Songbook: An Introduction
At work I am the token guy who still listens to CDs. Although I do have an old circa 2005 iPod on my desk that contains the vast majority of my music collection, I still bring in CDs that I've recently acquired and listen to them on the Discman my parents got me as a gift back in 1998. CDs have the benefit of being easily lendable, and although precious few of my coworkers are interested in listening to new music there are a few. Most notably is my colleague CFA, who likes indie rock (her son is named after the lead singer for The Decemberists). She went from borrowing my new CDs to asking me to lend her CDs I thought she might like. And then a few weeks ago there was this add-on to an email she sent me when she returned my Jens Lekman album: "I'd also be interested in just a list of some of your favorite songs. I'm big on just downloading a bunch of random songs from itunes to create a new playlist."
This is one of the coolest things someone has ever asked me to do. Obviously I already do the radio show, which is essentially the generation of a brand new mix tape every single week. But that show is mostly a collaborative effort with my co-hosts and intentionally includes lots of new music by artists I know little about. It doesn't really lend itself to deep explanations of a single song.
Last year I read Songbook by Nick Hornby when I was visiting pussygalore66. In the book Hornby writes about 31 different songs. Each gets a short essay outlining why the chosen song has a particular emotional resonance for him. He doesn't pick from an arbitrary list of the best songs. Indeed, they aren't even necessarily his favorite songs; at least one he claims not to have listened to in the last 15 years, even when he decided to write about it.
The list I ended up sending over to CFA last week followed this model. It had 20+ songs on it then, and I've modified it several times since. Most of the songs I love, or did once. All are permanently stuck in my head, whether it's a verse, a line, or the entire song. Some are huge hits and a couple are obscure even by the standards of college radio. A lot of them are tied permanently to my memories of specific girls. A few of them are sufficiently bad that I'm a little embarrassed about them.
For the next however many Sundays I'm going to write about these songs one at a time until I reach the end. We'll see just what kind of pop culture artifacts are filling up my skull. My goal is to cover them in roughly the order that they got stuck in my head, although precision on that topic is not going to be possible. When I get reach the end, maybe I'll try to arrange them in mix tape order.
And by the time I finish this, maybe I'll have been to a few more states :-)
This is one of the coolest things someone has ever asked me to do. Obviously I already do the radio show, which is essentially the generation of a brand new mix tape every single week. But that show is mostly a collaborative effort with my co-hosts and intentionally includes lots of new music by artists I know little about. It doesn't really lend itself to deep explanations of a single song.
Last year I read Songbook by Nick Hornby when I was visiting pussygalore66. In the book Hornby writes about 31 different songs. Each gets a short essay outlining why the chosen song has a particular emotional resonance for him. He doesn't pick from an arbitrary list of the best songs. Indeed, they aren't even necessarily his favorite songs; at least one he claims not to have listened to in the last 15 years, even when he decided to write about it.
The list I ended up sending over to CFA last week followed this model. It had 20+ songs on it then, and I've modified it several times since. Most of the songs I love, or did once. All are permanently stuck in my head, whether it's a verse, a line, or the entire song. Some are huge hits and a couple are obscure even by the standards of college radio. A lot of them are tied permanently to my memories of specific girls. A few of them are sufficiently bad that I'm a little embarrassed about them.
For the next however many Sundays I'm going to write about these songs one at a time until I reach the end. We'll see just what kind of pop culture artifacts are filling up my skull. My goal is to cover them in roughly the order that they got stuck in my head, although precision on that topic is not going to be possible. When I get reach the end, maybe I'll try to arrange them in mix tape order.
And by the time I finish this, maybe I'll have been to a few more states :-)