Genre: Oral history
Title: You, too?
Estimated publication date: 2050 (in time for U2's eleventh retirement tour)
I like the potential of this one. The basic idea is I collect stories from music fans about their favorite songs. I'm leaning towards a U2 focus, of course, even if just for the pun, but I'm open to using other reference frameworks for when I don't start working on this.
I first thought about the idea in the summer of 2008. I was on a six week trip to Japan. The first month was an internship with a small English school in Iida, Nagano. What struck me immediately was that many of the streets had no name.
On the same trip, I started running seriously for the first time. And of course, the opening line for 'Where The Streets Have No Name' is I want to run...
A few years later, U2 went on tour for their album, Songs of Innocence. I read an article prior to the tour's start that compared a U2 concert to seeing 'your life flash before your eyes'. It made enough sense at the time for me to remember the article today. I'm a few years older now and thinking about Nagano and I suspect I fully understand the idea.
I imagine many people feel something similar for their favorite songs or bands. Collecting all those stories for a big volume would be pretty neat. Of course, the obstacles for such a project are endless. I would need to actually meet some U2 fans, for starters. I would need to prepare myself to nod soberly each time some seventeen year-old tells me that 'Bullet The Blue Sky' opened his eyes about geopolitics. And I would need to figure out how to download the book onto everyone's iPhones without permission...
Crafting such a book would also present me with a strange kind of dilemma. In an oral history, the writing is taken out of the author's hands. Normally, I would consider this a great idea, a real 'clever like a fox' moment for my bibliography, but in my book (and this would be my book) I suspect I would prefer to do most - if not all - of the writing for my first published work. But who knows how I'll feel about this in 2050, right?
