In his book “High Fidelity,” Nick Hornby (who also wrote “About A Boy” and a multitude of well-received music reviews for The New Yorker) discusses the art of a great mixtape.
He gives a detailed account of Rob’s (the book’s lovable record-geek hero, played by John Cusack for those of you who don’t read) intricate rules regarding the tapes, and the reader comes to realize just how much is at stake with each Maxell High Bias blank he drops into his tape deck.
Now Hornby gets his chance to fully display this refined mixtape prowess on his own terms.
“Songbook” chronicles 31 songs and the parts they played or play in Hornby’s life. With the inclusion of a compact disc, the book reads like the liner notes every mixtape messiah dreams of one day writing. If a tape is as intimate as “High Fidelity’s” Rob would have you believe, then Hornby is bearing his soul to the world via other people’s expression.
The only downfall of this plan is that 20 songs are excluded from the disc. The final result is that the audio collection contains mostly Hornby’s more chill, acoustically driven picks and you’ll have to refer to your own or someone else’s collection for the rest.
Each chapter discusses one or two songs, beginning with Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” (This is if you interpret the first section, Teenage Fanclub’s “Your Love is the Place That I Come From,” as the book’s introduction) and ending with Patti Smith’s “Pissing in a River.” Packed in between are chapters on the hard-to-find (Soulwax, The Bible), the hard-to-escape (Nelly Furtado, Bob Dylan) and some really nice surprises.
Hornby describes himself as a person who “has to write books because he cannot write songs” when discussing a Badly Drawn Boy tune that was featured on the soundtrack to “About A Boy.” The song, “A Minor Incident,” was written to correspond with plotline from the book, but Hornby, in a moment of self-realization, sees how closely the lyrics reflect his own life and his son’s autism. He is amazed at the ferociously truthful connections that music can generate and the way art seems to tie everything together.
Now, in true “High Fidelity” style, I will list my own top five “Songbook” moments. Number Five: Hornby credits Ben Folds with being an amazing songwriter while comparing pop music to house music (which is simply for “making you dance when you’re off your face”).
Number Four: Hornby’s mid-teen resolve that he was going to lose his virginity while listening to “Samba Pa Ti” by Santana, “if not on the stereo, then in my head.” Unfortunately, when his opportunity rolls around, he ends up putting on a Rod Stewart album.
Number Three: Hornby chances losing some diehard music freaks with his decisions to include the Rod Stewart version of “Mama, You Been on my Mind,” as opposed to the original Dylan version and the inclusion of a chapter each on Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like a Bird” and “Late for the Sky” by Jackson Brown (who Hornby describes as a “delicate Californian flower”).
Number Two: His decision that Van Morrison’s “Caravan” would be the song played at his funeral and then his immediate knee-jerk fear that the song’s string section would make people doubt his devotion to pop music in favor of something more dignified, a suspicion that he quickly dissolves.
Number One: This is obviously Hornby’s love for pop music throughout, which is both endearing and somewhat frightening, but definitely worth a look.
Grade: A
