Musicians

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Does the world need another book on Oscar Hammerstein II? Hugh Fordin’s Getting to Know Him is a solid biography.

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Definitive, highly readable, and unusually revealing, this biography gives us the remarkable Chuck Berry in full.”

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Comin’ Right at Ya is a quick, snarky, enjoyable read, especially for outliers and real Western swing music aficionados.”

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“The book is a joy to read. You can dip in anywhere and swim about in Dylan’s brain.”

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Folk Music is not a conventional biography, and readers hoping to find in it details of Bob Dylan’s personal life will have to search elsewhere.

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Music memoirs come in many different forms, but Three Pianos by Andrew McMahon is in a small sub-genre: the self-loathing confessional.

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By the time Jeremy Denk was five-and-three-quarters years old, his elementary school career was in trouble.

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Often it’s the lyrics that Cantwell judiciously quotes and expertly contextualizes; at other times it's the imaginative, unerringly precise, and never-repeated wa

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There are celebrity autobiographies that put the author in the best possible light, with every awkward moment surgically excised.

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“‘Barely had you arrived in this world that you had to leave it, sweetheart . . . Too precocious, too uncompromising, too talented.’”

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“If there’s one book about music that deserves to be read cover to cover this year it’s Kelefa Sanneh’s Major Labels. It’s bound to be a contemporary classic.”

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Toward the end of the 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a character playing a newspaper man says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

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“Partly autobiographical, often funny, and entirely insightful from a cannabis-loving man who’s fully experienced every one of his 88 years, Willie Nelson’s Letters to America

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“Drawing on Heylin’s many remarkable new discoveries in the Dylan Archive, The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling (1941–1966) makes phenomenally captivating readi

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It’s not surprising that the jacket blurb compares this new memoir to Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Besides being a terrific book, that one sold really well.

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This is not the first biography of David Bowie.

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In Mozart: The Reign of Love musical historian Jan Swafford dispels the myths and popular lore about Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s hit play and movie Amadeus.

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“‘I have often said that my songs are my children and that I expect them to support me when I’m old. Well, I am old, and they are!’”

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Philip Norman has tackled some interesting luminaries of the golden age of rock and roll.

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“Guthrie, from what we learn, is part of a bigger picture, challenging the 'simple narrative' of individual freedom of expression."

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Leonard Cohen Untold Stories could not have happened before social media. Through Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp, Michael Posner located people who once knew Leonard Cohen and fell away.

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By opening the curtains to offer pure vulnerability and relatable authenticity, Lenny Kravitz leaves readers feeling inspired to find our own true voice.

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“A small, fun, and insightful book, She Come By It Natural can be enjoyed on its own or as a perfect companion to Smarsh’s Heartland.”

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