I really like Nick Hornby, but we have different definitions of what is pop music. Also, I was annoyed by how often he mentioned The Clash, but we never listen to one of their songs. Sigh. Still a Nick Hornby fan though!

When I heard this was a set of essays about songs that the author who has written some of my favourite screenplays loves, or has loved, I was naturally curious. In recent years I’ve taken to reading more essays than normal, not all of which felt overly academic and bogged down by pretentious intellect. Something I realised quickly about this set of essays was that they were far more about an emotional connection than they were about the technical aspects of the song. Hornby is not a musician and instead of trying to convince you of his intellect he plays to his strengths as a writer. This approach made this a very quick and easy read.

I wasn’t familiar with most of the songs prior to reading the book so if for nothing else it was great to be introduced to new music. I jump at the opportunity whenever my friend invites me to gigs performed by bands that I’ve never heard of so I think it’s safe to say that I’m willing to give any band a go. I decided that it wouldn’t be right to read the essays without having given the songs a listen to first so I hit up the playlist on Spotify and voila: new driving music. That way I could make my own opinions of the songs in question without being guided by the author. The songs were certainly a mixed bag and I definitely wasn’t prepared for the song by Suicide (driving with my window open and that song playing was an odd experience).

When listening to the songs, particular the ones I disliked, I found myself excited to read how someone could love a song such as that. I love reading well-argued contrary opinions. Perhaps the best aspect of the book is that Hornby does not try to rationalise his love of the songs. He talks about the attitude many have to pop music for sure but

I wouldn’t say that I personally loved any of the songs Hornby chose, mostly I felt ambivalent. Hornby isn’t writing about these songs being masterpieces though, it’s all anecdotal accounts of why he likes these songs in particular. His casual approach definitely works and makes this book feel far more like a memoir than a dry piece about technically good songs.

This book inspires me to discover and get inspired by good music (again).

Now I need to skim it again from cover to cover while looking up every single song I don't know on YouTube.

Music criticism? Not quite - music appreciation, and a reading so easy and quick it does feel like a good song, itself.

Nick Hornby has compiled a list of 31 or so songs that have impacted him in different ways, or the songs represent different aspects of music appreciation that Nick wants to share. He also has chapters at the end that cover albums, as well as one on boxed sets, and one on contemporary "pop" (as the book was written in 2003, it would be contemporary for 2003.) Nick's long-term love affair with music is apparent as he is intimate with every nuance of it through the chapters. Those who have similar love affairs with music will delight in his essays. Nick also has a very wry sense of humor that had me laughing out loud several times while reading.

This book is also a primer on music education. As he expounds on the intricacies of why he chose, or did not choose, a particular song, it gives me pause to reflect on aspects not considered before — which is making me a “better” appreciator of music.

I had considered blogging one of Nick's favorites each day for a month at my blog (http://tao-talk.com) and giving Nick's reasons why he chose it, but then I thought if a list will be made and shared, with the reasons why, it will be my own choices and reasons.

My biggest takeaway from Songbook is that each music lover out there has one of these lists, even if it's only in their heads and the reasons why not articulated. Nick is a genius for deciding to put his down on paper.

I'm reading and have read, especially in the past two years of pandemia, a lot of books about music, musicians, music criticism, and the like.

Enter Nick Hornby's Songbook in 2003. Judging by how much I enjoyed the 2000 film version of High Fidelity, I had sincere hopes for this read. The NYT Book Review declared it "a kind of prose equivalent of a mixtape" in a blurb on the paperback cover, and "delightfully passionate."

If that were the case, it'd be a rather homogenous mixtape. For the most part, it's terrifically white book. It hails from nearly 20 years ago, but feels about 40 years old in its coverage. Plus, he writes about and brings up Bob Dylan *a lot* for someone who doesn't particularly care for him and his music.

The chapters on Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith – at opposite ends of this book – bored me a bit, when they absolutely should not. Hornby's vigor or "passion" for these artists, albums and tracks, did not shine through for me for about two-thirds of this thankfully slender tome.

In the end, I should've expected this to be what it was: more aligned with the vibe and through-line of John Cusack's High Fidelity than Zoe Kravitz's more diverse and inclusive 2020 version, made for TV. I rewatched the film version during quarantine proper in the pandemic, and it made me cringe in ways I hadn't realized the past couple times. That's the passage of time and the new angles by which we look on things, knowing what we know and value now.

