{"id":285,"date":"2008-04-18T07:20:02","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T14:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/04\/music-as-memoir\/"},"modified":"2008-04-18T07:20:02","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T14:20:02","slug":"music-as-memoir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/04\/18\/music-as-memoir\/","title":{"rendered":"Music As Memoir"},"content":{"rendered":"

from Publishers Weekly<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Music as Memoir<\/h1>\n

Life stories with a backbeat.<\/h2>\n

by Mark Rotella — Publishers Weekly<\/h3>\n

\u00a0In a poem set to music by his lover Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden implored the patron saint of music, \u201cBlessed Cecilia, appear in visions\/ To all musicians, appear and inspire.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Nikki<\/p>\n

Or as Nikki Sixx, bassist and songwriter for heavy metal band M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, acknowledges inspiration in his bestselling memoir,\u00a0The Heroin Diaries<\/em>: \u201cI remember Iggy and the Stooges’ song ‘Search and Destroy’ reaching out from my speakers to me like my own personal anthem.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the authors of books on music\u2014be they history or critical analysis, biography or autobiography\u2014have surely felt a similar pull to write about music. In a field of music writing one might label \u201cmusic as memoir,\u201d authors reveal just how much music speaks to them and use music as a prism through which to view the world around them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour man or your woman’s gone, the whiskey don’t work no more, you’re aching for the homeplace\u2014and God ain’t listenin’,\u201d writes Dana Jennings in\u00a0Sing Me Back Home<\/em>\u00a0(Faber and Faber, May), drawing on his own dirt-poor family in New Hampshire to explain 20th-century rural America. \u201cYou just need to wallow sometimes,\u201d Jennings acknowledges in a Hank Williams\u2013inspired chapter titled \u201cI’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’ve got music fans who want a valentine of or homage to their favorite artists, and you’ve got those who just want the dirt,\u201d says Lissa Warren, senior publicity director at Da Capo. \u201cSome of these guys are just over the top,\u201d says Warren’s colleague, executive editor Ben Schafer. \u201cThey have decadent stories\u2014of women, sex and drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

And riding in on the heels of autobiographies such as last year’s\u00a0Slash<\/em>\u00a0by the Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist are such down-and-dirty tell-alls as Stephen Davis’s\u00a0Watch You Bleed<\/em>\u00a0(Gotham, Aug.) and\u00a0W.A.R.: Axl Rose<\/em>\u00a0(St. Martin’s, Feb.) by Mick Wall\u2014both of which are on, you guessed it, Guns ‘n’ Roses. Of course, old-time rockers are still garnering ink in such books as\u00a0AC\/DC<\/em>\u00a0by Murray Engleheart (Harper Entertainment).<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has been a trend toward rock stars finally telling their life stories themselves,\u201d says Schafer at Da Capo. \u201cOnce something like Clapton happens, they say, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ \u201d<\/p>\n

Eric Clapton, Nikki Sixx, Slash, Tommy Lee, and the Police’s Andy Summers and Sting\u2014the list goes one\u2014have all joined the confessional club.<\/p>\n

[ click to view full article at Publisher’s Weekly<\/a> ]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from Publishers Weekly Music as Memoir Life stories with a backbeat. by Mark Rotella — Publishers Weekly \u00a0In a poem set to music by his lover Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden implored the patron saint of music, \u201cBlessed Cecilia, appear in visions\/ To all musicians, appear and inspire.\u201d Or as Nikki Sixx, bassist and songwriter for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}