Every major singer from Frank Sinatra to Christina Aguilera. Every major composer from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim. Every major song from a century of favorites. Every major musician and lyricist. Every major styling from blues, jazz, and country to folk, big band, and rock and rollThe most recorded songs of all time. A guide to understanding the "standard" lingo. The evolution of popular music from Tin Pan Alley to contemporary musical theater, and more.

Created in the late 1960s, fashionable in the early 1970s and hated in the 1980s Progressive Rock has a colourful and eventful story. Many of the genres main protagonists, including Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, remain as popular as ever, while lesser-known names like Camel, Caravan, Renaissance, Van der Graaf Generator and Gentle Giant retain cult status.Prog expert Stephen Lambe guides the reader through the early years as the music developed out of the B...

There are so many k-pop boy groups, while the groups are too numerous to mention one by one. However, some of them just disappear after debut, and only a very small minority of k-pop boy groups can become popular. By the way, there is a boy group who has been on the steady rise since its debut and is now considered as one of the most popular k-pop idol groups. Yeah, it’s BTS.As BTS is enjoying a huge popularity at home and abroad, many people in the k-pop world are now saying "The ...

"A winning look at the stories behind 45 pop, punk, folk, soul and country classics" in the words of Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper and more ( The Washington Post).Every great song has a fascinating backstory. And here, writer and music historian Marc Myers brings to life five decades of music through oral histories of forty-five era-defining hits woven from interviews with the artists who created them, including such legendary tunes as the Isley...

And the Band Begins to Play is an in-depth, 12-volume guide to every song recorded by the Beatles. Part Six examines the LP Rubber Soul and associated singles.Going further than the usual song-by-song, album-by-album guide, it is a record of every moment that the Beatles came together to record, from the first EMI session in 1962 to their acrimonious break-up in 1970. In short, this 12-volume set is the blueprint to every single recording made by the Beatles: 12 albums and 22 singl...

Paul McCartney and John Lennon described him as the Beatles' "favorite group," he won Grammy awards, wrote and recorded hit songs, and yet no figure in popular music is as much of a paradox, or as underrated, as Harry Nilsson. In this first ever full-length biography, Alyn Shipton traces Nilsson's life from his Brooklyn childhood to his Los Angeles adolescence and his gradual emergence as a uniquely talented singer-songwriter. With interviews from friends, family, and associates, and mater...

Ewan Spence looks beyond the sequins, pyrotechnics and key changes to explore what Eurovision really means, from the finer details of the contest to the myth of political voting. This book examines whether the best song ever wins, the media perception of the contest and the ability of this mad, wonderful institution to represent Europe and the people of the continentEurovision is more than three hours on a Saturday night in May. It's something that lives and breathes throughout the year. But ...

Issued on America's premier rap label at the peak of the thrash metal movement, Slayer's controversial Reign in Blood remains the gold standard for extreme heavy metal, a seamless 29-minute procession of ten blindingly fast, apocalyptic songs. The first English book about Slayer explores the creation of the most universally respected metal album and its long road to the stores, through original interviews with the entire band, producer Rick Rubin, engineer Andy Wallace, cover artist Larry ...

It's October 1977, and the Rolling Stones are in a Paris recording studio. They're under siege. Keith Richards's legal troubles after his arrest for heroin possession threaten the band's future, and the broad consensus among rock aficionados is that the band will never again reach the heights of Exile on Main Street.But Mick Jagger is writing lyrics inspired by the year he has just spent in New York City, where he was hanging out with the punks at CBGB and with the glitterati at St...

Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and styli...

Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stompingon vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plunderedand reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in aroom like a...

Released in 1979, AC/DC's Highway To Hell was the infamous last album recorded with singer Bon Scott, who died of alcohol poisoning in London in February of 1980. Officially chalked up to "Death by Misadventure," Scott's demise has forever secured the album's reputation as a partying primer and a bible for lethal behavior, branding the album with the fun chaos of alcoholic excess and its flip side, early death. The best songs on Highway To Hell achieve Sonic Platonism, tr...