This year has already seen the release of a number of superb music books, including Warren Zanes’s Deliver Me from Nowhere (a dissection of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 Americana masterpiece Nebraska), Kiana Fitzgerald’s Ode to Hip-Hop, Alex Pappademas’s Quantum Criminals (on the meaning of Steely Dan) and Lucinda Williams’s memoir Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.
Novels from U.S., U.K., Canada and Ireland are finalists for the Booker Prize for fiction
And the hits just keep on coming.
This fall, a parade of biographies, autobiographies, historical essays, music miscellanea and works of scholarship hit real and virtual shelves in the lead-up to the gift-buying season. If albums no longer sell, the stories of the artists who make those records do. In particular, memoirs from Britney Spears, Barbra Streisand and Sly Stone are music to booksellers’ ears.
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The Woman in Me, Britney Spears (Gallery, October)
According to Variety magazine, a bidding war among publishers for Britney Spears’s autobiography pushed the deal to as much as US$15-million. The pop icon’s life has been splashed across tabloid pages for years, but she has remained tight-lipped outside social media about such stories as her court-ordered release in 2021 from a 13-year conservatorship enacted by her father. And while Britney is now free, her book will set fans back $39.99.
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My Name Is Barbra, Barbra Streisand (Viking, November)
Two months before it hits the shelves, Barbra Streisand’s memoir is already a No. 1 bestseller based on presales. Talk about your Streisand effect. The 992-page doorstop took the superstar singer-actress 10 years to finish, which goes to prove that stars are born, but books take time.
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Elvis and the Colonel, Greg McDonald and Marshall Terrill (St. Martin’s, November)
In Baz Luhrmann’s fever-dream of a film Elvis, Tom Hanks played a villainous fat man with the funny accent who was able to exercise a Svengali’s influence over the biggest star in the world. He was Colonel Tom Parker, an audacious entrepreneur with an unexplained past who sold candy apples at carnivals before taking control of a young Elvis. Journalist-author Marshall Terrill collaborated with Parker associate Greg McDonald for an insider’s account of a strange show-business partnership.
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Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, Lynnée Denise (University of Texas Press, September)
Elvis Presley did not sing Hound Dog first. Willie Mae Thornton, known as Big Mama Thornton, had a hit with the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller blues song three years before the King’s version. It is long past time for Thornton to get her full credit, which is where Lynnée Denise comes in. The Amsterdam-based writer’s “biography in essays” looks at the life of the gender-non-conforming Thornton through a Black, queer, feminist lens.
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Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans, Kenneth Womack (Dey Street, November)
Those who watched the Beatles documentary Get Back would have noticed the well-spoken chap who kept the bobbies at bay during the band’s famous rooftop concert. He was Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager and confidant. Unfortunately, when he tried to keep the L.A. police at bay at his home with an air rifle in 1976 he was shot dead during the incident. His archives, once feared lost, were used to tell his story.
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My Effin’ Life, Geddy Lee (HarperCollins, November)
The lyrics of the hard-rock trio Rush were often fantastical, but the band’s story is hardscrabble Canadian. The story of singer-bassist Geddy Lee, son of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland, starts in nerdy Toronto suburbia and ends in Rock & Roll Hall of Fame status and long-in-coming respect.
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101 Fascinating Canadian Music Facts, David McPherson (Dundurn, October)
Did you know that the Grammy-nominated Rush instrumental YYZ is an ode to Toronto, that the excitable term “Beatlemania” was coined by a Canadian, and that Tom Cruise and Van Halen’s David Lee Roth once saw Blue Rodeo perform at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern? With his nugget-filled Cancon celebration, music journalist David McPherson tells these three stories and 98 more.
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Prine on Prine, Holly Gleason (Chicago Review Press, September)
A cockeyed considerer of the human condition, the singer-songwriter John Prine was probably more Mark Twain than Bob Dylan. Calling him “the next Dylan” was just better marketing. Music critic Holly Gleason uses interviews and essays – including a few of her own – to produce the closest thing we will ever get to an autobiography of a genius wordsmith who could have written a doozy if he were so inclined (which, being uncomfortable with fame, he definitely was not).
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This Must Be the Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better, Shain Shapiro (Repeater, September)
It has been estimated that Taylor Swift’s six-concert visit to Toronto next year will generate $660-million for the city. But that is a one-off phenomenon. Shain Shapiro, executive director of the non-profit Center for Music Ecosystems, examines the holistic impact music can have on the building and managing of cities. The book is billed as a tool kit for civic leaders, artists and activists interested in the melodious reinvention of their communities.
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Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, Jeremy Eichler (Knopf, August)
“They stood at four different windows overlooking the same catastrophe. Each responded to the rupture through intensely charged memorials in sound.” In Time’s Echo, Boston Globe classical-music critic Jeremy Eichler contextualizes Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 and Britten’s War Requiem – transcendent works by composers who lived through the horrors of the Second World War and used their experiences to produce scores that resonate hauntingly and profoundly.
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Deep Sea Feline, Dave Hurlow (Latitude 46, September)
Unlike the other books in this list, Deep Sea Feline is a novel, written by Dave Hurlow, a former member of the rock band the Darcys. He weaves a rich tale of ancient gods, a humanist opera and a Bartok-loving musician’s desperate quest for equilibrium. Hurlow’s previous publications include 2004′s short-story collection Hate Letters from Buddhists.
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Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly Stone with Ben Greenman (AUWA, October)
Though Sly Stone wrote the iconic counterculture funk anthems Everyday People and I Want to Take You Higher, one wonders how much of his new memoir was written by him. According to publisher AUWA Books (an imprint directed by Roots drummer Questlove), the book on the reclusive Family Stone patriarch was co-penned by Ben Greenman and “created in collaboration” with Stone’s manager.