Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

By Ann Powers

(Dey Street Books, March 2024)

Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself.

For decades, Joni Mitchell’s life and music have enraptured listeners. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Mitchell has inspired countless musicians—from peers like James Taylor, to inheritors like Prince and Brandi Carlile—and authors, who have dissected her music and her life in their writing. At the same time, Mitchell has always been a force beckoning us still closer, as—with the other arm—she pushes us away. Given this, music critic Ann Powers wondered if there was another way to draw insights from the life of this singular musician who never stops moving, never stops experimenting.

In Traveling, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys. Through extensive interviews with Mitchell’s peers and deep archival research, she takes readers to rural Canada, mapping the singer’s childhood battle with polio. She charts the course of Mitchell’s musical evolution, ranging from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics. She follows the winding road of Mitchell’s collaborations with other greats, and the loves that emerged along the way, all the way through to the remarkable return of Mitchell to music-making after the 2015 aneurysm that nearly took her life.

Along this journey, Powers’ wide-ranging musings on the artist’s life and career reconsider the biographer’s role and the way it twines against the reality of a fan. In doing so, Traveling illustrates the shifting nature of biography, and the ultimate contradiction of celebrity: that an icon cannot truly, completely be known to a fan.

Kaleidoscopic in scope, and intimate in its detail, Traveling is a fresh and fascinating addition to the Joni Mitchell canon, written by a biographer in full command of her gifts who asks as much of herself as of her subject. 

****

One of the nation’s most notable music critics, Ann Powers has been NPR Music’s critic and correspondent since 2011. Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2006 until she joined NPR; prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic at Blender, a pop critic at the New York Times, and a senior editor at the Village Voice. She won the 42^nd annual ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 2010 and is based in Nashville, TN.

The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana

By Michael Azerrad

(HarperOne, October 2023)

A downright revolutionary 30th-anniversary deluxe edition of the iconic bestselling biography of Nirvana, updated with exclusive new content exploring the personal and cultural forces that inspired the music, the author’s friendship with Kurt Cobain and why multiple generations remain fascinated by the 1990s.

“Just tell the truth. That’ll be better than anything else that’s been written about me.”—Kurt Cobain to author Michael Azerrad

It has been three decades since Nirvana upended the pop cultural landscape with Nevermind, the landmark album that became the soundtrack of Generation X, capturing its confusion, frustration, and passion. In 1993, Michael Azerrad published what stands as the definitive biography of this revolutionary band and its star-crossed frontman Kurt Cobain. Written with the band’s complete cooperation—the only book to feature interviews with Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl—it became a massive bestseller, and in the words of Cobain, “the best rock book I’ve ever read.”

Seven months after the book’s original publication, Cobain was dead by suicide, making Come as You Are the only book-length record of the inner life and creative mind of one the most significant songwriters and musicians in rock history—a haunting and haunted artist whose influence continues powerfully to the present day.

Azerrad has revisited and reconsidered his original text. The result is this “amplified” version—a truly unique book within a book featuring extensive new essay-like annotations that deepen our understanding of this legendary band. Azerrad solves former mysteries, reinterprets the key players and the time, investigates depression and other psychic traumas, debunks myths and legends, and offers celebrations of that pivotal moment in the mid-1990s as he searches for the answer to the question: Why was this music so extraordinarily powerful?

Vivid, evocative, and thought-provoking, this gorgeous hardcover book—featuring more than 99 photos and ephemera—is an essential document not just for Nirvana fans but for anyone interested in the cultural legacy of the 1990s.

****

Michael Azerrad is a rock journalist, author and drummer. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Mojo, Spin and the New Yorker. He frequently appears on television as a commentator on rock music and was most recently the editor-in-chief of the Talkhouse. He is the author of the books Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana and Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991.

The World According to Joan Didion

By Evelyn McDonnell

(HarperOne, September 2023)

An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style.

Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, unsentimental critics, and meticulous stylists.

An antidote to a global view that narrows our vision to the smallest screens, The World According To Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she once said.

Evelyn McDonnell, the acclaimed journalist, essayist, critic, feminist, native Californian, and university professor who regularly teaches Didion’s work, is attuned to interpret Didion’s vision for readers today. Inspired by Didion’s own words—from her works both published and unpublished—and informed by the people who knew Didion and those whose lives she shaped, The World According to Joan Didion is an illustrated journey through her life, tracing the path she carved from Sacramento, Portuguese Bend, Los Angeles, and Malibu to Manhattan, Miami, and Hawaii. McDonnell reveals the world as it was seen through Didion’s eyes and explores her work in chapters keyed to the singular physical motifs of her writing: Snake. Typewriter. Hotel. Notebook. Girl. Etc.

One of the first books to be published after the revered writer’s death in 2021, The World According to Joan Didion is a literary companion for those embarking on new journeys and a guide to innovative ways of being. It will radically transform the way you explore the world, and will help you answer the question as you sit in a café, or on a plane or train, pondering the future: What would Joan Didion have seen?

