Tayari's Blog: What I'm Listening To..

Comment #1, by Michael Fischer

Someone is indeed testy! I’m glad you posted your list; I can get kind of crazy with creating playlists and soundtracks for my stories, ha. Here's my personal all-time "writing" playlist:

1) Miles Davis, "All Blues" (This is my favorite track off "Kind of Blue"...always gets me going...I listen to a lot of Bop when I'm writing an early draft because it's spontaneous).

2) Billie Holiday, “Solitude” (“In my solitude / You haunt me / With dreadful ease / Of days gone by”—these lines remind me of the characters I “live with” when writing; they haunt me; so does Billie’s voice.

3) Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Kinda weird, I know, but I always tell myself that I’m writing against the clock, and that one of the reasons writers write is so people will remember them, through their stories, when they die)

4) Neil Young, “Natural Beauty” (“On the roller coaster ride / That my emotions have to take me on / I heard a newborn baby cry / Through the night”—um, nuff’ said.

5) Junior Kimbrough, “Jr. Blues” (Like a lot of blues songs, this one will rip your guts out…the guitar solo in the middle of this song is wicked and makes you think of selling your soul to the devil at the crossroads…hey, that’s like writing, right?