Holding the Note
Writing On Music
-
- €7.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Yorker editor Remnick (Lenin's Tomb) delves into the lives and art of musical greats in this standout collection of pieces published in the magazine. Remnick's conversations with such luminaries as Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, and Luciano Pavarotti occurred late in the artists' careers, when each was "grappling, in music and in their own lives, with their diminishing gifts and mortality," though the drive to create never abated. "How the Light Gets In," published a month before Leonard Cohen's 2016 death, explores the so-called godfather of gloom's personal and artistic particularities, from his reluctant, sometimes anxiety-ridden relationship with performing to his religious devotions (a lifelong "spiritual seeker," Cohen practiced Judaism, but spent years in a Zen monastery). "Soul Survivor" traces Aretha Franklin's gospel roots, while "We Are Alive" probes the "darker currents" of Bruce Springsteen's psyche and how they've fueled his creative drive: "you cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing," says Springsteen, who also speaks of a "need to remake myself, my town, my audience—the desire for renewal." Remnick's close observational details add texture, but what's most remarkable is his ability to give due at once to the artists' larger-than-life musical legacies and their all too human fallibilities. Music fans will revel in this peek behind the curtain.
