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deep_dark_waters) wrote2018-04-02 06:46 pm
deep_dark_waters) wrote2018-04-02 06:46 pm
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jukebox_fest letter
Hello! I'm going on holiday tomorrow and won't get back until after signups close, so this is just a placeholder so I can include the link in my signup and I'll fill in prompts etc when I'm home. Home now, prompts added below :D
General info I include in all exchange letters:
I'm Deepdarkwaters on Ao3 and Tumblr and ambrotypes on Twitter for any recip-stalking needs.
Short version: I'm easy to please and happy to be completely surprised, as long as you don't include the couple of DNWs mentioned below. If you've got something in mind already then do it your way! These are just suggestions - I will honestly love whatever you come up with for any of these songs.
General fic loves: (probably not applicable to everything requested, but just so you've got an overview of some of the things I generally enjoy reading in whatever combination) worldbuilding/exploration of the canon world; dialogue; description; competence; petty arguments; unreliable narrators; misunderstandings; found families; really old comfy friendships; really old comfy friendships that accidentally/unexpectedly become more; clumsy inappropriate humour; backstories; melancholy; loonngg dragged out UST that feels like it'll never end and then ENDS GLORIOUSLY; awkward imperfect sex where everyone's still having the best time ever; intense physical fight scenes; huge scale destruction; ridiculous things played completely straight for comedy purposes; kissing; when dick-in-hole sex isn't always the end goal or the only type considered 'real' sex; anything to do with playing/stroking/pulling/grooming/whatever someone's hair.
Please no: noncon, hanging of any kind (choking/breathplay is fine - it's the rope and drop thing I have the trouble with), and hair cutting.
I love a lot of these songs more because of how they feel, rather than having existing ideas for a concrete A to B sort of plot. I hope some of the ramble below is helpful...! Feel free to ignore absolutely everything I say here and write whatever you feel fits the songs best if you've got other ideas, I love seeing how differently people interpret music. Also all my requests are for the songs, but if there's an official video (I think it's probably only the Bjork and Massive Attack that have them?) then go ahead and use those if you like. I'm open to anything!
If I mention gender in the prompts it'll be the singer's gender and/or that of the person they're talking about, but I'm totally happy to read any gender whether it's romance or not. Go with whatever you like to write.
Song: All is Full of Love - Bjork (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/AjI2J2SQ528
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bjork/allisfulloflove.html
Prompts:
Twist your head around
It's all around you
All is full of love
What I love so much about this song, and so many of Bjork's other songs really, is how she can pull out this huge cosmic expanse of meaning from quite sparse lyrics. She can say more in one song like this than a million other musicians can in their entire body of work. I love the pace of it all: the build up, her voice soaring through the middle section, then the come down towards the end - it feels very sexy, obviously, but it doesn't necessarily have to be! The pace and the up and down feel of it could represent a physical journey, for example, or an emotional one, or the change of seasons and new beginnings (which I believe is actually what it was written about - a difficult winter slowly morphing into spring and the world waking back up). I love the optimism and promise of it and how vast it feels - maybe it's the robot lovers in the video influencing me, but something about the feel of the song makes me think of huge epic science fiction films, Interstellar and 2001 and the like. Maybe something set in space would work: alien lovers, new discoveries, spaceship crewmates getting closer to each other as they speed farther from home, etc. Or maybe it's a smaller, simpler thing: one person finding hope somewhere in the darkness, or two (or more) people feeling woozy with love for the first time, or just one of those fleeting moments when you exchange compliments with a woman you've never met in the club toilet when you're both a bit drunk and feeling friendly. A story about love and wonder in whatever shape it comes, romantic or not.
