Fifty-four percent of Americans read a book last year, up from 48.5% in 2022, according to a YouGov poll. Compare that with the 63% of Americans who planned to attend a concert during the same time period, and it would stand to reason that many people must read books about music.
Each year I read a slew of those offerings and recommend some in this annual column, just to save you the hassle of, well, reading bad books about music. In no particular order, here are the best ones released in 2024 that would serve as great gifts for loved ones, or even for yourself.
Earth to Moon by Moon Unit Zappa
Would you rather be born into rock royalty in the late ’60s and raised in one of America’s most interesting and iconic families, or be parented well? That’s the question behind this mesmerizing, can’t-put-down memoir by Moon Zappa.
Before her genius musician-composer father, Frank Zappa, lay on his deathbed in 1993 at the age of 52, she says he had never written her a letter. In fact, throughout the eldest Zappa’s new book, Earth to Moon, she discusses the breathless, alien feeling of the few times growing up when Frank was actually home from touring and emerged from his basement studio to speak to her.
“I don’t want to say the wrong thing,” she remembers thinking when her father suddenly appeared upstairs when she was eight. “I don’t want to be the reason the moment ends.”
Moon was 26 years old — healing from a traumatic childhood — when her legendary father died, after she had paused her quests for Hollywood and spiritual success to take care of him as prostate cancer took hold. The letter her mother made her father write to her as he was dying read only “I love you, Moon.”
There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland by Steven Hyden
Music geek Steven Hyden’s new book was published to coincide with the historic milestones of New Jersey singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen’s 75th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his smash hit, Born in the U.S.A., one of the most commercially successful albums in the history of popular music.
Because The Boss is still touring, and because some of us can still remember the years (not months) when Born in the U.S.A. was promoted to us in every way possible like we were strapped to chairs A Clockwork Orange-style, Hyden says “it’s still possible to believe in the power of a commanding, charismatic rock star to bring us together.”
Springsteen’s 1984 smash hit paralleled (and was sometimes blurred with) a distinct chapter in American history. But while some stars would’ve wanted to keep burning brighter and brighter, ultra-fame led Springsteen to feel “Bruced out” — as Hyden’s book deftly details — leading the iconic artist on a journey that continues through our current moment.
At the Vanguard of Vinyl by Darren Mueller | Unspooled by Rob Drew
Both from Duke University Press, Unspooled and At the Vanguard of Vinyl are very different books from very different writers. But they represent siblings of a sort, brilliantly telling the stories of cassettes and long-playing vinyl records, respectively and how each came to dominate Americans’ listening lives.
Throughout Unspooled, Rob Drew traces the eccentric, dorky tentacles of tape culture — from the art of the mixtape to the music industry’s legal battles against the tiny giant, which children of the ’80s and ’90s religiously used to record music off the radio and friends’ purchases.
Darren Mueller astutely traverses the history of the LP in At the Vanguard of Vinyl, explaining how a medium that brought recordings of live classical and jazz performances into the homes of music lovers became the palette for geniuses like Mingus and Miles to stretch their wings.
Prince and Purple Rain: 40 Years by Andrea Swensson
Minneapolis-based writer Andrea Swensson began interviewing people in Prince’s orbit about Purple Rain near the album’s 30th anniversary in 2014. The late, multi-talented iconoclast invited her to a party that year to listen to some of his massive stash of unreleased recordings, only a smidgen of which has been made public in the eight years since his sudden and shocking death from a drug overdose.
With a foreword from Prince mega-fan Maya Rudolph, the coffee table book Prince and Purple Rain: 40 Years is a comprehensive visual and oral history of the Purple One’s first No. 1 album, which also made him a movie star. Swensson’s illustrated tome — featuring loving, erudite and poetic descriptions of the artist’s life and work from birth to death — is accessible, complete and uplifting.
Out of the Blue: Life On the Road with Muddy Waters by Brian Bisesi | 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan
Who you know can get you on a path, but what you do dictates where that path leads. Being a regular at a New Jersey club as a young man led to Brian Bisesi playing guitar with, and then being road manager for, one of the greatest and most authentic bluesmen of all-time: Muddy Waters.
“When you work for me, you wear that for life,” Waters often told him — and like James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue, Bisesi’s Out of the Blue delineates the musicianship and personal life of an American legend.
For its part, 3 Shades of Blue takes on the mighty task of mining the passion, addiction and genius of three icons who’ve already been written about widely, while still saying something new. Kaplan’s book is inherently anticlimactic because of how much the album Kind of Blue — where the captivating stories of Coltrane, Evans and Davis came together to create unforgettable magic — has been covered over the years, but his plunge into the fascinating and sometime maddening lives of these titans makes 3 Shades of Blue the most beautifully written music book of the year.
My Black Country by Alice Randall
With Donald Trump spewing racism over the last decade, you might have missed the specific bigotry Beyoncé faced upon the release of Cowboy Carter earlier this year. The album topped the country charts, a first for a Black woman, and yet garnered zero Country Music Awards nominations.
Alice Randall — a writer and scholar who was the first Black woman to pen a No. 1 song in 1994 (Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s”) — coincidentally released the illuminating My Black Country this year. Her book shines a spotlight on the many extraordinary Black musicians who have played crucial parts in the history of country music.
The oldest country recording that exists on wax is an 1891 performance by Louis Vasnier, a Black man, but — as Randall artfully details in My Black Country — Lil Hardin, Charley Pride and many others have been keystones in the genre since its inception. The result of the author’s extensive research on the subject is a wild, entertaining and educational ride that will open your mind and your ears.