There’s the famous phrase that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, meaning it’s beautiful but pointless, a doomed translation between two incompatible languages. I can personally speak to this difficulty. Some writers, however, have been able to make language listen. They make prose hum with rhythm and insight, turning analysis into art. Among…
Classical music can sometimes feel untouchable, like marble busts in a museum or scores hidden away in archives. But what makes it pulse with life isn’t just the notes on the page, it’s the people who carried them into the world. Many of the composers, conductors, pianists, singers, etc. lived fascinating lives. And thankfully, some…
Some artists spend their lives chasing joy. Leonard Cohen and Anna Akhmatova were not those artists. Both wrote about love with startling directness, but for them, love always carried a shadow. Desire came with betrayal, memory blurred into mourning, and intimacy was haunted by history. It might sound odd to pair a 20th-century Canadian songwriter…
Some albums are collections of songs, others feel like whole sound worlds. Rarely does music feel like a novel set to music. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975) is one of those rare records that plays less like a sequence of singles and more like a novel (albeit a modernist, fractured one). Listening straight…
Jazz Lives, Jazz Stories Jazz has never just been a style of music. It’s a way of telling stories that usually relies more on feeling than words, and it’s always had a connection to literature. A trumpet solo can say as much about struggle and joy as a whole novel. A ballad can sound like…
Why Pair Marcel Proust and Brian Eno? At first glance, Marcel Proust and Brian Eno don’t seem to belong in the same sentence. One was a French novelist who produced sentences so long they could swallow a page whole. The other is a British musician with a love of synthesizers, tape loops, and soundscapes designed…
Introduction: Why Read Novels About Music? Music and fiction share a lot of DNA. Both bend time, play with rhythm, and create worlds out of nothing but sound or words. Some novels use music as background atmosphere, but the best novels about music put it in the spotlight, making it the driving force of the…
Sometimes art collides in strange ways, and nowhere is that clearer than in books and albums with the same title. A novelist writes a masterpiece, and decades later a band drops an album under the very same name. Sometimes it’s an intentional nod, sometimes pure coincidence, but either way it’s fascinating to see how ideas…
Some works of art refuse to stay in their lane. A novel reads like music, a record unfolds like a novel. The forms blur. The more you look at them side by side, the more you realize that books and albums often share the same DNA: rhythm, repetition, structure, and an obsession with creating worlds…
Most of us have soundtracks for our lives, the albums we return to, songs that remind us of a moment, riffs that make us want to pick up an instrument. But when it comes to reading about music, things can get intimidating fast. Technical jargon. Dry musicology. Histories that forget the joy of listening. I’ve…