Music To Write To, A Playlist

A writing playlist, perseverance advice from Lincoln Michel, new music from Hooray for the Riff Raff & Island of Love, interviews with Maggie Smith & Stephen Buoro, and more

Apr 23, 2023

Do you write in silence? To music? Only instrumentals? Music with lyrics?

Over the years writers have answered this question in various ways through the playlists for their books at Largehearted Boy. Authors fall into several categories: those who need silence, those who listen to instrumentals only, and those who listen to music with lyrics while they write.

I try to write every day. The new longform project. An essay. Editing and/or revisiting something that has been percolating in a drawer. Our Brooklyn apartment is small, without a dedicated space for writing, so I bounce from one room to the next with my laptop or notebook. The living room wingchair. The dining room table. Lounging on the bed. In the backyard.

The background music changes, too. First drafts are written in silence, with only the occasional purr from Mr. Kibbles as white noise. Early edits are usually soundtracked by instrumental music, mostly indie rock and folk, but occasionally classical music. Final and copy edits are paired with the jazz and indie music that also soundtracks the rest of my life.

Enjoy this week’s selection of songs that have been in the background lately while I write, mostly instrumental music that has swirled around as I’ve reworked a couple of essays.

What is your favorite music to write to?

This Week’s Writing Playlist:

Largehearted Links

Lincoln Michel on perseverance in publishing with literary magazines
One anecdote I tell my students is that when I was in an undergrad creative writing class we read an issue of Best American Short Stories, which is an anthology rounding up excellent stories published by various literary magazines in the prior year. In the author notes, one of the contributors mentioned their story had been rejected thirty times by different lit mags before it was accepted by one. That’s persistence.
Our Band Could Be Your Wife on “Power Emo” (including a playlist)
I was trying to succinctly describe a particular wave of bands that occupied a space between the poppier aspects of 4th wave emo, and anthemic heartland rock. Bands like The Menzingers, Japandroids, and Titus Andronicus that gained dedicated cult fanbases and relatively widespread critical acclaim, bands that could headline The Fest and be a vital late-afternoon pull for Pitchfork’s Blue Stage. Sonically, I was searching for a phrase that could encapsulate a type of emo-adjacent, anthem-oriented punk sound that– whether due to its thematic content, narrative structure, or impassioned vocal delivery –took on a larger-than-life theatricality.
BOMB’s interview with Maggie Smith about her new memoir
The subtitle is “The Logic of Misogyny.” My first book of 2023, and you know what? It's actually a disheartening and yet deeply heartening read at the same time because you realize, people are writing books about misogyny because this is still an issue in the twenty-first century, but it's heartening because I'm not crazy. This is a widespread problem and not because misogyny means that everyone hates women.
New music from Hooray for the Riff Raff!
Stephen Buoro’s talk with Interview magazine about writing and reading
The last book you loved, and why?
Northern Nigeria is this huge, wonderful region of my country that’s sadly not as buoyant–economically, educationally, literarily–as the South. Writers from this region aren’t as celebrated as those from the South. Also, there are usually fewer literary texts from or about this region being published widely, internationally. Hence, it was refreshing to read Arinze Ifeakandu’s short story collection, God’s Children are Little Broken Things, which consists of nine stories, many set in Northern Nigeria. The collection broadly explores queer love in contemporary Nigeria, a severely conservative and homophobic place. The stories are perceptive, moving, and important. They helped me to see and smell and taste Northern Nigeria in new ways.
New music from Island of Love
Ned Beauman on the anxieties of being translated
Perhaps you’re thinking, ‘Ned, you needn’t have worried. Your work is not memorable enough to have any kind of influence on anyone, and anyway, that translator was probably just being polite.’ You may be right, but at the time she did sound very much in earnest, and I was horrified. The thousand-year tradition of Assamese letters was going to be permanently warped by a 28-year-old’s faltering stabs at short fiction. The Bangladeshi critic Kabir Chowdhury once wrote that an undue attention to translated work may ‘clog the main channel of original creative writing in the field of national literature’. And here I was as a potential 100-ton fatberg.
New indie pop from Stolen Jars
Rachel Heng discussed her new novel The Reclamation Project with the always insightful The Chills at Will Podcast
Even though [the book] is historical, it came out of my experience growing up in Singapore and the society I grew up within. I think there are a lot of things that one takes for granted when you live in a place, that you kind of accept like, Oh, this is just the norm, right? You don’t think about the question because that’s just the nature of your reality and it’s only when you leave or you experience something else that you think, wait, that’s a particular choice. Or, That’s a particular way of life that isn’t inevitable. It took me leaving in order to gain perspective on that. I think if I had never left Singapore and I only stayed there, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have written this book, but it definitely would have been more difficult.
New music from Bloc Party
8 books that demand to be read outside
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