Bøker i American Music Series-serien

How a DJ's innovative chopped and screwed technique changed the Houston hip-hop scene.

A literary and visual exploration of the songs of Steely Dan.

';Sobsey truly does deliver the goods with this biography... This work is as gloriously comprehensive as it gets on the subject of Chrissie Hynde.' PopMatters A musical force across four decades, a voice for the ages, and a great songwriter, Chrissie Hynde is one of America's foremost rockers. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, she and her band The Pretenders have released ten albums since 1980. The Pretenders' debut LP has been acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time by VH1 and Rolling Stone. In a business filled with ';pretenders' and posers, Hynde remains unassailably authentic. Although she blazed the trail for countless female musicians, Hynde has never embraced the role of rock-feminist and once remarked, ';It's never been my intention to change the world or set an example for others to follow.' Instead, she pursued her own vision of rocka band of ';motorcycles with guitars.' Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography traces this legend's journey from teenage encounters with rock royalty to the publication of her controversial memoir Reckless in 2015. Adam Sobsey digs deep into Hynde's catalog, extolling her underrated songwriting gifts and the greatness of The Pretenders' early classics and revealing how her more recent but lesser-known records are not only underappreciated but actually key to understanding her earlier work, as well as her evolving persona. Sobsey hears Hynde's music as a way into her life outside the studio, including her feminism, signature style, vegetarianism, and Hinduism. She is ';a self-possessed, self-exiled idol with no real forbears and no true musical descendants: a complete original.'

"e;Not only one of the best books of the year, it's one of the most beautiful rock memoirs ever written . . . Her portrayal of Chesnutt is perfectly done."e; -NPR"e;Friend, asshole, angel, mutant,"e; singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt "e;came along and made us gross and broken people seem . . . I dunno, cooler, I guess."e; A quadriplegic who could play only simple chords on his guitar, Chesnutt recorded seventeen critically acclaimed albums before his death in 2009, including About to Choke, North Star Deserter, and At the Cut. In 2006, NPR placed him in the top five of the ten best living songwriters, along with Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen. Chesnutt's songs have also been covered by many prominent artists, including Madonna, the Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M., Sparklehorse, Fugazi, and Neutral Milk Hotel.Kristin Hersh toured with Chesnutt for nearly a decade and they became close friends, bonding over a love of songwriting and mutual struggles with mental health. In Don't Suck, Don't Die, she describes many seemingly small moments they shared, their free-ranging conversations, and his tragic death. More memoir than biography, Hersh's book plumbs the sources of Chesnutt's pain and creativity more deeply than any conventional account of his life and recordings ever could. Chesnutt was difficult to understand and frequently difficult to be with, but, as Hersh reveals him, he was also wickedly funny and painfully perceptive. This intimate memoir is essential reading for anyone interested in the music or the artist."e;The music made by the late Vic Chesnutt was evocative, haunting and often heartbreaking. Kristin Hersh's book about the singer-songwriter shares all of these qualities."e; -Rolling Stone

A chronicle of Adams's rise from alt-country to rock stardom, featuring stories about the making of the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker.Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible character, one of the signature personalities of his generation, and as a singer-songwriter he blew people away with a mature talent that belied his youth. David Menconi witnessed most of Whiskeytown's rocket ride to fame as the music critic for theRaleigh News & Observer, and in Ryan Adams, he tells the inside story of the singer's remarkable rise from hardscrabble origins to success with Whiskeytown, as well as Adams's post-Whiskeytown self-reinvention as a solo act.Menconi draws on early interviews with Adams, conversations with people close to him, and Adams's extensive online postings to capture the creative ferment that produced some of Adams's best music, including the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. He reveals that, from the start, Ryan Adams had a determined sense of purpose and unshakable confidence in his own worth. At the same time, his inability to hold anything back, whether emotions or torrents of songs, often made Adams his own worst enemy, and Menconi recalls the excesses that almost, but never quite, derailed his career. Ryan Adams is a fascinating, multifaceted portrait of the artist as a young man, almost famous and still inventing himself, writing songs in a blaze of passion.';Menconi, a veteran music critic based in Raleigh, North Carolina, had a front row seat for alt-country wunderkind Ryan Adams' rise to prominencefrom an array of local bands, to Whiskeytown, and on to a successful and prolific solo career. Here, Menconi enthusiastically revisits those heady days when the mercurial Adams' performances were either transcendent or tantrum-filledthe author was there for most of them, and he packs his book with tales of magical performances and utterly desperate train wrecks.... This interview- and anecdote-laden expose of the artists early career will doubtless find a happy home with Adams fans.' Publishers Weekly

