In It Still Moves, music writer Amanda Petrusich seeks out Americana the beautiful
By Eryn Loeb
Published: August 25th, 2008 | 4:15pm
To trace the evolution of American music, Amanda Petrusich embarked on a thoroughly American endeavor: a road trip. Shunning computer-generated driving directions in favor of good old-fashioned maps, she left her home in Brooklyn and plotted her way down and through the south, the birthplace of so much richly influential music.
In It Still Moves, Petrusich (a writer for Pitchfork and Paste, and the author of Pink Moon, for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series) considers how places like Memphis and Nashville have nurtured the “Americana” music she’s fallen in love with over the years, and how that music’s legacy has been inherited and built upon by the likes of Iron & Wine, Joanna Newsom, and Wilco.
Hers is an unmistakably personal project — a woman out on the road, following other peoples’ stories as a way of creating her own. Alongside reconstructed histories of seminal moments in American musical history and meditations on the meaning of it all, Petrusich describes the specific roads she’s driving on, historical sites (including the original homes of Sun Records and the Grand Ole Opry,) and the antiques decorating her quirky hotel rooms and chain restaurants.
She’s searching for ideas — if not answers — about what it means to live in this complicated country, and to love the products of an uneasy history. She’s also grappling with nostalgia, understandably skeptical of its hold. Ultimately, she can’t resist it.
After spending so much time exploring the past, she devotes too little attention to what would seem from her book’s subtitle to be its real focus: parsing American music’s more contemporary forms. There are fresh connections to be drawn here, and since Petrusich is so clearly up to the task, it’s disappointing to be left wanting more.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (Faber & Faber)
By Amanda Petrusich
304 pages, $25
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Issue #35
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