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twilight-adamo · 6 years

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As Dreams Are Made On: The Mixtape - Liner Notes

Hello everyone! I am currently in the process of gathering my thoughts on Brave New World and trying to get the next installment of These Our Actors (which will focus on Rosalie) just right, in addition to trying to find my thread on Out of the Blue and other non-Twilight projects. This has been complicated by the fact that I’ve been fighting a couple rather nasty nose and throat bugs of late, and so this weekend I’m doing my best to relax and recover.

In the meantime, I thought I’d start offering up my notes on the Spotify playlist I posted a while ago and why I chose the songs I did. For anyone who didn’t see the link, here it is:

https://open.spotify.com/user/12153099402/playlist/5IYjYDbcM6qvQ2hgGnOCGF?si=orkjWU50SjKm7xbPSF_r5w

Since many of my choices do relate directly to specific plot points, there are potential spoilers ahead, so I’m putting this behind a cut. I won’t get through every song in this post, but I’ll add additional notes in subsequent posts as time allows.

As I think I mentioned before, I find playlists to be a very useful tool in my writing. It’s possible to spend too much time tinkering with playlists, of course, so I try not to do it in place of writing or outlining - this is just something I work on when I’m occupied with non-writing tasks that allow for a certain amount of downtime. Each song tends to relate to a plot point or an emotion I’m trying to evoke in a certain part of the story, and the sequence generally follows my outline of the plot, though I’ll sometimes put the playlist on shuffle if I’m feeling stuck and want to try and shake things up, and I sometimes end up adding, removing, or resorting various songs as my understanding of the plot evolves. Since As Dreams Are Made On is done, the current version of the mixtape - all 49 songs - is now pretty much in its final form, but when I’m working on a story, the associated playlist is very much a living document and subject to change.

Music has always been a hugely important part of my life, thanks in large part to my mother, who was an influence on much of my creative output. I tend to think of myself as a visual and verbal person first and foremost, but music has the power to set my mood, to reawaken old memories, to align my thoughts, and to soothe my emotional turmoil. My personal tastes are fairly eclectic - my mother favored country, and I’m still fond of the genre, but I also listen to a lot of pop, classical pieces, musical theatre, folk music, movie scores, and so on. Spotify has been kind of a godsend when it comes to building playlists, though there are unfortunately a few pieces which should be on the mixtape but aren’t simply because they’re unavailable on Spotify. I’ll try to make a note of those missing pieces in the appropriate sections.

Right, well, without further ado, let’s get to the songs.

Pieces and Pieces - The Rough and Tumble This song’s sort of a thesis statement for the whole story, in a way. The refrain, in particular, speaks to me of where I was going: Nothing is lost when it’s been found again / Everything’s found where it was lost. Cass/Bella (or CB, as I refer to her, when I’m not simply calling her Bella) has seemingly lost a great deal, but she comes to gain a great deal as well, and to recover things she thought lost to her forever. The line “I will make you mine again, pieces by pieces” also speaks to me of the story’s dramatic climax, where the nature of CB’s relationship with Alice becomes clearer.

Where Is My Mind? - Pixies Here’s where we’re getting into the actual sequence of events. This one might be a little bit of a cliché, but it reflects CB’s confusion when she wakes in the world of Twilight. It’s also just generally one of my favorite songs.

Turning Page - Sleeping At Last This is the first of many pieces pulled directly from the soundtrack of the Twilight films, and the first song that centers a character other than CB, as it reflects Alice getting hit by the mating bond full-force. It’s a lovely piece, but I think there’s an undercurrent of anxiety and some slightly ominous elements that suit Alice’s mood well. Love at first sight sounds like a pleasant prospect, but it’s also a frightening one, and neither Alice nor CB would have chosen it, given the chance to choose.

Iowa (Traveling, Pt. 3) - Dar Williams Another of my favorite songs. I listened to a lot of Dar Williams in college, and listen to her fairly often still, but I keep coming back to this one in particular. As a lifelong New Englander, famed for what my great-grandmother called ‘the Yankee reserve’ (which means we don’t tend to wear our emotions on our sleeves and generally we keep to ourselves), these lyrics in particular speak to me:

But way back where I come from We never mean to bother We don’t like to make our passions other people’s concern And we walk in the world of safe people And at night we walk into our houses and burn

So, to me, this song speaks of CB’s struggle with her own emotions as her life in Forks begins and she grapples with the mating bond and all it implies. And it also speaks to her background as a lifelong Bostonian, who doesn’t like to be a bother but nevertheless finds herself in a whole new social context and a position where she needs to reach out to others to survive.

