Not your mother's Meat Loaf

The Things I Carry: Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell & Back into Hell


My first exposure to Meat Loaf was in 1993 when "I'd Do Anything for Love" hit the radios. I was 13 and painfully weird and my father was dying of cancer. It was a rough year.



I was immediately in love. So I did what any fan girl did and bought everything I could find at the local Half Price Books (because I was poor). I had all his cassette tapes (because I wasn't cool enough for a CD player) and I ran them ragged. My mom remembers when he was touring college towns in the seventies and my parents didn't understand why I would want to listen to it at all. It only added to the appeal.

Just like Melissa Etheridge had reached into me and sang my painful outsider heartstrings, so too did Meat Loaf's voice and Jim Steinman's songs reflect an escapism that I desperately.

Now granted, I didn't ride motorcycles and I was far from experiencing "paradise by the dashboard light," there was a grand, fantastical element, an angsty hormonally driven truth, that resonated with the future storyteller within me. There was an S.E. Hinton vibe (also a personal favorite) about the true nature of being oppressed and teen-aged. Of being able to smash things or just fly away. It was my audible equivalent to Piers Anthony and Dean Koontz, and Orson Scott Card. Only with death and motorcycles and sex (gasp).

And there should be no surprise there is even a werewolf element.

Bat Out of Hell just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Its my age. Even after all these years,  on my really bad days when I just need to shove the world away for a while, you will find me blasting it as I drive my mild-mannered, four-door, charcoal gray sedan around town. You'll see me nodding my head to it as I roam around the grocery store to pick up a gallon of chocolate milk.  From the first chords overlaid with a revving motorcycle, I am on a highway and free.

As with most things that I carry with me, the meaning has changed over the years. Sometime it was about rebellion. Sometimes it was all about sex. And sometimes it was just about owning the demon that you carry around with you.

I have never been ashamed to say that I Love Meat Loaf.

And maybe some day I"ll get around to actually riding a motorcycle.

As always, Carry on,

Amanda Arista
Author
www.amandaarista.com

Dancing with My Muse

It took me a few years to figure this out, but my muse loves music. Loves it. I've always known that certain music can stir my emotions and sometimes even spark scene ideas. But I had no idea it could actually help me write. I used to think music would distract me from my work. Turns out, it was just the opposite because my mind is a chatterbox, constantly talking to me, one stream-of-consciousness riff after another. Unless there's music playing. My internal chatterbox is enchanted by music and quiets at the sound of it, allowing my muse unfettered access to my brain. Plus, the right music delights and excites my muse.

I've experimented with a number of different types of music, all instrumentals. I've written to movie soundtracks (Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Last Samurai) and any number of other artists' collections. But I've discovered that my ear and my muse prefer the new age jazz of Keiko Matsui. My friend Lynne turned me on to her when she brought a Matsui CD to exercise class to listen to during cool-down. I loved it and borrowed it, but when I began to listen to it as I wrote, I had to ask our instructor (a good friend) to cool us down to something else. Once it became my writing music, I couldn't listen to it at any other time for fear it would completely foul me up.

When I sit down to write, now, I always turn on Keiko Matsui. If I stop writing for any reason--to check my email, to grab the phone, to refill my glass--I pause the track. If the music is on, I'm writing. Period. And having done this for a number of years, now, my muse is well-trained. The moment the music comes on, I'm back in the zone, my fingers flying over the keyboard. I still experiment with new music from time to time, but my muse is completely in love with Keiko Matsui. So far, I've had no success tempting her with something new. After eighteen books, I can't argue that it's working for us!

A Life in Lyrics

Hello! The Heather half of Sable Grace here. Happy October!

Ok, so I have a confession to make. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed, either. I have ABBA on my Zune. That's right. You read correctly. ABBA. Why would someone in her early thirties have the Swedish (they are Swedish, aren't they?) gods and goddesses on her play list? Simple. For everything I do, I seem to have a soundtrack to accompany it. Growing up, the rare occasions when I cracked open my ever-locked bedroom door to venture into the rest of the house, ABBA was inevitably playing while the scents of Lysol and floor wax clogged my pores. I'd groan and moan, eager to get back to the Bangles or Bon Jovi that was blaring in my bedroom, but secretly, I hummed along to Mama Mia. Dancing Queen and such were my mother's soundtrack for house cleaning, and since, has become mine. There's something about listening to Fernando that makes dusting feel less like work and more like an excuse to shake what God gave me while singing slightly off tune.

Cleaning aside, I have a play list for just about everything. Jason Mraz for joy riding in my husband's Jeep. Girl power boppers like Lily Allen and Avril Lavigne for waxing my eyebrows or dying my hair. Cooking dinner? Gavin DeGraw or Gavin Rossdale. Then there's writing. A little Breaking Benjamin for the Sable Grace Dark Breed series. Movie scores for my historical romances. And the best song for writing love scenes? Damn, by Leann Rimes. I don't care if you don't like country music. It's the sexiest "romance book" song I've found to date.

But this time of year brings up one particular soundtrack. The kind that, every time you hear it, you get a shiver and the need to check under the bed before slipping under the covers. For me, a horror movie fanatic, that soundtrack is the theme score to the movie Halloween. Just those first few notes make the hairs on the back of my neck raise and perhaps even need to pee a little. I won't confirm that last bit. My pride forbids it. My husband has a similar reaction (maybe not the pee thing) to the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams, which I play as often as possible in hopes of one day hearing him squeal like a girl. Hasn't happened yet, but I keep trying. I think a childhood incident is responsible for his hatred for that song, but in my opinion, my fear of Halloween is a bit more understandable, right? RIGHT??

I can't be the only one whose day-to-day living is accompanied by task-specific music. Please tell me I'm not a freak. Although, even if I am, I'm okay with that. I'm sure I have a play list somewhere that will cheer me up.

If there's a song that evokes a specific emotion in you, what is it? I'm dying to know!