Product Description: Vinyl Me, Please specialize in curating record collections for members, as well as having their own record-of-the-month blog. They are, in their own words, the best damn record club there is, and this book teaches readers the basics in creating their own must-have collections...read more

Product Description: We are what we listen to. That's the premise of this study of 100 songs that have shaped and defined the American experience, from the Colonial period to the present.• Takes an entertaining approach to understanding the cultural tides in American history• Covers a wide range of songs from the Colonial period through the present to depict political and social perspectives as represented in music• Explores numerous subtopics related to the songs• Engages and educates as it gives historical context and meaning to songs with which readers have long been familiar• Uses a research-based approach to explore the historical and cultural background behind America's hit...read more

Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience’s expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world’s greatest composers. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments. With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.

Product Description: From revered music critic David Hajdu comes a personal, idiosyncratic history of popular music.David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of recorded pop music, in an unexpected place--not with nostalgic reminiscences of the 45s of his youth but with the sheet music era at the end of the nineteenth century...read more

Product Description: For fans of music and edgy fashion, this is the story of punk, told by the people who lived it and the shirts on their back. The punk revolution wasn’t just music—it also shaped fashion, especially the ripped, often handmade T-shirts emblazoned with provocative slogans...read more

Product Description: David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of recorded pop music, with the sheet music era at the end of the nineteenth century. From there, he takes us back to Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of records-- and to his grandmother's collection of Italian crooners on shellac records that young Hajdu liberated from her basement...read more

Product Description: “The most trusted opinion in rock music” (Billy Corgan, The Smashing Pumpkins), Matt Pinfield offers the ultimate music fan’s memoir, a chronicle of the songs and artists that inspired his improbable career alongside some of the all-time greats, from The Beatles to KISS to U2 to The Killers...read more

Product Description: This stunning book charts the rich history of the blues, through the dazzling array of posters, album covers, and advertisements that have shaped its identity over the past hundred years. The blues have been one of the most ubiquitous but diverse elements of American popular music at large, and the visual art associated with this unique sound has been just as varied and dynamic...read more

Product Description: Considered one of the greatest composers―and music critics―of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810–1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries...read more