A lively and informative collection about the art, craft, psychology, and technology of hit records.
Wide-ranging conversations about musical alchemy.
Drawn from Tape Op magazine, these interviews feature music producers from the 1960s to the present. Of those two dozen producers, several are known to the general public (Brian Eno, T Bone Burnett); others are familiar to aficionados (Mark Ronson, Joe Boyd, Glyn Johns, Daniel Lanois, Finneas O’Connell); and still others are known only through the memorable music they helped bring into the world. Their resumes are as different as the artists they served. Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, also known as RZA, produced albums for the Wu-Tang Clan before creating a fully orchestrated ballet in 2024. Susan Rogers worked extensively with Prince in the 1980s, then earned a doctoral degree in psychology and taught music perception and cognition at the Berklee College of Music. Tommy “Snuff” Garrett was a disc jockey in Wichita Falls, Texas, before producing more No. 1 hits than Phil Spector, including “This Diamond Ring,” and “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves.” The spacey, free associations of Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry make for a difficult interview, but most of the exchanges are lively and informative. Many revolve around equipment, others focus on rooms that lend themselves to memorable recordings, still others consider how producers set moods that allow artists to do their best work. Many of the best suggestions, producer Jon Brion notes in his interview, are conceptual rather than musical. Burnett once asked session players struggling with a song about Texas, “Do you know how when you’re standing in Texas and you look around and see miles in every direction?...That’s how it has got to be.” On the next take, Brion said, “everybody played their emotional, subconscious version of how they represent space as a musician.” It was the best example of good production he had ever seen.
A lively and informative collection about the art, craft, psychology, and technology of hit records.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781636143118
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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