Proof that I have officially reached the point of my life where nostalgia has poisoned my brain: On Saturday night, I spent two hours watching ‘90s music videos on YouTube and, guys, it turns out “Smooth” by Santana ft. Rob Thomas is a pretty great song.
Earlier in the evening, I had gone to see NOIR, a new musical that is having its grand premiere run at the Alley Theater in Houston. The musical, by Duncan Sheik (SPRING AWAKENING) and Kyle Jarrow (THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL), is a homage to film noir - about a haunted songwriter who becomes entangled in the lives of his next-door neighbors after he eavesdrops on their woes through the thin walls of his apartment. The music of NOIR is a bit anachronistic, with many of the songs being real bangers but stylistically owing more to ‘90s and ‘00s pop than anything you’d find in an actual film noir. This is, of course, because of the fact that, while Sheik may have a robust career as a Broadway playwright, he got his start with the 1996 pop single “Barely Breathing.”
Personally, as somebody who is a fan of ‘90s pop, noir movies, AND things that shouldn’t go together but are merged Brundlefly-style against the wishes of science and God, I dug NOIR the musical quite a bit.
In fact, I was so high on the ‘90s music wave I was coasting that I spent the rest of the night on my aforementioned music video binge. I mostly stuck to pop - love songs and ballads sung by dudes with frosted tips and wearing puka beads - during my YouTube spelunking expedition. This is ironic because, when I actually lived in the ‘90s, this kind of sugar-coated pop music is the exact kind of thing I would have never been caught listening to.
My musical history is kind of a weird one. The first CD I ever owned was an impulse purchase I made when I was ten years old - a collection of songs played on a piano with wolf howls mixed in. Yeah, of course, that was the first CD I ever bought, right? Over the next few years, I buy a few more CDs - the soundtrack to MORTAL KOMBAT (the video game, not the movie), Weird Al’s BAD HAIR DAY, and the SPAWN soundtrack - but I didn’t really listen to much music.
My sister Amy tried her best to introduce me to good bands. She bought me the Less Than Jake album LOSING STREAK and made me mixtapes with a mixture of songs she knew I liked (“Kiss From a Rose”) and songs she thought I might like (“Dancing Queen”). When I reached high school, though, I was desperate to establish a personality for myself that wasn’t “soft nerd who reads comic books” so I started listening to nu-metal. Despite actually initially hating most of the bands in the genre, I “Stockholm Syndrome”ed myself into being a fan of bands like Slipknot, Static-X, Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit. Occasionally I would allow myself to buy an emo album or a CD by a pop-punk band but I can’t tell you how many years I wasted listening to Creed because I thought it made me look cooler than if I listened to Vertical Horizon or Five for Fighting.
It wasn’t until I got to college that my musical tastes really began to take shape. Thank god for high-speed internet and piracy. Now, I don’t currently condone piracy. But twenty-year-old Rob? Yeah, he pirated the shit out of music. I think that twenty-year-olds should be allowed to pirate stuff - having access to thousands of songs and comic books and movies on my campus’ file-sharing network really allowed me to discover the stuff I was actually into instead of just listening to the stuff radio stations jammed down my throat. I started listening to music by Nick Cave and Death Cab for Cutie and Paul Simon and Murder by Death. I discovered bands both new and old across all kinds of genres that I really loved and - over the four years I lived in College Station - I really fell in love with music in a way I had never known before.
Today, I can’t imagine life without music. If I never saw a movie again in my life, I’d be extremely sad but I would survive. Ditto books and comics and video games and television shows. But if I could never listen to a song again, I think I might go insane. I love music so much - it’s etched into my life in a profound way. I think this obsession is partially because I don’t understand how music is made. I’m tone-deaf and can’t carry a tune to save my life so listening to a good song is like watching a magic trick - something that was seemingly created from nothing.
When I begin working on a new script or book, one of the first things I do is create a playlist of songs that have the type of tone and emotion I want to convey in my story. I then listen to that playlist every day for as long as I’m working on the story - adding new songs as I discover them. I listened to the WHERE WOLF playlist I created so much that some of the songs are etched permanently into my brain in a very specific order. That playlist is as familiar to me as the dialogue or illustrations from the comic book itself.
One of my artistic dreams is to work on a musical. I don’t think I can write music (tone-deaf, remember?) but I also didn’t think I could make a comic book and I did. One of the next projects I’m working on is a story set in the early ‘00s and I have already started working on the playlist. Even if the project doesn’t end up being a full-blown musical, music will - like with WHERE WOLF - be a core part of its DNA because music is a core part of my DNA.
And you bet your ass “Smooth” by Santana ft. Rob Thomas is already on that story’s playlist.