It’s the Music, Man!

Over on Rachel Michelle Wilson’s blog post from January 7th, she talks about following a breadcrumb of Sendak’s inspirations:

As I immerse myself in the Sendak world this week, I thought it would be fun to try out some of Sendak’s fountains of inspiration:

• William Blake
• Mozart
• Emily Dickinson
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• And if I have the time, I’ll also check out Schubert, Hugo Wolfe, Palmer, Proust, Eliot, Middlemarch, Randolph Caldecott, George Cruikshank, Ludwig Richter, Wilhelm Busch, A. B. Frost, Edward Windsor Kemble, Ernst Kreidolf, Hans Fischer, André François, Watteau, Goya, Winslow Homer, Mahler, Beethoven, Wolf, Wagner, Verdi, Walt Disney, James, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, or Melville

This brought to mind my own attempt at the same with James Marshall. Not so much in the literary (goodness knows I am not a reader) but in music. I had the idea that maybe if I played Marshall’s favorite composers, the air in my studio would be imbued with an ethereal Marshall-ness that would manifest itself in the art I was making. A romantic thought, but in practice… not so great. Marshall was a classical music egghead (I say this with respect as a classical music geek), and his favorite of favorites, Shostakovich, just didn’t do it for me. Marshall’s tastes tended towards the grander, heavier symphonies and I just couldn’t get into those while drawing a cartoon fox motoring a speedboat up a river. I did, however, include this little detail in one of my illustrations:

So, what music got me through this project? Let’s start with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

If you remember this post, there was a time, almost exactly a year ago, where I was feeling haunted by images coming out of Gaza. There was something in Storm that helped me find a place for my feelings of despair, and allowed me move ahead with the first final illustrations I did for JIM! In fact, I would turn to Godspeed again and again over the course of JIM! and I think it’s fair to say Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven got me through the first half of this project.

There were times when my feelings of despair turned into anger, and in those moments I sought help from Bill Evans.

Speaking of “feelings in the ether” and all that sort of thing, it was important to me that the primary feeling surrounding JIM! was love. Peace Piece always managed to return me to a calmer place where I could check in with myself and see if I was meeting my goals.

The other feeling I wanted, and this is probably obvious, was joy. For that, I turned to the theme from the George and Martha cartoon, Perfidia, as performed by the Mambo All Stars.

The comment section to the above tells you a lot about how fondly Marshall properties are remembered.

Granted, those comments are about the George and Martha cartoon (produced after Marshall’s death) but they put me in mind of this notion of legacy, and what I hoped to accomplish with JIM! Somewhere during all this, my family went to a Belle & Sebastian concert. They played If She Wants Me and the line “If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy” hit hard.

I would call If She Wants Me the anthem of the middle half of the project. I had found my stride and this song had the right mix of hope and purpose. The second half of the chorus goes: On second thoughts I’d rather hang around and be there with my best friend if she wants me.

Okay, we need to switch gears. So far everything has been loaded with meaning and intention. This next choice is a bit more lighthearted. There’s a scene in JIM! where Jim is signing books at a bookstore sometime, I imagine, in the late 70s/early 80s. I wanted to transport myself back to that era and I figured the best way was with muzak:

A lot of my late-night sessions were set to the soothing sounds of Ethiopian jazz:

While I usually prefer to curate my social media feeds by hand, I tend to let YouTube’s algorithm recommend (or auto play) my playlists. I was rewarded late last summer with and introduction me to Diamond Jubilee:

I had never heard of Cindy Lee but I became obsessed with this album and had it on repeat for probably the last third of JIM! Besides enjoying the music, I was inspired by Cindy Lee who released her album only on YouTube and who’s website is hosted on geocities. Be still, my old-internet lovin’ heart. There was something about the artistry of Cindy Lee’s project that kept me wanting to keep JIM! as authentic as possible. Here’s another easter egg from inside my book:

I’ll end by returning to classical music to tell you the one piece that did play a part in JIM! This was for the final chapter:

Clair de Lune accompanied the hospital scenes. I won’t say any more about that until after the book comes out. At which point you can tell me if I missed the mark entirely.