Welcome to September! What an awesome, joyous, fantastic month!

Are you catching the drift that I’m a fan of September?

It’s true, I love this month in Indiana, as summer starts slowly fading toward fall but the days and evenings are still long and the weather warm, though it eventually starts giving way to the occasional cooler nights and mornings.

This year, I’m celebrating September with my first Lucy’s Way fundraiser. During the entire month, I’m donating $10 to the Marion-Grant County Humane Society for each sale of the book made through MGCHS, Pipe Creek Animal Clinic, the MGCHS resale shop and my dedicated Venmo and PayPal links. Info can be found in the flyer below as well as here.

So, here are a few disclaimers. Books purchased through Amazon and other online retailers such as barnesandnoble.com, boooksamillion.com etc. are not eligible for this promotion. Without boring people to death too much with the “why”, it’s simply too hard to track those sales in a timely manner and the way royalties work through online retailers would leave me losing money on those sales if I were to honor the $10 fundraiser amount. If you are outside of the Grant County area and don’t want to travel to get a copy or use my PayPal or Venmo links, reach out to me at msaluke@hotmail.com and we will work something out. And yes, as I’ve already been asked, you can overpay i.e. $20 for a 17.95 copy and the extra would go to the shelter as well (in this case, $20 would equal a $12.05 donation to the shelter).

So while the fundraiser already has this September shaping up to be extra awesome, it’s always a great month, and one that flies by much too fast.

As each year passes by a little quicker than the one before, I’ve crammed my life with many memorable Septembers. But as this glorious month approaches each year, I often catch myself daydreaming back to one particular September in college and one particular apartment.

There’s nothing out of this world special about that particular apartment, and what I remember most about it that autumn was a single window in the corner of the living room, and the way the blinds would dance in that open window on those breezy September afternoons. I’ve always been a sucker for open windows and the way curtains dance to the tune of the breeze, and I paid homage to that in Lucy’s Way, particularly in the intro to chapter 13: “Blessing of the Animals.”

What was special about that September back in 1997 didn’t have as much to do with that window as it did with the moment in time I was living in, and the music that provided a backdrop for that time. It was at that point I was still fully enjoying the balance of the college party and education scene, teetering on the threshold of falling into the darkness that would soon envelop me for years to come. That autumn, I was continuing to discover new musicians and songs. To this day, hearing The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” or The Doors “Love Street” pulls me right back into that moment in time like I never left. (Fun fact: on my 21^st birthday that year I yelled out to a crowd of people that I was Jim Morrison and would live forever as several friends dragged me out of a bar following my first of many “cut off and kicked out” moments that would become commonplace the next several years).

Well, anyways, that music and those songs were shaping the soundtrack of my life in that moment, in a way so powerful that those songs can still take me back to that exact moment.

Lucy and I had our own soundtrack, hours upon hours of songs that created the symphonic hemisphere that we walked through life to the tune of, and there’s no way I could scratch the surface of naming all of those songs.

Much in the same way, Lucy’s Way had its own soundtrack, one which evolved over the countless afternoons and evenings, windows often open off to the side, as I wrote Lucy’s Way. The songs inspired me to write in certain styles, opened windows in my mind to more fully recall certain memories, and allowed me to fully engage in the process that was unfolding.

I can’t possibly list every single song that found its way into the Lucy’s Way playlist at one time or another. But there are songs that found their way on and stayed. Those songs, that I feel comprise the soundtrack of Lucy’s Way, are listed below. And while it would be overkill to do it for every song, I did pick certain songs to expound upon if their influence was particularly significant.

I’ve always tried to be careful about pushing my musical influences on people, so the idea of sharing the music that inspired Lucy’s Way was a more difficult decision than I initially anticipated. So, the idea I’d like to leave you with is to check these songs if you wish, or check them out again, or listen to your own musical tastes while reading this book and see how they flavor your personal take. Also, if you have interest, I’m closing this blog with an excerpt that was scrapped from the “Purple” chapter, one that pays proper credit to my sisters for helping me fall in love with music.

I think, at the end of the day, the most important takeaway is to live life to your soundtrack, whatever that may be.

“Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” – Smashing Pumpkins: This instrumental title track opens the Smashing Pumpkins epic double-album that dropped in October, 1995, a time when I was just a few months into college and really starting to embrace darkness and uncertainty in a fairly secretive way. This piano-driven opening track has grown on me more and more over the years. It set the tone of the album and while I’ve never actually seen anything written about this, I’ve always been able to catch glimpses of that song in other songs on the album. It’s thematically perfect, in terms of both the album and the timeframe. It was a song I put on the backburner for years and started enjoying again in recent years. As I began brainstorming and starting to write Lucy’s Way, it found itself evolving into the opening track of my playlist and I began playing it every time I started writing. Breaking away from my  idea of not suggesting you listen to these songs, if you listen to one song on this list, make it this song. Listen to it while reading Chapter one and I think it nails the tone on the head. It really is a beautiful song, and not one you’d picture to open a 90s alt-rock album full of slashing guitars and dark lyrical themes. It is 2 minutes and 52 seconds of utter bliss, and it drove many writing sessions of Lucy’s Way.

