I have a wide variety of music I listen to when I’m writing or when I need to focus. It can range from opera (love Puccini, some Mozart and a little Verdi), to cafe jazz (Melody Gardot and Agnes Obel, I’m looking at you), to playlist mixes put together by Pandora.
(Don’t hate on Pandora now. I don’t “get” Spotify and probably never will. Give me random music mixes any day, just like the mixed tapes I used to agonizingly make back in the day, when having the right order was crucial to the final product.)
But the music that gets me, that fills my soul, that doesn’t distract me unless I want it to, that I write the most to is scores. Film, TV or video game scores, it’s all the same to me. Although I will say the Leaving Earth score from Mass Effect 3 sounds amazing on a good audio system, especially if you’re blasting it. And the Final Fight score from Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV Show still moves me to tears, but I digress.
All of the albums in this picture are part of several different Pandora playlists I routinely listen to when I need to concentrate, but they aren’t the only ones. My standard playlists feature: Thomas Newman, Klaus Badelt, Yann Tiersen, Dario Marianelli, Bach, and many many others, including specific songs featured above.
It is amazing to me how scores impact you emotionally without you even realizing at the time when you are watching or hearing them for the first time. What about you? What music do you listen to when you write or when you want to be inspired?