Life has a Sound Track

Kimberly Burns

Imagine yourself a teenager, back in high school. It’s Friday night. What music is playing? I grew up in the seventies. I played my Fleetwood Mac album over and over. When I started college, New Wave music became popular and I spent many free afternoons watching music videos at a local joint that had both cable and a big screen. To this day, any song by the girl band The Go-Gos takes me back to that bar in Boulder, Colorado.

Often music can better express our feelings than we can ourselves. Great song writers tap into our hopes, our hurts, and our fears. They can make us cry or cheer. And songs help us remember, creating or recreating a mood. They allow us to relive our pasts and remind us how it felt in that moment. No matter if the memories are carefree and happy or heart-breakingly awkward, when the melody starts our spirits are transported to another time and place and the people we were then.

Music helps us define ourselves, who we were, who we are, and we want to be. During the pandemic I created a playlist of positive music. I still pump it through my earbuds on days I need a confidence boost. Like when I received a critical review from a woman who DID NOT READ my book I played Shake it Off by Taylor Swift at eardrum-rattling volume. It helped.

That’s when it dawned on me—every life has a sound track, a list of songs that help us explain who we are at any given time, a collection of music that changes and grows as we do. As a novelist, I could use music to enter into a character.

I write novels based on true stories of the Old West. I research historical events and the actions of actual figures who lived through those times. While the written record can give me a general idea of the personalities involved, I don’t actually know these people. They are long dead; I’ll never get a chance to interview them. But a novel is a pretty thin thing if readers can’t understand and relate to the characters. So to create a rich, complex character, I must get in touch with my inner 1890s madam or reach into my subconscious to find the Old West gambler that lives there. Music helps me flesh out those people.

My first book, The Mrs. Tabor, is based on the true story of Baby Doe Tabor, America’s original gold digger. She was a Material Girl a century before Madonna’s hit song. That song perfectly fit the persona I was trying to create.

The lyrics to Taylor Swift’s song The Man jumped into my head when I began writing my latest novel, The Redemption of Mattie Silks. Taylor sings, “If I were a man, I’d be the man.” Mattie Silks was a brilliant businesswoman and entrepreneur in a time when ladies were not expected to work. I imagined she tired of biting her tongue when men —who were not her intellectual equal—mansplained economics, commerce, or politics to her.

Two men played large roles in Mattie’s life—her ner-do-well husband Cortez and notorious con man Soapy Smith. Cortez was a dandy who fancied himself a professional footracer. His theme song? Sharp Dressed Man by ZZ Top. Soapy Smith could alternately be charming and dangerous, but by all accounts he was cunning. George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone seemed the best tune to explain my villain.

Since earliest man, music has been a defining part of every culture. One does not need a formal education in music appreciation to enjoy it. Just listen to the lyrics and feel the melody. Let the music become a part you and the moment you are living.