Writing Music

I just reached the 20,000-word mark of my work in progress, which is a straightforward horror novel, set in my home state of Arkansas. For now, that’s all I’ll reveal about it. I’m just a little superstitious, and it seems that if I ever get too excited about a work and start speaking or writing about it, said work will retaliate by dying on the proverbial vine.

I’m here to don my music critic hat and talk about some music I’ve re-discovered while working on this book.

I can write in silence, just as I’ve been known to write in noisy waiting rooms, car lots, and classrooms. But when the setting is 100% to my liking, I prefer to have some writing music emanating from my portable Bose speaker. I have no clear definition of writing music. It varies, depending on my mood. Sometimes it’s a playlist of quiet, somber songs; sometimes it’s folk; sometimes it’s a Radiohead album or a collection of bizarre non-music (such as Tool’s most abstract, Area 51-inspired noise tracks).

Lately, though, my go-to writing music has been what I feel is three straight releases of under-appreciated material by the Swedish progressive death metal band Opeth.


Yes, I do listen to a Swedish progressive death metal band when I need to think: except it’s not death metal. Progressive, yes. Death, no. After Opeth’s 2008 album Watershed, the band abandoned the “death” part of their style entirely (and their progressive death albums are excellent as well, if you’re into that sort of thing). Since Watershed, they’ve released three albums—Heritage (2011), Pale Communion (2014), and Sorceress (2016)—that could be loosely described as simply “prog rock.”  Except this material can't be properly categorized with one label. It’s prog; it's also folk, hard rock, experimental, and yes, a little bit metal; or it's at least influenced by metal. It’s also very fine thinking music.

Heritage is the most challenging of the three efforts. The album begins with its title track, a somber two-minute piano number, then launches into one of the most aggressive tunes of the entire three-album stretch, “The Devil’s Orchard.” This aggressive track hits you head-on and charges furiously towards the short-lived but memorable guitar solo that wraps it up. From here, Heritage crawls and gallops its way through an unpredictable landscape that’s at one moment explosive and the very next quiet and atmospheric. This apparent disjointedness is not entirely a bad thing. Given its unpredictability and complexity, Heritage offers something new with every listen, and the more you listen to it, the more you start to think, “Maybe disjointed isn’t the right word. Maybe this is simply a complex album that takes time to get.”

Pale Communion is a tighter album than Heritage, with a much stronger folk influence than either Heritage or Sorceress. The album opens with a complex, prog-inspired track “Eternal Rains Will Come,” passes through the closest thing this band will come to mainstream rock territory with “Cusp of Eternity,” and then launches straight into the opposite of “mainstream rock” with the eleven-minute prog-folk-metal tune “Moon Above, Sun Below.” This track is complex and unpredictable without meandering; quiet, moody, softly-strummed passages explode into epic guitar solos, which seamlessly retreat into folk territory. "Moon Above, Sun Below" is arguably a microcosm of the entire album. Calmer waters persist through the middle of the album, until we arrive at the three-track closing set: the folk-inspired epic “The River,” the latter-Led Zeppelin-esq. “Voice of Treason,” and the beautifully flowing “Faith In Others,” which sounds exactly like its title.

Sorceress is the most modern-rock influenced of these three albums. It does not contain the heavy-quiet-heavy-quiet unpredictability of Heritage, but it does not—to me—come across as cohesive as Pale Communion; with any other artist, the latter would be a bad thing. But this album, lately, has been my favorite of the three, cohesive or not. There are three tracks here that are straightforward rock/hard rock: the down-tuned and heavy title track, the charging “Chrysalis,” and the (dare I say it?) optimistic-sounding “Era.”  Between these rockers is the complex, bizarre “The Wilde Flowers” (which has grown on me and become a favorite); the largely-instrumental and Middle Eastern-tinged “The Seventh Sojourn”; and the nine-minute Opethian concoction “Strange Brew.” But Sorceress is not without its soft side: “Sorceress 2” is a slightly-ominous, quiet number, and “Will O the Wisp” is a folk-inspired song that soars just enough to take you away.

I’ll summarize with this: if you are open-minded about music and give these three albums a chance, I almost guarantee they’ll take you away, especially if you’ll partake of them with a good set of headphones.

And if you’re a writer who wants some complex, diverse thinking music to entrance you while you work… Well, that’s what brought me here. They work for that, too.