Four album covers arranged on the page: Madonna, Talking Heads, Womb and Bikini Kill. Behind them is cursive writing.
Just some of the musicians who inspired this talented crop of Aotearoa writers.

BooksNovember 27, 2025

Eight New Zealand novelists on the music they write to

A bunch of people
Four album covers arranged on the page: Madonna, Talking Heads, Womb and Bikini Kill. Behind them is cursive writing.
Just some of the musicians who inspired this talented crop of Aotearoa writers.

What they listen to when they write, and how it influences their work.

I played the song ‘Harvest‘ from the soundtrack to the 1978 Terrence Malick film Days of Heaven on repeat when I started planning my second novel. I listened to it so much that it was there when I went to sleep, playing somewhere deep inside my brain. It wasn’t so much that the song inspired the novel, but that the wordless, deeply atmospheric music attached itself to my brainwaves and sort of weighed them down so I could focus. I have no idea the science behind this but I do know that I’m not alone. The following Aotearoa writers all have different ways of using music to inspire or accompany their writing: from the masochistic, like me, to the more applied sort of practise where the songs are intimately connected to the characters, the time and the tone of the story. / Claire Mabey

Kirsten McDougall, author of She’s a Killer

I’m two-thirds through writing a novel, Blood Harmonies, about three sisters who are singers. The novel covers a long period of time from 1986 through to 2025. The sisters in my novel were in a briefly successful band together in their early 20s, in the late 1990s. So there’s a lot of music that I’ve been listening to, remembering what was around when I was a child (‘Feed the World‘, Band Aid; ‘Like a Virgin‘, Madonna), and a teenager (‘Even Flow‘, Pearl Jam; ‘Lithium‘, Nirvana), and a young woman (‘Cannonball‘, The Breeders; ‘Sour Times‘; Portishead), through to today (‘Point and Kill‘, Lil Simz and Obongjayer; ‘Husbands‘, Geese). 

Brannavan Gnanalingam, author of The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat

I write masochistically with music. I listen to one or two songs, over and over again with a project, and each time I put it on, it has a Pavlovian dog type effect to get me in the writing mood. It works for me when I have limited time. There’s usually no specific song – sometimes it’s a mood, sometimes it’s a tone, sometimes it’s just what I was listening to at the time. 

For Sprigs, I had a different song for each part, and I sought to have a song that matched the theme. For part one, “the rugby game”, I used ‘I Will be Waiting‘ by Let’s Eat Grandma (a terrible band name, truth be told, but it had a sense of expectation and promise). For part two, “the party”, I used a song that my character Priya would have likely listened to in the car there, which was ‘New Rules‘ by Dua Lipa. And for part three, when the book became more scabrous in its satire, I used ‘This Year’s Girl‘ by Elvis Costello. And for part four, I used silence, because I wrote that in a frenzied period of a couple of weeks in Toronto and didn’t want anything distracting me from the voice. 

For my novel Slow Down, You’re Here, I used ‘Inertia Creeps‘ by Massive Attack (vibe for one part of the narrative) and the sad-girl Italo (a sub-genre of disco) of ‘I Know‘ by Sally Shapiro (vibe for the other part of the narrative). 

For Sodden Downstream, it was ‘Pale Movie‘ by Saint Etienne, mainly because I was listening to a lot of Saint Etienne. For The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat, I was again, lost in my head. 

I became a writer through writing about music and film. I refuse to listen to podcasts because there’s so much music I don’t know about and want to know about. It will always play a crucial part of my writing process, even if I kill the pleasure of a particular song forevermore.

Pip Adam, author of Audition

I have an album for each project I’m working on. It’s kind of a touchstone so I can find a way back into the work when I’m task hopping. Finding the album is always helpful for the project because I can work out things like mood and tempo and narrative structure of the work. For the last project I completed I was writing to Womb’s ‘One is Always Heading Somewhere‘ and ‘Dreaming of the Future Again‘. I also couldn’t have written this project without i.e. crazy’s album Country Justice which is a work of stone-cold genius.

