Engaging look at the seductions of late-in-life creativity and a cleareyed account of the strange state of today’s music...
Affectionate memoir of a second-career songwriter finally making a record, alongside a cast of music-scene lifers.
Siblin (The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, 2011), former pop-music critic for the Montreal Gazette and recipient of the QWF Mavis Gallant Nonfiction Prize, loved playing in garage bands until “university and then journalism took over my life, while songwriting remained a hobby.” More recently, he wanted to complete these long-gestating musical projects. “For a long time songs had been percolating in me,” he writes. “But a new urgency had recently been brought to the equation.” This determination stemmed from chance encounters with musicians from his past and newly beguiling chanteuses from the blues and club circuits. The gradual development of these friendships is a thread throughout the narrative, as these new and old acquaintances update Siblin on industry upheavals and new recording technologies. Considering his options, the author writes, “a few decades into the songwriting process, I felt ready to make a truly professional recording.” His determination to capture ideal takes of a dozen songs fuels a meandering but detailed production narrative. He began at a friend’s attic studio and then graduated to the elaborate setup of a producer associated with the Arcade Fire, who warned him, “people often come in here thinking that I have some gold dust that I can sprinkle on them…but your record is going to be a reflection of you and your songs.” The producer brought a variety of professional players, who exposed the wistful Siblin to the grit and glamour of the working musician’s life. Throughout the journey, the author remained equally fascinated by the technological transformations of pop music and the emotional undercurrents of collaboration. Only occasionally does the observational prose become solipsistic.
Engaging look at the seductions of late-in-life creativity and a cleareyed account of the strange state of today’s music industry.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77089-934-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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