Play It On Repeat

Why I chose to give my novel it's own soundtrack

Photo by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash

I've always believed that the best stories have an echo. It's a word or phrase whispered down the corridors of the mind long after the last page has been turned, like a lingering note, a bassline that catches you off guard in the car, or lyrics that burn themselves onto the inside of your skull when you least want them to.

When I sat down to write Play on Repeat, I didn’t begin with a plot, or even a clear ending. I began with a song. Then another. Then thirty more.

Even the first line of my book starts with a lyric:

"When everything's made to be broken… I just want you to know who I am..."

I actually started with two songs. One of them is the song that I once recorded onto a tape and gave to my first ever boyfriend, and the other was a song that reminded me of what it was to feel wanted and loved. Re-listening to these sparked the initial idea, along with a conversation with a friend. 98,000 words and an extensive playlist later, here we are.

Here’s an example of how I wove tracks into my writing:

He had thought about the way she had looked at him when he had first played her How Soon is Now by The Smiths, her face relaxed and her fingers tracing patterns across his forearm. Then she’d very lightly kissed him.

I am human and I need to be loved… Just like everyone else does…

- Chapter 2, Play on Repeat

Or, this if you prefer:

The note was brief. Too brief.

I just need time, but I’ll always be your friend. Don’t be a loser, Stappard. Keep in touch.

Dylan exhaled through his nose, rubbing a hand over his jaw. There it was. The final sentence in a story that had never quite been allowed to end.

He glanced down, feeling something small and plastic in his lap.

Her earbud.

She had left it behind.

He felt for the other in his ear. She must have decided she didn’t want to wake him.

He sat up properly and stretched his arms out, holding the ear bud in his hand. The note floated down in front of him, revealing another part of it that he hadn’t read yet.

“What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you..."

Keep the earbuds. I’ve put the case for them in your backpack. - E

A soft breath escaped him, something between a laugh and a sigh. The airport continued around him, indifferent, the world moving forward even as he sat there, still.

- Chapter 10, Play on Repeat

I didn’t write the book like I was scoring a film. It wasn’t that deliberate, or that detached. Instead, in my memory of half-remembered nights, missed calls, damp sheets, and all the words I never said out loud but sang to myself in the dark, it was the soundtrack that accompanied my life that gave me the most comfort. This was alongside the books I was reading. They still do, and I wanted to honour that.

My musical tastes have never been considered cool.

I was born in 1988, which means I was a child of the 90s, but far too young to really appreciate the music at the time. As a teenager though, I listened to it more than anything else. My novel starts in the early 2000s, and makes it way through 4 decades, but the soundtrack remains closely linked to my teenage tastes, almost as a reminder that we never truly forget who we were.

“Without music, life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche wrote. That quote is a cliché now, pinned to Pinterest boards and made into edgy typography posters for café walls, but the sentiment is true enough.

To be honest, I’d go further: without music, my writing would be half dead.

When I was seventeen, I read about Hemingway writing in Parisian bars and how he let the din of piano and chatter drown out his fears of the blank page as he penned his best pieces. Fitzgerald’s parties in ‘The Great Gatsby’ pulse with jazz so realistically that you can almost smell the champagne on the page. Haruki Murakami says: “If I’m asked what my ideal writing environment is, I’d say it’s one with good music.” He runs miles and writes miles, all to rhythm.

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

For me, the playlist for Play on Repeat became both a map and a mood. It was a way to chart the scene, and to set its temperature. I’d play the same track on loop until the scene bent itself around the beat. If a kiss needed a soft acoustic hush, that's what it would get. A fight possibly demanded the metallic snarl of guitars or the irony of some clever lyrics.

I’d write dialogue like lyrics too. I'd write half truths and unfinished phrases that made more sense sung than spoken. I want my readers to hear what my characters couldn't say, like in this moment where I want to give a brief foreshadowing of what’s to come:

She could hear students all around her in the different rooms, some of them having lively debates, some of them playing music. The 90s were back in fashion. Finally. Somewhere, out of one of the classrooms, someone was playing No Doubt’s Don’t Speak.

You and me, we used to be together… Everyday together, always… I really feel, I’m losing my best friend…

There was a song that she hadn’t heard for a long time. She carried on walking as fast as she could.

- Chapter 6, Play on Repeat

I use songs to time travel a lot. The right one can drag me back to an old bedroom or an old heartbreak. It’s humiliating really, that a single chord can gut me with the memory of someone who no longer speaks to me.

Nick Hornby got it right when he wrote in High Fidelity: “What came first - the music or the misery?”

For me, it was the misery. Then the music. Then the novel.

My book is based on my own experiences, so it only tracks to use the music means something to me. The experts do say to write what you know after all. Whilst most of my book is embellished, because it's a fiction after all, some of it really was true, and the memories came flooding back with every stroke of the keypad and every drumbeat in my earphones.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

I used songs as bookmarks for my own past and as lines I couldn’t bear to write plainly. A repeated chorus could be a repeated mistake. I hid tracks in scenes as secrets I wanted someone to find, like here:

He had played her Nick Cave’s Do You Love Me? and followed it with The Murder Ballads album under a tree in the back fields, the summer sun beating down around them relentlessly. He’d explained to her that he quite liked the idea of being a writer. He liked the way the music they were listening to always had a narrative.

- Chapter Two, Play on Repeat

I want my readers to listen in the same way I wrote: with their hearts slightly cracked open, humming along to something they didn’t know they’d been missing.

So yes, Play on Repeat has a full soundtrack because the story demands it. The songs aren’t just part of the story, but the beat behind it. My own life has never been silent, so, when I write, I want the page to breathe, to echo, and to bleed through your headphones at 2:00am when you think you’ve forgotten that one person you wanted to forget - until you hear the song sums them up again.

As it is for my protagonists, so it is for you as the reader.

Maybe you’ll listen to the playlist and hear your own ghost humming back. Maybe you’ll remember someone you’d sworn you’d outgrown. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a new song to ruin you all over again.

Put it on. Lie back.

Let it play on repeat.

Listen to the Play on Repeat soundtrack on Spotify here.

The songs on the soundtrack are featured in the order that they appear in the novel. This means that some artists have more than one track placed listed one after the other.

🖤

What song means the most to you and why? Tell me below.

Helen