I didn’t know this book was a book right away. But more on that later. Right now, I want to talk about the music in the book.
Because wow, was that a surprise!
After I had finished writing the March Break half of the book in April 2021, I edited in early June. I was looking up how to write lyrics from a song in fiction so that I could write the lyrics I had chosen properly in the text.
That’s when I discovered that if you use an artist’s lyrics, you have to pay licencing fees. Yikes! (Although, yeah, that makes COMPLETE sense!)
Cue panic. We had lyrics in Assassins! Accidental Matchmakers and we had already submitted it to our publisher. (Don’t worry, we took them all out before it went to print.) Music wasn’t a big deal in that book.
But music was a huge deal in this book. Tommy sings a song to Carter to tell him that he likes him. I had agonized over which song to pick, and I wasn’t happy with it. Taking out the lyrics made it feel even more impersonal.
Éric suggested I write my own song.
I laughed at him.
Less than a week later, a snippet of a song popped into my head as I was falling asleep. I was no longer falling asleep. I tapped out syllables as I worked through the verse and then the chorus appeared fully formed in my head. By the time less than 15 minutes had passed, the full song had been figured out. I hoped it would stick around until morning.
Surprisingly, it did, and I wrote it down with very little changes.
I did not get any constructive criticism on it because it’s supposed to sound rough, as Tommy wrote it in about half an hour. I figured a 36yo writing a song as she fell asleep was about equivalent to a 14yo writing their first song.
So I put my song in the book and put it away.
Then Éric suggested I write the music for it.
I laughed at him.
Are you seeing a trend here?
His suggestion stuck in my brain. I had the tune I wanted in mind… Why couldn’t I write it down, other than the fact that I didn’t know how to play guitar?
So I asked to borrow my dad’s guitar and sat down with a learning app. It was actually kinda fun, but I was struggling with the size of the guitar. Two weeks later, I bought my own guitar.
But I still couldn’t figure out how to write the chords for my song.
I asked author Bruce Gordon for help. In case you didn’t know, he plays guitar and is very good at it. And apparently, he enjoys writing chords for lyrics.
I sent him a recording of myself singing the tune I’d come up with, and asked for extremely basic chord progressions.
Not only did he figure them out for me, but he had several video calls to teach me how to play it properly.
I owe him a lot.
Thus, the song was born!
You can hear my song “Get to Know You” in the Spotify playlist for Crushing It.
Crushing It by Jen Desmarais is available now!
Physical from Canadian indie bookstores, physical from Indigo, electronic version
