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Hi! I'm John Glynn, and I'm excited to share some book recommendations inspired by one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs, "Cruel Summer." To me, this song perfectly encapsulates the heightened emotions of summer love—a theme at the heart of my memoir Out East. I chose books that capture the "fever dream highs" of the season. But at the same time, as Taylor sings, "Summer's a knife," filled with longing and heartache, primed for nostalgia. All of these books carry the kind of moonlit shimmer I crave in a smart beach read. As a Swiftie, a beach lover, an avid reader, and a hopeless romantic, I hope you enjoy.
This might be my all-time favorite memoir. Every time I sit down to write, I tend to read a few pages of it to absorb the rhythm of Patti Smith’s unadorned, lyrical writing.
Like Taylor Swift, Patti Smith is a music icon, a poet, and a genius wordsmith. For me, this book totally captured the radiant nostalgia of a bygone era and a romantic love that evolves into something more permanent and transcendent.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
At the age of 23 I brought Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight to play the 1969 festival. In my naivety when making the bid I knew nothing about the sixties superstar but by the time he accepted the invitation I had soaked up all that was generally known of his music and backstory. Through the decades since I have closely followed Dylan’s remarkable career and written about his indispensable place in the counterculture. I am an architect and author working in Oxford.
A timely anthology of 35 essays by an interestingly diverse array of contributors. A correspondingly diverse selection of aspects of the multi-dimensional Bob Dylan and his remarkable six-decade career is subjected to forensic scrutiny. No Dylan book peaks beneath the cloak of so many of the mysteries surrounding the enigmatic ‘song and dance man’.
2021 marks Bob Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and…
At the age of 23 I brought Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight to play the 1969 festival. In my naivety when making the bid I knew nothing about the sixties superstar but by the time he accepted the invitation I had soaked up all that was generally known of his music and backstory. Through the decades since I have closely followed Dylan’s remarkable career and written about his indispensable place in the counterculture. I am an architect and author working in Oxford.
Among the 1,000 plus books about Bob Dylan this is the closest we have to a full authorised biography. Robert Shelton was with the artist from the beginning in 1961, witnessing all the controversial concerts. No Direction Home is the definitive biography, written with Dylan’s blessing and co-operation and with favoured access to original sources. This beautifully illustrated 2011 edition, edited By Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries, is an update of the original 1986 standard.
This lavishly illustrated and thoughtfully abridged edition of THE classic book on Dylan—published to coincide with Dylan’s 80th birthday (May 24, 1941)—is a must for all Dylan aficionados.
Robert Shelton met Bob Dylan when the young singer arrived in New York in 1960, becoming Dylan’s friend, champion, and critic. Shelton’s book No Direction Home, first published in 1986, was hailed as the definitive unauthorized biography of this complex, passionate genius, and is the only one written with the subject’s active cooperation. Dylan gave Shelton access to his parents, his brother, and his childhood friends, among others. No Direction Home took…
At the age of 23 I brought Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight to play the 1969 festival. In my naivety when making the bid I knew nothing about the sixties superstar but by the time he accepted the invitation I had soaked up all that was generally known of his music and backstory. Through the decades since I have closely followed Dylan’s remarkable career and written about his indispensable place in the counterculture. I am an architect and author working in Oxford.
Not the best-known Dylan book but Jokerman is unusually productive in its scholarly analysis of many of the Nobel Laurette’s revered lyrics. Investigating the writer’s use of ‘Identity’ in his work happens to coincide with 20 of his best known and most loved songs. At one level this might be seen as a book for anoraks, but it is much more and likely to be of interest to anyone inclined to seek answers to questions raised in the apparent opacity of these Dylan classics.
