Other books that might interest you

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  Urge for Going: Joni Mitchell

  Jason Schneider

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  "Urge for Going" is excerpted from Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music ... From Hank Snow to The Band, available as a print or ebook.Canadian songwriters have always struggled to create work that reflects the environment in which they were raised, while simultaneously connecting with a mass audience. While nearly every songwriter who successfully crossed this divide did so by immersing themselves in the American and British forms of blues, folk, country, and their bastard offspring, rock and roll, traces of Canadian sensibilities were never far beneath the surface of the eventual end product.What were these sensibilities, and why did they transfer so well outside Canada? With each passing decade, a clear picture eventually emerged of what Canadian songwriters were contributing to popular music, and subsequently passing on to fellow artists, both within Canada and around the world. Just as Hank Snow became a giant in country music, Ian & Sylvia and Gordon Lightfoot became crucial components of the folk revival. In the folk-rock boom that followed in the late '60s, songs by The Band and Leonard Cohen were instant standards, while during the '70s singer/songwriter movement few artists were more revered than Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.This is the first thorough exploration of how these, along with other lesser-known but no less significant, artists came to establish a distinct Canadian musical identity from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Anecdotes explaining the personal and creative connections that many of the artists shared comprise a large aspect of the storytelling, along with first-person interviews and extensive research. The emphasis is on the essential music - how and where it originated, and what impact it eventually had on both the artists' subsequent work, and the wider musical world.

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  Exploring Chicago Blues - Inside...

  Rosalind Cummings-Yeates

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  Discover the living legacy of Chicago Blues in this guide to the iconic clubs and musicians who made—and keep making—music history.During the Great Migration, African Americans left Mississippi for Chicago, and they brought their music traditions with them. The music took root in the city and developed its own distinctive sound. Today, Chicago Blues is heard all over the world, but there’s no better place to experience it than in the city where it was born. In Exploring Chicago Blues, Chicago music writer Rosalind Cummings-Yeates takes you inside historic blues clubs like the Checkerboard Lounge and Gerri's Palm Tavern, where folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Ma Rainey transformed Chicago into the blues mecca. She then takes you on an insider’s tour of the contemporary blues scene, introducing the best spots to hear the purest sounds of Sweet Home Chicago.

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  Not Dead & Not for Sale - The...

  Scott Weiland, David Ritz

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  The “shockingly honest” memoir by the iconic musician who fronted Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, including personal photographs (Rolling Stone). 
   
  In the early 1990s, Stone Temple Pilots—not U2, not Nirvana, not Pearl Jam—was the hottest band in the world. STP toppled such mega-bands as Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses on MTV and the Billboard charts, and lead singer Scott Weiland became a compellingly charismatic front man in the tradition of Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Robert Plant. 
   
  Then, when STP imploded, it was Weiland who emerged as the emblem of rock star excess, with his well-publicized drug busts and trips to rehab. Written just a few years before his tragic death, this raw and revealing memoir delves into these experiences and more—his early years as an altar boy, his yearning for his father after his parents’ divorce, his complex relationship with the love of his life, Mary Forsberg Weiland, his traumas and heartbreaks. Readers also learn the fascinating stories behind his most well-known songs and what it was like to be there at the beginning of the grunge phenomenon. Not Dead & Not for Sale is a hard rock memoir to be reckoned with—a passionate, insightful, and at times humorous book that reads with extraordinary narrative force. 
   
  “The tales he sketches out often are as poignant as they are cautionary.” —USA Today 
   
  “A compelling and worthwhile read.” —Associated Press

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  High Treason and Low Comedy:...

  Robert T. O’Keeffe

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  High Treason and Low Comedy is the first in-depth treatment in English of E. E. Kisch’s work as a playwright, a phase of his life to which he devoted considerable effort during the years 1920–1925.The translations of his two most successful works for the cabaret stages of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia form the basis of discussions that fit them into several intersecting streams: biographical, historical, and cultural. The plays are Die Hetzjagd, which describes the last day on earth of the infamous traitor, Colonel Alfred Redl, and Die Himmelfahrt der Tonka Šibenice (Galgentoni), which presents the comical, coarse, and, at times, pathetic efforts of a Prague prostitute to argue her way into heaven. The plays are a portal into the world of Kisch’s youth as an enterprising journalist and into his thinking and writing just before he became “the raging reporter” and the star of international reportage. While they reflect the Prague milieu of his youth during the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they also illustrate Kisch’s lifelong critical attitude toward the conservative authorities of society, their derelictions of duty, and their indifference to the welfare of the common man and woman.
  
  The book also examines the long afterlife of both of these stories as they were re-created by artists in stage, film, novelistic, and television adaptations, illustrating the theme of what happens when historical materials are transformed into art.

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  Pissarro

  Nathalia Brodskaya

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  “Father Pissarro”, as his friends liked to call him, was the most restrained of the artists of the Impressionist movement. Perhaps it was his age, being older than his fellow artists Monet, Sisley, Bazille, and Renoir, or rather his maturity, which resulted in his works having such serene and sober subjects and compositions. 
  A man of simple tastes, he enjoyed painting peasants going about their daily lives. However, Pissarro owes his belated fame to his urban landscapes, which he treated with the same passion he used to paint beautiful stormy skies and frost-whitened mornings.

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  The Little Match Girl

  Hans Christian Andersen

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  Art Classic Stories is a special series of English fairy tales that combines the paintings of great painters with classic fairy tales.

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