I can’t remember exactly when I had this epiphany, but at some point after reading dozens of musician memoirs I realized that guitarist memoirs hit differently than those by singers. Now, that is not an anti-singer position. Singers get the spotlight, the scream-back lyrics, the giant public wound, the famous silhouette at center stage. There…
The scariest pleasures are not the ones that get old quickly. Those are easy. They disappoint you or make you feel bad fast enough that your self-respect has time to stage a small recovery. The dangerous pleasures are the ones that work beautifully. They work so well that the rest of life starts to look…
There is a kind of modern weirdness that can look like a supermarket aisle so overstocked it starts to feel theological under the fluorescent lights. Or maybe like a man in a too-large suit singing about air, cities, paper, buildings, and other things that absolutely should not feel this suspicious. And yet somehow they do….
After my Best Books About Musicians post, I got to thinking about albums about musicians that feel almost like books. Some albums are great because the songs are great. A record does not need a cast list, a tragic backstory, and a symbolic talisman in track seven to justify its existence. Sometimes twelve strong songs…
Books about musicians can go wrong in a very familiar way. They turn into prestige montages. The first guitar. The first gig. The terrible manager. The genius. The drugs. The breakup. The comeback. The legend. Everybody gets a dramatic entrance and a carefully placed wound. The prose tries on a leather jacket. Somewhere in the…
Some of the best writing about music does not tell you whether an album is good. That may sound like a dig at music criticism, but it’s not. I love good music criticism. I love the context, the arguments, the genre maps, the strange little grudges. A great critic can make you hear a record…
Travel often gets sold to us in a very narrow emotional key. Say the word and suddenly everything is freedom, reinvention, the open road, a train window, a notebook, and some supposedly better version of yourself waiting a few hundred miles away with excellent hair and no inbox. And yes, sometimes travel really does feel…
The quickest way to describe Afrofuturism is to say that it imagines Black futures. That’s true. It’s also not nearly enough. Because once you spend real time with Sun Ra and Octavia Butler, the bigger revelation is not just that they imagine tomorrow. It’s that they refuse to let time behave. The past doesn’t stay…
Some writers mention music to set a scene, whereas Ralph Ellison treated music as a way of knowing. That difference matters. With Ellison, jazz is not just atmosphere. It’s not there to make a room feel cooler, or to place us in a certain decade, or to signal a particular kind of urban sophistication. Jazz…
People often say Joni Mitchell’s Blue is “poetic,” which is true but also a little lazy. Lots of albums get called poetic. Usually that just means the lyrics are pretty, the mood is serious, or somebody played an acoustic instrument while feeling complicated. None of that really explains why Blue feels so complete, or why…