The 31 songs of the life of Nick Hornby, author of “High Fidelity”

Thanks to a direct, brilliant style full of pop culture references, with his 1995 novel “High Fidelity” (“High Fidelity”), Nick Hornby presented an ironic and deeply human portrait of the thirty-year-old generation of the 90s, with an affectionate and disenchanted look on relationships.

His prose, as accessible as it is thoughtful, balances humor and melancholy, giving life to flawed but irresistibly real characters. The story of Rob Fleming, owner of a record shop in London, who rereads his failed love stories like a personal playlist. Having become one of the most celebrated musical stories, which was made into a film starring John Cusack and Jack Black, and a series with the main role entrusted to Zoë Kravitz, “High Fidelity” is therefore also an ode to music and songs as a universal language and as a mirror of human emotions, which makes the book still today a cult novel, current and deeply empathetic. A few years after the success of the novel about Rob Fleming, the British author then dedicated himself to writing another book focused on music, without being a work of fiction. In 2002, “Songbook,” or “31 Songs,” was released, in which Hornby explored 31 songs and the particular emotional resonance they had for him. .

In a gripping journey through his childhood, adolescence and just before the volume hit bookstores, Nick Hornby explores songs by – among others – Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Patti Smith and many others.

In an article for the “Guardian” in 2003, explaining why 31 songs, the author stated: “I thought that each song would be linked to specific moments and places in my life. Then I realized that this is not the case, because beautiful songs transcend the particular. This could mean that many of these songs aren’t all that good, as almost all of them connect to specific moments in my life. On the other hand, if you buy one of my books, prose stylist that I am, you want to read about me, right? So here are the soundtracks of my son’s autism and the end of my marriage.”

Here are Nick Hornby’s 31 songs in “Songbook”:

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’
OV 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’