This playlist has been open since 2017
A hundred songs and the emotional crutch of writing to music
The playlist started the week I drafted the first chapter of Spirit Hunger. I needed something that sounded like running through a forest at night, and Spotify handed me Faux Tales’ “Atlas,” which was close enough. I added it to a blank playlist and kept writing. That was 2017.
Spirit Elfen is out now, the playlist has a hundred songs, and I finally stopped adding to it.
I write to music the way some people write to white noise. It isn’t background. Each song does a specific job, holding the pitch of a scene while I try to get the words to match what I’m hearing. Sometimes the song gets there first and the scene follows. Sometimes I write a scene, realize it’s flat, put on the right track, and the whole thing reshapes itself in twenty minutes.
A few of these songs have basically written scenes for me. I’m giving you the full playlist today (link at the end), but here are the ones I keep coming back to.
The heavy lifters
Wardruna’s “Helvegen” is Old Norse for “the way to Hel,” and it sounds exactly like that. Low drums, a vocal chant that builds, and underneath it all a bass drone that never resolves. I play it when I’m writing passages where the spirit world presses close to the surface. The song doesn’t build to a climax the way a pop song does. It just keeps opening until the drums drop out, and you realize your shoulders have been up by your ears for the last six minutes. That’s what I want the veil to feel like on the page.
Florence + The Machine’s “Seven Devils” does the opposite job. That one is anger. It’s the track I queue up when a character has been pushed past their limit and the thing they do next is going to cost them.
I’ve worn it out. My laptop probably flinches when it starts playing. Tom Odell’s “Can’t Pretend” is the one where the piano does most of the work and the vocal sits right on the edge of falling apart. I use it for every scene where someone has to say the true thing out loud instead of the safe thing. There’s a specific kind of vulnerability in this series that I keep circling back to, two people who’ve been careful for so long that honesty feels like throwing a punch, and this song holds exactly that register.
The accidental discoveries
James Vincent McMorrow’s live version of “Wicked Game,” recorded at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in Ireland, is the one I didn’t plan on. McMorrow strips it down to a voice and a stage and turns Chris Isaak’s seduction into grief. I wasn’t even writing when I first heard it. But one afternoon I was stuck on a scene, hit play on the wrong track, and wrote the scene in forty minutes. Some songs find the scene you couldn’t.
The Paper Kites’ “Bloom” surprised me in a different way. It’s soft, almost ambient, and it became the track for every aftermath: the scene after the fight, the morning after a confession, when two people are sitting with what just happened and neither knows what comes next. I set it on repeat and write slow.
John Williams’ “Across the Stars” is the love theme from Star Wars: Episode II, which is not a film anyone would describe as a masterclass in romance. But Williams wrote a piece of music that carries more doomed love per bar than most operas. It’s what I reach for when I need the sweeping, this-love-will-cost-you-everything energy that the Spirit Walker series runs on underneath all the mythology and fight scenes. It has nothing to do with spirit animals or faerie courts. But every time that cello line comes in, I write faster.
Shivaree’s “Goodnight Moon” is on the list because it sounds like the inside of a locked room at 2 AM.
That’s all I’m going to say about that.
The full playlist is on Spotify:
A hundred tracks, no particular order, nine years of accumulated damage. Ian asked me once if I’d considered writing in silence. I put the headphones on instead.
Want more of this? I send a weekly letter with the stuff I don’t post publicly — deleted scenes, character asides, the occasional emotional wreckage. You can download the first book in the series for free and join the list at the same time.
xo Ella
Originally published on Writing Through the Veil