Songs that changed me: a soundtrack to my life

Good morning everyone, I hope it’s sunny where you are. It’s beautiful here today, which is kind of torture at the same time because I really cannot revise in the sun – I just go to sleep – so I’m sitting at my desk, by my window, looking longingly outside. But hopefully it’ll all be worth it in the end, and I’ll be able to write a stunning answer in my exam on Wednesday. Here’s to hoping.

Anyway, due to the constraints of revision I haven’t finished Oliver Twist yet so I can’t give you a review – although I am really enjoying it so far. But yesterday in I (the 30p sister paper of The Independent) there was a piece where a load of musicians talked about songs that had changed them or were really important to them in some way, so I thought I’d write a little bit about songs that are important to me. Most of theirs seemed to be focused around songs that made them decide to be musicians or first turned them on to music in the first place. Obviously none of my songs are going to be important in that sense, but the more I thought about it the more I thought of songs that have achieved something of an iconic status in my mind. So here, in no particular order, is the soundtrack to my life – enjoy!

“Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers

This is my favourite song in the world, bar none. Nothing can beat it. A lot of my childhood memories are of being in the car, driving out for tea or to the beach or swimming lessons or whatever and my Dad playing some random CD, and I think this is where I first heard this song. Even though it’s so sad, it’s so beautiful, and Bill Withers’ voice is like heaven. It doesn’t matter how many times I hear it, I’ll never get bored.

“Blue Skies” by Noah and the Whale

You know how people say that sometimes something is going on in their lives, and one day they switch on the radio or the CD player and a song comes on that feels like it’s been written just for you at that very moment, like the artist has stepped out of the speaker, sat down beside you and told you something you really needed to hear. Well, this is the only song that has ever done that to me. It was about a year and a half ago. I’d just started my gap year, at a job I was finding it difficult to find my niche in. All my friends bar two had gone off to university and for the most part were having fabulous times. I was starting the long, arduous and unexpectedly traumatic process of applying to university. And I was very freshly single. Life, in short, sucked. I was crying all the time, in that kind of way people do when they aren’t even aware that they’re crying anymore, they just kind of leak from the eyes (to borrow a phrase from an old friend). My sister was keeping watch over me at my other job lest I had some kind of breakdown over the customers. And then one day, for no particular reason, I bought The First Days of Spring album by Noah and the Whale, and was playing it in my room when this song came on. And suddenly, it was like Charlie Fink was whispering in my ear (in a non-creepy way, obviously) and saying that I couldn’t carry on this way. And that it was going to be OK very soon. I wasn’t going to feel this way forever. And so even now, when I hear that song, I want to cry a little bit, but in a good way.

God, that was a bit long, wasn’t it? Sorry about that, but you wouldn’t understand the significance if you didn’t know the story!

“The Lost Chord” by Arthur Sullivan

This is the first song I learned to sing with the choir, Of One Accord, that I was a member of from January of last year until I moved to Leicester in October, and so carries with it not only the satisfaction of knowing that I can sing this song, which is fiendishly difficult for a choir (I couldn’t find a version with a choir singing it on youtube) but also lots of very happy memories of singing with that choir. The musical part of my brain improved so much while I was singing with them – proven by the fact that I passed the aural section of a music exam for the first time, having failed it in the previous 11! And apart from all that, it’s a really great song.

“Allegretto in C Minor” by Beethoven

I include this because this piece is my musical nemesis. I spent about a year learning it when I was in sixth form preparing it for my Grade 7 piano exam, and I think it’s safe to say I developed a kind of musical block against it. Eventually it didn’t seem to matter how much I practiced it, how much I tried, I just couldn’t get it right. My fingers fell over themselves every time. I was playing a Tchaikovsky piece and a random jazzy one as well for that exam, and they were both relatively comfortable, but the Beethoven and my inability to play it how I knew it should be played just hung over them both like a big c-minor-shaped cloud. And in the end, I failed my piano exam. By 3 marks. I started with the Beethoven (God only knows why) and played it so badly that everything else fell apart. I haven’t done a piano exam since. But even so, I still have the book that has the piece in it, and I’m determined that one day I will be able to play it properly!

“Let’s Face The Music and Dance” – played by me!

I played this as a trombone solo accompanied by piano in my last sixth form concert, and I LOVED it. I’ve never been much of a solo performer, but this was such fun to play and I really threw myself into it on the night – and I got a nice big clap at the end! The only time I’ve ever come off stage from playing a solo and thought “Yes! That was bloody good!”

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. If you lived in my head, that’s what would be playing over the speaker system

Over and Out.

P.S. If you have any songs that changed you, then feel free to share

Long time, no see!

Good evening everyone!

