Music

Jeff Buckley made only one album, but the one he made has proved to be seminal. Grace emerged at a time when grunge gripped the charts. Buckley s refined melodies...

In October 2016 the Swedish Academy finally conceded to a quarter-century's worth of clamorous petitions and sustained lobbying enacted by a chorus of poets novelists songwriters and academics. At long...

The 1960s were a period of radical cultural, social, and political upheaval in the United States and around the globe; yet in just three years, between 1969 and 1972, Village...

As anyone who has ever taken a music lesson knows, the key to playing well is practice. The same is true for another transformative discipline-meditation-and yet so often meditation and...

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits transcend commercial value, touching a generation of listeners and altering the direction of music. In Anatomy of...

His talent was spectacular, electric. He was a thriller beyond compare. And he left us too soon. "Life" was there to capture the excitement that was Michael Jackson, from his...

The essential playlist of great writing about the music that rocked America, with fifty landmark pieces on Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Lez Zepplin, and other rock n' roll legends Jonathan...

This title makes learning how to play acoustic or electric guitar easy. With clear, step-by-step instruction, diagrams, and practice tips, this practical manual will have anyone playing simple chords and...

The history of photography is teeming with portraits of musicians made iconic by their album covers: Thelonious Monk by W. Eugene Smith, Miles Davis by Irving Penn, Grace Jones by...

The Black Dog Opera Library is the most popular, informative, and budget-friendly way to enjoy the greatest operas of all time. Each book contains a history of the opera, a...

Frank Zappa was an unremitting musical innovator and experimenter, always looking for ways to exploit the latest advances in technology. His working life coincided with the explosive development of music...

___________'Incredibly tense and thriller-like . . . I totally recommend it' LEE CHILD'The dialogue is punchy, cinematic . . . we get inside the mind of Patterson's villain, the delusional...

'I can't rewrite history; all I can do is be honest and wear my heart on my sleeve. It's really the only way I know. I want to show people...

Written with a searing honesty and published for the tenth anniversary of Amy Winehouse's death, My Amy is an evocative portrait of unbreakable lifelong friendship - and a devastating study...

In her intimate memoir, More Myself, Alicia Keys shares her quest for truth: about herself, her past, and her shift from sacrificing her spirit to celebrating her worth.One of the...

The global icon, award-winning singer, songwriter, producer, actress, mother, daughter, sister, storyteller and artist finally tells the unfiltered story of her life in The Meaning of Mariah Carey.It took me...

THE NO 2 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFrom the indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, powerful, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging...

Spell Songs is a musical companion piece to The Lost Words: A Spell Book by author Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris. This mixed media CD is accompanied by sumptuous...

'Honest and moving' Independent on SundayFreddie Mercury was a rock superstar like no other. Recently the focus of the Academy Award-winning film Bohemian Rhapsody, he generated over GBP1 billion worth...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFrom the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids 'Magical' GUARDIAN 'A gripping tale of the search for meaning in times of turbulence - expressed with...

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR'Brilliant. The unwritten Bowie book that needed writing' CAITLIN MORAN'Splendid. Provides plenty of evidence of Bowie's restless, rummaging intelligence, and his pleasure in the fact...

This volume brings together a range of writers from different academic disciplines and different locations to provide an engaging and accessible critical exploration of one of the most revered and...

'How refreshing, to read a book about music written for a music lover and not a musicologist. In clear, lucid, entertaining prose, Jane Glover makes those of us who lack...

With an introduction by neuroscientist Daniel Glaser.With his trademark compassion and erudition, Dr Oliver Sacks examines the power of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people....

For more than three decades, Madonna has been generating headlines and topping charts. Now J. Randy Taraborrelli has written the definitive biography of one of the richest and most successful...

Few people rode the popular wave of the sixties quite like Tara Browne. One of Swinging London's most popular faces, he lived fast, died young and was immortalized for ever...

This easy-to-understand beginner's guide provides an introduction to playing the harmonica and includes helpful information about basic techniques, tools, and music knowledge.Learn to play the harmonica with this step-by-step guide...

The state of contemporary music is dizzyingly diverse in terms of style, media, traditions, and techniques. How have trends in music developed over the past decades? Music Composition in the...

Just as music has the power to inspire, it has the power to irritate and enrage. Why does certain music annoy us? Why does it force us to leave rooms,...

The relationship between popular music and consumer brands has never been so cosy. Product placement abounds in music videos, popular music provides the soundtrack to countless commercials, social media platforms...

In August 1994, Manic Street Preachers released The Holy Bible, a dark, fiercely intelligent album that explored such themes as mental illness, murder and war. Richey Edwards, the band's lyricist...

The Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera takes listeners on a road trip through the American South, with stops along mean old highways and soul-sucking swamps, iconic recording studios and doomed...

By 1985 Tom Petty had already obtained legendary status. He had fame. He had money. But he was restless, hoping to stretch his artistry beyond the confining format of songs...

Of the many girl-groups that came out of the 1960s, none is more idiosyncratic and influential than the Shangri-Las. They were together only five years, but within that time they...

When Twin Peaks debuted on the ABC network on the night of April 8, 1990, thirty-five million viewers tuned in to some of the most unusual television of their lives....

Cowboy Bebop is one of the most beloved anime series of all time, and if you ask its fans why, you can expect to hear about its music. Composer Yoko...

Is there such a thing today as music that's meaningfully new? In our contemporary era of remixing and retro styles, cynics and romantics alike cry "It's all been done before"...

Humming is a ubiquitous and mundane act many of us perform. The fact that we often hum to ourselves, to family members, or to close friends suggests that humming is...

Most die-hard Brazilian music fans would argue that Getz/Gilberto, the iconic 1964 album featuring "The Girl from Ipanema," is not the best bossa nova record. Yet we've all heard "The...

Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba are Camp Lo. These two emcees from the Bronx, NY entered the American hip hop scene with an insider slang that bewildered listeners as they...

Two and a half decades on, Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993-94) is the rare album to have lost none of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence. If anything, today,...

In recent years, Bjoerk's artistry has become ever more ambitious and ever more respected. With the release of her conceptual app-album Biophilia in 2011, and a huge retrospective exhibition at...

In 1978, Siouxsie and the Banshees declared 'We don't see ourselves in the same context as other rock'n'roll bands.' A decade later, and in the stark aftermath of a devastating...