Keep Moving!
by David Overend
January 2024
by David Overend
January 2024
This is one of four playlists that emerged from an experiment where four academic authors documented and then reflected upon the ways that music shaped their writing spaces. They did this while separately working on book chapters for the edited collection, 'Postdigital Learning Spaces: Towards Convivial, Equitable and Sustainable Spaces of Learning'. Elsewhere on this site you will find the playlists compiled by Genaro Oliveira, John Potter and James Lamb, the other authors involved in this project. The playlists are each presented alongside a reflective commentary, like the one below, that were written as part of the experiment. A fuller account of this exercise is provided within the Postdigital Learning Spaces book, which is due to be published by Springer during summer 2024.
Documenting my music choices throughout the writing process has prompted me to attend carefully to my sonic environment for the first time. I have realised what an important role music plays during the hours that I have set aside for this work. Listening to Spotify playlists, radio channels, LPs and YouTube videos, I traverse my working day by moving slightly frantically between different modes of engagement with my writing tasks. These shifts and jumps are frequently soundtracked by bursts of music. Ambient lo-fi, Scottish folk, contemporary pop; there is a considered lack of fidelity to any particular artist, genre or era. My choices are driven by a combination of factors from indulging in nostalgia to fuelling creative energy or alleviating the pressure of impending deadlines. The various technologies that I use grant me flexibility in the times and places that I work. Sometimes, when I get into the flow of writing and long stretches of time are given over to the slow and careful progress of rising wordcounts, I work better in silence.
I have noticed that music helps me mostly with transitional moments. 8th June 2023 was the day before I moved house. After a day of meetings at the university, I returned to my flat around 4.30pm. The movers had been working in my absence and had – with my permission – packed almost all the furniture apart from the bed. With few of my routine distractions available, I propped myself up with pillows and opened my laptop. The flat felt very different. Unheimlich. I needed a way to ground myself in familiar surroundings before I could think about writing. Steve Lamacq could help me with that. When Lamacq presented The Evening Session on BBC Radio 1 in the 1990s with Jo Whiley, I was a teenage muso listening out for the latest releases, often with a cassette tape ready to hit record if, say, a new Blur track got its first airing. Over the ensuing years I migrated with my favourite DJs from Radio 1 to Radio 2, then Radio 6. This is where I go now if I need to reset and refocus. A familiar, homely audio environment that readies me for the imaginative and intellectual work of writing. Thankfully my Echo Dot had not yet been boxed up and Alexa duly obliged to “play Radio 6”. Now I could relax into the task at hand – reading my co-authors’ latest additions to our chapter and working my way towards the next phase of writing. Everything in New Order.
Moving into a more focussed and applied mode of writing, I need something different to the lively conversational textures of radio shows. I turn to tracks without lyrics and seek out albums that take me on a journey of some kind. Ludovico Einaudi’s Seven Days Walking includes some of the most played tracks on my Spotify account (along with Taylor Swift’s Midnights, but that’s mainly because my daughter usually controls the airwaves). When I write new paragraphs sitting at my desk, Einaudi is often an important part of the process. This is music that is unobtrusive but has a pace and a drive to it that is conducive to a productive writing process. It is also significant that it is a collection of albums about walking, the subject and method of the chapter that I am co-authoring.
I am writing this on a train between Glasgow and London as I travel south to lead a workshop at Kings College. I have written elsewhere about the space of creative transformation that is engendered by train travel (Bissell & Overend 2015). I am transitioning from one place to another, finding ways to write myself forward through the paragraphs. On my Bluetooth headphones, I am listening quite deliberately to ‘Writing on a train’ by my friend and collaborator Scott Twynholm – the first track from the soundtrack to the documentary Alasdair Gray: A life in progress. As I speed by hills, motorways, canals and wind farms, this music syncs up with the rhythmic progression of the train with little flurries of melody carried along by the swelling synth. It feels like it’s going somewhere. Progress is being made.
