96 books like Confess

I am a huge Iron Maiden fan, like a devoted acolyte fan. Over the years, I’ve seen them multiple times, bought a closet full of concert shirts, and collected their beers/Funko Pops/album deluxe versions. Bruce Dickinson is the band’s second vocalist, and here he gives us the tales of his early days in Samson before joining Steve Harris and the Maiden crew. We get stories of his childhood and family in typical autobiography fashion, but it takes off once he gets into the meat of his time with Iron Maiden.

The book is captivating because he reflects on leaving Maiden to follow a solo career. The struggles he dealt with personally and professionally paint a picture of a man who had it all but wanted to try something new. The book’s final portion deals with his return to Iron Maiden and how he went through cancer. Cancer could’ve ended his… show more.

If a person ever personified being a metal god, it was Lemmy. The leader for the legendary Motorhead didn’t care about how he appeared to people. Lemmy wanted to kick ass on stage and leave a legacy marked by booze and smokes. This book shines the light on how Lemmy rose to become one of the most influential vocalists and bass players in metal. If you like an irreverent look at the price of fame, this book is for you.

Adrian Smith is one of the lead guitar players in Iron Maiden. Adrian has a passion beyond the stage and his career; he loves fishing. When I first picked up the book, I wasn’t sure how the book would be at keeping me engaged and interested. I’m not a fisherman, and I don’t relish going outside much. The book begins with him recounting how he started his love of fishing near his childhood home when he was younger. The book then uses his touring and recording schedules to recount his fishing trips and most extraordinary catches spanning the globe. Each catch is part of a tapestry woven through his life on the road. In the end, I found myself in awe of how much Adrian loves to fish and how seriously he takes it as a hobby.

This was the true story of Rockstar Anthony Kideas and his struggle with an abusive childhood and then a drug addiction. I related to how he felt as a child and how low he felt during his addiction to drugs. Many of his childhood issues and abuses he faced gave me the strength to write about the abuse I had faced.

Like me, John Darnielle of the band Mountain Goats (a Merge Records act, as it happens) was not born in North Carolina, but fully embraced it upon moving here.

After much acclaim for the twisted freak-folk of his band, Darnielle launched a parallel career as a fiction writer with this novella in Continuum Books’ 33-1/3 series.

Nominally about the 1971 Black Sabbath album of the title, Master of Reality is actually a personality sketch of obsessed and troubled super-fans of the sort Darnielle has in abundance in his hometown of Durham and elsewhere.

He has followed it up with more literary greatness, especially his revelatory 2014 novel Wolf in White Van.

Chuck Eddy cartwheels onto the page like a stoned Bart Simpson with the complete works of Lester Bangs in his back pocket.

He sees “metal” as a broad church: not a genre but a mindset, an intent, an intensity level. As such, pop, rap, jazz, funk, experimental, blues, and contemporary classical albums rub shoulders with the rock, punk, and actual heavy metal you’d expect on such a list.

It’s a hilariously opinionated read, occasionally even perverse. He’s wrong on every page, but I’m with him that the 1974 Alice Cooper Greatest Hits album may be the single greatest slab of electric music ever pressed to wax. 

The cutest book I’ve ever read about being a fan. Warm and softhearted, Chuck’s writing is literary comfort food.

A music and sports journalist turned memoirist, this is his misty-eyed look back at childhood. Like an episode of The Wonder Years all about Hair Metal. You can substitute Hair Metal for anything chronically un-cool that you ever fell in love with.

It’s a gleeful defence of the dork inside, a reminder that taste is subjective, that fashions come and go, that when we poo-poo things we’re denying ourselves potential enjoyment. There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Pleasure is pleasure, and there isn’t enough of it in this sorry world.

So, curl up with Klosterman and enjoy what you enjoy. 

Nearly twenty years ago, I wondered why nobody had written about being a rock fan in the nineteen-eighties, and then I came across Seb Hunter’s Hell Bent for Leather.

Hunter’s story was very similar to mine (we’re of a similar age and based in the UK), but whereas I still love the music and look back on my ultimately futile rock star aspirations with a certain sense of pride and warmth, Hunter is dismissive of his more successful attempt, and embarrassed by his allegiance to the spandex and six strings.

So why recommend this book, I hear you say? One word – passion. His stories and opinions, though I may not agree with all of them, clearly come from the heart and cut through his often cynical but incisive narrative.

If you don’t know Poppoff, you should. He’s a genial Canuck Youtuber who also happens to be the world’s most prolific music reviewer.

An inveterate headbanger with an unquenchable thirst for loudness. In this—the book for which he’ll surely be remembered—Poppoff turns his eye on the whole prehistory of heavy metal, breaking the music down into component parts, and tracing those components backwards through time.

From psychedelia to early rock n roll, blues, jazz, classical music, all the way back to the Vikings, the Ancient Greeks, and the Battle of Jericho in 1250 BC. If there’s a better researched, more thorough, or more sweeping book about loud music on the planet Earth, I ain’t aware of it.  

I often use selections from Whose Middle Ages? in my medieval history courses, but this collection of short, insightful essays is a great resource for anyone interested in understanding what leading scholars think about invocations of the medieval past in contemporary culture. Touching on a wide range of topics, from Viking imagery in heavy metal music and Celtic crosses on white supremacist websites to controversies over Sharia law and papal heresy in the popular press, this volume serves as an ideal introduction to the use and abuse of the Middle Ages.