Heads Will Roll - Yeah Yeah Yeahs This is Rosalie’s introduction to the story. I don’t really know why, it just seems to suit her, somehow.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead - CHVRCHES It may be physically impossible for me to write about vampires WITHOUT using this song. I just felt like I had to fit it in somewhere, and the first meeting with the rest of the Cullens (sans Carlisle and Esme, of course) seemed like a good spot.

Looking for a Place to Shine - Deidre Thornell Hear the Bells - Naomi Scott I’ll be honest, I don’t have a lot of compelling reasons for these two. They just seemed to fit the sort of transitional period between the first meeting with the Cullens and Leah’s introduction a little later on.

Red Eyes and Tears - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Leah’s introduction to the story. Again, it just seemed to suit her.

New For You - Reeve Carney We’re back to Alice with this one. It sort of reflects her own emotional turmoil in dealing with the mating bond and having to accept that CB doesn’t necessarily reciprocate all her feelings just yet.

Fearless - Taylor Swift Well, this one actually comes up in the story, so you can pretty much guess where it fits in. Again, though, it’s one of my favorite songs, and speaks to the joy that I think love should carry with it, and the idea that love should drive us forward and make us better. It’s been a serious contender for the first dance at my hypothetical wedding for a long time (though “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri may be beating it out now).

The Mercy of the Fallen - Dar Williams More Dar Williams! This one...I don’t know. Somehow, it speaks to me of love and acceptance, of individuals who are all burdened and broken in their own ways reaching out and comforting one another. And that, in turn, makes me think of CB’s first visit to the Cullen house: her first real conversation with Rosalie, her introduction to Carlisle and Esme, all of that. This is where she really starts to build bridges, I think, and where she and some of the others begin to open up to one another.

Bella’s Lullaby - Carter Burwell, Dan Redfeld and Elizabeth Hedman This is of course one of my favorite pieces from the Twilight movie score, and includes a leitmotif that comes up more than once in both the films and in my playlist. I couldn’t find the original version from the score itself on Spotify, but this cover works. Of course Edward plays it on the piano at this point in the story, reading it out of CB’s thoughts, and I think she adopts it in a sense as a sort of personal theme. Every time I listen to it, it makes me think of soaring pine trees and crisp, cold air, and I find the melody very soothing.

Missing Piece: Star by Star - Cassandra Lease and Melissa Carubia Someday I’m actually going to get together with the friend who helped me with the arrangement on this one and record it. It probably won’t go up on Spotify, but I’ll likely post it somewhere. This is the song I wrote for my mother’s memorial service; the lyrics are of course reprinted in the story in their entirety. This is probably one of the most personal elements of the story, the point where I really started to spill my guts across the page. I obviously backed off a little from my own life once I introduced Callie to the story, but there’s still a lot of my soul buried in the text; sometimes, I think, too much.

Bella’s Lullaby (Extended Mix) - The Twilight Orchestra I’m not really sure why this shares the name Bella’s Lullaby when it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the shorter piece, but whatever. This is just a lovely piece that sets the mood for Alice and CB on the rooftop and the events that follow.

Possibility - Lykke Li Similarly, this is more of a ‘setting the mood’ song. I don’t think the lyrics quite fit, in their entirety, but this basically represents CB awakening to the possibility of forming a real attachment to Alice, despite her qualms.

Shake It Off - Taylor Swift Another (highly anachronistic) Taylor Swift song that shows up in the story itself. I can be an extremely basic white girl at times.

Bad Reputation - Avril Lavigne The Joan Jett version isn’t on Spotify! I don’t know what to tell you! This cover’s pretty good, though. Another Leah song, and something I imagine might be playing in the dive where CB introduces Leah to fried pickles.

Nothing to Lose - Minusworld My friend Melissa’s band! Get their EP, Giant Blazing Sword, wherever you buy digital music! Listen to them on Spotify and Bandcamp! Anyway, I think this is the track playing during Leah and CB’s encounter with the scary assholes in the alley, and when Emmett and the others get their big damn hero moment.

In Place Of Someone You Love - Carter Burwell, Dan Redfeld and Elizabeth Hedman We’re skipping ahead a bit here. This piece comes after the shopping scene and CB’s attempt to analyze Rosalie’s abilities, when she’s in the dream of the burning house, trying to save her memories.