In closing a li'l list of what I'm definitely glad for in this book:

- Hornby's thoughts on Nelly Furtado and "I'm Like a Bird," a song/singer my (straight) college roommate the first two years was singularly obsessed with; that chapter helped me look differently and more fondly on his fixation
- The author's meditation on Aimee Mann, whose work I delved into more afterward, esp. that splendid Bachelor No. 2 album (note: She has a great new one, too)
- His take on Ani Difranco's "You Had Time," a song I've long adored
- Its introduction to me of the songs "Royksopp's Night Out" and Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky"
- It's reintroduction to the Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist" ("That boy needs therapy!")

I take music very seriously, drawing deep meaning, or trying to, from many of the songs and albums I listen to. I've been told by someone I care deeply for that I take music too seriously--that I'm idealizing fake or pretend stories and messages and that, by doing so, I've tainted my outlook on reality. But that, to put it bluntly, is utter bullshit. Music is just another form of human artistic communication, no different than someone pouring their inner feelings and desires out on canvas or on stage or hell, just through talking to one another. People spew lies and deceit to one another all the time. Any one form of communication is not necessarily better than any other, so long as it is honest and truthful. Hell, people say dishonest and deceitful things to one another all the time. There is plenty of garbage music that is similarly devoid of meaning at best, or harmful at worst. But to say that anyone looking for deeper meaning through pop songs is misguided is flat out insane. If doing so comes off as disingenuous to someone, then it's their inability to empathize and emotionally connect that is at fault, or perhaps their choice of music. This is an argument I could make all day...or I could just point them to Nick Hornby's wonderful collection of essays about pop songs and their often intimate meanings.

As the author of "High Fidelity," Hornby's musical bona fides are unquestionable. These are some of the choice nuggets he presents in "Songbook":

"Now, whenever I hear "Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From," I think about that night, of course--how could it be otherwise? And initially, when I decided that I wanted to write a little book of essays about songs I loved (and that in itself was a tough discipline, because one has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect), I presumed that the essays might be full of straightforward time-and-place connections like this, but they're not, not really. In fact, "Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From" is just about the only one. And when I thought about why this should be so, why so few of the songs that are important to me come burdened with associative feelings or sensations, it occurred to me that the answer was obvious: if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use. If I'd heard "Thunder Road" in some girl's bedroom in 1975, decided that it was okay, and had never seen the girl or listened to the song much again, then hearing it now would probably bring back the smell of her underarm deodorant. But that isn't what happened; what happened was that I heard "Thunder Road" and loved it, and I've listened to it at (alarmingly) frequent intervals ever since. "Thunder Road" really only reminds me of itself, and, I suppose, of my life since I was eighteen--that is to say, of nothing much and too much...One can only presume that the people who say that their very favorite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family Chihuahua, don't actually like music very much. I wanted mostly to write about what it was in these songs that made me love them, not what I brought to the songs."

"But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. And they don't do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or for worse. It's a process something like falling in love. You don't necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest, or the most beautiful; there's something else going on. There was a part of me that would rather have fallen for Updike, or Kerouac, and DeLillo--for someone masculine, at least, maybe somebody a little more opaque, and certainly someone who uses more swearwords--and, though I have admired those writers, at various stages in my life, admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I'm talking about. I'm talking about understanding--or at least feeling like I understand--every artistic decision, every impulse, the soul of both the work and its creator. "This is me," I wanted to say when I read Tyler's rich, sad, lovely novel. "I'm not a character, I'm nothing like the author, I haven't had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if ever I were to find a voice." And I did find a voice, eventually, and it was mine, not hers; but nevertheless, so powerful was the process of identification that I still don't feel as though I've expressed myself as well, as completely, as Tyler did on my behalf then."

"When it comes down to i, I suppose that I, too, believe that life is momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope, and maybe that makes me a self-dramatizing depressive, or maybe it makes me a happy idiot, but either way "Thunder Road" knows how I feel and who I am, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art."

