Alice Buell Lawrence

We’re all inspired by something. Even when it’s a spark in my mind that I suddenly want to type out, it’s connected in other ways to the texts and people I’ve encountered in my life. Memory and connection.

Lately I’ve been writing to songs I like, letting them create the setting and the flow for what I’m trying to do. I wrote a meditation on watching a lover sleep in the moonlight that was inspired by hearing Hot Chip’s “Worlds Within Worlds.” I did something of a tragedy to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Gold Rush.” And “Endless Waves” by Silkken has helped me find a story of middle-age angst and falling out of love. It isn’t the lyrics, specifically, either. It’s the way a song makes me feel.

I don’t hear lyrics very well, in fact. When I’m listening to a song, the voices sound like something, but I’m not processing them as what they’re saying. I’m pulling in the bassline and other sounds, building a dream-like world with these building pieces. It’s one way I write. It’s not the only way I write.

My writing comes out fast. A first, extremely rough draft of a piece comes out in less than an hour as I belt away on my lemon-hued Freewrite. Not necessarily a plug for the admittedly expensive device, but it is perfect for my workflow. If I put a song on repeat, I’m generally not sick of listening to it before the draft is ready.

The challenge comes with editing. It helps to have my mind calm and in that space while I’m cleaning up so I keep the feel, the atmosphere of the piece. Creating that world is going to be a large chunk of the appear around my work. If I lose that, the piece could fall like a baking disaster. But how many times can you keep a song on while working on a piece and not get sick of it? I’ll edit a piece for hours and still not love it, and I can’t play something on repeat for that long. The few minutes of a song starts to wear out if I try it.

It’s the weekend, and that’s what I’m trying to do right now. I have quite a few stories open in my taskbar, and I’m trying to make them all shine. I’ve tried flipping through them as songs change, but that is an ungodly mess.

A shame I can’t stretch the way a song feels a bit more. I have some of those remixing skills but, again, it wouldn’t be the same. Pity.