The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)—Marshack chronicles the band’s day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk’s DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.

Los Angeles, 1988. In a summer of hedonism, everyone wants their share. On Sunset Strip, undiscovered bands dream of emulating their heroes: Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Poison and all the other chancers who got lucky... Above them in the canyons, the city’s privileged youth already live like rock stars. Drifting between these separate worlds is a journalist on the trail of stories that grow darker by the day: a rock star wannabe who may or may not be who he says he is, a guitar player who will do anything to succeed, crossing the line between reality and fantasy. Then comes beautiful Iris, distant Brenna, ambivalent Blair, Lana the singer - taking their chances, losing their way, doing whatever it takes... Set in the glory days when the music business was a vast and amoral empire where stardom seemed arbitrary and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were the lifestyle of choice, My Life and the Beautiful Music blurs memoir, myth and reality to recreate the last, lost era of a now-vanished world.

“[An] eight-track flashback of a novel set in 1970s Detroit” from the international bestselling author of The Narcissism of Small Differences (O, the Oprah Magazine, Summer 2018 Reading List). Set in early 1970s Detroit, a divided city still reeling from its violent race riot of 1967, Beautiful Music is the story of one young man’s transformation through music. Danny Yzemski is a husky, pop radio–loving loner balancing a dysfunctional homelife with the sudden harsh realities of freshman year at a high school marked by racial turbulence. But after tragedy strikes the family, Danny’s mother becomes increasingly erratic and angry about the seismic cultural shifts unfolding in her city and the world. As she tries to hold it together with the help of Librium, highballs, and breakfast cereal, Danny finds his own reason to carry on: rock and roll. In particular, the drum and guitar-heavy songs of local legends like the MC5 and Iggy Pop. In the vein of Nick Hornby and Tobias Wolff, yet with a style very much Zadoorian’s own, Beautiful Music is a touching story about the power of music and its ability to save one’s soul. “A sweet and endearing coming-of-age tale measured in album tracks.” —The Wall Street Journal “For Danny, cracking the seal on a fresh piece of wax and dissecting cover art and liner notes are acts of nigh religious experience that unveil to him a community of fellow rockers across Detroit . . . It’s in these small moments—a lonely boy experiencing premature nostalgia—that Zadoorian shines.” —The Washington Post “A disturbing yet humorous tale of beleaguered adolescence in 1970s Motor City.” —Steve Miller, author of Detroit Rock City

Go behind the scenes with the musician The New York Times called "a guitar God!" Oft-hailed as the Jimi Hendrix of his generation, living guitar legend Joe Satriani has long transcended stylistic boundaries with a sound that raises the bar like a new horizon for the broader genre of instrumental guitar rock. Joe's 6-string secrets have astounded listeners around the world for nearly 30 years. In Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir, Satriani and coauthor, music biographer Jake Brown, take fans on their first authorized tour of the story behind his climb to stardom and the creative odyssey involved in writing and recording a storied catalog of classics including "Surfing with the Alien," "Summer Song," "Satch Boogie," "Always With Me, Always With You," "The Extremist," "Flying in a Blue Dream," "Crowd Chant," and more. Featuring previously unpublished photos and hours of exclusive, firsthand interviews with Satriani, Strange Beautiful Music offers a unique look inside the studio with Joe, giving fans a chance to get up close and personal like never before. With insider details about his collaboration with multi-platinum supergroup Chickenfoot, exclusive interviews with Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony of Van Halen and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, commentary from fellow guitar legends such as Steve Vai, Metallica's Kirk Hammett, Primus's Larry LaLonde, and legendary music producers including Glynn Johns and the late Andy Johns, this memoir offers a rare inside look for die-hard Satriani fans, guitar enthusiasts, and anyone who loves to rock.

Recalculating ... the GPS for the Soul takes you on an intimate mother-daughter journey of self-discovery and healing through numerotherapy and metaphysics. Andrea shares the experience of her own twenty-five-year journey integrating numerotherapy and metaphysics, and each chapter is filled with fascinating personal stories that recount her own life adventures, aha moments, and deep personal transformation in far-flung, exotic places. This unique slant on the use of numerology for self-empowerment and healing is a refreshing, uplifting, and inspiring look at how you can heal your life; let go of old, negative thought patterns and create a life that you desire; manifest the abundance and beauty in your life; and be the best that you can be.

Vargas-Cetina, a native Yucatecan and trova musician, offers ethnographic insight into the local music scene. With family connections, she embedded herself as a trovadora, and her fieldwork--singing, playing the guitar in a trova group, and extensively researching the genre and talking with fellow enthusiasts and experts--ensued. Trova, like other types of artistic endeavors, is the result of collaboration and social milieu. She describes the dedicated trova clubs, cultural institutions, the Yucatecan economy of agricultural exports, and identity politics that helped the music come about and have maintained it today. --Publisher description.