Attune to the beat of our collective heart

In a parlor game reminiscent of the contests played at Championship Vinyl, the record store in Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel “High Fidelity,” I have lately pitted rock bands against one another for pure pop pleasure. It’s an idle pastime played while driving and spinning the FM dial -- no more serious than any other detour into popular music.

But let’s not diminish the stakes. Take the Foo Fighters’ acoustic version of “Times Like These.” Can there be a more disappointing song on the radio today? The melody is promising, sure, but its undeveloped lyrics and mawkish sincerity are only compounded for sharing the play list with Coldplay’s “Clocks,” a nearly ethereal plaint of heartbreak and missed opportunity that after more than six months of airplay, has yet to become cliche.

Such ruthlessness -- but what fun is music if it doesn’t elicit passion? -- is based in no small part from having just read Hornby’s new collection of essays on pop music, “Songbook.” If ever there was a critic to help guide us through the morass of base sentiment, cheesy chord progressions and empty-headed fandom that floods the airwaves today, it would be Hornby, whose novels “High Fidelity,” “About a Boy” and “How to Be Good,” as well as his occasional writings in the New Yorker, have only hinted at his acumen and broad musical vocabulary.

Composed of 26 chapters, each named for a song and an artist (from Gregory Isaacs and “Puff the Magic Dragon” to Led Zeppelin and “Heartbreaker,” from Bob Dylan and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” to Ben Folds Five and “Smoke”), “Songbook” is a meditation on the meaning of popular music: the three- or four-minute verse-chorus-verse diversion that so consumes and sustains our culture. In assembling these songs, Hornby smartly avoids the trap of mere reminiscence, easily stepping over music that is tied to a particular period in his life. “[I]f you love a song,” he writes, “love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life.”

“Songbook” is essentially a book about love. Hornby’s criterion is simple: “[T]he best music connects to the soul, not the brain.” His selection is wide-ranging and his rationale pointed: “[W]e must learn the critical language that allows us to sort out the good from the bad, the banal from the clever, the fresh from the stale; if we simply sit around waiting for the next punk movement to come along, then we will be telling our best songwriters that what they do is worthless.”

Whether he is quoting Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci or raving about the Strokes, dismissing Harold Bloom or conceding an ancient, if diminished, love for a Black Sabbath song called “Rat Salad,” Hornby casts an easy spell, never once underestimating the importance of popular music without losing sight that it is, well, popular music. He is a critic whose intelligence and familiarity with the music never keeps him from confessing its basic emotional satisfactions.

“A couple times a year,” he writes, “I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all 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 only need a few hundred more things like that, and you’ve got a life worth living.”

While his writing sometimes overflows with a little too much Byrdsian sunshine, his enthusiasms can bowl you over. You may not agree with all that he writes, but his ideas are simple, optimistic and, if not true, then so close to the truth that you want him to be right. It helps too that “Songbook” is, materially speaking, a gorgeous object. Manufactured in Iceland, it has been designed with a flat-back spine, stitched pages, handsome paper stock, type laid out in two columns on each page, color illustrations by Marcel Dzama and, on the back binder board, a CD with 11 songs.

If having the opportunity to hear Aimee Mann’s “I’ve Had It” or Badly Drawn Boy’s “A Minor Incident” for the first time isn’t enough, then consider this: Proceeds from “Songbook” benefit a British charity for children with autism and a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that teaches writing to children. (Be forewarned: With a printing of only 25,000, “Songbook” is nearly sold out. As McSweeney’s explores a second, you may have to call around to secure a copy.)

Hornby believes -- crediting a riff from McSweeney’s editor, Dave Eggers -- that the appeal of a pop song lies in its inherent mystery. Each song asks us to solve it, which is why we so often play it over and over again, and then, suddenly, walk away. It is a process of discovery that continually jolts the heart, and when melody and lyrics align with our own history and experience, the circle’s made more complete. One of the strengths of Hornby’s criticism lies in the details of his own life, which he sprinkles throughout these essays.

He was born in 1957 and grew up in “comfortable English suburbs” (“a country which, looking back on it, seemed to be striving for the ambience and amenities of Communist Poland”), spent a few teenage years in Wilton, Conn. (falling head over heels for the “berserk irreverence” and “terrifying intensity” of the J. Geils Band), struggled to be a writer (discovering the writings of Anne Tyler and especially “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant”), married, had a son (diagnosed as autistic), divorced and somewhere along the way found success. It is a progression through hope and despair, love found and love lost that has left him no stranger to the consolations of art.

“It is important,” he writes, “that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move and cheer? Please?”

The plea allows him, in a later chapter, to concede his recent affection for the early music of Jackson Browne. It wasn’t easy, he admits, with a wink, and his prejudice against Browne has a certain undeniable eloquence: “He wasn’t a punk. He had a funny pudding-bowl haircut that wasn’t very rock ‘n’ roll. He wrote ‘Take It Easy’ at a time when I didn’t want to take it easy. And though I hadn’t heard any of the songs, I knew they were wimpy, navel-gazing, sensitive -- American in all the worst ways and none of the best.” Yet when a friend suggested to a newly divorced, 40-plus Hornby that he listen to the laid-back California songster, the advice seemed sound. Suddenly the delicacy and fragility of “Late for the Sky” had a resonance for him that anyone who has turned to music to feel less alone in the world can understand.

Hornby’s skill in expressing moments like these in words -- and in anecdote -- is part of what makes “Songbook” so appealing. It is tempting, as well, to suggest that Hornby’s sensitivity to pop music is something he learned from his son, who because of his autism is unable to communicate with the world around him and yet, at an early age, developed an intense relationship to music, wandering around the house with a portable cassette player, volume turned up as high as it would go.

“[I]t’s how I know he has something in him that he wants others to articulate,” Hornby tells us. “In fact, thinking about it now, 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.”

If all art aspires toward a condition of music, as essayist and critic Walter Pater once wrote -- a line Hornby quotes as well -- then “Songbook” is a glorious aspiration and a happy reminder of what is at stake when, in an idle moment, you happen upon music from bands like Foo Fighters and Coldplay on the FM dial. Find the right songs, put them in succession, and you too just might find a life worth living.