Here's an interesting tidbit from Nick Hornby's Songbook that Noah might appreciate:

The first thing I ever wrote, a TV play that I never sold, I wanted to sound like the piano part on the intro to Aretha Franklin's "I Say a Little Prayer"; maybe the reason I never sold the play is that the piano part is less than thirty seconds long, which isn't really enough to sustain a whole play. "About a Boy," my second novel, was intended in some way to resemble "E-Bow the Letter" by R.E.M. How? I don't know how. I just know that there was a tone in the song that I wanted to replicate in the book, something simultaneously mysterious and wry and reflective. Generous readers might give me the wry part of it, anyway.

Noah, as a generous reader and R.E.M. fan, what's your reaction to this?

(I can certainly relate to Hornby's attempt to capture the mood of a song in a piece of fiction. I once wrote a short novel that was infused, at least in my own mind, by the mood of R.E.M.'s "Suspicion," as well as a teleplay similarly in debt to "Sunday" by the Cranberries. A subcategory of this, perhaps, is my desire to make a movie someday where the emotional arc of the entire story would only be complete if a particular pop song (such as "Get the Message" by Electronic, "Signs of Love" by Moby, or "Sulk" by Radiohead) were to seep onto the soundtrack in the movie's closing moments, and play over the closing credits. I don't have the slightest idea what this movie would be about...but I know exactly how how the closing credits would feel.)