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{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Song Man: A Melodic Adventure, or My Single-minded Approach to Songwriting
|author=Will Hodgkinson
|buy=Maybe
|borrow=Yes
|pages=304
|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
|date=4 Jun June 2007
|isbn=978-0747584957
|amazonukcover=<amazonuk>0747584958</amazonuk>|amazonusaznuk=0747584958|aznus=<amazonus>0306815818</amazonus>
}}
When watching a TV documentary, I'll routinely grumble "this'd be better on the radio", so unedifying is the visual content. It's rare that a book will elicit a similar comment, but while reading ''Song Man'' I longed to hear, or even see, what was being described.
Being partly an account of the songwriting process, the book inevitably lacks arguably the most important aspect of that art: the music. Which means we're often left with Will Hodgkinson's dodgy lyrics. Mercifully his prose style is far more sophisticated.
He also redeems himself with some first-class music journalism. It's the wisdom he extracts from some of the best practitioners of the trade that make this book more than yet another high-concept comedy quest (à la Tony Hawks's [[''One Hit Wonderland]]'').
Having chronicled his struggle to master the guitar at the age of 34 in his previous book [[''Guitar Man]]'', Hodgkinson here takes the process to the next level: to preserve some of his compositions for posterity in the form of a vinyl single. His slightly ironic hope is that future generations will discover it as a lost classic.
But first he has to write the songs. It's not as easy as it seems. His only excursion into the genre is called ''Mystery Fox''. His voice is, he confesses "horrible". It's not a promising start. But he has various more musical friends; his long-suffering wife has a passable set of pipes. Thanks to his trade as a journalist writing for ''The Guardian'', ''the Daily Telegraph'', as well as the music magazine ''Mojo'', he also has access to the PRs of some of the biggest names in songwriting.
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