|
|
Book Archives:
Most Recent
| Highest
Rated | Alphabetical
Time and Motion
 |
|
Neil Peart: Traveling Music: The Soundtrack to My Life and Times
Neil Peart
ECW Press, 2004
Rating: 4.0 |
|
Posted: August 24,
2004
By
Kevin Forest Moreau
Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for the band
Rush, has previously published two travelogues: The Masked Rider,
an account of bicycling through Africa, and 2002's
Ghost Rider, which
recounts the author's grief-fueled motorcycle odyssey through Canada, the
United States and Mexico as a means of escaping from, and coming to grips
with, a couple of family tragedies. With Traveling Music, Peart
revisits the travelogue format, but with a more ambitious scope. The road
trip at the heart of Music -- a six-day round trip by car to Texas's
Big Bend National Park -- serves as a framework for a thoughtful, sprawling
collection of autobiographical sketches, record reviews, geographical
history and past travel adventures.
Most of all, though, Traveling Music is intended as a kind of
dissertation on individual drive, particularly as it pertains to
music and motion -- the drive to create and the urge to travel, to explore,
to chart new experiences. These two titular impulses -- traveling and music
-- are presented as smaller facets of man's larger need to be doing
something. And indeed, Music -- like much of Peart's lyrical
oeuvre -- is presented as a celebration of that drive, especially as it
relates to his own life.
And also, not to get too metaphysical, as an example of that drive in
action: Peart occasionally stops to remind us of the book's origins and its
intentions. As he recounts late in the book:
"In the two perspectives I wanted to explore,
present day and distant past, I saw a pattern that reminded me of
songwriting. Those alternating moods, or frames, could be cast as verses and
choruses, maybe even with a middle section set apart somehow, to be a
"middle eight." I could see the possibilities, and started trying different
ways of imposing that architecture. I would begin each section with a
lyrical line, and maybe try to tie them all together into an actual song at
the end."
And so Traveling Music is structured in "verses" and "choruses"
rather than chapters, each prefaced with a lyric that sets the stage for
what's to come. It's a clever conceit, and while it works well, it also
proves distracting -- coming as it does on the heels of the book's other
structure, the Big Bend travelogue. For the most part, the interlocking
devices are easy to navigate: The verses mainly stick to the present
(including the Big Bend trip), and the choruses to the past (highlighting a
formative stay in Britain, or a range of seminal musical influences
encompassed in the '60s concert film The T.A.M.I. Show).
Indeed, it's not the dueling structures that occasionally trip up the
reader, but long digressions within these sections. The fourth chorus, which
kicks off with a lyric line about "drumming at the heart of an African
village," dutifully recounts two impromptu occasions during bicycle journeys
(in 1985 and 1992) in which Peart got to drum with African natives. But then
it suddenly plops us into a harrowing account of an earlier leg of the
latter trek, one with no discernible tie to drumming, and in fact no
particular thematic significance to speak of. It feels like a story Peart
just wanted to get into the book somehow, linked to the rest of the section
only by an early statement that "traveling became a kind of home for
me, and also a kind of music. Adventure travels moved from inspiration to
perspiration on a quest for new horizons."
Likewise, the verses are given to anecdotal detours away from the Big
Bend trip, and travel reminiscences within that travelogue, without
clear transitions back to the main "narrative." Such is the winding nature
of the book that Peart's idea of writing a book around the music he's
listened to on the trip isn't expressed until page 200 -- just over halfway
through!
To be fair, though, Traveling Music is about much, much more than the
CDs Peart enjoys during his trip -- although to be sure, his listening
tastes are certainly diverse (both Frank Sinatra and Radiohead?)
interesting (it's nice to know there are others out there who can
appreciate certain genres, or bands like the Beatles, without
wholeheartedly embracing them) and occasionally head-scratching (at least,
it's hard for this writer to share Peart's appreciations of Madonna, Linkin
Park or 98°).
But those tastes make up a relatively small part of a book that touches on
topics including bird watching, regional history, mariachi music and a
spirited defense of progressive rock, among others. And although such a
multitude of subjects might overwhelm a less engaging writer, that
meandering feel never derails the proceedings. That's because Traveling
Music isn't defined by its attempts at structure, but rather by the
abovementioned explorations (and many more besides) of that certain drive.
In an absorbing, conversational style that favorably recalls John Irving's
(and makes one impatient for a book about his life with Rush), Peart weaves
his many threads together into a paean to the lifelong quest for knowledge,
for movement, for excellence. It's that questing spirit that gives
Traveling Music its momentum, and makes even its longer detours worth
the trip.


Site
design copyright © 2001-2011 Shaking Through.net. All original artwork,
photography and text used on this site is the sole copyright of the respective creator(s)/author(s). Reprinting, reposting, or citing any of the original
content appearing on this site without the written consent of Shaking
Through.net is strictly forbidden.
|
|
|

Ratings Key: |
5.0:
A masterwork |
4.0-4.9:
Great read |
3.0-3.9:
Well done |
2.0-2.9:
Ordinary |
1.1-1.9:
Sub par |
0.0-1.0:
Horrendous |
|
Archived
Reviews |
Most Recent |
Highest Rated |
Alphabetical |
|
|
|
|