Here are 100 books that The Music Book fans have personally recommended if you like
The Music Book.
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I grew up in the eighties, and that means I grew up watching movies such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Say Anything. Thirty years after watching those movies, some iconic scenes have stuck with me: the characters of The Breakfast Club sliding across the hallway to Simple Minds’ song “Don’t You Forget About Me,” John Cusack holding the boombox over his head while blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and the Psychedelic Furs “Pretty in Pink” song playing on the soundtrack of a movie by the same name. The books in this list do a lot with those same ingredients of heartbreak, music, and hope that the characters who so often remind me of myself might find love.
The actor John Cusack brought me to this movie, and I read the book after the movie and loved it. One of the key differences between the movie and the book is that the movie is set in Chicago, and the book in North London. As someone who grew up in the ’80s, I started with Cusack as the nerdy sidekick in Sixteen Candles and became obsessed with his Lloyd Dobler character in Say Anything; you know, the guy who dressed in a trench coat and held a boom box over his head outside a girl’s window.
The narrator of this novel is a record shop owner in London named Rob, and he starts off with his desert island, all-time, top five most memorable breakups, in chronological order. When we’re in the record shop that Rob owns, the guys are always making lists: top 5 guitar solos, top 5…
"I've always loved Nick Hornby, and the way he writes characters and the way he thinks. It's funny and heartbreaking all at the same time."—Zoë Kravitz
From the bestselling author of Funny Girl, About a Boy, A Long Way Down and Dickens and Prince, a wise and hilarious novel about love, heartbreak, and rock and roll.
Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. His girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for the guy upstairs, and Rob is both miserable and relieved. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a…
I wrote Leaving the Beach because I was once bulimic and music-obsessed. After seeking help and recovering, I realized I wanted to write a realistic book about a bulimic woman; it was critical that I didn’t unintentionally romanticize any aspects of this insidious, potentially fatal disease.
When I first read Girl, I thought Blake Nelson was a woman. That’s how convincingly this male author writes—diary-style—in the voice of female protagonist Andrea. Andrea’s a typical high school student in the Pacific Northwest who lives and breathes music and thrift-store clothing. But through her friendship with another like-minded woman, she becomes way more involved in the Portland, Oregon grunge scene than she ever imagined she would. One thing I love about Girlis the way we experience the world exclusively through Andrea’s eyes. She sees the world as it happens, without editorializing or offering any sweeping commentaries. I found this book impossible to put down.
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Meet Andrea Marr, straight-A high school student, thrift-store addict, and princess of the downtown music scene. Andrea is about to experience her first love, first time, and first step outside the comfort zone of high school, with the help of indie rock band The Color Green.
"After I saw Todd Sparrow something deep inside me began to change. It was not a big change and I didn't shave my head and I didn't really think any differently about my life or Hillside or anything like that. But one glimpse of Todd and you immediately realized how limited you were and…
I wrote Leaving the Beach because I was once bulimic and music-obsessed. After seeking help and recovering, I realized I wanted to write a realistic book about a bulimic woman; it was critical that I didn’t unintentionally romanticize any aspects of this insidious, potentially fatal disease.
All the characters in this story—even the minor ones—are so three-dimensional and human that they must be based at least partly on real people. The protagonist, Via—who lost her parents to gun violence as a child and struggles with substance abuse and other things—isn’t a musician or a die-hard music fan, but music and the Seattle music scene play such a huge role in this story that I was compelled to include it on my list. Ina Zajac’s writing is impeccable. She doesn’t shy away from the gritty side of reality and demonstrates a deep understanding of musicians, the things that make them tick, and the people who love them.
An emotionally-charged urban cautionary tale with quirky characters who will stay with you: including Grandma Daney, a mystical star child who serves up universal inspiration with her milk and cookies.
It’s September when good girl Via Sorenson stumbles into a Seattle strip club, drunk and alone on her twenty-first birthday. Matt and Nick—best friends, bandmates, and bouncers—do their best to shield her from their sadistic cocaine-trafficking boss, Carlos. They don’t realize her daddy issues come with a forty-million-dollar trust fund and a legacy she would do anything to escape.
She is actually Violetta Rabbotino, who had been all over the…
I wrote Leaving the Beach because I was once bulimic and music-obsessed. After seeking help and recovering, I realized I wanted to write a realistic book about a bulimic woman; it was critical that I didn’t unintentionally romanticize any aspects of this insidious, potentially fatal disease.
This is the only nonfiction selection on my list. If you live in the Boston area and love music, you’ve probably read Brett Milano’s music reviews in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, or Phoenix.He’s also written numerous books—both fiction and nonfiction—about various types of music. Vinyl Junkies is a wonderful read, even if you’re not particularly interested in music, because although many people featured in it are well-known in the music and art worlds (Peter Buck, Robert Crumb), on a higher level, the book’s really about collecting and collectors in general. Why do people collect? What’s the difference between simply accumulating stuff and curating a collection? And where does one draw the line?
Not too far away from the flea markets, dusty attics, cluttered used record stores and Ebay is the world of the vinyl junkies. Brett Milano dives deep into the piles of old vinyl to uncover the subculture of record collecting. A vinyl junkie is not the person who has a few old 45s shoved in the cuboard from their days in high school. Vinyl Junkies are the people who will travel over 3,000 miles to hear a rare b-side by a German band that has only recorded two songs since 1962, vinyl junkies are the people who own every copy…
I’m a journalist whose work is often heard on NPR's national news magazines, and read in publications such as The New York Times, New York Magazine’s Vulture, BBC Culture, Wired, and Bandcamp. I'm most interested in stories about people, communities, and scenes that have been overlooked, forgotten, seen through a distorted lens, or perhaps never seen at all. I’m on a mission to get to a deeper understanding of what’s at stake in the way we see music and art- and the way we see ourselves.
