Music memoirs fall generally into three categories. Some, like Gregg Allman’s My Cross to Bear (William Morrow), tiresomely catalog an artist’s immersion in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, providing very little insight into the artist’s music or the value […]
In September, I wrote a feature for Publishers Weekly discussing many new memoirs — many written by women, and some which are just now being released. Carly Simon’s Boys in the Trees (Flatiron Books 2015) has sold over 77,000 copies — a […]
Many of us who write about music often like to ask artists what songs have most inspired them, or what songwriters most influenced them. Bob Boilen, creator and host of NPR Music’s All Songs Considered — as well as their […]
This week’s Grammy Awardss remind us just how uneven music performances – and music itself – can be. As we all know, great artists can be ruined on vinyl or tape by poor production, or over-production. And there’s not much […]
Ah, it’s that time of year once again; we’re making our lists and counting one, two, three times the albums on which we’ve dropped the needle most often or the books whose pages we’ve turned the most frequently and to […]
Rarely do great songwriters make exceptional prose stylists. If Steve Earle has authored his share of outstanding story-songs (“Copperhead Road,” “Ben McCulloch”), the same cannot be said of his prose fiction (Doghouse Roses, I’ll Never Get Out of This World […]
While there are still some great music books to hit the shelves in stores this summer—Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (Dey St., $26.99, July) is one of the most revealing […]
