Tag Archives: Biography

I love A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the funniest, most empathetic looks at misfits and outsiders ever written, that blessedly never dips into sentimentality. Ignatius P. Reilly is a vexing, troubling, brilliant character who represents the late author’s alter ego, ultimately triumphant. The dialogue is brilliant and dead real …

The NY Times reviews Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso’s new biography: Imagine a singer-songwriter having emerged in the 60’s who combined the poetical and political allusiveness of Bob Dylan, the melodic seductiveness of Burt Bacharach, the good looks of a French New Wave actor, the hip thinkiness of Susan Sontag in …

Mark Prendergrast’s The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance – The Evolution of Sound In the Electronic Age is an enthusiastic and exhaustive tour through a century’s worth of biography of the music’s creators and disseminators. Included are early-twentieth century fathers Mahler, Satie, Debussy, Ravel; mid-century pioneering electronic composers Varese, …

There is an evocative review of the new Carter family bio in the NY Times: Today’s popular musicians, morbidly alive to the anxiety of influence, labor to manufacture strangeness. (Except in Nashville, where they labor to manufacture normality.) But the Carters’ strangeness was just them being them. Like Dock Boggs …

Reviews of the new Dead bio and an assessment of the band's career.