My "Cloaked" Playlist

I'm getting sooooooooo close to finishing my first draft of "Cloaked," my western reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood story.  The final showdown is behind me, and I just might polish off the denouement tonight.  I had such a good stint last night -- 1,800 words of mainly actions, very little dialog!  I write dialog like the wind, but describing what people are doing takes me much longer.  I want it to be clear; I want readers to know who is where doing what, and when and how they do it.  And when I've got four people converging on one spot like I do in the bit I was working on, that takes me a while.

But anyway!  I thought it would be fun to share with you some of the music I've been listening to while writing "Cloaked."  I've had four soundtracks on heavy rotation, and part of Aaron Copland's Rodeo too, so here are some of the tracks I've used most from those, for your listening pleasure.

When I first began writing "Cloaked," I listened mostly to Victor Young's score for Shane (1953).  Not surprising, given that Alan Ladd was my inspiration for one character.  Here's one song, "Trip to Town," which gives you a good feel for the whole album, and is also a track I listened to a lot for early scenes in "Cloaked."  It's got such a happy, homey feeling, and I was trying to capture something similar for the part of the story where my main character was getting acquainted with her new surroundings.

I bopped back and forth between Shane and Jerry Goldsmith's score for Bandelero! (1968) for a lot of the first third or so of the story.  I almost never buy soundtracks for movies I haven't seen, because a lot of my enjoyment of soundtracks comes from associating the music with the stories they accompany.  But I have never seen Bandelero!, having been reliably informed that it's not worth my time.  The score, however, is extremely fun, and I bought it as mp3 files last year.  You can listen to it here on YouTube, although the tracks are all out of order.  The main theme is my favorite, but I actually listened to "Across the River" the most for "Cloaked," so here it is:

I eventually settled on music from The Big Country (1958) by Jerome Moross as the ideal fit for the whole middle section of this story.  It's cheerful, but exciting, which was precisely what I needed.  You can hear the whole album here on YouTube, but "Old Thunder" is the track I was drawn to the most for this story.  It's almost a musical description of my heroine, quirky and sweet, but with an underlying strength.

There's a dance scene in "Cloaked," which I wrote all in one evening while listening to this selection from Rodeo by Aaron Copland.  It's got "Buckaroo Holiday," "Corral Nocturne," "Saturday Night Waltz," and "Hoe-down" all strung together, nineteen minutes of music that I could just keep repeating.  Usually I don't listen to YouTube when I'm writing, opting for music I own (sometimes soundtracks, sometimes Bobby Darin -- those are just about all I listen to while writing anymore).  But I discovered that my Aaron Copland CD only has "Hoe-down" on it, which means I need to get a CD of all of Rodeo, obviously.  But I haven't gotten one yet, so YouTube it was.  Like I said, it's nineteen minutes long, so I'm not going to embed it here, but you can follow the link at the beginning of this paragraph to listen to it if you want to.

Now, so far, everything I've listed here probably makes a lot of sense to you for stuff to listen to while writing a western.  But for most of the last act of "Cloaked," and all of the big showdown, I listened to nothing at all but Patrick Doyle's score for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).  And that has absolutely nothing westerny to it.  But I'd listened to a few tracks from it over and over while writing an atmospheric action sequence years and years ago, and I knew its dark energy would serve me perfectly for the heroine confronting the villain, so I asked for the soundtrack for Christmas, as I'd only borrowed it from the library before.  And I got it!  And it was practically perfect in every way.  You can listen to the whole soundtrack here on YouTube, but "Death of Cedric" is the track that I will forever associate with "Cloaked."  I hit a very emotional part of my climactic scene while listening to it, and the combination of my heroine's journey to meet her fate and this music brought me to tears while I was writing.  At Starbucks, in full view of a Saturday morning customer rush, where I blew my nose loudly into not one but two tissues before going back to the writing.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed these!  If you're also a writer, I want to know -- do you listen to music while you write?  And if so, what sort?  Do you try to find music that matches what you're working on?  Or listen to whatever you're in the mood for at the moment?  I'm curious!