SOUND BITES
Listening party for `High Fidelity' scribe
By Jim Sullivan, Globe Staff, 11/6/2003
Nick Hornby, author of "High Fidelity," "About a Boy" and "How to be Good," was once heralded in the New Yorker as "maestro of the male confessional." Hornby, in return, loves the New Yorker, but as the magazine's occasional rock critic, he found it hard to live with. He quit the job "because of the endless editing and fact-checking," things he admits make the magazine a great read. Speaking from his home in London, which is five hours ahead of New York, he says the tireless fact-checkers rung him up repeatedly, at night, to verify such things as lyrics quoted in a piece. He'd end up holding the telephone up to a loudspeaker so they could listen for themselves.
Currently Hornby, who will speak at the First Parish Church in Cambridge on Tuesday, is working on two screenplays. One of which is an adaptation of Dave Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." The other is a romantic comedy he's cowriting with Emma Thompson.
He's also halfway through a novel, of which all he'll say is "it has four main characters of different ages, from their 20s to 50s, who come together for a reason and go different places."
He's reticent to discuss a work in progress. It can come out quite differently than imagined, he says. "I hear this stuff coming out of my mouth and it seems so dumb. It started with `High Fidelity.' I'd tell people what it was about: `Well, this guy works in a record store and he splits up with his girlfriend. . .' And they'd just look at me. I'm going to shut up from now on."
At Cambridge, Hornby will read from "Songbook," 31 essays about songs that matter to him, from Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" to the J. Geils Band's version of "First I Look at the Purse," from Van Morrison's "Caravan" (which Hornby envisions being played at his own funeral) to Dury & the Blockheads' "Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3."
There are times when even the most ardent pop music fans think, somewhat guiltily, well, it's just pop music, after all.
Not Hornby. He brings exuberance and gravitas to explaining its importance in his and others' lives, something that comes through in "High Fidelity," the book that became a movie starring John Cusack and Jack Black.
For Hornby, 46, pop still matters. "It seems so fractured now. You can always find some corner of it that's going to accommodate you. I'm not running out of new things to listen to, but my tastes don't coincide with a 16-year-old's. It's taken a different form than from when we were kids. I feel lucky to have gone through punk. Even though I don't listen to it any more, I was the right age for it.
"The quest for a new great song, I can't ever imagine that leaving me," he says. "When our parents said we'd grow out of it, I don't think anyone could anticipate the way that pop music would grow old and the sophisticated artist would be able to talk about their middle age and eventually their old age, that there would be whole generations that would go through with pop music, the Dylans and Neil Youngs that paved the way, then the Springsteens and next generations down. Whatever you think of Springsteeen, he's not a revival act."
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