Song: Circus - Tom Waits (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ApRnHiu7kCo
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tomwaits/circus.html
Prompts:
and then there was Yodelling Elaine, the queen of the air, who wore a dollar sign medallion
and she had a tiny bubble of spittle around her nostril and a little rusty tear
for she had lassoed and lost another tipsy sailor
and over in the burnt yellow tent by the frozen tractor, the music was like electric sugar
and Zuzu Bolin played Stavin' Chain and Mighty Tiny on the saw
and he threw his head back with a mouth full of gold teeth
and they played Lopsided Heart and Moon Over Dog Street
and by the time they finished Moanin Low I was soaking wet and wild eyed
I could listen to Tom Waits' voice forever. This one feels like an entire long audiobook condensed down to four minutes, everything about his storytelling is so vivid and sensory. I love the rambling stream of consciousness feel to this. I love how absolutely solid and vibrant all the characters are in only a few words. I love this sense of weary realism he always brings. I love the pace of his narration: his gravel-gargle voice slowly showing us around this tired old circus a tiny bit at a time like a peepshow. Would love fic about any of these characters - backstories, futures, romance, murder, anything. Does Elaine ever keep a sailor? Does Poodle ever get her whiskey and gun? Who is the narrator and what's his part in the circus?
Song: Mortal City - Dar Williams (Song)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5tCJdfnZ31zvsHKUOf3K52?si=Hm25Eu3STb-HrMZcD7b_uQ (it's not on YouTube)
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Dar-williams-mortal-city-lyrics
Prompts:
And think about tonight, I heard the same newscast you did
I unplugged everything, I looked out the window
And I think the city heard
I watched as one by one the lights went off
So they could give their power to the hospital
This song completely bewitched me the first time I heard it and it's not lost any of its power over the last twenty or so years, it still makes the hairs on my arms shiver up every time. I love the feeling of quiet melancholy in it, that sense of being small and alone in a huge world and then something happens that affects everyone at once and suddenly it highlights humanity all around - there are people everywhere that the lonely narrator has something in common with even if it's only for one night. It opens up this chance of a real connection with somebody she might have only dated once and never thought about again otherwise. I love the forced cosiness of it (SHARING A BED and HUDDLING FOR WARMTH, aka fanfiction's greatest tropes!) and the lovely contrast of this slightly tentative connection becoming warmer as the world outside gets colder in the ice storm. Where do they go after this? Do they fall in love? Is it a connection just as strong as love, but as friends?
I've been reading a ton of post-apocalyptic fiction lately and maybe something along those lines would work for this song if that's something you're into: like a Day After Tomorrow kind of scenario, the world starting to freeze and yet people still do all they can to help each other because that's what we're here for. Or a sci-fi take on it: an ice storm on a settlement on some other planet, people having to learn to survive in an environment they're not really supposed to be in.
Song: Prisoners - Regina Spektor (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/N4Rhn04dpCA
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/reginaspektor/prisoners.html
Prompts:
All of the prisoners serving life sentences
Wait for the earth to suddenly shake
For the walls to somehow suddenly come crumbling, tumbling and
For the bars to somehow magically break
... they want to run through the air with no barriers or obstacles
Gunmen or guard dogs or priests
And to rise from the mud and start over and over
With the people all dead
I love the idea of taking this one literally. Something happens (plague/alien attack/massive natural disaster/whatever) to kill off a huge percentage of the earth's population, but the people in this prison were safe from it and get to start over in a new world. How would that work? Would the government and police force rebuild themselves eventually and try to round everyone back up to serve their pot possession sentences or whatever because even after an apocalypse the world is a bureaucratic hellscape? Do the prisoners build their own new community around the abandoned prison or try to go home, or somewhere else? Do the different prison cliques learn to work together to survive, or is fighting and terrorising people a human impulse that can't be overcome even in the most extreme situation? Are there some people who just can't be rehabilitated?
