(Harper Perennial)

www.harperperennial.com

BY JAKE CLINE

"It ought not just to be a joke, to say that there are albums that can change your life," Mark Greif writes in this collection of essays that, based on the résumés of its contributors, would appear to offer little in the way of jokes. Selected by journalist Peter Terzian, these writers seem more likely to be caught opining on Joyce's Dubliners than on albums such as the Who's Quadrophenia, but here they are: Greif and Benjamin Kunkel, co-founders of the esoteric literary journal n+1, sounding off on the Smiths' The Queen Is Dead and Fugazi's self-titled album, respectively; Irish novelist Colm Tóibín on Joni Mitchell's Blue; Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (check your nightstand), on ABBA's Super Trouper; the highbrow New Yorker book critic James Wood on the aforementioned Who classic.

Still awake? Good, because even though Heavy Rotation in theory should rock you about as solidly as a left hook from Perez Hilton, the book is a surprisingly engaging, often moving and, yes, occasionally funny exploration of what it means to be irrevocably connected to a piece of music. As Terzian and his contributors prove, this connection often begins by accident, be it while shopping for pirated cassettes in a bazaar in India (Mishra), while spying on the guitar-playing boy next door (Lisa Dierbeck) or after being dragged to see a nightclub performance of the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Claire Dederer). As a longtime acquaintance of Wood's pedantic literary criticism, I was surprised to learn the appropriately named writer had ever even heard music - let alone a monumental rock album such as Quadrophenia. But in fact, his introduction to the album took place in the hoariest of fashions: His older brother shared it with him. (Wood does an excellent job dissecting Quadrophenia's themes and emotional impact, though he doesn't satisfactorily answer the question of how it changed his life.)

Save Greif's dry take on Fugazi and Kunkel's personal if familiar recollection about discovering the Smiths (boy meets Morrissey; boy loses self to Morrissey; boy takes years to realize Morrissey was kidding about all that death and stuff), these essays capture the excitement of falling deeply and madly in love with an album, the person who gave you said album or, in Sheila Heti's hysterical and charming ode to the Annie soundtrack, the fictional character featured on this album. Several essays focus on albums that appeared during pivotal moments in the writer's life. After initially finding the music of Gloria Estefan "torturous," Asali Solomon later realizes the singer's Mi Tierra provided the ideal soundtrack to a semester abroad in the Dominican Republic. Terzian credits the music of an obscure British '80s band named Miaow for his developing into a professional writer.

Daniel Handler, meanwhile, mounts a convincing argument that the Eurythmics' Savage didn't change his life "in a moment of personal crisis or epiphany" but "more like a book changes lives: slowly, purposefully, insidiously." And surely, the man who created Lemony Snicket knows from insidious.

Nothing, however, will prepare you for the emotional wallop delivered by Todd Pruzan in his essay "Mental Chickens," which concerns the soundtrack to a mid-'90s "Gen X drama" from New Zealand titled Topless Women Talk About Their Lives. Featuring the Clean, the Bats, the Chills and other stars of New Zealand's singular rock scene, the compilation was "a curious soundtrack" for Pruzan's first year in New York after emigrating from Chicago and "the album that brings [him] closest to that opening bell on [his] first New York decade." More important, it's an everlasting link to the woman who introduced him to it. His remembrance of this "big spirit" and her tragic fate is at once beautiful and heartbreaking. Certainly, it's no joke to say that even an album with an outrageous name can change a life.