Songs about Books: And the First Book Is . . .

As Levi mentioned yesterday, he asked me to take part in his exciting new Songs about Books project. I interviewed the five musicians who volunteered for the job, and picked books for them to write songs about. For the next few days, I’m going to be unveiling my choices here on the BoW blog. I’m not going to talk specifically about why I made the connections I did—I’ve got to save something for the concert and CD publishing party in August—but I am briefly going to talk about my relationships to the books I chose.

The first interview I did for this project was with Alex Guy, who makes music as Led to Sea. She was an ideal first interviewee: Patient, funny, and willing to walk with me through the process of deliberation. We shared a pot of tea at Elliott Bay Book Company and talked about her prior experiences combining books with music (she used passages from Galeano’s suberb Book of Embraces as lyrics in a song not so very long ago). The decision for her book came to me first, and while my choices for all the other musicians changed at least twice during the selection process, I always knew the whole time that I was going to assign Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov to Alex.

I read all of Nabokov’s books about ten years ago now, starting with Lolita. (In order to make the books less intimidating to me, I had to scour Boston’s used bookstores to find mass-market paperback editions of every one of his novels; those editions—as pulpy and gaudy-looking as the dime-store science fiction novels I love so much—made his work more accessible to me somehow.) While Pale Fire isn’t my favorite of his (that would be Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle), I think it’s the one that resonated with me the most. I like novels that take the form of something else, and Pale Fire‘s narrative disguised as critical analysis speaks to me on what is probably an embarrassingly obvious level. Nabokov called Lolita the story of his love affair with the English language, but I think Pale Fire is the story of his love/hate relationship with the idea of language in general.

Asking Alex to take on Pale Fire, to add another layer of commentary to Nabokov’s already dense puzzle box of a book, is probably the toughest assignment I gave in this project. But she’s an avid reader and a strong lyricist and I know she’ll knock our socks off.