The 10 best music books of 2021
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Loading... - Brandon Stevens
- 28 Dec 2021
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It’s been an amazing, bumper year for music books – perhaps time off the road inspired our favourite artists to dust off the manuscript that’s been languishing in a drawer. Whether you’re on the hunt for some last-minute Christmas stocking fillers, or a hefty tome to hide behind when things get heated after the Queen’s Speech, look no further than NME‘s best music books of the year…
The Lyrics by Paul McCartney
The Beatles’ Paul McCartney has written some of the best-known lyrics of all time, and in this chunky volume – edited by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon – Macca lays out the fascinating stories behind ubiquitous classics such as ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. As well as being crammed with intriguing pieces of trivia (‘Yesterday’s original lyrics were: “Scrambled eggs / oh, my baby / How I love your legs”) it makes for a detail-packed autobiography told through music.
Killer line: “Writing a song is like talking to a psychiatrist”,
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
“Some day I’ll have to tell you the rest,” writes Dave Grohl in his mostly wholesome memoir, which sticks largely to digging into the origin story of how a bored kid from the suburbs of Virginia ended up in Nirvana and later founded Foo Fighters. It makes for an alternative, more personal retelling of how he ended up drumming in the biggest bands in the world.
Killer line: “You never know how much Beatles memorabilia you have until a Beatle comes to visit”
Self Esteem by Rebecca Lucy Taylor
Would you be brave enough to share the contents of your phone notes – chaotic shopping lists and drafts for long paragraph texts alike – with the world? As you’d perhaps expect from listening to her candid, brutally honest music as Self Esteem, Rebecca Lucy Taylor is up for the challenge, and through a series of poems, diary entries and brief notes, her debut book tells the story of how the former Slow Club member turned solo, contextualising her solo project’s ethos in the process.
Killer line: “You might be bored of my four chords but there’s still so much I want to say”
Tenement Kid by Bobby Gillespie
Beginning with the Primal Scream frontman’s childhood growing up in Springburn, Glasgow, ‘Tenement Kid’ tells the story of a kid who dreamed of becoming an astronaut and ended up becoming a “cosmonaut of inner space” instead, defining a generation with his psychedelic dance-rock. Concluding with the release of ‘Screamadelica’ in 1991, it leaves plenty of room for a sequel, too.
Killer line: “Don’t be a spectator, be a creator – that’s what the message of punk was, and, to me, that’s also the legacy of acid house.”
Music is History by Questlove
Spanning 50 years of modern music, The Roots’ founding member Questlove covers a lot of ground in his sixth book – drawing lines between Dr. Dre, Tears For Fears, OutKast and Prince, frequently examining why certain pieces of art become embroidered into the tapestry of history while others fade away.
Killer line: “Much of the time, history gets told when people are permitted (or even invited) to tell it — in other words, when someone who is already interested in telling a story is charged with doing so.” Read More…
