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I discovered my favorite writing music in the winter of 2023, at an audio art exhibition in Berlin. It was an otherworldly experience—instead of paintings or sculptures filling the cavernous white space of the museum, headphones lined the walls. Listening to track after track of avant garde sounds, I eventually came upon the minimalist composers Arnold Dreyblatt and Charlemagne Palestine. Their compositions cycled through the same two or three notes repeatedly, creating what’s known as consonant harmony: the phantom tones between notes. I played the compositions for a friend, who said “This must be what going mad sounds like.” Playing it later as I typed, all I could think was: This is perfect.
What does it mean, for a song to be “good writing music”? Artists’ preferences for background music are often strange and always diverse. When writing, a little melodic madness seems required. It brings to mind religious ceremonies designed to reach ascendant levels of meditation or spiritual ecstasy—the whirling dervishes in Sufism, monks circumambulating a Buddhist statue, Islamic pilgrims revolving around the Kaaba, or Catholics repeating the same prayer as they cycle through rosary beads. Throughout history, humans have used cyclical patterns to shed the petty parts of ourselves and to open the door to our deeper minds.
For example, when writing Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin moved to a remote village in the Swiss Alps, bringing with him one Bessie Smith album that he played incessantly. “It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence,” wrote Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son, “who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken.”
For some, like Baldwin, the music is intensely personal. For others, it’s simply a matter of practicality. Metallic Realms author Lincoln Michel listens to Sleep’s stoner metal song “Dopesmoker,” partially because of its length: “It’s a handy unit of time at 64 minutes,” he recently told me. “‘I have to write for at least two Dopesmokers today!’”
Still for others, music is not a tool but an anxiety that must be muffled: Joan Didion famously wanted no outside influence as she wrote, keeping herself solitary in a windowless room. Her sentences had a beat all their own, and she often worried about disrupting the metronome: “I don’t want anybody else’s speech rhythms in my dream,” Didion said in a 1978 Paris Review interview.
Similarly, Jonathan Franzen writes in dark room with earplugs and noise cancelling headphones blasting pink noise (a deeper, more balanced version of white noise).
Very few writers are as monastic as Franzen when it comes to aural distraction, but many prefer wordless instrumental tracks. Still, even that isn’t set in stone… there are some writers that don’t mind a singer. Seek the Traitor’s Son author Veronica Roth is completely agnostic when it comes to her music. She listens to all kinds, she told me: “Pop, soundtrack music, folk, rock, metal, alternative, whatever. I’m looking for the right mood to fit the book and the specific scene that I’m writing, and I don’t mind writing to music with lyrics.”
In my experience, finding “the right mood,” as Roth puts it, requires two different phases of music consumption. The first phase is the music one listens to while thinking about writing, and the second is the music one listens to while actually writing. In the first phase, song choices are entirely to do with mood. They can have lyrics, or not. Playlists often shift with the project. The requirements and parameters are looser—it’s more about using music to get into the headspace of the story. For example, when I wrote my first novel The World Gives Way, which had a futuristic multicultural setting, I listened to songs in as many foreign languages as I could. While working on a gothic ghost story, I’d listen to Kate Bush on repeat. Whatever fits.
But when it comes to that second phase, when it’s time to actually knuckle down and write, a different kind of music is usually called for. At that point in the process, it’s all about concentration.
“It needs to be complicated enough to help me focus my roaming anxious thoughts,” says Backstitch author Marian Mitchell Donahue, “but not so overwhelming that it distracts from the scene I’m trying to craft.” Writers frequently mention jazz working to this effect… music that’s lively enough to keep their energy up, but not so energetic that it can cause distraction.
The factor that seems to unite everyone is a sense of repetition—no matter the style, writers will play the same songs over and over again to reach a kind of creative trance.
Soundtracks often work in a similar way—music that’s been composed with the idea of accompaniment, melodies that are meant to join with a story already can work perfectly when one is in the midst of creating a character or scene. Movie scores are a classic choice, but game scores are becoming increasingly popular. For travel writer and essayist Matt Ortile, the music that’s most effective is “video game background music, the kind of tracks that play at night,” he says, “compositions that are meant to play in ‘scholarly’ in-game areas like libraries.”
In literary circles, the sweeping scores of Dario Marinelli are frequently mentioned, or the driving intensity Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. And Philip Glass. Always Philip Glass. Glass almost belongs in a “writing music” category all his own. “I had this era where I listened to Glass’s Amazonia album and the incessant rhythms really helped me reach flow state,” says Ortile.
Mitchell Donahue echoes a similar sentiment. “I like to listen to repetitive instrumental music,” she says. “Philip Glass is still one of my favorites.”
In an interview for the Common Reader, novelist Brandon Taylor cited Philip Glass as his main musical tool while writing Real Life. “I would put on Philip Glass’s score for The Hours and then just type while the centrifuge was running.”
Glass’s influence makes perfect sense when you start to think about the breadth of writers’ musical tastes. Writers demand all kinds of different styles in their music; some want instrumental, some don’t mind lyrics, some want mellow classical while others want heavy metal or some other kind of driving beat. But the factor that seems to unite everyone is a sense of repetition—no matter the style, writers will play the same songs over and over again to reach a kind of creative trance.
This is what happens to me when I play the obsessive two-note compositions of Dreyblatt or Charlemagne Palestine. I can’t listen to stoner metal or pop while writing, and I rarely listen to jazz. The stuff I like is Philip Glass-ish, if Glass took too many drugs and turned into a tweaker. I listen, hypnotized, and I can feel my mind separating from my quotidian self. It’s music that drives me the right kind of mad.
Like nearly every other writer I know of, I’m looking for cyclical meditation, something to keep my mind in a state of constant imagination. No matter the genre, if you want to write something true, something lasting, you need to leave a little of yourself in your work. If we can get our souls to transcend while we write, just a little, there’s a chance some of that soul might make it onto the page.