The Music Book Gift Ideas
Whose people love music and love reading about the behind-the-scenes wonder and drama? I have a lot of music lovers on my gift list, and these are the 2024 books about music that I'm most excited to give as gifts this holiday season.
Six more that made my honorable mention list:
Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna
A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene: 1989-1999 by Tom Maxwell
George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman (published fall 2023)
Sinead O'Connor: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations, edited by Melville House
A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time by Sheryl Kaskowitz
I'll be sharing my annual Bossy book gift ideas leading up to the holidays, and I hope you'll find a book or two in these lists to delight someone you love--or to give to yourself!
You may want to check my past Bossy gift idea lists (linked below) for quirky books, perennial classics, modern favorites, nonfiction must-haves, or other new-to-you titles that might be perfect for the people on your holiday list!
2024 Bossy Book Gift Guides...So Far
2023 Bossy Book Gift Guides
2022 Bossy Book Gift Guides
2021 Bossy Book Gift Guides
2020 Bossy Book Gift Guides
Bossy Independent Bookstore Love
A Bossy book-buying note: If you're buying books this holiday season, please support your local independent bookstore. They need and appreciate our business! (The book covers on Bossy Bookworm link you to Bookshop, a site that supports the beloved indies that keep us swimming in thoughtful book recommendations and excellent customer service all year round.)
I love my local independent bookstore, Park Road Books. They have a fantastic selection of titles, staff members offer spot-on recommendations (and sparkling personalities!), and they can order almost anything they don't have in stock.
01 How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music
How Women Made Music is pulled from the NPR series Turning the Tables and includes interviews, archive materials, essays, photographs, and illustrations from female musicians ranging from Dolly Parton to Beyonce, Joan Jett to Joan Baez, Taylor Swift to Odetta, and Nina Simone to Patti Smith.
Turning the Tables began in 2017 as a multi-platform way of exploring the equal position of women in music and the ways women make music. How Women Made Music draws also on fifty years of NPR coverage of women in music, as well as newly commissioned work.
02 Brothers by Alex Van Halen
"We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800-square-foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic. Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming successful, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I've spent doing anything else in this life. We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime."
Brothers is seventy-year-old Alex Van Halen's tribute and love letter to his younger brother ("Edward" or "Ed," never "Eddie"), told with intimate reflections and details.
Alex shares stories of the brothers' young lives spent in the Netherlands, to their family's move to working-class Pasadena; of their proper Indonesian mother and traveling musician father; of Van Halen band politics and complicated dynamics; and of the brothers' strong bonds.
The book includes never-before-seen photos from Alex Van Halen's personal collection.
03 The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America by Larry Tye
Based on over 250 interviews, The Jazzmen explores early 20th century America through the lens of three pivotal Black musicians who shaped its music.
Ellington, the grandson of slaves, was named Edward Kennedy Ellington, and his music defied categorization; Armstrong was born in a slum nicknamed The Battlefield, and he turned a ten-cent horn of his childhood into the beginnings of a jazz movement; and Basie, the son of a laundress and a coachman, managed to escape his poor upbringing with the help of Fats Waller.
The "kings of jazz," Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie overcame pervasive, powerful racism to become the most popular performers on the planet--and along the way created the background soundtrack for the Civil Rights Movement.
04 Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher
The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, Cher is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center.
In Cher: The Memoir, Part One, the singular force, a lifelong philanthropist and activist, outlines her childhood spent surrounded by artists and musicians, her difficult relationship with her mother, her young marriage to Sonny Bono, their split, and the shaping roles of her life--daughter, sister, wife, mother, friend, ally...and unparalleled superstar.
05 The Name of This Band is R.E.M.: A Biography by Peter Ames Carlin
In the spring of 1980, Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry played their first gig at a college party in Athens, Georgia.
The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. traces their meteoric rise to success, with their heartfelt, rocking, defiant, tender songs on albums like Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Document, Life's Rich Pageant, Reckoning, Out of Time, Monster, Green, and more.
By continually evolving, pushing limits, and challenging the status quo, the four friends shaped the music world for decades, while sticking together through various challenges and difficulties.
I'm surely dating myself by sharing that I won tickets off the radio to see R.E.M. almost thirty years ago--but that was an amazing show. In my yearly roundup of listening patterns, R.E.M. remained in my top five bands this year.
06 Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music by Rob Sheffield
"Every Swiftie is full of stories. The stories about the song that changed their life, the song nobody appreciates the way they do, the song they listened to on their fifteenth birthday. We go to these songs because they tell us our stories. We tell our secrets to these songs, and they scream our secrets back at us."
In Heartbreak is the National Anthem, Rolling Stone contributing editor and music journalist Rob Sheffield delves into the magic of Taylor Swift.
Sheffield draws on his years of covering Taylor's music, from her youthful, teenaged musical explorations to her explosion into an unparalleled superstar, exploring her life's path to cultural phenomenon and worldwide songwriter expressing our collective hopes, sorrows, and dreams.
Rob Sheffield is also the author of Dreaming the Beatles, On Bowie, and Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time.
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