Bob Dylan is described as one of the most startling, prolific and controversial contemporary song-writers. This book explores the complexity and subtlety of his lyrics and their themes, seeking to make intelligible that seems obscure and difficult. The author reviews the manner in which many of Dylan's lyrics treat fundamental questions concerning the nature of human identity. He argues that these lyrics represent a continuation of the experimental poetic practices of modernism. At the heart of Dylan's work are the discrepancies between the conscious, socialized self, born of language, and those potencies of personality that lie outside rational formulation. For…
I have two major passions in life: music and writing. I started learning guitar aged 16, and my friends and I formed a band as soon as we possibly could. My first professional job was writing about pop music for a monthly magazine, and much later in life, I discovered jazz. Now I’m a bass-player, jazz singer, and composer who works with some of the finest jazz musicians in London, and I play regularly at Ronnie Scott’s club. As well as the Donald Fagen biography, I’ve also written biographies of the great jazz singers Mark Murphy (for me, the greatest of them all) and Jon Hendricks.
When I was growing up, the fabled 1969 Woodstock music festival was a byword for the alternative drop-out culture of hippiedom then at its height.
Even today, people remember it and the town that gave it its name (although it's actually located 40 miles from the site of the festival). What’s perhaps less well known is that Woodstock first became Hippie Central several years before, after Bob Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman moved there, and it continued to attract musicians and artists long afterwards.
This book tells an often shocking tale of excess – drink, drugs, and sexual shenanigans. (And incidentally, Donald Fagen now divides his time between Woodstock and New York.)
Think "Woodstock" and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But the town of Woodstock, New York, the original planned venue of the concert, is located over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. Long before the landmark music festival usurped the name, Woodstock-the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan holed up after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident-was already a key location in the '60s rock landscape. In Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns re-creates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, scheming…
I’m a singer/songwriter and I grew up in a rock’n’roll household. My family has always traded great books about music between us, memoirs, biographies, scientific studies, deep dives into subcultures, industry exposes – I love them all and find a good music book impossible to resist. I always get excited when I find books written by other obsessive music-loving kindred spirits––if I can feel the love I’m right in there with them. I especially love the behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the work and fascinations that helped forge an artist’s career.
Written by the revered god-daddy of Australian songcraft, Shotsis a beat peek behind the curtain of what it is to be a young band on the road and on the rise, all lens flare vignettes; dry, brutal, and perfect, as cool as The Don himself. His uncanny way with words lets us bear witness to the country hall dances, Kings Cross streets, and back of the van like a poetic spy cam.
This remarkable memoir begins with Don Walker's early life in rural Australia and goes up to the late ’80s. In mesmerising prose, Walker evokes childhood and youth, wild times in the ’70s, life on the road and in Kings Cross, music-making and much more. Shots is a stunningly original book, a set of word pictures – shots – that conjure up the lowlife and backroads of Australia.
‘Singular, strong and beguiling’ —The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Better than good. Most of the time it is brilliant.’ —Australian Book Review
‘The book shines with its descriptive sense of place. Shots carries the…
I’m a singer/songwriter and I grew up in a rock’n’roll household. My family has always traded great books about music between us, memoirs, biographies, scientific studies, deep dives into subcultures, industry exposes – I love them all and find a good music book impossible to resist. I always get excited when I find books written by other obsessive music-loving kindred spirits––if I can feel the love I’m right in there with them. I especially love the behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the work and fascinations that helped forge an artist’s career.
As someone that lovingly collected fallen sequins from a theatre dressing room floor after a show as a kid, I relate hard to this story of the intense love and awe Warren Ellis has for Nina Simone, and for seeing the world through a lens of music in general. His snowballing obsession with Nina Simone’s discarded gum (which I once had the pleasure of seeing, back when it lived unceremoniously inside a plastic bag on a shelf) makes for a wild absurdist ride through true love.
THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER A GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, THE TIMES, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY EXPRESS, ROUGH TRADE, MOJO, CLASH, ROLLING STONE, UNCUT BOOK OF THE YEAR
From award-winning musician and composer Warren Ellis comes the unexpected and inspiring story of a piece of chewing gum.
