wish you were here

I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence music has had on my life and my writing.  Every story I’ve written has had some kind of soundtrack or playlist associated with it.  I’m one of those people who writes with music playing in headphones or on the stereo, and music textures always inform my writing.

And lately, I’ve been going back, way back, to when I first started seriously writing when I was about 14. I grew up listening to a lot of hip-hop and whatever was on the radio, so I still have an affinity for New Jack Swing as well as New Wave. But by the time I’d hit 13-14, Queen was making a comeback on the charts, and I was all over it.

I’m not sure what it is about “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that shit was like a gateway drug into an obsession that was really not healthy in high school. But it was like a healthy gateway drug? Maybe?  Is it a good thing to be obsessed with an awesome band?

I’d bought every tape I could. (This was before I’d started buying CDs when I was about 16, then all those tapes eventually got replaced.) Anytime a Queen video or special was on TV, I taped it on my junky VCR. I bought books, posters, shirts. Whatever I could get my hands on, eventually.

Queen made me want to write poetry.

It all started with a song called “Is This The World We Created.” I guess for some reason, when I heard the lyrics, it made me want to write a poem about how we’re fucking up the earth. (Yeah, I was all environmental and shit in ’92. Okay, not really.) I really thought I was writing some deep verse. And no, I’m not going to post it.

But it was this song that really made me think about lyrics, and poetry, and it made me want to write. I’d just started playing violin, and hearing Queen’s lyrics made me want to write songs, and be in a band, and be a rockstar writer.

I still want to be a rockstar writer, but I’m a little more practical about it these days.

I don’t listen to this song as much anymore, probably because it feels hokey after that first listen 16 years later, but whenever I happen to hear this song either on random or I happen to catch a Queen concert somewhere out there in cableland, it reminds me of that summer night in my bedroom, listening to my tape with the headphones on, rewinding the tape every time the song was over and just playing this song again and again.