Review: The Sanest Guy In The Room

The Sanest Guy in the Room: A Life in Lyrics by Don Black
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An unusual autobiography. By his own admission, Don Black doesn’t like reading biographies with loads of information about families and childhood; he would rather cut to the chase. As he says:

I have never been a fan of autobiographies. I find all of them way too long, full of boring pages about stuff I'm not at all interested in. I only want to know about the subject, not about the subject's grandparents who may have come from Lithuania, or the subject's aunt who may have been a Windmill girl.

The first thing you learn as a lyric writer is not to waste a syllable, and that you have to eliminate the unnecessary. Lyric writing is all about compression and getting to the nitty-gritty. I guess that's why I find it numbingly tedious when these books veer away from the reason I bought the book in the first place.

Fair enough. I don’t have a problem with that. But this philosophy lead to an autobiography that is arranged as a randomly organised collection of loosely themed sections. A pity because it was very good in parts.

Generally, the stories and observations in the book are really interesting. For example, many (but frustratingly, not all) of the sections start with an interesting quote:

"Youth is believing that some day you'll dance like Fred Astaire."
--Jacqueline Friedrich (Journalist)

There are some great anecdotes that make me think I'd rather sit and have a meal with him, listening to his reminiscences, rather than reading them. He ventures into grumpy old man territory at times but, I can forgive him that as often there is a really sharp observation buried in the grumpiness:

When I wrote 'Born Free' in the sixties around six hundred people recorded the song. When 'Skyfall' won the Oscar I don't think anyone recorded it apart from Adele. No one covers songs any more which means it's harder than ever to write a standard these days.

I did enjoy this book but somehow, it is less than the sum of its parts.

View all my reviews