FEATURING AN INTRODUCTION BY NICK CAVE
I hadn't opened the towel that contained her gum since 2013. The last person to touch it was Nina Simone, her saliva and fingerprints unsullied. The idea that it was still in her towel was something I had drawn strength from. I thought each time I opened it some of…
My research and writing about music, particularly country and other Southern genres, began with the "Louisiana Hayride", a radio barn dance in the post-World War II era that launched both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley to prominence. From there, I turned to the long-running PBS music showcase Austin City Limits, which now names a huge music festival as well. In both projects, understanding music encompassed larger contexts of region, media, and meaning, all of which bear on understanding Dolly Parton as a musician and songwriter; as Appalachian; as a recording, TV, and movie star; and as a global cultural icon. I’ve never known life without Dolly Parton in it. Of this, I’m glad.
Marissa centers on three contemporary songwriters, Kacey Musgraves; Maren Morris; and Mickey Guyton, to illuminate the experiences of country women more broadly during the twenty-first century. Facing closed doors and narrowed constraints, this trio carved channels for music business success, using new-century tools to reach audiences and ears. The industry-old guard was left to catch up.
The backdrop for their stories is the well-documented nosedive for women on country radio airwaves since 2000, but terrestrial radio matters less for this younger generation. Dolly’s own path-clearing journey inspired these artists. At one notable intersection of their stories and hers, Dolly’s surprise appearance onstage during an all-women performance at the Newport Folk Festival drew a reaction from musicians and the crowd alike. One close observer remembered it was like they had seen “f-ing Snow White.”
In country music, the men might dominate the radio waves. But it’s women—like Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves—who are making history.
This is the full and unbridled story of the past twenty years of country music seen through the lens of these trailblazers’ careers—their paths to stardom and their battles against a deeply embedded boys’ club, as well as their efforts to transform the genre into a more inclusive place—as told by award-winning Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss.
For the women of country music, 1999 was an entirely different universe—a brief blip in time, when women like Shania…
Almost all of my books have been historical novels, but this one is the one most dear to me, an attempt to understand the fault line that the Vietnam War laid across American society, leaving almost every man of my generation with scars physical or psychic. My picks are all books that illuminate the multiple upheavals of that time.
If there is any cultural icon that defines this era, it is music.
Positively 4thStreetchronicles the personal and musical lives of these four, a portrait of extravagant, quarrelsome genius and the transformation of folk music from academic song-collecting to an era-defining musical form, by way of Greenwich Village, the anti-war movement, and shifting personal entanglements.
When twenty-five-year-old Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was already recognized as a genius, a youth idol with an acid wit and a barbwire throat; and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark, was unquestionably the center of youth culture.
In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu recounts the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular and enduring art form as the story of a colorful foursome: not only Dylan but also his part-time lover Joan Baez -- the first voice of the new generation; her sister…
I grew up with the music of the 1960s. Going to packed, pheromone-heavy dances featuring The Lincolns—Nova Scotia’s most popular and most soulful band—were a huge part of my teenage years. Those experiences implanted a deep love of R&B, and somehow or other pointed me in the direction of becoming a writer. It’s a bit of a mystery how it all works. In any case, of all my books, none was as much fun to work on as Kings of Friday Night. It has received lots of love, including from readers who grew up far from the time and place I write about. Long live local bands! And live music everywhere!
Joni Mitchell’s career extended long after the 1960s, but that was the decade when she burst on the scene with her distinctive voice and incredible song-writing and musical abilities. This book provides in-depth details of how she went from being an unknown blonde girl from Saskatchewan to an undisputed folk music superstar with songs like no one else. As Leonard Cohen put it: “She was like a storm.” To present Joni’s story, the author conducted interviews with Mitchell and her childhood friends, and with the many others who played important roles in her life—including Cohen, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and David Crosby. Along the way, David Yaffe reveals the backstory behind all of Joni’s songs. It’s a fascinating book.
Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.
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