As 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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