31 Songs

by Nick Hornby

  Nick Hornby

  31 SONGS

  Contents

  31 SONGS

  1 Introduction: Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From Teenage Fanclub

  2 Thunder Road Bruce Springsteen

  3 I’m Like a Bird Nelly Furtado

  4 Heart breaker Led Zeppelin

  5 One Man Guy Rufus Wainwright

  6 Samba Pa Ti Santana

  7 Mama You Been On My Mind Rod Stewart

  8 Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? Bob Dylan

  9 Rain The Beatles

  10 You Had Time Ani DiFranco

  11 I’ve Had It Aimee Mann

  12 Born for Me Paul Westerberg

  13 Frankie Teardrop Suicide

  14 Ain’t That Enough Teenage Fanclub

  15 First I Look At The Purse the J. Geils Band

  16 Smoke Ben Folds Five

  17 A Minor Incident Badly Drawn Boy

  18 Glorybound The Bible

  19 Caravan Van Morrison

  20 So I’ll Run Butch Hancock and Marce LaCouture

  21 Puff the Magic Dragon Gregory Isaacs

  22 Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 Ian Dury & the Blockheads

  23 The Calvary Cross Richard and Linda Thompson

  24 Late for the Sky Jackson Browne

  25 Hey Self Defeater Mark Mulcahy

  26 Needle in a Haystack The Velvelcttes

  27 Let’s Straighten it Out O. V. Wright

  28 Röyksopp’s Night Out Röyksopp

  29 Frontier Psychiatrist the Avalanches

  30 No Fun/Push It Soulwax

  31 Pissing in a River the Patti Smith Group

  … AND 14 ALBUMS

  1 It’s a Mann’s World: Melodies for a Darker Mood

  2 Alternative Earle: The Resurrection of a Great Songwriter

  3 The Entertainers: Learning from Los Lobos

  4 Sweet Misery: The Mellowing of Nick Cave

  5–14 Pop Quiz: What Does the New Top Ten List Mean?

  Favourite Recenl Songs

  Discography

  Picture Credits

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Hornby was born in 1957. He is the author of four novels: High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to be Good and A Long Way Down, and two other works of non-fiction, Fever Pitch and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. All six books have been international bestsellers and all are available in Penguin. He has also edited two anthologies, My Favourite Year and Speaking with the Angel. In 1999 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and works in Highbury, North London.

  ‘Smart, entertaining and moving. A manifesto on why pop is so glorious, beautiful and important’ Sunday Express

  ‘Always stimulating, this fine read gets you musing on your own desert island discs’ Mojo

  ‘Perceptive, funny, brought tears to my eyes’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A passionate defence of Hornby’s taste, his writing and his success’ Literary Review

  ‘A book about the joy of listening to great pop songs, about the elusive genius of a catchy chorus … what shines most is Hornby himself – his wry sell-awareness, his disarming honesty. Effortlessly readable, every chapter reminds us how special an observer of human behaviour Hornby is’ Heat

  ‘Sing along with him’ Arena

  ‘Chatty, confiding and unashamedly personal’ Harpers & Queen

  ‘Inspiring, amusing’ Rolling Stone

  ‘Anyone interested in great essays, or in the delicate art of being funny, or in how to write about one’s feelings in such a way that oilier people will actually care … should love 31 Songs’ San Francisco Chronicle

  ‘Conveys an irrepressible enthusiasm for the simple and superficial fun of hearing a great tune’ Metro

  ‘A wise book, contains some very good criticism’ GQ

  ‘Delivered in a hugely enjoyable, invisible prose that does in words what Hornby’s tunesmiths do with sound. He writes good’ Time Out

  For Lee, and all the other people

  who have introduced me to new songs.

  31 Songs

  1 Introduction

  Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From

  Teenage Fanclub

  So we were doing this thing, this launch party, for Speaking with the Angel, a book of short stories I put together to raise money for my son’s school, and we – the school, the publishers of the book, me and my partner – were nervous about it. We didn’t know if people would turn up, we didn’t know whether the mix of readings and live music would work, we didn’t know whether anyone would enjoy themselves. I arrived at the Hammersmith Palais early, and when I walked in I noticed two things simultaneously. One was that the venue looked great: there had been some big office party the night before, and there was all this glitter and tinsel everywhere; at the time, it seemed like a cheesy but effective way to symbolize magic. The other was that Teenage Fanclub, who had agreed to play an acoustic set (and had postponed a gig in Europe so that they could do so), were going through a soundcheck. They were playing ‘Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’, one of the loveliest songs on one of my favourite-ever albums, Songs From Northern Britain. It sounded great, a perfect musical expression of the tinsel; and I knew the moment I heard it that the evening, far from being a flop, would be special. And it was – it turned into one of the most memorable events with which I have been professionally connected.

