Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir by Michael V. Smith

Is a song enough
to hold all the truths we cannot bear
without it? 

From award-winning writer Michael V. Smith comes a poetic memoir about growing up gay in the shadow of AIDS. Embodying an elusive part of queer history, these song and album-inspired poems capture the last three decades of the millennium and reveal how music has an uncanny ability to remind us not just where we were at a given moment in time but who we were.

With his signature humour and tenderness, and guided by the music of the era, Smith catalogues social prejudices, court rulings, and medical breakthroughs, alongside personal devastations, triumphs, and the search for community. From a first crush toting a Michael Jackson Thriller cassette, to falling in love to the music of Jane Siberry, to dancing at a gay bar to “Groove Is in the Heart,” Soundtrack is a moving personal record of a man who survived the lost generation and a vital document of queer joy.

Praise for Soundtrack

“Michael V. Smith is at it again. Soundtrack gives us an arc we so rarely get, one in which all our preteen longings, our teenage mistakes, our frailties and traumas are just the first verse of a killer song, and it’s building to a delirious, cocky, ecstatic final chorus.” —Marcus McCann, author of Park Cruising

“Soundtrack is a songbook that thrums with heart, hilarity, and moments of brilliance so sharp, wise, and tender I’ll carry them with me forever. Soundtrack is a testament to the poetics of living and the power of music through Michael V. Smith’s essential kaleidoscope of lenses: queer artist, activist, writer, radical, drag diva, humourist, poet, documentarian, and personal DJ.” —Andrea Warner, author of We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ’90s and Changed Music

“Looking back in time through the prism of music Michael V. Smith crystallizes moments from life, homing in on the safe space music makes for a queer kid, enhancing details or bearing witness to trauma or just letting us live forever even during a plague. This collection is like pulling a well-loved vinyl record from the sleeve and knowing even before you drop the needle, you are going deep.” —Brent Bambury, CBC Broadcaster

Press Coverage

2025 Fall Preview: Nonfiction —Quill & Quire

Most Anticipated: Our 2025 Fall Nonfiction Preview —49th Shelf

45 Canadian nonfiction books to read this fall —CBC Books

The Music in Soundtrack Chronicles the True Joys and Looming Dangers of an Important Cultural Era —Open Book

Le Vancouver Writers Fest : L’engagement des auteurs et le pouvoir de leurs mots —Lauren Theodet, La Source

“In Soundtrack, there’s music, music everywhere at the point where these two unequal forces interact.  With poems named after music by Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, Jane Siberry, The Cure, and Sinead O’Connor, Smith summons experiential highs and lows.” —Brett Josef Grubisic, The BC Review

“Smith has written a smart and sexy book, full of joy and humour and history and resistance and music. Sometimes it may be true that music articulates what cannot be borne, but here, Smith succeeds in articulating what he needs to say and what many need to hear.” —Amanda Thru the Looking Glass