Come Selahway With Me…

So yeah, I do like trashy rock folklore. I also plain  like rock (especially classic rock and eighties metal). So I suppose this begs a few questions, mainly…

How does a fairly straight-laced, small-town chick with a classical music background end up getting into something so different?

And what’s it like to write something so far out of one’s element?

Because I do want to clarify one little thing….while there is a lot of partying in the book, a lot of decadence, a lot of fairly down and dirty behavior…

I am a horrifically boring person.

No, seriously. I really am. I work all day, I come home and curl up with my laptop and work some more. And then I read until I pass out.

Rock n’ roll, man.

Seriously, don’t believe anything else that you might hear about me at cons, or any other public places. I shall stand by this statement until the end of time: I AM A BORING PERSON.

So anyway…

Question/thought numero uno..

I love all music. I love classical music, and if I do say so myself I sang it fairly well when I was still performing. I love show tunes (especially the old standards), love big band, love the blues.  For a good portion of my youth I was aware of popular music, but for some reason I felt that if I gave into it I’d give up whatever it was I was trying to be (which was apparently some opera/Broadway elitist hybrid).

And then David Bowie happened. He’ll get his own post later. But yeah…I got into his music, and the world cracked wide open. Funnily enough, the first groups I got into were probably those that aren’t that popular with the typical masses (Iggy, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, etc). I bounced around from interest to interest and group to group, caught in a weird time warp of stuff I grew up on and loved in the eighties (and then made myself not like because I was Ze Serious Artiste),  stuff I vaguely remembered but missed out on in the nineties, and stuff I loved that happened before I existed.

And then my radio discovered the classic rock station. Now I didn’t grow up completely under a rock, so I did know some stuff. But I did end up getting a hell of an education pretty fast. The Who, The Stones, The Beatles, The Zombies, The Steve Miller Band, BTO, The Guess Who, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, Springsteen, Mellencamp (for those who have read In the Red, yes I really do like him), Janice Joplin, Jimmi Hendrix, and on and on and on. I love them all.

…and then I discovered Led Zeppelin. For what ever reason I wasn’t really aware of the group until my early twenties. Don’t ask me what I thought they were, but it wasn’t until I was driving home one night and heard the MOST amazing song…so amazing that I had to pull over and write the lyrics on my arm so I could google it later (this was before smartphones). That song was ‘What is and What Should Never Be.’ Life was never the same. If Bowie is always number one, then Zeppelin is second by /just/ a hair.

And then I remembered that I kind of liked eighties metal growing up. Granted, I was young and had no idea what they were singing about, but everyone listened to it back in the day. So G’NR, Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Poison, Def Leppard, et al came back into my life. And I’ve never looked back since.

I don’t know if I’m attracted to a sound that I may not be able to do as well as I can other stuff, I don’t know if I’m attracted to a way of life that I probably wouldn’t fit in well with, I don’t know what it is. I love the anarchy of a really heavy sound, I love the hot wail of a really steamy guitar riff. I love a really hard, driving rhythm that changes as the song moves along. It’s amazing. For me, that’s the sound of freedom. Of possibility. Of purpose.

So back to the trashy part…

I will admit that I had to go back four or five times and convince myself that it was okay to put in certain sections. All the while, my inner narrator/small-town editor may have been hissing “But what if people who know you read this?!?!”

eh, then they should know me well enough by now to know I’m writing a story, yo.

Maybe I just felt the need to explore a way of life far removed from mine. I mean, I’m no saint. I’m no angel (a thousand internet points to whomever gets that),  but I think my inner editor/reigns-holder/whatever has a firm grip on me most days. So it was really fun to explore a different, harder way of life in fiction. And with a male protagonist, because frankly, it was far easier to get away with more with the lead being a guy. Not that I let him off easy, mind you.

Besides, you can’t really have demons and rock n’ roll come together without some massive bad behavior.

So what am I talking about? How does any of this relate to the book? Is it really that dark and sleazy?

I dunno, you’ll have to check it out! 😉

If anything, click on the cover below to check out the face book page; if you like it, you’ll get access to the full excerpt, blurb, trivia game, and more!