Today, I stopped at a cute little sandwich shop in Sherborn. I wasn't getting a sandwich, so I browsed their shelves (whoever had the idea to have a shelf of books to read is a freaking genius), and I discovered Nick Hornby's Songbook. I started reading his essay on Thunder Road (one of my favorite Springsteen songs, of course), and I was hooked. I had to speed off to my local Borders after work in order to obtain a copy for myself. I'm already almost done with it, which is both exhilarating and sad. I've never been able to appropriately express my feelings when it comes to music, unless you consider things like "cool" and "amazing" to be descriptive. Nick considers music to be the purest form of expression, writing, "If I could write music, I never would have bothered with books," in his essay on Ani's You Had Time and Aimee Mann's I've Had It. (And really, if a man can appreciate the heartbreaking beauty of You Had Time, doesn't that automatically win him genius status? Or at least a place as one of my very favorite writers?)
Oh, I could quote lots from this already ("Our breakups, in the end, have more melody to them than our work does"), but read the damn thing yourself, if you haven't already. (How I missed this in 2003, I'll never know.) He covers everyone from the Boss to Ben Folds to Led Zeppelin to Nelly Furtado, and it has already made me start digging through my collection -- both to listen to the songs he writes about and to rediscover some of my own lost favorites.
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