I Need Your Musical Genius

On Creating a Playlist for My Current Work-in-Progress

Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso

I am five years old and my parents have purchased an ancient Cadillac, the only vehicle they can find for the money they have. I think they may have bought it with my aunt and uncle. Miracle of all miracles, it has an 8-track player. Late nights driving home from church, open windows letting in the blistering hot Laredo night, and I fall asleep in the back seat listening to the rush of the air through the windows and Dottie Rambo’s “Down by the Creek Bank.”

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I am sixteen years old driving my parents’ Oldsmobile Cutlas Sierra, navy blue, on back country roads. I have just gotten my driver’s license, and the feeling of freedom is palpable. On the radio: “Two Princes,” by the Spin Doctors, then “Jealousy” by Gin Blossoms. Later, when I have the money, I buy my own car as well as a CD player, buy six CDs for a penny through Columbia House, and wear out U2’s “Joshua Tree” and Counting Crow’s “August and Everything After.”

Around this age I start listening to music everywhere, spending all of my money at Sam Goody.

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Music becomes even more a part of me in college. I meet (figuratively speaking), and fall in love with, Innocence Mission and Over the Rhine, Tom Petty and Natalie Merchant. I fall asleep to music; I wake up to music. And I start to experience this thing where music can take me back to particular moments in time, particular years. I start making sound tracks for my life.

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This love of music, and my desire to sound track my life, continues to this day. And something I started doing was creating Spotify playlists that I listen to only when I’m writing a particular story. Here are a few of my old ones, in case you’re a Spotify person:

In the Beginning was the playlist I listened to while writing Light from Distant Stars.

In Between Here and There was a playlist I listened to while writing These Nameless Things.

And now, as I finally plow into writing my next novel, I’m looking for your help on song suggestions. I don't want to talk too much about the story itself, but here are some of the themes:

• a father letting go of his adult child

• faith and doubt

• fate versus choice

If you’ve read any of my other novels, you know my style is melancholy and reflective. Here are a few of the songs already on the playlist (which I’ve named The Maker, after the first song):

This playlist is currently at about an hour (including songs not pictured above), and I’d love to get it to around two hours, so . . . do you have any songs to suggest that would fit with the themes and songs already listed above? I try not to double up on artists, so that’s another restriction.

What are your suggestions? Thanks for your help with this!

(You can find the entire playlist I’ve created so far HERE.)