31 Songs

So my sister's given me Nick Hornby's '31 Songs' for Christmas, which is a lovely present and I'm very much enjoying working my way through it. I've owned some similar books but not owned this one myself - my former flatmate Michael owned it and I certainly browsed it from time to time, but to actually read it properly is a treat, as Nick Hornby is, of course, a proper skilled writer, not just a pop archivist, and he has crafted it just so, while seeming not to be crafting it at all.

And you may have noticed - '31 Songs' has a certain similarity to the title of this blog, and it was quite conceivably on my mind when I came up with the title. Which made me think a few things.
Firstly, I remembered how few people have I ever really made aware of the blog (which began, gosh, almost four years ago), including my family. When I got the book, I wanted to say "aah, good thinking, this fits in well with my blog" but then held back.

Come to think of it, I do now remember directing my sister to the very first post, the list of 101 Songs, but not to all the nonsense that followed. Really, I've only ever let about 8 people know this blog exists, perhaps understandably, and not really with any discretionary process. For example, the above former flatmate Michael has I think never read it, though I imagine it would be of some interest to him, and I hope would not be put out to discover it had been going all this time without his knowledge, but the truth is what happened is, when I started it out, and was a little embarrassed about the whole thing, I vaguely mentioned it, and if someone followed up on that, that was fine, but I didn't want to push anyone to read it. How frightful. Anyway, Michael, if this is you reading this now, you've got a lot ot catch up on!

Blogger now has precise stats so I know how many people ever look at it - not many but always a steady few, and not just my friends. Ironically, the entry through which most people come to it (one presumes through google search terms) is "10 Songs about Embarrassment, Shame ...", which is slightly delicious, as what we have is a man deeply prone to embarrassment having his deeply embarrassing words being read by people who themselves are pretty prone to embarrassment, otherwise why would they have searched for songs about embarassment? How embarrassing! And the most embarrassing thing is that that is, in my opinion, a pretty undistinguished entry, and i'd much rather they'd found the blog through, I don't know, 'Songs about The End of the World' or something. I nailed that one ...

Anyway, back to '31 Songs', wherein Nick Hornby actually does something different from what i've done in this blog - he literally just writes about his love for 31 individual songs, a lovely simple idea, which you'd have to be an extremely popular and skilled writer to get away with publishing and people actually buying, reading and enjoying. Cos, really, anyone could do that. If I could walk into a publisher and go "I want to wrote a bit about 31 songs I like" and that would eventually end up with the The Spectator saying it was "as good a book about pop music as I have read in many years" I'd be a very lucky man.

But I'm not Nick Hornby. Though in a way I am. And that's the genius of Nick Hornby. I've very much enjoyed 4 (or maybe 5) of his books but never once thought that's something I couldn't do. But I couldn't. And he does write about people you think are you. Even if they are him.

Probably his most nailed-on up-my-street book is 'High Fidelity', the book about music obsession. [Incidentally, I don't quite buy his "I'm not a total and utter music geek" shtick he's putting across in '31 Songs'. No one who writes about full-on music geekdom like he does in 'High Fidelity' could not be a full-on music geek. They just couldn't].
Goodness, it's a long old time since I read it, as it helped me through my first few weeks in Kenya in early 1997. The album I was mainly listening to then was 'Blood on the Tracks', of which the first track is 'Tangled Up in Blue', which contains the lyric "And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off of every page like they were written on my soul" which is a little how I felt about parts of 'High Fidelity', though I was a callow 18 year old gap year student, rather than a 30 something independent record store owner. Of course, the film is cracking too, part of the Cusack hot streak, full of lovely music - the first time I attempted to see it at the cinema in Kensington, with Stephen, a migraine took hold of me, and, reader, let's work through this embarrassment together, I had to throw up in the loos and scuttle home. Aah, memories, misty, watercolour memories of the way we were ...

But, anyway, so, anyway, ok, all I'm actually saying is, how's about I do a little of that for a while, steal Nick Hornby's idea and just write a section on an individual song and its place in the world, whether my own world or the world as a whole. Although in my final list of 101 songs (keep up, there have been lots of lists of 101 songs!) I did write a few lines on each of those beloved songs, i've rarely (as I recently did with Going Underground) delved deep into an individual song, like Hornby does so skilfully.
Probably better if some of the songs are pretty well-known, I've already had a little think, and here are some songs I might write about

Wonderwall
Hallelujah
Dry the Rain
Killing Me Softly
Heatwave
The State I Am In
One Day Like This

Am I being too obvious? These might be songs you hate. They might be songs I hate. But better, I think, to give readers a chance of knowing what i'm talking about. Anyway, that is very much subject to change, and it won't necessarily stop the flow of writing on other subjects.
I'm really beginning to get into the second incarnation of this blog, after a stuttering start. I feel the writing's been quite poor so far,  but hopefully it can get better again with more practice.