Book Review: Sounds Like Titanic, by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

I still remember walking through Midway Airport a few years ago, and seeing the cover for this book staring back at me in the window of a bookstore. The intriguing title immediately took me back to early 1998 when I would blast James Horner’s film score from my Jeep in small-town Iowa, the weird actions of a teenager who surely was not going to end up having a life that involved working on a farm.

Sounds Like Titanic is a memoir from author Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman. Growing up in West Virginia to middle-to-upper-middle-class parents, hearing a particular musical piece in an animated film when she was young soon had her wanting to play the violin. She eventually stopped playing following high school, when she went to New York City to study at Columbia University.

It was here when trying to pay for college, that she answered an ad looking for a violin player to do several gigs. This led to her meeting several people who were under the employ of a figure Hindman refers to only as The Composer, whose music they played.

This is where the title of the book comes into play. What Hindman and several others play “sounds like (the music from) Titanic,” but is not. The group doesn’t even play the music, but “plays along” as the album music blasts from speakers, convincing numerous people that they are in the presence of incredibly talented musicians, who want to bring hope and joy to millions!

Eventually, Hindman “playing” and selling CD’s of The Composer’s music at malls and fairgrounds around New York, leads to her being chosen for a multi-city tour across the country in 2004 with The Composer and a couple musicians.

When I started reading the story, I had expected the entire thing was just going to chronicle the God Bless America tour Hindman was a part of. Instead, the story soon began to weave in other elements as Hindman begins to analyze her life, and who she is/was.

We get remembrances from her youth of 3-hour drives to get to the closest violin instructor, how New York and Columbia became unexpected goals for her, as well as her brief stint enrolling in the armed forces to pay for her tuition.

In reading over her background, I could draw some parallels to my own life. It was due to Schroeder playing Beethoven on his toy piano in the Peanuts specials, that led to 6-8 years of piano lessons by the time I was in high school.

In Elementary School, children could play instruments as part of the band or orchestra in fourth and fifth grade. I remember the allure of considering the viola, before deciding to hold off, and went with the trumpet in fifth grade. Why? Because of the regal, booming fanfares those instruments made in the John Williams scores for the likes of Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark! While Williams did weave orchestra and band elements into a musical whole, the trumpet was an instrument that seemed to command attention…and like some kids, I had that egotistical need to be loud, and heard! I still recall getting some chances to shine in high school marching and jazz band, before the laissez-faire atittude of the marching band in a college I attended, finally made me retire the last of my musical talents.

Hindman does also bring up the feeling of her instrument giving her an identity, as she struggles through her teen years in the face of a changing body, depressive middle-school dynamics, and earning praise from those around her for her playing (while she does work to be good, she doesn’t see it as a professional career move). Plus, I soon realized that she was chronicling these elements from the same time period that I grew up in! There were some instances of pop-culture that made me recall commercials or the ways of a world that I had almost forgotten, let alone that feeling of escaping a small town world, and going off to make something of oneself far from the norm.

That introspection was something that soon had me turning pages, as she chronicles her views of an America several years after 9/11, a time where many were mostly convinced of the war rhetoric that shifted focus from Afghanistan, to Iraq. At one point, Hindman’s study in Middle Eastern culture (she was in Egypt at the time the Twin Towers were hit) makes her feel that her experience and study could lead to a lucrative career covering the war from the battlefront. What she finds instead, is fascinating and frustrating. This even extends over into some other small jobs she takes upon returning to America (one of them involving the development of the MTV reality show, Teen Mom).

As for the God Bless America tour, this is the through-line of the story that the book’s 272 pages focus on. Crammed into an RV with The Composer, a few other musicians and a voluntary driver who is obsessed with The Composer, she sees an America beyond her youth in Appalachia, and college years in New York City. The tour plays in malls, fairgrounds and concert halls, all while The Conductor smiles like a frightening (but sincere) Velociraptor, and seems hell-bent on making the PBS-loving audiences forget their troubles, while selling CD’s of his “not quite Titanic” music.

The tour overall does make one wonder just what is going to be encountered. I’ve seen plenty of road trip films to expect the unexpected, but what happens here is not the movies, but a more “humanized” view of a person trying to earn enough money to survive, let alone seemingly living a lie while being highly-praised for her skills by people she’s never met.

At first, I questioned her storytelling bouncing around at times. Instead of an early start and leading into the aftermath, we have little story “detours” along the way, that worked out surprisingly well. She even finds ways to reference James Cameron’s film in a few instances, and tries to decipher just what it is about The Composer’s music (let alone some other similar-sounding music at that time), that was making people so emotionally connected to it.

Sounds Like Titanic is a memoir that chronicles a most unexpected journey in one person’s life, that leads to events, opportunities, and instrospection as its writer moves from one century to the next. Her observations lead her to observations and introspection of the people who she met at this time, along with the state of the world she lived and grew up in. There’s quite a lot crammed into the books 272 pages, and it is a journey I think many others who lived through those times, can get something out of as well.