Holding the Note
Writing On Music
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Publishing:17th Oct '24
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 17th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
![Holding the Note cover](https://cdn.theportobellobookshop.com/img/9781035024018.jpg)
Essays on Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith
A Financial Times Book of the Year 2023
The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor of The New Yorker, writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.
He portrays a series of musical lives – Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more – and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.
‘This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature . . . He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal' – New York Times
Remarkable, not just for the essays' expertise and vividness, but for the aeons he spends talking to his subjects and those around them * Observer *
This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature . . . He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal * The New York Times *
Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious * The Times *
[A] standout collection of pieces . . . What’s most remarkable is [Remnick's] ability to give due at once to the artists’ larger-than-life musical legacies and their all too human fallibilities * Publishers Weekly *
Written over the past three decades, these are keenly observed, deeply felt, and judiciously detailed encounters of genuine communion mixing interviews, biography, and analysis, all lyrically and radiantly composed . . . There is acuity here, bemusement, tenderness, and gratitude -- Donna Seaman * Booklist *
Remnick, the intellectually nimble editor of the New Yorker, has lately been focusing closely on world politics, but he finds time to profile a number of artists who, having enjoyed early success, ‘were all grappling, in music and in their own lives, with their diminishing gifts and mortality.’. . . There’s dish here . . . and plenty of astute observation . . . A perceptive pleasure for literate music lovers * Kirkus Reviews *
ISBN: 9781035024018
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages