Pre-meeting playlist

Music helps me write, as explained in this overly detailed blog post about my writing process. One particular song, played over and over, actually helped as a catalyst to get me sending stuff to agencies, which I wrote about here. Sometimes I even just put on music while testing out a new idea, letting visuals and thoughts pop into my head.

But for years, I've also been using music as a pre-meeting warmup device. I put together a playlist of songs and soundtracks to listen to on my way to meetings - they help to pump me up, get me feeling confident and assertive, make me walk faster, so that when I arrive I'm primed and ready for action. I hesitantly mentioned it on Twitter, wondering if I was weird - but lots of other people did the same thing. Not just for meetings - for pitches, interviews, auditions, anything where they needed a boost.

I promised to put the tracklisting online, in case there's anything you wanted to snag for your own playlists, so here it is, after lots of fiddling with Spotify to transfer it from iTunes. Some aren't on Spotify, they're listed underneath with links where I could find them. It's kind of a weirdly personal thing, and is a mishmash of different styles - but I use different parts on different days, I just wanted to collect them all together.

Anyway, here's the playlist - the link will open a Spotify page, so you can listen to the songs.

Missing tracks:

Beat City - Flowerpot Men. This is from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when they drive the Ferrari to the city.
Call Me A Hole - pomDeter. An excellent mashup of Nine Inch Nails and Carly Rae Jepsen that shouldn't work,  but does.
Beat Fuga Shake - Riz Ortolani
Cut You Up With A Linoleum Knife - Mastodon (starts about a minute in)
Back in Black - AC/DC
DirtyGirl - Another fun mashup that shouldn't work, takes one terrible song, one good song, and makes a really fun mix. NSFW- sorry about the softcore porn video of women in underwear, it's the only link available at the moment due to the grey area of mashup legality - you can easily download the audio.
Battle Without Honour or Humanity - Tomoyasu Hotei. As made popular in Kill Bill.

And there you have it. Sometimes, instead of this playlist, I'll go with the Tron Legacy soundtracks - the standard one, and the remixed one, both of which are superb. If you have any of your own that aren't in my list, leave them in the comments below, which are open temporarily.

If you can't get Spotify to work, or just want a list, I've exported the whole thing as two image files here (clicky-clicky for biggy-biggy):

Crazy For You update

After a great premiere at London's FrightFest, Crazy For You went to Manchester's GrimmFest, where it also got a lovely response. Soon it'll head to the USA for the Telluride Horror Show, and has more festivals lined up, which I'll tell you about when they go public. For now, check out the official blog of the short for details, links, and festival updates.

It's been a long road getting it finished, so it's a relief to see that people are enjoying it. We've just started our festival tour, and plan to take it to as many places as possible. Obviously I'm applying to the festivals that I know of, but if you work for a festival and would like to screen the short, please get in touch!