THE YIN AND THE YANG OF IT ALL

Faye recounts a life caught between identities in this debut music memoir.

The Caulfields released two albums with A&M Records during the height of late-1990s alternative rock. Unlike many of their contemporaries, however, the band was fronted by a mixed-race singer/songwriter. Faye was raised in Delaware by a Korean American mother who was 40 years old when he was born; his father was a 62-year-old Irish American ex-cop who died when the author was 6. Faye thought of himself as a perpetual outsider—a sensitive child who felt alienated from White kids he grew up with and from his extended Korean family. He found his voice in rock ’n’ roll, although that path was hardly a simple one to follow. As a lifelong working musician, Faye says, he still feels caught between worlds: “I’m always just one song, one soundtrack, one viral anything from being able to put my kids through college,” he writes in his preface, “or one unforeseen dry patch from having to play ‘Wagon Wheel’ in front of an eighty-inch plasma TV that the bar owner refuses to turn off during my set.” With this memoir, Faye recounts not only “the Caulfields’ fifteen minutes in the spotlight,” but what happened to him before and after it: his confused childhood in the 1970s, the premature demise of his band, and the way music and writing helped him to grapple with subsequent losses in his life. Faye’s prose is even and evocative, particularly in chapters framed as letters to his late mother. Here, he drives past her old house: “Even though the bamboo trees are gone—the ones that used to piss off the neighbors when they sprouted up into their yards—the Japanese maple you planted when I was a teenager is still there, standing as strong as I remember, although the current occupants don’t seem to have the skill or desire to maintain it like you did.” The book sometimes drags a bit due to its length of nearly 450 pages, but Faye’s thoughts on music and family are likely to linger in readers’ minds.

A sometimes-rambling but often affecting remembrance.