I first discovered The Walkmen from a mix (funny how I still want to type mixtape) a friend of mine made. The single “Donde Esta La Playa” was what he chose from You & Me, and the power of that song just took my breath away. The lines “There is still sand in my suitcase/There is still salt in my teeth” are stunning. Maybe it’s just having grown up in Florida, but those lyrics unlock so many memories.

I got a copy of the album in May of last year, and I eventually wrote about it on my site:

It’s easy to find good music for almost any occasion, but it’s difficult to find good music for writing. For my biographical work, sometimes the music I heard when I was experiencing the event can be helpful to recapture the mood or emotion. Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and Radiohead’s OK Computer were particularly helpful for many of my stories from 1997.

When I’m writing in general, I prefer music that’s not too distracting, but maintains a certain sense of drama, something evoking a soundtrack. Ours’ Distorted Lullabies has this quality, as does Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun and David Gray’s White Ladder (perhaps my favorite album of all time).

I’m not good about keeping up with new music. I remember watching MTV when I was young and promising myself that I would not lose touch with what’s cool with music, and now here I am scratching my head at some of the biggest names in music. I could blame being in Poland for this, but I can’t say I was doing great in this category when I was in the States. In fact, my interest in keeping up with music pretty much died in 2002.

Luckily, I have friends who are good at pointing me in the right direction, which brings me to The Walkmen’s You & Me. This album has been on repeat for the last three weeks now and it still isn’t in any danger of being overplayed. If I were listening to this on cassette I’d be doomed by now.

What I didn’t know then was that their music was going to take over my life for the better part of a year. I didn’t know that I’d be spending the following July writing ten stories (eleven by the time I was done), each story devoted to one song from You & Me, and that I’d be hearing their music all of the time.

I didn’t know that I would be dragging nine other writers to put together an anthology of 100 stories, each one to choose a different album and write stories inspired by the music. I didn’t know about the plus thousand emails that would be sent back and forth. I didn’t know about what a mess it is to obtain permission to use lyrics and song titles in a book (thankfully, the wonderful people at Gigantic Music allowed me to use the Walkmen’s album). I didn’t know how excited I’d get when a writer would send me their stories. And I didn’t know that we’d be creating something new in the process, something like euphiction.

In fact, I’ve learned more about publishing in the last year than I’ve learned in all my years as a writer. And like any good teenage comedy from the eighties, I learned an awful lot about myself in the process.

The important thing is that we’re here now. This website is the home of our anthology Cover Stories, a book that I am so proud of that it makes me grin like a loon. And it’s all because of the Walkmen. As I said in the Liner Notes in the book:

Without [the Walkmen's] album, I would not have written these stories. More importantly, without your album, this book would not exist.

This all started, literally, from You & Me.

Naturally, I hope this website inspires you to pick up Cover Stories. But more importantly, I hope that you have or will discover something in your life that will inspire you to create something amazing. Because at the end of the day, our anthology is about inspiration, about being lifted by the things we love and finding a way to make something new.

And in Cover Stories, we offer you 100 different ways for that to happen.