Setting Times stories to music: From Radiohead to Matthew Sweet

So the thought has probably occurred to some of you: If I listen to this one specially chosen song while editing, does that mean I can edit a story in three minutes?

Yes, I’m that good.

OK, the real answer is that sometimes I listen to that particular song as I start working the story, and then move on to other music by the same band, or something with a similar mood.

Or I go into full “High Fidelity” mode (see: near-perfect novel and movie of the same name) and listen to that song over and over and over (see: “Someone to Pull the Trigger,” for the Wednesday story.)

In these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Column One -- maybe they’ll buy your eye and you can settle in for a good weekend read. And you’ll also get the songs that inspired me while editing the stories, or reading them later. A story-song combo!

Monday’s Column One:

A hunt for dark matter in a former gold mine

The scientists don hard hats, jumpsuits and steel-toed boots to pile into a metal cage for a rumbling 11-minute descent into an abandoned South Dakota gold mine. They step over old mine-cart rails, through rough-walled tunnels and into a bright white room. There, they cast off their dusty garb and enter a lab hidden nearly a mile beneath the Earth.

Inside, Patrick Phelps peers at valves connected to half a million dollars’ worth of some of the purest xenon in the world.

“Is everyone ready?” the Case Western Reserve graduate student calls out over growling machinery filling the cavernous space. Ice piles on a nearby tank, digital displays glow green, and bundles of wires curl in every direction.

“Let’s do it,” says Attila Dobi, a University of Marylandgraduate student.

Here, with a two-story state-of-the-art detector sheltered in what was once North America’s deepest gold mine, the scientists are panning the cosmos for a flash of something far more elusive than gold: dark matter.

#storysongs combo: “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” Radiohead. The band is brilliant in both the American and British senses of the word, so thought the song fit a story that’s brilliant in both senses too.

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Tuesday’s Column One:

For gunsmith, a full-bore interest and a high gauge of expertise

For Terry Tussey, a gun is the perfect marriage of form and function, a carefully crafted machine that can contain an explosion delivering 20,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and drive a bullet through a barrel at 1,000 feet per second.

Every spring, catch, plunger, plug, pin and cap must work for it to fire properly. Dirt, rust and abuse lead to jams, misfires and parts breaking.

This morning, he’s holding a .45 semiautomatic, popularly known as a 1911. Built in the ‘70s with military surplus parts, it has a plastic opalescent grip and a slide engraved with what looks like the tendrils of a climbing rose.

The design’s too garish for Tussey, but right now looks don’t matter. He drops the magazine, pulls back the slide to make sure there isn’t a cartridge in the chamber and soon has the gun in three pieces: barrel, slide and frame.

#storysongs combo: “Someone to Pull the Trigger,” Matthew Sweet. Here we have a case of a singer’s name perfectly describing his pop. Why wasn’t he a big star? Maybe it was that pining thing (which I happen to love). Hey, two of this week’s bands could do a pining/self-loathing song smackdown: Radiohead’s “Creep” and Matthew Sweet’s “Sick of Myself.”

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Wednesday’s Column One:

In Egypt, grief lives where 50 children died

Let us eat first, he says. “I will tell you, after, my memories of who they were.” Liver. Bread. Cheese. Coffee. A cigarette. A train hurtles past the village, shaking his table, slicing through fields of wheat.

Trains come so often that they feel like family, yes like uncles and cousins, or so they once did.

Hamada Anwar speaks of God and the harvest. But the meal is done and he can no longer put off the story he has promised to tell. He breathes in and begins. It was just after dawn in November when the train — he wants to say here that he’s forgiven everyone — raced through the crossing and tore into the school bus carrying his children.

Four of them. A tangle of backpacks, drawings blowing in blood and dust. Reem, 10; Adham, 8; Arwa, 6; Nour, not yet 3. He gathered and buried them in a graveyard beneath the black smoke of a brick kiln. Forty-six other children died that day. The bus driver too. All of Egypt mourned.

The government paid out $5,000 per child; no one ever asked how one calculates the worth of a son or daughter.

#storysongs combo: “The Ones We Hurt the Most,” Stornoway. I already used this band last week, but I can’t think of a more heart-wrenching song to play as you read this story of loss. “The ones we love the most we hurt the most ... And the ones we need the most/we build our hopes upon/we build our hopes upon.” This is a lovely live version.

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Thursday’s Column One:

In Ramona Gardens, simmering tensions ease

They were eating dinner in their Ramona Gardens living room when the rock crashed through the window like a meteorite.

Jeff Littrel and his little boy hadn’t been in their home more than a few days. Peering through the torn screen and shattered glass, they saw the shadows of young men in the dark.

Three years later, father and son are sitting in the same room, in the same Boyle Heights housing project. An old episode of “Fat Albert” plays on the TV. Malik, a bright 11-year-old with a sunny demeanor, screws up his face and asks his father: “Do you still have the rock?”

“I still have the rock,” the 49-year-old restaurant cook replies. “Just to remind me where I’m at. So I’ll never be slipping.”

For nearly two decades, black families like the Littrels were but a rumor in the project. Their absence, in fact, had become a defining characteristic of “R.G.,” a Latino neighborhood built at the bottom of a hill and bounded by railroad tracks, factories and the San Bernardino Freeway.

And Big Hazard, the gang that has claimed Ramona Gardens since the 1940s, intended to keep it that way.

#storysongs combo: “Neighbor,” Band of Horses. Yes, I overlooked the lyric referencing Bartles and Jaymes, because I loved the simple-then-lush music--and wanted to give a tip o’ the hat to a band performing at Coachella this weekend and next. The video is almost static, but mesmerizing.

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Friday’s Column One:

Beauty queen will charm the masses — of snakes

Each spring for more than half a century, this small West Texas town has hosted what’s billed as the world’s largest gathering of rattlesnakes. The roundup began as pest control, but has grown to become a cultural phenomenon that draws 30,000 people. And every roundup is ruled by a queen: Miss Snake Charmer.

Texas has plenty of bizarre pageant royalty — Gatorfest Queen, Watermelon Thump Queen, Queen Citrianna.

Miss Snake Charmer is perhaps the most daring, braving not just the spotlight and the judges, but also the snake pit. She is expected to handle scores of serpents, often “milking” or gathering their venom, and beheading and skinning them. Queens usually eat some of what’s left after skinning, which gets fried at the roundup cook shack and tastes like a cross between rabbit and frog.

#storysongs combo: “Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” Bill Monroe. Bluegrass keening at its best, and just a wonderful title. At first I wondered if the snake was a metaphor for the bad boy who takes the daughter away, but then realized I was probably overthinking it.

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If you have ideas for story-song pairings of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATimesColumn1 with the hashtag #storysongs.

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-- Kari Howard

kari.howard@latimes.com