By Justin Lee
The following is an email interview with Nick Hornby that took place just a couple weeks after a serendipitous encounter with him on the flight from Cologne to London. It doesn’t, as the headline suggests, allow you to physically step inside the head space of Mr. Hornby in some grandiose Charlie Kaufman-penned vehicle. But it’s certainly the next best thing as he discusses his innate connection with music, the influence music has on his own writing, and why he could never be in a romantic relationship with a Susan Boyle fan.
My Liner Notes: Once they reach their mid ’30s, it seems as though a lot of people get set in their old music tastes and fail to venture out of those confines to explore new music. Why do you think this is, and why hasn’t this happened to people like you and I?
Nick Hornby: Well, the major obstacle is kids. You lose maybe 19/20’s of your free time, and eventually, you lose control of the car stereo. You can’t go wandering about on a Saturday, browsing. You don’t have time to listen to your old music, let alone anything new, and if your friends are having kids too, then nobody is recommending much to you any more. My saving grace was first of all my job, and secondly the internet. Of course, writing is hard work and so on. But I do find myself with the odd, um, free patch during the day. When I first started writing full-time, I befriended the guy who ran our local CD store, and he had very similar tastes to mine, so he introduced me to loads of things. He closed down, like everyone else, but then I started investigating music on the web, and…well, there’s a lot of it, isn’t there? But I’m in an entirely privileged position. If I had an office job, or was still teaching, I’m sure I’d have stopped listening to so much new stuff. I try and keep the friends I have with proper jobs in the loop, by making them CDs, and making them buy stuff.
How has music helped to contribute or influence you in your writing?
NB: Music and writing are inextricably linked. What I hear is what I want to write. It’s pretty much as simple as that – music fuels it all.
What do you listen to when you’re writing? Is there a particular genre, band/artist, or record that provides a more effective soundtrack to facilitate your writing process?
NB: There isn’t one particular thing, and I don’t work while I’m actually writing anyway. I can’t listen to anything with words while I’m working, and just about everything I like has words. But sometimes a piece of music seems to have something that I’m after, tonally, and I play it a lot during the period that I’m writing. I wanted About A Boy to sound like REM’s “E-Bow The Letter,” for example. I’m not sure it does, or that anyone would be able to notice even if it did. But for some reason it helped me to write the book I wanted to write. And when I was writing A Long Way Down I listened over and over to bootleg versions of Springsteen’s Prove It All Night from the ‘78 tour.
You mentioned in Songbook that your severe lack of musical ability was one of the reasons why you went into writing instead of pursuing music. If you were suddenly blessed with the talent of, say, Dylan, would you wipe out all your past achievements in writing for a chance to pursue a music career?
NB: No, definitely not - unless you let me be 21 again at the same time. It’s a pretty good life, the writer’s life. And I think it’s much easier to sustain a career as a writer. I’m 52, and I have a complicated and expensive family, and the chances are that I’d have been finished as a musician at least a decade ago. And of course nobody knows how to make money out of music now anyway. My musician friends are all trying to switch careers.
You once said, “It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favourite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” Can you recount a past relationship where your music and film tastes “disagreed violently”, and how did it all end?
NB: Well, the truth is that conversations about tastes in culture become, in the end, conversations about all sorts of other things – like educational background, aspirations, and how much you have invested in the arts anyway. As I get older, I can see that waving these things during courtship around is a way of saying, “Hey, I’m OK – you could settle down with me.” If I listen to, I don’t know, Broken Social Scene, but she prefers Sonic Youth, then we’re not going to fall out. But if I’m into Broken Social Scene and she likes Susan Boyle, then we’re going to have problems. And those problems are going to be found in all sorts of areas, not just in our iTunes. I don’t think I could live with anyone who didn’t care about movies/books/films – and people who like SuBo do so because, actually, they don’t make their cultural life any kind of a priority. And that doesn’t make them bad people – just people I wouldn’t be able to make very happy. The chances are they’d prefer to be with someone who likes mountaineering. Or dogs.
How similar is your wife’s music/film tastes compared to your own?
NB: I think our tastes are very similar. She’s an independent movie producer, so she’s prepared to watch more movies than I am, simply out of professional curiosity. But we listen to more or less exactly the same sort of music. I’m the one who brings it into the house, though. She doesn’t really buy anything, and she chooses from within what I bring home.
What’s one band/artist you’ve introduced her to, and one that she’s introduced to you?
NB: The last thing she introduced me to, I think, was Laura Veirs.
One of the most shameful reasons why I am looking forward to eventually becoming a father is that I will be able to have some influence on my future son/daughter’s music tastes. What kind of bands/artists does your own son listen to and how much of a role did you play in shaping his music tastes?
NB: Ha! Well, good luck with that. That’s when you realize just how much music is about peer pressure. I have three sons. The oldest has autism, so he’s a different case – he can’t really choose his own. But the two little ones…They were fine with what I told them to like until they got to school. Then they realized that Dad’s tastes were redundant, because none of their friends had ever heard of anyone I liked. They watch X-Factor, our American Idol, and like just about everyone they see on it, at least in the final rounds. I have been able to play them the original versions of some of the songs they hear on the show, though. Last season, “Superstition” became a big favourite. You have no chance influencing your kids’ tastes. The whole point of listening to the stuff is actually to piss parents off. They don’t want to be approved of by you.
Just as the name suggests, My Liner Notes takes from the nostalgic art form of an LP’s liner notes, which can be found within the inner sleeves and inserts of dusty records and cassette tapes. The personal essays found on this blog contain anecdotal and factual material which celebrate the visceral and emotional connection we all share with music. These analytical, humorous, and often poignant opinion-editorials are always delivered with the kind of brutal honesty you can only expect from a music nerd.
