If I were hard-pressed to choose one art form I could not go without, then I think, to my shame, it'd have to be music. Not books. I was gonna stay stories, but then, everything is story. Adn music, for me, as someone who hasn't an ounce of musical talent, really, has always signified something primordial, a monolith to come back to, but not always from.
Alberto Giacometti's Grande Tete Mince | The Tate Modern, London
I've always written to music.
Even when I couldn't write any more because the music I liked got too loud, too distracting, it only pushed me to dig out a different kind. I discovered writing to classical music. Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bruckner, Saint-Saëns. The utterly superb cellist Bruno Philippe actually inspired a character in one of my stories.
The point is, I always sought out music, and I didn't understand it for some time. I just thought it was an accompaniment, a background to working, except not for this. I've learned now to have patience as I unravel the melodies inside my own head. Pull too harshly, you're left with half a story. And nobody wants half a story.
But if you're careful, the music actually helps you unwind an essential component of the story you're trying to tell via words. It's early days, and I couldn't yet tell you what the story I'm working on is properly about. I have ideas and nuggets of information, but they don't yet coalesce.
It is, however, littered with music. And it started with 'Fruit Bat', I know I've told you, already. Then it went to The Kills' That Love. Now it's here,
It's not the first time. What I find is, it's cyclical.
To me, certain songs surface from time to time to guide and aid me in uncovering a deeper narrative inside my head. Naturally, they're terrific storytelling in their own right because they need to be, and certainly that feeds into my own creativity. But I think of it as a darker thread unspooling, the essence of a song sparking a light in something essential of my own to tell. The hopeless doom of Adam Raised a Cain has always resonated with my own storytelling.
It's because often, the characters I write are addicted to their own fate and incapable of shattering through it. I'm reminded, often, I haven't properly learned the distinction between choosing and being chosen. And as long as my characters struggle with this question, so will this song continue to haunt me.
Somber, possessive love is another recurring theme for me, both in my personal life, and my writing. I remember becoming obsessed, as a child, with a shadowed figure in the back of the theater which seemed to consume and enthrall me whenever I went there. That uneasy kinship, that all-sacrificing sense of belonging, I think I've always sought that in my adult life and through my words.
At times when I get lost, music like this helps remind me what I'm looking for.
Anything by Tash, really, is simply a delight to create to. I've noticed much of my writing in the past few years has featured, almost obsessively, characters in isolation. Houses in the forest thick, walled villages in the desert, loneliness in an ocean of surrounding that really resonates with that desert-stranded hollow of her voice, so I keep coming back here.
I've yet to decide if the reason I keep returning to these themes is because I fail to identify myself in anyone who looks back at me, or the exact polar opposite. I reckon writing is, by its nature, an obligation of solitude, at least to a certain extent.
How can you listen to that loud music, and still work?
Because I've bound music - the right kind, anyway - around my tender-flesh waist. Been using it as a skipping rope and anchored leeway as a means to self-exploration.
I keep the music loud because it seems to know those things within me that remain dark and terrible and core-rooted, that I've yet to understand myself.
Ahoj, 
