Review: Memories Set to Music

We've all had it happen – you hear a song and you are instantly transported back in time by a lyric, a melody, or a bass solo (hey, I fell in love with a bass player; I can't help that reference). Our lives have played out to soundtracks – music that hit us like an emotional brick at a particular place and time.
I can still remember exactly where I was in the summer of 1984 and I heard Prince's Purple Rain for the first time. I was riding in a car with my best friend, going through the dark streets of Baltimore, cold and warm at the same time and driving aimlessly so we could listen to the entire thing several times over. Let me hear "When Doves Cry" today, and I'm right back in that car.
Drummer, DJ, music producer, and chronicler of our musical times, Ahmir Thompson not only knows what I'm talking about, he captures it perfectly in his new memoir Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove (which is Ahmir's a.k.a.).
If you're a fan of The Roots (and you'd better be), you know that Questlove is the heart and soul of the group, and he's a man who loves to tell a story. The liner notes to any Roots album are practically novels themselves.
Questlove is an amazingly evocative storyteller, too, setting his life's events against the music and musicians of the day. He spins his tales as deftly as he DJs, weaving them together by track, album, band, ending up with a fabulous mixtape of days, events, and relationships.
The "meta" of the title is introduced by two Bens – his co-writer Greenman and the book's editor Greenberg – as well as The Roots' co-manager Richard Nichols. They pop up occasionally to give a sound check or to add a footnote, giving the reader that collaborative and collective feeling of The Roots themselves, and it feels totally natural to have others step up to the mic and into the dialog.
The rhythm of the writing is right on target, offering a bittersweet nostalgia served up like a late-night phone call with a friend you knew back in the day. Just like the best song on your playlist, Questlove also gives it everything he's got, opening up about family troubles, his idols and mentors, the highs and lows of his life, and his musical influences.
There's a twinge of regret, too, for the coming-up generations and their instant access to music that lacks the spontaneity and excitement that others of us experienced collectively through radio and album releases. He says: "I worry that it'll be harder for the present generation to process memory, because they have so many options to choose from, and most aren't shared in a physical space." Very true.
But back to Prince (because shouldn't everything lead back to Prince?)...
Like Questlove says, that summer of '84 he and I both got "Princed." As he describes it, Purple Rain "took whatever categories remained and burned them all down. That song ('I Will Die 4 U'), and that album, did more to bring together freaks and geeks and thugs than almost anything else from that decade." Amen, Ahmir.
Not to mention that Prince was completely ahead of his time with the quick-type spelling of a texter. Come on – 4U? He was a rulebreaker and a standard bearer for the future. Just like Questlove.

Recipe: Mo' Betta Blueberry Cakes

Probably the next best memory sparker for so many of us would be food. We all gather around meals, share snacks, and break bread together to celebrate, commiserate, or just participate with others. And, as I like to occasionally do, I found a perfect food pairing for Questlove's book. These cakes are tart yet sweet and they evoke those summer days that are all-too-quickly slipping away.
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 cup sour cream
1/4 cup melted butter
1 beaten egg
1 cup blueberries
Heat oven to 350. Line 12 medium muffin cups with paper or foil baking cups. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Stir in sour cream, butter, and egg until just moistened. Then gently fold in the blueberries. Fill baking cups 1/2 full. Bake cakes 25 to 30 minutes, or until an inserted wooden pick comes out nice and clean. Cool and then glaze with Lemon Glaze:
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 Tbs. lemon juice
1 tsp. grated lemon peel
Mix together and glaze cakes.

Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend

I have a group of friends who make everything more fun. We've been through a lot of seasons together, but our favorite time of year might just be summer. You see, one of our number has a pool. Need I say more?

This Saturday, we hold yet another of our "official meetings" at the pool, with an agenda of food and cocktails, of course. Since we all are readers, I have found the perfect book for our meetings. Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist by Tim Federle is fun and frothy, much like the margaritas we whip up poolside.

Each section offers cocktail recipes by theme: Drinks for Dames, Gulps for Guys, Bevvies for Book Clubs, Refreshments for Recovering Readers, and some nibbles to go with all those drinks in Bar Bites for Book Hounds.

In the "Dames" section, I have my eye on Are You There God? It's Me, Margarita. But Gin Eyre sounds good, too. Other faves throughout the book include The Last of the Mojitos, Huckleberry Sin, and The Wonderful Blizzard of Oz (appropriately alcohol-free).

Book clubs would be so much more fun with a round of these to get the conversation started, right?

So start planning for the weekend now by getting the ingredients for these literary libations ready to go. After all, doesn't a Monday always make you want to think about the next weekend? Exactly. 

Cheers!

Ready for the Journey

Review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

This is a book that came along just when I needed it. I find that happens to me quite often - that a book will resonate with me at the perfect moment or will give me an insight into something that's happening in my life.
Life is a journey, a series of stops and starts, of peaks and valleys, of gorgeous blue skies, and of the darkest, coldest nights. Sometimes you travel with companions, and sometimes you have to make the trip on your own. Either way, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Harold Fry was a just an ordinary Englishman, simply breathing in and out each day of his 65 years, but not really living. And then he received a letter from a long-lost friend and he took a detour. Queenie Hennessy had done something extraordinary for Harold in their past, and now he felt he owed her more than just a quick note back.
Queenie's letter said that she was dying of cancer, and that she wanted to thank Harold for being kind to her. It was a letter that made Harold feel guilty and sad that they had lost touch. So he decided to walk further than just to his own mailbox with his reply. As he passed another postbox, and then the post office itself, he just continued to walk, without really knowing why.
Thanks to a chance encounter with a girl in a garage, Harold decides to keep walking, believing that in doing so he can make a difference. In fact, he determines that he will walk 500 miles to where Queenie is in hospice, and that his journey - in a way his penance - will help Queenie live. As another person he meets says, "If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope."
So Harold walks, through pain and suffering, through gorgeous sunsets and lovely paths. He's propelled by a bit of guilt, a bit of hope, a bit of gratitude, and maybe even the need to impress his wife Maureen. Maureen is angry and hurt by Harold's snap decision and what she sees as his abandonment. But then she comes to believe that "there was even a beauty in it, if only because Harold was doing something he believed in for once, and against all the odds."
Harold's journey gives him the chance to cross paths with many people from all walks of life. He talks to them and he does what he does best - he listens. He gives them the courtesy that many don't today, to stop and truly listen to someone else, to share their time and their need for a connection. "Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human."
But, more importantly, Harold also renews his relationship with himself. He slows down to see himself for who he truly is. And he recognizes why he needs to make the journey to Queenie. The truth, as he sees it, is that he was compelled to walk to redeem himself and to make those connections with others along the way.
After all, as Maureen says, "It was not a life, if lived without love."
I recently made a journey of my own with a friend of mine who was fighting cancer. It was not an easy path for her, and it was not an easy one to travel with her. Watching her put one foot in front of the other, as Harold did, was a revelation of courage and of love. She fought her way step by step for her daughter and for her family.
It was a privilege to hold her hand, and to fight alongside her. At the end, it never seemed that she "lost" her fight. She had simply given all that she had to give. In a way, I owe her a debt of gratitude for reminding me that connecting with each other and showing people that we care is really why we are all here in the first place.
And to Harold Fry, and his author, I owe thanks for walking with me and offering the perfect words of comfort when I needed them.