The four albums Nick Hornby would take to a desert island
Few authors have been able to capture the romanticism of music quite like Nick Hornby. High Fidelity may not be the most mind-expanding piece of literature by any stretch, but anyone who has spent way too much time in a record store talking about the beauty of music can resonate with at least a little bit of what he was trying to say. For all of the great music that Hornby has previously mentioned, his holy grail of records can be narrowed down to four eclectic albums.
It’s hard for someone like Hornby not to have a little of everything. Since one of his greatest novels is about people who have spent time in a record store, it’s not like he was going to have just one style and be a fairweather fan of everything else.
When asked by Pop Matters what albums he would hear for the rest of his life Hornby served up four classics from all walks of musical life, saying, “If I were to survive on a desert island: Al Green’s Greatest Hits, Horses by Patti Smith, The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen, the first Kate and Anna McGarrigle album (Kate & Anna McGarrigle)”.
Compared to everything else on the list, the first thing that really sticks out is Al Green. Whereas everyone else was a more lyrically driven affair dominated by rock music, Green’s melodies have provided the soundtrack to some of the most homely tracks of the last century. As much as Green may seem like a relic at times, no one with a straight face could ever turn down a song like ‘Let’s Stay Together’ or ‘Love and Happiness’ if they tried.
For any writer, every great song is only as good as its lyrics, and Patti Smith practically wrote the Bible on how to go against the grain on Horses. Whereas most artists still held onto the sounds of blues rock, Smith paired everything down to fundamental playing and walked away with some of the songs that served as the spearhead for the punk movement.
That’s not to say that Smith was a punk rocker. She was a poet first who chose music as her empty canvas, and hearing a song like ‘Birdland’ was enough to get people hooked. Smith may have represented the art style of 1970s New York City, but Springsteen was more concerned with what the people on the street were hearing.
The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle may have come just before his landmark album Born to Run, but the way he sprawls out across every song comes from a man who just sees the song as a vehicle for his stories. As much as ‘Born to Run’ may be cut and dry, a song like ‘Rosalita’ or ‘Kitty’s Back’ does a lot better to set the scene, being much more intense drama than ‘Born to Run’s feel-good underdog story.
As for Kate and Anna McGarrigle, this might be one of the more writer-inclined picks on this list. Since half of the album is drenched with country and Americana traditions (despite them being from Canada), the songs are actually much more to the point than what their 1970s contemporaries were doing. Bob Dylan didn’t care for how long a song was, but every song on here is done quickly and to the point, telling stories that are incredibly complicated with a runtime anyone can appreciate.
If anything, all of these records point to the kind of person that you’re dealing with whenever you read any of Hornby’s work. Some may ramble, and some may be fairly straightforward, but the importance is always about telling the story rather than trying to write something by the numbers.