Working on a Song: The Lyrics of HADESTOWN


Anaïs Mitchell - 2020
    Heralded as "The best new musical of the season," by the Wall Street Journal, and "Sumptuous. Gorgeous. As good as it gets," by The New York Times, this show is the breakout hit of 2019, and is positioned to be a longtime Broadway favorite with its poignant social commentary, to the tune of spellbinding music and lyrics.   In this book, Anais Mitchell takes readers inside her more than decade's-long process of building the musical from the ground up--detailing her inspiration, breaking down the lyrics, and offering thoughtful annotations of Hadestown. Fans of the musical will love this deeply thoughtful, revealing, and open look at how the songs from “the underground” evolved and became what they are today.

Next to Normal


Brian Yorkey - 2009
    "A brave and breathtaking musical."--The New York Times

Love Is the Drug


Sarahbeth Purcell - 2004
     "Hello, my name is Tyler Tracer and I am falling apart. I am twenty-four years old, and I have no ability whatsoever to choose an occupation or a hair color." Meet Tyler, the singularly irresistible and straight-talking heroine of Sarahbeth Purcell's touching first novel. An incurable romantic, Tyler's chief obsessions include music, list-making -- and David, the man who broke her heart. Despite an exhaustively detailed list of reasons for why she should just forget about David once and for all -- including (but by no means limited to) chronic illness, terminal self-absorption, and geographical inaccessibility -- Tyler remains hopelessly hooked on him. Hence the wild ride she embarks upon in the wake of her father's death, a ride that takes her from her hometown in Tennessee to sunny Los Angeles, all in hopes of saving David from his ominous take on life. This hilarious and dark cross-country expedition finds our young heroine negotiating the universally perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships with uncommon verve, wit, and more than a little recklessness. Along the way, Tyler discovers, among other things, the uniquely redemptive powers of roadkill, the fact that enduring love tends to blossom in the most unexpected and unlikeliest places, and, above all, that nothing can stop her from making her own rules and mapping out her own life. Not even herself. A joyous triumph of a debut to which readers will respond with a sense of instant recognition, Sarahbeth Purcell's Love Is the Drug spins a story of bold living and loving that crackles with energy and innovation.

A&R


Bill Flanagan - 2000
    Now the big time calls, and Jim accepts an offer to become head of A&R at industry giant WorldWide Records, founded and still run by the legendary maverick Wild Bill DeGaul. Little by little, though, it dawns on Jim that he has walked into a vipers' nest, and he must choose between picking up a dagger in a bloody palace coup against DeGaul or standing by him and losing everything.         Never before in fiction has the music business been so thoroughly nailed, but A&R is as much Julius Caesar as it is The Player: for all its great wit and dead-on insider texture, it's as wise about human nature as it is about one very dysfunctional industry.

One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel


Julian Cope - 2014
    What a place to die. But that's precisely why I was back."When drugged-up Time Traveller and '80s musical burnout Rock Section and his fellow English hooligans get kidnapped during Italia '90, there are ruinous implications. But now Rock has returned to Sardinia one final time to settle some scores and uncover the truth. He believes only Dutch cult leader Judge Barry Hertzog, still incarcerated on the island for the crime, can provide the answers. But through prescription drugs, the persistence of his driver Anna and a quest for the hidden ancient doorways strewn around Sardinia's only highway, the 131, Rock will discover that a greater truth awaits him. Judgement, consequences, hoodwinking on a grand scale, Gnosticism versus agnosticism...131 is a Gnostic whodunit that pursues readers' memories of all previous fiction into a peat bog and impales them with seven-foot-long pikes.