The Forgotten - Green Day This piece represents CB’s emotions after she wakes from her brief coma, as she struggles with losing her memories and burning away parts of the world she left behind.

Black Is The Colour - Cara Dillon And this piece represents CB’s acceptance of her feelings toward Alice, her confession of love despite her reservations. It took me a while to find a cover I liked, as I very much wanted to use a version that had a woman singing about another woman, for obvious reasons.

Okay, I think that’s pretty much all I can handle for now. More to come soon!

#twilight fanfiction #twilight fanfic #twilight au #adamo #as dreams are made on #adamo spoilers #the mixtape #bellice #alice/bella

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tinymixtapes · 6 years

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Music Review: Chvrches - Love is Dead

Chvrches Love is Dead [Glassnote; 2018] Rating: 3/5 “A code which no one can explain but everyone understands.” Sound has no narrative. It doesn’t swell and end like love affair or plot like sentence. It doesn’t have a history like our bones or nodes. Its absence isn’t a death. Silence instead, is reaction, a part of the processing of the sound that came before, to the ears that heard a sound. There’s no meaning to that kind of continuum, just what we hear is what we hear. Even when intentional, whether organized into melody or scrambled into noise, sound remains a universal, unknowable and unassailable. Or: “Let the rhythm pull you in — This will touch it/ You know what I’m sayin’ and I haven’t said a thing.” (Kylie Minogue, “Slow”) Still, we wrestle it. We treat it like a lover. What did you say? What did you mean when you said it? Chvrches made a record called Love is Dead. How love? When dead? What Chvrches? It seems it’s all it means. Seems (descriptive) and means (prescriptive) are methods by which ears and eyes ascribe and infuse art with explanation. We take the sounds and images and render the sensation sensed, the ineffable as effigy. And we do it with words, equal parts extrapolation and reduction and voila: narrative. Is it history? In 2013, a Scottish synthpop band made an EP called Recover. A few months later, they released a full-length, The Bones of What You Believe. Both pieces fused the break free of dance-floor with the exaltation of arena anthem. Songs like “The Mother We Share,” “Recover,” and “Night Sky” were sticky: a body felt good moving to these sounds because a body recognized that the songs had room for it to rock with them. Chvrches flecked their songs with a belief in songs themselves, in bodies moving and the power of voice. That sincerity, however broad, felt like a viable antidote to the chilled irony of indie craftpop circa 2013. Chvrches saw how irony positioned itself above and away from beating hearts and so struck out in absorbing, engaging tones. It was “sincerity in spite of irony, which is to say sincerity within irony,” TMT’s Gabriel Samach wrote. It resonated. The band would play in the same earnest hues on 2015’s Every Open Eye in sharper resolution and higher contrasts. “Never Ending Circles,” all arms-aloft and afterglow, was the best Chvrches ever re-sounded. And then, as now, Love is Dead, the same Scottish synthpop band alive in 2018, the third album, the first with outside producers and Matt Berninger cameos. Lots of ears got their thoughts in by the deadline. And the narrative felt pretty set, even from the early singles: Love is Dead is a little flimsy. Pitched as a genuine pop gesture with the aid of producer Greg Kurstin (Adele’s “Hello,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger,” etc.), the album misjudges the line between pop’s universals and specifics. It’s broad in sentiment and unspecific in feeling. Chvrches feel swallowed up in production. The hooks aren’t great and the singles, especially “Get Out” and “Never Say Die,” drift between repetitive, flattened choruses and verses unanchored to any specific image or idea. The heart of earlier efforts beat best affixed to real aches, a tether between renunciation and resolve (hope operates as a line through misery: “The way is long, but you can make it easy on me.”) Love is Dead is formally earnest and it succumbs as a product of its (unearnest) production, an art of sincerity lost underneath. Love is Dead, damnably, is sincerity in place of irony, which is to say sincerity outside irony. It has no world to tease of tense. “Rhythm doesn’t stand for anything. It can’t be proven to be in any privileged relation to the unconscious, and the same is true of melody.” Critical narrative (unlike the unconscious or sound or pop music) is a code no one can understand but everyone explains. Unlike the bolded text framing this review (notes on pop music-politic, Green Gartside and Mark Fisher in discussion), critical narrative is neither aphoristic nor hypothetical. It isn’t excited when it’s proven wrong. Rather, art that bucks the trend assigned to an artist is absorbed into the narrative. We