Here is a thing that happened.
Earlier this year, Irvine Welsh - author of Trainspotting, owner of a tattoo collection and a credible dance label - released a new novel called Men In Love. (It's a good book. Go read it)
And alongside it, an album. A proper one. Soul vocalists, disco production, orange vinyl, the works. The Trainspotting boys, reunited and set to a soundtrack.
I read about this and smiled, because I had just done the same thing.
Cold Heart October came out in May with fifteen songs attached to it. A whole album by the band at the heart of the book, for a story about a singer who has a voice like none other.
I wrote the lyrics, and Cold Heart October brought them to life. There is something strange and lovely about hearing words you put on a page come back to you as a song. I am still not entirely used to it.
The scale of the two operations is not, shall we say, comparable. Welsh has The Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra and a record label and Rolling Stone interviewing him in a Camden pub. I have a band that exists in the pages of a book and a desk in the west of Ireland. But the instinct was the same, and that is the part I keep turning over.
Welsh has been very honest that his album sits beside the book. Same world, same feeling, but separate. You are not meant to read a chapter to a track. It is a companion piece in the truest sense, a thing that stands next to the thing.
The Cold Heart October album does not stand next to the book. It lives inside it. The songs are the band's own songs. They happen in the story. Readers have been listening as they read, which is exactly what I hoped for, and several have told me the experience felt like nothing they had encountered before. One review called it "a novel you can hear." I have not stopped thinking about that line since.
So no, I did not follow Irvine Welsh. We arrived at the same crossroads in the same year by different roads. Two writers who both decided a book was not quite enough on its own, that the story needed a sound as well as a shape.
If you have read Cold Heart October and not yet pressed play, the band is waiting. And if you have not read it, well. Now you know there is more than one way in.
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