The Best Music Books of 2023

In Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler was the “Quiet One” in the Seventies’ loudest band, playing wah-wah bass rumbles and poeticizing paranoia for Ozzy Osbourne as the group’s chief lyricist. In Into the Void, he opens up about formative moments (learning that he didn’t just hate eating meat, but was actually a “vegetarian,” a word he learned on tour at an Asian restaurant), he tells unexpected stories behind the band’s most well-known lyrics (“Iron Man” is actually about Jesus Christ taking vengeance instead of forgiving), and he peels back the curtain on Sabbath’s decades of breakups and makeups. It’s entertaining and enlightening, and along with Osbourne’s and Tony Iommi’s memoirs, the book provides a welcome, alternate gospel on the birth of heavy metal. —K.G.

Too often, the girl groups who defined the pop charts in the early Sixties have been historicized in terms of the male producers (and sometimes the male-female songwriting teams) who called the shots. This feast of an oral history puts the focus back on the young women who sang those hits. First-time author Laura Flam and poet Emily Sieu Liebowitz have combined 100 new interviews with a slew of finely combed secondary sources. These singers know their strengths, and not just vocally, as when Nedra Talley-Ross of the Ronettes explains the group’s “eye makeup was exaggerated, our hair was exaggerated, because it was like, see me in the balcony. You had to project your voice, but you had to project your look too.” —M.M.

The Nineties may well have been the most musically overstuffed decade ever, somehow packing the rise and fall of alt-rock, the golden age of hip-hop, the rise of teen pop, and so much more (Björk! Pavement! TLC!) into 10 short years. It’s a story so complex and contradictory that it’s all but impossible to convey linearly, so veteran journalist Rob Harvilla wisely chooses a more freewheeling approach in his new book, which adopts the premise of his entertaining podcast of the same name. Outkast lives next to the “Macarena” in his chronicle, which ends up invoking the feeling of wandering down a dorm hall where every room is playing something new, different, and great. —B.H.

Critic and historian Will Hermes (a contributing editor at Rolling Stone) had unique access to Lou Reed’s archives at the New York Public Library, and emerged with the definitive biography of one of the most hard-to-pin-down rock icons of all time. The account of Reed’s childhood on Long Island and college days at Syracuse is revelatory, and the section on Reed’s tenure inventing punk rock in the Velvet Underground is definitive. Hermes perfectly situates Reed’s life and work within a historical and social context — as a reflection of bohemian life in Reed’s beloved New York City, as a pathfinding articulation of gender nonconformity, as a paragon of uncompromising creative independence, and as a beacon for generations of outsiders longing to find meaning beyond anyone else’s system. —J.D.

Books about brilliant, self-sabotaging weirdos are usually far more entertaining than superstar biographies, and Bill Janovitz’s definitive bio of the monumentally influential pianist and singer Leon Russell is no exception. As Janovitz (also the frontman of Buffalo Tom) makes clear, Russell is a Zelig-like figure in the story of classic rock: a session musician on classics, from Tina Turner’s “River Deep Mountain High” to the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man”; a key influence on Elton John and many others as a solo artist; the driving force behind the epochal Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour, live album, and film with Joe Cocker; and a collaborator with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and others. But the book gets most interesting as Russell passes the peak of his career and spends decades drowning in his own eccentricities — and finally has a late-in-life comeback with the help of Elton John, who repaid him for the inspiration. —B.H.

Turns out Geddy Lee’s voice as a writer can also reach unprecedented heights: Rush’s frontman, bassist, and keyboardist wrote a revealing, funny, utterly singular rock memoir, complete with a harrowing chapter on his parents’ experience as Holocaust survivors that likely features more extensive historical research than every other music autobiography put together. Fans will appreciate his generosity in doling out deep Rush lore, including the making of their classic albums, synth-era battles with guitarist Alex Lifeson over their direction, and some surprises about their drug use, but it’s his deeply felt chronicling of his early life — from facing antisemitism at school to finding his identity as a musician in the wake of his father’s early death — that lingers. —B.H.

LiLiPUT were one of the most fiercely original punk bands — Swiss women chanting in fractured English, in a herky-jerky swirl of avant-garde playground bangers and experimental art-funk. The Zurich band started out calling themselves Kleenex, until the lawyers came knocking, then became LiLiPUT halfway through their career. (Kurt Cobain listed “anything by Kleenex” on his famous list of 50 favorite albums.) But despite a string of brilliant Rough Trade singles — “Ain’t You,” “Split,” the irresistible “Ü” — they were barely known in the U.S. before breaking up in 1983. Kleenex/LiLiPUT tells their story in collage form, based on the diaries of the late guitarist Marlene Marder, photos, fanzine interviews, and an appreciation by Greil Marcus. Like LiLiPUT’s music, the book is messy, unruly, yet alive with excitement. —R.S.

