Music While You Write

When I'm developing a character for a novel, I frequently think about what music the character listens to. Their musical preferences don't always make it into the book, but knowing what they listen to helps me know them. Ellie in Gravity listened to Shlomo Carlebach, a rabbi who helped transform Jewish music. I could imagine Ellie's parents rocking out to Carlebach's Od Yishama while Ellie listens, tormented from the stairs.

 

 In my second novel, The Book of Trees, music was an integral part of Mia's life because she had played in a band. While writing the novel I listened to Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, the songs of her childhood. I also listened to Rockabilly singers like Imelda May and the Louvin Brothers, a country band that released a gospel album entitled, Satin is Real. (How can you not love an album title like that?)

 

The songs my characters love frequently become a background to my writing. The music has to be familiar enough that it's not distracting. Recently I've fallen in love with the band London Grammar and their album Metal and Dust. It's become the background to my current novel, Feast. Although my character Sydney never listens to any specific music in the book - she's got lots of other things going on- in my head this is the music, both eerie and lush, introspective and reverential that Sydney would listen to. 

 

A recent trip home found my brother and I belting out songs from our childhood in my parents' kitchen. We only seem to sing the same shmaltzy songs from a tape my mother once had of Jewish music. In particular we're fond of a song called "Jewish Child," which has some killer lyrics: "Jewish child, you are out there running wild/ You've got no strings attached to you/ You can do whatever you want toooo!" The song goes on to recount that people are praying at the Western Wall that the child will return home to the Five Books of Moses. As kids (and adults) we found this endlessly entertaining. (We sang this so much this trip that my husband, who isn't Jewish, was also singing it at the top of his lungs.) 

 

Moshe Yess

By googling one of the more popular songs on the tape,  "David Cohen's Bar Mitzvah Day," we discovered the singer was named Moshe Yess, a Canadian from Montreal who had once been in a psychadelic music group in the sixties, and then became a Chabbad entertainer.  He used American musical trends to communicate the values of Judaism. Yess died in 2011 from cancer at the age of sixty-five, but his music has made it to youtube and is covered by other Chassidic artists. 

 

 

 

Moshe Yess tape circa 1985 with my brother's printing

Although I still find the music shmaltzy and I bristle at some of the messianic messages behind his lyrics, this is the music of my childhood. I have exactly four tapes from my childhood collection and Yess' Megama hits is one of them. (The others are Madonna's Greatest Hits, much listened to when my husband and I communted together in Toronto; Beethoven Lives Upstairs, a childhood favourite; and a compilation my friend James made for me of songs my husband and I wrote in the late 90's in India and Nepal.) 

Lately I've found myself listening to some of Yess songs as I write. A chasidic singer named Yerachmiel Ziegler does a beautiful cover of "Jewish Child"that sounds influenced by Cat Stevens. Another musician, Tali Yess, plays a great acoustic piano version of "That's My Boy."

 

There's one Yess song I've avoided listening to, possibly Yess' most famous song: My Zaidy. In the song the narrator describes his Zaidy's escape from Europe and his new life in Canada, and the legacy of Judaism he creates for his family. I've avoided listening to the song because the Zaidy dies and it's too hokey and sentimental,  and it makes me think of my mother crying in the car for her father, my Zaidy, with my brother and I in the backseat.  And yet, this is the background to my novel, Feast. The main character Sydney has a grandfather who is this Zaidy: from the old world, involved in Judaism, frail and also difficult. "My Zaidy" is one of Sydney's songs and she feels as tortured and nostaligic for this song as I do.