“Love Will Tear us Apart” – Joy Division

“These are Days” – 10,000 Maniacs: While I prefer the Unplugged version, the studio is great as well.

“Summer Breeze” – Seals & Crofts

“St. Stephen” – The Grateful Dead: When I talk about Grateful Dead music, take it with this disclaimer of salt…I never made it to a concert and I’m not a deadhead deep cuts guy. My range of faves (maybe or maybe not in order) includes “Uncle John’s Band,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Shakedown Street,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Sugaree,” “Scarlet Begonias” and “St. Stephen.” For whatever reason, it was the melodies and guitar licks of St. Stephen while I was writing that pulled me back into the dorm rooms, the sweaty basements, the memories of that first big party on page two, so many of those moments that were important to retell in a relatable way with specific images while still driving the narrative forward. “St. Stephen” was one of those tunes that cracked the door and got the job done.

“If I Could” – Phish

“River of Deceit” – Mad Season: Perhaps the most difficult chapter to pull apart and rework decision-wise was the chapter originally titled “River of Deceit” with its title deriving from this song and its melodies and subject matter influencing the structure and tone of the chapter. It initially began with me floating on the water in the Salamonie Reservoir. It included the frogs, me trying to drown, and Lucy learning her limits in water, but it ended again with me in the water, floating, recounting a conversation with a particular individual in a Hawaiian shirt. It went together so well but the difficult decision was made to drop it like glass and put it back together. It had to happen, because that’s the only way a bulk of it made its way to much earlier in the book. And the frog story deserved to be much earlier in the book.

“Malibu” – Hole

“I Got a Name” – Jim Croce

“Watching the Wheels” – John Lennon

“Down Easy” – Noe Venable: I couldn’t really go with the soundtrack theme without including at least one soundtrack song here. This Noe Venable track isn’t the best soundtrack song ever, but the placement of this in its particular scene in the 2002 movie “Cherish” is in my humble opinion divine. The song itself induces a trance-like element with its slow roll, and it’s placed in a scene meant to depict the passage of movement and time, centered around the main character’s life not moving forward even as the world does. The movie itself is musically inspired all the way to its title, and had it not been the background music it might not have stood out for me as such an excellent flick. Not to mention that Jason Priestly cameo in the movie is priceless.

“Goose Snow Cone” – Aimee Mann

“Can’t Get my Head around it” – Aimee Mann

“Green Eyes” – Coldplay

“Seasons Change” – Future Islands: A song I didn’t initially like that eventually became the inspiration for the title and much of the content of Chapter 14. A newsroom worker shared it with me around the same time I was deciding it was time to shift job roles in life. It became a great guiding song in recounting and believing in the concept that everything happens for a reason. And if you ever wanna see a lead singer throw every last ounce he has into a performance, check out their David Letterman performance of this song.

“Take a Picture” – Filter

“Crush” – Dave Matthews Band

“Times Like These” – Foo Fighters

“Any Other Name” – Thomas Newman: Another instrumental gem, this one from the “American Beauty” soundtrack, one that captures the chill of loneliness and isolation in its melodies yet also drags you into that longing for something more. It’s like a cold winter night, yet one with a glimmer of hope.

“Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” – Pearl Jam

“Fill the Fields” – Talk Show

“Interstate Love Song” – Stone Temple Pilots: I could put a lot of Stone Temple Pilots songs here, but this was one of mine and Lucy’s favorites on car rides. I’d sing it to her as we drove along and she didn’t seem to mind. Off of the Purple album, the song factored heavily into the “Purple” chapter before I discovered that song lyrics were a big no no, unless I wanted to spend a lot of time and money. I reworked the chapter significantly and while I was happy with the final product, I definitely missed all the musical references in the chapter. Following is an excerpt from that original chapter, one that gives credit where credit is due to some of my biggest musical influences: my sisters.

*****

If I didn’t thank my sisters Laurie and Michelle for my introduction to the world of music, I’d be a pretty bad brother.

I was six when I stumbled across my sisters’ turntable in the back of my bedroom closet. I opened it up and was immediately mesmerized with all of these mechanisms I didn’t understand. Soon after inquiring with my mother as to what this fascinating device was, I was presented with one of those Golden Books on record where you follow along with the record while flipping through pages of the book. It was something like Porky Pig or Loony Tunes, or maybe The Little Engine That Could, and I listened along and followed the words while glancing up at the hypnotizing needle grooving rhythmically up and down along the revolving circle.

I really enjoyed associating these sounds coming from this glorious machine with the books, so I asked for more, flipping through the pages and following along with the spinning black discs.

And then I stumbled across the game changers. At the back of that same closet, stashed away behind where I’d found that record player: a treasure trove of Laurie and Michelle’s vinyl 45s and LPs from the ‘70s.

