Musicians

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Author Dan Callahan specializes in big biographies of stars such as Barbara Stanwyck and Vanessa Redgrave. He profiled Alfred Hitchcock, looked at the art of screen acting, and wrote a novel, too.

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“The author calls Billie ‘the consummate performer whose gift was her ability to make a listener experience the emotion she was feeling as she sang a song.’”

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“a part of the Beatles history that was nearly lost but now is a compelling and important read.”

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The Velvet Underground, playing music far ahead of its time in mid-60s New York, has always been more written about than actually heard.

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“The reader will get an education in the formative years of a rock band, the grotty clubs, the vans, the marginal pay.”

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Now here’s an interesting premise for a book: Jason Thomas Gordon, lead singer and drummer of the LA-based rock group Kingsize, interviews dozens of vocalists, some of them very prominent, about .

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“a worthy part of any Beatles’ fans collection.”

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The relationship between journalist and subject is an ancient one, and the ice is frequently broken with the hoisting of a glass . . . or two.

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For readers who love the magical sixties and the legendary Beatles, 1964: Eyes of the Storm is for you.”

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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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