For me, there’s only one book coming out next week that matters: Mike Campbell’s memoir about his life before, during and after his years as lead guitarist, co-writer and co-pilot of Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. For those whose tastes run more toward Jean Grae, the blues and Lata Mangeshkar, good news: You also have something to look forward to. Read all about ’em:
Heartbreaker: A Memoir
By Mike Campbell & Ari Surdoval
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Mike Campbell was the lead guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers from the band’s inception in 1976 to Petty’s tragic death in 2017. His iconic, melodic playing helped form the foundation of the band’s sound. Together, Petty and Campbell wrote countless songs, including some of the band’s biggest hits: Refugee, Here Comes My Girl, You Got Lucky and Runnin’ Down A Dream among them. From their early days in Florida to their dizzying rise to superstardom to Petty’s acclaimed, platinum-selling solo albums Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers, Petty never made a record without him. Their work together is timeless, as are the career-defining hits Campbell co-wrote with Don Henley (The Boys of Summer) and for Stevie Nicks (Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around). But few know of his less-than-glamorous background — a hardscrabble childhood in Jacksonville, often just days ahead of homelessness, raised by a single mother on minimum wage. After months of saving, she bought him a $15 pawnshop acoustic guitar for his 16th birthday. With a chord book and a transistor radio, Campbell painstakingly taught himself to play. When a chance encounter with a guidance counselor inspired him to enroll in the University of Florida, Campbell — broke, with nowhere else to go and the Vietnam draft looming — moved into a rundown farmhouse in Gainesville, where he met a 20-year-old Petty. They were soon inseparable. Together they chased their shared dream all the way to L.A., where Campbell would meet his destiny, and the love of his life. It was an at-times grueling dream come true that took Campbell from the very bottom to the absolute top, where The Heartbreakers would remain for decades, creating an astonishing body of work. Brilliant, soft-spoken and intensely private, Campbell opens up within these pages for the first time, revealing himself to be an astute observer of triumphs, tragedies and absurdities alike, with a songwriter’s eye for the telling detail and a voice as direct and unpretentious as his music.”
In My Remaining Years
By Jean Grae
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In My Remaining Years, by creative juggernaut Jean Grae, debunks the myth that coming-of-age narratives should be reserved for the kids, providing a much-needed rallying cry for those of us still trying to figure it out in our 40s. These laugh-out-loud essays cover everything from aging gracefully (with and without Botox), what happens when you look for community and almost start a cult, befriending childhood demons (Hi Mumm-ra!), gender fluidity in middle age, the cost of being too fabulous, and the various gymnastics we do to avoid becoming our parents, taking us from her childhood in 1980s New York City to present-day Baltimore. In these pages, Jean captures magic in a bottle, distilling the feeling of hanging out with your smartest, funniest, and most brutally honest best friend.”
Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening
By Ben Ratliff
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Out the front door, across the street, down the hill, and into Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This is how Ben Ratliff’s runs started most days of the week for about a decade. Sometimes listening to music, not always. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, he began taking notes about what he listened to. He wondered if a body in motion, his body, was helping him to listen better to the motion in music. He runs through the woods, along the Hudson River, and into the lowlands of the Bronx. He encounters newly erected fences for an intended FEMA field hospital, and demonstrations against racial violence. His runs, and the notes that result from them, vary in length just as the songs he listens to do: ’70s soul, jazz, hardcore punk, string quartets, Éliane Radigue’s slow-change electronics, Carnatic singing, DJ sets, piano music of all kinds, Sade, Fred Astaire and Ice Spice. Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he’s listening to — let’s run it, he’ll say. And with that, the reader in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.”
Debt & Redemption In The Blues: The Call for Justice
By Julia Simon
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This volume explores concepts of freedom and bondage in the blues and argues that this genre of music explicitly calls for a reckoning while expressing faith in a secular justice to come. Placing blues music within its historical context of the post-Reconstruction South, Jim Crow America, and the civil rights era, Julia Simon finds a deep symbolism in the lyrical representations of romantic and sexual betrayal. The blues calls out and indicts the tangled web of deceit and entrapment constraining the physical, socioeconomic, and political movement of African Americans. Surveying blues music from the 1920s to the early 21st century, Simon’s analyses focus on economic relations, such as sharecropping, house contract sales, debt peonage, criminal surety, and convict lease. She demonstrates how the music reflects this exploitative economic history and how it is shaped by commodification under racialized capitalism. As Simon assesses the lyrics, technique, and styles of a wide range of blues musicians, including Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Albert Collins and Kirk Fletcher, she argues forcefully that the call for racial justice is at the heart of the blues. A highly sophisticated interpretation of the blues tradition steeped in musicology, social history, and critical-cultural hermeneutics, Debt and Redemption not only clarifies blues as an aesthetic tradition but, more importantly, proves that it advances a theory of social and economic development and change.”
Lata Mangeshkar: My Favourites, Vol. 2
By Anirudha Bhattacharjee & Dr. Chandrashekhar Rao
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “A history of Hindi film music recounted from a list of 50 of Lata Mangeshakar’s songs that she chose as her favorites. Mangeshkar, one of India’s all-time most influential singers was known as ‘the nightingale of India.’ For her album My Favourites, Vol. 2, Lata chooses 50 songs as her favourites among her own work, from a repository of over 5,000. This book covers an expanse of nearly 40 years, connecting you to the real-life events behind the songs, going back to when music listening in India was limited to the radio, the 78 RPM shellac, the occasional visit to the cinema, and later, the vinyl records, cassettes, and the 30 minutes Chitrahaar on television every week.”
