Synopsis

Sound Advice invites readers on a voyage of self-discovery that uniquely combines the immersive joy of listening to pop music with the desire to implement simple, practical yet inspiring lifestyle changes designed to help restore balance and build healthy habits into busy lives.

Drawing on Top 10 UK chart hits from the 1980s – pop music’s ‘Golden Age’ – the book explores and analyses relatable themes that resonate with everyday life: education, friendships, youthfulness, truthfulness, love and relationships (marriage and divorce), health and fitness, loneliness, passion, fortitude, work, ageing and more. Each piece of lyrical advice is tested for soundness through the lenses of history, science, literature, philosophy and psychology.

Discover some unlikely connections, such as those between ABBA and Einstein, Iron Maiden and Shakespeare, and Bob Marley and Darwin.

Review

If music be the food of love play on… especially in a week that saw millions of people weep tears of joy to see their close, personal friend Taylor Swift become engaged to NFL player Travis Kelce – finally getting her own Love Story. The crowds that came out to pay their respects to Ozzy Osbourne, also showed the power of music and musicians, and how they genuinely mean so much to so many.

Music makes us feel so many things, and many of us listen to music to get us into (or out of) a certain mood. I for one have playlists for different characters I play or write about to help me channel their emotions. It’s a powerful thing that’s been with us for centuries, and has always been something that people have turned to in times of crisis, grief or joy.

Alan Green has taken songs of the 1980s (a fantastic decade for music) and drawn life lessons from them. It’s an interesting concept for a book, and the author has clearly done his research. There are multiple parallels to be drawn, and lyrics associated with everything from dreaming and love, to education and the environment.

Although interesting, it’s quite tricky to read as songs are mostly referenced in footnotes, and if you don’t know the song inside out you won’t get the lyrical link. This makes it quite frustrating and time-consuming to read, because you have to keep looking up lyrics or listening to the song; although this isn’t a hardship, it does affect the book’s enjoyment. If this were more of a coffee table book, with photographs of artists, lyric sheets and perhaps even an accompanying playlist on Spotify, it would have made for much more enjoyable reading.

That said, it’s a fascinating idea, but many readers might find it a little pretentious and overwritten, and see some of the links to the topics as tenuous. But then of course music – like so many things – is subjective, and everyone will interpret it in their own way.

Sound Advice may not be a book to read in one go, but it’s a good one to dip in and out of whilst enjoying the songs referenced.

Thanks to Salt Publishing for my advance copy. Opinions my own.