Turn Around Bright Eyes | A Micha Favorite

Rob Sheffield has proven through Love Is A Mixtape and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran that he is a male spirit animal of mine…of sorts. He blends a sweet concoction of quick wittedness and genuine romanticism with extreme reverence for pop culture – above all music – that is like the best cocktail I ever did drink. Time and time again, I cry, laugh and envy his skill for weaving sentiment and sarcasm into his writing. I first fell in love with Rob’s longform writing (he’s been a columnist for Rolling Stone for almost two decades) in Love Is a Mixtape, his music-based homage to his late wife who died in his arms. I’ve now listened to Turn Around Bright Eyes, my favorite book of his, many times from top to bottom while driving cross country or hiking the many hills of Los Angeles I’ve lived near. While Rob has a new book out this summer I’ve not read (On Bowie), I wanted to celebrate my favorite book by this New York Times Bestseller and share it with you.

“Turn Around Bright Eyes is an emotional journey of hilarity and heartbreak with a karaoke soundtrack. It’s a story about finding the courage to move on, clearing your throat, and letting it rip. It’s a story about navigating your way through adult romance. And it’s a story about how songs get tangled up in our deepest emotions, evoking memories of the past while inspiring hope for the future.”

Gems ABOUND in Turn Around Bright Eyes, but a few of the chicest:
“The things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going right is what’s bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I’m concerned, ‘some people are very kind’ is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breakup songs are kid stuff. Some people are very kind and there’s nothing in the universe to explain why. It’s a mystery how people lose each other–but to me, it’s an even stranger mystery we manage to stay together, or to collide together at all.”

“This is what they call “hitting rock bottom,” and they call it that because it rocks.”

“There’s only the one, see. When you fall in love with a girl, she’s the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don’t understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she’s the bloody Beatles White Album and there’s only one of her.”