For many listeners, when this non-traditional, surprisingly feminine album was released, it was like hearing an entirely new form of music.In this book, Shawn Taylor explores the creation of the album as well as the impact it had on him at the time - a 17-year-old high-school geek who was equally into hip-hop, punk, new wave, skateboarding, and Dungeons & Dragons: all of a sudden, with this one album, the world made more sense. He has spent many years investigating this album, from the packaging to the song placement to each and every sample - Shawn Taylor knows this record like he knows his tattoos, and he's finally been able to write a fascinating and highly entertaining book about it.

    Having sold over 30 million albums since its triumphant 1991 debut 10, Pearl Jam brought the hard-edged, estranged and oftentimes angry sound of Seattle to the musical forefront. They pioneered a movement in music and culture that quickly became known as grunge. Imitators followed, and the band could have quickly lost touch with its fans and unpretentious ideals and become simply a money-making celebrity group. Instead, Eddie Vedder and the members of Pearl Jam took on the establishment: challenging Ticketmaster's control over concert venues and ticket prices and refusing media any access to the band--even through music videos--during the peak of their success. Pearl Jam's disappearance from media and from traditional touring has intensified the loyalty of its fans and has refocused the band's attention on its original musical center. Despite the lack of advertising and recent shifts in musical trends, Pearl Jam concerts repeatedly sell out within hours for the hundreds of thousands who remain devoted to a group that continues to uphold its musical and political integrity. Allowed access to the concerts, jam sessions, and private moments of Pearl Jam's members, photographers Charles Peterson and Lance Mercer provide a heretofore unseen record of the Pearl Jam experience for new and diehard fans alike.

    For the Beatles, writing songs was a process that could happen anytime -- songs we all know by heart often began as a scribble on the back of an envelope or on hotel stationery. These original documents have ended up scattered across the world at museums and universities and with collectors and friends. Many have never been published before. More than 100 songs and lyrics are reproduced in The Beatles Lyrics, providing Hunter Davies a unique platform to tell the story of the music. The intimacy of these reproductions -- there are sections crossed out and rewritten, and words tossed into the final recordings that were never written down -- ensures that The Beatles Lyrics will be a treasure for musicians, scholars, and fans everywhere.

    Never one to be shy of the spotlight, Dusty broke the mould as the first female entertainer to publicly admit she was bisexual, and was famously deported from South Africa for refusing to play to segregated audiences during apartheid in 1964, just a year after the launch of her solo career. Combining brand-new material, meticulous research and frank interviews with friends, lovers, employees and confidants, journalist Karen Bartlett reveals sensational new details about the soul diva’s unconventional upbringing, tumultuous relationships and unbridled addictions, including a lifelong struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. Named one of the Sunday Times’s best musical biographies of 2014, this is the intimate portrait of an immensely complicated and talented woman – the definitive account of one of music’s most legendary figures.

    But it is also a journey through the keys, and the music that inspired, shaped and provided refuge for Emma throughout her travels with music.

    His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world’s most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and “fate’s hammer,” his ever-encroaching deafness. Throughout, Swafford offers insightful readings of Beethoven’s key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

    In the workplace today there's a glass wall. Men and women can see each other clearly through the divide, but they don't speak the same language or have the same expectations. And as a result, women and their careers are suffering.With more women than ever in the workforce, but still too few in the boardroom, now is the time to address the assumptions and miscommunication holding women back. This book gives women the tools they need to master any situation. Drawing on Unerman and Jacob's own experience in male-dominated businesses, as well as over a hundred interviews with both men and women, The Glass Wall provides clear, smart and easy-to apply strategies for success. From unlocking ambition and developing resilience to nurturing creativity and getting noticed, these are the skills that everyone needs to learn to help break down that wall and create better workplaces for all.

     Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists--mostly women, mostly queer--whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman--and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

       A great cover only makes a song stronger. Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” The Beatles rocking out with “Twist and Shout.” Aretha Franklin demanding “Respect.” Without covers, the world would have lost many unforgettable performances. This is the first book to explore the most iconic covers ever, from Elvis’s “Hound Dog” and the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away” to Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” the Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River,” and Adele’s “Make You Feel My Love.” Written by the founder of the website covermesongs.com, each of the 20 chapters investigates the origins of a classic cover—and uses it as a framework to tell the larger story of how cover songs have evolved over the decades. Cover Me is packed with insight, photography, and music history.