****

“McDonnell offers a thoughtful assessment of Didion’s importance but doesn’t shy away from Didion’s flaws…. An appreciative portrait of an iconic author.”
–Kirkus Reviews

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Evelyn McDonnell has written or coedited eight books, including Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyonce. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl and Queens of Noise: the Real Story of the Runaways. She has been a pop culture writer at the Miami Herald and a senior editor at the Village Voice. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Ms., and Billboard. She teaches journalism at Loyola Marymount University and lives in San Pedro, California.

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

By John Szwed

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2023)

Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture.

He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, sat at the piano with Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, argued film with Susan Sontag, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants. He was always broke, always intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.”

In Cosmic Scholar, John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to living in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture. He was an insatiable creator and collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society, or keep himself healthy or sober. He was “so devious,” said Ginsberg, and “so saintly.”

Exhaustively researched, energetically told, and complete with a trove of images, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue deification of an American icon.

****

“In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith . . . Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject’s emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders [Smith’s] extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life . . . A masterful ode to a ‘strange and singular character’ in American arts.” 
–Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[An] engrossing, revelatory, often beyond-belief portrait of a reckless, maddening, cosmic, and transformational genius.”
–Booklist, starred review

“Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down. . . . As lively a writer as he is scrupulous, [he] has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure.”
–Library Journal, starred review

“Szwed, piece by obscure piece, masterfully puts [Harry Smith’s] puzzle of a life together . . . . A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.”
–Kirkus Reviews

****

John Szwed is the author or editor of many books, including biographies of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 2005 was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz, a book included with the album Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. A former Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies for 26 years at Yale University, he was also a Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, and served as the Chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia with his family.

The Knowing

By Ani Di Franco

(Rise x Penguin Workshop, March 2023)

From the Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter, political activist, and feminist icon comes a picture book with purpose, with heart, and with words that sing.

Singer-songwriter, activist, feminist, and best-selling author Ani Di Franco has written something for her youngest audience: a picture book that invites young readers to ponder the distinction between outer forms of identity and the inner light of consciousness that is even more central to our being. In her signature folk style, Di Franco weaves a story that incorporates themes of individual power and collective responsibility. First-time illustrator Julia Mathew paints universal scenes of childhood in her family’s native India, glowing with honesty and love. Designed to be read aloud or sung, and pored over, this picture book is rich with meaningful text, poignant illustrations, and a unique message that will resonate with all.

****

“The interconnectedness of humanity shines throughout this affirming picture book from singer/songwriter Di Franco…. A sweet, lyrical book perfect for bedtime sharing.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“A book that is well worth revisiting, with a comforting tone to the whole project that speaks to love and connection, with others and with your own personhood in the world.”
–The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“Di Franco’s debut picture book offers up a rhyming reverie on selfhood and collective consciousness….presented with an genuine openheartedness that should both intrigue and reassure.”
–Publishers Weekly

****

Ani Di Franco is a Grammy-winning musical artist and feminist icon recognized for her poetry and songwriting which pierces social convention and challenges the status quo, as well as for her social activism and political engagement. One of the first artists to create her own label in 1990, she is the mother of the DIY movement and has sold over 5.5 million albums on her own Righteous Babe Records, and recently released her twentieth studio album. While she has been known as the “Little Folksinger,” her music has embraced many genres and collaborators ranging from Pete Seeger to Chuck D to Prince. She lives in New Orleans.

Time Is Tight: My Life, Note by Note

By Booker T. Jones

(Little, Brown, October 2022)

The long-awaited memoir of Booker T. Jones, leader of the famed Stax Records house band, architect of the Memphis soul sound, and one of the most legendary figures in music.

From Booker T. Jones’s earliest years in segregated Memphis, music was the driving force in his life. While he worked paper routes and played gigs in local nightclubs to pay for lessons and support his family, Jones, on the side, was also recording sessions in what became the famous Stax Studios-all while still in high school. Not long after, he would form the genre-defining group Booker T. and the MGs, whose recordings went on to sell millions of copies, win a place in Rolling Stone’s list of top 500 songs of all time, and help forge collaborations with some of the era’s most influential artists, including Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam & Dave.

Nearly five decades later, Jones’s influence continues to help define the music industry, but only now is he ready to tell his remarkable life story. Time is Tight is the deeply moving account of how Jones balanced the brutality of the segregationist South with the loving support of his family and community, all while transforming a burgeoning studio into a musical mecca.

Culminating with a definitive account into the inner workings of the Stax label, as well as a fascinating portrait of working with many of the era’s most legendary performers-Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Tom Jones, among them-this extraordinary memoir promises to become a landmark moment in the history of Southern Soul.