It was a mix of musicals and disco, of rock and roll and pop, R&B and soul.

I was first drawn to the art work on the album covers. I don’t remember which one came first. There was Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies, its cover a giant green snakeskin wallet. When I opened the “wallet,” a paper billion dollar bill fell out, fluttering in the air as it fell to the ground. The album art included the band posing with a baby wearing black eye makeup in the style of the lead singer.

Epic.

There was Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, a visual cornucopia of colors and images vomited onto the cover that my little brain could barely process, giant red lips and gold flowing dresses and multicolored neon rope candy weaving in and around the images, the band’s name at the top in a font that resembled toothpaste squeezed out of a tube.

Exhilarating.

And there was The Best of Earth Wind & Fire, Volume 1, its cover a gold coin with a phoenix, stamped on a burnt orange background. Opening the album, I was pulled in by the enormous photo montage with a group shot of the nine band members splayed across the middle of the fold out, a barrage of snapshots scattered all around the band centerpiece, stretching to the edges of the cardboard canvas.

While all of these covers visually pulled me in, once the needle nestled into the grooves of whichever of these albums I decided to play first, it was over. Just like that, my world was full of guitars and drums and energy and sounds I had never experienced before.

Existential.

I’d found my first love, and it was the head-over-heels variety.

These three albums opened the door to a new dimension. I stumbled across School’s Out soon after and with that, at age six, Alice Cooper was my favorite musician.

There were other albums that I clung to in their record collection as well, though I don’t necessarily want to mention them (yes, I was dancing around my bedroom to Saturday Night Fever before I stepped foot into first grade) but rock and roll is what I was steering toward with a locomotive’s velocity and I couldn’t get enough of it.

With my first tape recorder on my seventh birthday I began my own music collection. My first cassette tapes were Van Halen’s 1984 and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. And the first album that drew me in start to finish – from the art work, to every single brilliant song and of course the over-the-top singer who filled every bit of the rock star image right down to his wardrobe – was Prince’s Purple Rain.

By this point, MTV was taking the television airwaves by torrential storm as my world became Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, Duran Duran and U2, Twisted Sister and Tom Petty, The Cars and Culture Club, the list was growing at a frenetic pace.

My collection also grew, and with my mother being the main chaperone of my musical tastes (I talked her into letting me join one of those tape-of-the-month clubs where you got 10 cassettes out of the gate as long as you taped a penny to the card and mailed it back) she pretty much let me do my thing. By the time I was eight, I’d decided that I was going to be a rock star. Thus began lip-synched concerts to sold out auditoriums of invisible fans in my stadium bedroom, sneaking into my mom’s makeup drawer and swiping any of her necklaces or jewelry that gave off a heavy metal vibe, ripping holes in jeans and searching out a variety of headbands with the likes of Van Halen, Ratt and Twisted Sister’s names etched across them.

As the mid-80s moved toward the end of what I thought had been the greatest decade of music ever achieved, Guns N Roses came to rule my world. It was a new level of hard edge rock that would open the door for what was coming.

I hit the full stride of my teenage years in the early 1990s, at the same time that hair metal and 80s rock was getting trampled to its eventual death by the alternative and grunge movement it ushered in. Nirvana had opened the doors to a new world, and the likes of Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots were all over the airwaves, served in large helpings on MTV as well as streaming into my ears and inner being as much as possible.

Music made the problems of life disappear: the bullies, the girl problems, the issues with trying to fit in. I could get lost in albums for hours on end. Music became my retreat. Many years before I began to contemplate and understand meditation, I was already doing it. By listening to music, yes. But there is a completely different type of meditation involved when you aren’t just listening but actually feeling the music, when you begin to transcend and become one with it. I used to take acid hoping to hear colors and see sounds. Now I can do those things without any drugs.

Stone Temple Pilots became my favorite band in high school and into college. The hooks were strong, the melodies catchy, and I related to the lyrics long before the realization that lead singer Scott Weiland fought the demons of addiction. These demons were becoming obvious in the band’s second album. The title of the album was Purple, the Chinese symbol for the word etched on the bottom left corner of the cover, which featured a Chinese baby riding a dragon through the sky. It quickly became one of my favorite albums.

Everything about the album – its varying speeds and flow, the layers of guitars and melodies, lyrics that were loose and whimsical yet deep and entrenched – made it feel like the title.

As Weiland’s struggles with addiction were televised for the whole world to see, I began dancing with my own demons on a much smaller stage, as an awkward high school student trying to find my way and then heading off to college, where I felt lost.

Years later, sober and living my life with Lucy, I was drawn back to that album once again.

I’ve picked up the habit of singing to myself in the car over the years, so once Lucy was along for the ride, I was no longer singing to myself: I was singing to her.

And when Purple found its way into my CD player – the same copy I’d raced to the store to buy the first day it came out in June, 1994 – I often found myself playing a particular song and getting lost in a little dream, glancing over at her sleeping peacefully, curled into a ball next to me in the bucket seat of the Grand Am.

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