The Sound That Opens the Veil

On Music, Memory, and the Sacred Noise of Now

Music has always been more than background for me. It’s a portal. A key. A second pulse. Sometimes it carries me forward when writing feels impossible. Other times, it drags me back—into memory, emotion, and everything I’ve been trying not to feel. And every once in a while, it meets me exactly where I am.

Right now, that music is Sleep Token.

There’s something about them—about him, really—that bypasses the rational and hits straight in the chest. The blend of tenderness and brutality, the unfiltered grief, the desire, the sacred hush before a scream. It feels like worship and breakdown all at once. A band that wears masks but says the truest things. That’s power. That’s story.

If there’s one song that captures it all for me, it’s “Caramel.”
It starts soft—almost unsure of itself. The piano is hesitant, like it’s afraid to speak. Then the voice slips in, low and intimate, like a confession whispered in the dark. It’s not about spectacle. It’s about surrender. About someone so deeply in love they’re willing to dissolve to prove it. There’s longing, there’s obsession, and this quiet devastation hiding just underneath every word.

“I’m going to give you the space to destroy me…”

That line guts me every time.

But Sleep Token is just the latest voice in a long chorus that’s shaped the way I write—and honestly, the way I feel.

The soundtrack of my youth was built on the ’80s and ’90s, but it really came into its own during the grunge era. That was when music stopped sounding like performance and started sounding like pain you could trust. I remember hearing those first low guitar notes, the slurred honesty of a voice that didn’t care if it was pretty—and thinking: Oh. This is real.

I grew up in the golden age of MTV, back when it was actually about music.
Back when videos weren’t just promotional fluff—they were transmissions.
Mini-films that carried heartbreak, rebellion, style, and truth in three-minute bursts. That’s where I first learned that storytelling wasn’t just about words—it was a feeling that could live in your bones. And that never left me.

So much of the music I love—and the music that shaped me—lives in the space between emotion and atmosphere. Some of it is loud and distorted. Some of it is soft and strange. But it all carries something honest. Something felt.

There’s the haunted precision of Radiohead, the warm ache of Turin Brakes, and the slow-burn melancholy of The Dears.
Interpol taught me that cold can still be beautiful.
The Mars Volta reminded me that chaos is divine, and that you can bleed all over a song and still call it structure.
Deftones showed me that love and violence sometimes live in the same breath.

The Shins gave me permission to be whimsical and heartbroken at the same time.
The National made vulnerability feel like armor.
She Wants Revenge pulsed like late nights and open wounds.
Sunny Day Real Estate was sacred sadness wrapped in distortion and sky.

Jimmy Eat World was catharsis—those anthems that cracked the world open just long enough to let the light in.
Eisley felt like dreams carved into melody, feminine and ethereal and strong.
Puscifer said don’t take it all so seriously—until suddenly, you have to.
Dax Riggs and Acid Bath were the swamp and the shadow—southern, strange, spiritual, scarred.

And Alice in Chains?
They were the first time I really heard grief. Not sadness. Not angst. Grief.
And it never left.

These aren’t just bands to me. They’re memory anchors. They’re ghosts I invited in on purpose. They’re part of the scaffolding of every story I write.

When I work on Unto a Golden Dawn, I imagine the veil between worlds responding to music like this—not just lifting, but aching open. Not because of some perfect ritual, but because something honest was finally said.

When I write The Cancer Diet, or dive back into Civil War #7, music reminds me why any of this matters. It helps me feel things I’ve numbed. It brings the dead back to life—at least for a few minutes. It keeps me from turning away.

Some people need silence to work.
I need sound.
I need the ache of a piano behind a scream.
I need songs that understand things I haven’t put into words yet.

And right now, I need Caramel.
I need all of it.

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