Description

Essays on Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2023

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor of The New Yorker, writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.

He portrays a series of musical lives – Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more – and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

‘This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature . . . He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal’ – New York Times

Publisher Review

Remarkable, not just for the essays’ expertise and vividness, but for the aeons he spends talking to his subjects and those around them * Observer * This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature . . . He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal * The New York Times * Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious * The Times * [A] standout collection of pieces . . . What’s most remarkable is [Remnick’s] ability to give due at once to the artists’ larger-than-life musical legacies and their all too human fallibilities * Publisher’s Weekly * Written over the past three decades, these are keenly observed, deeply felt, and judiciously detailed encounters of genuine communion mixing interviews, biography, and analysis, all lyrically and radiantly composed . . . There is acuity here, bemusement, tenderness, and gratitude — Donna Seaman, Booklist Remnick, the intellectually nimble editor of the New Yorker, has lately been focusing closely on world politics, but he finds time to profile a number of artists who, having enjoyed early success, ‘were all grappling, in music and in their own lives, with their diminishing gifts and mortality.’. . . There’s dish here . . . and plenty of astute observation . . . A perceptive pleasure for literate music lovers * Kirkus Reviews *