Category: Books

How to Write One Song, by Jeff Tweedy (Dutton, 159 pages)

Of all the implausible goals on my bucket list, writing a song is not one of them. Although I possess both a guitar and a piano, and regularly abuse a vintage iPod, I have always been a consumer of music, not a creator, and it never even crossed my mind to try birthing a song. I’ll venture to say that’s probably true of you, too.

So Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song should have no value to people like us, but as it turns out, the book is a quirky little pep talk that’s more about creativity in general than about songwriting in specific. Imagine Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) or Steven Pressfield (The War of Art) in a cowboy hat. Like these creativity coaches, Tweedy proposes to wrest people from tedium — of jobs, lives, dinner choices — by inviting a daily visit from the muse. But he believes that anyone can write a song that is meaningful to them, even without music education or even owning an instrument.

Tweedy, recently described in Rolling Stone magazine as “one of today’s greatest songwriters,” leads the Grammy-winning rock band Wilco and was co-founder of the group Uncle Tupelo. He begins with an interesting assessment of how songs differ from other art forms, like novels or paintings. “They’re hard to hold on to — airlike and ephemeral. They pass through time. They’re here, then gone … Yet they’re portable, they can linger as a memory, and even crazier, they can just pop into our minds for no discernable reason.”

If people think at all about the craft of songwriting, Tweedy says, they’re likely to assume that songs are conjured, not written. He concedes that there is some sort of partnership between the conscious mind and the unconscious, but doesn’t subscribe to the magical “the universe gave me this work, I am but a lowly conduit” mindset. Instead his is a practical method that benefits from timers, schedules and, amusingly, theft.

“Everyone who you could possibly steal from at this point in human evolution is a thief. Even innovators seemingly without any historical precedence are found to be building on someone else’s foundation, upon deeper investigation,” Tweedy writes.

That doesn’t mean he endorses presenting someone else’s work as your own, but seeing the work of others in the context of a “shared ability to create,” and thus allowing for inspiration and integration into your own work. “I believe that writing your own lyrics to an existent melody is a damn fine thing to do if you don’t have much of handle on the music side of things and you really need to get something off your chest in song.”

In fact, one of his suggested exercises is to steal words from a book. Think of a melody, and then “Open up a book anywhere, any page, and keep humming the melody to yourself as you scan. Don’t really try to comprehend what you’re reading; just let your mind skim over the surface of the words on the page and focus your attention on the melody.”

The goal is to capture ideas without the control of the ego, to connect with an “anchor word” from which inspiration flows. Tweedy says that he used this process when writing Wilco’s song “Hummingbird,” conceived with an assist from Henry Miller’s Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. (That’s a nice example of how “theft” doesn’t have to be a crime.)

Simple and folksy, How to Write One Song does not attempt to be more than what it is, a conversation between someone who knows how to write songs and people who don’t. There may not be any great gems of insight here, but there are pebbles of smart, such as Tweedy’s insistence that, to truly succeed at any form of art, the process has to be the goal, not the success of the work, or even the work itself.

In other words, if you want to write a song in order to make money and win a Grammy, you will most likely be emotionally crushed. If you, instead, decide that writing a song is a worthy goal in itself, that the act of creating it has benefits (which Tweedy believes), then you win every time you sit down with a timer and work on your song (or painting or poem) for five minutes. That you win every day when you do it for nothing more than the love of the work.

“There’s just a lot of joy in it, in having created something at all. I don’t feel as bad about other things. I don’t necessarily feel high, or overly joyed. I just feel like, ‘Oh, I’m not wasting my time.’”

But what if we are wasting our time? It’s easy to think that if we are creating things that don’t net us money or recognition. Tweedy says we have to mentally return to childhood, when we hunched over a Crayola masterpiece for an hour and were so proud of what we produced, despite its actual artistic worth. “The drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everyone loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?”

He goes on: “That’s one of the problems with humans — that we can be talked out of loving something. That we can be talked out of loving something that we do, and we can be talked out of loving ourselves. Easily, unfortunately.”

