So those of you who know me know how much I love soundtracks. Yes it started with Disney, but John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore…Gods. What they can do with my emotions… Perhaps you’ve watched a favorite movie scene with the music off and realized just how much weight they pull: uplifting the heroes, making us shake with fear – or grief, moving us to another, transcendent plane.
Two ancillary thoughts: one from my husband who insists the 80’s fantasy Ladyhawke would have been a great film if only it had a decent score; the other from a young religious education student of mine who once profoundly said she thought our souls must be made of music, because how else could they be touched so completely by songs?
Right?
My prologue opens in a great hall during a festival. The Brochs are storysinging on the kantele about how iron was created. (If you haven’t heard a kantele, here you go.)
When writing the Veil of Silver Tears I listened to the Last Kingdom soundtrack and the incomparable Eivør. Her throat singing evokes the ‘12th century Northern’ I imagined for my world. It was made into a You tube Music and Ambience that with Part II gave me 2 hours of uninterrupted writing time.
When I was writing the battle scenes I would often use music that had a more urgent rhythm and a crescendo that I could time the scene against. The two part climactic battle was timed to the first seven minutes of Marry Me by Hans Zimmer from the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. And a death scene (character shall remain nameless! No spoilers.) was written against Chevalier de Sangreal by Hans Zimmer from the DaVinci Code soundtrack. When Veil publishes, you can listen to those as you read the scenes 🙃
And on the crazy, crazy chance someone does adapt my book into a movie (after it gets published…), it would be absolutely surreal if Hans Zimmer would be willing to score it.
A girl can dream.