31 Songs by Nick Hornby

It’s official: I love Nick Hornby. (Well, it was official before, but nevermind). 31 Songs, as you may have gathered from the title, is a collection of 31 short essays by Nick Hornby about songs that are meaningful to him for some reason or other. And as a bonus at the end we also get a few essays on albums he likes and a list of some of his favourite recent songs (well, recent in 2003, of course.)

Before I started this book, I thought my favourite essays would be the ones about songs I also know and love. That tends to be the case when I read books about books, at least. So I expected to prefer to read about Rufus Wainwright, Aimee Mann, Nick Cave, Badly Drawn Boy or Bob Dylan to, say, Santana, Suicide, The Velvelettes or Gregory Isaacs.

But no. That wasn’t the case at all. Because, see, this is Nick Hornby writing about these songs, which means that every single essay was funny, wise, unpretentious, touching and insightful in one way or another. In fact, this book made me decide to also read Fever Pitch, his book about football. I’m not a big sports fan, but if Nick Hornby is writing about football, then you bet I want to read it. I’m sure he’ll have interesting things to say about it.

Anyway. What makes these essays great isn’t just how well he writes about music and the things music makes us feel. (Though for me that’s very admirable in itself. I’m as passionate about music as I am about books, but I could never keep a music journal simply because I’m hopeless at writing about it.) What Nick Hornby does is write about the songs themselves, about other songs they might remind him of, about music in general and how some of it is still Frowned Upon, about snobbery, small independent stores, and his life. This isn’t, however, done in a straightforward way. He doesn’t go on a tangent about what a song reminds him of. As he puts it:

If you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use. If I’d heard ‘Thunder Road’ in some girl’s bedroom in 1975, decided it was OK, and had never seen the girl or listened to the song again, then hearing it now would probably bring back the smell or her underarm deodorant. But that isn’t what happened; what happened was that I heard ‘Thunder Road’ and loved it, and I’ve listened to it at (alarmingly) frequent intervals ever since. ‘Thunder Road’ really only reminds me of itself, and, I suppose, of my life since I was eighteen – that is to say, of nothing much and too much.

So more than about specific moments of his life, what he writes about along with writing about the songs is, well, life in general. There’s no other way I can put it, really. My very favourite essay was the one about “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Gregory Isaacs, where he talks about Danny, his autistic son, and his relationship with music. I don’t even want to say anything about it because I don’t want to cheapen it somehow, you know? So I’ll just say that the book is more than worth reading for that essay alone.

You can read the essay about "A Minor Incident" by Badly Drawn Boy (another one of my favourites) here. He also mentions his son, and he talks about writing About a Boy and seeing it turned into a movie (the song is in the movie's soundtrack). It's a great essay.

If you like music, if you like Nick Hornby, if you like funny and open personal essays and books that make you laugh and cry, then you must read 31 Songs. And now I shall go away and devote some time to my new Project: acquiring and reading everything Nick Hornby has ever written.

(Have you reviewed this book? Let me know and I’ll link to your review at the bottom of this post.)