Great music books from 2024
2024 was another excellent year for music books. Below you'll find a selection of our favourites that include memoir, essay and nonfiction from superstar Australian and international icons . . . and more.
The Shortest History of Music by Andrew Ford
From award-winning broadcaster and composer Andrew Ford, The Shortest History of Music is a lively, authoritative tour through several thousand years of music. Packed with colourful characters and surprising details, it sets out to understand what exactly music is – and why humans are irresistibly drawn to making it.
This is not a traditional chronological account. Instead, Andrew Ford focuses on key themes in the history of music and considers how they have played out across the ages. How has music interacted with other social forces, such as religion and the economy? How have technological changes shaped the kinds of music humans make? From lullabies to concert halls, songlines to streaming services, what has music meant to humans at different times and in different places?
Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher
Cher's career is unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is also the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. With her trademark honesty and humour, Cher: The Memoir, Part One follows her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono, and traces how she succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become a trailblazing superstar.
Unlovable by Darren Hayes
Darren Hayes was always a storyteller. As a child, in suburban Queensland in the 1970s, he told himself he was going to be a pop star – and he did it. Throughout Savage Garden's astonishing success – which included multiple Australian number 1s, cracking the US charts and selling more than 35 million albums worldwide – he kept telling us stories of love and longing, through his vulnerable, open song lyrics. But the reality of his life was much more complicated than the constraints of a three-minute pop song.
In Unlovable, for the first time, Darren recounts the events and circumstances that shaped his unique life: from childhood trauma and his journey with depression, to the dizzying heights of worldwide fame in Savage Garden, and everything in between.
Patti Smith: Before Easter After by Patti Smith & Lynn Goldsmith
Originally published in a limited edition at $1,000, Before Easter After is now available in this stunning trade hardback. With hundreds of rarely seen images by Lynn Goldsmith, one of the great photographers of rock 'n' roll history, and texts by Patti Smith, this book documents a transformative moment in the artist's career and celebrates two women whose creative partnership continues to this day.
Music as Medicine by Daniel Levitin
We are only just beginning to appreciate the healing power of music. In recent years a wave of scientific research has upended everything we once knew about its effects on our brains: not only in reducing stress, but also in enhancing cognitive function, slowing the spread of neurodegeneratvie diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, even strengthening our immune systems. Daniel Levitin inroduces a bold new paradigm for medical treatment, rooted in the unexpected influence of music on our minds and bodies.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna
A no-holds-barred memoir from the American singer, artist, and feminist icon Kathleen Hanna.
Pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, Hanna was the lead singer in BIKINI KILL and Le Tigre. She is now the front woman of Julie Ruin and is married to Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys.
The Voice Inside by John Farnham & Poppy Stockell
Music was always part of John Farnham's world. But he could never have dreamed of what was to come: pop stardom in the 1960s; the release of the highest-selling Australian album of all time; a decades-long touring career; and a long list of accolades and achievements. However, more than these highs, his story is also one of setbacks, resilience and staying true to himself. And it is one of family, friendship and finding one's voice. After his devastating cancer diagnosis and far too many goodbyes, Farnham is now telling his story, his way.
Spinning Around: The Kylie Playlist edited by Kirsten Krauth & Angela Savage
This stunning follow-up to Minds Went Walking: Paul Kelly's Songs Reimagined and Into Your Arms: Nick Cave's Songs Reimagined features Alice Pung, Ellen Van Neerven, Christos Tsiolkas and more, and is the perfect stocking stuffer for Christmas 2024.
Australian icon Kylie Minogue is the musical muse for this sparkling new anthology. Twenty-four writers, a third of whom identify as LGBTQIA+, used a Kylie Minogue song as the springboard for a new, original piece of work, covering the genres of crime, memoir, speculative fiction, poetry and science fiction – from Kylie's 1987 release 'I Should Be So Lucky' all the way through to her newest album Tension.
Just Don't Be a D**khead by Kasey Chambers
Just Don’t Be a D**khead and Other Profound Things I’ve Learnt is a whirlwind of great stories, rock-solid life lessons and Kasey Chambers at her most heartfelt and honest.
