Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs
John Harris, John Murray, £16.99

THE world of the singer-songwriter is non-academic. Key tunesmiths, lyricists, and bands happen up unqualified and unbidden. Here is a world of trial and error, folkloric in its roots and practice, hazarding sounds that must get into the proletarian head – which, cyclically, is right where the tonalities originated. Funny old world.

There’s something beyond logic about music’s independent drive. Its process of making can be both thankless and the only thing that matters. Genius (or competence) in the field can emanate from folk who can’t manage much else. Similar things could be said of the world of catering or other traditional family business – scenarios with binds, that may nevertheless feature roles for neurodiverse players. Such thoughts are underlined on reading of John Harris’s Maybe I’m Amazed.

Between its covers are inventories of simple impactful songs, their lyrics and circumstance. These spool out according to the narrative of a family’s progress. Harris is a rock-music journalist of reputation, whose prose brings songs and their singers to vivid life. It may be that his writing has been replenished by the intense enthusiasms of his autistic son, to whom bands and their music form a liveable universe.

Harris chronicles the life of his son and its polarities. The child’s destiny is shaped by monotropic intelligence and cumbersome sensitivity. A bundle of parental understanding and resilience is demanded. Hence an empirically written book, to illuminate thoughtful strategies.

There’s real value in Harris’s hands-on exposition of all that comes with the nurture of a child of fabulous difference. Harris senior does not stint on his torment, the sleeplessness, or the dawning of square-peg-in-a-round-hole vexation. Yet discoveries sing out. James dwells happily in a digital world. His rote learning is quietly immediate. His inner life eludes expression but is deep and continuous. Consistent awareness and familial graft combine to foster episodes of heightened euphoria. Palpable joys can be found and made to re-occur. Good things centre on live music; on being able to pick up guitars and keyboards that are vitally to hand, and on eventual witness of gigs amid a vibrant West Country scene.

In empathy, we see aspects of ourselves in this writer’s portraiture. He highlights parallel experience. He also delineates his impulse to provide parentally, against a backdrop of peer encouragement and bureaucratic dismay. Chapters include speculation, including some thoughts on history’s misfits who may have been on the autistic spectrum; spookily, these turn out to be Mozart, Beethoven and Bartok. Wanting the best company for his boy invites such fleeting gambits, even when the thinking doesn’t all stack up. After all, when we don’t get to pen the Ode to Joy or the Elvira Madigan theme tune, it’s not entirely because we’re neurotypical.

Digressions aside, journalism and biography fuse impressively. Major players turn out to be affability itself, in interactions with the young James. That close contact with somebody considered problematic actually brings out the very best in many is the real crux. Meanwhile, writing that emanates a sense of being couched in a particular sphere turns out to be far-reaching. The amazement is shared.