I’d like to welcome Catherine Schaff-Stump to Twisted Fairytale as part of Drollerie Press’ Blog Tour! Welcome, Catherine.

September’s theme is music (a subject I hold near and dear to my heart, as I am a music elitist and snob, ha ha). You can find Catherine’s story Sister Night, Sister Moon in the anthology Needles and Bones, available now, as well as a list of her other publications on her website: http://cathschaffstump.com/

My post is on Rachel Olivier’s website, Blogetary. Check it out!

(Also, mark your calendars for the next Drollerie Press chat on September 27th at 4pm. There will be randomness and book giveaways. A great time had by all!)

Music

I bought Bryon, my husband, an iPod Nano for Christmas.  He wanted one because in during a foolish moment I stuck a homemade CD in the player of our Versa, and since then, although it has been in the shop three times, it had never been the same since.  The Nano is the alternative.  We bought all the hookups, stuck it in our MP3 jack, and we prowled on down the road.

The Nano gives us a chance to have many albums at our disposal, rather than the mere 12 cassette tapes I carted with me in the 80s.  It is odd to conceive of cassettes as ancient artifacts, but I think that all magnetic tape is good for now is stringing about your Christmas tree.  I digress.  When we carried CDs in the car, we carried 24.

On the Nano there are currently 1114 songs, any of which I can touch in a non driving moment (because I want to stay alive.)  I often put the Nano on shuffle, which basically means surprise me.

You may remember I said this was Bryon’s Nano.  There are many things that I love about my husband, but he has some odd taste in music.  We have overlap, you betcha, but the thing I don’t get is his fascination with soundtracks.  I understand his support of the Superman soundtrack.  The first Superman film is one he identifies with; as a young man, he left a farm home and went off to college in much the same way as Clarke Kent.  What I don’t get are the Sci Fi’s Greatest Hits collection parts 1 and 2 which take up valuable space with track after track of same-iness.  I guess it could be worse.  He could have decided to take his entire soundtrack collection of great 60s action shows produced by Irwin Allen,  and put all 10 of those albums on the Nano.  I would then handle it with tongs.

Really, though, there is more to this music post than impugning Bryon’s reputation.   I myself have suggested two Battlestar Galactica soundtracks on the iPod.  Bear McCreary is one of the best composers of music in the United States today.  The Adama and Roslin theme makes me cry every time I hear it.  Music has the power to reach into you and pull out emotions you might not have suspected you would have.

Although I have none of her songs on the Nano, I enjoy Suzanne Vega and have many of her albums.  There’s a song of hers Fifty-Fifty Chance.  It’s about a victim surviving after a suicide, and the relative near her bedside, anxious.  I remember my own father dying over the course of six weeks.  Nothing is the same except the feeling.   I don’t cry the same way I do when I think of Bear McCreary’s unrequited love theme.  I cry because of the ghost of grief.  Music transports me to 1993 watching a ventilator.

As an artist myself, I can only hope that the words I write could touch like the notes of more successful artists.  Wouldn’t it be something to reach into someone and pull out tears, laughter, anger, the stuff of our lives with the mere illusion of experience through the words I wrote?

Art helps us to find and experience ourselves more fully.  Well, except the Land of the Giants soundtrack.  There, all bets are off.