Songbook

I recently finished reading Songbook by Nick Hornby. It is a collection of essays he wrote about songs he loves, or “…a kind of prose equivalent of the mix-tape,” and like when you discover a great song or movie and want to tell all your friends about it, I figured I would share a few of my favorite parts of the book.

“…if I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I’d choose Zeppelins’s “Heartbreaker,” from Led Zeppelin II. I’m not sure that me going “DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA DANG” would enlighten him especially, but I’d feel that I’d done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks.”

“A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I have loved over the previous months, and every time I finish one I can’t believe there’ll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can’t wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you’ve got a life worth living.”

“There is no doubt, though, that lyrics are the literate pop fan’s Achilles heel. We have all lived through the shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic belief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the T.V. “What does that mean, then?” my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. “ ‘Get it on / Bang a gong’ How long did it take him to thinks of that, do you reckon?” And the correct answer—“Two seconds, and it doesn’t matter”—is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shutup, while inside you’re hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs.”