Daphne A. Brooks’ book is a revolutionary work, centering more than a century of innovations by Black women in popular music who have been marginalized, overlooked, or erased.
Situating Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer and Lorraine Hansberry as a cultural critic alongside blues pioneers such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith and contemporary artists like Janelle Monáe and Valerie June, Brooks doesn’t merely fill in blind spots.
She exposes how those blind spots reflect the partial, subjective view of white male critics and historians.
Showing us a different way of seeing and listening to culture, Brooks has informed and inspired my thinking, and some of the best work I’ve done as a journalist, including this piece about Elizabeth Cotten, whose music fueled the 1960s folk revival.
Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year
"Brooks traces all kinds of lines, finding unexpected points of connection...inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening by tracing lineages and calling for more space." -New York Times
An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyonce.
When you get a PhD in music, you end up with a lot of music books. Like, hundreds of them. At the end of every semester I could never bring myself to sell my textbooks because I just love books. Over the years I’ve continued to collect books about music, and books about everything. I’m happy that now a few have my name on the spine.
This book is essentially a book of quotes from famous musicians, composers, and conductors. I find this book especially inspiring because of the trivial nature of some of the quotes. Sometimes it is just refreshing to read Beethoven complaining about his taxes, or Mozart trying to get paid after a gig. I use this book in my university classes constantly.
A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and other…
I’ve been trying to balance a need to help make the world a better place with my own small expertise as a musician and teacher. So I’ve played music with birds, whales, and bugs, taught philosophy to engineers for decades, written many books and released many albums, and traveled all over the world learning what people are doing to improve things. I need to find words to read that encourage me and lift me out of the looming pull of depressing statistics and real suffering that we all read about every day. I hope change is possible, and I urge everyone to work toward it in their own specific and unique ways.
From the 1960s but still one of the greatest books on how being creative means trying everything, trusting no one, and listening to everybody and everything. After you read this you will know that you can be an artist, that is, if you are meant to be one.
Silence, John Cage's first book and epic masterpiece, was published in October 1961. In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching. Fifty years later comes a beautiful new edition with a foreword by eminent music critic Kyle Gann. A landmark book in American arts and culture, Silence has been translated into more than forty languages and has…
As an author and educator, my work centers on the history, business, and art of the music industry and film industry. I don’t think my fellow historians use musical evidence enough as a primary document that reveals much about the society and time period one is writing about—just as much as the usual primary and secondary documents historians use. I try to ensure my books are entertaining as well as rigorously researched. I’m also a songwriter, with many years in the music biz, and have done much work in radio, especially crafting music shows. I’m always discovering amazing stuff from various eras, and it’s not much fun if you don’t share it, which is part of why I’m on Twitter.
The story of how Warner Bros Records, perhaps the best, most profitable yet artist-friendly record label in the 1970s and 1980s became heavily damaged when it was bought out in the 1990s and put under corporate auspices and expectations. Goodman communicates the financial details in a clear and accessible way, as well as the music executives’ singular personalities. Also offers a close-up view of how the corporate execs, especially with their short-term focus on quarterly results, failed to deal with the challenges of Napster and downloads at the turn of the century. An insightful view of the changing components of the music business in our time.
In 1999, when Napster made music available free online, the music industry found itself in a fight for its life. A decade later, the most important and misunderstood story-and the one with the greatest implications for both music lovers and media companies-is how the music industry has failed to remake itself. In Fortune's Fool, Fred Goodman, the author of The Mansion on the Hill, shows how this happened by presenting the singular history of Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., the controversial heir to Seagram's, who, after dismantling his family's empire and fortune, made a high-stakes gamble to remake both the music…
My mom was an excellent artist, and my father was an accomplished scientist, so I grew up with a passion and mission to combine these in my life’s work. I have played clarinet since 8, in classical, jazz, world, experimental, and sound healing, and have mastered a variety of visual storytelling arts (painting, sculpture, filmmaking, game development). My fascination with mind/body led me to neuroscience research and developing edtech for autism. These all integrated into writing my book and offering this inspiration to others. This book list has nurtured my deepest interests and propelled me to discover more of our human potential to experience sound, storytelling, and well-being.
This book is one of the biggest influences in my life as a sound designer, musician, neuroscientist, and super curious researcher/creator. Dan’s personal life trajectory mirrors my own love of music and science, and his writing style is so accessible and engaging.
He and I have met personally, signed each other’s books, and are literally and figuratively on the same page. I also love his book, The World in Six Songs, a deep dive into how and why music affects us emotionally, culturally, and socially, which is very pertinent to sound design storytelling and portraying human nature from prehistoric to current pop culture.
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music-its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it-and the human brain.
Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, he reveals:
* How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way…
Having spent seven years researching and writing about Prince (and another year updating the book), I spoke to as many people who worked and lived with him as I could. While my book is rich with information gleaned from interviews, alongside my own analysis, there were a few people who didn’t talk to me. Of the above, I did talk to Dez Dickerson, but the others were holding off (presumably because their own books were in the works). All the books below work as perfect compliments to mine and are all must-haves for any Prince fan’s purple library.
It was one of the great strokes of good fortune in Prince’s career that one of his earliest engineers was a brilliant musicologist.
Of course, the reverse is true too, and Rogers’ extraordinary knowledge of music is brought to life (at least in part) by the time she spent alone in the studio with Prince, in the middle of the night, at Christmas, whenever he called.
This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it's also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits ,including Barenaked Ladies' "One Week," as one of the most successful female record producers of all time.
Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess a…
