on my front porch. I do have a country playlist for it though.)

Sleep has not been all that friendly to me lately so the sunshine's doing some good. It always does, and I mentioned when recapping my book revision that it finally feels like summer again. Light. Simple natural beauty spoils me rotten. This post started as a standard monthly "What I'm Listening to" installation, but ended up turning into a musing on the role of music in building out atmosphere. So I followed that rabbit hole.

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Did I ever tell y'all that one of the original influences of the book was a prompt to write a story that felt like the song Home by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros?

I cut the cigarette story but loved it.

Or that I pitched it as being reminiscent of The Lumineers? Or that the fictional town in my book was renamed Kahan (yes, after Noah Kahan) because I realized the previous name was too similar to another area of western North Carolina?

Mountain Sounds is primarily atmospheric, so drenching the manuscript in mood—and building it out using other forms of media and texture like visual art, music, etc,.—felt imperative to the writing process.

I want my writing to feel tactile and sensory. My art direction and studio background helps my writing so much because I focus primarily on building out an entire immersive ecosystem. My (very novice) interest in psychology targets what exactly that does to us within our brains, anchoring my strategy in the concrete.

As the creator, I can't speak to the efficacy of my attempts on my audience, but I can gush about how much I love the process itself. And it entirely supports my obsession with neuroaesthetics and my college insistence that I wanted to build out my own major in aesthetics. Definitely an example of me knowing exactly what I was meant to do, but not knowing exactly why. Articulation often comes in hindsight, as it did for the motivation behind starting my blog in the first place.

What I've Been Thinking About Re: Music & Mood

Book: This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers, Ogi Ogas
Release Date: September 19, 2023
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Format: Paperback
Source: Bought (Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee — love an indie!)

This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it's also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits, including Barenaked Ladies' "One Week," as one of the most successful female record producers of all time.

Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess a unique "listener profile" based on our brain's natural response to seven key dimensions of any song. Are you someone who prefers lyrics or melody? Do you like music "above the neck" (intellectually stimulating), or "below the neck" (instinctual and rhythmic)? Whether your taste is esoteric or mainstream, Rogers guides readers to recognize their musical personality, and offers language to describe one's own unique taste. Like most of us, Rogers is not a musician, but she shows that all of us can be musical--simply by being an active, passionate listener.

While exploring the science of music and the brain, Rogers also takes us behind the scenes of record-making, using her insider's ear to illuminate the music of Prince, Frank Sinatra, Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, and many others. She shares records that changed her life, contrasts them with those that appeal to her coauthor and students, and encourages you to think about the records that define your own identity.

Told in a lively and inclusive style, This Is What It Sounds Like will refresh your playlists, deepen your connection to your favorite artists, and change the way you listen to music.

Anyway, I've been in the middle of this book forever (and love it—have just been slow!) and love how it articulates what many of us instinctively feel: that we feel closer to those who share our music taste.

How do we develop it? What does it share about us? When you experience a memory overlaid over a certain song with someone, do they think about you when you think about them?

Nostalgia's baked into the process of listening to music (alongside active recall), and I have a horrible despair over how memories warp each time we retrieve them—so think a lot about how to preserve or dilute memories especially in songs.

I'm a little freak about this especially in regards to scents and perfumes—I don't even want to talk about the agony of standing in the shampoo aisle in March 2020 as I got the email that my senior year of college was canceled, worrying about whether honey repair or tea tree peppermint would preserve my memory more. Or with someone, wondering if I should queue up a song I'd always found romantic or whether I wanted to solely associate it with a previous person. Which layer would last?

I ended up writing a lot of this curiosity into my book in small ways. For example, the love interest plays the violin and is deeply passionate about it, and the main character has an attachment to certain songs they've heard together (which many people experience.) But then you worry about it somewhat as a time capsule. What you forget, remember, dilute, attach to, etc,. define this sense of permanence versus loss—this impossible need to know whether you're holding onto the right things about yourself. Where is the line between romanticization and preservation?

I did, primarily, write a book about corrupted nostalgia, and have been curious about how negative sensations tend to recede in our memory (which also dovetailed with the avoidant attachment cycle I've resonated with lately.)

Anyway, there's also such cool research showing that there's also a hierarchy to the senses and how vividly activate our perception i.e. some senses make you feel more in-the-moment than others, evolutionarily developed so that you can identify danger more quickly.

How I Use That Curiosity to Write Better

Even on a line-level writing wise, I use tidbits like this to consider how best to make the reader forget the outside world.

For example, The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr points out a study about how textural, rough-feeling words activated brain regions associated with touch, which made the reader feel more immersed.

For me, part of the goal is to make the reader forget that they're sitting down with a book. I also stalked my Instagram highlights the other day on one of those "What do people see when they look at my socials?" kicks and rediscovered this fabulous Aeon article pointing out that referencing smells more often concretely made readers more likely to connect and love a given book. Which makes total sense, because scent is also the sense most closely linked to memory.

There is so much cool, applicable research in this domain that goes beyond standard literature craft that writers (and all creatives) can harness to make their art more capable of moving people, and I hope to always, always, always be getting better at that. You can't predict what people connect to within your work, but you can try to make it more likely.

Synesthesia can also be effective, when used either neurologically or metaphorically, because collapsing the distance between the senses can have an equally profound effect. But I'll talk about what I call my philosophy of "sensory variation" another time.

