SRM: Of course, this isn’t your first multimedia project…. There was Roswell Six and your Terra Incognita trilogy.
KJA: Right, Roswell Six. For my Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, we did two rock albums that were based on the novels—by “we” I mean my wife Rebecca and I. We worked with a record label and got a producer and got some of my favorite rock stars: Steve Walsh from Kansas, James LaBrie from Dream Theater, Michael Sadler from Saga, John Payne from Asia. We got David Ragsdale, the violinist who plays the Kansas song “Dust in the Wind.”
I’ve always felt that music and fiction go hand in hand. They’re different lenses of looking at a story, and I like putting them together so you can get the full spectrum.
SRM: I imagine writing song lyrics is a different process from writing a novel or a short story, since music tends to be more abstract.
KJA: It’s very different. In a song, the most important thing is to capture the mood and evoke certain images, whereas in a novel or a short story, obviously, you’re trying to tell the whole story. If you listen to a song, you rarely get the big picture of a character. It’s some mood you’re trying to evoke, like, for instance, “I’m so sad because my girlfriend left me”, which is what it sometimes seems like most music is about.
But writing lyrics…I knew the overall album story I wanted to focus on, and in writing the lyrics I would get the chorus, I’d get certain phrases, and my wife would tear the lyrics apart and rewrite them, because when I write, I’m just telling the story. And in a song you can’t do that. (You don’t see terribly much Kevin J. Anderson poetry out there because I don’t work well in that very dense format.)
SRM: Has your experience writing lyrics changed the way you approach prose?
KJA: Well, I think if you read Clockwork Angels the novel, its flavor is very different from my other novels. It’s so distilled and crystallized in terms of mood and themes. The lyrics of the album helped me really create a better novel.
