A Mind Full of Music
Meditations on Imagination and Popular Song
Similar to how songs become familiar and welcoming earworms, these essays will imprint themselves on readers' minds.
A Mind Full of Music contemplates and celebrates the mysterious, powerful, dynamic relationship between ourselves and the songs we love: the way in which songs work upon our minds and in which our minds, because of the inevitable creative force of our imaginations and memories, work upon them. The book does not propose or develop a unified argument, nor does it tell, chronologically, the story of the author’s life of listening. Instead, in recognition of the varied, fluid, and ultimately mysterious ways in which our minds respond to songs, it is structured associatively, with one topic inspiring thoughts of another; the book begins with a song drifting into the author’s mind, and it ends with that mind still in the midst of listening, waiting for a beat that will never come.
Chris Forhan is the author of the memoir My Father Before Me (Scribner, 2016) and three books of poetry: Black Leapt In, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award; and Forgive Us Our Happiness, winner of the Bakeless Prize. Forhan is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.
