The Sound of Muzak

How Music and Song Influenced My “Daria” Fanfic

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Synopsis: Music has more of an influence on fanfic writing than is sometimes thought. Some examples of this are given from this author’s own “Daria” works.

Author’s Notes: Not much has been said online about music and fanfic writing, as far as I can tell. Perhaps this will spark a little thought or help people enjoy my stories better. 8)

Acknowledgements: Thanks to all who produced the music that inspired my writing!

The first “Daria” fanfic I ever wrote was woven around a song. “Nine-Eleven and Counting” was, of course, about the terrorist attacks against America on September 11, 2001, and how it affected the major characters of the Dariaverse. As I wrote the story, a particular song kept going through my head—the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” played over and over. (I can hear it inside my head now as I write this.) Certain lyrics jumped out of that song and came to life, waving in my mind like a flag in the wind, and I borrowed fragments of those lyrics and made them into chapter titles for the story. “Nine-Eleven and Counting,” like every author’s first story, is badly flawed, and I am fond of saying it will be revised one day—but when it is, the chapter titles will stay. I cannot imagine the story now without the song, or the song without the story.

Since then, I’ve written a few other “Daria” fanfics, and looking back I am surprised at how many of them were influenced by particular songs or musical works. The “Daria” show itself made extensive used of background music by alternative bands, and some fans of the series find the DVD versions of the show sadly lacking because the music tracks were removed for public distribution, for royalty reasons. “Daria” and music are thus joined in my mind, and for whatever interest this topic has among fanfic authors and readers, this essay on music and writing is offered. It is hoped that the reader will forgive me if I ramble a bit. Music is a separate language, and I was never very good with languages other than English.

Sometimes music forms only a small part of a “Daria” story, a background element to a particular scene. I don’t recommend certain songs be played during every scene, as some fanfic writers do, but when it’s appropriate I mention it. For example, Daria Morgendorffer and her father Jake listen to Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” during a father-daughter dinner in “A Midsummer Nightmare’s Daria.” I was looking for something that a hotel restaurant would play on a special evening, and Mozart came to mind, as I was a fan of the movie Amadeus. Daria, I thought, would appreciate classical music as well as alternative rock.

Another scene in “A Midsummer Nightmare’s Daria” uses the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which is especially good for this tale as Daria is mentally and emotionally changed by a supernatural force to become angrier and more aggressive, the constraints on her behavior suddenly removed. People around her thus need to seek shelter from her rage. The connection with the documentary movie of the disastrous Altamont concert (“Gimme Shelter”) is echoed as well. I thought about using “Sympathy for the Devil” in that scene, but “Gimme Shelter” worked better.

A lyric from a Kid Rock song, “Fist of Rage,” arises in a scene between Daria and Jane in “Nine-Eleven and Counting,” right before they discover news of the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The lyric talks about the singer’s negative view of the world and his struggle to get through it: “I see the future and it’s looking grim / A lake of fire, looking like a long swim” described exactly how I felt about life after 9/11, and I used it here to foreshadow what was to come.

In the angst story, “Winter in Hell,” Sandi Griffin reveals that she once took piano lessons until she dumped them in favor of running the Fashion Club. In a piano shop in a shopping mall, she sits down and plays a selection of pieces that I took from various piano CDs. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was reflective of Sandi’s trouble with her father, who has abandoned her, and of Quinn Morgendorffer’s relationship with the neurotic Jake. The Beatles’ song, “Yesterday,” was similarly linked to events in the story, and Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” echoes Sandi’s fears that her best (and probably only) friend, Quinn, will soon head for college and leave Sandi to an uncertain and lonely future.

The short, humorous script “Quinnisqatsi” has a musical soundtrack from the movie “Koyaanisqatsi,” though altered in a ludicrous way by Jeffy, Joey, and Jamie to fit their home movie about their worship of Quinn. This was the only time I recall using a song in a humorous way in a story, though you could easily read the farce “Luuuv Story” to a selection of 1970s Barry White songs.

In the alternate-history “Pause in the Air” series, Daria and Jane are gay. They become lovers (as you would expect), but they then go so far as to get married and have a baby. In a scene in “Shock and Aww,” the fifth in the series, Jane hums the tune to Pat Benatar’s “We Belong,” a 1980s song that Jane would to have heard as a child or seen on MTV as a music video. “We Belong” is actually the theme song of the entire PitA series, and the lyrics reflect exactly what goes on in their stories as they struggle with personal doubts and real-world troubles in an effort to make their marriage and family work.

A song’s title or lyrics can strike me as inspiration for a story title. “Click Click Boom” (from Saliva’s song of the same name) worked nicely for an alternate-history story in which Daria and Jane meet because they are both camera bugs—which they are to a lesser extent in the regular Dariaverse. An alternate-history story about Jane’s older sister, Penny Lane, was titled “There Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies” after a line in the Beatles’ song, “Penny Lane” (probably the source of Penny’s name).

Sometimes a song serves as the inspiration for certain scenes in a story, but it is not mentioned in the tale itself. “April Is the Cruelest Month” begins with Daria and Jane driving through the Rocky Mountains, which are majestic enough in themselves, but I wanted a particular feeling to go with this scene and found it hard to write without something to help the emotional tone along. That feeling was supplied by Loreena McKennitt’s “The Mystic’s Dream,” from The Mask and the Mirror. This song perfect captures the eeriness of that overcast day, the mountaintops wreathed in fog, reflecting a certain loneliness of spirit and a pending meeting with destiny. I must have listened to “The Mystic’s Dream” fifty times while writing the opening to the story.

AC/DC’s “Shoot to Thrill” (From Back in Black) came to mind a great deal during the writing of “Where No Light Breaks, Where No Sea Runs,” an angst nightmare story in which Daria becomes a murderer. Many of the lyrics to “Shoot to Thrill” evoke memories of the story in me, as the story now makes me think of the song.

An incomplete story now posted on the “Lawndale Leftovers” website was helped along in part by a song by Kid Rock. In this story, “Buried Alive,” Quinn becomes trapped in her car under a tractor-trailer following a long chain-reaction Interstate pileup. The scene in which the accident develops came vividly to mind while listening to Kid Rock’s “F— Off” (deletion mine), because the opening chords of that song have a harsh, screeching, metallic edge to them, followed by a hard-driving rhythm that fit Quinn’s panicked and futile efforts to steer clear of the crashes around her. If I finish the story one day, I’ll probably rewrite the crash scene—but again keep it to the music of Kid Rock.

I’ve tried a couple of times to write lyrics without music—rather, the lyrics are to music, but the music’s locked in my head and I can’t write it down. Lyrics to unique songs appear in the stories “Go Ahead and Dance” (actually the lyrics to a song Trent Lane is supposed to have written) and “Meet the Fashion Club” (an alternate history in which Quinn and the Fashion Club are a rock band).

So, music is sometimes a part of the stories I write, though I cannot predict when or control how that happens. It’s one of those things that come to mind for writers of any sort—you go with the flow and see where it takes you, hoping all the while that it makes sense in the end for a good tale.

Original: 7/30/03

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