[image error] I like to write to music. Not just any music, though: complex, knotty modern pieces, or highly-colored Romantic orchestral music, pull my concentration away from my work, as does (for obvious reasons) anything with words I pay more attention to than the words on the page. Sometimes, too, the texture or the rhythm of the music is wrong for what I'm trying to write. But when I hit the sweet spot, the music I'm listening to doesn't just help my syntax flow more freely, it puts me in the mood I need to be in to capture what I'm writing about.

Trying to find that sweet spot was a fairly easy process with my two previous books, Everybody Was So Young and Somewhere, my biography of Jerome Robbins. In Robbins's case, there was music I needed to listen to as I wrote, the music Robbins was making ballets to, the music that was in the Broadway shows he was directing and choreographing. I had a shelf of CD's in my office and just kept popping the disks in as I wrote: Chopin piano music, Fancy Free, Fiddler on the Roof, Philip Glass. Everybody was a slightly different proposition: my subjects, Gerald and Sara Murphy, weren't composers or choreographers, so they didn’t have an obvious playlist. He was a painter; she was, for want of a better word, a muse – to many creative souls in the modernist movement, from Picasso to Scott Fitzgerald. But music was the sea both Murphys swam in: they painted scenery for Stravinsky's Les Noces and Pulcinella, they introduced Erik Satie to African-American spirituals, they danced at Bricktop's and Le boeuf sur le toit, they named their yacht after Louis Armstrong's classic, "Weatherbird," and sealed a recording of the song into its keel. So when I was writing about their lives I listened to Armstrong and his Hot Five, and to Satie and Stravinsky and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

While writing my most recent (and, to my great relief, just completed) book, Hotel Florida, I had a wider array of characters and landscapes to work with than ever before. Six people, three couples – two Americans, one Hungarian, one Austrian, one Pole, and one Spaniard – whose paths cross in Madrid during the dangerous days of the Spanish Civil War. Their stories were full of tension, drama, romance, and tragedy, and unfolded not only in Spain but in Vienna, Paris, New York, and Moscow. What would I listen to when writing about them? Obviously some Spanish music, something that would evoke for me the look of the country's landscape and the poignancy of its history; but also American popular music of the time, which was played on the radio and broadcast via loudspeaker across enemy lines. Schubert lieder, because one of my subjects, Ilsa Kulcsar, played and sang them; and French jazz and music hall songs – from Django Reinhardt to Maurice Chevalier and in between – because my subjects spent a lot of downtime in Paris. Chopin mazurkas, again – because Hemingway used to play them on his Victrola during enemy bombardments to drown out the noise. And of course the songs of the International Brigades.

I put all this music into a playlist that I could run on my computer as I wrote, adding items as the narrative suggested them. In the end, I realized, I'd constructed a kind of soundtrack to my own private interior film of Hotel Florida. I'm not yet ready to share the manuscript – books need to settle, like a roast, after you take them out of the oven; but anyone wanting an aural preview of it can go to Spotify and click on Hotel Florida.

In coming weeks I think I'm going to write a little bit about the selections in the list – their background, the reasons for their inclusion; but for now, happy listening!