Record Store Day Reading

Today is record store day! Explore our curated list of reading recommendations celebrating the best in music writing.

 

“We believe book shops and record shops are kindred spirits.”  To celebrate today visit your local record shops, enjoy some special music reads, and make a playlist of music to pair with favorite books. 

 

🥁 Support independent book and record shops 🥁

Here are our top 3 musical books we recommend perfect for this day: 

Chronicles Volume 1, Bob Dylan (Author)

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE  

The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.  

'I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.'  

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities - smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (Author)

The international Number One bestseller.
Over a million copies sold in the English language.
Published in 23 foreign languages.  

'A heartfelt memoir . . . there is a fearlessness to his prose, a willingness to engage with his past, that chimes with his songwriter's desire to give voice to the people around him' Sunday Times  
"Writing about yourself is a funny business...But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these pages, I've tried to do this." - Bruce Springsteen , from the pages of Born to Run  

In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl's halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That's how this extraordinary autobiography began.

Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.

He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as "The Big Bang": seeing Elvis Presley's debut on The Ed Sullivan Show . He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park , and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work, and shows us why the song "Born to Run" reveals more than we previously realized.

Born to Run  will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen , but this book is much more than a legendary rock star's memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll.

Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs ("Thunder Road," "Badlands," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "The River," "Born in the U.S.A.," "The Rising," and "The Ghost of Tom Joad," to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen's autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.

Bob Marley: The Untold Story, Chris Salewicz (Author)

What was it about Bob Marley that made him so popular in a world dominated by rock'n'roll?

How is that he has not only remained the single most successful reggae artist ever, but has also become a shining beacon of radicalism and peace to generation after generation of fans across the globe?

On May 11, 1981, a little after 11.30 in the morning, Bob Marley died. The man who introduced reggae to a worldwide audience, in his own lifetime he had already become a hero figure in the classic mythological sense. From immensely humble beginnings and with talent and religious belief his only weapons, the Jamaican recording artist applied himself with unstinting perseverance to spreading his prophetic musical message.

And he had achieved it: only a year earlier, Bob Marley and The Wailers' tour of Europe had seen them perform to the largest audiences a musical act had up to that point experienced. Record sales of Marley's albums before his death were spectacular; in the years since his death they have become phenomenal, as each new generation discovers afresh the remarkable power of his music.

Chris Salewicz, who had a sequence of adventures with Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1979, offers us a comprehensive and detailed account of Bob Marley's life and the world in which he grew up and came to dominate. Never-before-heard interviews with dozens of people who knew Marley are woven through a narrative that brings to life not only the Rastafari religion and the musical scene in Jamaica, but also the spirit of the man himself.