Playlist: The 31 songs that feature in Nick Hornby’s ‘Songbook’
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(Credits: Far Out / Joe Mabel)
If you’re going to write a novel about sneering record shop owners, then it might be best to have the vast musical knowledge to back up your portrayal of such a character. To truly bring the character of Rob Fleming (Rob Gordon in the film adaptation) to life in his 1995 novel High Fidelity, writer Nick Hornby needed to put himself in the shoes of a music nerd, and given how well the book and big-screen version were received, it doesn’t seem like it took much effort to really get into the role.
Seven years after the success of High Fidelity, Hornby would turn to writing another music-focused book, although this time, it wouldn’t be a fictional work. Songbook, or 31 Songs as it was also published under, was an exploration of all the songs (31, funnily enough) that had stuck out to him throughout his life as a listener, although not everything on the list was an exploration of tracks that he loved.
From Aimee Mann to Van Morrison, the book is a riveting journey through his childhood, adolescence and right up to shortly before the collection hit the shelves, exploring songs that amused him, made him cry, irritated him despite being earworms, or scared the absolute shit out of him. It’s a real voyage through the history of music, with folk, punk, electronic and soul all making appearances over the course of the list.
Some will be ubiquitous tracks that have probably played a part in many people’s lives, such as selections from Led Zeppelin and The Beatles, while others are deeply personal picks that might only hold meaning to a select few individuals. There are a few notable inclusions that either seem out of place or specific to Hornby’s life to highlight; the inclusion of Badly Drawn Boy, for example, is directly linked to another of his works, About A Boy, for which the songwriter would contribute the soundtrack to its film adaptation.
Also notable is the inclusion of two songs by Teenage Fanclub, the only act to be duplicated on the list, and a personal favourite of Hornby’s. He would tell The Guardian in an interview from the same year of the book’s publication that what he loved about the Scottish group was their “optimism and a lack of cynicism. You get ground down after a while by the dark stuff.”
It might not be the only time that Bruce Springsteen has segued into Nelly Furtado, but it’s a fascinating history of one music obsessive’s quest to catalogue every song that truly means something to him, and somehow, both of them turn up in the process. It’s the sort of read that reminds you exactly why you love the music you love and will surely send you down a rabbit hole thinking about which tracks would make the cut on your own personal list.
“I assumed every song would be full of time and place connections, but I realised this isn’t so because good songs transcend the particular. Which must mean that most of these songs aren’t very good because they nearly all relate to specific times in my life,” mused Hornby when discussing the readability of the book. “There again, if you buy a book by me, prose stylist that I am, you want to read about me, don’t you? So here are the soundtracks to my son’s autism and the break-up of my marriage.”
The full list of Nick Hornby’s 31 songs:
- Teenage Fanclub – ‘Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From’
- Bruce Springsteen – ‘Thunder Road’
- Nelly Furtado – ‘I’m Like a Bird’
- Led Zeppelin – ‘Heartbreaker’
- Rufus Wainwright – ‘One Man Guy’
- Santana – ‘Samba Pa Ti’
- Rod Stewart – ‘Mama, You Been on My Mind’
- Bob Dylan – ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’
- The Beatles – ‘Rain’
- Ani DiFranco – ‘You Had Time’
- Aimee Mann – ‘I’ve Had It’
- Paul Westerberg – ‘Born for Me’
- Suicide – ‘Frankie Teardrop’
- Teenage Fanclub – ‘Ain’t That Enough’
- The J. Geils Band – ‘First I Look at the Purse’
- Ben Folds Five – ‘Smoke’
- Badly Drawn Boy – ‘A Minor Incident’
- The Bible – ‘Glorybound’
- Van Morrison – ‘Caravan’
- Butch Hancock and Marce LaCouture – ‘So I’ll Run’
- Gregory Isaacs – ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’
- Ian Dury and the Blockheads – ‘Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3’
- Richard and Linda Thompson – ‘Calvary Cross’
- Jackson Browne – ‘Late for the Sky’
- Mark Mulcahy – ‘Hey Self-Defeater’
- The Velvelettes – ‘Needle in a Haystack’
- O.V. Wright – ‘Let’s Straighten It Out’
- Röyksopp – ‘Röyksopp’s Night Out’
- The Avalanches – ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’
- Soulwax – ‘No Fun / Push It’
- Patti Smith Group – ‘Pissing in a River’
