Music

What’s your favorite writing music from 2011?

Share the songs or albums that inspired you in the comments section and we will add it to our growing Spotify playlist (also posted below)–it currently contains six hours of instrumental, Amazon’s best classical music of 2011, rock, folk, electronica and more for your listening pleasure.

If you want more inspiration, check out Largehearted Boy’s annual list of Year-End Music Lists. Every year this GalleyCat editor makes an annual collection of his favorite writing music from the year. We’ve posted the list below along with music from GalleyCat readers around the country. Follow this link to listen to the playlist.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the musical team that created the moody soundtrack for The Social Network, have just released a six-song sampler from their upcoming soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Follow this link to download the sampler, containing six atmospheric songs for your writing pleasure–a glimpse of the three hour long final album. The David Fincher-directed adaptation of Stieg Larsson‘s mega-bestseller will hit theaters in mid-December.

Here’s more from Reznor, the leader of Nine Inch Nails: “For the last fourteen months Atticus and I have been hard at work … We laughed, we cried, we lost our minds and in the process made some of the most beautiful and disturbing music of our careers. The result is a sprawling three-hour opus that I am happy to announce is available for pre-order right now for as low as $11.99. The full release will be available in one week – December 9th.”

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Both Knopf and Doubleday and have joined Spotify, building hand-picked music lists for their authors. The site includes a number of playlists, including mixes from Colson Whitehead, Erin Morgenstern, and Jennifer Egan.

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. We also recommend you check our “How to Control Your Facebook Apps” post to make sure you are happy with your privacy settings. We’ve already built “12 Spotify Playlists for Writers.”

Here’s more about Whitehead’s playlist for Zone One: “The undead take Manhattan in this literary and literal feast from award-winning author Colson Whitehead. The author selected these 10 songs to set the scene for his postmodern meditation on exterminating zombies in Manhattan.” (Via K.B. Abele)

The indie rock band Wilco just released their complex and inspiring new album, The Whole Love. The record concludes with a song, “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend).” We caught up with novelist Jane Smiley, confirming that the haunting song is indeed about her partner.

Smiley (pictured, via Mike Bennington) explained: “Apparently my partner was chatting to Jeff Tweedy about some religious thoughts. I don’t quite understand the song, but those who’ve heard it seem to really like it, especially the music. I do think that it is really funny that someone as square (and old) as myself would end up in the title of a song in an alt-rock group’s album.”

The 12-minute song won’t be available until September 27th, but here’s a sample of lyrics from the song: “One Sunday Morning /  Oh, one son is gone. / I can see where it’s dawning / Over the sea / My father said what I had become / No one should be.”

The streaming music service Spotify allows readers to create and share playlists drawn from millions of songs online. Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service.

Once you have an account, we’ve rounded up twelve Spotify playlists for writers–hours and hours of writing music for you to enjoy. We love making music mixes, so we will create more playlists for writers.

If you have playlist suggestions, add them in the comments section for future posts.

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Eleanor Henderson had punk rock legends like Misfits and Minor Threat wailing throughout her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints. GalleyCat reader Tim Frederick built a punk rock soundtrack for the book on Spotify.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel: “Jude was the one in Converse high-tops, the stars Magic Markered into pentagrams, and he wore his red hair in a devil lock–short in the back and long in the front, in a fin that sliced between his eyes to his chin. Unless you’d heard of the Misfits, not the Marilyn Monroe movie but the horror-rock/glam-punk band, and if you were living in Lintonburg, Vermont, in 1987, you probably hadn’t, you’d never seen anything like it.”

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. Once you have an account, check out our Patti Smith Spotify playlist, our Geoff Dyer Spotify playlist, James Ellroy Spotify playlist and the new Eleanor Henderson Spotify playlist.

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James Ellroy has a portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven mounted above his bed. Inspired by the crime novelist’s love of the great composer, we’ve created a three-hour Spotify playlist collecting James Ellroy’s favorite Beethoven music.

Read more about Ellroy’s favorite classical music here. In an interview, Ellroy once explained: “Classical music brings back the awe of life to me and the essence of drama, and I grew up digging big, thunderous, important (music). And wanting to create it in my own way. Which could only be the word.”

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. Once you have an account, check out our Haruki Murakami Spotify playlist, our Patti Smith Spotify playlist, our Geoff Dyer Spotify playlist and our new James Ellroy Spotify playlist.

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Today Little, Brown and Company announced that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has sold more than one million copies of his memoir, Life.

To celebrate, we’ve linked to Beth Miller’s comprehensive Spotify playlist collecting “the songs, artists and recordings discussed by Keith Richards in his autobiography Life in the order they appear in the book (generally).” That amounts to 300 songs, enough writing music to keep you busy for 17 hours.

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. Once you have an account, check out our Haruki Murakami Spotify playlist, the Patti Smith Spotify playlist, our Geoff Dyer Spotify playlist and this new Keith Richards Spotify playlist.

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Geoff Dyer‘s brilliant But Beautiful explored jazz history with novelistic flourishes, giving readers an invaluable jazz education in the process. Check out our new But Beautiful playlist on Spotify and listen to more than four hours of classic jazz albums handpicked by Dyer.

Here’s more about the great trumpet player and vocalist Chet Baker, from the book (all songs listed below): “Put them all together and they were like a book, a dream guide to the heart: ‘I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me,’ ‘The Way You Look Tonight,’ ‘You Go to my Head,’ ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily,’ ‘There Will Never Be Another You.’ It was all there, all the novels in the world wouldn’t tell you more about men and women and the moments flashing like stars between them.”

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. Once you have an account, check out our Haruki Murakami Spotify playlist, our Patti Smith Spotify playlist, our Lev Grossman Spotify playlist and our new Geoff Dyer Spotify playlist.

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The new video for “Calamity Song” by The Decemberists reenacts a scene from David Foster Wallace‘s masterpiece, Infinite Jest. We’ve embedded the video above–what do you think?

In the video, a group of teenagers play Wallace’s imaginary Eschaton game, a combination of tennis match and computer simulation for nuclear war. Follow this link if you want to play the game in real life. Singer and novelist Colin Meloy told NPR he had just finished reading Infinite Jest and wanted the video to be a tribute to the late novelist.

Check it out: “I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that’s played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace’s work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we’ve come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud.”