picture window - ben folds & nick hornby

I've been thinking about starting a music blog for awhile now. I really like talking about songs; where I first heard them, what they mean to me, why I love (or hate) them. I tried doing this facebook thing a few months back where you post a song every day for a month in response to the criteria they give you - stuff like a song that describes you, a song from your childhood, a song you want at your funeral - but I found the categories cliched and boring. I tried making up my own, but lost motivation pretty quickly.

My idea for this blog came from Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs. (Incidentally, Nick Hornby is one of my all time favourite authors. I first realised how brilliant he was when I was reading High Fidelity at the age of 17 or 18 and noticed myself feeling an affinity with the main character, a 30-something year old male rehashing his sexual history in an attempt to decide whether to settle down with his current girlfriend.) Basically, 31 Songs is just Hornby talking about songs that've meant something to him. It's less about the songs and more about the stories. (I wish I had it here to quote, but I lent the copy I nicked from my parents to a friend.) So that's kind of what I want to do here, although unlike Hornby, I am a musician, so a little more musical analysis is bound to creep in. I can't remember if there's any significance the number 31, but I'm not awarding it any. If I get to 31 - great. If not - these things happen.

I'd never really listened to much Ben Folds before reading 31 Songs. I knew Brick and Rockin' the Suburbs from the radio, and I had a few others collected off various mix CDs people had made me. But that was about it. Anyway, Hornby talks about the song Smoke, and I loved the lyrics so much I went and got myself acquainted with a bunch of Ben Folds' music.

I decided Picture Window was an appropriate choice for this first post because it too was born of Smoke's inclusion in 31 Songs. It's from an album for which Hornby wrote the lyrics and Folds wrote the music. And I'm pretty sure 31 Songs was the reason they decided to collaborate. And it's my favourite track from the album. And that's the whole story. The next one will be more profound, I promise.