It was the first Brian Eno album tobe composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio,over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. The album was a proofof concept for Eno's budding ideas of "the studio as musicalinstrument," and a signpost for a bold new way of thinking aboutmusic.In this book, Geeta Dayal unravels Another Green World's abundantmysteries, venturing into its dense thickets of sound. How was analbum this cohesive and refined formed in such a seemingly ad hoc way?How were electronics and layers of synthetic treatments used to createan album so redolent of the natural world? How did a deck of cardsfigure into all of this? Here, through interviews and archivalresearch, she unearths the strange story of how Another Green Worldformed the link to Eno's future -- foreshadowing his metamorphosisfrom unlikely glam rocker to sonic painter and producer.

    "In the form of a diary, he takes us through the crazy journey that is making music. His excellent recollections of the excesses of morons and geniuses involved in creating melodies and rhythms for us to enjoy are sheer entertainment." - Musician Robert Palmer (from his foreword for the book). From the author's first glimpse of a magical recording studio in the mid-1960s up through a busy career that continues to the present day, this rollicking story can only be told by those that were there. As the young tape operator on sessions for The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Cocker at the famed Olympic Sound Studios in London, Phill learned the ropes from experienced engineers and producers such as Glyn Johns and Eddie Kramer. Phill soon worked his way up engineering sessions for Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and many other lendary rockers. He eventually became a freelance engineer/producer and worked with Roxy Music, Go West, Talk Talk, and Robert Plant. But more than a recollection of participating in some of the most treasured music of the past 40 years, this is a man's journey through life as Phill struggles to balance his home and family with a job where drug abuse, chaos, rampant egos, greed, lies and the increasingly invasive record business take their toll. It's also a cautionary tale, where long workdays and what once seemed like harmless indulgences become health risks, yet eventually offer a time to reflect back on.

    Rosen offers a firsthand witnessing of Foley’s transformation from a reticent hippie musician to the enigmatic singer/songwriter who would live and die outside society's rules. While Foley's own performances are only recently being released, his songs have been covered by Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett, and John Prine. When he first encountered “If I Could Only Fly,” Merle Haggard called it “the best country song I've heard in fifteen years.”In a work that is part-memoir, part-biography, Rosen struggles to finally come to terms with Foley's myth and her role in its creation. Her tracing of his impact on her life navigates a lovers' roadmap along the permeable boundary between life and death. A must-read for all Blaze Foley and Texas music fans, as well as romantics of all ages, Living in the Woods in a Tree is an honest and compassionate portrait of the troubled artist and his reluctant muse.

    . .A few days before her 26th birthday, Melissa Schickel returned to her Indianapolis home and went to bed. An hour later, she was yanked from her dreams into terror. An intruder held her down, brutally beating and stabbing her. Melissa fought fiercely.  The assailant fled, leaving her to face a long road to recovery from deep-seated fear and post-traumatic stress. She tells her exclusive true story as part of a compelling narrative by bestselling crime expert M. William Phelps. Her strength and courage will inspire all women with similar experiences to think of themselves proudly as survivors—not victims. "Phelps clearly shows how the ugliest crimes can take place in the quietest of suburbs." —Library Journal on Never See Them Again  "Phelps is a true-crime veteran."—New York Post"Anything by Phelps is always an eye-opening experience." —Suspense Magazine

    With the rigorous research of a scholar and the eloquent prose of a novelist, Judith Chernaik takes us into Schumann's nineteenth-century Romantic milieu, where he wore many "masks" that gave voice to each corner of his soul. The son of a book publisher, he infused his pieces with literary ideas. He was passionately original but worshipped the past: Bach and Beethoven, Shake­speare and Byron. He believed in artistic freedom but struggled with constraints of form. His courtship and marriage to the brilliant pianist Clara Wieck--against her father's wishes--is one of the great musical love stories of all time. Chernaik freshly explores his troubled relations with fellow composers Mendelssohn and Chopin, and the full medi­cal diary--long withheld--from the Endenich asylum where he spent his final years enables her to look anew at the mystery of his early death. By turns tragic and transcendent, Schumann shows how this extraordinary artist turned his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly--and timelessly--to the heart.

    Wexler has worked with the entire range of American genius: Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and others. 75 photographs.

    On a May evening in 1922, the English arts lovers Violet and Sydney Schiff convened a grand dinner at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, following the premiere of a Stravinsky ballet. In addition to guests of honor Stravinsky and Diaghilev, the dinner was attended by Picasso, James Joyce, and finally, arriving around 2:30 in the morning, one more artist at the peak of his fame: Marcel Proust. Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth and most shocking volume of Proust's monumental work In Search of Lost Time, had just appeared, transfixing readers with its finely detailed observations on themes of Jewishness and anti-Semitism, the interplay across social classes, and all manner ofsexual expression. The book's eccentric, ailing author had become a celebrity to French and English-language readers alike, and his presence at the dinner was all the more unusual since Proust rarely went out. In fact, he would be dead only six months later. Acclaimed historian and biographer Davenport-Hines takes the dinner at the Majestic as the leaping-off point for an examination of Proust's last days, and the enormous reaction his novel garnered from its first years of publication. Using accounts by Proust]s contemporaries, including other modernist stars, Proust's dazzled readers, and wealthy patrons such as the Schiffs, Davenport-Hines illuminates the Paris of the author's last days.

    Davis, political activist, scholar, author, and speakerSophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his "solo" turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter's personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, "Man, you ought to leave your karma to science."Dexter Gordon the icon is the Dexter beloved and celebrated on albums, on film, and in jazz lore--even in a street named for him in Copenhagen. But this image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms with the multidimensional man full of humor and wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a comforting insider who was a son, father, husband, and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt to fill in the gaps created by our misperceptions as well as the gaps left by Dexter himself.

