What's the LATEST Book You've Read? MUSIC-RELATED ONLY!

[Clement]

My next purchase? (Although I might wait a year for the paperback edition.) Love Ann Powers, love Joni--what's not to like? You can read the preface for free on the publisher's website:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/traveling-ann-powers
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I couldn't wait! Thanks SO much for the link! Those >40pp convinced me to buy two copies–one for my daughter!

 

[hafquark]

Just finished "I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs"

 

[~dave~~wave~]

My next purchase? (Although I might wait a year for the paperback edition.) Love Ann Powers, love Joni--what's not to like? You can read the preface for free on the publisher's website:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/traveling-ann-powers
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I can recommend this recent interview with the author on Rock's Backpages podcast, by noted UK music writer Barney Hoskyns.

https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Podcast/Episode/e178

 

[humprof]

I've been a loyal reader of music writer Phil Freeman's Burning Ambulance blog for years. (He moved to Substack a few months ago.) In today's post, he reviews a whole bunch of books, a couple of which have been sitting on my shelves unread: one of them, Jon Savage's classic England's Dreaming: Anarchy, *** Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, has sat there for ages; and the other, Will Hermes' Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever, only since it was published a couple of years ago. But the volume Freeman spends the most time on is one I don't have: Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock. He makes it sound pretty fascinating--"despite," like me, "not being a particularly obsessive fan of the music filed under that heading." It struck a particular chord because I'd just finished listening to Steven Wilson & Tim Bowness's Album Years episode on "Folk, Ambient, & Krautrock" in 1972. (Wilson's favorite album ever is Tangerine Dream's Zeit.)

https://burningambulance.substack.com/p/krautrock-punk-rock-and-the-weight

 

[knifeman]

Geezer Butler's Into the Void. Great book if you're a Sabbath fan.

 

[Kenneth Burns]

Here's the latest. I reread Mike Nesmith's wonderful memoir "Infinite Tuesday," and I can't say enough good things about Gary Giddens' two-volume (and counting) biography of Bing Crosby. This is superb music writing.

Semi-relatedly, can anyone recommend a good Cole Porter biography?

 

[Clement]

Can't wait to get into this one! @GOS !

 

[humprof]

Here's a review (by Hua Hsu, himself an excellent music writer, in the New Yorker) of a new book I'd like to read: Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music, by Franz Nicolay. "Young people who came of age before the twenty-first century...could be forgiven for assuming that working one’s way up from gigs to a steady job in music was a plausible career path...But anyone who has streamed a song on their phone for free can sense that something has changed. 'Musicians,' Nicolay argues, 'were the canaries in the coal mine of the precariat.'"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/28/band-people-franz-nicolay-book-review
https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477323533/band-people/