Sometimes we live in the moment. Sometimes we live in the past. New books on Justin Townes Earle, David Bowie, Fela Kuti and The Yardbirds should tell you where our heads are at next week. Read all about ’em:
What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle
By Jonathan Bernstein
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When Justin Townes Earle died of an overdose alone in his Nashville apartment, his death sent waves of grief through the country-Americana music community. The son of alt-country hellraiser Steve Earle had long struggled with mental illness and addictions. There had been encouraging periods of long-term sobriety and active recovery in his adult life, including the years that led up to his career peak — the 2010 masterpiece Harlem River Blues, a career-making album of rambling folk-blues set to Southern gospel. He sang of cramped Brooklyn apartments and crippling hangovers, about emotional displacement, economic anxiety, and the wandering that characterized his feral, formative years as a rootless kid rambling around Nashville, developing his own unique guitar style and absorbing the musical influences that surrounded him. He was anointed by critics as the next coming of the authentic troubadour. By the time of his death, he’d recorded and released eight albums, creating a striking and original body of work. Jonathan Bernstein, with the full cooperation of Earle’s estate, unravels in these pages a short but incredibly creative life, and reveals the backstories behind Justin’s greatest songs (Mama’s Eyes, White Gardenias) and what happened when it all fell apart, while also capturing a shadow world of the neglected children of Nashville legends who wrestle with the legacies of their hard-living, road-weary, often-absent parents. Justin’s journey to near-stardom is a harrowing story shot through with moments of clarity and promise, including his marriage to his wife Jenn Marie Earle and the birth of their daughter. But what Earle called “the myth” — the idea that one must suffer for one’s art — proved to be too powerful. This heartbreaking, deeply researched tale is an exemplary music biography.”
David Bowie & The Search For Life, Death & God
By Peter Ormerod
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In this wide-ranging biography, Peter Ormerod explores the quest for spirituality that powered David Bowie’s creativity from his earliest recordings to his death-defying final album. Bowie’s genre-expanding, era-crossing genius had an extraordinary impact on popular culture but his life-long search for spiritual truth and enlightenment has been overlooked. From Bowie’s first musical encounters as a choirboy, this book traces his spiritual obsessions over the years. As a young musician at the start of his career, he was enraptured by Tibetan Buddhism. It was the first step in a spiritual journey that would generate his most profound lyrics and music. From the Kabbalah-influenced tracks of Station to Station to Ziggy Stardust‘s messiah complex and the profound affinity between Heroes and Christian thought, Ormerod sheds new light on the spiritual traditions behind Bowie’s genius. Taking Bowie’s spiritual explorations and faith seriously, Ormerod shows us how this quest for meaning propelled him through his darkest moments and biggest successes, lending his music a timelessness and depth that has spoken to so many people across the world. Whether experiencing a dark night of the soul in L.A. during his occult phase or reciting the Lord’s prayer in front of thousands of concertgoers, Bowie was always searching for that universal truth that lies beyond everyday reality.”
Yardbirds: Every Album, Every Song
By Andrew Darlington
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The neglected psychedelic classics Happenings Ten Years Time Ago and Mister, You’re A Better Man Than I carried their legacy into the punk era. Their cult albums, Five Live Yardbirds, Roger The Engineer and Little Games, remain highly esteemed and collectable decades later, while their sequence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up movie catches the ’60s at its most swingingly iconic. Classic rock seldom came as classic as it does with The Yardbirds, and this book exhaustively traces their full story track-by-track from first to last, then picks up the narrative as former members become Led Zeppelin, Renaissance and Box of Frogs.”
Iron Maiden | Every Album, Every Song Revised & Updated
by Steve Pilkington
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Mention the words heavy metal and chances are one of the first names you’ll get back is Iron Maiden. From their early days as front-runners of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal in 1980, through to their epic and progressive works of more recent times, the band have been all things to all fans in the metal world. Such is their profile that even the non-metal fan would probably cite them as a key example of the genre. This book lifts the lid on every single track recorded by the band, album by album, from the punk-ish debut with original vocalist Paul DiAnno, via the glory years fronted by Bruce Dickinson, through to the band’s most recent album Senjutsu. By way of facts, anecdotes, analysis and a dollop of opinion, Steve Pilkington provides both an informative companion for the diehard fan and a perfect road-map for the more casual listener to follow. From Prowler to Empire Of The Clouds, through each and every lineup change, this is every number of the beast — the ultimate recording history of Iron Maiden.”