I love the fairytale elements in the lyrics too, her mermaid tattoos and the line "if Hans Christian Andersen could have had his way with me then none of this shit would have ever gone down" - I always took this as a sort of reference to Andersen's stories being about human nature, and also how fairytales have been used for generations to scare children into behaving. "If I'd learned right and wrong from stories like other kids then maybe I wouldn't have fucked up so badly and got myself thrown in here." But if you feel like an extra challenge and can figure out a way to do it, wrangling actual Andersen into a fic would be awesome too :P
Song: Safe From Harm - Massive Attack (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/PKtTmZnVhhI
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/massiveattack/safefromharm.html
Prompts:
Midnight ronkers, city slickers
Gunmen and maniacs
All will feature on the freakshow
And I can't do nothing about that
But if you hurt what's mine
I'll sure as hell retaliate
My favourite thing about this song is the fierceness in the line "if you hurt what's mine I'll sure as hell retaliate". Who is she warning? Who is she protecting? "Just as long as my baby's safe from harm tonight" - is "baby" a lover, or her child? Why are they in danger? The lyrics (and the video) suggest she's wary of the dangers in the troubled area and times she's living in - is that what it is? Maybe she's protecting her child or new partner from a violent ex or bullying neighbours etc, but could it be something else? Maybe it's supernatural - ghosts or werewolves or demons or vampires or a rogue dragon or fairies or aliens or anything. I said in the general notes at the top that I don't mind what gender the characters are in the fic, but this is the exception because so much of what I connect to in the song is this female courage and strength - if this is what we matched on, I'd really love the protector to be a woman.
Song: The Consort - Rufus Wainwright (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/eGBJFNeDKrY (ignore the video! Everything else is a crappy quality live recording)
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rufuswainwright/theconsort.html
Prompts:
Let streamers fly and cannons roar
on your arrival, beautiful queen
Tomorrow night prepare to walk
on anyone her highness ever wants
Trust in me
You're not alone
Together we'll wreak havoc on the throne
There are two potential ways I was thinking about this song in terms of fic when I nominated. The non-literal version: maybe friends to lovers, a couple of teenage boys or girls figuring themselves and each other out over a summer holiday or their last year of school or whatever. One's afraid about coming out, but their partner is so extravagant in their promises of support - you're not alone and the world needs to learn how to fit itself around us instead of the other way around because we're here to rule it, not serve it - that it makes everything feel like it's going to be ok.
Or the literal version: a young queen and her consort (not necessarily a cis het couple, it could be anyone you want) wreaking havoc on the throne. "Havoc" is relative - were her parents deposed and she takes back her throne from the destructive usurpers through force? Or is she a warrior queen storming through some fantasy world snatching control of every country she touches? I have absolutely no preference for good or evil - I'd cheer on an evil witch queen and her besotted lover just as much as a noble young couple regaining control from their usurpers :D
Song: You and the Candles - Hawksley Workman (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/6G2PsIlcd4o
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Hawksley-workman-you-and-the-candles-lyrics
Prompts:
When society's crumbled and everything's gone
When the cars are all rusted away
When there ain't no more money and there's nothing to buy
When all that we have is the day
When the world becomes silent, no planes in the air
When the voices just gather to sing
When the guns are the fence posts, the cars are the doghouse
And the telephones no longer ring
What of the night with no electrical light?
So what then?
You and the candles will be all that I need
Your face bathed in the firelight will be all I want to see
Another post-apocalyptic one! I think about this tumblr post a lot, it always creeps into my head when I listen to the album this song comes from, Treeful of Starling (which in 36 minutes tells the story of the whole history of human existence from the beginning through evolution and civilisation and apocalypse and love and death and the rebuilding of society and everything - please listen to it, it's my favourite album ever and honestly changed the way I think about the world). This song in particular evokes the "soft apocalypse" thing for me better than anything - it's speculative, the apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but I'd love to read a story where it has and the narrator and his partner (alone or within a community of fellow survivors) are content just to be together. I like the "I'll still write you a song" bit, like he's picked up a bashed old guitar from somewhere and he's trying to make his partner smile when things feel desperate. I'm always happy to be a bit depressed by a story, particularly in a setting like this, but there's still so much love and hope in the song so anything capturing that sort of feeling would be perfect. It's difficult for me to take this song out of the context of the album, but if you prefer to write a slightly less depressing setting then it works fine as a present-day "if" as well, like "so much shit going on in the world but if everything goes to hell I'll still love you no matter what" so something along those lines would be wonderful too!
