It Still Moves

According to its cover, Pitchfork writer Amanda Petrusich was attempting to find the "next American music" in her non-fiction novel It Still Moves. Her highway journey comes in the form of a throwback to Chuck Klosterman's almost true road narrative, Killing Yourself To Live. Petrusich drove from her New York City home to explore the birthplace of blues in Memphis, Tenn., the beginnings of rock 'n' roll at Sam Phillips' Sun Studio, Elvis' mystic at Graceland and the clean country sounds of Nashville. While the book is highly informative, her writing comes nowhere near Klosterman's descriptive flair and gets bogged down with the drier material. It also sometimes bounces from her first-person accounts on the road to interviews she later did in New York, which breaks up the sense of the journey and its rhythm. The cadence is disrupted for good towards the end of the novel when Petrusich returns home to the Big Apple. She quickly switches gears from going in-depth about Woody Guthrie to entirely glazing over the '60s onward, practically ignoring the likes of Bob Dylan and everything that followed. She finally speeds through the new American music of today that she was supposedly out to find, merely mentioning artists like Iron And Wine, Devendra Banhart and Will Oldham. For a book named after a My Morning Jacket album, I was entirely disappointed there was only a brief mention of the band. Just like any road trip, I was excited for it to begin and was sad when it seemed to come to a close way too soon.