Will you write a song after reading this book? Maybe not, but it’s still worth the small investment of time, and if nothing else, maybe you’ll resume coloring on the floor, a joyful activity that Tweedy himself would endorse. B

BOOK NOTES
Since songwriting is, well, writing, it’s a natural progression for musicians to write books, too. Whether they’re readable is another story.
Anything by country music superstar Dolly Parton, however, seems a safe bet. She’s out this week with Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, written with an assist from music journalist Robert K. Oermann (Chronicle, 388 pages). The publisher promises that fans will learn the origin stories of Parton classics such as “Jolene,” “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You,” as well as more than 170 other songs that Parton has written.
If you have a Parton fan on your Christmas list, pair this with a “A Holly Dolly Christmas” CD and you’re done.
But Thanksgiving stands between us and Christmas, so more pertinent to your life this week may be The Book on Pie: Everything You Need to Know to Bake Perfect Pies by Erin Jeanne McDowell, with photos by Mark Weinberg (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pages).
McDowell, the author of 2017’s The Fearless Baker and a host on Food Network Kitchen, believes that pie of any kind is perfectly acceptable fare for breakfast, which seems reason enough to buy this book. In it, she walks novices through crust-making (she prefers butter to Crisco and lard), and offers her own recipes on classics like apple pie, entrees such as chicken pot pie, and dozens of creative variations such as striped citrus pie, watermelon pie, triple chocolate caramel truffle pie and pina colada pie. Your socially distanced relatives and friends will thank you for reading this book.
Also, fans of Hallmark holiday movies (I don’t understand you, but I know you exist) will want to pick up the clunkily titled Hallmark Channel Countdown to Christmas: Have a Very Merry Movie Holiday (Hearst Home, 224 pages). Author Caroline McKenzie offers recipes and decorating tips from “stars, screenwriters, set designers, costume designers, and directors who create the movie magic.”
In other TV-inspired holiday fare, check out The Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook (Weldon Owen, 240 pages) by Regula Ysewijn. “Now you can eat like an aristocrat,” a review in Delish promises, evidence of yet another wide divide in America: the Downton Abbey stans versus the Hallmark Christmas movie peeps.

Featured photo: How to Write One Song

Squeeze Me, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, 336 pages)

This year has already seen the publication of one clever novel about the weirdness of the Sunshine State (Florida Man by Tom Cooper) and another that was a satirical takedown of the Trump presidency (Make Russia Great Again, by Christopher Buckley). Did we really need another that combines the finer points of the two?

Why, yes, it turns out that we did. Carl Hiaasen, a Miami Herald columnist who also finds time to crank out books every other year or so, offers balm for the post-election brain in Squeeze Me, a satirical novel that takes a well-worn premise (a political cover-up) and makes it glorious. The fact that it takes place in the second term of the presidency of a man the Secret Service code-named Mastodon should not be a deterrent to anyone except for die-hard Trump supporters born without a funny bone.

The novel begins with a Palm Beach socialite gone missing during a charity gala. Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, whose wealth derived from marrying well twice, spent a lot of time at events benefiting second-tier diseases. (The current one, the White Ibis Ball, is a fundraiser for “a group globally committed to defeating Irritable Bowel Syndrome.) She has the sort of friends who object to her being listed missing through a “Silver Alert” for seniors. “Isn’t there a premium version for people like us? A Platinum Alert, something like that?”

Like many of her friends, Kiki Pew’s lineage can be described simply from whence her money came, i.e, “the antifreeze and real-estate Cornbrights”; and the “asbestos and textile Fitzsimmonses.” It is the sort of sly detail that makes Squeeze Me so delectable, savage and mocking yet never coming off as mean.

Kiki Pew, in addition to raising money for various causes, is an ardent supporter of a president who is “white, old and scornful of social reforms.” So are her friends.

“Often they were invited to dine at Casa Bellicosa, the Winter White House, while the President was in residence. He always made a point of waving from the buffet line or pastry table.”

Unfortunately, Kiki Pew, fascinating a character as she is, is with us only for a short time, as what happened to her sets up the cover-up that consumes the bulk of the novel. The unsettling manner of Kiki’s death was not good for business at the Lipid House, the place where she was last seen. But, rewritten, it could be very good for the president.

So a plot is hatched to blame her disappearance on a 25-year-old man from Honduras named Diego Beltran, who was arriving on the shore of Palm Beach via a smuggler’s boat the same night at the White Ibis Ball. And the president seizes the opportunity to suggest that her “brutal murder” was an act of “political terrorism” aimed at his administration. At her funeral at Cape Cod (“Winter residents of Palm Beach inevitably return north forever, either in caskets or urns”), she is eulogized by the vice president as a “martyred patriot.” A rallying cry is soon heard across the country: No more Diegos!