Well, all I can do is apologise. I’ve been on Easter holiday from university for the past 5 weeks, and I’ve been revelling in being home (and writing essays and revising) so much that I just never thought to write a post! So I think what I’ll do to get myself back into it is talk to you about two Jodi Picoult books that I read over the holidays – one that I was reading for the first time, and one for the second:

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

Firstly, I’m an absolutely huge Jodi fan, and I’ve had this one sitting in my drawer of books to be read for aaaaages, so as soon as I’d given up on old Robinson I went straight on to it. The story centres around Jacob, a teenage boy with Asperger’s Syndrome and an obsession with forensic science, his long suffering mother Emma and his younger brother Theo. The premise, at its most basic level, is that Jacob’s social skills tutor is found dead and Jacob is accused of her murder. The most interesting part of the book for me was the way Picoult explores how a person with severe communication difficulties but who otherwise is pretty high functioning and therefore appears “normal” is percieved and treated by the law enforcement and judiciary system (in the US, not the UK). The scenes where Jacob is imprisoned are particularly striking, as his rigid, routine-obsessed brain totally fails to cope with the alien situation. Another thread that I found particularly moving were the sections where Jacob talks about Jess, his tutor – both before and after her death. It’s a hotly contested issue, whether people with Asperger’s or other types of autism can feel love towards another person, because they are almost completely unable to feel empathy, or whether they just love in a different way. I mean, a big part of love is built on how a person makes you feel – if a person makes someome with Asperger’s feel safe, and calm, and like they really have a friend, then why shouldn’t they love that person? I felt that when Jacob talked about Jess, he was coming as close to honestly, naturally expressing love as his condition allowed him

Despite all this, I have to say I think Picoult let me down in a couple of other areas – although neglected brother Theo and his penchant for breaking into strangers’ houses were developed quite well, I struggled to believe the relationship that blossomed between Jacob’s mother Emma and his defence attorney Oliver. When a novelist is showing me the development of a romantic relationship, I need to understand what attracts the two people to each other, and with Emma and Oliver I didn’t really get it. The other thing I didn’t quite get was the inclusion of the police chief, Rich, as one of the small band of narrators. In all her books, Picoult narrates from the perspectives of a selection of characters – in this case Jacob, Emma, Theo, Oliver and Rich. Rich was not a particularly sympathetic character, but not an unsympathetic character either. He was just…nothing. Personality-less. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like he was just a cipher for Picoult to examine how a person with Asperger’s would be observed by a law enforcement professional. Although that was the aspect I found most enjoyable, as I’ve said, this particular part disappointed me. I felt that if Rich was going to be included as a narrator, he should have had a better story of his own to tell.

Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

I first read this a couple of years ago, but once I’d finished House Rules I was in the Picoult mood, so I thought I’d give this one another run through. This offering is about the O’Keefe family – Charlotte, Sean and their two daughters Amelia and Willow, the last of whom has severe osteogenesis imperfecta. As a result, the family struggle with spiralling medical costs and the crisis point that forms the thrust of the plot is when Charlotte, swayed by the huge amount of money it could potentially bring and the future this could provide for Willow, decides to file a wrongful birth lawsuit against her obstetrician during her pregnancy with Willow. There are two snags to this. The first is that in order to win such a lawsuit she will have to convince the jury that, had she found out about Willow’s condition earlier in the pregnancy than she did, she would have had an abortion. The second is that her obstetrician is her best friend Piper. And from here, the fun unfolds.

Once again, the story is told through multiple voices – Charlotte, Sean, Amelia and Piper. Interestingly, we do not hear Willow’s own voice until the very end of the book. There are a couple of parts of this novel that are so outstanding I’m almost tempted to compare them to My Sister’s Keeper, the first and still the greatest of Picoult’s novels that I’ve read. One of them is Amelia’s voice. Just as in House Rules the other child, the one whose needs are pushed into the background in the face of their sibling’s more immediate, obvious ones, is skilfully drawn in the character of Theo, so Picoult manages it again in Amelia, the daughter who is arguably more affected by what her mother is planning to say in court than Willow is. Her self-hatred, common in many teenage minds but exacerbated by her extremely stressful family situation, feels almost painfully real; but so also were glimpses of joy, like her first experience of love with a boy she meets at an osteogenesis imperfecta conference. In fact, I’d say she was the most well-drawn, believable character in the whole novel.

Another really great aspect was the exploration of Charlotte and Sean’s marriage, and the incredible strain placed on their relationship when Charlotte decides to go ahead with the lawsuit against Sean’s wishes. The descriptions of their courtship were both original and tender, and I felt really wrenched as I watched them drifting away from each other over the court case. I felt that the conversations the couple had that were full of misunderstandings (or refusals to understand) could be seen in any marriage or relationship in crisis, where the ability to communicate almost completely falls apart.

Handle With Care is certainly not a perfect book; in fact, in some ways it’s quite flawed. For example, at one point at the height of the trial Sean and Piper, both miserable and desperate, share a kiss. I didn’t understand at all why Picoult chose to slot that little incident in there. There’s no hint of chemistry between them for the whole book – in fact, Sean doesn’t even like Piper that much! And it’s never referred to again. A bit like Rich’s story in House Rules, I struggled to find what Picoult was trying to do with that scene, what it was supposed to mean or add to the story. When I read the book the first time round I was appalled by the ending (which I’m not going to tell you) – in fact, I finished it at a table in our sixth-form canteen and, if I remember, slammed it down and swore, to which one of my best friends, who’d read the book before me, said “I KNOW, right?!” If you’d asked me then, I probably would have said the ending was a serious flaw, not at all satisfactory. But on the second reading I changed my mind – given the outcome of the trial, I guess it would be hard to see how the story would feasibly conclude. And it certainly stays with you after you finish the book!

OK, so now I’ve assuaged my guilt about not blogging, I’m off to bed now.

Over and Out