When I wrote Chosen, I had songs that related to different chapters and scenes, but with Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, I didn’t have the same experience. I’m sure it’s partially because it just tumbled out so quickly. Or maybe it’s because TEHW is a different kind of book, lighter and quirkier. I listened to a lot of Evans Blue and Death Cab for Cutie while I wrote, but when I edited I discovered Sky Sailing.
The lead singer and creator of Sky Sailing is by Adam Young, the lead singer of Owl City. They sound a lot like Owl City but with less electronic key board and more acoustic guitar. I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many times my iTunes says I’ve listened to it, but I’ll admit it just broke three digits.
Sky Sailing’s CD An Airplane Carried Me to Bed is light, sweet and a little bit wistful. Like Rose. A lot like Rose. So I found that the entire CD is a fitting playlist for Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, as weird as that is. But here’s what’s weirder: Rose has a theme song on the CD. The words aren’t necessarily appropriate to her character but the melody itself IS her. Sweet, wistful, yearning. Rose spends a lot of time yearning for something else, something better in her life. I hear this song and to me it is Rose. You can hear the yearning between the chorus and the verse and this sums up Rose’s life. But at the end of the song, it’s resolved, the yearning breaks and she finds what she’s looking for and the beautiful part is it was inside her the whole time. She just had to find it.
