Composers Musicians category: 3267 books

“Robert’s memoir is more proof that the dues-paying years are the most crazy, fun-filled, and potentially dangerous times of a young musician’s life. He captures that naïveté running headlong into harsh reality, usually with hilarious results. Robert also gives us plenty of historical context,...

“Mick is able to weave together what can only be referred to as the most complete and accurate portrait on the band ever published. Yes it is THAT good and that well researched! . . . Thorough research and eloquent writing is a beautiful union and Wall’s successful deployment of both, coupled...

Adversity.Every living person faces it. It’s part of the human condition. I’m Christopher Wiehl, an actor and filmmaker, and I’ve had plenty of challenges of my own. Some people may not think that’s the case, but I bet they’ve never had brain fluid leaking from their nose.I’d been living...

“…By the time I got back to camp on Monday morning, I realised that I had just travelled roughly two thousand kilometres in forty eight hours for a roll in the hay!...” Thus ends one of the chapters in Clive Hay’s unusual and entertaining story of life in the South African Defense Force. This...

"A wonderful collection that gives Mozart a voice as a son, husband, brother and friend." —New York Times Book Review "Mozart's honesty, his awareness of his own genius and his contempt for authority all shine out from these letters."—Sunday Times  (London). "...

This is the first book by a founding member of Little River Band: the first Australian band to achieve a gold album in the US. 'Every Day of My Life' tells the remarkable tale of how Beeb Birtles, David Briggs, Graeham Goble, George McArdle, Derek Pellicci and Glenn Shorrock conquered the world...

This brilliant biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about jazz improvisation, post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and recordsession guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began...

The massive, world-wide outpouring of grief at the death of David Bowie notably focused on not only his stunning musical output, but also his fascinating refusal to stay the same—the same as other trending artists, or even the same as himself.   In this remarkable collection, Bowie reveals the...

Billy’s Back! shows how William Shepherd ("Billy Shears") replaced Paul McCartney in The Beatles, revealing exactly how he went from being "Billy Pepper" of Billy Pepper and the Pepper Pots, to "Sgt. Pepper" of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  You will see how replacing Paul saved the band, but plagued each band member.

Bob Dylan’s abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of...

An engrossing and intimate portrait of the Oklahoma-based psychedelic pop band the Flaming Lips, cult heroes to millions of indie-rock fans. In July 2002, the Flaming Lips released an ambitious album called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which merged elements of orchestral pop, electronic...

They had just a few hundred pounds, one band missing a drummer, a sock drawer for an office, more dreams than sense and not a clue between them how to run a record company. But when Alan Horne and Edwyn Collins decided to start their own label from a shabby Glasgow flat in 1979, nobody was going to...

Frédéric Chopin’s reputation as one of the Great Romantics endures, but as Benita Eisler reveals in her elegant and elegiac biography, the man was more complicated than his iconic image. A classicist, conservative, and dandy who relished his conquest of Parisian society, the Polish émigré...