    A champion cross-country skier in training for the Winter Olympics, her life was irrevocably altered during a bike ride to the Blue Mountains when she was hit by a truck. Her neck and back were broken in four places, as were her right arm, collarbone, and five ribs. Her right leg had been ripped open, she had sustained massive internal injuries and severe lacerations to her abdominal area, and she had lost five liters of blood. The bleeding alone was enough to kill her. Doctors warned her parents that she was not expected to survive her ordeal. Even if by some small chance she recovered, she would never walk again. Coming to terms with her shattered Olympic dreams, refusing to believe what expert medical staff were telling her about her chances of any kind of recovery, Janine focused every sinew of her being on healing her broken body and crushed morale. Her fighting spirit was rekindled watching small planes flying overhead. She said to herself, "If I can’t walk, I’ll fly." And fly she did. Within a year she had her private pilot’s license; 12 months later, her commercial license; soon after, her instructor’s permit and aerobatic endorsement. And all the while she pushed her body to mend itself, forced her legs to walk again, step by painful step. Here is her story, a testament to the power of the human spirit, and one that will move and inspire all who read it.

    His journals reveal an artist who loved music, who knew the history of rock, and who was determined to define his place in that history. Here is a mesmerizing, incomparable portrait of the most influential musician of his time.

    What do Postman Pat, Tommy Cooper, Norman Wisdom and George Best have in common with being abandoned in a Costa Rican jungle after a severe bout of flatulence? Indeed, how are they also connected to trying to buy an Australian brewery just to get a beer, owning twenty-two cars, an American soccer team and a Swiss mail-order pornography company?The common feature is of course a certain Richard Wakeman.The Further Adventures of a Grumpy Old Rock Star takes you, the privileged reader, on a trip of absurd excess, a cultural car crash of side-splitting hilarity and an unforgettable glimpse (again) into the life of one of Britain's most legendary showmen, rock stars and all-time great raconteurs.

    Fay has gone back to primary documents: Shostakovich's many letters, concert programs and reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of his contemporaries. An indefatigable worker, he wrote his arresting music despite deprivations during the Nazi invasion and constant surveillance under Stalin's regime. Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. In August 1942, his Seventh Symphony, written as a protest against fascism, was performed in Nazi-besieged Leningrad by the city's surviving musicians, and was triumphantly broadcast to the German troops, who had been bombarded beforehand to silence them. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet, holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador with his unflagging artistic ambitions. In the years since his death in 1975, many have embraced a view of Shostakovich as a lifelong dissident who encoded anti-Communist messages in his music. This lucid and fascinating biography demonstrates that the reality was much more complex. Laurel Fay's book includes a detailed list of works, a glossary of names, and an extensive bibliography, making it an indispensable resource for future studies of Shostakovich.

    Left to run wild with his sister, his father off in some parallel universe of his own invention, Everett's upbringing was 'ridiculous, sometimes tragic and always unsteady'. But somehow he manages to not only survive his crazy upbringing and ensuing tragedies; he makes something of his life, striking out on a journey to find himself by channelling his experiences into his, eventually, critically acclaimed music with the Eels. But it's not an easy path. Told with surprising candour, Things The Grandchildren Should Know is an inspiring and remarkable story, full of hope, humour and wry wisdom.

    “Pages of dreary emptiness,” sniffed a leading American conductor. Yet today, almost one hundred years later, Mahler has displaced Beethoven as a box-office draw and exerts a unique influence on both popular music and film scores. Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel. Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does?  Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was—along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world. “Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,” writes Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace  chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge.” Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.

    Lewis Lockwood sketches the turbulent personal, historical, political, and cultural frameworks in which Beethoven worked and examines their effects on his music. "The result is that rarest of achievements, a profoundly humane work of scholarship that will—or at least should—appeal to specialists and generalists in equal measure" (Terry Teachout, Commentary). Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  "Lewis Lockwood has written a biography of Beethoven in which the hours that Beethoven spent writing music—that is, his methods of working, his interest in contemporary and past composers, the development of his musical intentions and ideals, his inner musical life, in short—have been properly integrated with the external events of his career. The book is invaluable." —Charles Rosen "Lockwood writes with poetry and clarity—a rare combination. I especially enjoyed the connection that he makes between the works of Beethoven and the social and political context of their creation—we feel closer to Beethoven the man without losing our wonder at his genius." —Emanuel Ax "The magnum opus of an illustrious Beethoven scholar. From now on, we will all turn to Lockwood's Beethoven: The Music and the Life for insight and instruction." —Maynard Solomon "This is truly the Beethoven biography for the intelligent reader. Lewis Lockwood speaks in his preface of writing on Beethoven's works at 'a highly accessible descriptive level.' But he goes beyond that. His discussion of the music, based on a deep knowledge of its context and the composition processes behind it, explains, elucidates, and is not afraid to evaluate; while the biographical chapters, clearly and unfussily written, and taking full account of the newest thinking on Beethoven, align closely with the musical discussion. The result is a deeply perceptive book that comes as close as can be to presenting the man and the music as a unity."—Stanley Sadie, editor, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians "Impressive for both its scholarship and its fresh insights, this landmark work—fully accessible to the interested amateur—immediately takes its place among the essential references on this composer and his music."—Bob Goldfarb, KUSC-FM 91.5 "Lockwood writes like an angel: lucid, enthusiastic, stirring and enlightening. Beethoven has found his ablest interpreter."—Jonathan Keates, The Spectator  "There is no better survey of Beethoven's compositions for a wide audience."—Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Book Review