****

“Booker T. Jones composed some of the finest music of the last century, and now he’s given us one of the finest music books of this one.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Booker T. will forever be known as the Booker T. from Booker T. and the MGs. But this book reveals so much more of the man.”
—Bob Dylan

“Booker T. is a great producer, a great musician, and a great friend. Those three ‘greats’ together pretty much let you know how I feel about Booker. He and I worked together on many projects, all were fun-just like this book, which is as joyful to read as Booker’s music is to listen to.”
—Willie Nelson

“Booker is simply one of the tenderest-hearted people I’ve ever met and I’m so honored to have ever been in his company. This beautiful memoir is a near perfect reflection of the man I would walk a million miles for: engaging, unforgettable, and deeply creative.”
—Sinéad O’Connor

****

As the keyboardist for the Memphis-based quartet Booker T & the MGs, Booker T. Jones performed R&B and funk hits by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam & Dave, and, as a member of the house band for Stax Records, helped define the sound of Southern soul music. Booker T & the MGs are also known for original hit singles like “Green Onions,” and for being one of the first integrated instrumental groups. In 1992, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they received a Grammys’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

She Begat This: 20 Years of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

By Joan Morgan

(Atria Books, June 2022)

• An NPR 2018 Great Read
• One of Pitchfork‘s “Best Music Books of 2018”

A stirring and eye-opening celebration of the enduring legacy of one of the most acclaimed and influential albums of the 90s—The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Released in 1998, Lauryn Hill’s first solo album is often cited by music critics as one of the most important recordings in modern history. Artists from Beyoncé to Nicki Minaj to Janelle Monáe have claimed it as an inspiration, and it was recently included in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, as well as named the second greatest album by a woman in history by NPR (right behind Joni Mitchell’s Blue).

Award-winning feminist author and journalist Joan Morgan delivers an expansive, in-depth, and heartfelt analysis of the album and its enduring place in pop culture. She Begat This is both an indelible portrait of a magical moment when a young, fierce, and determined singer-rapper-songwriter made music history and a crucial work of scholarship, perfect for longtime hip-hop fans and a new generation of fans just discovering this album.

****

“A lot of people have a lot of thoughts (not to mention feelings) about the elusive hip-hop star Lauryn Hill, but only the journalist Joan Morgan could have written a slender book as capacious as this one…. With She Begat This: 20 Years of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” Morgan takes an album that was a cultural touchstone—the kind of work that elicits ardent devotion and ardent backlash—and holds it up to the light, showcasing its brilliance and its shadows.
—The New York Times

“Joan Morgan schools like no other. While reading this masterful, rich, and amazingly concise cultural history of the Nina-Simone-Defecating-On-Your-Microphone-Nineties, I learned two lessons. One, you cannot tell the story of Hip Hop or Black womanhood in the 1990s without a deep understanding of the prototype for Black Girl Genius that is Lauryn Hill. And two, you cannot tell the story of Hip Hop or Black womanhood in the 1990s without the fiya-spitting, Jamaican, Bronx-girl pen of Joan Morgan. Lauryn gave us the soundtrack, the artistry, and the permission. Joan and her crew of badass, pioneering Hip Hop journalists, many of whom are featured here, continue to give us the language and the frameworks to understand the singularity of turn-of-the-21st-century Black cultural production. Absent either of these Black girl geniuses, the story is incomplete. Indeed, she begat this.”
—Brittany Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“Pioneer hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan takes on Lauryn Hill, the complicated star whose monumental album changed the world, and we finally get the loving, vibrant, critical attention the artist, her work, and her generation has been due. This book is a listening companion with attitude and a sure-shot conversation starter. You may never hear Ms. Hill the same again.”
—Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“The dope shit always needs a remix, if only to be reminded of the brilliance of the original joint. And if you were on the scene back in ‘98, you knew it would be Joan Morgan who would remix The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, because who else would it be but another Caribbean sister stepping in the world fly AF and with the gift of verse? Lauryn might have Begat This, but Joan Morgan is giving it back to us all lovely and new and as vital as it was that summer of ‘98.”
—Mark Anthony Neal, Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University

“With She Begat This, Joan Morgan brings the full lyrical prowess of her unstoppable flow and ferocious prose to tell the multilayered saga of Lauryn Hill’s seminal masterpiece. Morgan serves up an intimate artistic portrait that is compassionate, unflinching, and imbued with the razor-sharp analysis and from-the-heart truth-telling that made her a legend of hip-hop journalism.”
—Daniel José Older, New York Times bestselling author of Shadowshaper and Dactyl Hill Squad, winner of the International Latino Book Award

“A new book by Joan Morgan would be cause for celebration whether it was about Lauryn Hill, Bunker Hill, or ant hills. But for hip hop’s founding feminist and most incisive critic to apply the force of her intellect, the power of her memory, and the dexterity of her cultural mixology to a record so fraught with meaning and misunderstanding makes me feel the way I did the first time I heard the needle drop on ‘Lost Ones.’ In fact, I’m dancing with one fist in the air as I write this.”
—Adam Mansbach, #1 New York Times bestselling author

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Joan Morgan is an author and cultural critic who coined the phrase “hip-hop feminism”. Morgan has been a widely sought-after lecturer and commentator on hip-hop and feminism. An award-winning journalist, a provocative cultural critic, she began her professional writing career freelancing for The Village Voice and has been published by Vibe, Interview, Ms., More, Spin, and numerous others. Formerly the executive editor of Essence, she’s currently the program director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at NYU.