Turning the pages slowly, anticipating the final chapter of the challenging, sometimes daunting, and often entertaining narrative of 2023, readers have a chance to pause and to reflect on the highlights of their journeys. While some readers and critics […]
With World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music, Jeff Tweedy completes a trilogy of meditative books that offer windows into his life, his songwriting, and, now, his deeply personal take on […]
Just over a decade ago, in 2011, Bob Dylan remarked: “Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me […]
Ken Irwin was born a ramblin’ man, searching out the music where its notes filled the air at old-time gatherings and festivals. In the early 1970s, he and his partner Marian Leighton staked out a claim on picnic tables at […]
According to at least one former music magazine editor’s recent collection of interviews and public conversations, rock and roll is the province of aging white men. Jann Wenner even titles his collection The Masters, as if the seven artists on […]
When John Prine died on April 7, 2020, he left behind a sumptuous banquet of lyrically ingenious songs that captured the vagaries of the lives of individuals whom society had consigned to its margins. Prine was better than any other […]
Every fall brings another crop of big music memoirs and biographies, and I mean that both literally and metaphorically; Michael Azerrad’s “annotated” version of his 1993 Nirvana bio, The Amplified Come as You Are, totes up almost 700 pages, for example. […]
Like Marty Stuart’s rockabilly guitar licks and Ricky Skaggs’ lightning-fast mandolin runs, music historian and critic Michael Streissguth’s tour-de-force music history, Highways and Heartaches: How Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, and Children of the New South Saved the Soul of Country […]
In the introduction to his often hilarious and poignant new memoir, Bang Bang Crash, novelist and drummer Nic Brown gets off a resounding rim shot at his own expense, revealing a glimpse of his own journey from drums to pen […]
Alan Paul has done it again. In 2014, he published a definitive oral history of the Allman Brothers, One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. While that book covered much of the history of the band, […]