David Overend is a lecturer and researcher in interdisciplinary education, creative fieldwork and contemporary theatre and performance at the University of Edinburgh.
Documenting my music choices throughout the writing process has prompted me to attend carefully to my sonic environment for the first time. I have realised what an important role music plays during the hours that I have set aside for this work. Listening to Spotify playlists, radio channels, LPs and YouTube videos, I traverse my working day by moving slightly frantically between different modes of engagement with my writing tasks. These shifts and jumps are frequently soundtracked by bursts of music. Ambient lo-fi, Scottish folk, contemporary pop; there is a considered lack of fidelity to any particular artist, genre or era. My choices are driven by a combination of factors from indulging in nostalgia to fuelling creative energy or alleviating the pressure of impending deadlines. The various technologies that I use grant me flexibility in the times and places that I work. Sometimes, when I get into the flow of writing and long stretches of time are given over to the slow and careful progress of rising wordcounts, I work better in silence.
I have noticed that music helps me mostly with transitional moments. 8th June 2023 was the day before I moved house. After a day of meetings at the university, I returned to my flat around 4.30pm. The movers had been working in my absence and had – with my permission – packed almost all the furniture apart from the bed. With few of my routine distractions available, I propped myself up with pillows and opened my laptop. The flat felt very different. Unheimlich. I needed a way to ground myself in familiar surroundings before I could think about writing. Steve Lamacq could help me with that. When Lamacq presented The Evening Session on BBC Radio 1 in the 1990s with Jo Whiley, I was a teenage muso listening out for the latest releases, often with a cassette tape ready to hit record if, say, a new Blur track got its first airing. Over the ensuing years I migrated with my favourite DJs from Radio 1 to Radio 2, then Radio 6. This is where I go now if I need to reset and refocus. A familiar, homely audio environment that readies me for the imaginative and intellectual work of writing. Thankfully my Echo Dot had not yet been boxed up and Alexa duly obliged to “play Radio 6”. Now I could relax into the task at hand – reading my co-authors’ latest additions to our chapter and working my way towards the next phase of writing. Everything in New Order.
Moving into a more focussed and applied mode of writing, I need something different to the lively conversational textures of radio shows. I turn to tracks without lyrics and seek out albums that take me on a journey of some kind. Ludovico Einaudi’s Seven Days Walking includes some of the most played tracks on my Spotify account (along with Taylor Swift’s Midnights, but that’s mainly because my daughter usually controls the airwaves). When I write new paragraphs sitting at my desk, Einaudi is often an important part of the process. This is music that is unobtrusive but has a pace and a drive to it that is conducive to a productive writing process. It is also significant that it is a collection of albums about walking, the subject and method of the chapter that I am co-authoring.
I am writing this on a train between Glasgow and London as I travel south to lead a workshop at Kings College. I have written elsewhere about the space of creative transformation that is engendered by train travel (Bissell & Overend 2015). I am transitioning from one place to another, finding ways to write myself forward through the paragraphs. On my Bluetooth headphones, I am listening quite deliberately to ‘Writing on a train’ by my friend and collaborator Scott Twynholm – the first track from the soundtrack to the documentary Alasdair Gray: A life in progress. As I speed by hills, motorways, canals and wind farms, this music syncs up with the rhythmic progression of the train with little flurries of melody carried along by the swelling synth. It feels like it’s going somewhere. Progress is being made.
- Suite II Overture by Janelle Monáe
- Writing on a Train by Scott Twynholm
- Tender by Blur
- Seven Days Walking/Day 2: Low Mist Var. 1 by Ludovico Einaudi, Federico Mecozzi, Redi Hasa
- Ceremony by New Order
- Sleep the Clock Around by Belle and Sebastian
- Labyrinth by Taylor Swift
- Riding (Day) [From "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom"] [Cover] by Masters of Sound
- You're My Best Friend by Queen
- The Grants by Lana Del Rey
David Overend is a lecturer and researcher in interdisciplinary education, creative fieldwork and contemporary theatre and performance at the University of Edinburgh.