There is a monkey wrench in this plan, which is that there are people who do know what happened to Kiki Pew, most significantly, Angie Armstrong, who runs a nuisance-wildlife removal business. From alligators to coyotes to possums, Armstrong wrangles them all, releasing them in the wild when possible, burying them when it’s not. (Again, demonstrating Hiaasen’s wicked mastery of blending real life with comic fiction, in one memorable scene she snares a bobcat hunched on a Peloton bike like Grace in Boston.)

Baked into this Wag-the-Doggish story is an affair the first lady (code name Mockingbird) is having with a Secret Service agent.

Hiassen is a longtime writer of humor, but this book is an extraordinary accomplishment, given a personal tragedy. His brother, Rob Hiaasen, was one of the journalists killed by a gunman in a newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018. The book is dedicated to him. It’s good that he has retained a sense of humor in the wake of loss like that. (Side note: A novel that Rob Hiaasen had worked on for years was published after his death. All proceeds from Float Plan go to a group called Everytown for Gun Safety.)

As the election fades into memory — if the election fades into memory — we may all be a little hung over, needing just a we fix of politics before returning to what resembles real life. Squeeze Me will get you over the hump. A

BOOK NOTES
You don’t have to have been a supporter of Barack Obama to be dazzled by the recent video clip of him effortlessly swishing a basketball through a hoop in Michigan while on a campaign stop with Joe Biden.

Say what you want about his politics, but the former president is cool. Which reminded me of a 2018 book, Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents, (Little, Brown & Co., 240 pages). The author is Pete Sousa, who was the official White House photographer for the entire eight years of Obama’s administration. His book juxtaposes photos of Obama with tweets, articles and headlines about and by Trump, and is predictably devastating but also smart and entertaining. It is definitely not for Trump fans, but if you know someone who still has an Obama/Biden bumper sticker on their car (I still come across them), this would be the perfect Christmas gift, paired with Obama’s new memoir.

Shade was released in paperback last fall, but this is the type of book better in hardcover.

What we all should be reading for the next few weeks are books about the Electoral College in anticipation of the events of Dec. 14, but who can stomach that?

Better: Humorist David Sedaris has a new collection of previously published work: The Best of Me (Little, Brown & Co., 400 pages).

But if you are bent on staying up with the news, these are two salient books that should be read together: Why We Need the Electoral College by Tara Ross (Gateway Editions, 320 pages) and Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman (St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages).

Incredibly, there are two other books about the Electoral College that were published this year: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar (Harvard University Press, 544 pages); Presidential Elections and Majority Rule, the Rise, Demise, and Potential Restoration of the Jeffersonian Electoral College by Edward B. Foley (Oxford University Press, 256 pages).|

Don’t ever let anyone tell you traditional publishing is dead.

Featured photo: Squeeze Me

Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, 241 pages)

To be human in the 21st century, at least in the comfortable, fleece-lined pockets of the first world, is to suffer a palpable loss: the constant, energizing churn of adrenaline.

It was the consolation prize when we were booted out of Eden, the furious cycle of tension and release that the brain comes to crave when fight or flight is no longer a choice that dictates survival, but more like an aftertaste of road rage. We miss this adrenaline. Its loss helps to explain our fondness for a genre best explained as “apocalypse wow.”

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind belongs in that genre like Moby-Dick belongs in the genre of animal books, which is to say that it’s technically correct to shelve it there, but that would be an insult to the novel’s grandeur.

Alam has produced a marvelously taut and suspenseful story of two families thrown together as an unspecified calamity unfolds. It flirts with many contemporary themes — racism, climate change, disease, even over-reliance on technology — but not preachily or self-consciously so. At its heart throbs a sophisticated thriller, understated in its telling, which makes the punch it delivers all the more satisfying.

Amanda and Clay are an unremarkable couple: parents of a 13-year-old girl and 15-year-old boy. Amanda is an advertising executive whose reliable thrill is feeling needed on her job; Clay is a professor at a New York City college. When they’re together, he drives the car, “not so new as to be luxurious nor so old as to be bohemian.” They’re the Griswolds, better educated, without the hijinks.

We meet the family en route to a week’s vacation in a secluded Long Island house they rented from Airbnb. (“Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind,” the listing enticed.)

The house has a pool and is near the ocean; Amanda and Clay have no greater ambition for their vacation than to spend time together before their young teens descend into constant disdain.

