On music as a food of love, or something

People often ask me, they say, 'Nikesh, do you listen to music when you write?' and I look them in the eye and... I'm sorry, I can't keep this up, I think I was asked this once but I know people often talk about this... But, no. I don't. Since you ask.

I never listen to music when I write.

Mostly, I need silence. Occasionally, I need the sound of my own voice when I read stuff back. To hear the rhythms of the prose and the back-and-forth of the dialogue, I need to read aloud. God, I sound pretentious. I've just been thinking about this a lot recently, because music looms large in what I write, yet I need to lock it away during the actual writing bits. The prose I work on often references music, sound, ambient melodies, instruments, half-heard lyrics - the omniscience of music around us and how our emotional responses to songs often mirror our emotional responses to life. But when it comes to writing about that... nope, nothing - no writing. If I need to reference a particular song and how that influences a narrative, I will listen to the song in isolation before returning to my manuscript.

I've been thinking about music and books a lot, for two reasons. One was reading T M Wolf's Sound earlier this year. Sound is a simply coming-of-age one-hot-summer story of boy likes girl more than girl likes boy, but the way it's told is where its daring lies. Each page is printed with lined sheet music paper, and the narrative is interweaved with concurrent ambient sounds, lyrics blasting from radios, internal monologues and overlapping conversations. It is a cacophony of a book. One that perfectly creates the cadence of conversation and the omniscience of music and sound in our lives.

The other was writing my contribution to the new Book Slam anthology, Too Much Too Young. I was given the brief that the story had to be named after a song and that song be related in some way, tangentially or not, to the story. Which is hard, because which song tells the story you want to tell, which one echoes the sentiments you want to convey? Do you choose the song first or second? I went for the song 'Safe From Harm' purely because the lyric 'Whatever happened to the niceties of my childhood days?' has stayed with me for years. I always thought it was the perfect opening line for something, and for the story I wrote for the anthology, about the cracks in a friendship group as everyone gets older, seemed to echo those sentiments so closely.

I just couldn't listen to the song while writing the story.

Music looms large in the Book Slam stories, because each one is based on a song, whether obviously, like mine or obliquely like Jesse Armstrong's 'Life During Wartime'. And I wonder if other writers out there write in silence or write with music on in the background. Does it help? What do you listen to?

And if you were going to write a short story taking inspiration from a song, what would the song be?

I leave you with The Divine Comedy's 'The Booklovers'...