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
View attachment 107674

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
View attachment 107674

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, Sex 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/

 

[leahypc]

For anyone interested in Geddy Lee's book, 'My Effin' Life', there's a great price on it right now on Amazon - $14.67 (63% off).

 

[cbmmm3]

and its an effin good book btw

 

[SyrinxTemple]

For anyone interested in Geddy Lee's book, 'My Effin' Life', there's a great price on it right now on Amazon - $14.67 (63% off).

I cannot recommend enough. I know it is 500 pages, but I would have been fine with double that. Of course, they have been my favorite band since I was 10.

 

[Blackwood]

I don’t remember being aware of XTC when they were active, but that’s not surprising since the style is something I would have avoided at the time and not played on the radio stations I listened to.

However, always being interested in Steven Wilson’s surround mixes, I started buying the 5.1 reissues in the last year or so. There was a lot of it I liked (King for a Day is now a favorite song) so I wanted to learn more about the band and ran across this book which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The book is an interview format and covers about 30 songs that Andy wrote. What impressed me was his desire to do something different with each song, mainly musically but also lyrically. Since the person interviewing him was a musician, he could draw things out that a non-musician might not so you could understand what was happening in the songs.

Some of the stories relate to what was happening in the band at the time, so while it’s not a band biography, you get a general overview of their history sprinkled throughout.

I know we have The Big Express in Atmos. I hope Wilson revisits his earlier 5.1 mixes for Atmos.

 

[humprof]

The entire 33-1/3 series (excluding pre-orders) is 30% off--not 33-1/3% off?--at Bloomsbury through the weekend.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/33-13/

 

[Kenneth Burns]

Music reads and rereads since September:

Mark Russell, "Presenting Mark Russell"
Dave Marsh, "Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who"
Ken Caillat and Steve Stiefel, "Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album"
Mike Rutherford, "The Living Years"
Geoff Emerick, "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles"

In my 50s I think I spend more time reading about music than I do listening to it!

 

[Quad Linda]

Been reading woefully little for too long.
recently read 90 page hard bound book from Hear My Song - Laura Nyro UK 19 CD. Mostly text by Gil, her Son. Many photos, too.