![]() While Hornby was writing the book, his young son was diagnosed with autism-a fact that adds greater resonance to the seemingly unrelated song he hears much later: "I write a book that isn't about my kid, and then someone writes a beautiful song based on an episode in my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did." Meandering asides and observations like this linger in your mind (just like a fantastic song) long after you've flipped past the final page. ![]() Especially poignant is his reaction to "A Minor Incident," a Badly Drawn Boy song written for the soundtrack of the film version of Hornby's book About a Boy. More than his humble disclaimer, he captures "the narcotic need" for repeat plays of Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird," and testifies that "you can hear God" in Rufus Wainwright's coy reinterpretation of his father Loudon's "One Man Guy" ("given a neat little twist by Wainwright Junior's sexual orientation."). "And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do," writes Hornby. But then, who better to riff on 31 of his favorite songs than the author of that literary music-lover's delight, High Fidelity? If anything will convince you that pop music can make life worth living it is this book and Nick Hornby's straightforward rapture: "I can hear things that aren't there, see and feel things I can't normally see and feel".The personal essays in Nick Hornby's Songbook pop off the page with the immediacy and passion of an artfully arranged mix-tape. The book ends with his favourite tracks of 2002, which range from Ms Dynamite to Linda Thompson, showing that unlike most of ours, his record collection keeps on growing. Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" receives its due as the best pop song ever written and he rightly raves about the violin solo on Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Body's In Trouble". ![]() He is a man who listens to the Velvelettes and who can admit that a friend's band turned out to be quite good. He puts forward a passionate case for Ian Dury's England, tells us to go shop in his local record store Wood in Islington, and alerts us to the existence of Reggae for Kids on which Gregory Isaacs performs "Puff the Magic Dragon". Hornby's continuing excitement, his willingness to go where the music takes him and to be proved foolish or wrong, make this a pleasure for anyone to read. He must receive a lot of mail from those who beg to differ: Rod Stewart's version of "Bring It On Home To Me" over Sam Cooke's maybe, but if it is raucousness and swing you are after, Mr Hornby, what about Eddie Floyd's?ĭon't be put off by the casual mention of things like an "out-takes bootleg". And that terrible gig you paid so much money to go to? Guess what, you can walk out! Hornby has a position but leaves room for yours. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes because the whole point is to still be capable of getting hooked all over again. Also songs about rivers, or parents, or roads". It is "songs about love that endure the best. " In the end, though, pop is a pretty conservative medium. ![]() Most of us will recognise the moment when Hornby's mother walked in on him watching Marc Bolan: "What does that mean then? Get it on/Bang a gong. Lyrics leave room for music, can get away with a lot and provoke your parents. Hornby is against the notion that Dylan is any sort of poet, as anyone with any respect for pop lyrics would agree. This made me think of Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You", which I can't stop humming now, and want a copy of, even if it does have what sound like budgerigars on backing vocals. He knows how songs seep into our consciousness, here Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird", which he pre-empts by saying that of course a lot of pop is inane but sometimes you hear something and it drives you "pleasurably potty". He recognises the sensation and does not discriminate. Hornby is not afraid of the word "perfect". It's as if he has allowed the song to choose him in the same way that, as he says here, it was Anne Tyler rather than Kerouac or DeLillo who really spoke to him when he began to write. Hornby calculates that he has listened to this track 1,500 times: "just over once a week for twenty-five years, which sounds about right, if one takes into account the repeat plays in the first couple of years". One is that a song like Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" can know how an Englishman who has neither porch nor screen-door nor convertible, feels.
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