Carl Shuker, author of The Royal Free

My current project has an original soundtrack (called “THEME FROM M*A*S*H*”), 12 hours long, ranging all over my southern Gen-X youth from “Watership Down”, Mike Oldfield’s gorgeous ‘Moonlight Shadow‘ (shivers down my eight-year-old spine), Springsteen and Velvet Underground to seminal Manic Street Preachers and all the English indie of the early 90s that showed us a way out. 

The Pogues, steeped in Ireland and outrage, war and mental illness; the genius absurdity of early Primus; the pale, sexy, sad, broken, glamour of early Suede – all this important work that was betrayed by the excesses of the later 90s and the embrace of the industry that seemed to pretend the 90s and our stratospheric suicide rates never happened. 

All this I listen to rebuilding the world and editing it. Composition though – it must be done in silence with just the music of the head.

Whiti Hereaka, author of Kurangaituku

A significant event in Ariā (the novel I’m currently working on) is set at the music festival The Gathering 2000 — music reminds me what it felt like to be there in the rain and the mud at the turn of the millennium. 

Pitch Black played the last set of New Year’s Eve, 1999. It was probably a mix of tracks from Futureproof and Electronomicon — but ‘The Gatherer‘ evokes that night for me. 

The track starts with a sizzle reminiscent of cicadas and howls that hint at something sinister and somewhat supernatural happening in the copse near the Happy Happy Chai Chai tent. 

Duncan Sarkies, author of Star Gazers

I’m writing a scene in which someone’s mood is replicated by a storm. Kate Bush sings “the wind is whistling through the house”, and my character can’t sit in it, so she goes down and unwisely does some roofing while she feels the disappointment of a world that isn’t listening to the symptoms of its own sickness.

I’m writing a character who is having an irrational response to seeing a small imperfection in her alpaca, and I am probably listening to ‘Animals‘ by Talking Heads, and David Byrne is singing “Animals want to change my life / I will ignore animals advice.”

A character lies in bed at night thinking of a hideous choice she must make, whether to break free or draw closer to a pact with a person who is powerful and dangerous, and Robert Smith from The Cure is singing “If only tonight we could sleep”.

A character spreads a malicious message implicating that someone who seeks transparency is actively trying to bring down an alpaca organisation. As I write this I am probably listening to Neneh Cherry sing “Lies travel faster than the truth”.

I am writing about a group of characters who live in glasshouses and throw stones, who are quick to use violence as a response when they are provoked to be transparent, and I’m listening to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke singing “Once again we are hungry for a lynching / You should turn the other cheek / Living in a glasshouse”.

I am paralysed by a decision I must make when writing the book, overthinking and overanalysing, trying to tune in to where my heart and soul thinks it should travel, and the lead singer from Drahla is singing “you can open up your white leather bound book / It has all the guidelines on how to live your life / Make a fictional decision / Be a righteous survivor / For the evangelical counterfeit”.

Rachael King, author of Violet and the Velvets series

Writing the Violet and the Velvets series has been a complete joy. I get to channel the voice of a 12-year-old guitarist with ADHD, whose musical taste has been heavily influenced by her mum, who used to play bass guitar in a band, and who may or may not be based on the author. So, I’ve been listening to the kind of songs that Violet and Kate Grumble might listen to together, which somewhat resemble the songs I used to inflict on my own kids. They also influence the songs that Violet herself writes (which I have been writing and recording myself – my songwriting skills are about the same as a 12-year-old’s). Here’s a selection, which is mostly made up of fairly obvious (this is a kids’ book after all) alternative bands from the 70s, 80s and 90s that every self-respecting 12-year-old should be introduced to. There’s a couple of token modern bands thrown in that are in the same spirit of giving the middle finger to the mainstream (though Violet isn’t allowed to play Wet Leg at school as they are too rude): 

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