  Now, whenever I hear ‘Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’, I think about that night, of course – how could it be otherwise? And initially, when I decided that I wanted to write a little book of essays about songs I loved (and that in itself was a tough discipline, because one has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect), I presumed that the essays might be full of straightforward time-and-place connections like this, but they’re not, not really. In fact, “Your Love Is The Place Where I Come From’ is just about the only one. And when I thought about why this should be so, why so few of the songs that are important to me come burdened with associative feelings or sensations, it occurred to me that the answer was obvious: 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 that it was OK, and had never seen the girl or listened to the song much again, then hearing it now would probably bring back the smell of 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.

  There’s this horrible song called (I think) ‘Mummy I Want A Drink Of Water’ that they used to play on a BBC children’s radio show on Saturday morning; I don’t think I’ve heard it since, but if I did it would remind me overwhelmingly of being a child and listening to the Saturday-morning children’s radio show. There’s a Gypsy Kings song that reminds me of being bombarded with plastic beer bottles at a football match in Lisbon, and several songs that remind me of college, or ex-girlfriends, or a summer job, but I don’t own any of them – none of them means anything to me as music, just as memories, and I didn’t want to write about memories. That wasn’t the point. One can only presume that the people who say that their very favourite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family chihuahua, don’t actually like music very much. I wanted mostly to write about what it was in these songs that made me love them, not what I brought to the songs.

  Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t listen
to classical music or jazz very often, and when people ask me what music I like, I find it very difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and I can only give them song titles. And mostly 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; I’m sorry that I have nothing to say about ‘Trampoline’ by Joe Henry, or ‘Stay’ by Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs, or ‘Help Me’ by Sonny Boy Williamson, or ‘Ms. Jackson’ by Outkast, or anything by Lucinda Williams, or Marah, or Smokey Robinson, or Olu Dara, or the Pernice Brothers, or Ron Sexsmith, or about a thousand other people, including Marvin Gaye, for God’s sake, nothing to say other than that they’re all great and you should really hear them if you haven’t already … I mean, I’m sure I could squeeze something out, and bump this book up to something like a regulation length in the process, but that wasn’t the point either. Writers are always squeezing things out because books and articles are supposed to be a certain number of words, so you have in your hand the actual (i.e., natural, unforced, unpadded) shape of this particular book; it is, if you like, an organic book, raised without force-feeding or the assistance of steroids. And with organic stuff, you always have to pay more for less. Anyway …

  2 Thunder Road

  Bruce Springsteen

  I can remember listening to this song and loving it in 1975; I can remember listening to this song and loving it almost as much quite recently, a few months ago. (And, yes, I was in a car, although I probably wasn’t driving, and I certainly wasn’t driving down any turnpike or highway or freeway, and the wind wasn’t blowing through my hair, because I possess neither a convertible nor hair. It’s not that version of Springsteen.) So I’ve loved this song for a quarter of a century now, and I’ve heard it more than anything else, with the possible exception of … Who am I kidding? There are no other contenders. See, what I was going to do there was soften the blow, slip in something black and/or cool (possibly ‘Let’s Get It On’, which I think is the best pop record ever made, and which would easily make it into my top 20 most-played songs list, but not at number 2. Number 2 – and I’m trying to be honest here – would probably be something like ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ by The Clash, but it would be way, way behind. Let’s say I’ve played ‘Thunder Road’ 1,500 times (just over once a week for twenty-five years, which sounds about right, if one takes into account the repeat plays in the first couple of years); ‘(White Man) …’ would have clocked up something like 500 plays. In other words, there’s no real competition.

  It’s weird to me how ‘Thunder Road’ has survived when so many other, arguably better songs – ‘Maggie May’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Stir It Up’, ‘So Tired of Being Alone’, ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’ – have become less compelling as I’ve got older. It’s not as if I can’t see the flaws: ‘Thunder Road’ is overwrought, both lyrically (as Prefab Sprout pointed out, there’s more to life than cars and girls, and surely the word ‘redemption’ is to be avoided like the plague when you’re writing songs about redemption) and musically – after all, this four and three-quarter minutes provided Jim Steinman and Meatloaf with a whole career. It’s also po-faced, in a way that Springsteen himself isn’t, and if the doomed romanticism wasn’t corny in 1975, then it certainly is now.

  But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. And they don’t do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or for worse. It’s a process something like falling in love. You don’t necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest, or the most beautiful; there’s something else going on. There was a part of me that would rather have fallen for Updike, or Kerouac, or DeLillo – for someone masculine, at least, maybe somebody a little more opaque, and certainly someone who uses more swear-words – and, though I have admired those writers, at various stages in my life, admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I’m talking about. I’m talking about understanding – or at least feeling like I understand – every artistic decision, every impulse, the soul of both the work and its creator. ‘This is me,’ I wanted to say when I read Tyler’s rich, sad, lovely novel. ‘I’m not a character, I’m nothing like the author, I haven’t had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if ever I were to find a voice.’ And I did find a voice, eventually, and it was mine, not hers; but nevertheless, so powerful was the process of identification that I still don’t feel as though I’ve expressed myself as well, as completely, as Tyler did on my behalf then.

