I am a pretty huge fan of This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales. For one, it is about music, which I love, and how music can in fact save you. On Sunday we discussed some of the songs that have saved TLT. And tucked away in the pages of This Song Will Save Your Life is a friend standing up for another friend when she sees a group of young men sexually assaulting her very inebriated friend in a club, reminding us all that she is too drunk to consent. I discuss this scene as part of The #SVYALIt Project. On April 14th This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales comes out in paperback, with a brand new cover, so if you haven’t read it yet I highly recommend that you go get a copy. It’s a really great book. Today as part of the This Song Will Save Your Life Blog Tour, author Leila Sales is sharing with us a song that saved her life. At the end of this post we are giving away an ARC of Leila’s September 2015 release, Tonight the Streets are Ours.

I competed on my high school debate team, so on Saturdays I would wake up early, put on a businesslike skirt and shiny Mary Janes, and get in the team van. We would then drive to St. Sebastian’s or Phillips Exeter or some other New England prep school, where we would argue about the electoral college all day long.

In the van we would take turns playing music on the stereo. This was in the days before CD burners or iPods, so I made mix tapes. I’d keep a blank tape in the boom box by my desk and listen to the radio while I was doing homework, and whenever I heard a song that I liked, I would quick hit “record.” So all the songs on my mixes were missing the first fifteen seconds, had static throughout, and had lost their final notes to a radio DJ’s voice saying, “You’re listening to Mix 98.5!”

One Saturday in the debate van, we were playing one of my mixes, and an older girls commented, “Leila, you must really love Matchbox Twenty.”

And I said, “What’s Matchbox Twenty?”

She laughed and said, “The band that played half the songs on your mix tape so far.”

I hadn’t known this; I had just hit “record” whenever something sounded good. But apparently everything that Matchbox Twenty did sounded good to me. And that’s how I realized that Matchbox Twenty was my favorite band.

To this day, this still seems to me like the most authentic way to fall in love with a song. Not because you’ve read a review that tells you it’s objectively good, or because a friend tells you it’s cool, or because it’s played a million times in a commercial. Just because you hear it, without knowing anything at all about how you’re “supposed” to feel about it, and still you want to hear it again.

Thank you Leila!

THIS SONG WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE

Making friends has never been Elise Dembowski’s strong suit. All throughout her life, she’s been the butt of every joke and the outsider in every conversation. When a final attempt at popularity fails, Elise nearly gives up. Then she stumbles upon a warehouse party where she meets Vicky, a girl in a band who accepts her; Char, a cute, yet mysterious disc jockey; Pippa, a carefree spirit from England; and most importantly, a love for DJing.

Told in a refreshingly genuine and laugh-out-loud funny voice, This Song Will Save Your Life is an exuberant novel about identity, friendship, and the power of music to bring people together.

ISBN: 9781250050748