From her childhood in the Australian outback to the heights of her chart-topping international success as a singer/songwriter, Kasey has trusted her gut, stuck to her values and learned some hard truths, always while trying to live by the best advice she’s ever received: just don’t be a dickhead.
I Hear Motion: Bands that Soundtracked Our Lives, 1980-1989 by Jane Gazzo
The '80s. The era of Hawke, a booming economy, big hair, gender benders and the new wave synth pop explosion. Every Sunday night, Australians would be glued to Countdown to watch the latest and local bands strut their stuff. Bands who became household names and sound-tracked our lives in one of the most colourful and creative decades in Australian music.
I Hear Motion is a celebration of the Aussie bands we loved: Models, Machinations, Wa Wa Nee, Real Life, Kids in the Kitchen, Do-Re-Mi, Koo De Tah, Eurogliders, Boom Crash Opera and more – and what happened to them following the end of the decade. Includes interviews, never-before seen photos and archives of the time. A must-have for every Australian music fan.
The Book of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover by Jan Gradvall & Sarah Clyne Sundberg (trans.)
More than 50 years after their songs were recorded, people the world over still dance and sing their hearts out to ABBA. After interviewing the four members for an article in 2013, Jan Gradvall was granted unique access to them for the next decade. In The Book of ABBA, the band share their thoughts and opinions more openly than ever before, while Jan reveals the context in which their sound developed – and shows how the story of ABBA is also the story of Sweden and the globalisation of pop culture. From their chart-topping ABBA Voyage – their first album in 40 years – to the 2-million-ticket-selling concert of the same name, there has never been a group like ABBA.
Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain by William Reid & Jim Reid
For 5 years after they'd swapped sought-after apprenticeships for life on the dole, brothers William and Jim Reid sat up till the early hours in the front room of their parents' council house, plotting their path to world domination with the music turned down low so as not to wake their sleeping sister. They knew they couldn't play in the same band because they'd argue too much, so they'd describe their dream ensembles to each other until finally they realised that these two perfect bands were actually the same.
Picking up those conversations again more than 40 years later, William and Jim tell the full story of one of Britain's greatest guitar bands for the very first time – a wildly funny and improbably moving chronicle of brotherly strife, feedback, riots, drug and alcohol addiction, eternal outsiders and extreme shyness, that also somehow manages to be a love letter to the Scottish working-class family.
Mind Games by John Lennon & Yoko Ono
A cult classic since its release in 1973, Mind Games is John Lennon's celebrated fourth solo album in which he employs a Plastic Ono Band comprising the cream of New York session musicians. This beautiful book presents handwritten lyrics, letters and artworks by Lennon and Ono, and previously unseen photography alongside their firsthand commentary about the lyrics, songs and album artwork. It also includes contributions from the musicians, engineers and others involved in the album's making.
Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove & Ben Greenman
When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn't expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Award-winning musician, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, a New York Times bestselling author, a producer, an entrepreneur, a cofounder of one of hip-hop's defining acts (the Roots), and the genre's unofficial in-house historian.
In this landmark book, Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove skilfully traces the creative and cultural forces that made and shaped hip-hop, highlighting both the forgotten but influential gems and the undeniable chart-topping hits-and weaves it all together with the stories no one else knows.
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough
Born into an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir completed by her daughter, Riley Keough. In 2022, Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir. A month later, Presley was dead, leaving the tapes she had recorded for the book. This unique biography is comprised of both their voices, delivering the words of the only child of a true legend.
Songbird: The Intimate Biography of Christine McVie by Lesley-Ann Jones
Christine McVie was the quintessentially English rock star, as both the backbone and the beating heart of Fleetwood Mac. Straddling the band's incarnations to achieve global fame alongside Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Lindsey Buckingham and John McVie she wrote and performed many of their greatest hits.
Told by an author who herself was friends with Christine, and with new contributions from those who knew her best, Songbird offers a true insider's view, and deep psychological insight into Christine as a both a woman and a musician – the first, the only, the ultimate picture of a rock legend and a national treasure.
