Some people prefer to write in silence. I do not understand those people. Like a one-hit wonder by Autograph, the only time I turn it down is when I’m sleeping it off. Or, in less dramatic more honest fashion, I only turn off the music if I get stuck on a particularly difficult sentence or am struggling with a thought.

I love writing to music. This habit formed back in college when I worked at The Spectator and always wrote to music. Always. I took this habit with me to corporate life and still spend a majority of my day in headphones listening to music. Duh.

As I slowly and painfully get back on the writing wagon after a very long holiday hiatus, my brain has chosen a new soundtrack for this difficult revision of The Beast. It’s Bad Bad Hats who I cannot stop listening to (I also cannot stop listening to Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, but we’ll talk about that some other time).

Of course, I discovered Bad Bad Hats on The Current after hearing their song “Super America.” The song is super charming and has great, catchy hand claps, which is one of my favorite things songs can have. I went out and downloaded the EP based purely on the lyric “I want a Reese’s and a nice boy to date.”

Then I promptly forgot all about the song and the band for two years. I am a fickle monster. But then I started hearing Bad Bad Hats on The Current all the time and I was all “huh, I should check these people out.”

So eventually I did and I was super pleased to discover they were the singers of my long-forgotten love “Super America.”

And now I listen to them every time I crack open The Beast (which is slowly killing me because I writing is hard and I’m deathly afraid of “ruining it”).

And in case you are interested. Here’s the soundtrack for this book thus far. This is not to be confused with all the music mentioned in the book, because strangely, that is totally different.

V1: BOY, Mutual Friends and Stevie Nicks
V2: Lissie, Catching a Tiger
V3: Random playlist consisting of Ike Reilly, Pearl Jam, Glen Hansard, and Willie Nelson
V4 (thus far) Bad Bad Hats, It Hurts EP & Psychic Reader