RTW: My Summer Soundtrack!

Road Trip Wednesday is a blog hop hosted by YA Highway!

This week's question...

What music has been your summer soundtrack?

My summer soundtrack has been a very strange mix of songs. 

 

I started by compiling a YouTube playlist of somewhat ‘teeny bopper pop’ songs, I should be ashamed to admit it…. But I’m really not..!

I started with Carly Rae Jepson’s hit song ‘Call Me Maybe’ and followed it by Justin Bieber’s ‘Boyfriend’ (okay, we all have to admit, he’s getting older, and so are his songs. Come on now!)

I also love One Direction – I have a group of 16 year olds I know from my hometown on my Facebook and Twitter pages… now they obsess over 1D. They are the type that repeatedly tweet the band members, they photoshop themselves into pictures of Harry… some of them have even changed their last name on Facebook to ‘Styles’ – a little creepy, right?!

Anyway, once their obsessing took over my timeline, I checked them out and really love ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ and ‘One Thing’. Sticking with the teeny bopper theme – Demi Lovato’s ‘Give Your Heart a Break’ and Selena Gomez’s ‘Hit the Lights’.

There's a few songs that I've loved for almost a year now and don't show any signs of dropping off my playlist - Christina Perri's 'Jar of Hearts', LP's 'Into the Wild' (Made famous by Citibank's commercial!), and Jessica Mauboy's 'The Scariest Part'. All great songs!

This could easily be me....

I've also been introduced to Lana Del Ray by my roommate who has impeccable taste in music. I love her songs 'Diet Mountain Dew' and 'Video Games'. It took me a long time to come around to actually listening to her, but I really love her music. I think she's going to speed up my list of favourite artists in no time.

My roommate also introduced me to Sufjan Stevens, and I'm totally in love with his song 'Chicago'. He has a lot of talent. Beautiful music, great for writing to.

Aside from those song you all quite likely know, there’s a few songs that have come out of New Zealand recently that you may not have heard before. Some of them are truly great, summer feel good songs.

The first one I want to introduce you to is called ‘Everything’s going to be alright’ by The Babysitters Circus. It’s very much a summer feel good song that just makes everything seem light-hearted, happy and bouncy. The music video was filmed as flash mob on the waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand.

The other song I love is called ‘Love, Oh Love’ by the band Paper Plane. The lead singer, Nathan King, was once in a famous New Zealand band called Zed. A few of his songs from both his solo career and Zed are also in my playlist. Paper Plane is his new venture, and this song is simply such a great happy summer song that I could truly play on repeat!

On the opposite end of the spectrum I’ve also been playing a lot of Ludovico Einaudi’s music this summer. His stuff really helps get my creative juices flowing. I can’t write to songs that I know the words to – it’s like the music pushing on into my mind and screams until I sing-along. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata are favourites to write to as well. 

Finally, I went to an off-Broadway show recently and in the weeks before seeing the show I was playing the soundtrack a lot. The show is called Songs for a New World. It was basically a musical performance and the songs were so beautiful. The melodies and lyrics really stuck in my brain and actually helped significantly inspire my latest WIP. My FH is in the film industry (or trying to be) and also said the music helped inspire some storylines for his screenplay.

Here is the link to my playlist. I tried to make it on playlist.com but I failed, so YouTube it is!  I tend to mash all these songs together and play them as much as I can - when I bike around Brooklyn, when I'm at the gym, when I'm writing, working, making food... it's great!

So that’s my summer soundtrack – what’s yours?