In terms of taste, I've been thinking about how beautiful it is that all forms of art serve as buffers for indirect processing i.e. articulating bits of ourselves we can't put into words correctly. For one, so much meaning churns below the surface of what you love, helping you resolve yourself psychologically without consciously realizing or confronting it.

And here's what I think a lot of people forget:

Books are two-way. In some ways, they're artifacts that cease to be "living documents" as soon as they're printed for shelves as final versions. But each word, moment, etc,. within one is subjective and associative to the reader. So a lot can affect the reading experience beyond objective plot, prose, etc,.: your expectation, newest unrelated interests, author context, current circumstances, and past and memories. So understanding each of those too feels important to me. If there are 90,000 words in a manuscript, I have at least 90,000 chances to make it resonate so you bet I'll try my damned hardest to be intentional about details without losing the big, overarching feeling.

Taste Is a Way to Connect Without Words

Basically, you can connect with someone over the reflection of a favorite piece of media and what it says about you without the pressure of somehow conveying yourself incorrectly by trying to do so directly. I love the trust built into quiet understanding. All the crucial, gentle ways we get to know each other and establish our identities through the aesthetics we gravitate towards.

I actually used musical comps in my querying process when pitching literary agents, largely for the reasoning that if they vibed with what Spotify calls "stomp and holler" or what I call "mountain music," they'd probably at least align with the look and feel of Mountain Sounds—which I felt was the main driver.

As Maya Angelou puts it, people will forget what you said but not how you made them feel.

Pro tip to writers: If you ever struggle describing your writing tone, voice, flavor, etc,. I find that studying the way that experts articulate other emotive forms of media—like how Spotify articulates their daylists—to be helpful in building that skill too. For example, if all the music you listen to while drafting your nostalgic contemporary romance is then packaged in your daylist as bubblegum Y2K friendship vibes, that might be helpful for you to use in stitching together your pitches and understanding! Don't be afraid of getting weird or niche with initial targeting, in my opinion, because I think the best writing/reading/art finds and expresses the universal within the specific.

That being said, all my daylists for Mountain Sounds can be frankly offensive (see: devastated tailspin tuesday afternoon) so maybe I shouldn't swear too much by that system.

A lot of us struggle to put exactly what we're feeling into words (which is part of the point of reading and writing—for that YES moment of seeing your muddledness articulated) so I'm forever trying to dial into precision here. It's hard! There are studies too about what it does to you to be able to identify an exact feeling versus letting it diffuse into your nervous system.

The gist? Being able to separate out and identify exactly what a feeling is and what it does to you is ultimately critical in making sure that the bad doesn't bleed into the good. For example: identifying what's fear versus excitement, as they feel the same within your nervous system activation. And then—oh God—you have to try to get that precision across to someone else in order to feel understood.

As books like You're Not Listening point out, nothing makes us quite as lonely as feeling like we can't get ourselves across to another, and that's why art and beauty are necessary to us. Music—alongside other forms of storytelling—is allowed to be an imperfect, imprecise prism, unlike us. (This exact concept is why I love the conversations in books like Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.) I actually used the exact word prism in my 9th anniversary Words Like Silver post before getting into all of this, so it's fitting that's always felt like a framework.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. — James Baldwin.”

There are other books I love about music and the science of it, and that's another post I still need to transfer over from the old Words Like Silver website archive: Musicophilia, This Is Your Brain on Music, Every Song Ever, etc,. I could go down my dance/matching senses rabbit hole too but will resist. This time. I should totally mind map this one at some point too.

Anyway, I Rediscovered These Breakdowns of Various Songs That Inspired the Book

A few excerpts of many that I found in an older photo album on my phone. Will share more!

At the end of the day, I'm just absolutely dying to book club my own narratives with others, which is why it's been such a pleasure to get feedback from beta readers, sign with my agency, gush about various inspirations, etc,. There is no better feeling. At one point, I started pulling apart which songs rippled into various moments of the narrative, and I rediscovered them the other day to share. Non-exhaustive, of course, but still fun.

JUST KIDS — MAT KEARNEY

BEDFORD FALLS — FORD.

NEVER GONNA LET YOU GO — BEN RECTOR

MR. SANDMAN — SYML

IN AND OUT OF LOVE — OH WONDER

THE NIGHT WE MET — LORD HURON

SEPTEMBER — JAMES ARTHUR

ATLANTIC CITY — THE BAND

Of course, there is so much more I could layer and unpack here. I could go forever, and do these endlessly. They're also roughly a year and a half old, so I could absolutely update them with new understanding. (Some plot details are slightly out of date.)

There's so much about word frequency, narrative, unconscious influences, sensory activation, "human details," atmosphere, sense of place—all these various factors that affect how I construct my work as a creative.

Despite the endless challenge, I love this type of work so much and every opportunity that allows me to dive into this more—the Mountain Sounds ecosystem, especially—is such a damn privilege.

A mood board from literally 2018, tacked in my dorm room.

Although you of course are not (yet) exposed to the literal text, I hope that stalking the blog and listening to the music involved in the construction might give you a feel for what I've been doing (although I will note that the playlist leans darker, often, because it's best for the woods / regret / angst / faded / shadows / need sensations of the book.

If you want lighter, like that specific sense of contrast or "earned beauty" I aim for, you should opt for the camp counselor
playlist instead. The vibe is equally important in balance. The tension between lightness and darkness is a tough line to walk, which might be why multiple agents called MOUNTAIN SOUNDS "ambitious." Hahaha—I love it so, so much.

Emphasis on Mountain SOUNDS.