General info I include in all exchange letters:
I'm Deepdarkwaters on Ao3 and Tumblr and ambrotypes on Twitter for any recip-stalking needs.
Short version: I'm easy to please and happy to be completely surprised, as long as you don't include the couple of DNWs mentioned below. If you've got something in mind already then do it your way! These are just suggestions - I will honestly love whatever you come up with for any of these songs.
General fic loves: (probably not applicable to everything requested, but just so you've got an overview of some of the things I generally enjoy reading in whatever combination) worldbuilding/exploration of the canon world; dialogue; description; competence; petty arguments; unreliable narrators; misunderstandings; found families; really old comfy friendships; really old comfy friendships that accidentally/unexpectedly become more; clumsy inappropriate humour; backstories; melancholy; loonngg dragged out UST that feels like it'll never end and then ENDS GLORIOUSLY; awkward imperfect sex where everyone's still having the best time ever; intense physical fight scenes; huge scale destruction; ridiculous things played completely straight for comedy purposes; kissing; when dick-in-hole sex isn't always the end goal or the only type considered 'real' sex; anything to do with playing/stroking/pulling/grooming/whatever someone's hair.
Please no: noncon, hanging of any kind (choking/breathplay is fine - it's the rope and drop thing I have the trouble with), and hair cutting.
I love a lot of these songs more because of how they feel, rather than having existing ideas for a concrete A to B sort of plot. I hope some of the ramble below is helpful...! Feel free to ignore absolutely everything I say here and write whatever you feel fits the songs best if you've got other ideas, I love seeing how differently people interpret music. Also all my requests are for the songs, but if there's an official video (I think it's probably only the Bjork and Massive Attack that have them?) then go ahead and use those if you like. I'm open to anything!
If I mention gender in the prompts it'll be the singer's gender and/or that of the person they're talking about, but I'm totally happy to read any gender whether it's romance or not. Go with whatever you like to write.
Song: All is Full of Love - Bjork (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/AjI2J2SQ528
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bjork/allisfulloflove.html
Prompts:
Twist your head around
It's all around you
All is full of love
What I love so much about this song, and so many of Bjork's other songs really, is how she can pull out this huge cosmic expanse of meaning from quite sparse lyrics. She can say more in one song like this than a million other musicians can in their entire body of work. I love the pace of it all: the build up, her voice soaring through the middle section, then the come down towards the end - it feels very sexy, obviously, but it doesn't necessarily have to be! The pace and the up and down feel of it could represent a physical journey, for example, or an emotional one, or the change of seasons and new beginnings (which I believe is actually what it was written about - a difficult winter slowly morphing into spring and the world waking back up). I love the optimism and promise of it and how vast it feels - maybe it's the robot lovers in the video influencing me, but something about the feel of the song makes me think of huge epic science fiction films, Interstellar and 2001 and the like. Maybe something set in space would work: alien lovers, new discoveries, spaceship crewmates getting closer to each other as they speed farther from home, etc. Or maybe it's a smaller, simpler thing: one person finding hope somewhere in the darkness, or two (or more) people feeling woozy with love for the first time, or just one of those fleeting moments when you exchange compliments with a woman you've never met in the club toilet when you're both a bit drunk and feeling friendly. A story about love and wonder in whatever shape it comes, romantic or not.
