How Spotify Playlists Saved My Novel

Writer Laura Elizabeth Woollett on how the perfect book playlist can save your novel.

Every writer has a unique relationship with music. While some of us crave the silence of a cabin in the woods, others just want to silence the critics in our heads. Music is good for this. Yet for me, music is primarily about inspiration – a force that attracts details and holds them together. 

When I began working on my novel Beautiful Revolutionary, which takes place in the 1960s and 70s, I found the songs before I found the words. Songs from the era, mostly – Donovan’s ‘Sand and Foam’, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Master Song’, Joan Baez’s cover of ‘Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair’. But not exclusively. Lana Del Rey’s ‘Ultraviolence’ felt like it was written just for my characters. Watching Rage late one night, I saw the video clip for Mogwai’s ‘The Lord Is Out Of Control’, and something about the combination of music and images seemed so graceful, I knew I wanted to replicate that grace on paper.

My music selections became more deliberate, the more I wrote. I created separate playlists for my two main characters, which helped me to switch perspectives almost as easily as switching between songs. Some songs became shorthand for stages in my characters’ lives: ‘Theme From A Summer Place’/ “Evelyn meets Percy”, ‘Gimme Shelter’/ “Lenny goes nuts”,  ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’/ “Evelyn at her most powerful and corrupt”. It didn’t matter that these songs had meanings outside my novel. They were a way for me to immerse myself deeper in the world I was writing.  

If I could count all the hours I spent compiling and listening to music for my novel instead of actually writing, it’d probably amount to a month-long writer’s retreat, at least. But procrastination isn’t necessarily a waste of time. It can also be enriching – a way for us to make associations and come to conclusions that might otherwise elude us. 

More than a year after completing Beautiful Revolutionary, I continue to strongly associate certain songs with certain scenes and characters. I don’t know if the associations will follow me forever. I do know, though, that my next novel will require a whole new soundtrack.

It’s a work in progress, like the book itself. Yet there are some things I’ve already established. Like the fact that my protagonist was born in the early ‘70s, to a mum who likes Big Star and The Hollies. That she goes through a Goth phase in her mid-teens, comes of age with Sonic Youth and the Smashing Pumpkins. That she likes to drink, sometimes in grungy underground clubs, sometimes Irish pubs. That she finds shoegaze boring, but will pretend to like it for cute boys.  

Music can’t tell you everything you need to know about a person – or a book, for that matter. Yet, when you’re stuck for words, it’s worth seeing where it takes you. Listen out for the songs that express whatever you’re yearning to express – be it a mood, a character, an era, or a sequence of images. Compile a playlist (or several!) made up of these songs. Consult your playlists the way you consult your favourite books, memorising lines and rhythms, searching for new meanings. Take them with you wherever you go.