Musical Monday: (Introductory Post) Anticipation

 

First a disclaimer: I am NOT musical.  After years of lessons, I can sort of pick out a tune on a piano, I can play a few notes on a cedar flute, I can strum a guitar, but don't recall so much as a single chord. I CAN sing in tune, mostly, but my voice has almost no range, so... Does that even really count? 

Virtually EVERYONE ELSE in my family is very talented and/or accomplished musically. So I APPRECIATE music, so that's just about it.

 I don't think it's surprising, however, that I almost always listened to music when I write OR that certain songs will trigger the most vivid memories of a book I might have been reading when the song had been playing on the radio. AND I've recently embarked on a new project/journey: creating Listen-While-You-Read playlists for each of my books. 

Well...maybe not EVERY book. There's a lot of them, and most of them are LONG. But that's all beside the point. 

From a practical standpoint, we're talking HOURS of music for every book. It might very well be an extremely advanced form of procrastination. But I find I really want to talk about these songs, but I can't really do that in the book annotations, since those are...well, about the BOOKS.

So, instead, I've decided to share some of these songs in blog posts like this. Will it be every week? Every month? Purely sporadic? Who knows at this point! However (in)frequently it occurs, I expect to enjoy it. I hope you will too!

For the first post in this series, I've chosen Carly Simon's 1971 hit, Anticipation (who a lot of people will remember best from the ketchup commercial that nearly RUINED this song for me).

I've chosen this song because I'm currently re-visiting my Oberon series, which first debuted twenty years ago. The plot is (in large part) concerned with events that took place twenty years earlier, so...this is a somewhat contemporary song. It's also a very time-trippy song. The singer is thinking about events that haven't happened yet, thinking about looking back--from that point--to where she is now. And I FEEL that, ya know?

I'm working on a series that begins "Scout Patterson had been running away from home for twenty years".  And I'm working on it at a point where that's finally true. So I'm looking back twenty years and so is my character. And I'm writing this now, remembering writing that then, and trying to get into that mindset of looking back twenty years...

All of which is the same kind of mental gymnastics I went through when I first heard this song and was trying to imagine the singer's emotions. Which is probably entirely too convoluted. I'm overthinking this. It's a pretty song. I love the emotions it brings up--a nostalgic longing for a time that hasn't yet come. It reminds me of the Richard Bach book, Bridge Across Forever. It makes me want to go out and read all the time travel romances I can find. Or to write one--but I can't go there today. I have entirely too many works already in progress!