';[A] compulsively readable biography... Essential for fans of Yoakam and lovers of good music writing.' Library Journal From his formative years playing pure hardcore honky-tonk for mid-'80s Los Angeles punk rockers through his subsequent surge to the top of the country charts, Dwight Yoakam has enjoyed a singular career. An electrifying live performer, superb writer, and virtuosic vocalist, he's successfully bridged two musical worlds that usually have little use for each other: commercial country and its alternative/Americana/roots-rocking counterpart. Defying the label ';too country for rock, too rock for country,' Yoakam has triumphed while many of his peers have had to settle for cult acceptance. Four decades into his career, he's sold more than twenty-five million records and continues to tour regularly. Now award-winning music journalist Don McLeese offers the first musical biography of this acclaimed artist. Tracing the seemingly disparate influences in Yoakam's music, McLeese shows how he's combined rock and roll, rockabilly, country, blues, and gospel into a seamless whole. In particular, McLeese explores the essential issue of ';authenticity' and how it applies to Yoakam, as well as to country music and popular culture in general. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with Yoakam and his management, while also benefiting from the perspectives of others closely associated with his success (including producer-guitarist Pete Anderson, partner throughout Yoakam's most popular and creative decades), Dwight Yoakam pays tribute to the musician who has established himself as a visionary beyond time, an artist who could title an album Tomorrow's Sounds Today and deliver it.

How Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation.

A moving memoir exploring how a poet found support and revival through Dolly Parton's music and story.

Now with an afterword covering his final years, John Prine traces the crooked road traveled by the brilliant songwriter responsible for "Angel from Montgomery," "Sam Stone," "Paradise," and "That's the Way That the World Goes 'Round".

From the East Los Angeles barrio to international stardom, Los Lobos traces the musical evolution of a platinum-selling, Grammy Award-winning band that has ranged through virtually the entire breadth of American vernacular music, from traditional Mexican

A cofounder of the dB's, Chris Stamey re-creates the music scene in late 1970s New York City, recalling the birth of punk and other new streams of electric music as well as the making of the cult albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion.

In this collection of personal essays, a diverse group of women music writers pay tribute to the female country artists who have inspired them, including Brenda Lee, June Carter Cash, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Taylor Swift.

An illuminating cultural study arguing that, in the late 1980s, the reality TV of Cops and the reality rap of "Fuck tha Police" were two sides of the same coin, redefining popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium.

In the first full-length book on the Drive-By Truckers, Deusner examines the southern spaces that shaped the band¿s ideas of what music can say and do while also discovering how their music shifted the way we view the modern South.

In the spirit of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love, Madonnaland takes us on a revelatory road trip through the quirky hinterlands of celebrity and fandom and the quest to make music that matters in the face of relentless commercialism.

Tracing the whole sweep of Mary J. Blige's career through the critically acclaimed 2014 album, The London Sessions, this is the first serious look at the music and cultural impact of one of the most important musical artists to emerge in the past quarter

Spotlighting three legends of American music-Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock, The Flatlanders recounts the band's epic forty-year journey from a living room in Lubbock, Texas, to the release of their extraordinary long-lost demo, The Odess

Focusing on the most prolific decades in the career of this complex, often contradictory artist, David Cantwell explores the life, times, and enduring impact of Merle Haggard's singularly American music.