Up The Road a Little Bit - Music Without Ego
Up the Road a Little Bit: Music Without Ego
Michael Forty never set out to be a musician anyone had heard of. He just kept writing songs - in an office, in the evenings, over the better part of a lifetime - and hoping, each time, that one of them might actually reach somebody.
This book is both an account of that hope and the songs themselves. It opens as a plainly told argument about what music asks of the people who make it, and what it doesn't: talent, certainly, but far less ego than most of us are taught to think. From there, it walks through all seventy-two songs of his collection Up the Road a Little Bit - printed here in full, alongside a chapter's worth of honest reflection on where each one came from and what, if anything, it was actually trying to say.
The songs move through village life and Irish comic characters, love and the long middle of a marriage, grief, faith and doubt, the quiet decency of people nobody wrote down, childhood, the work of making something, and a handful that don't resolve easily at all. A few, the author admits, he doesn't think fully worked. He's left them in anyway.
What emerges isn't a case for his own talent. It's a close look at the moment a song either lands or it doesn't, and an argument that the difference has very little to do with the person who wrote it.
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