Music That Helps You Write: A Free Spotify Playlist of Your Selections

What music puts you in the mood to write? At the moment, I have on Alice Coltrane’s “Bat­tle at Armaged­don” from her 1971 Uni­ver­sal Con­scious­ness, a work of psy­che­del­ic free jazz that makes my fin­gers skit­ter over the key­board and sends thoughts rac­ing through my mind. Should Coltrane’s mys­tic jazz counter the mood I want to sum­mon, I might find some­thing less syn­co­pat­ed, more lugubri­ous, omi­nous, melan­choly, serene, etc. (Per­haps Grouper’s atmos­pher­ic suite of reverb-drenched tone-poems The Man Who Died in His Boat.)

This inter­ac­tion between the ears, the fin­gers, and the writ­ing mind struck our inter­est back in 2012, and we put out a call to read­ers to sug­gest the best pieces of music to write by. Some read­ers found that silence made for the best—or only—accompaniment. Many more made rec­om­men­da­tions rang­ing from Miles Davis, to min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er Steve Reich, sitar mae­stro Ravi Shankar, the clas­sic Krautrock sound of Neu!, the dub reg­gae of King Tub­by, the vio­lin Sonatas of Bach, and the ambi­ent sound­scapes of Bri­an Eno. We took it upon our­selves to com­pile a sam­pling of your sug­ges­tions with Youtube videos at the time. Now we offer above a more portable Spo­ti­fy ver­sion of our “music to write by” playlist—over 13 hours of music. (Stream it above. Or find it online here. If you need to down­load Spo­ti­fy, grab the soft­ware here.) I’ve added Alice Coltrane, Grouper, and the beau­ti­ful …Until We Felt Red (2006) from one of my favorite gui­tarists, Kaki King.

I hope this playlist inspires you, or at least inspires you to make your own. While it could go on indef­i­nite­ly, the key to a good mix­tape is the art of judi­cious selec­tion. Please tell us in the com­ments, what would you absolute­ly have to add? What artists, com­posers, and musi­cians get you in the mood to write, help you shift tem­pos, or move you from major to minor keys while you com­pose, whether you write non­fic­tion, poet­ry, tech­ni­cal man­u­als, or the Great Amer­i­can What­ev­er? We’ll add many of your sug­ges­tions to the playlist over the next few days.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

The Best Music to Write By: Give Us Your Rec­om­men­da­tions

The Best Music to Write By, Part II: Your Favorites Brought Togeth­er in a Spe­cial Playlist

Lis­ten to Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Clas­si­cal Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

62 Psy­che­del­ic Clas­sics: A Free Playlist Cre­at­ed by Sean Lennon

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.