Year to year, categories wax and wane in their popularity with readers as well as the number of titles published; 2022 was a fantastic year for essay and memoir on music. Below you'll find a selection of our favourites.

This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music edited by Sinéad Gleeson & Kim Gordon

Published to challenge the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work seeks to confront the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space.

Edited by Kim Gordon and Sinead Gleeson the collection features contributors including Anne Enright, Fatima Bhutto, Jenn Pelly, Rachel Kushner, Juliana Huxtable, Leslie Jamison, Liz Pelly, Maggie Nelson, Margo Jefferson, Megan Jasper, Ottessa Moshfegh, Simone White, Yiyun Li and Zakia Sewell.

Exit Stage Left: The curious afterlife of pop stars by Nick Duerden

Nick Duerden has spent many years interviewing the most famous musicians on the planet. Without exception, they are at their most interesting when they’ve peaked, and when they are on their way down.

In many ways, this is when these former idols are at their most heroic, too, because they reveal themselves not only to be humane and sensitive, but also still driven to create, to fulfil their lingering dreams, to refuse to live quietly.

Good Pop, Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker

We all have a random collection of the things that made us – photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer. When Jarvis Cocker starts clearing out his loft, he finds a jumble of objects that catalogue his story.

This is the hard evidence of Jarvis’s unique life, Pulp, 20th century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he’d rather forget. And this accumulated debris of a lifetime reveals his creative process - writing and musicianship, performance and ambition, style and stagecraft.

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan

From a place of considered reflection, Faith, Hope and Carnage offers ladders of hope and inspiration from a true creative visionary. Created from over forty hours of intimate conversations with Sean O'Hagan, it is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave’s own words, of what really drives his life and creativity.

The book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief and love. It draws candidly on Cave’s life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic and his dramatic transformation in recent years.

This Is What It Sounds Like by Dr. Susan Rogers & Ogi Ogas

Despite being unable to play an instrument, Susan Rogers became an extraordinarily successful record producer – and certainly one of the most successful women record producers in history – because of her ability to listen.

This is What It Sounds Like distils a lifetime’s expertise as a producer and an award-winning professor with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, to present a new theory of listening for everyday music fans. Each person has a unique identity as a listener, she explains, determined by seven influential dimensions of musical listening- authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm and timbre.

Sound as Ever by Jane Gazzo & Andrew P. Street

The 90s was a magical time for Australian music. Record labels had money to spend, the Big Day Out and Triple J went national and suddenly everyone was getting a 3-piece together and gigging in the inner-city pubs of their town.

Sound as Ever is a celebration and a documentation of this fertile period with never-before-seen photos and archives from the time and never before told stories about the songs, bands, festivals and break-ups from the artists and industry folk who were there.

Sound Within Sound by Kate Molleson

Through charting the stories of ten forgotten sonic pioneers, Kate Molleson opens up the world of classical music far beyond its established centres, challenging stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shattering its traditional canon.

A survey of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance, Sound Within Sound is an energetic reappraisal of twentieth century classical music.

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One – and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers a masterclass on the art and craft of songwriting.

He writes over 60 essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyses what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal.

No Bull by Vika and Linda

For three decades they were best known as backing singers and collaborators to some of Australia’s biggest artists, but it was when the world turned upside down that everyone realised just how much they loved the exquisite harmonies of these hard-working, easy-talking, all-singing sisters.

With charming honesty and infectious humour, Vika and Linda recount the highs and lows, twists and turns they’ve navigated on the long road to centre stage, from growing up as dark-skinned girls in 1970s Doncaster to confronting their personal demons and stepping into the spotlight as their unabashed selves. No Bull is a riot of a show and a tonic for our times.

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Time of My Life by Myf Warhurst

We all have a soundtrack to our lives. Songs that as soon as you hear them transport you to a moment in time. As the youngest child, and only girl, in a family of creative types, Myf Warhurst grew up with the music in her. Later her love of music (and the realisation that a professional pianist gig wasn’t part of the plan) would shape her career.

In Time of My Life, Myf shares funny, fabulous and occasionally fraught tales about growing up in a small country town with an unhealthy obsession with Countdown, working in Australian radio, and her experiences on the much-loved music quiz show Spicks & Specks. She spills the backstage beans on work, fame, feminism, failure, love and success.

Hip Hop & Hymns by Mawunyo Gbogbo

Mawunyo Gbogbo is a church-going African Australian girl growing up in the sleepy mining town of Muswellbrook, NSW. At primary school, Black Is Beautiful until a racist bully dares to tell her otherwise. But at high school, she falls in love with two things that will alter the course of her adult life: hip hop music and bad boy Tyce Carrington.

When Mawunyo’s offered a chance to further her budding media career in New York City at the Bible of hip hop, The Source magazine, she throws herself headlong into the city’s heady buzz and hustle - but even as it lures her in, it threatens to derail her dreams.

Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press by Paul Gorman

Totally Wired is the definitive story of the music press on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing the rise and fall of the creatively fertile media sector which grew from humble beginnings nearly 100 years ago to become a multi-billion business which tested the limits of journalistic endeavour.

Evoking the music press's kaleidoscopic visual identities, Totally Wired is illustrated with rare and legendary magazine artwork throughout. What emerges is a compelling narrative containing conflicting stories of unbound talent, blind ambition and sometimes bitter rivalries

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono

Bono – artist, activist and the lead singer of Irish rock band U2 – has written a memoir; honest and irreverent, intimate and profound, Surrender is the story of the remarkable life he's lived, the challenges he's faced and the friends and family who have shaped and sustained him.

As one of the music world's most iconic artists, Bono's career has been written about extensively. But in Surrender, it's Bono who picks up the pen, writing for the first time about his remarkable life and those he has shared it with.