Largehearted Boy: Book Notes - Ken Denmead ("The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists")

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November 1, 2011

Book Notes - Ken Denmead ("The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists")

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Kevin Brockmeier, George Pelecanos, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, David Peace, Myla Goldberg, and many others.

I am a frequent reader and great admirer of Ken Denmead's GeekDad blog, which smartly covers science, technology, film, music and books through an admittedly geekly lens.

Denmead's new book, The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists: The Coolest Experiments and Projects for Science Fairs and Family Fun is filled with easy to follow projects that are as fascinating as they are informative about the concepts behind them.

Stream a Spotify playlist of these tunes. If you don't have Spotify yet, sign up for the free service.

In his own words, here is Ken Denmead's Book Notes music playlist for his book, The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists:

Music has always been a part of my writing process. I think having good music in the background when writing is just priming the creative pump, and helps get me into a mental rhythm that lets the word flow.

Now, because what I write is almost exclusively non-fiction, I'm never looking for my playlist to set a mood. Indeed, I like my playlist to get out of the way - to create an atmosphere within which I can live and breath and work. So I tend towards music with few, if any words, but strong beats, awesome hooks, and long, lush arrangements. I pretty much listen to downtempo/trip-hop electronica (with a bit of lounge music thrown in for fun) when I'm writing (though one has to be careful when trying to categorize the sub-genres of electronica; there are so many subtle variants that it gets a little complicated).

Being a geek, I like to be in-the-know about things that others might not have heard of before. There's a lot of electronica that never hits the mainstream. For every Moby and Chemical Brothers, there's a hundred other artists putting out awesome music on small labels, and just touring the world and building small-but-rabid fan-bases online.

The funniest thing that has happened more than once is that my wife or kids will call me in from another room where they are watching television. They'll have paused on some car commercial, and when I come in, hit play, and then say "isn't this that band you played for us way back?" And low-and-behold, yes, some advertising person will have found some great song from some artist who may be reasonably well known in Europe, but almost never heard of in the U.S. and then used it as a prop for their cool commercial. And I, as a music geek, will nod and say "yes, yes it is."

I am not, however, a skilled music critic, and as such I don't have loads to say about any given song or group, other than I love them, and their creativity helps me be creative. Which is why I'll simply give you my Top-10 Downtempo/Trip-Hop Bands for Writing To.

10. Thievery Corporation