“We were a tightknit group, so only one of us would have been able to get these kinds of photographs,” writes Paul McCartney beneath photos he took of George Harrison snoozing and a thickly bespectacled John Lennon pondering the day in the back of a car. And he’s right: What makes his photo diary, 1964, so special is the intimacy of his photos of the biggest rock band in history right at Beatlemania’s flashpoint. McCartney subtitled the book “Eyes of the Storm” because of the fans who greeted them, the paparazzi who trailed them, and the security who looked after them. The most interesting aspect of exploring McCartney’s pics, taken in Liverpool, Paris, New York, and Miami, is that the band sometimes looks tired but never overwhelmed. They knew they were where they needed to be in history, right down to a chaotic shot that inspired a scene in A Hard Day’s Night. —K.G.

Read Kim Gordon’s dishy 2015 book, Girl in a Band, for an interior look at her marriage to and divorce from her Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore. Read Moore’s book, which is really more of a musicology than a memoir, for a microscopic look at how his interests in punk, art, and guitar experimentalism fueled his contributions to one of alt-rock’s most daring bands. Although he dedicates about a paragraph and a half of the nearly 500-page book to his divorce, and he certainly could have revealed more personal stories about his other bandmates, Moore’s memories of being a New York band on SST, the Year Punk Broke, and the horror he felt following Kurt Cobain’s death document turning points both in his life and in the evolution of underground rock with vivid detail. —K.G.

Steely Dan’s stock is even higher today than it was in the 1970s, when they were having hit records. Critic Alex Pappademas and illustrator Joan LeMay deliver the perfect celebration of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s unique hermetic grandeur, honoring their oblique mystique while also getting at the real human beings lurking beneath the pristine tunes and cynical worldview. Each chapter is a revelatory riff on a different character in a Dan song — from Peg to Rikki to Mr. LePage to the Gaucho — with LeMay’s artwork just as smart and fun as the writing. They get into topics like the band’s secret hip-hop influence, their “famously overdetermined guitar solos,” and the dialectical nature of their relationship with fellow El Lay rock royals the Eagles. People have been trying to untangle the riddle of Steely Dan’s greatness for decades. No one’s ever done it better. —J.D. 

In Where Are Your Boys Tonight? former Billboard staffer Chris Payne delivers an oral history of the bizarre moment when emo music went mainstream in the early to mid-2000s. Payne makes sense of third-wave emo’s takeover by tracing the intimate history of the genre/subculture’s rise from the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. Silent Majority frontman Tommy Corrigan and former Saves the Day bassist Eben D’Amico pay homage to the shows in sweaty basements and packed VFW halls that paved the way for arena tours; Geoff Rickley from Thursday and Chris Carraba dissect their pivotal MTV appearances; heavy-hitters Pete Wentz, Hayley Williams, and Mikey Way bust myths and reveal the wildest of nuggets from their early days in the scene’s most successful bands. —M.G.

Combining academic rigor with unacademic language, first-time author Jesse Rifkin has written a great New York music book unlike any other. What sets This Must Be the Place apart isn’t just its scope — Rifkin tracks 60 years’ worth of New York music history, from Washington Square Park’s open-air hootenannies to Williamsburg’s unlicensed warehouses, with stops in on the births of disco and punk, the rise of hip-hop (not to mention Bob Dylan and Madonna), and the shifting sands of gentrification — but also its focus. Few music histories are this sharply attuned to day-to-day costs and proximity as driving forces of a scene: Rifkin argues persuasively that the CBGB’s punk scene happened largely because the key band members all lived within a few blocks of the club. —M.M.

Rick Rubin has produced some of your favorite songs, and in The Creative Act, he details the philosophies he follows while making art. These include challenges like “Create an environment where you’re free to express what you’re afraid to express,” which he writes like a three-line poem, and “Look for what you notice but no one else sees.” The simplicity of his advice is deceptive and, in fact, Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies may be more effectual, but there’s a hypnotic quality to Rubin’s longer musings between his koans that show how he has become something of a creative guru, teaching people how to believe in themselves enough to tap into the ingenuity they already have inside them. —K.G.

