Hornby calls this “the magical coincidences and transferences of creativity.” ![]() The most moving passage describes a song written for the movie adaptation of About a Boy, which came to mean a great deal more to Hornby in his relationship with his autistic son than his own book, which gave rise to the song “A Minor Incident.” His writing is at its best when Hornby is expressing his personal connection to certain songs. He has little time for snobbishness, though in a piece previously published in The New Yorker he surveys the Billboard Top Ten albums with a mixture of bewilderment, distaste and humor. Hornby’s definition of pop is broad enough to include Bob Dylan as well as Nelly Furtado. The book that follows is a rambling, self-deprecating and often hilarious account of Hornby’s personal relationship with pop, from metal to folk to electronica. “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,” Hornby writes in the opening chapter of Songbook. Dispensing with the fictional complications of a novel, Hornby has now brought himself directly into his writing. In both High Fidelity and About a Boy, the narrators, who bear more than a passing resemblance to Hornby himself, use music as a tool to live by, measuring their lives in songs. ![]() Music has occupied a central place in all of his work. Hornby’s latest work, Songbook, recently published in paperback, zeroes in on two key themes in Hornby’s previous novels: music and the art of being a fan. Thanks.Nick Hornby is a fan’s fan, and has written the book to prove it. There might be a Heartbreaker - or a Blood On The Tracks or a Layla - in it for all of us. And how can you be happy, really, if you are only ordinary in your happiness, but extraordinary in your grief? Is it really worth it? It sounds harsh, I know, but if you are currently romantically involved with someone with a real talent - especially a talent for songwriting - then do us all a favour and dump them. ![]() What rights do we have here? Are we entitled to ask other people to be unhappy for our benefit? After all, there are loads of us, and only one of them. His upbeat songs are fine, but they sound a lot like other people’s upbeat songs (you can hear the cheeriest incarnations of the Stones, Dylan and Van Morrison all over Gold) his blues gave him distinction. (It helps that Adams got Emmylou Harris, the best harmony vocalist in the history of pop music, to sing with him on it.) On Adams’s next album, Gold, he seems to have cheered up, and though that’s good news for him, it’s bad news for me, just as it was when Edward stopped being miserable. Ryan Adams’s beautiful Heartbreaker album is, I suspect, the product of a great deal of pain, and “Oh My Sweet Carolina” is its perfect, still centre, its faint heartbeat, a song so quiet that you don’t want to breathe throughout its duration. Some people are at their best when they’re miserable. I copped out, in my prissy English way, but he disappeared for forty-eight hours (leaving me with sole use of a beautiful apartment in the centre of Rome) when he came back, he told me he was engaged. He was revelling in his status as a single man, a status that, apparently, required very little self-reflection or intelligence: on the night I arrived, I found that he’d fixed us up with a couple of call-girls. When it was time for him to return to Rome, he asked me to go and stay with him, and I accepted the invitation.īut when I got there, a few weeks later, he wasn’t unhappy any more. I remember the concentration our talks required, and the stillness and intensity they engendered I knew that he was in pain, but when our fifty minutes were over I felt invigorated and inspired. But he was lucid in his unhappiness: he talked with regret, of course, but also with insight, and enormous intelligence, and his melancholy took him off to all sorts of interesting conversational places - places I never normally got to visit in the normal run of things. Edward was an African living in Rome, where he was a foreign correspondent for his home-town newspaper, and he was unhappy because he was going through a divorce. A long time ago, when I was still teaching English to foreign students in a London language school, I gave private conversation lessons to an unhappy man who called himself Edward, even though that wasn’t his name.
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