The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce

From the author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queen Hennessy, I was happy to discover a new novel.  I loved the way Rachel Joyce brought together such unlikely combinations of characters. The Music Shop is no exception.

The story is set in a neighborhood in a declining section of London as the streets up and down the street are being forced to close their doors, some selling out to pushy developers. In 1988, Frank, the owner of a music store, refuses to give in to music trends. He has resisted cassette tapes and now refuses to add CDs, to the dismay of the music sales reps. Frank loves vinyl. He also has a gift for matching up just the right music for each customer--part retailer, part counselor.  He has a listening area set up in a repurposed piece of furniture. He employs an accident prone young sales assistant, and he interacts with the neighboring business owners--twin brothers running the family funeral business, a former priest selling (only occasionally) religious icons and bookmarks, and an eccentric female tattoo artist with a not-so-hidden attraction to Frank.

Resistant to love, Frank's life changes when a lovely woman in green passes out just outside his store--and then disappears. Claiming ignorance on the topic, she pays Frank to give her lessons in music outside of store hours. The only obstacle is her fiancé.

Joyce also develops the back story of Frank's childhood, the son of a quirky single mother, negligent at best. Readers learn his mother is the reason he can't bear to hear "The  Hallelujah Chorus."

The Music Shop may not be the stuff of literature classes, but it is a fun reading experience--especially for music lovers--with a nice love story. As an added bonus, the author provides a play list on Spotify: bit.ly/TheMusicShopPlaylist.  Who doesn't love a playlist that ranges from Chopin and Handel to "Stairway to Heaven" and Aretha Franklin?

The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce

Johnny's Cash & Charley's Pride: Peter Cooper's stories of Music City Legends

One of my biggest challenges in keeping up posts on what I'm reading is that sometimes the book I have just finished insists on jumping to the front of the line. I had a busy reading month in April, and I have several books I still plan to introduce here. This week, though, I went to Parnassus Books to hear Peter Cooper read from his new book Johnny's Cash & Charley's Pride.

Cooper was the music writer for the Tennessean for a long time, which gave him the opportunity to meet and interview so  many legends of country music.  He's also a singer-songwriter and, as I learned this week, he's quite a storyteller.

Of course, the book covers the best known figures of country music--Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard--but he also shares great stories about "Cowboy" Jack Clement, Don Light, Jimmy Martin, and even Ann Soyars, who took up money at the door of the Station Inn for years.  Best of all, he gives a glimpse into the way the lives of the famous and not-yet-famous intertwined with those who were not famous at all. 

This is one of those rare books that sets the synapses jumping in my brain, reminding me of my own stories and of the music that's been playing since I was sixteen, maybe younger. After the book event, I started building a playlist, and as I read, it grew and grew--favorite songs, great music I hadn't discovered yet, some music I have in vinyl but not in any more updated format. I'm listening to Loretta Lynn and Waylon Jennings, Lee Ann Womack, and Irene Kelly, Chris Stapleton, and of course Kris Kristofferson.

Now that I've sped through the book, I can't decide whether to share it with a friend first or to start back over and read through one more time. It's that much fun.

Johnny's Cash & Charley's Pride: Peter Cooper's stories of Music City Legends

The Downside to eBooks

I have been an unapologetic owner of the Sony eReader for two years now, often having to defend the technology against my beloved low tech reader, the book. This Christmas, I saw more and more of my reading friends becoming proud owners of Kindles, Nooks, and the like. Most are enthusiastic.

I just figured out the downside, though. Short of lending my reader, I can't share my books. I've always participated in that highest form of theft--book borrowing and lending. I dare say I could match the books on my shelves that belong to others against those of mine that have likewise wandered off. It's a bittersweet loss. I most love to share with a friend a book that I've loved, then to have it return--along with the opportunity to talk about it.

Now I find that when I recommend a book, someone will no doubt ask to borrow it when I'm finished, and I have to admit I only have the electronic copy. The phenomenon is not limited to reading, of course. Now that we all have such quick and easy access to iTunes, no one borrows CDs anymore. I can only imagine what will happen when the technology advances and my reader (and iPod) are obsolete. Will I have a gap in my shelves--books and music? As a woman who still listens to her record albums and revisits favorite old books, I certainly hope not.

The Downside to eBooks

Flashbacks

At the beginning of a semester, I attended a staff development session about the different generations in America--ranging from the Veterans (my parents' generation) to Baby Boomers (me) then the Gen X-ers (my baby sister and my daughter) and the Milliennials (my younger son and my current students--at least the ones of traditional college age.) The sociologists may question the dividing lines and cut-off dates, but the descriptors intrigued me. The implications for faculty made up of about 3/4 Baby Boomers teaching Millenials were challenging, to say the least.

This past week, my husband and I went to Charlotte, NC, with another couple to see the Eagles in concert (not the Philadelphia football team). I had last seen them live in 1975, standing in my chair on the second row in Nashville, TN, for most of the show. While I was looking forward to the show, I was overwhelmed by the performance.

I'll admit, Glen Frey, Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy Smith, members from the seventies, looked older--no surprise--and wore black suits, white shirts, and black ties, almost an early Beatles look. The one thing that hadn't changed was the quality of their voices. They put on an almost-three-hour show and sang both their old songs from their Grammy-nominated (as they continued to remind us) album Long Way to Eden to their classics--"Peaceful, Easy Feeling," "Life in the Fast Lane," "Hotel California." The tight harmony and the instrumental versatility of the band showed them to be more than fluff.

Going into the arena, I accurately predicted the encore songs: "Desperado" and "Take It Easy." While the audience was packed with all age groups, we Boomers were in the majority. We knew all the words and got all the jokes. For those three hours, we were transported to our college days--"Lying Eyes," "Take It to the Limit," and "Witchy Woman."

In fact, the Eagles spent some time in my hometown back when I was in high school. At the time, the Muscle Shoals Sound drew all the great recording artists--the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, Joe Cocker, and Kris Kristofferson, to name a few. My best friend Debbie somehow ran into the Eagles while they were in town and ended up driving them to buy socks. They gave her a set of drumsticks. Back then we were exposed to so many big musicians that we at least pretended not to be fazed by them.

I realized during the concert that we had such great lyricists writing "our music." I wonder how much the switch from albums to CDs has affected the literacy level of liner notes. Now that most people just download their music, I wonder if we'll lose that quirky little genre. If I were younger (i.e., my eyes were better), I might be able to peruse the CD liners notes more easily. Now I need a magnifying glass. I've noticed that many don't even print the lyrics of the songs, much less other clever text.

During the concert, I recalled the first year I taught high school when some of my students had the lyrics from an Eagle song --I think it was "Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?"--and were trying to trace the literary allusions. And it wasn't an English class assignment. I hope that urge hasn't disappeared. After all, our best songwriters are some of the poets of our day, letting us create our own music videos in our heads.

Flashbacks