Songs from Nowhere Near the Heart

A funny book by any standard, Songs from Nowhere Near the Heart is even funnier to anyone who has had any experience watching small struggling bands try to convince themselves and their audience that they should be stars. A timely satire of the current state of the alternative rock world where label consolidation threatens to truly turn musicians into little more than commodities, this book tells the story of two bands battling to not get dropped by their record label. The book is essentially a continous series of viqnettes, using multiple narrators to tell the story as it unfolds. The main text is interspersed with sidebars explaining references to earlier events, places, reviews, etc... In the hands of a bad writer, this format could have easily resulted in a confusing or disjointed book, but Baird uses it to flesh out the world the bands live in without bogging down the main flow of the story. This is helped by the use of good graphic design- the sidebars are made to look as though they were clippings or post-it notes pasted into the book.The best reason to buy Songs from Nowhere Near the Heart however is that Baird is himself (allegedly) a struggling rock musician, and clearly deserves support for writing a hilarious book while presumably driving around from college town to college town in a dented old Econoline, sleeping on friend's or friends' of friends couches and living on cigarettes, cheap beer and pizza.