31 Songs by Nick Hornby

Author:Nick Hornby [Hornby Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141935225
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

What was I listening to in 1974, when ‘Late for the Sky’ came out? Not Jackson Browne, for a start. I wasn’t really aware of him until 1977, when my musical microclimate was way too ferocious to accommodate delicate Californian flowers; the ubiquity of ‘The Pretender’ in all the record collections of the girls I met at college confirmed my suspicion that when it came to music, girls didn’t Get It. And then, a couple of decades later and going through a marriage break-up, I found that Blood On the Tracks and Tunnel of Love, having been mined exhaustively during peacetime, didn’t have much left in them, and meanwhile, The Clash and the Ramones, the people who, I felt, had wanted me to turn my nose up at ‘The Pretender’, had long since ceased to be much use to me. (Which is not to say that the college girls had, after all, Got It back then. We were nineteen – we should all have been listening to punk, not listening to songs about marital discord and early mid-life crises, although considering that the boys were listening to punk while studying English literature or law at the University of Cambridge, you could argue that either option involved an element of make-believe that young adults should have grown out of.) So, after taking advice from my friend Lee (q.v.), I returned home with a couple of Jackson Browne albums, and found within minutes that I had made a new friend.

I didn’t know any of the great songs on those first three or four albums, apart from ‘Doctor My Eyes’ and ‘Take It Easy’. I’d never heard ‘Late for the Sky’, or ‘These Days’, or ‘For a Dancer’, or ‘From Silver Lake’, or ‘Jamaica, Say You Will’. It was almost like discovering a writer I’d never read – except we discover writers we’ve never read all the time, and only rarely, as adults, do we stumble across major pop artists with a decent back catalogue: it is usually prejudice rather than ignorance that has prevented us from making their acquaintance, and prejudice is harder to overcome (indeed, much more fun to maintain). And, yes, of course it was prejudice that had stopped me from listening to Jackson Browne. He wasn’t a punk. He had a funny pudding-bowl haircut that wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll. He wrote ‘Take It Easy’, at a time when I didn’t want to take it easy. And though I hadn’t heard any of the songs, I knew they were wimpy, navel-gazing, sensitive – American in all the worst ways and none of the best.

And suddenly, there I was, aged forty-plus, lapping it all up, prepared to forgive all sorts of lyrical infelicities and banalities in the sad songs; prepared to forgive, too, all the limp, hapless, thankfully rare attempts to rock out (although I would have been much less forgiving in vinyl days, when I had no access to a remote control and a skip button). I’m prepared to

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