Nick Hornby's latest effort, Songbook,

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is a collection of short, personal essays on 31 of his favorite songs and songwriters. A portion of the proceeds from the book will benefit TreeHouse Trust, a UK charity based in central London, established in 1997 to provide an educational Centre of Excellence for children with autism and related communication disorders.

Hornby is the acclaimed author of How To Be Good,

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About A Boy,

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High Fidelity,

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and Fever Pitch.

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He also edited the collection of short stories, Speaking With The Angel,

© Riverhead Books

and is the pop music critic for The New Yorker.

Awarded the E.M.Forster award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hornby is a graduate of Cambridge University and was a teacher before turning to writing full-time.

Before turning his attention to fiction, Hornby was a regular contributor to Esquire, the London Sunday Times, and The Independent. He has also written for GQ, Elle, Time, The New Republic, Vogue, and Premiere.

He lives in North London.

Nick Hornby
Interview

You would be amazed how far a little letter can get you. Either by means of the old hand written epistle or the more mod e-mail, failbetter has been extremely fortunate when it comes to landing interesting authors to interview. Thus, when an e-mail response ended up in our collective INBOX from one of our favorite writers, Nick Hornby, saying "I'm up for it. Hit me with some questions." ....Well, we were more than happy to oblige. What we didn't realize was that rather than talking about his popular novels-turned-movies like About A Boy and High Fidelity, or his more recent writing and editing efforts such as How To Be Good and the story collection Speaking With The Angel, Hornby would end up talking tunes. But that's understandable, given his newest work, Songbook, a collection of short, personal essays on 31 of his favorite songs and songwriters.

It has been said, that no matter how successful or famous one becomes in his or her chosen career, everyone wants to be a rock star. Several of the characters from your previous novels would agree with this statement, but how about yourself? Even now, with your professional path in life fairly apparent, do you still have such fantasies/aspirations?

Really not, any more! I still maintain that music is the best way of getting the self-expression job done. But publishing is still, despite it all, a very pleasant industry - unlike the music business. I said to a musician recently that I thought his work was, in a way, an aural equivalent of mine, in that we both seemed to believe that the old ways of telling stories and writing songs are basically unimprovable, so it's best to focus on stuff like wit, truth, nuance, accessibility, freshness. And while he's struggling to be heard, I'm doing OK. The music industry is always looking for the next big thing (and trying to exploit ten-year-olds), whereas the book industry is still, despite novels by models etc, quite interested in good writing, in books that work. A good book is enough in a way that a good song isn't, any more. In other words, it's too tough to be a musician at the moment. Plus, of course, I'm 45 - my career would almost certainly be over in the rock industry!

Early on in Songbook, you make the point that the songs you chose to discuss were not selected because of a nostalgic memory they may bring to mind, but on the merit of the music itself. Nevertheless, whether it is the relationship of Gregory Isaacs "Puff the Magic Dragon" to your son, or the rite of passage associated with Santana’s "Samba Pa Ti," there is a relationship between music and life. In this regard, do you think that songs give life meaning? Or does life give meaning to a particular song (perhaps more than the songwriter ever intended)?

I don't think that most songwriters can ever anticipate quite what their songs are going to mean to people. I have quite often been convinced that some song or other contains the meaning of life - or the meaning of my life at a particular moment. And then, when you revisit the song, you're shocked at how little is there, and you can't imagine how it came to bear that much weight. A lot of the songs I write about in there are literally soundtrack - they're not the same without the accompanying images. But, then, part of the job of soundtrack music is to make sense of the accompanying images, and that's what music does, at its best.

We were impressed by the list of pop songs discussed in the book—ranging from the classic to the contemporary—from Van Morrison to Mark Mulcahy, from Bruce Springsteen’s "Thunder Road" to Teenage Fanclub. Perhaps, in addition to your love of music, your duties as the writer for The New Yorker require you to remain musically "hip." Yet given that you admittedly listen to these favorites at "alarmingly frequent intervals" (i.e. – listen to Thunder Road at least once a week) and, at the same time, confess that you have "become old, and so therefore Jackson Browne’s sedate music holds more appeal" …well, do you ever take a look at your music collection and suddenly say, "Damn, I haven’t gotten a new CD in months!" Or worse yet, find yourself curmudgeonly barking, "there aren’t any new bands out there worth a damn!"?????

No. I buy new music every single week; I'm much more likely to think, Damn, I bought six albums this month and I've only listened to three of them. For me, it's to a large extent about novelty - I don't mean novelty as in 'Disco Duck', but as in freshness. I love Astral Weeks and Blonde on Blonde, but I'm not sure how many more times in my life I'll play them all the way through - I'd rather play something I've heard maybe three or four times and am just learning to love. That's the best. But that means you gotta keep shopping!

Many of songs you have chosen to discuss in Songbook share a strong sense of storytelling—something any writer can appreciate. But when considering which songs you were going to talk about, was there any stupid tune that, while you may secretly love, you couldn’t bring yourself to include in the book? Not that, to a real enthusiast, neither J. Geils or The Bible represent the pop-cultural highbrow, but did you have to fight the urge to include anything like "Everybody Wang Chung" tonight? (i.e. – some song that your characters from your earlier novels would really give you grief for?) Or worse yet, a song that thanks to parental influences, or haunting 8 track tapes, leaves you with a soft spot for "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" or Andy Williams’ "Can’t Get Used to Losing You"????

