Posts Tagged: Music

Unexpected Party, art by David T Wenzel

Unexpected Party, art by David T Wenzel

If you’re anything like me, the songs in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings probably left you a little confused. I don’t have much of a musical talent, outside of being able to keep a bit of a rhythm, but melody has always escaped me, so I recited the songs in the novels more as spoken word poems than as actual melodies. I was delighted when I first heard the haunting rendition the dwarfs’ song in trailers for Jackson’s upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit, but this audio clip I came across on Reddit really takes the cake. Thanks to HarperCollins, Tolkien’s current publisher, we can all enjoy an audio recording of Tolkien himself singing “That’s What Bilbo Baggins Hates,” one of the most memorable songs in The Hobbit.

AND BLUE SKIES FROM PAIN by Stina LeichtAs a former art student, I’m a visual person, but music has always played a big role in my life. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in the back of my parents’ car with “Hit the Road, Jack” playing on the radio. My parents had just had an argument where my father had walked out the door and then turned around and come back. That song perfectly fit a moment I’d lived through not twenty minutes before. My mother says I might have been two years old at the time — tops. Ever since then, I’ve associated songs with certain events in my life. So, it was a natural transition from real life to novel scenes.

I used music to help me travel back in time to the ‘70s. While I was writing Of Blood and Honey, I dumped anything I remembered hearing in addition to anything I might like from the era into a huge playlist. (Of course, Charles de Lint had more than a few suggestions, thank goodness.) I usually run through the giant list a few times until a select few frame up into something that tells the story of the novel I’m working on. That becomes my final list. Here’s the list for Of Blood and Honey:
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