Songbook

By Nick Hornby
McSweeney’s, $26


On its face, Nick Hornby’s Songbook should be a nauseating work of staggering self-indulgence.

The man behind High Fidelity and About a Boy, a rare book-and-film bifecta, has teamed up with hipster author Dave Eggers’s artsy, smarty-pants publishing company. Their beautiful hardbound book — 150 thick, tactile pages long — details Hornby’s favorite tunes and what they mean to him. With an accompanying CD of exclusively white rock artists, it’s a neat package aimed at coffee tables, not libraries.

Sounds pretty self-satisfied, doesn’t it? Hornby himself points out another pitfall: namely, that “one has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.” (Which is presumably why so many people still go to Jimmy Buffett shows.)

But Songbook works. Partly because, as High Fidelity proved, Hornby is a music fan, and partly because he avoids too much tedious autobiography while dissecting the Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist,” Van Morrison’s “Caravan,” Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” and 28 other songs in illuminating and amusing essays. Of course, Hornby being Hornby, he can’t help but touch on love, maturity, fatherhood and even his own funeral along the way.

But Songbook is most affecting when he exposes his deepest emotions. While listening to one of Badly Drawn Boy’s songs for About a Boy, he’s amazed by how it encapsulates his feelings for his recently diagnosed autistic son. “I write a book that isn’t about my kid, and then someone writes a beautiful song based on my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did,” he marvels. “It’s worth an awful lot.”

Or, as the playwright-composer Noël Coward once remarked, “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” This light, funny book is not without a few hidden depths too.
—Andy Pemberton