I Wish I Had a Lyric I Could Name This After: Art as an Artist's Inspiration in Paul Lisicky's SONG SO WILD AND BLUE

FOR THE READER:

Paul Lisicky's SONG SO WILD AND BLUE is a memoir that intertwines his creative life with his love of the music of Joni Mitchell. It doesn't compare them one to one, in a way that links a memory or time of Mitchell's life with Lisicky's, but rather takes memories of her songs, and instances of her life as jumping-off points to discuss his own creative development. Lisicky writes here, of his mother and his father, his famous writer lover, his current relationship as things that propel him into the depths of understanding, much as Mitchell's music does.

This is not a tell-all memoir, not that we'd expect such from Lisicky. Famous partners float away as easily in the narrative, and with as little drama, as the family members who die quietly in the night, alone. Locations float in and out of the narrative. Most of the heavy lifting of the book is done by deep dives into the disparate moments being discussed, both in introspection and in lyric-like prose. One moment that stayed with me long after I finished the book was a black-out that Lisicky had while driving on the road -- a terrifying moment made even more so by its proximity, in the text, to Mitchell's debilitating brain aneurysm.

Not a huge Mitchell fan myself, I found myself sticking with the book due to the moments of revelation that Lisicky came to from her music. The song titles meant little to me, but the takeaways that Lisicky had from these songs struck me enormously. The book reads a bit like Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain in that I knew little of the music being written about, but I found the writing propulsive and compelling even in my ignorance.

FOR THE WRITER:

Lisicky makes two points that struck me deeply as a writer within this book.

His first, stemming from the fact that he started out as a songwriter, is that one should try another form of art before picking up writing, and bring those sensibilities to it. You can see Lisicky's lyrical prowess in his prose, and it's all the stronger for it.

The second point he makes is that you should just go for writing about the things you love, that keep you awake at night. He puts a stake in the music of Joni Mitchell here that's so firm that you can't imagine anyone else writing about her quite like this. And it's done not out of a sense of proprietariness but out of sheer love and exuberance. Of course he writes about this music because he's stayed up all night listening to it, because he's waited in long ticket lines, because it's saved his life. One might err towards being ashamed of such an intense love, but not Lisicky. This book really proves that things we love become intertwined with us, the art we love becomes our ancestors, and we should sing those songs however we can.