Deep Cuts

I recently read a novel called 'Deep Cuts', being a sucker for a will they-won't they romance centred on music. It can be compared to yer Ones Days and yr Normals Peoples but - crucial difference! - is set in the US of A. Anyway, I liked it.

It's being made into a film - initially there were fairly big stars attached, and now the stars are smaller, but hopefully it will be good - the director has done some well-reviewed films.

After all, why shouldn't there be another will-they won't they romance covering several years in which music plays a significant role? This is a good type of book/film that people like.

What I liked most about Deep Cuts, by Hollie Brickley, is that it really is about the music, man. If nothing else, there are some pretty solid pieces of music writing in it. And, even more so, the music that it's about is the music I treasure. So it starts in around 2000 and goes up to, I think, 2009, and we cover the likes of the Shins, LCD Soundsystem, Joanna Newsom, OutKast, amongst many older classics. There is even a brief section relating to US hipsters in the 2000s going nuts to Britpop which really nails why Britpop was actually great pop music - I'm often very sniffy about Americans writing on British music and culture, but, in this case, the distance, the absence of self-loathing cultural hang-ups about flags, misogyny, race, guitars, politics etc, just means you get a couple of great sentences about why it was/is great pop by Brits.

The narrator is a young woman and her paramour is a singer-songwriter she meets at college. I certainly appreciated that she is someone who is utterly obsessed with songs who is not themselves musical (though the nub of the story is their songwriting collaboration). The romance is often quite secondary - indeed I've have been more than happy if it had petered out and we'd ended up at somewhere else more interesting - the relationship between her and the songwriter's original girlfriend is maybe the most well-drawn thing in the book.

I also appreciated that she describes herself as obnoxious and is, yes, obnoxious enough, but not too obnoxious.

Probably the most memorable piece of music writing within it (by the main character as aspiring music writer) is a scathing takedown of Lenny's Chelsea Hotel #2 and indeed Nash's Our House and all that kind of jazz. Also, the bit on Newsom was great - just reminded me, now it's been 11 years since she did an album and that may well be all we're going to get, how lucky I was to see this miraculous artist perform four times, that I was in the right place at the right time enough.

I'm glad, also, that it resisted the temptation to push the characters further into the next decade and beyond - the characters are very online, as not everyone was in the 2000s, and as the changes in technology multiplied and darkened in the 2010s and 2020s, that might have got a bit unbearable. As someone who is myself quite online, but online as a "stuck in online 2008" way, I found the cultural history quite nostalgic.

So, yeah, it's a nice book. This is the playlist of songs specifically discussed within it https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6ZN7YF1Kn24S2kaEGF5JOz