"Songbook"

[fiefoe]

Nowadays, I like to stretch a writer out - no more strip-mining a new favorite's backlist. But this book practically landed on my car's backseat, and it would have been churlish not to crack it open.

Nick Hornby has an artless way to talk about art. Even his name droppings are user-friendly - 'It's no wonder Pythagoras got so worked up about harmony.'

• (Describing how Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant perfectly express who he is:) It's a process something like falling in love: You don't necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest... There was a part of me that would rather have fallen... for someone masculine, .. somebody a little more opaque. ... Admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I'm talking about.
• I try not to believe in God, of course, but sometimes things happen in music, in songs, that bring me up short, make me do a double take. <...> This occasional vision of the Divine in the music I love... comes as a relief, ... now I have something, a little scrap of spirituality, I can wave back at them.
  
• Listening to (Dylan's work from the 60s) a quarter of a century later is like watching old film of Jesse Owens running. You can see that he won his races, but all sense of pace has been wiped away by Maurice Greene.
  
• Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.
• (Why the songs about love endures the best:)  It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself. Songs that are about complicated things  - Canadian court orders,...- draw attention to the inherent artificiality of the medium: Why is this guy singing? ... Lyrics about love become,... like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song.