Song: Circus - Tom Waits (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/ApRnHiu7kCo
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tomwaits/circus.html
Prompts:
and then there was Yodelling Elaine, the queen of the air, who wore a dollar sign medallion
and she had a tiny bubble of spittle around her nostril and a little rusty tear
for she had lassoed and lost another tipsy sailor
and over in the burnt yellow tent by the frozen tractor, the music was like electric sugar
and Zuzu Bolin played Stavin' Chain and Mighty Tiny on the saw
and he threw his head back with a mouth full of gold teeth
and they played Lopsided Heart and Moon Over Dog Street
and by the time they finished Moanin Low I was soaking wet and wild eyed
I could listen to Tom Waits' voice forever. This one feels like an entire long audiobook condensed down to four minutes, everything about his storytelling is so vivid and sensory. I love the rambling stream of consciousness feel to this. I love how absolutely solid and vibrant all the characters are in only a few words. I love this sense of weary realism he always brings. I love the pace of his narration: his gravel-gargle voice slowly showing us around this tired old circus a tiny bit at a time like a peepshow. Would love fic about any of these characters - backstories, futures, romance, murder, anything. Does Elaine ever keep a sailor? Does Poodle ever get her whiskey and gun? Who is the narrator and what's his part in the circus?
Song: Mortal City - Dar Williams (Song)
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5tCJdfnZ31zvsHKUOf3K52?si=Hm25Eu3STb-HrMZcD7b_uQ (it's not on YouTube)
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Dar-williams-mortal-city-lyrics
Prompts:
And think about tonight, I heard the same newscast you did
I unplugged everything, I looked out the window
And I think the city heard
I watched as one by one the lights went off
So they could give their power to the hospital
This song completely bewitched me the first time I heard it and it's not lost any of its power over the last twenty or so years, it still makes the hairs on my arms shiver up every time. I love the feeling of quiet melancholy in it, that sense of being small and alone in a huge world and then something happens that affects everyone at once and suddenly it highlights humanity all around - there are people everywhere that the lonely narrator has something in common with even if it's only for one night. It opens up this chance of a real connection with somebody she might have only dated once and never thought about again otherwise. I love the forced cosiness of it (SHARING A BED and HUDDLING FOR WARMTH, aka fanfiction's greatest tropes!) and the lovely contrast of this slightly tentative connection becoming warmer as the world outside gets colder in the ice storm. Where do they go after this? Do they fall in love? Is it a connection just as strong as love, but as friends?
I've been reading a ton of post-apocalyptic fiction lately and maybe something along those lines would work for this song if that's something you're into: like a Day After Tomorrow kind of scenario, the world starting to freeze and yet people still do all they can to help each other because that's what we're here for. Or a sci-fi take on it: an ice storm on a settlement on some other planet, people having to learn to survive in an environment they're not really supposed to be in.
Song: Prisoners - Regina Spektor (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/N4Rhn04dpCA
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/reginaspektor/prisoners.html
Prompts:
All of the prisoners serving life sentences
Wait for the earth to suddenly shake
For the walls to somehow suddenly come crumbling, tumbling and
For the bars to somehow magically break
... they want to run through the air with no barriers or obstacles
Gunmen or guard dogs or priests
And to rise from the mud and start over and over
With the people all dead
I love the idea of taking this one literally. Something happens (plague/alien attack/massive natural disaster/whatever) to kill off a huge percentage of the earth's population, but the people in this prison were safe from it and get to start over in a new world. How would that work? Would the government and police force rebuild themselves eventually and try to round everyone back up to serve their pot possession sentences or whatever because even after an apocalypse the world is a bureaucratic hellscape? Do the prisoners build their own new community around the abandoned prison or try to go home, or somewhere else? Do the different prison cliques learn to work together to survive, or is fighting and terrorising people a human impulse that can't be overcome even in the most extreme situation? Are there some people who just can't be rehabilitated?