Britney Spears’ memoir was destined to be a blockbuster from the moment she announced it, shortly after her 13-year conservatorship was finally ended. The Woman in Me lived up to much of the hype: the fast-paced book details more than 40 years of pain, trauma, and exploitation that the pop star has endured. Spears names names and doesn’t hold back from letting the world know what she’s been through. The juiciest moments come from the revelations about her relationship with Justin Timberlake, adding depth and sadness to their experience together as pop’s golden couple during the early aughts. The book isn’t as meaty as other celebrity memoirs in terms of length and painstaking detail about her life and career, but it’s clear Spears needed to get some of the worst moments of her life off her chest first. Given a recent announcement that she is working on a second book, she may have only just scratched the surface. —B.S.

Lol Tolhurst is a goth elder — he was in the Cure for their unholiest hours, in their black-lipstick funeral-party trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography. So who better to write a scholarly, witty, yet totally engaging guide to the goth lifestyle — as he calls it, “the last true alternative outsider subculture.” He begins with literary precursors like Poe and Bronte, then moves into the music of Bauhaus, Bowie, Nico, Siouxsie, Joy Division, and others, sorting them into “Architects of Darkness” and “Spiritual Alchemists.” Tolhurst shares his own personal stories about the scene, as in his excellent 2016 memoir, Cured. But the community is timeless — “bigger than the Deadheads,” he boasts like a proud uncle. For him, goth isn’t merely music or fashion — it’s “a way to understand the world.” —R.S.

As the chief lyricist in the Roots, Tariq Trotter (a.k.a. Black Thought) is never without an apt word or a multilayered image. But in all his years of quotable bars, he’s kept his personal life at a cool remove; in interviews, he’ll tell you that even the most candid-sounding Roots songs are more like works of fiction, and he’s long ceded the celebrity limelight to his childhood friend and bandmate Questlove. That makes it all the more remarkable when Trotter lets the world in on the experiences that shaped him in this debut memoir, writing in detail for the first time about growing up in South Philly, losing both of his parents to street violence when he was young, and the often-challenging path he had to take to develop and protect his talent. These are stories that he’s only hinted at on the Roots’ records, but once you read them, you’ll never hear his music the same way. —S.V.L.

Is it possible that the whole time Jeff Tweedy was impressing us as one of his generation’s most consistently moving songwriters, he was only warming up for his role as an equally insightful essayist? The Wilco frontman’s third bestseller is an extraordinary memoir disguised as a collection of music criticism. Writing about a bunch of songs he loves (by Rosalía, Dylan, the Replacements …), and a couple he can’t stand (“Wanted Dead or Alive”), Tweedy takes us through his whole journey, from misunderstood Midwestern kid to the kind of guy who can write a book like this. Each track on the playlist is a new chance for him to think through the ways we all use music to shape our identities and connect with one another. He ends up with a gently wise self-portrait of someone who’s attuned to the world’s sensitive frequencies. —S.V.L.

There’s a matter-of-fact delivery to Lucinda Williams’ Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, as the Southern songwriter dryly recounts a series of pivotal events and relationships in her life with the nonchalance of someone telling you what’s on their grocery list. But Williams has never been one for flash, and it’s that casual tone that makes her memoir, full of freewheeling escapades on the road, busted romances with her ideal type of man (“a poet on a motorcycle”), and paths crossed with the literati, such a personal read. “It was New Year’s Day and I was hungover as fuck,” she writes in one chapter, detailing the creation of her song “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten.” Despite its title, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You doesn’t drop any major revelations. But it doesn’t have to: Williams’ skeletons live in plain view in her songs. —J.H.

Winder shines a light on the women of the Rolling Stones — Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, and Anita Pallenberg — who were long overlooked and dismissed as girlfriends, groupies, and mere muses. In reality, they were much more, exposing Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones to art, culture, and high society. They got them to pick up some Russian literature, dabble in LSD, and indulge in the occasional occult practice. In other words, as Winder writes, “It’s about women of such potency that their sheer proximity turned a band of mama’s boys into Luciferian demigods.” With Parachute Women, Winder removes these powerhouses from the shadows of rock stars and hands them their well-deserved flowers — dead flowers, but flowers all the same. —A.M.

Paul McCartney called Mal Evans “a big loveable bear of a roadie.” He was a crucial figure in the Beatles’ inner circle — their loyal road manager, assistant, friend, confidant, sometimes bodyguard, sometimes nursemaid. Everybody knows Mal as the cheerful giant from Get Back, banging the anvil or stalling the police at the door. But he had a dark side that turned deadly in coked-out Seventies California — in 1976, he aimed a rifle at the L.A. cops and was gunned down. Kenneth Womack reveals the whole Mal Evans story in Living the Beatles Legend, a complex portrait of one of the few friends all four Beatles trusted, as he shares their adventures from Liverpool to Hollywood, from Abbey Road to Rishikesh. —R.S.