WESTWORLD (SEASON ONE)
Ramin Djawadi
I have two conditions when I write: (1) complete silence and (2) listening to music plugged into my ears loud enough that I don't hear anything else. I have ADHD, so you learn all these tricks to manage your short attention span. That's definitely one of
the reasons I do flash fiction [stories of less than 300 words]. My very favourite place to write is at the laundromat. There's nothing else to do there, no distractions and it costs about the same as buying two coffees in a cafe. I've never watched Westworld but Ramin Djawadi [Game of Thrones] does fantastic soundtracks. I can plug this in and at the end have clean underpants and a few hundred words. It's very satisfying.
TAKE ME TO CHURCH
Hozier
When you read the lyrics with your queer glasses on, as I do with everything, it's obviously about a taboo relationship. "We were born sick" is the kind of thing that's said about gay people. The song is devastatingly sexy – it's "yes, this is my church and it's hot"; it doesn't require anyone to forgive me, it just involves being who you are. I do ballet so when I watch Sergei Polunin dancing to this, I'm simultaneously awed and slightly depressed because I will never be that good. And Hozier has become a lesbian icon, which I think is delightful.
SKY FULL OF SONG
Florence + The Machine
If I hear this at the wrong moment, it drives me to my knees. I was in a hostel in Copenhagen when I heard it for the first time, about three hours after I learned a boy I loved had killed himself. I broke down but you can't scream out loud in a hostel and I felt that if I did, it might rip a hole in the universe. I process things by writing about them but I'm still unable to write about that span of time, so I'm quite glad Florence found some of the words for me first.
ABSOLUTION
Muse
When I was becoming a teen who hangs out at the mall – except I was in Wellington, just lurking around Manners St – there was a CD store where you could sit and listen to music. And I listened to this album a lot. I'd opted out [mentally] from school and had that very teenage thing of feeling like no one understood me. Absolution was just the right level of angry for me at that time.
SHIMMER
Fuel
I was on a road trip with friends in this crappy station wagon we'd borrowed and discovered a burned mix CD in the glovebox, titled "Good Music". I put it in, prepared to get judgey, and this was the first track. S***, it really was good music! We had such a great time. Then a few months later, my father was diagnosed with brain cancer and, for ages after, there were no more great times. Looking back, that's pretty much the entire song: being unable to fully enjoy something good because it never lasts.
FRIDAY I'M IN LOVE
The Cure
I was 15 and there was this boy ... We'd lie on the floor with our heads next to one another listening to The Cure, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and all this stuff I'd never heard before. He was 17 and so cool. This song still makes me happy every time I hear it.
* Jack Remiel Cottrell is the first flash fiction writer to win Auckland University's $5000 Sir James Wallace Creative Writing Prize. He's now working on his first novel - hoping to follow in the footsteps of 2017 Wallace winner Amy McDaid, whose debut novel "Fake Baby" was a bestseller last year.