I am admittedly late to the Ray LaMontagne bandwagon. It happens to me frequently – there will be a musician or a band that is burning up the charts or have become the indie darlings of the radio and I’ll find out about them five years later. Then I become a little obsessed with their music and email all of my friends something along the lines of “you need to hear this band!” And then … crickets. Because they typically will have heard of said band when they were relevant.
Anyway … Ray LaMontange. Love his music. And although I’m just writing about him now, I’ve been listening for a couple of years. And as I’ve written in the past, music tends to inform a lot of the atmosphere around my writing. Some writers need absolute silence to write. I’ve heard that Stephen King likes to listen to heavy metal when he’s penning his work.
I’m in a bit of a limbo right now in waiting to hear feedback from some of my beta readers. I have a couple of items that I want to work on in my writing life, but I’ve been thinking about using this time to start outlining the next full-fledged fiction project that I’m going to work on. To give you an idea where my head is right now (beyond trying to come up from air under the amount of boxes and crap that my husband and I need to unpack … bleh), it vacillates between a story set in my heart’s home of northeast Iowa or the story that’s set in the lake country of west central Minnesota. The northeast Iowa story starts in the fall – it always has had its starting time frame in the fall, when the trees along the Mississippi River bluffs display their quiet riot of fall colors and when the farmers are in the field, trying to harvest the last of the corn. But the west central Minnesota story is a resort story – it belongs on a place called Dragonfly Lake where time is moving on, despite the memories that would keep Marv Carlson trapped in the past. And when Ray LaMontagne’s “For the Summer” cues up on my mp3 player and when I think about the summer I spent cleaning resort cabins on weekends for a couple extra bucks, my heart knows what story to tell next.
PS – The picture above is of my dad. When my mind isn’t thinking of Minnesota lakes, Mr. LaMontange’s song makes me think of summer on the farm – one arm out the rolled down window of my mama’s pickup truck. Spring Grove pop. And I think of this particular day on a long ago vacation when my dad and I found a riot of flowers in South Dakota.
michellekubitz 