Do you listen to Pink Floyd or Yes or King Crimson for inspiration?

On today’s edition of the Morning Media Menu, we spoke with Rare Bird Lit publisher Tyson Cornell and author Marc Weingarten, the collaborators behind a new anthology about progressive rock. In Yes Is the Answer (And Other Prog Rock Tales), novelists and journalists share their personal experiences with this largely ignored genre of music.

Press play below to listen on SoundCloud. We’ve also included a free prog rock Spotify playlist curated by Weingarten and some excerpts from the interview…

Read more

Neon Neon has released Praxis Makes Perfect, an entire album dedicated to the life story of Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

The Italian activist published Boris Pasternak‘s Doctor Zhivago and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard, and both novels get their own songs on the album. Below, we’ve embedded a free Spotify playlist so you can listen to the whole album. Here’s more about the album:

Praxis Makes Perfect is inspired by the life and times of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Born in to one of Italy’s wealthiest families, Feltrinelli was a left-wing political activist and published some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, including The Leopard and Doctor Zhivago. He died in highly suspicious circumstances in 1972. Praxis Makes Perfect features Sabrina Salerno, Asia Argento, Cate Le Bon & Josh Klinghoffer.

Read more

What’s your favorite writing music from 2013? We’ve already found some great albums for our annual list of the best music that helped us write this year.

Follow the links below to listen to the instrumental songs we’ve picked so far this year. Share the instrumental songs or albums that inspired you in the comments section and we will add it to our growing Spotify playlist (also posted below).

Follow this link to read our Best Writing Music of 2011 list and our 2012 list. If you want more inspiration, check out Largehearted Boy’s annual list of Year-End Music Lists and Open Culture’s timeless Best Music to Write By list.

Read more

Wish your book had a soundtrack? Small Demons has added some automatically generated Spotify and iTunes playlists to its collection of information about your favorite books.

On the Morning Media Menu last year, we interviewed Valla Vakili, CEO of Small Demons. His company is building an online literary database that collects and catalogs thousands of references to music, movies, people and objects mentioned inside of books.

Press play below to listen to the interview on SoundCloud. Vakili explained how writers and readers can build book collections using the new Storyboard feature, bringing together books on digital shelves.

Read more

The great jazz musician Dave Brubeck has died. He was 91 years old. “Take Five” was his most famous track, but his entire catalog overflowed with creativity and inspiration.

Remember his legendary work as you write today. We’ve created a free Spotify playlist to introduce his work, perfect writing music for a December afternoon.

Here’s more from NPR: “Born Dec. 6, 1920, Brubeck grew up on a 45,000-acre ranch in California and he came to music through a circuitous route. In a 1999 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, he said his first love was rodeo roping. But his mother, who spotted a special talent when he sat at the piano, insisted he not rope anything larger than a yearling.” (Image via)

Read more

Writing HBO AMERICAN GODS pilot with @tordotcom AMERICAN GODS playlist playing to keep me company. j.mp/SeMHHC

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 28, 2012

On Twitter, Neil Gaiman shared the fact that he is currently writing an American Gods pilot for HBO. We’ve embedded the tweet above.

Click here to read the first five chapters of the award-winning novel, “a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth.” The news of the possible adaptation emerged last year.

If you want to listen to the American Gods playlist on Spotify, follow this link. We’ve embedded the songlist below, a great collection of writing music.

Read more

What’s your favorite writing music from 2012? We’ve created our annual list of the new music that helped us write this year.

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 music.

Follow this link to read our Best Writing Music of 2011 list. If you want more inspiration, check out Largehearted Boy’s annual list of Year-End Music Lists and Open Culture’s timeless Best Music to Write By list.

Read more

Mark Z. Danielewski published The Fifty Year Sword in the United States today, creating a digital book version of his intricate ghost story alongside the print edition.

The iBooks version features music from pianist and NPR From the Top host Christopher O’Riley. In an email interview with GalleyCat,  Danielewski explained how his relationship began with the pianist and how the created the digital book. Read his response and enjoy O’Riley’s piano work in the free Spotify playlist below–it makes great writing music.

Follow this link to read Danielewski’s advice for making enhanced digital books. The author will make a few book tour stops with O’Riley, reading the book along with the music. Follow this link to see the stops on the tour.

Read more

Brain Pickings writer Maria Popova has created the Literary Jukebox, sharing a song and a related quote every day.

Check it out: “As a lover of both literature and music, I frequently find myself immersed in a passage, with a conceptually related song beginning to play in my mind’s ear. I recently started making such matches more consciously and was quickly drawn into a highly addictive exercise in creative intersections and associations. So I decided to make a little side project out of it. Enter Literary Jukebox, a minimalist site where I match a passage from a favorite book with a thematically related song each day.”

Josh Boston designed the logo and Debbie Millman helped inspire the project. If you are looking for more music and literary inspiration, explore our Spotify Playlists for writers below…

Read more

Rock star Beck will publish his next album with McSweeney’s. The 108-page package will feature booklets, lyrics, sheet music (sample page embedded above) and covers for 20 different songs–but the reader must play the music themselves. Check it out:

Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form—twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of- home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case (and, when necessary, ukelele notation), the Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012 … The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.

Will you play Beck Hansen’s Song Reader? The collection comes out December 2012. The publisher will also feature its favorite covers of the songs on its website.