Phoenix Inspirations: Writing Music

I've made a few posts before about the music that I listen to when I write.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, you won't be surprised to hear that I listened to quite a bit of the The Cure again while writing my new book, Phoenix!  But there were some new bands on my soundtrack this time.

This is the first song I ever heard by Sigur Rós. They're a brilliant Icelandic band who make music as epic and huge as the sky. To me, they make the sounds I imagine when I think about the stars singing, as they do throughout Phoenix, from the first page to the last.

This is a song from their untitled album ( ).  It's the song I listened to the most in the seven years of writing Phoenix.  It's what I was thinking of when I wrote that the stars made "a small, soft, silvery sound, like the chime of a faraway bell."  And it's the kind of thing I had in mind when I wrote about how the sound "surged and swelled, rising up into the sky."

The concert that Lucky, Bixa and Frollix go to on Scorpio Six definitely owes something to the various Sigur Rós concerts I've been to in my time... like this one, at Alexandra Palace, back in 2008! Though there were a lot of other concerts in the back of my mind... and lots of other music, too!

If you've enjoyed this post, and would like to hear the whole () album, I've made a Spotify playlist for you here.  And I'll be posting another blog soon with more music that inspired Phoenix...