Monday, September 9, 2013

Time After Time Playlist Song + The Better Than Ezra Experience

Back in May, Tamara Ireland Stone and I drove from an event in St Louis to the Romantic Times Convention in Kansas City.  After only a couple hours of sleep and fueled by coffee and anticipation, we kept ourselves awake by sharing some of our favorite songs. Obviously it was an amazing road trip that I'll never forget.



Tamara has a real love affair with music. Her debut novel Time Between Us (read my review) was inspired by Tamara's desire to have the power to time travel back to epic shows by bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins.  In one of the first chapters of the sequel Time After Time, Bennett and his sister travel to a small club in Munich to see Coldplay before they were big. I mean, how cool is that?!

So, when I found out that Tamara was doing a playlist blog hop for Time After Time, I begged her to be part of it. And when I saw that there was a Better Than Ezra song on Anna's playlist, I knew I had to have it.



To me, Good is a song about being apart which makes it an apt choice for Anna and Bennett who are in the ultimate long distance relationship across time. When you're together it's good. And when you're not, you're left with this yearning feeling, not knowing if you'll ever see each other again.

Better Than Ezra is the soundtrack to my college years. I didn't start listening in earnest until I saw the video for In The Blood, and this face:



And then I had the chance to go to a concert in Lawrence, KS at the end of October 1996. The concert was the highest of highs, not only did I feel the music deeply in my bones, I also got a backstage pass for being such an enthusiastic fan.




On the way home from that concert, a deer hit my car while we were listening to the song Rewind.  Rewind has the following lyric that I love, and it struck me as so ironic at the time.



In any case, over the course of the next two years, I traveled to any BTE show in KS, MO, OK or TX, culminating with my last show at The Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas in November of 1998 to bring me up to a total of 11 shows. Almost every journey was fraught with some sort of calamity - a speeding ticket, a flat tire, running out of gas - but those concerts will always hold a special place in my heart.

As will Tamara's novels, and Bennett and Anna.



More about Time After Time (add to Goodreads):

Calling Anna and Bennett’s romance long distance is an understatement: she’s from 1995 Chicago and he’s a time traveler from 2012 San Francisco. The two of them never should have met, but they did. They fell in love, even though they knew they shouldn't. And they found a way to stay together, against all odds.

It’s not a perfect arrangement, though, with Bennett unable to stay in the past for more than brief visits, skipping out on big chunks of his present in order to be with Anna in hers. They each are confident that they’ll find a way to make things work...until Bennett witnesses a single event he never should have seen (and certainly never expected to). Will the decisions he makes from that point on cement a future he doesn't want? 
Told from Bennett’s point of view, Time After Time will satisfy readers looking for a fresh, exciting, and beautifully-written love story, both those who are eager to find out what’s next for Time Between Us's Anna and Bennett and those discovering their story for the first time.

AND because today is a Playlist Double Dip, you can get a Bennett Song & enter a giveaway for signed copies of the books over at Once Upon a Prologue

3 comments:

Christina said...

Awwwww, author friends! Though this isn't as marvelous as that one with Justine Larbalestier (I think it was). :-p

Anonymous said...

I LOVE BTE. I discovered them just as I was leaving for college and the line from Rewind is one of the best lyrics from any song. So happy to see them getting some love on your blog and spreading their wonderfulness to everyone! (A lot of people don't know that Kevin has written/produced some pretty popular songs lately, too.)

Great band, awesome music.

SweetMarie83 said...

What a great story! I don't think I know ANYONE who remembers BTE but I loved them back in the day, so this post made me feel all nostalgic. It's so cool you got to see them so many times, I bet they were amazing live. :-)

~Marie @ Ramblings of a Daydreamer