Patti O'Shea's Blog

I hate it when a song I want to buy has multiple versions because then I have to figure out which version I want. If it’s just a remastered song or one copy is on the Best Of album then it’s not a big deal. I know what that is, but a lot of times it’s unclear.

Last week I wanted to buy a copy of Good To Be Me. I Googled the lyrics I remembered to get the name of the song and who sings it and then went to buy.

And found three versions. My choices were the regular song, the Deluxe version, and the River Road (River something) rendition. I figured out the Deluxe one had to do with the album and not the song, so I had it narrowed down to two options. I listened to a sample for each of them, but that didn’t help me because of the parts of the song in the sample. The lengths were different; one was 4:12 and the other was 4:01.

I decided to Google this and didn’t find anything helpful. I did find something interesting, though. The song had received “unsolicited” airplay and this bulletin board had people complaining that this song had gotten the play. There was another, more worthy country singer who hadn’t gotten unsolicited airplay like this. I was like, whoa. There are really people discussing things like this? And becoming angry on behalf of another singer? I had no idea that fans kept track of stuff like that.

But I digressed. Sorry. So none of my search results that I checked were helpful. I decided to go to my local radio station’s website, hoping they’d list which version of the song they played because that was the one I wanted. I had trouble getting parts of their site to load, including the listing that contained this song. I did find a video for it, played it, but it never said which version it was.

With nothing guiding me the direction I wanted to go, I punted and selected the longer version. I played it when it finished downloading and realized immediately that I’d bought the wrong one. Figures, doesn’t it?

I ended up going back and buying the other version. This is the one I wanted. I probably should have figured it out sooner since this mentioned it “featured Kid Rock,” but just because the other one didn’t say that, didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t singing on it. I’ve run into that before. But in this case, it was accurate.

Mission accomplished, it just took two tries to reach the goal.

I never really considered myself that into music. Sure, I had a lot of CDs and I’m always buying MP3s, but I can’t sing worth a damn and my attempts at playing an instrument went nowhere. Not that I didn’t try. I attempted to learn the viola, the guitar, the piano, the drums, and I think there’s one more, but I can’t remember what it was now. I failed miserably at each. I even know why–I never practiced.

I think this is what separates an interest from a passion–the desire to work at the passion. Writing is my passion. From the age of 14, I wrote and rewrote and revised. If my words didn’t live up to my standards, I didn’t give up. I went back in and worked on it some more, or I chalked it up as a lesson and went to a new story.

With music and art, I gave up when I wasn’t immediately good enough in my own view. Yes, I have an interest in both and I wish I could pick up a pencil and draw. I can’t. But then I’ve never taken the time to try to improve. These are interests for me, not passions.

Oops, digressed. Sorry. Anyway, I never considered myself that into music despite my large collection because I’m a passive consumer and I don’t even really listen to music all that much. Then I started thinking about it some more. I listen to music a lot at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). Not every day, but I call my iPod “life support.” (At home, the laptop is called “life support.”

I also usually have a song in my head, even if it’s just a stanza or something replaying itself. This week it’s been the Brady Bunch kids singing It’s a Sunshine Day. Why? I have no idea. I haven’t watched the Bradys in a long, long time.

My books have theme songs. This started by accident. When I was revising my first published book, Ravyn’s Flight, I was listening to Devo’s Greatest Hits and when Girl U Want came on, I kept replaying it over and over and over. It finally dawned on me that I was looping the song because it fit my book. Ever since then, I’ve tried to find a theme song for every story.

Sometimes I just pick one because I can’t come up with the perfect choice and I don’t have time to waste looking any more. So while I list theme songs for Through a Crimson Veil and my story in Shards of Crimson (among others), they don’t really bring the book to mind or the characters.

But when a book has picked it’s song, it’s a completely different story. I can’t hear that Devo song I mentioned without thinking of Ravyn, Damon, Alex, and Stacey. And the music can influence me while I’m writing the book. The theme song for book 2 of the paranormal trilogy my agent is shopping right now brings in information on that hero every single time I play it. I know that when I actually grow close to writing his story, I’ll have this song looping to get my head into it.

Another example was when I was writing The Power of Two. Whenever I wasn’t sure what to do next (and back then, I wrote a lot more seat of the pants than I do right now), I would listen to Corey Hart’s Never Surrender. That was Cai’s motto: Never surrender. So the song helped me see what the character would do next.

It’s not always theme songs either. When I wrote Blood Feud for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2, Isobel and Seere were listening to Tchaikovsky in her car and I’ll be damned if I didn’t have to listen to Tchaikovsky, too. The weird thing is that I had to listen to it while I was writing In the Darkest Night, which has no relationship whatsoever with the vampire story. I don’t know why, but I bought 3 MP3 albums and shuffled them all weekend while I wrote Kel’s book. Kel has zero interest in classical music. He’s more Seether and Korn than violins and horns.

And that’s the other weird thing–my characters influence me. If they have a word they use all the time, I’ll pick it up even if it’s one I rarely used until they came in. Same with music. I’d never listened to Seether until Kel, now I have one of their albums and I listened to it just this week. Actually, I’m blaming my heroes for all the hard, edgy music I have now. I have always had an eclectic taste in music, but metal was not something I liked or played. Until I started writing contemporary paranormal and my guys arrived.

It’s also interesting that music is more important to my heroes than my heroines. Hmm. I need to think about that. Maybe I have a blog topic for another day.

I mentioned on Thursday that I bought the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz and I’ll confess now that I love soundtracks.

Movie soundtracks are great when I write to music because most of them are instrumental, designed to enhance the movie rather than call attention to itself. That doesn’t mean it isn’t great stuff, just that it’s role isn’t to scream listen to me. Perfect for me because I can find myself too easily distracted by sounds/noise when I’m writing. It just occurred to me that I should create a playlist titled Writing Music.

My favorite soundtracks, though, are from musicals–either Broadway or Hollywood. Although when it comes to movie musicals, I prefer the old days of Hollywood like The Wizard of Oz era.

Currently, I have the songs from 1776 going through my head. I’ve been singing one or the other for about a week now, but my collection of show tunes is fairly impressive. Some of them I don’t listen to that often–okay, most of them–but sometimes I just get a tune stuck in my head and I have go back and listen to the entire soundtrack again. It isn’t just a listening experience for me, it also brings back the story that the music is part of.

Maybe that’s why I don’t own many soundtracks from musicals I haven’t seen. (I’ve got a couple, but usually it’s for one song that I’ve heard over and over somewhere.) Because the music becomes so intertwined with story for me that they’re inseparable.

When I hear the opening song from Guys and Dolls, I see the actors and actresses moving down the streets of New York, the police trying to stop the scammers after tourist dollars, and Sergeant Sarah with her Salvation Army troop trying to save souls.

When I hear I wish from Into the Woods, I can see the stage, see the costumes, and remember the humor. I remember having trouble finding a parking lot near the Ordway Theater in St. Paul and I recall wondering if the play was over at intermission because it seemed complete. I also remember the second half of the play (yes, there was an intermission) and how dark the play became. Still fascinating, but not appropriate for the young children some people had brought to the theater.

When I hear The Impossible Dream from The Man of La Mancha, I remember standing in line at the half price ticket sales place on Times Square, I remember the surprising smallness of the theatre which gave the performance an intimacy and made it uncomfortable to sit because the rows were so tight to each other. But I also remember being entranced by the story, the sets, the costumes.

It’s more than music then that I’m listening to–it’s the complete experience that goes with seeing a production–and maybe this counts as magic, too.