The Song Is You: A Novelcould easily be subtitled “The Anxiety of Influence.”  From the opening sentence, “Julian Donahue’s father was on a Billie Holiday record,” Phillips explores the themes of influence, creativity, and generations.  I was quickly seduced by the opening scene and pulled completely into the moment by Arthur Phillips’ prose.

Julian is forty-something, somewhat successful, separated from his wife, haunted by tragedy, and enamoued with a twenty-two year old singer, Cait. Cait is everything Julian is not: young, fresh, and a rising star.  Claiming his as the generation of portable music, Julian is constantly accompanied by his iPod.  Phillips delves into the influences of creativity through deft catalogs of music.  In one scene, after her first hears Cait sing, Julian listens to CDs while at home alone:

And now he burned through his discs ever faster, confirming suspicions within seconds, spotting the Irish girl lurking in the undergrowth: a chord, a vocal trick, a way of singing over or against an instrument, a breath or phrasing: Billie, Ella, Janis, Alainis, Sinead, Patti Smith, Edie Brickell, Annie Lennox.  She’d likely deny Madonna and Stevie Nicks and Belinda Carlisle, but that didn’t change the facts.

Reading this novel, at times, caused me to panic at my own limitations.  I’m far from the hipster scene in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that Phillips depicts.  Growing up, my taste in music was embarassingly pedestrian — Michael Jackson and Boy George, then all the ladies of the nineties, straight from the Lilith Fair.  Heck, I was even happy to own the soundtrack to Friends after the first season.  I always tensed when people asked what music I listened to because I never mastered the subtle art of sizing up one another and bonding over the back and forth of eclectic musicians.

So, I was prepared to bristle as I got deeper into the novel, but instead I was charmed by Julian and his broken family and his crush on Cait.  Phillips creates just that tension I always felt about not having ‘cool’ taste in music.  Through the tightrope courtship between Julian and Cait, it’s easy to recognize our own struggles.  Striving to be original and not just some crazed fan, Julian’s dilemma sums up most of our adult attempts to fall in love with people who start out as strangers.