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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Guest Post with Author Mercy Brown


Mercy Brown is a retired indie rock front girl turned author and LOUD IS HOW I LOVE YOU is her first book. LOUD is a New Adult novel and will be published by Intermix (Berkley-Penguin) in January 2016. LOUD is based, very, very loosely on Mercy's experiences fronting bands in the 90s. A follow-up will be published in June 2016.


Music is everything to me, but I never really considered writing a book about being in a band (though I’ve been playing in bands for years), because I didn’t know how to get the feeling of the music across when there wasn’t a way for people hear it. It’s a book, after all. Books are quiet. What I realized while writing LOUD, though, is that everyone has their favorite music in their heart, all the time. And I hope that’s what people hear (with a 90s bent to it, of course) while they read it.

One of my favorite parts of writing LOUD was actually writing the lyrics of the title song, Loud is How I Love You. I finished writing these after I’d written the entire book, and while I didn’t really plan it this way, they turned out to be about Emmy’s experience growing up and falling in love. In the book, this song is how Emmy lets Travis know how she really feels about him when she’s still too afraid to come right out and say it. 

These lyrics also sum up what I think the book is really about: falling in love when you’re terrified that you’re too weird or broken (or loud, as the case may be for Emmy) for love to work out. And then having the very happy life lesson that you’re wrong about that. To me, finding the one who’s going to love you because of your quirks (and not in spite of them) is the most romantic thing of all. 

Loud is How I Love You

Way back when, on the first day of school
My kindergarten teacher left the room
So I stepped up to fill the leadership vacuum
And told the class what to do

I came home shaken, but not deterred
A long angry note pinned to my favorite shirt
said “this little girl is two hands worth of handful— 
bossy and brazen, a little dictator. 
This little girl is two hands worth of handful, 
rein her in now or you’ll be sorry later.”

But what if I was born this way?
What if I don’t want to change?

Some years go by, I join the girls’ choir
But I feel the need to kick it up higher
The choir director, he doesn’t agree
So he kindly imparts this guidance to me, 
“Don’t you know little girls all sing like angels
With soft pretty voices and white wings and halos
You can’t go on singing your own melody
Louder than everyone, in your own key!”

What do I do? I start my own band.
Now I’ll be as loud as I can
But then you show up with your Les Paul in hand
And everything changes from what I’d planned

I fall so hard for you, I’m so afraid
I can’t stop pushing you far, far away
I’m a little dictator, so bossy and brazen
When will you pack up and head for the pavement?

But you stay there standing as I fall apart
I take your thunderbolt right to my heart
You catch me falling like stars to the floor
You don’t turn me down, no, you turn me up more
and say

Loud is how I love you
Loud is how I know you’re there
Stay loud so I don’t lose you
I will follow the sound of you anywhere



One girl’s heart gets rocked to the core in the first novel in this sexy New Adult series.

Twenty-one-year-old front girl Emmylou knows that getting her band noticed in the ‘90s indie rock scene will be no easy task. She definitely knows better than to break the number one rule of the band: Don't sleep with your bandmates! But after she ends up having the best sex of her life with her guitarist, Travis, she finds following that rule is a lot harder than it sounds.

When the band gets the gig of their dreams, making it big seems just within reach. But Emmy’s inability to keep her hands off Travis threatens everything they’ve worked for. Can Emmy find a way to break the rules and not blow the chance of a lifetime?

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