    However, that's not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law. At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly. Jump forward or backward a century or two (and often far less than that), and the harmless fun of one time period becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.Writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz uses flesh-and-blood cases—much flesh and even more blood—to evoke the entire sweep of Western sex law, from the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 for "gross indecency." The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes, London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged—and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it. With the light touch of a natural storyteller, Berkowitz spins these tales and more, going behind closed doors to reveal the essential history of human desire.

    Chris Evans, Chris Moyles, Rob Brydon and Steve Wright have all cited Kenny as a huge influence on their work - even the great Spike Milligan called him a genius. It was Kenny who developed the radio show format with which we are so familiar today: a mix of music, jingles, funny voices and sound effects. When he seamlessly made the move to television in the seventies, he created unforgettable characters such as Sid Snot, Cupid Stunt and Marcel Wave. Rarely seen without a smile on his face in public, in reality, Kenny was a deeply insecure man who suffered severe bouts of depression. He also struggled with his sexuality, only coming out to the public in 1985. Diagnosed with HIV in 1987, Kenny died in 1995. This in-depth and affectionate biography has been fully authorised by Kenny's family and contains original interviews with Kenny's sister, Kate and with his former wife, Lee, as well as entertainment figures such as Barry Cryer, Cliff Richard, Chris Tarrant and Paul Gambaccini. Packed with fabulous stories about the highs and lows of Kenny's life, his great friendships with The Beatles and Freddie Mercury, this is a book that any fan of comedy and entertainment must read.

    A golden Fender Stratocaster hidden away in an attic for 30 years. A sunburst Gibson Les Paul worth $100,000. Jimi Hendrix’s Strat burned by the guitarist during a concert—and then mysteriously lost for decades. The mint Fender Broadcaster forgotten under a bed in a neighbor’s house. The 1960s Rickenbacker bought for $50 at a garage sale! These days, classic vintage guitars can bring Ferrari and Porsche prices. Baby boomers who wish they’d been rock ’n’ roll stars have shot the market into the stratosphere for classic models. As with automobiles, finding that classic guitar stashed away beneath a bed, in a closet, hidden away in an attic, or in the dusty corner of a guitar shop is the Holy Grail.

    Their grungy rock sound and such stunts as giving away albums for free erased the barrier with fans and inspired thousands. Yet for all their musical acumen, the band made the most headlines for their apparent “live fast, die young” lifestyle and for lead man Pete Doherty’s drug addictions and ongoing relationship with fashion model Kate Moss. This insightful new look at The Libertines goes behind the headlines to document the band’s true history, tracing its extraordinary highs and lows through the breakup and fallout between Doherty and the rest of the group. Lushly illustrated with rare photos, this is the authentic story of the band that defined a generation.

    After a little noticed debut and a follow-up that had failed to chart at all, Pye Records were threatening to annul the group’s contract. But with its unforgettable distorted guitar riff, 'You Really Got Me’ went on to reach No.1, entering the US Top Ten later the same year. Followed by a string of hits, it marked the breakthrough of one of Britain’s most innovative and influential bands, and a turning point in the fortunes of two brothers whose troubled story is as tumultuous and characterful as the music they produced: Ray and Dave Davies. Born into a deeply musical working-class family in London’s Muswell Hill, Ray and Dave grew up in a city recovering from the bombs and privations of the Second World War, and, more than any other musicians of the Sixties, they crafted the soundtrack that made it swing again. In songs such as ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, ‘Sunny Afternoon’ – which toppled The Beatles to become the hit of Summer 1966 – ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Days’ and ‘Lola’, they drew on music hall, folk and rhythm and blues to craft a peculiarly English pop idiom, inspiring generations of songwriters from David Bowie to Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn.Pocked by sibling rivalry, furious on-stage violence, walkouts, overdoses, a career-throttling ban from the US, gross self-indulgence, and the band's curious rebirth as Eighties stadium rockers, the story laid bare in God Save The Kinks is one of the greatest in British pop history.

    More than just an engaging personal account, it's a story about personal growth, coming of age, and the real power of punk and hardcore. Gain an insider's look at a truly influential underground movement.