Raise your hand, please, if you’ve ever had a crush on a musician.

Mmm hmm. I thought so.

Whether it’s the primal beat of rock, the heartfelt twang of country, or the complex soaring of classical, music gets under your skin, speaks to you on a deeper level. “Music is the language of the emotions,” my high school music teacher used to say. Damn straight.

The emotion in question is passion, and that’s why we’re drawn to those who speak the language, who feel it, who create it. They unleash the passion, and we want to roll around naked in it like it’s silk and chocolate.

It’s no wonder music gets tangled up wth the sensual, with the erotic….

So, back to that question of musician crushes. A few years ago, in a conversation that no doubt involved wine, I turned to my best friend of nearly 30 years and said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to write a novel together?”
We’d been Styx fans for almost as long as we’d known each other, and the resulting novel was riddled with in jokes. Even the hero of A Little Night Music (as Sarah Dale, Cheek Books) looks suspiciously like the current keyboardist (only taller).

In the book, Hannah Montgomery, at the tender age of 17, falls down the stairs and into the arms of her personal rock star crush, Nate Fox. Emboldened by her good fortune, she kisses him, and for an all-too-brief moment he kisses her back… She makes a vow some of us might admit to after being plied with copious amounts of alcohol: that someday, she’d have her night of passion with Nate.

Nine years later, she gets her chance. She’s a successful publicist, and Nate’s desperately in need of good publicity to get him back on top after drug addiction and a car accident that killed his then-girlfriend…and a secret nobody but his manager knows until Nate lets down his guard and confides in Hannah.

Hannah fully intends to keep things professional until he’s back on top, but lust does crazy things to one’s plans, doesn’t it? It’s her dream come true: he wants her just as excruciatingly badly as she wants him. He flirts with her, she gives back as good as she gets, and the next thing she knows, he’s leading her upstairs…

::fans self:: Let me tell you, those were easy and fun scenes to write!

Thanks to the glory that is iTunes, many authors put together playlists: for specific moods, even specific books. I’ve done both. I write a lot of erotica and erotic romance, so I’ve got one playlist simply titled “Sexy Songs.” The ones that work for me. Some are raw and dirty, some edge towards romantic. Some are brash and obvious, others subtle. Maybe it’s the singer, or the video, or the memory the song evokes of some naughty encounter I’ve had.

Kate Bush. Whitesnake. Loreena McKennitt. Led Zeppelin. Queensrÿche. Katy Perry. AC/DC. Styx and Lawrence Gowan (solo), natch. A head-spinning variety of styles and sounds, but they all whisper in my ear, “Sex,” and then they lick that spot on the back of my neck as they go down….

Sing to me: What songs make you think of sex? What songs make your knees weak, your heart pound, leave you wet and wanting?

One lucky commenter (randomly chosen by number) will receive a copy of A Little Night Music and some other goodies!

(Pictures in this post are of Lawrence Gowan, keyboardist and singer of Styx and unabashed inspiration for Nate Fox. I even gave him a copy of the book. Picture #1 taken by Ken Meese (yes, my husband loves me very much!), Casino Rama, May 2007. Picture #2 taken by Brigitte Boulais, from the Crystal Ball website, Casino Rama, 2003. Used with permission.)

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