Steeleye Span 1970 to 1989: Every Album, Every Song
By Darren Johnson
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When Ashley Hutchings broke away from Fairport Convention in 1969, he recruited two musical duos who didn’t seem to agree about very much at all. This fractious group imploded before their debut album was even released. Undeterred, two new musicians were enlisted and Steeleye Span carried on. Then Hutchings himself resigned. Rather than this being a disaster, however, it set in train what would become the band’s most commercially successful period. It was an extraordinary time for folk rock but it was not to last. The second half of the 1970s saw another change in line-up, disappointing album sales and a two-year hiatus. All was not lost, though, and the classic lineup reconvened at the start of the 1980s. Covering a two-decade period, this book looks at every album from Hark! The Village Wait in 1970 to Tempted And Tried in 1989. The fascinating history behind the traditional songs on these albums is examined in detail, together with insights into how the band went about truly making them their own. Steeleye Span: Every Album, Every Song is a meticulously researched celebration of the music of one the U.K.’s most important bands in the folk-rock genre at the most crucial period in its history.”
Temptations 1960 to 1978: Every Album, Every Song
By George Haffenden
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “As one of the greatest acts to come out of the Motown Record Corp., the influence of The Temptations cannot be overstated. Their catalogue of classic hits and their performances have set the standard for all male groups that followed. The ‘Classic Five’ lineup of Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin created a legacy that has endured to this day. Aided by William ‘Smokey’ Robinson, and later Norman Whitfield, the group had hits such as Get Ready, Ain’t Too Proud To Beg, and, of course, My Girl. This lineup only lasted four years, but they created such an impressive legacy and following that the group has been able to carry on until the present day. The introduction of Dennis Edwards in 1968 coincided with a new style of music for the group, produced by Whitfield, dubbed ‘psychedelic soul’ and inspired by Sly & The Family Stone, that gave the group a second act of new hits. However, by 1972, only Williams and Franklin would remain from the vintage lineup and the hits were becoming more elusive. This book explores their releases from their founding to 1978, when the group had endured further personnel changes and a change in record label. It examines the group’s triumphs and struggles during this period, and tells a remarkable story of persistence and longevity.”
Songs In The Key of MP3: The New Icons Of The Internet Age
By Liam Inscoe-Jones
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “It’s 2013. You’re a teenager squinting at your laptop in the dead of night, flicking between iTunes, YouTube and PirateBay. Endless reams of artists unspool at the click of a button. New forms of musical discovery open up before your very eyes. This evolving digital landscape exists beyond the radio, HMV and even the most extensive record collection. You’ve entered a whole new world and, suddenly, just about everything feels possible. In Songs In The Key Of MP3: The New Icons Of The Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones explores five contemporary artists who broke the old rules of sound, style and the music industry at large: Devonté Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and Sophie. Each began as an obscure outsider but, over time, helped to re-shape pop culture in their image. Through these five extraordinary figures and an eclectic supporting cast of dozens more, Inscoe-Jones paints a picture of the sonic landscape of the last 10 years, exploring the influence of their dazzling music on pop culture, the internet and ourselves. An unorthodox mix of criticism, biography and music history — and featuring interviews with the likes of Caroline Polachek, Daniel Lopatin and Nicolás Jaar — Songs In The Key of MP3 is a book of endless curiosity and wonder; a salutary attempt to define pop culture in a fast and ephemeral age.”
Felasophy: Rhythm, Rebellion & The Politics Of Afrobeat
By Benedict Enigwana
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “What if a groove could spark a revolution? What if one man’s horn could rewire how a continent thinks about power, music, and freedom? Felasophy: Rhythm, Rebellion & The Politics Of Afrobeat is a lively, sharp-minded exploration of Fela Kuti’s music as both sonic innovation and political weapon. Tracing the birth of Afrobeat from Lagos club circuits to global stages of protest, this book unpacks how polyrhythms, call-and-response, and blistering horns carried messages of dissent, Pan-African thought, and cultural self-determination — and how that legacy still pulses through today’s soundscape.”
Better Do It Now Before You Die Later
By Sonny Simmons With Marc Chaloin
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the ’60s cemented his reputation as “one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field,” saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the ’80s, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and separated from his wife and kids. “I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year,” Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin. “I would go to North Beach, and I’d sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out.” The resurrection of Simmons’ career — upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual (Qwest Records) in 1994 — has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, joining the pantheon of great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure. Here, in the first ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source tinnitist.com ’
