Matt Forbeck

I’m still finishing up the novel I mentioned last month—almost there!—so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.

I love to listen to music. Back when I was a kid, I’d pull out my parents LP albums and 45s (that’s a single-song vinyl record, kid, not a pistol) and listen to them over and over again. I’d learn the lyrics, sing along, and then sing them to myself when I wasn’t anywhere near a record player or radio. (This was back before MP3s and things that play them.)

Today, I still love listening to music, and fortunately I work at a computer that gives me access to countless tunes of all stripes. The trouble is that when I’m working I don’t want to listen to most of them. Writing uses the verbal centers of your brain, the ones they always check to see if they’re shutting off accidentally when they do brain surgery, which is why they keep you awake through it and treat you as if you’re drilling words for the national spelling bee.

Songs with lyrics, of course, also worm their way into that part of the brain—unless I’m familiar enough with them to ignore them and treat them like background chatter. Unfortunately, I need every bit of that center that I can draw on when I’m writing a novel. There’s just not enough of it to spare, and if my brain starts latching on to lyrics and singing along—even just in my head—it’s not letting me use what I need to write. In other words, there’s only so much mindwidth getting pumped out of my verbal centers, and I need to give my writing full access to it.

Because of this, I like listening to wordless music when I write: soundtracks, techno, trance, house, things with a beat but nothing to say—at least literally. In fact, I’ll often pick up or adopt a certain album for a new book and then listen to it over and over while I write. When I’m done with the book, I’m often done (at least for a while) with that piece of music too.

The music also helps drown out the other strange noises in my house—I have lots of kids—and lets me focus on the writing instead. Things like screams still manage to poke through, which is likely good for my family’s long-term survival though.

When I’m not writing, though, I really go for great music with solid lyrics that mean something to me. For instance, the ringtone on my cell phone is the opening bars to “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. As the song says, “If you ever get annoyed, look at me. I’m self-employed. I love to work at nothing all day.”