In past interviews, I’ve discussed the music that inspired some of my novels, but since I’m skipping interviews for the most part on Odysseus Wept, I figured that warranted actually posting something here.
Note, I’ll try to do this without spoiling much (but will hint at particular portions of the book).
In an early chapter, a character is quite isolated for a prolonged period of time (which was probably my favorite part of the book from a writing perspective). If memory serves, John Barry’s “Dances With Wolves” (the extended edition) was the primary music I was listening to for that portion. Barry’s writing for the American prairie certainly fit the landscape I was imagining.
There’s a period of the book where there are multiple groups assigned different “homesteading” activities (which was also fun to write) — while it would have been fitting to listen to some barn-raising music from “Witness” I was listening to a fairly eclectic set of albums, from Pink Floyd’s “The Endless River” to Owen Pallett/Arcade Fire’s score to “Her”, probably a mixture of different John Barry scores, and even Ramin Djawadi’s score to “Iron Man” from time to time.
There’s a big action scene that ruins everybody’s day after things seemed to be going so well. Almost that entire action scene, from its initial choreography to the actual writing, which took weeks if not months, had Hans Zimmer’s “Man of Steel” music playing in the background. In particular, if you hunt down a few tracks called “Arcade” and “General Zod” from the Deluxe Edition there’s a very repetitive theme Zimmer uses that was really helpful in maintaining a particular mood for that part of the book. But the overall score was very, very much a part of much of the book — it’s got a wide variety of themes and tempos that seemed to have something for every situation.
There are some trippy parts of Odysseus Wept. I think I was mainly listening to Steven Price scores to a number of nature documentaries he’s done (big fan of David Attenborough, I am).
“Man of Steel” is really the heartbeat of most of the book. You can never tell how these things are going to work out.