FEATURE:
Long Players: Writers on the Albums That Shaped Them
IMAGE CREDIT: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Tom Gatti’s Revealing and Insightful New Book
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IT is not often that I focus on a book…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bernardine Evaristo/ PHOTO CREDIT: David Levenson/Getty Images
but a fascinating new release arrived on Thursday. There are a lot of books dedicated to great albums and why they are so important. We do not often read about albums that are important towriters. I think that every album affects people differently, though it is interesting learning why different people have different reactions. Tom Gatti has released Long Players: Writers on the Albums That Shaped Them. As the title suggests, it is a book where a series of writers discuss why particular albums are important to them. It is a book that every music lover should have on their shelf. Waterstones tell us a bit more:
“From Bernardine Evaristo to Neil Gaiman, fifty of our finest writers divulge their favourite album and the story behind their adoration in this addictive love letter to the power of music.
Our favourite albums are our most faithful companions: we listen to them hundreds of times over decades, we know them far better than any novel or film. These records don't just soundtrack our lives but work their way deep inside us, shaping our outlook and identity, forging our friendships and charting our love affairs. They become part of our story.
In Long Players, fifty of our finest authors write about the albums that changed their lives, from Deborah Levy on Bowie to Daisy Johnson on Lizzo, Ben Okri on Miles Davis to David Mitchell on Joni Mitchell, Sarah Perry on Rachmaninov to Bernardine Evaristo on Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Part meditation on the album form and part candid self-portrait, each of these miniature essays reveals music's power to transport the listener to a particular time and place. REM's Automatic for the People sends Olivia Laing back to first love and heartbreak, Bjork's Post resolves a crisis of faith and sexuality for a young Marlon James, while Fragile by Yes instils in George Saunders the confidence to take his own creative path.
This collection is an intoxicating mix of memoir and music writing, spanning the golden age of vinyl and the streaming era, and showing how a single LP can shape a writer's mind.
Featuring writing from Ali Smith, Marlon James, Deborah Levy, George Saunders, Bernardine Evaristo, Ian Rankin, Tracey Thorn, Ben Okri, Sarah Perry, Neil Tennant, Rachel Kushner, Clive James, Eimear McBride, Neil Gaiman, Daisy Johnson, David Mitchell, Esi Edugyan, Patricia Lockwood, among many others”.
There is a connection between the world of literature and music. I feel a lot of artists are inspired by literature and books. Writers, in return, take influence and motivation from music. Gatti’s book brings together authors and songwriters to get their take on particular albums. Not only does it provide us with fresh perspectives on well-known albums. There are going to be albums mentioned that many of us have not heard. That fresh discovery is so rewarding for the reader. As much as I love hearing authors speaking about albums and why they are loved, having a collection of testimonies Long Players: Writers on the Albums That Shaped Them provides a different angle.
It is no surprise that Gatti’s tome is already accruing some positive reviews. I have ordered the book and feel like it will compel other authors to embark on similar projects. In their review, The Guardian observed the following:
“Perhaps unsurprisingly it turns out that writers tend to value literary effects and skills, and to draw literary comparisons. Deborah Levy, who chose Ziggy Stardust, calls Bowie a “great writer” who has influenced her “more than Tolstoy ever will do”. Sarah Hall compares Radiohead’s OK Computer to “a great short-story collection” and Musa Okwonga loves Outkast’s Aquemini as he loves “the collected short stories of Kurt Vonnegut – every time I return to both works, I find some new way of looking at the human condition”. In less celebratory mode Daljit Nagra links Morrissey – “grudgingly” via the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder and the 80s yobs who smashed his parents’ shop windows and painted the shutters with racist slurs - to Philip Larkin. “Like Larkin, I’d have Morrissey leave the limelight, so I can love the best work before he smashes the shopfront of his own great tenderness.”
The entries can be just a few hundred words long – some of them began life as a column in the New Statesman where Gatti is deputy editor – but throw up some vividly disparate autobiographical vignettes. In the mid 80s the teenage David Mitchell, who’d “never been in love, much less fallen out of it”, first heard Joni Mitchell’s “raw autobiography” of California heartbreak, Blue, on his Walkman while wandering around his hometown of Malvern. His encounter with the great and dark Christmas breakup song “River” came on a June day “halfway across the golf course”.
Around the same time Will Self was in a cavernous flat off the Cromwell Road in west London “with a needle stuck in my arm, the barrel of the syringe full of blood” as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks “strummed his heart strings”. The poet Will Harris recalls how his father once made him “sit through the eight-minute album version of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’” which, very indirectly, led him to Warren G’s Regulate ... G Funk Era.
Taken as a whole, the collection’s many observations and angles amount to a richly textured snapshot survey of artists on art. And at their best the pieces reveal something useful about the writer, the music, the world at large and the world at that moment. For Linda Grant, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira clearly laid out “the great paradox of 70s feminism”, the desire for independence from men and also for a “love that sticks around”. It also crystallised the strange and powerful relationship between the listener and the artist: “I never saw her perform live. I don’t want to. I’ve no interest in sharing her with total strangers because none of this is about her, it’s about me”.
Long Players: Writers on the Albums That Shaped Them is a really immersive and compelling book that gives us some very personal takes on particular albums. It has made me think more carefully and personally about particular albums. Normally, I listen to albums and do not really consider why they mean a lot to me. If we all think about it, our favourite albums are so loved because they affect us in a specific way – or they are attached to special memories. Given the great reviews that many have afforded Long Players: Writers on the Albums That Shaped Them, there will be plenty of demand for…
A sequel.