Spring Awakening


Steven Sater - 2007
    Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society’s efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.Steven Sater’s plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which played in London.Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll


Luke Haines - 2011
    Post Britpop. The dawn of the rock and roll apocalypse. If it feels like there's nothing new under the sun, that's because there is nothing new under the sun. After the death of Kurt Cobain popular culture entered, and is still in, its final phase: post everything.Post Everything is the sequel to the hugely acclaimed Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfall. It is a story of survival in the music industry ... and the only way to survive the tyrannical scourge of Britpop is to become an Outsider.We open with Luke Haines - the 'avant-garde Arthur Scargill' - calling upon the nation's pop stars to down tools and go on strike. We get the story of Haines' post-Britpop art house trio Black Box Recorder (Chas and Dave with a chanteuse) then, barely pausing to put in a brief appearance on Top of the Pops, we meet a talking cat, two dead rappers (Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur), a mystical England football manager, and a shady transgender German Professor - exponent of a dangerous and radical 'Beatles denial' cult and author of The Theorem of the Moron (the most important book about rock that you've never heard of). Haines even finds time to write a musical for the National Theatre.Blisteringly funny and searingly scathing, Post Everything may quite possibly be the first and only truly surreal comic rock memoir. It even contains a killer recipe for scrambled eggs.

Notebooks of a Naked Youth


Billy Childish - 1997
    Over the course of the novel, he leads us through a series of encounters and adventures from industrial North Kent to the sleazy sex clubs of Hamburg's Reeperbahn. A powerful sequel to Childish's first novel My Fault

Rave: Vintage Minis


Irvine Welsh - 2018
    Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption…Selected from Irvine Welsh's novel Ecstasy.VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series:Home by Salman RushdieDreams by Sigmund FreudEating by Nigella LawsonWork by Joseph Heller

Holiday in Your Heart


LeAnn Rimes - 1997
    She was declared the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, or of a teen star like Tanya Tucker or Brenda Lee.Catapulted into the national limelight, Rimes was profiled everywhere from "People" to "The Wall Street Journal." Now she chronicles the pressured life of a teen-aged singing sensation in this Christmas tale. "Holiday in Your Heart" takes the reader inside a show business world where priorities are often misplaced. But in this magical tale, words of wisdom from an older, more seasoned country star and the pending death of a loved one put the young star's thinking and her heart in the right place.

The Only Girl in the Band


youXfoundXme - 2011
    She's got the look and she's got the voice. The only thing that's stopping her is her stage fright...and an opportunity. But opportunity knocks when pop-punk band, The Velocity, holds auditions for a new lead singer at the restaurant that Vanessa works at. Getting in was the easy part. Surviving as the only girl in the band is the hard part. Can she do it?

The Year the Music Changed


Diane Thomas - 2005
    Achsa is a lonely, passionate and precocious fourteen-year-old. Isolated at school by her intelligence and disfigurement, troubled at home by the undercurrents in her parents' relationship, she finds comfort and inspiration in the tunes and rhythms she hears on her radio. Hearing a recording by an unknown 20-year-old country singer named Elvis Presley, she fires off a fan letter, telling him she knows he's going to be a star.

Fun Home


Lisa Kron - 2015
    Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family's Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality, and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father's hidden desires. Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.

Solo Guitar Playing: Book 1 (with CD)


Frederick Noad - 1992
    For years, the most popular classical guitar method ever published!

Rock Hard


Paige North - 2017
    Music’s biggest star. Sexiest man alive. My new boss. And the man who could bring my world crashing down around me… I felt like I couldn’t breathe when he stared at me from underneath the brim of his cowboy hat. Those sexy brown eyes, the way his penetrating gaze raked up my body… it made me break out in goose bumps. Why did he single me out? I’d seen the women he’d taken to the CMAs before, and they were tall and lanky and fancy, like gourmet biscotti. Me? I was vanilla ice cream. His presence overpowered, commanded, and given different circumstances, I might’ve said yes to a date. But I couldn’t. I worked for him now, and I refused to be one of those girls who slept their way to stardom. I didn’t spend four years getting a B.A. in Music Performance, learning guitar, piano, and vocals, moving to Nashville to try and make it against my family’s will, all so some cocky country star could woo me with his charisma. But with the way he looked at me, the way he touched me, the way he said my name….I just couldn’t resist. Before I knew it, I was just like every other girl who’d met Jayce Owens…tangled up in his web of secrets, half-truths, and twisted desire. And just like any good country song… the whole thing was destined to end in nothing but heartbreak.