For the first time, I’m participating in the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge! The concept is simple: Each day in April I’ll be blogging on a topic starting with the letter of the day, beginning with A and progressing to Z by the end of the month. Posts will be short and will relate to my chosen theme: my new coming of age story, Rightfully Ours, released April 1.
I is for iPod Playlist
I didn’t listen to the radio much until I reached the middle school years. Until then, I listened to whatever my brothers played (The Beatles, Wings, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and more) or albums my parents owned. (I remember listening to a lot of Mitch Miller and On Top of Spaghetti.) When I developed my own interest in popular music, the only way to assemble a playlist was by creating the infamous mixtape, camped out in front of the radio with a cassette recorder.
Enter the iPod, iTunes, and Spotify, and, oh, how things have changed. It’s certainly much easier and less time-consuming to create a custom playlist.
In Rightfully Ours, Paul inherits his father’s iPod. Listening to his dad’s music helps him feel connected to his dad, particularly when he starts to see a relationship between which songs are playing and the events in his life. The right song comes at the right moment. (You can find the songs on Paul’s dad’s iPod (and more) on the Rightfully Ours playlist.)
Have you ever experienced hearing the right song at the right moment, as if it were speaking to you?
First of all, I love how you have a playlist for all the books you’ve written.
Secondly, I love the old country songs my parents used to listen to (on vinyl records, of course) Marty Robbins, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, etc. Listening to them brings back memories.
Thirdly, I also used to sit by the radio with my cassette recorder, waiting for my favorite songs to play! Those were the days, huh? We had to totally work to get our playlist. Kids today don’t know how easy they have it!
And finally, yes, I have heard the right song at the right moment a few times in my life: The day we got the news that we could adopt our little foster baby Cisco, Cisco Kid was playing on the radio!
The Cisco Kid – oh, how perfect that is! We had my old record player out a few months ago to listen to a few of our old albums. Can’t beat that big console my parents had though. It was a giant piece of furniture.
Music can create such a special connection between characters. In my first novel, Never Gone, the main character loads all of her dead dad’s CDs onto her iPod and puts on the music whenever she especially needs his emotional support.
http://laurelgarver.blogspot.com/2017/04/i-indignation.html
That’s great, Laurel! It’s something similar in my novel. Music is uniquely capable of taking us back to a time and place and soothing the soul.
Love the idea of a playlist for each book. May have to steal that idea. As for songs coming at the right moment, I do have one that seems seems to me at certain times. My son, Jay, was killed in a tragic accident at age 28. His fiancé at the time told us his favorite song was Sweet Child o’ Mine, and we used it at his memorial service. Of course I gave it on playlist but the best time to hear it is when it miraculously pours forth on the radio or some setting.
So sorry for your loss, Janet. There is something special about songs flowing over the airwaves without our having played them on demand.
thank you – I don’t know that that big Baptist church will ever get over us playing guns and roses HaHa but it was his favorite and I was determined!
Haha! Well, at least it wasn’t “Welcome to the Jungle.”
I love when the right song comes on at the right moment. 🙂
With Love,
Mandy
Me too!
I write loads of flash fiction so I haven’t created any playlists for these super-short stories…,maybe when I work on a book that’s longer, then that would lend itself more to a playlist.
Yes, longer works are more suited to it.
I have never listened to any other playlist (but sounds like a lot of the music of my youth were similar to your brothers), but there are many songs that I relate to events of my life–some uplifting others sad.
There are songs that take me to a specific place – as in, in my first car, heading south on such and such road. Musical memory is amazing.
Not so much the right song at the right time but there are definitely songs that always take me back to a moment. Great post.
Yes – music has the uncanny ability to do that.