History & Criticism

In this intimate and open account—nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you’ve ever read—Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love in a remarkable tribute to his beloved brother and band mate.

In his second New York Times best seller, Daniel J. Levitin's genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history....

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A.

David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form, from its very inceptions to the influences that shape it, whether acoustical, economic, social, or technological, is now updated with a new chapter on digital curation.

Revised and updated with new material for fans of the band and this beloved rock classic, Hammer of the Gods is the gold-standard biography of the band Led Zeppelin.

On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock hit, "Like a Rolling Stone"....

Jan Swafford's biographies have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life....

Acclaimed music biographer Jonathan Gould presents the long-overdue, definitive story of this singular band, capturing the gritty energy of 1970s New York City and showing how a group of art students brought fringe culture to rock’s mainstream, forever changing the look and sound of popular music.

In 1992, the Screaming Trees were expected to become the next big band to come out of the Seattle music scene during the heyday of grunge. Except it never happened....

An unsparing investigation into Spotify’s origins and influence on music, weaving unprecedented reporting with incisive cultural criticism, illuminating how streaming is reshaping music for listeners and artists alike.

In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times....

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears.

In the second half of the 20th century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene....

From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—and how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue.

Pastor Robert Morgan’s goal is to keep these traditional hymns vital and meaningful to all generations. Then Sings My Soul will help listeners reacquaint themselves with 150 beloved hymns of the faithful....

From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens is a violent and introspective memoir that reveals not only 50 Cent's story but the story of a generation....

An entertaining and deeply nostalgic dive into how female pop stars broke through the music industry in the 2000s and altered the cultural landscape forever, from the Ringer writer and Every Single Album podcast cohost.

The follow-up to The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1, the most complete work on the life and work of Paul McCartney ever published. Volume 2 continues to paint the portrait of one of the world’s greatest musicians, his work post-Beatles, and his life from 1974 to 1980.

A landmark account of Paul McCartney’s triumphant musical reinvention in the 1970s and the subsequent rise of one of the decade’s most iconic bands.

In this first of a groundbreaking multivolume set, THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY, VOL 1: 1969-73 captures the life of Paul McCartney in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Beatles, a period in which McCartney recreated himself as both a man and a musician....

Tune In is the first volume of All These Years - a highly-anticipated, groundbreaking biographical trilogy....

Everybody Had an Ocean chronicles the migration of the rock 'n' roll business to Southern California and how the artists flourished there. The cast of characters is astonishing....

The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters—who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, invented electric blues, and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle—is chronicled with rare vividness in Robert Gordon’s widely praised biography....

I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands....

Drawing from her successful career as a music producer (engineering hits like Prince’s “Purple Rain”), professor of cognitive neuroscience Susan Rogers reveals why your favorite songs move you....

When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July of 1985, we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. As the forty years since have shown, he—and many others of his generation—were just getting started. This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the '60s and '70s exploited the Age of Spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honor in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else in the business had retired.

Stan Getz was more than the saxophone's answer to velvet. He was a man whose tone could make silence ache—and whose life left scorched earth behind every melody. Stan Getz is a hauntingly intimate portrait of one of jazz’s most seductive and self-destructive figures. Drawing from eyewitness accounts, out-of-print interviews, tour diaries, and unreleased session logs, this book strips away the mythology to reveal the man behind the horn: brilliant, broken, cruel, and human. From the Bronx tenements to Parisian clubs, from the cool jazz scenes of L.A. to the fevered studios of Rio, Getz ...

Ghost Notes: The Life and Death of Kansas City Frank unearths one of jazz history’s most mysterious and overlooked figures—Frank Melrose, the gifted sideman who played in the shadows of legends like Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, and Bix Beiderbecke. While his brothers built music empires, Frank chased down smoke-filled stages, cut bootleg recordings, and lived out a raw, itinerant life that ended violently and anonymously in 1941. Born into a family that shaped the early recording industry, Melrose rejected commerce for pure expression. Under the misleading pseudonym “Kansas City...

Philly Joe Jones was more than a drummer—he was the pulse that powered an entire movement. In Papa Jo: The Hi-Hat Prophet Who Swung the Future, dive deep into the explosive, elegant, and often volatile life of one of jazz’s most influential and underappreciated timekeepers. As the rhythmic engine of the Miles Davis Quintet and a defining architect of hard bop, Jones reshaped modern drumming with a signature blend of swagger, structure, and swing. From his tap-dance beginnings in Philadelphia’s street corners to the smoke-filled studios of New York, from addiction and exile to an ...

In Philly Joe Jones: The Swagger in the Swing, dive deep into the raw, rhythmic world of a jazz drummer who shaped modern music from behind the kit—without ever chasing the spotlight. From his gritty beginnings in working-class Philadelphia to his electrifying years with Miles Davis, Jones defined a style of drumming that was equal parts precision and danger. He wasn’t just playing time; he was rewriting it. This definitive biography captures the full arc of his life: his tap-dance roots, Army service, iconic recordings, addiction battles, exiles, revivals, and quiet death with no ...

Before Gene Krupa, the drummer was background noise. After Krupa, he was the main event. "Krupa: The Man Who Made Drums Loud Enough to Matter" traces the seismic shift sparked by a restless Polish kid from Chicago’s South Side who turned percussion into performance and rhythm into cultural currency. From his early rebellion against Catholic conservatism to the invention of the modern drum set, Krupa's journey runs through mob-run speakeasies, the seismic swing of Benny Goodman’s orchestra, and the explosive 1938 Carnegie Hall concert that changed jazz forever. The book tracks Krupa’s ...

Art Blakey didn’t just play the drums—he commanded them like artillery. Hard Bop General: The Rhythm Doctrine of Art Blakey is a thunderous biography written in the voice of a 1950s Black jazz drummer who lived the life, not just watched it. This is not a sanitized museum piece. It’s a front-row seat to the chaos, genius, and ferocity of one of jazz’s most uncompromising bandleaders. From the smoke-filled clubs of Pittsburgh to the world stages of Paris and Tokyo, Blakey turned the drum kit into a pulpit and trained an army of jazz greats along the way. Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, ...

And After All gives the mic to the fans that launched Oasis to stratospheric fame and takes a deep dive into the band’s formation, history, and reunion. Through the lens of the fans who were there for all the songs, feuds, and incredible shows, journalist Melissa Locker examines the path Oasis charted as they cemented their place in modern rock history.

The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions.

In 1981, David Bowie and Queen both happened to be in Switzerland: They met and made "Under Pressure." Recorded on a lark, the song broke the path for subsequent pop anthems. In Under Pressure, Max Brzezinski tells the classic track's story, charting the relationship between pop music, collective politics, and dominant institutions of state, corporations, and civil society. Brzezinski shows that, like all great pop anthems, "Under Pressure" harnesses collective sentiments in order to model new ways of thinking and acting.