  So, even though I’m not American, no longer young, hate cars, and can recognize why so many people find Springsteen bombastic and histrionic (but not why they find him macho or jingoistic or dumb – that kind of ignorant judgement has plagued Springsteen for a huge part of his career, and is made by smart people who are actually a lot dumber than he has ever been), ‘Thunder Road’ somehow manages to speak for me. This is partly – and perhaps shamingly – because a lot of Springsteen’s songs from this period are about becoming famous, or at least achieving some kind of public validation through his art: what else are we supposed to think when the last line of the song is ‘I’m pulling out of here to win’, other than that he has won, simply by virtue of playing the song, night after night after night, to an ever-increasing crowd of people? (And what else are we supposed to think when in ‘Rosalita’ he sings, with a touching, funny and innocent glee, ‘Cos the record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance’, other than that the record company has just given him a big advance?) It’s never objectionable or obnoxious, this dream of fame, because it derives from a restless and uncontrollable artistic urge – he knows he has talent to burn, and the proper reward for this, he seems to suggest, would be the financial wherewithal to fulfil it – rather than an interest in celebrity for its own sake. Hosting a TV quiz show, or assassinating a president, wouldn’t scratch the itch at all.

  And, of course – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – if you have dreams of becoming a writer, then there are murky, mucky visions of fame attached to these dreams too; ‘Thunder Road’ was my answer to every rejection letter I received, and every doubt expressed by friends or relatives. They lived in towns for losers, I told myself, and I, like Bruce, was pulling out of there to win. (These towns, incidentally, were Cambridge – full of loser doctors and lawyers and academics – and London – full of loser successes of every description – but never mind. This was the material I had to work with, and work with it I did.)

  It helped a great deal that, as time went by, and there was no sign of me pulling out of anywhere to do anything very much, and certainly not with the speed implied in the song, ‘Thunder Road’ made reference to age, thus accommodating this lack of forward momentum. ‘So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young any more’, Bruce sang, and that line worked for me even when I had begun to doubt whether there was any magic in the night: I continued thinking I wasn’t that young any more for a long, long time – decades, in fact – and even today I choose to interpret it as a wistful observation of middle age, rather than the sharp fear that comes on in late youth.

  It also helped that, some time in the early to mid-eighties, I came across another version of the song, a bootleg studio recording of Springsteen alone with an acoustic guitar (it’s on War And Roses, the Born To Run outtakes bootleg); he reimagines ‘Thunder Road’ as a haunting, exhausted hymn to the past, to lost love and missed opportunities and self-delusion and bad luck and failure, and that worked pretty well for me, too. In fact, when I try to hear that last line of the song in my head, it’s the acoustic version that comes first. It’s
slow, and mournful, and utterly convincing: an artist who can persuade you of the truth of what he is singing with either version is an artist who is capable of an awful lot.

  There are other bootleg versions that I play and love. One of the great things about the song as it appears on Horn To Run is that those first few bars, on wheezy harmonica and achingly pretty piano, actually sound like they refer to something that has already happened before the beginning of the record, something momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope; as ‘Thunder Road’ is the first track on side one of Born To Run, the album begins, in effect, with its own closing credits. In performance at the end of the seventies, during the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, Springsteen maximized this effect by seguing into ‘Thunder Road’ out of one of his bleakest, most desperate songs, ‘Racing In The Street’, and the harmonica that marks the transformation of one song into the other feels like a sudden and glorious hint of spring after a long, withering winter. On the bootlegs of those seventies shows, ‘Thunder Road’ can finally provide the salvation that its position on Born To Run denied it.

  Maybe the reason ‘Thunder Road’ has sustained for me is that, despite its energy and volume and fast cars and hair, it somehow manages to sound elegiac, and the older I get the more I can hear that. When it comes down to it, I suppose that I too believe that life is momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope, and maybe that makes me a self-dramatizing depressive, or maybe it makes me a happy idiot, but either way ‘Thunder Road’ knows how I feel and who I am, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art.

  Postscript

  A few years ago, I started to sell a lot of books, at first only in the UK, and then later in other countries too, and to my intense bewilderment found that I had somehow become part of the literary and cultural mainstream. It wasn’t something I had expected, or was prepared for. Although I could see no reason why anyone would feel excluded from my work – it wasn’t like it was difficult, or experimental – my books still seemed to me to be quirky and small-scale. But suddenly all sorts of people, people I didn’t know or like or respect, had opinions about me and my work, which overnight seemed to go from being fresh and original to clichéd and ubiquitous, without a word of it having changed. And I was shown this horrible reflection of myself and what I did, a funfair hall-of-mirrors reflection, all squidged-up and distorted – me, but not me. It wasn’t like I was given a particularly hard time, and certainly other people, some of whom I know, have experienced much worse. But even so, it becomes in those circumstances very hard to hang on to the idea of what you want to do.