It is a testament to Alam’s gorgeous writing that we don’t abandon the couple before their first night in the home, such is their level of ordinariness and the depths to which we are exposed to it. Case in point: Nearly half of Chapter 3 is essentially a shopping list, things that Amanda bought at the supermarket. (“She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black.”)

There is rich detail, however, in the recitation of locally made pickles and unsliced hard salami, and Alam does not trade in superfluous words. It’s rare that he even indulges in concluding dialogue with “said.” By the time Amanda and Clay are startled by an unexpected knock at the door on their second night at the home, we are vaguely fond of them and their well-behaved offspring.

At the knock, Amanda reacts as many mothers unacquainted with firearms would, saying to her husband, “Get a bat.”

Her husband, amiable and clueless, first thinks of a flying mammal. “He understood then, but, where would he get a bat? When had he last held a bat? Did they even have a baseball bat at home, and if they did, had they brought it on vacation?”

The couple finally quiet their alarm enough to open the door to a handsome, well-dressed couple in their 60s, apologetic but quietly insistent on coming in. They explain they are the owners of the home (Amanda had only corresponded with a man using the initials GHW in his email address), and that there has been a widespread power outage in New York and they had nowhere else to go. They are hoping to stay in a basement suite until the next day when they can figure out what has happened and what to do.

There is another detail here, which is that Amanda and Clay are white; the couple at the door, GH and Ruth, are Black. While Amanda and Clay are not overtly racist, there is present the innate fear of “otherness,” the biological impulse that drives tribalism in our constant search for safety.

There is also the heightened sensitivity of parents, whose No. 1 task is to keep their offspring alive. Alam, himself a father, understands this, writing of Clay, “Sometimes, looking at his family, he was flooded with this desire to do for them. I’ll build you a house or knit you a sweater, whatever is required. Pursued by wolves? I’ll make a bridge of my body so you can cross that ravine.”

Amanda and Clay struggle with how to respond to the unusual request, the genesis of which is unconfirmable because the internet and phones are no longer working. It is the first of many encounters in which Alam poses a silent question to the reader: What would you do?

As the story unfolds, the stakes take on a quiet urgency. Something is off in the world right now; that’s clear from the strange behavior of animals, the arrival of unwanted guests, and the disappearance of cell service.

But Amanda and Clay can’t get an answer without leaving the seemingly safe confines of the house, which may seem the obvious thing to do, except for not having GPS, not knowing anything about the area, and not knowing whether there is electricity, gas or even safety beyond the borders of the property. But they’re also not sure if they’re safe at the house, or what sort of catastrophe caused Amanda’s phone to send four breaking news headlines, the last one of which ended with garbled letters.

Leave the World Behind could be an apocalyptic thriller, or a mystery, or a study in unfounded alarm. Its true genre is not revealed until the final pages. A story that simmers long and eventually boils, it is a delightful respite in a year in which we all long to forget the world, at least for the duration of a book. A+

BOOK NOTES
The biggest publishing event of 2020, we’re told, is the forthcoming memoir of former President Barack Obama. The first of two volumes, A Promised Land, published by Crown, comes out Nov. 17 and is said to be 768 pages. Its website, obamabook.com, promises “a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy.”

While there are no doubt many Americans who are interested in a lengthy, historical treatise on the presidency, it’s unclear whether we’re up for this so soon after an exhausting election.

For anyone who prefers to forget about politics altogether for a while, there is the genre called “speculative fiction,” loosely defined as fantastical writing that transcends reality, science fiction included. (Another way to describe it in two words is “Ray Bradbury.”)

One forthcoming book that is getting some buzz is The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco, 320 pages), which the publisher says is about “what happens when much of what we take for granted — cars, guns, computers and airplanes, for starters — quits working.” It’s set in rural Maine, so extra appeal for New Englanders, and will be released Nov. 10.

Another new title set in New England is Peter Heller’s The Orchard (Scribd Originals, 199 pages). It’s billed as a suspenseful coming-of-age story that takes place in Vermont’s Green Mountains. Curiously, it’s only available on Kindle. For a compelling physical book by the author, check out his 2012 novel, The Dog Stars, chillingly set in a world in which a flu pandemic has killed off much of the population. (Knopf, 336 pages.)

Also out this month is a new Stephanie Plum novel from Janet Evanovich. Fortune and Glory (Atria, 320 pages) is categorized as both humorous fiction and a crime thriller.

Featured photo: Leave the World Behind