How can you live without music?
How is it that merely listening to an instrument, a composition, a harmony can fill you up with so much emotion? A different kind of feeling. It can take you to another place altogether. Surely, it’s a gift from the heavens. If I need an idea for a film or video project, I listen to music. I begin to see scenes. I typically use the music I was listening to in the films themselves. Letters To Mon Coeur was written while listening to Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen Op. 20. The scenes appeared exactly as I heard them, which is why the film is set to match that composition. La Epoca Dorada came from Oratores by Vladimir Cauchemar, Apashe, and Ruti. That strange, hypnotic rhythm dictated the video’s pulse from the first frame. Mother’s Smile was written to Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight and Mercy, though I left both out of the final cut to avoid licensing fees.

Since we’ve already began recommending music: Freedom Station by Thabang Tabane; Tom Jones’ rendition of You’re My World; Stevie Wonder’s If It’s Magic. Diamonds by Y’akoto; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ version of I Put A Spell on You; Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleurs; Adele’s Strangers By Nature. I mention these songs in particular because I’ve used them in some scripts of mine. The last four live together in a single short film script called Strangers by Nature. It’ll be another silent film carried entirely by those songs, each scene shaped to their melody.

Synaesthesia is when the stimulation of one sense triggers experiences in a second, unrelated sense. Some people see shapes when smelling something (olfactory–visual synaesthesia), or colours when reading letters, numbers, or symbols (grapheme–colour synaesthesia), or when listening to music (chromesthesia). Hans Zimmer, Billie Eilish, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder, Mary J. Blige, and Kanye West are among a long list of celebrities who have reportedly stated that they experience the latter. It’s curious that chromesthesia is evidently the second most prevalent form of synaesthesia, the first being grapheme–colour synaesthesia, which is also fascinating, but that’s a story for another day. Isn’t music heaven-sent? That it awakens another sense entirely.

Like scent, music calls upon certain memories, memories of childhood, memories of a place and time, memories of a person. To me, music is where my memory is stored, not the other way around. The movies that affect me the most often have music as the main driver of certain scenes that leave an indelible mark in my unsparingly selective memory. Music such as Mist by Jung Hoon Hee, used multiple times in Decision to Leave (I intend to use Twin Polio’s rendition Fog in a script of mine named Valerie, but that’s also a story for another day); John Williams’ rendition of Adagio in D-Moll, BWV 974 by Bach (the central composer of an LGBTQ script I’m writing) for Spielberg’s beautiful semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans. I find myself constantly going back to the scene of Sammy editing his family’s camping trip video, with the camera passing by magnifying glass as he slowly pieces together images of an infidelity. And of course, Scorsese’s use of In the Still of the Night by The Five Satins in The Irishman.

I strongly believe that the late David Lynch’s writing process for Blue Velvet was very similar to mine. Blue Velvet feels like a dream of a movie, and his use of Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet as the central musical piece makes it all the more memorable, not to mention Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, lip-synced by Dean Stockwell. Man, what a scene.

It’s sacrilege that I never even mentioned Tarantino. The master of needle-drops. Just, Tarantino. I’ll leave it at that because almost every one of his films is carried on the backs of beautifully chosen licensed music.

Music is everywhere. I can’t dance, but I feel my body moving like Michael Jackson to music. The hearing-impaired bob their heads to the vibrations of sound. Babies laugh and clap to the sound of a good tune. Man, I’m sure an undertaker would eventually discover a dead man shake to the sound of an afrobeat.

Hmmm.

Maybe… just maybe… you truly can’t live without music.