I love music - songs are almost as good as stories, and if I had an atom of musical ability in my body I might even have gone further... but I haven't. If you think my writing is ham-fisted, you should have seen my teenage attempts to learn the guitar.
Songs, and the ideas and words from them, have always informed my writing - not in a conscious way necessarily, but just in the way that certain songs have sunk down deep into me, and will obviously bubble up now and again.
These are some of the obvious connections to songs in my writing, but I'm sure there's many buried in there. Click the links for youtubes...
Feed The Enemy - a great song by the under-valued Magazine (post-punk Manchester band, like a more sarcastic and witty Joy Division). Like all the best music, it sounds profound, but I've no idea what it's actually about. "No room to move, no room to doubt" - well quite. Source of the title for my stand-alone short story Feed The Enemy.
When The Walls Bend - a line from The Gloaming, by Radiohead. Amazing, but you already knew that. What you may not have known is that it's also the title for a story in my collection The Other Room available from all good booksellers. Well, Amazon.
Wilder - achingly beautiful song from The Boo Radleys. "Beautiful" is an over-used word when writing about music, but go and listen to this and tell me what else I could have said? I used a line from this ("maybe it's brighter down there, maybe it's wilder") as a heading for my as yet unpublished story 'Long Distance Relationships'.
Trying To Be So Quiet - "Aint it just like the night, to play tricks when we're trying to be so quiet..." C'mon, you know which song opens like that don't you? Surely you don't have to click the link to find out...? Title of yet unpublished ghost story; didn't make the grade for The Other Room.
