Songbook
By Nick HornbyMcSweeney’s Books, 150 pp., $26
Three years ago, while discussing music, my girlfriend at the time made a remark that caught me completely off-guard: “You really don’t listen to much music, do you?” It was a disturbing thing to hear, because I’ve always been mad for music. She was right, however; the once-integral background music of my life had dissipated to the point of silence. Post-relationship, that all changed, in a massive, utterly wonderful/awful way: wonderful because it was good to be back in the land of the three-minute pop song, awful because the return to form was fueled by a lengthy spate of post-breakup soul ripping. Music, as Nick Hornby notes here (and has noted elsewhere, most poignantly in High Fidelity), is great therapy. A single sad song can salve wounds seemingly unhealable by any other means, and in the same note might rip open old scars. Hornby knows the music is what matters, providing a counterpoint to both the smiley highs and weepy lows of life and love in this eloquent McSweeney’s volume that offers essays on 31 songs lodged in his heart. Ranging from Teenage Fanclub’s “Your Love Is the Place That I Come From” to Badly Drawn Boy’s “A Minor Incident,” there’s nary a trace of critical elitism on display; Hornby’s tone is that of fond affection. Of the Avalanches’ gloriously goofball “Frontier Psychiatrist” he writes, “It’s reminiscent of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets … the same determination to make the incoherent cohere — and cohere into something new.” A lot like relationships, then, a subject Hornby knows well enough to return to time and again. Terrific pop-crit lit like this doesn’t come around often enough, so McSweeney’s has included an 11-track CD sampler of the songs discussed, to boot.
This article appears in January 31 • 2003.