My daughter, who lives in the Peoples Republic of Islington, tells me about a bookshop in London Fields. She tells me that it’s my type of bookshop: radical, eclectic, inventive. I guess it must be a little like Five Leaves.
Each year she pops in and gets me a book for Christmas. Sometimes politics, sometimes music, sometimes football, sometimes a mix. She almost invariably gets it right – it’s always something I really enjoy reading. This year was no different. She got me “This Woman’s Work“, a book of Essays on Music.
Now, some folk say that attempts to write about music are pointless: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture“. I’m looking at you Costello. Don’t deny it. Anyway, I disagree. I love essays about music like the ones in this book.
I love it when someone gets passionate about an artist and can convey their love and excitement about that artist in words. When I read about the author’s passion for the music, it inspires me to go out and listen to it. That’s how I got into George Jones. It’s how I got into Patti Smith. It’s how I got into James Carr. While reading “This Woman’s Work”, I’ve dug out my old Lucinda Williams albums. I’ve started listening to TAD and Mudhoney again. I’ve searched our folk I didn’t know like Wanda Jackson, Rose Maddox, Sis Cunningham, School of Seven Bells, and more. I wish I could write about the bands I love in the same way. If I could, you’d all be listening to The Only Ones and Ren and Tommy Verlaine and The Murder Capital. Instead all I can do is grab people by the neck and drag them to my record player and force them to listen to whatever has turned my head.
I love it when someone writes about a deep emotional connection to a track. How it is associated with a particular time or episode in their past. How hearing it can bring back Proustian memories. I loved reading Yiyun Li’s essay about her mother and Maggie Nelson writing about her brilliant friend.
We are all of us built on a foundation of emotions. We have a collection of songs and tunes that transport us back to a time and a feeling in our past. Sometimes it’s a general period. Sometimes it’s a specific event.
The Wonder Stuff and Jesus Jones take me back to summers spent driving round France in the Renault with My Darling Wife listening to the mix tapes we made.
When I hear Ringo Starr’s ‘It Don’t Come Easy‘, I’m sitting in the room of a sweet lass that I met at university, drinking tea and listening to her albums. I arranged for her to get together with her husband, so she gave me the single to say thank you. I treasure it.
Most of the tracks on Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing remind me of the summer of 75 and that time after leaving school and before leaving home when we did nothing but lounge around. However, I only have to hear the intro to the track ‘Still Love You‘, and I’m back on the old District line to Southfields with Julie M after we’d been out dancin’ and come home singin’.
When I hear X ‘Burning House of Love‘ or Midnight Oil ‘Dead Heart‘, it takes me back to living in Southern California when you could only ever get one decent radio station and they played those two tracks in constant rotation.
And, of course, ‘Freed from Desire‘ will always mean May 29th 2022.
And there are so many more. The Tracks of My Years.
So, if you’re a dancer, go ahead and dance about the Chrysler Building in New York or the Heydar Aliyev Center in Azerbaijan or the LiYuan Library in Beijing. You can even sing about the Hoover Building if you are that way inclined.
And if you’re a writer, go ahead and write about the music in your heart. I’d love to read about it.
The Ned Wood Archive 