The closest to that is Bert Kaempfert's 'Swingin' Safari', this crappy Lawrence Whelk- type thing that my mum used to have. But I didn't know what to say about it. But to tell you the truth, I think that whole 'Guilty pleasure' thing is overplayed. Once you get outside the Marvin/Dylan/Joni "pop as art" canon - which is actually a pretty small group - everything's a guilty pleasure, if you want to look at it like that. The (English) Beat did a great cover of that Andy Williams song on their first album; and what's the difference between Abba's 'SOS' (sort of hip) and, I don't know, Lou Christie's 'I'm Gonna Make You Mine' (resolutely not!) I certainly can't tell the difference in terms of cultural significance!

Some writers need complete silence to literally compose their thoughts. Others like a little familiar noise in the background as they type away. Do you normally play music while you write?

No, I find it distracting. I've been playing a little Nick Drake today in an attempt to help me out with the tone of a scene - I do that sometimes - but for the most part I prefer not to listen to other people's words as I try to produce my own. The only thing that has ever worked for me is a nice spot of minimalism - Reich, Glass, those guys.

Your comedic use of pop cultural references is often questioned because of the old artistic "test to time" argument. Leaving that aside, your last novel, How To Be Good, was inherently more serious in nature, and at times, even bleak. How much of this would you attribute to your "maturing" as a writer? Too often, things "literary" are equated to mean, "serious." Is this something you have had to consciously grapple with as a writer? Do you think one becomes more serious in life the older he or she gets given the trials and tribulations of life experience? Do you ever envision a time when it may actually be more difficult for you, as a writer, to be funny rather than somber or "serious"?

It really doesn't feel anything to do with "maturing" - I profoundly disagree with those who equate "literary" with "serious" - unless "serious" encompasses "po-faced", "dull", "indigestible". Anyone who does anything that seems easy or light or which actually entertains people always tends to get overlooked - apart from by the reading public, the only people who really matter. But I reserve the right to write the kinds of books I feel like writing. Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time. But of course as you get older, the characters tend to be playing for higher stakes - that's true of most writers, I think. And some of my recent life experiences have been....sobering. That's got to come out somewhere.

I don't worry too much about what I am, what I do, what I want to do. That's sort of the easiest part. I could, I think, write a literary novel, but I have no desire to - even my bleakest book has some jokes in it, and I'd feel nervous writing a book with no jokes. I mean, I get pissed off with a certain kind of snooty critic, but mostly I think I manage to occupy my own space without too much discomfort. Songbook got reviewed by the Poet Laureate the other day in the Times, and though I didn't read the review, it seemed absurd, wrong; it really wasn't written for him, or anyone like him. But he apparently quite enjoyed it, so in the end, you think, well, I'm pulling off something pretty unique here. Because the kind of person who will enjoy that book the most is not a Poet Laureatey kind of person...

Football fanaticism aside, you admittedly have been more influenced both as a writer and a person by American culture than that of your homeland. While Britain remains the setting for your books, your sense of style and storytelling is arguably more American. Perhaps this is why your novels have been so well received in the US (and coincidentally, why they seem so ripe for successful movie adaptations). But at the risk of alienating your American audience, what negative cultural observations have you made of the States? To what extent is the superficially fashion and trend-conscious character of Will in About A Boy the unfortunate result of the economic and cultural Americanization of the world?

Well, I'm becoming more and more anti-globalization; I get sick of small bookshops and record stores closing down and being replaced by Starbucks. It's funny, but Anne Tyler's wonderful Accidental Tourist, written in 1985 or thereabouts, makes almost no sense now - her central character is a guy who writes guide books for cautious Americans travelling abroad, and his indicates his personal nervousness and lack of adventure. But now, of course, it seems to us as though every American is an accidental tourist; there's no longer anything that makes Macon special. He's just an American. And then there's your politics, your death penalty, your scary Christian Right...But I see none of this when I tour the US. My book readers seem impeccably liberal, delightfully unsnobby folk.

In the past, many critics and readers alike have been inclined to track your evolution as writer via the gender roles you have explored, starting with the male-character confessionals of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, to the female-lead in How To Be Good. Both the current work, Songbook, and the previous short story collection you edited, Speaking With The Angel, were both created in effort to raise funds for you son’s school, TreeHouse, an educational centre for children with autism. That said, you are already on record that, given your own experience, you will need more time before you write about the father-son relationship. So perhaps, as a fiction writer, possible future topics may be come from within? Can you see yourself writing about spirituality, for example? What plans are in the works for the next work? Or does the attempt to categorize a work before you even begin to write add needless pressure to the process?

I'm writing a novel about four people who want to kill themselves. So, you know, another happy one. (I'm hoping that it's paradoxically going to be a lot less bleak than HTBG) It's not coming from within, although of course the whole relationship between a writer's psyche and a novel is complicated! I don't really like talking about work in progress because I don't think my books sound terribly interesting when they're synopsised; in fact, they sound disastrously thin! I remember trying to tell people that I was writing a memoir about supporting Arsenal, or a novel about a guy who works in a record store and who splits up with his girlfriend, and the pitying and mystified looks on these people's faces made me want to kill myself!( Which is maybe how I got the idea for this new book.) I tend to be too embarrassed to give the books any kind of hard sell, and that of course means that they sound as appetising as a regurgitated Big Mac. So it's not really secrecy that makes me tight-lipped; just a need for a little self-confidence during the writing. Books are long. Even mine. You don't want to feel bad about them as you're writing them.

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