Drawn

Welcome to Studiotunes!*

Without further ado, here’s Kean Soo’s Studiotunes essay:

I tend to have music running almost constantly in the background as I work — when drawing, I listen to just about anything, but when I’m writing I have to stick to songs without lyrics otherwise I’ll get completely distracted.

This usually means I’ll be listening to classical (I can still point out quite a few scenes in Jellaby that I’ve written to Beethoven’s piano sonata cycle), or something along the lines of progressive trance (Hybrid has always been a favourite of mine), but for this particular Jellaby mix, I decided to stick to the more traditional pop songs that might accompany scenes or the reading of the graphic novel.

So. Here we go:

Nada Surf – Imaginary Friends (YouTube)
Wilco – Just a Kid

Here we are with two songs to really kick the mix off with a bang. From Nada Surf’s opening lines of “Hey! Calling all imaginary friends!” to the chorus of singing kids in Wilco’s “Just a Kid,” these two songs are pretty much indicative of the mood and tone of the book: Fun! The songs also touch on recurring themes that seem to keep cropping up in Jellaby: friendship and the occasional difficulties of just being, well, a kid.

Peter Gabriel – Not One of Us

Portia’s song, if ever there was one. Peter Gabriel was one of the first musicians that I really glommed on to when I first started seriously listening to music so many years ago, and he’s stayed with me ever since. It’s not hard to imagine this song playing over top of Portia’s scenes in the playground as she becomes more and more isolated from the rest of the kids around her.

Akira Ifukube – Godzilla’s Theme (From Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah)

What would a comic about a monster be without a reference to the ultimate monster movie?

As I grew up with a healthy diet of kaiju on the television, it seemed almost inevitable that I would end up having Jellaby idolizing Godzilla after seeing him for the first time on TV.

I always liked the idea of competing influences pushing and pulling on Jellaby: Portia’s gentler side bringing out the best in him, while Jason, like most boys — me included — would’ve loved to have had a monster that you could train to step on cars or smash buildings.

The Kinks – Sitting by the Riverside

If there’s one song that would best describe Jellaby (the monster or the book), it would probably have to be this one. A slight, almost silly little piano and mellotron number, if feels like it could be a throwaway song, but there’s a strange undercurrent that bubbles just under the surface that reveals itself midway through, and especially towards the end of the song.

It’s an interesting dynamic, and something that I’ve tried to play with in Jellaby as well. Appropriately enough, Chapter 4 of the book opens with Portia and Jellaby actually sitting by a riverside, so there you go.

The Boy Least Likely To – My Tiger, My Heart

Here was a song I listened a lot to as I was writing early drafts of the book. While the story ended up going in a completely different direction from the song, at its roots, this song still shares a lot with Jellaby. The sense of melancholy and the end-of-summer feel bring with it a real sense of change, something that the characters in Jellaby are right on the cusp of.

Band of Horses – Monsters (YouTube)
Talking Heads – This Must be the Place (YouTube)
From the album: Speaking in Tongues

And ending the mix how we began, here are two more songs that are more about the mood and feel of Jellaby. In many ways, I feel that both these songs are about finding a home or a place for yourself in the world, and that’s something that every single character in Jellaby is searching for.

The line in “Monsters” is one that resonates strongly with me: “If I am lost, it’s only for a little while.”

Jason Anderson – The First Snow of the Year
From the album: Tonight

And a bonus track! I wrote a Jellaby short story called “First Snow” in 2006 that took some time to find a home in print, and it’s finally going to see the light of day in the forthcoming Flight Explorer anthology being released at the end of March. But since then, I came across Jason Anderson’s music which I fell head over in heels in love with (his album Tonight was hands down my favourite album of 2007), and it just so happens that he also has a song about the first snow of the year that I thought would be great to go along with my story. So here it is.

Kean Soo started his first webcomic, Confessions of a Music Slut, in 2002 and since then has gained a reputation for intimate and poignant comics. He also co-edits the hugely successful Flight anothologies and is co-founder of the very-difficult-to-get-into Secret Friend Society.

Find out more about him at keaner.net

Also of interest:
Kean Soo interviewed by Silver Bullet Comics

*Studiotunes is completely inspired by the Book Notes series on the amazing mp3 blog, Largehearted Boy – which is a series of essays by authors about how music has influenced their writing.