My Current Music Obsessions!

For the first time in ages, I have been just sitting down, chilling out and listening to music. Although I like being busy, and love having people around me, this evening it’s been lovely to just relax (well, I can’t exactly do much the way my back is right now!). So, I thought I’d blog about my current music obsessions and the reasons why I’m currently obsessed with them.

Plain White T’s – Hey There Delilah – I’m ashamed to say, I never heard this song until a couple of weeks ago, when my boyfriend played it on his phone while he was at my house, and it’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard for a long time. I don’t know why I hadn’t heard it before, I remember it being really popular a couple of years ago, but I’m so glad I know it now – I absolutely adore it. I love the really simple acoustic-y songs, and it’s so beautiful. Learning to play it on guitar 🙂

Train – Drive By – I’ve been hearing this song on the radio for a couple of weeks, and although I was able to sing along to the chorus because I’ve heard it so many times, I never actually heard who it was by. I’m a fan of Train (another of their songs appears in this list, no prizes for guessing which one!) and when I heard this was by them, it made me love them even more. The chorus is so catchy and the words are beautiful.

Ed Sheeran – Lego House – This one is mainly for the video (Rupert Grint is amazing in it!) but I also just love the song. Yes, it’s played a lot, as is A Team (which also appears in this list), but I could listen to it all day. Again, it’s another one with beautiful lyrics, and the video is very clever – it kind of shows you that the song could be about romantic love, which is what I assumed at first, but it could also be about obsessive love, which is what the video shows.

Ed Sheeran – A-Team – I just love this one. I like the cover Birdy did of it, but Ed Sheeran is mindblowing on this one, I love the lyrics (for a girl who loves epic score instrumentals, I’m also mad on lyrics, I absolutely adore meaningful, beautiful lyrics) and the guitar. I’m learning to play this one on guitar too.

Ed Sheeran – Drunk – Yup, another Ed Sheeran song. What can I say, I think he’s great. At first, I wasn’t too keen on him, but I listened to A Team and Lego House and was keen, and then I heard this one and it sealed the deal. Gorgeous song, and I love the video, even though I don’t like cats 😛

Train – Hey Soul Sister – This one is mine and my boyfriend’s “our song” kind of thing (there are a couple of others too, but this is the one that makes me think of him every time I hear it). He played and sang it for me, not long after we got together, and although I loved it before that (I used to play it on the ukulele, which I haven’t played for ages and need to get back into!), the link to him just makes it even more special. I can’t help but smile every time it comes on the radio, and I love it when one of us plays it on guitar (he taught me to play it too!) and we sing it together. I have the lyrics printed out and blu-tacked above my bed so that before I go to sleep, I can look at them and think of the first time he sang it to me.

 

So that was a brief(ish) and very soppy romantic look at the songs I’m currently mad about. There are a few more (Birdy’s covers of A-Team and Skinny Love, and Winter Winds & Awake My Soul by Mumford and Sons are almost permanently on that list!) but those are the main ones!

Roll On Wednesday Evening!

I just feel so busy at the moment, it’s like I’m drowning in stuff that I have to do! The drama practical exam on Wednesday has taken over completely, it feels like ages since I’ve written anything properly on my story and I’m itching to get back to it but I know I need to perfect this exam to give myself the best chance of getting an A on it, or at least a B! I also have a Psychology powerpoint to do, but that is nearly finished and can wait for the weekend to absolutely finish.

I’m so looking forwards to Wednesday afternoon – once the exam is finished, there’ll be no more work to do apart from a little bit in preparation for the self-evaluation Friday morning, and I can relax with my boyfriend and not be stressing about anything.

As for writing, I really am eager to get back into it. Finished a brilliant book today and it’s got me itching to get back and start writing, even if I can only do a couple of thousand words or something, it’d still be progress, and that’s what I really want to be making right now! One of the only benefits of doing revision/college work over writing is that I can listen to music with actual lyrics in it. When I write fiction, it has to be epic score type music, but if I’m writing out essays or just revising, I can actually listen to music with lyrics and everything. Currently, my “Wordy Music” playlist consists of –

• “Paradise” – Coldplay
• “Brighter Than The Sun” – Colbie Caillat
• “Somebody That I Used To Know” – Gotye ft. Kimbra
• “Everlasting Love” – Jamie Cullum
• “Lego House” – Ed Sheeran
• “Drunk” – Ed Sheeran
• “What Doesn’t Kill You” – Kelly Clarkson
• “Video Games” – Lana Del Rey
• “Last Friday Night” – Katy Perry
• “Skinny Love” – Birdy
• “A-Team”  – Birdy’s version (I love Ed Sheeran’s, but Birdy’s has so much emotion in it!)

So, that was a little peek into my musical tastes! Approve, disapprove, I don’t really care – it helps me feel more productive with my work and also makes me feel a little more human, as opposed to a writing machine who listens to nothing but epic score on a loop in her head.

The power of music!

Music is a truly amazing thing. It can move people to tears, melt the hardest of hearts and bring a smile to your face when you’re feeling at your worst. It also has benefits that can be more personal to you – for instance, I find it very hard to write if I don’t have music on. However, it has to be instrumentals, or classical/acoustic. I can’t write to many songs with words – pop songs, rock songs etc are all out of the question. The only two songs with lyrics that I have on my writing playlist right now are an acoustic version of “Cancer” by My Chemical Romance, and “Who Wants To Live Forever”, the Katherine Jenkins version of the Queen classic.

I’m not sure what it is about the lyrics – perhaps that I find myself wanting to sing along, and that distracts me from actually doing any productive writing – but I really struggle to write if the music I listen to has any fast-paced lyrics. I mainly use “soundtrack” music – I believe the correct term is “epic score” or something similar. I find the best two groups for this are Two Steps From Hell and Immediate Music – both of these groups have such a variety of pieces available (I say “pieces” rather than “songs” because they are – they are beautifully orchestrated and incredibly emotional. You can get pieces that range from mind-blowingly epic to heartbreakingly emotional and tear-jerking, and my Writing playlist is full of their pieces.

Personally, I find it easier to write with the emotional music – when it’s epic, I often find myself having to sit back and actually losing myself in the music, and I picture epic battle scenes that usually don’t actually fit with where I am in the story at the moment – because it seems to enhance my writing somehow. If I’m writing a particularly sad scene, I will find one piece, which I feel best represents the emotions I’m trying to show in the scene, and I will listen to it on repeat constantly until I’ve finished the chapter. There are some chapters, like the epic long one in this book, where I actually have a smaller playlist playing on loop to write it, because the characters are experiencing such a plethora of emotions, and I want all the different pieces on hand to help me to write it. It seems to work pretty well – I’m so proud of that chapter I wrote, and I’m convinced the music I chose played a definite part in it.

There are some people who can’t write to music, but they find that music helps them to picture scenes in their heads, and even helps them to come up with new scenes – one of the Immediate Music pieces, “Boy Wonder”, basically gave me the whole scene in my head of the first chapter of what will be the sequel to the trilogy I’m currently writing, and that all came from around two minutes of music – just two minutes of noise, but it’s some of the most beautiful and most inspiring “noise” I have ever heard.

So, if you’re ever struggling for a plot, or the words just don’t want to flow, slip on your headphones (or better yet, play it out loud if you don’t have to be considerate of neighbours!), go to YouTube and find some of this epic score music – search for Two Steps From Hell or Immediate Music, listen to a few of their pieces and then see what the Recommendations bar down the side of the video suggests to you – you might just find a new piece of music that gets your story back on track!