I love the fairytale elements in the lyrics too, her mermaid tattoos and the line "if Hans Christian Andersen could have had his way with me then none of this shit would have ever gone down" - I always took this as a sort of reference to Andersen's stories being about human nature, and also how fairytales have been used for generations to scare children into behaving. "If I'd learned right and wrong from stories like other kids then maybe I wouldn't have fucked up so badly and got myself thrown in here." But if you feel like an extra challenge and can figure out a way to do it, wrangling actual Andersen into a fic would be awesome too :P
Song: Safe From Harm - Massive Attack (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/PKtTmZnVhhI
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/massiveattack/safefromharm.html
Prompts:
Midnight ronkers, city slickers
Gunmen and maniacs
All will feature on the freakshow
And I can't do nothing about that
But if you hurt what's mine
I'll sure as hell retaliate
My favourite thing about this song is the fierceness in the line "if you hurt what's mine I'll sure as hell retaliate". Who is she warning? Who is she protecting? "Just as long as my baby's safe from harm tonight" - is "baby" a lover, or her child? Why are they in danger? The lyrics (and the video) suggest she's wary of the dangers in the troubled area and times she's living in - is that what it is? Maybe she's protecting her child or new partner from a violent ex or bullying neighbours etc, but could it be something else? Maybe it's supernatural - ghosts or werewolves or demons or vampires or a rogue dragon or fairies or aliens or anything. I said in the general notes at the top that I don't mind what gender the characters are in the fic, but this is the exception because so much of what I connect to in the song is this female courage and strength - if this is what we matched on, I'd really love the protector to be a woman.
Song: The Consort - Rufus Wainwright (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/eGBJFNeDKrY (ignore the video! Everything else is a crappy quality live recording)
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rufuswainwright/theconsort.html
Prompts:
Let streamers fly and cannons roar
on your arrival, beautiful queen
Tomorrow night prepare to walk
on anyone her highness ever wants
Trust in me
You're not alone
Together we'll wreak havoc on the throne
There are two potential ways I was thinking about this song in terms of fic when I nominated. The non-literal version: maybe friends to lovers, a couple of teenage boys or girls figuring themselves and each other out over a summer holiday or their last year of school or whatever. One's afraid about coming out, but their partner is so extravagant in their promises of support - you're not alone and the world needs to learn how to fit itself around us instead of the other way around because we're here to rule it, not serve it - that it makes everything feel like it's going to be ok.
Or the literal version: a young queen and her consort (not necessarily a cis het couple, it could be anyone you want) wreaking havoc on the throne. "Havoc" is relative - were her parents deposed and she takes back her throne from the destructive usurpers through force? Or is she a warrior queen storming through some fantasy world snatching control of every country she touches? I have absolutely no preference for good or evil - I'd cheer on an evil witch queen and her besotted lover just as much as a noble young couple regaining control from their usurpers :D
Song: You and the Candles - Hawksley Workman (Song)
YouTube: https://youtu.be/6G2PsIlcd4o
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Hawksley-workman-you-and-the-candles-lyrics
Prompts:
When society's crumbled and everything's gone
When the cars are all rusted away
When there ain't no more money and there's nothing to buy
When all that we have is the day
When the world becomes silent, no planes in the air
When the voices just gather to sing
When the guns are the fence posts, the cars are the doghouse
And the telephones no longer ring
What of the night with no electrical light?
So what then?
You and the candles will be all that I need
Your face bathed in the firelight will be all I want to see
Another post-apocalyptic one! I think about this tumblr post a lot, it always creeps into my head when I listen to the album this song comes from, Treeful of Starling (which in 36 minutes tells the story of the whole history of human existence from the beginning through evolution and civilisation and apocalypse and love and death and the rebuilding of society and everything - please listen to it, it's my favourite album ever and honestly changed the way I think about the world). This song in particular evokes the "soft apocalypse" thing for me better than anything - it's speculative, the apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but I'd love to read a story where it has and the narrator and his partner (alone or within a community of fellow survivors) are content just to be together. I like the "I'll still write you a song" bit, like he's picked up a bashed old guitar from somewhere and he's trying to make his partner smile when things feel desperate. I'm always happy to be a bit depressed by a story, particularly in a setting like this, but there's still so much love and hope in the song so anything capturing that sort of feeling would be perfect. It's difficult for me to take this song out of the context of the album, but if you prefer to write a slightly less depressing setting then it works fine as a present-day "if" as well, like "so much shit going on in the world but if everything goes to hell I'll still love you no matter what" so something along those lines would be wonderful too!