Behind, “CUT HERE,” Part Five.

During the writing of CUT HERE, there were several songs that I listened to on repeat as a way to create the ideal mood for me to emerge myself into the dark world of Lena and Jonathan. One of these songs is the infamous Smashing Pumpkins song, Today. Appropriately, this song is about suicide (a major theme in the book), but many people don’t seem to know this. Throughout the years, many listeners have misinterpreted Billy Corgan’s of the lyric, “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known,” as it can be evidenced by the use of this song in the movie, If I Stay, where the characters of that movie were singing the song together in a sort of happy gathering amongst friends. To them, the song was supposed to be interpreted just as it sounds, “Today is the greatest day,” but boy are they wrong. Dead wrong. Pun intended.

When Corgan sang that lyric, he meant that it was the greatest day he’d ever known, because he wouldn’t be living for a tomorrow. The song is musically upfliting in sound, which gives the lyrics a darker twist. The song sounds happy, because looking towards death was seen as the best thing that could be happening to the singer. Now, a character in my story, Amelia Stevens, loves the Smashing Pumpkins, and there’s a brief reference to them. But the reason why I found listening to to the song so powerful in helping me get into the right mind-frame for writing CUT HERE is that each of the characters in CUT HERE are broken in their own way. The lyrics of Today drip heavily with the blood of a broken person, and what better way to delve into the psyche of broken characters than by obsessively listening to a song that does just that?

CUT HERE availabe for pre-order HERE. Book releases on February 13, 2015.

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