Good musician biographies

Do you want to start by giving an introduction to how you chose these biographies? I think you have quite strong views about how to approach the history of music as a writer. Maybe you could start bygd telling us about that. 

It’s very difficult to write about music because, as one of my favorite musicologists, Wilfrid Mellers, once said, if you’re not writing technically about music, you’re not writing about music at all. You’re writing about something else. I’ve always taken that to heart and tried to keep it in mind when I write about music.

The problem is that in beställning to write technically about music, there is all of this jargon, and most readers don’t understand the jargon. So you have to try, somehow, to either explain the jargon along the way or avoid it and try to use everyday terms. The jargon is a time saver for people who understand it. That’s why it’s there, it’s a series of shortcuts. But there’s no point in using it if you’re writing fo

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You might know all the songs and albums of your favorite musicians, but do you know the experiences and inspirations behind their work? Luckily, you can find out by listening to some great musical biographies on Spotify. 

With picks that include memoirs from legendary stars including Dave Grohl, Billie Eilish, Gucci Mane, and Dolly Parton, you can discover all the wisdom these greats have to share. 

The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music

Written and narrated by Dave Grohl

Dave Grohl’s autobiography, The Storyteller, sheds light on what it&#;s like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, who goes on to live out his craziest dreams as a musician. The rock icon reflects on everything from hitting the road with Scream at 18, to his time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. He remembers jamming with Iggy Pop and dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. He tells stories about drumming for Tom Petty and meeting Paul McCartney at Royal Albert

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The 50 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time

So many CBGB-era punk memoirs out there, but Richard Hell’s is unique — poetic yet never pompous, bemused without corny punch lines. As a year-old Kentucky kid, he runs off to NYC to be a poet, but ends up a rock & roller. “‘Sacred monster’ is definitely the job description,” Hell writes. “Being a pop star, a front person, takes indestructible certainty of one’s own irresistibility. That’s the monster part.” He depicts his music comrades — Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Patti Smith, Lester Bangs — and all the girls he’s loved before. (Hell was the punk Leonard Cohen in that department.) He quips about his popularity with critics, “because they were predisposed to favor noise, intellect, and failure.” In the final scene, he runs into his old nemesis Verlaine for the first time in years — flipping through the dollar bins outside the Strand Bookstor