Miss Waiting

31 Songs...

"This book isn't predicated on you and me sharing the ability to hear exactly the same things; in other words, it isn't music criticism. All I'm hoping here is that you have equivalents, that you spend a lot of time listening to music and seeing faces in its fire."



1. Introduction
"Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From" by Teenage Fanclub

*If you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life.

*I don't listen to classical music or jazz very often, and when people ask me what music I like, I find it very difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and I can only give them song titles. And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.



2. "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen

*But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. And they don't do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated then that.

*When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or for worse. It's a process something like falling in love. You don't necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest, or the most beautiful; there's something else going on.



3. "I'm Like a Bird" by Nelly Furtado

*And anyway, I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room the other day, and four little Afro-Caribbean girls, patiently sitting out their mother's appointment, suddenly launched into Nelly Furtado's song. They were word perfect, and they had a couple of dance moves, and they sang with enormous appetite and glee, and I like it that we had something in common, temporarily; I felt as though we all lived in the same world, and that dosen't happen so often.

*A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe that there'll be another. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living.



8. "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" by Bob Dylan
9. "Rain" by The Beatles

*I regret never having heard any of the songs at the right age, in the right year.

*If you can hear Dylan and The Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak, but unmistakebly themselves in a way we haven't heard a thousand, a million times before, then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit, and it's as close as we'll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren't expecting them, or anything like them.



10. "You Had Time" by Ani DiFranco

*"You are very good food and I am full."



17. "A Minor Incident" by Badly Drawn Boy

*"You always were the one to make us stand in the crowd / Though every once in a while your head was in a cloud / There's nothing you could never do to ever let me down," sings Damon as Fiona, and the lines brought me up short. Autistic children are by their nature the dreamiest of kids, and Danny's ways of making us stand out in the crowd can include attempts to steal strangers' crisps and to get undressed on the top of a number 19 bus. But that peculiar negative in the last line... How did Badly Drawn Boy know that it's the things that Danny will never do (talk, read, play football, all sorts of stuff) that make those who love him feel the most fiercely proud and protective of him?

*That's where the excitement lies: in the magical coincidences and transferences of creativity. I write a book that isn't about my kid, and then someone writes a beautiful song based on an episode in my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did.

*But it's worth an awful lot, something money can't buy, and it makes me want to keep writing and collaborating, in the hope that something I write will strike this kind of dazzling, serendipitous spark off someone again.



19. "Caravan" by Van Morrison

*The magnificent version of "Caravan" on It's Too Late to Stop Now (Van Morrison's most enjoyable album, unarguably, so don't even think about arguing) sounds to me like it could be played over the closing credits of the best film you've ever seen; and if something sounds like that to you, then surely be extension it means that it could also be played at your own funeral.



20. "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Gregory Isaacs

*It's why I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part, and Danny's got it, too, of course, he has.



25. "Hey Self Defeater" by Mark Mulcahy

*Your old music cannot sustain you through a life, not if you're someone who listens to music every day, at every opportunity. You need input, because pop music is about freshness, about Nelly Furtado and the maddeningly memorable fourth track on a first album by a band you saw on a late-night TV show. And no, that fourth track is not good as anything on Pet Sounds or Blonde on Blonde or What's Going On, but when was the last time you played Pet Sounds? 

*If you're going to stick rigorously to the Greater Scheme diet, then it's Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds and Don Quixote and Moby-Dick for you, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Elliott Smith is my bag of peanuts, and Rahsaan Patterson my Ben & Jerry's; life would be inedible without them.

*The most depressing thing about chains is being confronted by the same books and DVDs and albums everywhere you go, the same bestseller lists, the same three-for-two offers.



28. "Royksopp's Night Out" by Royksopp

*But that's what happens now: pop music is everywhere. If you like a song, then so, almost certainly, will someone just like you who works on TV advertisements, or in movies, or who edits sports-highlights packages, or puts together complications for hotels, or chain stores, or airlines, of coffee shops. How is it possible to love or connect to music that is as omnipresent as carbon monoxide?