Sound Check: Five Songs That Capture the Essence of My Book Blended Roots

Music has always been a big part of my life, and that doesn’t exclude my writing. Not only does listening to music while I write help me stay focused (thank you, ADHD), but it also helps me stay emotionally connected to the story I’m trying to tell.

For every project, I build a curated playlist that captures the characters, the tension, the tenderness, and the political undercurrent of the world I’m creating. Some songs feel like specific scenes. Some feel like entire character arcs. Some feel like grief itself.

From love songs to protest anthems, here are five tracks that hold the soul of Blended Roots.

1. Spiritual - Pink Sweat$

This song is love in its softest, most natural form.

Spiritual not only reflects the sweeter moments between my main characters, it shares a name with my FMC, Spirit. That alone made it impossible to ignore. But it’s more than that.

The song speaks to the sacredness of loving someone fully; body, mind, and soul. Through all of the social and political tension, that’s what Spirit and Will wrestle with. Their connection isn’t just romantic; it challenges their individual belief systems. Faith plays very different roles in their lives. Spirit’s worldview is deeply rooted in community, legacy, and something larger than herself. Will is more guarded, more skeptical, more shaped by disillusionment.

And yet, love becomes the bridge.

This song captures that moment when love stops being casual and starts feeling divine.

2. A Change Is Gonna Come - T-Pain

This one hits different.

Originally written and performed by Sam Cooke during the Civil Rights era, the song is already a cultural cornerstone. But T-Pain’s rendition carries a modern ache and a reminder that while progress has happened, the fight isn’t over.

Blended Roots is a love story, yes. But it’s also a story about systemic racism, social tension, and what it means to exist loudly in a world that has historically tried to silence you.

This song mirrors that duality: exhaustion and hope sitting side by side.

There’s weariness in it. But there’s also conviction. Together they say we’ve been here before, and we will endure again.

That’s Spirit. That’s Will. That’s the heartbeat of this book.

3. Proud Mary - Tina Turner

If you know, you know.

Proud Mary is a shout-out to my own heritage and family legacy, the music, the strength, the unshakable matriarch energy that helped raise me. There’s something about Tina Turner’s version specifically that feels like fire, survival, and joy all at once.

That energy lives inside Blended Roots.

Spirit comes from a lineage of women who endure, who hold communities together, and sing through hardship. The rhythm of this song feels like family gatherings, like church basements, like stories told around kitchen tables.

There's movement, resilience, and pride in this song, and in this story.

It reminds me that even when the world tries to break you, you can still keep rollin'.

4. Freedom - Beyonce ft. Kendrick Lamar

If Blended Roots has a battle cry, it’s this.

Freedom is not a quiet song. It is not polite. It does not ask gently. It demands.

And so does Spirit.

When I submitted the start of this story to be graded in a creative writing course, the feedback I received was soaked in something very familiar. My professor at the time tore Spirit apart, calling her unlikable, insufferable, and "too loud." She then asked me to decentralize her and focus on a different (whiter) character.

The way I fell out of my body, y'all.

Freedom embodies that ancestral rage I felt in that moment, being asked to comply to a system which had power of me and my future, as if that's not the whole thesis of the book (!!!!), but I digress...

There’s something old in this song. Something that sounds like chains breaking and ancestors watching. The percussion feels like marching. The vocals feel like testimony. And Kendrick’s verse sharpens the blade.

This song mirrors the systemic pressure woven through the novel and the tension between assimilation and resistance. Spirit carries the weight of legacy. Will carries the burden of awakening. Neither positions are soft, or easy.

But Freedom insists on something radical: that liberation is worth fighting for. The exhaustion of that fight does not cancel conviction. We can be both wounded and unbreakable.

It’s fury. It’s faith. It’s forward motion.

And that energy lives in the roots of this story.

5. Fix You - Coldplay

A large part of Blended Roots is charged and moved by loss.

While my husband and I experienced losses on both sides of our family during the writing of this novel, Fix You was (and is) the song I fell apart to. There were nights when it felt like grief was rearranging our lives, and all we could do was try to hold each other upright.

“When you try your best but you don’t succeed.”

That line ruined me immediately.

The tenderness of wanting to save someone you love, even when you’re both breaking, is woven deeply into Spirit and Will’s relationship. They can’t fix each other. But they can stand in the wreckage together.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

That solidarity, that's the love.

"Sound Check: Blended Roots" on Spotify Playlist

Each of these songs holds a different root of Blended Roots: love, faith, protest, pride, ego, grief. If you ever want to understand a story before you read it, listen to the music that built it. And if you press play on this playlist, I hope you feel the pulse of the world I created. I can't wait to share these words with you soon.