"But the truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself. Songs that are about complicated things--Canadian court orders, say or the homosexual age of consent--draw attention to the inherent artificiality of the medium: Why is this guy singing? Why doesn't he write a newspaper article, or talk to a phone-in show? And how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway? But because it is the convention to write about affairs of the heart, the language seems to lose its awkwardness, to become transparent, and you can see straight through the words to the music. Lyrics about love become, in other words, like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song. Maybe this is what gives "You Had Time" the edge: our breakups, in the end, have more melody to them than our work does."

"If it's true that music does, as I've attempted to argue elsewhere, serve as a form of self-expression even to those of us who can express ourselves tolerably well in speech or in writing, how much more vital is it going to be for him, when he has so few other outlets? That's why I love the relationship with music he has already, because it's how I know he has something in him that he wants others to articulate. In fact, thinking about it now, it's why I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part."

"Your old music cannot sustain you through a life, not if you're someone who listens to music every day, at every opportunity. You need input, because pop music is about freshness, about Nelly Furtado and the maddeningly memorably fourth track on a first album by a band you saw on a late-night TV show."

"The dance floor is still, to me, the social equivalent of the North Sea during English seaside holidays--something to be treated with the utmost fear and caution, something you walk toward and away from over a period of several hours while battling with your own courage, something you plunge into briefly and uncomfortably while every corpuscle in your blood screams at you to get out before it's too late, something that leaves lots of important parts of you feeling shriveled."

the original hardcover edition is the one to get. it's all made up nice to resemble a mix tape you made back in high school and handed, sweaty palm and all, to the girl you were madly in love with. she was all long brown hair and old striped izod shirts that were hand-me-downs from her older brother or father. and afterwards. days later. you sat on a guardrail in a parking lot and talked about the songs. and the sun was setting over telephone wires on beat-up cars and still. it was a perfect landscape. and you held hands and looked her in the eye and watched the last light leave the day. that is pretty much this book.

Here is your book playlist: Listen to all the songs before or throughout reading the book. I listened to these songs as I made my way through each section.

Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From - Teenage Fanclub
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
I'm Like a Bird - Nelly Furtado
Heartbreaker - Led Zeppelin
One Man Guy - Rufus Wainwright
Samba Pa Ti - Santana
Mama You've Been on My Mind - Rod Stewart
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window - Bob Dylan
Rain - The Beatles
You Had Time - Ani DiFranco
I've Had It - Aimee Mann
Born for Me - Paul Westerberg
Frankie Teardrop - Suicide
Ain't That Enough - Teenage Fanclub
First I Look at the Purse - J Geils Band
Smoke - Ben Folds Five
A Minor Incident - Badly Drawn Boy
Glorybound - The Bible
Caravan - Van Morrison
So I'll Run - Butch Hancock and Marce Lacouture
Puff the Magic Dragon - Gregory Isaacs
Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3 - Ian Dury and the Blockheads
The Calvary Cross - Richard and Linda Thompson
Late for the Sky - Jackson Browne
Hey Self Defeater - Mark Mulcahy
Needle in a Haystack - The Velvelettes
Let's Straighten It Out - O. V. Wright
Röyksopp's Night Out - Röyksopp
Frontier Psychiatrist - The Avalanches
No Fun/Push It - Soulwax
Pissing in a River - Patti Smith Group


This is an interesting piece of essays. I think this would be great for someone who is a big fan of Hornby. It gives you a lot of preservative into his life and interests. You don't see that too much in other pieces. I think this is also a good book to see another side to music. I am always looking for people to sit down and debate issues like this with me. I always have something to say about music.

The most important thing that Hornby makes here is that songs create memories and they also help us relive things. Like a first love, or the time your wrecked your car, or whatever. It's something we all universally connect to. It's subjective and objective in many ways. All of these songs mean something totally different from what he explained in this book. Listen to what other have to say and you can learn something from it.

Nick Hornby on Thunder Road....seriously, what could be better? Some of the essays were better than others, especially since some of the music was pretty seriously obscure, but I enjoy Hornby's thought processes so much that he can pretty much write about anything and I'll dig it.

I am not quite the music snob as Mr. Hornby, and his music taste is while not completely unlike like my own, not quite in the same radar. Still, I just loved his passion about music and enjoyed this quite a bit. I was especially touched on his section about music and its connection to his autistic son.

Last 40 pages really brought out the ‘back in my day’ old man music fan in Hornby. Gah. I’ll be doing the same no doubt.