History & Criticism

Featuring an exclusive, never-before-heard piece of music, the last written together by the legendary Van Halen brothers! In this intimate and open account—nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you’ve ever read—Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and...

Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated. A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Ralph J. Gleason...

An engrossing oral history of a band that came to define a generation, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap story of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band.

The fascinating story behind the making of Bruce Springsteen’s most surprising album, Nebraska, revealing its pivotal role in Springsteen’s career—now with a new afterword Soon to be a major motion picture starring Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) “Brilliant . . . For fans of American music...

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL MOVIE STARRING MACHINE GUN KELLY, DANIEL WEBBER, DOUGLAS BOOTH, AND IWAN RHEON, DIRECTED BY JEFF TREMAINE. Celebrate over thirty years of the world's most notorious rock band with the audiobook edition of The Dirt—the outrageous, legendary, no-holds-barred autobiography...

A massively entertaining oral biography of the golden era of critically derided yet monumentally popular radio rock, when Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Toto, and more ruled the airwaves Paul Rees’s Raised on Radio is, remarkably, the first biography of AOR (“Album-Oriented Rock”)...

This gritty bestselling memoir by the singer Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, and Soulsavers documents his years as a singer and drug addict in Seattle in the '80s and '90s. When Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just "an arrogant...

Cazzu es una de las traperas más importantes de Latinoamérica. No es casual que la llamen La Jefa. No es casual que su perreo moleste a muchos, interpele a tantas, y no deje indiferente a nadie....

An entertaining and deeply nostalgic dive into how female pop stars broke through the music industry in the 2000s and altered the cultural landscape forever, from the Ringer writer and Every Single Album podcast cohost “Hit Girls bridges our butterfly-clipped, bedazzled past with today’s...

The definitive chronicle of underground music in the 1980s tells the stories of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and other seminal bands whose DIY revolution changed American music forever. Our Band Could Be Your Life is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A MULANEY READS PICK A kaleidoscopic history of the Grateful Dead that explores the American counterculture through the life of iconoclastic frontman Jerry Garcia, and his merry band “By writing this book, Jim Newton informs the rest of the world what Deadheads have...

Legendary musician Prince's first wife shares a uniquely intimate, candid, and revelatory look inside the personal and professional life of one of the world's most beloved icons. "An achingly loving memoir ... a heartbreaking inside look at the tortured side of genius that most of us are never...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize Winner of a Certificate of Merit from the 2025 ARSC Awards for Excellence A New Yorker, GQ, The Daily Telegraph (London), and Library Journal Best Book of 2025 A 2025 Washington Post Notable Nonfiction An NPR...

Tune In is the first volume of All These Years—a highly-anticipated, groundbreaking biographical trilogy by the world's leading Beatles historian. Mark Lewisohn uses his unprecedented archival access and hundreds of new interviews to construct the full story of the lives and work of John...

Ted Gioia's History of Jazz has been universally hailed as a classic - acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world....

The definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock—from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation. This program is read by the author. Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of...

Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR and GQ Joining the ranks of the classics Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, an intriguing oral history of the post-9/11 decline of the old-guard music industry and rebirth of the New York rock scene, led by a group of...

A 2026 Audie Awards finalist for Best Nonfiction Narrator! Moving and powerful, this is a vivid portrait of the women who came together to form an orchestra in order to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. New York Times bestselling author of Les Parisiennes and That Woman: A Life of Wallis Simpson...

The gold-standard biography of the band Led Zeppelin—revised and updated with new material for fans of the band and this beloved rock classic. “One of the most notorious rock biographies ever written.” —Chicago Tribune The members of Led Zeppelin are major deities in the pantheon of rock...

This is the first comprehensive history of the disc jockey, a cult classic now updated with five new chapters and substantial additional material. It's the definitive account of DJ culture, from the first record played over airwaves to house, hip-hop, techno, and beyond. From the early...

Jan Swafford's biographies have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life....

I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands....

Long-listed, Carnegie Medal, 2024 Long-listed, CPL: Chicago Public Library Best of the Best, 2024 Long-listed, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2024 Long-listed, Minneapolis Star Tribune Holiday Book Recommendations, 2024 Recorded at the legendary Electric Lady Studios in New York City, the...

We've had the time of our lives as Swifties, and now that story-full of boundless joy, unexpected friendships, cherished memories, and wild theories-lives in this celebration of our fandom and the reason were all here: Taylor Swift. We all know how it started: A teenage girl from Pennsylvania...

Drawing from her successful career as a music producer (engineering hits like Prince’s “Purple Rain”), professor of cognitive neuroscience Susan Rogers reveals why your favorite songs move you....

A massively entertaining oral biography of the golden era of critically derided yet monumentally popular radio rock, when Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Toto, and more ruled the airwaves Paul Rees’s Raised on Radio is, remarkably, the first biography of AOR (“Album-Oriented Rock”)...

In the tradition of Just Kids, Ronen Givony's Us v. Them chronicles the generation of young artists who came to Brooklyn in the mid-2000s: a small but seismic scene that coalesced under a billionaire mayor, a series of forever wars, and a music industry in free fall. In tandem with the impresarios and unlicensed venues that lined the Williamsburg waterfront, combining elements of noise and pop, a few became unlikely superstars. Meanwhile, countless flared and vanished, reminders of an unusually fertile moment—the age of indie—that now means little more than a term of marketing.

OVER THE LAST SEVEN DECADES, one of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall kitting themselves out in Nazi uniforms to Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious brandishing swastikas in the pomp of punk...

A vivid, captivating account of the Beatles's musical transformation throughout the pivotal year of 1963, as the world became caught up in the maelstrom of Beatlemania and its far-reaching cultural impact. The Beatles broke up more than half a century ago, yet millions around the globe are still...

Christian Music Appreciation: History, Theology, Genres, and Contemporary Culture provides a comprehensive, academically grounded exploration of the development of Christian music from biblical foundations to the digital streaming era. This college-level textbook traces the evolution of Christian musical expression across centuries and cultures—beginning with Hebrew psalmody and early church hymnody, progressing through Gregorian chant and Reformation chorales, examining Baroque sacred masterpieces and revival hymnody, and analyzing the emergence of African American spirituals, gospel ...