FiXT Labs: Putting the “Muse” in “Music”

We continue our FiXT Labs series with entry #003. When you press play on a track and suddenly feel like you’ve stepped into another world, chances are someone like Chantal Holmes is behind the curtain. As a creative world-builder for musicians, Chantal doesn’t just help artists craft songs—she helps them construct entire universes. From lore-rich storylines to immersive visuals, her work bridges music, mythology, and emotion in ways that bring a project to life far beyond the speakers.

Putting the “Muse” in “Music”

The songs that we listen to are powerful things; they can act as pseudo scores that turn everyday chores into epic adventures, they can bring you back to specific moments, or help you work through particularly rough times. They also have the ability to weave both visuals and narratives in ways and places where you’d least expect them. The right combination of sounds, or the right lyric at the right time, can be enough to craft entire mental movies or keep someone up into the small hours of the morning, turning things over and over again to build something from the pieces they’ve been given – passing the muse, and whatever story or world may lie within, from music on to listener.

If you go into your music library right now, pick a song you love, and focus on it with your eyes closed, do you see anything? As a writer, and lover of stories with a score of their own, I try to pull at the threads of, and open a portal paired to, those unwritten worlds hiding in the soundwaves – both those intended and those I find in my own happenstance – giving other listeners and fans a chance to push their immersion a few steps further.

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Scoring in Reverse

I promise the header you just read isn’t a(n intentional) pun. While an artist can score a movie, or even a book, and cater their music to specific scenes or moods in both, what I do requires working in the opposite direction – something a very dear friend of mine started calling “reverse scoring” years ago, and the term has stuck with me ever since. Every soundscape, and mind behind their creation, is unique in its own way: evoking distant worlds and epic adventures, strange dreamscapes and eldritch myths, dark dystopias and human connection, alongside any and everything in between. By looking into those soundscapes, I try to shine a spotlight on the stories hiding in the little nooks and shadowy corners, slowly pulling their cores to the surface and working to build them into something with more tangible tooth.

The process leaves no stone unturned; a piece’s composition, lyrics, and artist’s own intents are put under a magnifying glass, becoming the foundations of settings, characters, plotlines, and literary tone. A single melody or lyric is all it takes to start – even a low background drone has the power to shape the aspects of a story.

Facets of Fiction

So, what does a storywriter actually do when it comes to the world of music? It can be broken down into three main types of writing projects, from concepting to full reads.

• Lore

Don’t let the name fool you, “lore” doesn’t exclusively mean the process of building an entire world. Lore development can range from light to heavy: from molding themes into a handful of elements, to fully constructed characters, timelines, locations, and the occasional mythos. When developing lore elements for music, specifically, everything is molded to fall in line with an artist’s, song’s, or album’s theming – giving a little more body to the ideas and sound.

• Companion Pieces

The equivalent of a standalone expansion, companion stories are more flexible than a fully integrated story or piece of lore, and able to stray a bit more from the source material; these are often written in both official and unofficial capacity. While able to stand on their own two legs, their main purpose is to either draw a listener into a specific side story or accompaniment, or to pique a reader’s intrigue in the song – both extending its lifecycle, and giving fans something to discuss and turn over in their heads.

• Integrated Stories

More elaborate and involved projects than a companion piece, and utilizing concepted lore, integrated stories are carefully woven and interconnected across multiple releases. Unlike companion pieces, these stories all tie directly back to an artist’s intent and are connected to one another through recurring beats, themes, characters, or places. The aim of an integrated story is to tell the in-progress story of a series of singles leading up to an album or the album itself – either developing and appearing alongside it, or a short time after.

Working in Words (and Worlds)

Lorecrafting and writing stories from music is a heavily collaborative effort; I work with artists from inception to final draft to make sure the story they want to tell, and the mental movie they want to show, comes together.

The process starts with a little bit of a study: working with an artist to understand their vision, themes and important lyrics, as well as any pre-existing groundwork – any world building, characters, or concepts they may have already created. If I’m writing for a song or album that’s already been released, I’ll also listen to it (often multiple times) so I can take notes and integrate as much as possible into the story. From that point, depending on the need, I can start pulling things together into something more cohesive. I build out an outline and a doc for any additional written lore, to maintain consistency, confirming everything still lines up before starting on the first written draft.

All throughout the process, I try to keep in contact both for updates and any extra development as the story progresses. That back-and-forth communication is a large part of what keeps everything on track and in line with the final desired outcome: helping the artist weave their tales.

Creativities Combined

Let’s try this one more time: if you go into your music library, pick a song, and listen to it with your eyes closed, do you see anything? If you’re an artist yourself, are you able to write your own songs? If you can, if you even have a vague ghost of an image or concept, you have enough to start. Whether it’s some intangible feeling, a dark future unknown, cosmic impossibilities, a fall through a forest fairy circle into the supreme court of the frog wizards (that’s… oddly specific), or something a bit more personal – it’s a story worth being told. The music’s already given your creation a pulse, doc, let’s give it a chance at a whole second life.