The Trouble With Being God

Listen to the Soundtrack for The Trouble With Being God

Posted by William under Music

If you’re at all familiar with my new novel, The Trouble With Being God, you already know one of the key components of the book is the set of footnotes for suggested listening for key points of the story.  While this listening is by no means necessary to enjoy the book, I do feel they add to the overall story, as they were painstakingly chosen through a process of basically listening to thousands of songs and knowing when a song playing was perfect to tie in with a key plot element.

Since I’ve worked in the music publishing industry for almost a decade, I know how difficult it can be to license songs for a project, the inevitable necessity to jack up the price for any book/CD package if one were available and the fact that people prefer to listen to music via many different mediums (online, downloads to iPods, old-fashioned CDs, etc). Therefore I opted not to pursue directly licensing songs for the book.  The other, perhaps less obvious benefit, of this is that I was able to select exactly the songs I felt were most perfectly matched to what I was going for in the storytelling, rather than being forced to simply choose from a batch of licensable songs which were simply “good enough.”  Basically, throughout this project my goal was to not have to sacrifice anything and to produce exactly the final experience I envisioned.

While you’re reading The Trouble With Being God (you have already bought a copy, right?), you do now have an option to easily hear the songs featured throughout the suggested listening soundtrack.  To hear the songs, just visit the “About the Music” page through the link at the top of the site, scroll down and you’ll have access to hear everything online (although I have to admit, I do prefer the studio version of Wilco and Billy Bragg’s “One By One” but as of this writing the only version I could find for free streaming was the live one from Wilco’s Kicking Television).

Of course, if you’re simply curious as to what music made the cut, or if you just want to get a feel of The Trouble With Being God, you can listen to the soundtrack now even without buying a copy of the book.