Band People
Life and Work in Popular Music
-
- $37.99
Publisher Description
A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren’t the center of their stage.
Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people” are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Musician Nicolay (The Humorless Ladies of Border Patrol) paints a perceptive portrait of musicians who are not known "as the authors of the works in which they participate, but without whom those works would not exist." Drawing on interviews with a mostly male, mostly white group of bassists, horn players, backup singers, and accompanists who comprise the "support staff" of the music industry, Nicolay dissects such challenges as cutting business deals in a world of "handshake agreements and vague ‘understandings,' " navigating power dynamics in bands, and striking the right balance between working for other musicians and pursuing one's own artistic ambitions. The interview subjects shed fascinating light on the complications of dedicating one's life to another's music—one guitarist observes that "there's such a physical aspect to music that my musculature will have changed after playing hundreds of times" ("In the most literal, embodied way," Nicolay comments, she's "been shaped by those songs"). Taken as a whole, these profiles succeed in complicating the "lone genius" narrative of artistic creation and raising provocative questions about how society values the production of music. It's a captivating look at what it means to occupy the complicated space "between a career and a calling."