always knew Scritti would disregard post-obtuse punk for pop success/ failure. We always knew Kylie would release a retready country record in 2018; we were laughing before it dropped. We always knew Mark Fisher would kill himself. We’re sorry for that, sure, and we’ll write a tribute, probably, but it’s all there, in the work’s words, right? Critical narrative has already moved on, like it always already does. It lacks the thing that makes Love is Dead flawed and flecked and straining, an exhilarating listen, months later, months after a review could be due. Critical narrative has no time for empathy. And beyond the product of pop (what sound seems to be) and the properness of reading art via product (how Chvrches means), the same narrative sketched above sounds different. Extract explaining, shift back to knowing. Or: “I feel, I feel, I feel/ You know I feel for you” (Kylie, “I Feel For You) “In pop music, we are dealing with a history of production that has made the improper proper. “Do you really believe that you are one of a kind?” Empathy, body to body equivalence, is a system of improper conclusions. In order to wholly feel another body’s pangs and aches, another body has to leave its self behind. Under all the proper production, Love is Dead litter glimpses into pop music as empathy, a force aimed at improper progress. Songs detail broken hearts and lost loves but never weaponize apathy. Like life and death, love and ends, empathy breeds equivalence, “And you could be my remedy/ If you could show me love,” a sound through despondency. “Graffiti” paints the foolishness of an ended tryst while celebrating the feel of being foolish: “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old/ And now we never will.” Why should we sentence our selves to despondency? “Get Out,” the best buzz of the singles, abandons apathy while remaining affixed to our (and other) bodies. Repetition is a fixture of most of these songs, Lauren Mayberry turning and returning to the same words again and again (“Get, get, get out of here/ Can we get out, get out”; “Forever, forever, forever, forever/ I told you I would hate you till forever.”) Repetition highlights a moment almost maddeningly (Green Gartside: “If in doubt, I opt for stupid. I write lots of lyrics, and end up throwing away anything that sounds too clever”), but the madness here is of prizing others like we prize our selves, illogic only in service of something like love. And with “Graves,” Love is Dead shows what that madness is for, detailing bodies on shorelines and mad kings in high castles. It doesn’t bang like “Keep You On My Side” or even “Lies,” but it engages in engaging, even with the monsters: “If you don’t have a heart, I can offer you mine.” Love is Dead fits the complaints of its narrative, sketched above and elsewhere. It is often not as exhilarating as other moments in Chvrches’ breadth. The mode of proper production disservices the trajectory of an improper urge (namely, that bodies can know bodies through singing and dancing.) Pop is at its best improperly, transfiguratively. But seeming to know doesn’t stand for knowing to feel. And to dismiss any pop as broad and derivative means siding with seem over feel, irony over sincerity, apathy over empathy. “Ask me no questions, and I will tell you no lies,” Mayberry sings, confessing, “I’m not asking for a miracle.” And there as with the rest of a frustrating, exalting album, what initially feels like formal sincerity is revealed to be empathy in place of sincerity, which is to say sincerity through irony. “Out in the general text, resemblance passes for truth. In my little hot house, the appearance of difference passes for truth. And it goes on.” It’s easy to feel despondent. Mark Fisher killed himself, seemingly when he’d found a way through writing to keep living. Green is mostly functionally self-disappeared, no longer making sounds. Kylie’s still around, but in the mostly retro-mode country-impression, Golden. And Chvrches made the overproduced, under-realized Love is Dead The miracle of pop music isn’t its resemblance to truth, but rather its creation of it. Pop bangs best in the empathy mode; the beat moves our bodies when we measure it against our hearts. Empathy, a philosophy of hearing and feeling heard, is paramount to pop, via Gartside (“To do what I should do/ To long for you to hear/ I open up my heart”) and Kylie (“Do you wanna hear me sing?/ Pop, pop, pop, pop”) and Chvrches (“If none of this is real/ Then show me what you feel”). Or: “I’ll meet you there, at the moment where despair end and tactics begin” (Mark Fisher.) Maybe empathy is the tactic and the beginning. Maybe all it is is getting into a loop, bodies in sync with bodies. It goes on. Dancing is still honest, like, “When I go out, I wanna go out dancing” (Kylie, “Dancing.”) The way is long, but you can make it easy on me if I make it easy on you. Or: “You better give up on giving up.” (Chvrches, “Deliverance.”) http://j.mp/2NEXvAm

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