Nashville native Drew Bratcher writes musically about memory and memorably about music in uncommonly beautiful essays that announce the arrival of a major new voice. The title essay, a requiem in fragments, tells the story of a grandfather through his ear, comb, hands, El Camino, and clothes. Bratcher delivers a tough and moving tribute to a man who “went on ahead, on up the road, and then the road turned.” Elsewhere, Bratcher directs his attention to Johnny Cash’s looming presence over hi...

The revealing, wildly entertaining, and bestselling memoir from the legendary Bruce Springsteen, one of the greatest songwriters and performers of any era. Born to Run is the greatest rock ‘n’ roll story ever told.Essential reading for the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s seminal album Born to Run, the long-awaited release of Nebraska ’82, and a companion to the acclaimed film Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White...

Willie Nelson shares his life story in this captivating bestselling memoir of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms."Unvarnished. Funny. Leaving no stone unturned." ... So say the publishers about this book I've written. What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it.It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, t...

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREThe celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.“I’d come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his li...

"Refreshing . . . candid . . . poignant. . . . One of the best of country's tell-alls, as warm, peculiar, and individualistic as Jennings's music itself." — Entertainment WeeklyEqual parts outlaw, renegade, and legend, Waylon Jennings enjoyed a stellar music career for four decades and this no-holds-barred autobiography reveals the story of a man who infused country music traditions with the energy of rock and roll to rewrite the rules of ...

Neil Peart decided to drive his BMW Z-8 automobile from L.A. to Big Bend National Park, in Southwest Texas. As he sped along “between the gas-gulping SUVs and asthmatic Japanese compacts clumping in the left lane, and the roaring, straining semis in the right,” he acted as his own DJ, lining up the CDs chronologically and according to his possible moods.“Not only did the music I listened to accompany my journey, but it also took me on sidetrips, through memory and fractals of assoc...

The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to ...

If you had to give America a voice, it’s been said more than once, that voice would be Willie Nelson’s. For more than fifty years, he’s taken the stuff of his life-the good and the bad-and made from it a body of work that has become a permanent part of our musical heritage and kept us company through the good and the bad of our own lives. Long before he became famous as a performer, Willie Nelson was known as a songwriter, keeping his young family afloat by writing songs-like “Crazy”-that ...

Talking Music is a collection of nineteen of Holger Petersens in-depth radio interviews with artiststhe pioneering men and women who created the blues and roots sounds that have influenced the course of popular culture and music in North America. Many of his interview subjects are no longer with ustheir stories need to be told. The book is divided into four collections of interviews: British Blues Revival, Delta and Memphis Blues, Artists Who Helped Build Stony Plain, and Bonus Tracks. Eac...

The essential playlist of great writing about the music that rocked America, with fifty landmark pieces on Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Lez Zepplin, and other rock n’ roll legendsJonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar's Shake It Up invites the reader into the tumult and excitement of the rock revolution through fifty landmark pieces by a supergroup of writers on rock in all its variety, from heavy metal to disco, punk to hip-hop. Stanley Booth describes a record...

This eclectic, funny, and moving book tracks a life lived in music and words. Paul Quarrington ruminates on the bands of his childhood; his restless youth, spent playing bass with the cult band Joe Hall and the Continental Drift; and his incarnation, in middle age, as rhythm guitarist and singer with the band Porkbelly Futures.Ranging through rock ’n’ roll, the blues, folk, country and soul, he explores how songs are made, how they work, and why they affect us so d...

A gripping narrative that captures the tumult and liberating energy of a nation in transition, Sweet Soul Music is an intimate portrait of the legendary performers--Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Al Green among them--who merged gospel and rhythm and blues to create Southern soul music. Through rare interviews and with unique insight, Peter Guralnick tells the definitive story of the songs that inspired a generation and foreve...