Blogroll

A bit of memoir mania

I’ve never investigated if publishers push autobiographies and memoirs to a particular time of year. All I know is they’ve dominated my reading lately.

Four of the last five books I’ve read (and five of the last eight) are autobiographies/memoirs. (Who decides when a work crosses the line between autobiography and memoir?) All four […]

Book Review: How Music Works by John Powell

If there’s one thing that can be said about music, it’s that as much as we may love it we generally don’t want to think about it. After all, music speaks to the emotions, not logic. That’s why if you ask someone about the music they like, you will get a list of genres or […]

Indubitably and perhaps irremediably old

Something that had been in the back a my mind for a while really started to sink in with last week’s announcement of the Grammy nominees — age is not only staring me in the face, it is slapping it.

Ever since this blog started, I’ve had an annual post on my record of the […]

Brief reflections on Life (Keith Richards’, not mine)

To be honest, I was surprised at the length of Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life. And, all in all, it is far from an insipid celebrity memoir. To the contrary, it provides interesting insight into the guitarist’s life and some of the exaggerated tales of his life. It does ramble a bit but there’s far more […]

Dylan treats fans equally, even those named Obama

Anyone who’s attended a Bob Dylan concert knows he is far from a gregarious stage presence. After attending several of his concerts, my wife and I remarked to each other at a show in Minneapolis that he’d actually spoken to the audience other than announcing a song title or saying “Thanks.”

But if you think […]