Some people prefer to work with no background music. We call those people “freaks.” They “enjoy” something they call “peace and quiet,” and say it helps them to concentrate.

Kent and Jen, like all right-thinking people, feel more productive with their favorite tunes serenading them.

When you’re working by yourself you can choose whatever music you like. Adding a writing partner to the equation complicates things, because chances are you won’t always agree on what constitutes good music. And the only thing worse than no music in the background is bad music in the background. It distracts like a motherfucker.

In addition to the challenge of finding music you can both agree on is the need to have that music also be conducive to writing. Some things, no matter how wonderful, just don’t work as background music, whether it’s because the lyrics are too awesome or too funny, or because the music itself is too kick-ass and all you want to do is dance or headbang. If you get too wrapped up in a song, it won’t work as a writing accompaniment.

We could of course wear headphones, and thus be free to both partake of whatever we want, but one of the most enjoyable parts of collaborating for us is the spontaneous conversations. We’d lose that if one or both of us busted out the Skullcandy.

Our current project presents its own challenges when it comes to choosing a soundtrack. We’re writing about musicians, and as we talked about last week, we like to set a mood with their music. If we’re trying to describe something dark and brooding while we’re listening to something bright and exciting, it’s just not going to work. And vice versa.

Our requirements for Writing Cave background music while working on Son-of-Music-Novel are:

• is our son currently playing drums or piano? if not:
• something we both like
• that is generally conducive to writing
• that does not set the wrong mood for the scene that either of us is working on
• something that hasn’t been overplayed

What it boils down to is that we end up working in silence more often than we’d like :(

But what about when it’s not the Sound of Silence (a song which makes an appearance once in a blue moon)?

Classical music works in many situations because of the lack of vocals (we don’t do opera). We lean toward piano pieces, but Kent also has a really nice collection of classical guitar on his Mac. Full orchestration is a bit overwhelming we find, when we’re trying to work.

Non-classical stuff we’ve been into lately:

• Royal Blood
• Hanni El Khatib
• The Kills
• The Black Keys
• Franz Ferdinand
• Radiohead
• Jack White and his various incarnations (but he tends to be distracting)
• Fiona Apple
• Portishead
• The Cure
• Bowie
• The Doors
• Nick Cave
• Mike Doughty/Soul Coughing
• Toadies (they were our first Twitter followers! True story)
• Talking Heads
• PJ Harvey
• Police

Thank you, Sarah M, for giving us the nudge. (Sorry the Decemberists aren’t in our rotation. Perhaps we’ll check ’em out.)

What about you? What are you listening to?