Halfway through the first show of their summer tour, the Bookshop Band introduced a song written for the launch of “Underland,” Robert Macfarlane’s epic tome exploring the mysteries of the subterranean world.

“It’s about this sense of something much bigger than we are,” Beth Porter told the audience at Rheged, an arts center in Penrith, just outside the Lake District in northern England. “Our place in history is very tiny, really, but it’s also important.”

Two minutes later, as if to emphasize this point, the power went out with a soft thud. The crowd gasped, myself included. Five emergency bulbs illuminated Porter, her husband Ben Please and their menagerie of string instruments on the small stage. The pair glanced at one another across a pool of yellow light — a quick meeting of eyeballs.

Porter kept singing. Please kept strumming his guitar. The show went on, electrified by applause.

It had been a long day. The journey from London had taken almost seven hours, significantly more time than when I first mapped the route from my desk in New Jersey. The driving was, shall we say, harrowing.

I’m not a music aficionado or even much of a fan, so it was unlike me to go to such great lengths for a concert. I grew up in the Garden State without pledging allegiance to Bruce or Bon Jovi. I went to college in Vermont in the 90s and never went to a Phish show. These days, I listen to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, sometimes up to 15 times in a row, mostly as background noise while I work.

Blasphemous? Yes. But I’ve long wondered whether the part of my brain that should be devoted to music has been overtaken by books. Describe a plot and I can name the novel it comes from. Mention a title and I can tell you who wrote it. Somehow I’ve parlayed this parlor trick into a career at the Book Review, yet I’m still envious of people whose musical taste isn’t calcified, as mine is, around the original Lilith era (10,000 Maniacs, Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin). Who can snap or clap to a beat. Who feel music in their bones, the way I feel words.