Books about music blast away the January blahs
The darkest time of the year needs some music to brighten things up.
Matters of Vital Interest: A FortyYear Friendship With Leonard Cohen, Eric Lerner
Leonard Cohen and his contribution to the culture have been memorialized many times since his death two years ago, but here’s something different. Cohen and writer Lerner met at a Rinzai Zen monastery outside Los Angeles in 1977. Cohen was 42; Lerner was 27. In the four decades that followed, they never stopped talking, discussing “matters of vital interest” (which began with enlightenment and included everything from Neanderthals to emperor penguins to the “subversive tendencies” the two men shared). Cohen called his friend “Old Eric,” Lerner called Cohen “Old Leonard,” and reading this book is like hanging out with two fascinating men for whom life was never easy but of vital interest.
Hindsight & All the Things I Can’t See in Front of Me, Justin Timberlake
This is an outsized coffee-table book — a curated explosion of images, vignettes, memories, hooky graphics and aphorisms — created by the outsized personality that is Justin Timberlake. It has been described by his editor as “experiential,” by which she means that it’s not so much a memoir as a highly visual road trip through his life — from the Mickey Mouse Club, to ’N Sync, to his lustrous solo career as musician, actor, comedian and now writer. Presumably he has experienced setbacks and disappointments in his life, but the mood here is enthusiastically optimistic, satisfied and confident.
Joni on Joni: Interviews and Encounters with Joni Mitchell, edited by Susan Whitall
Joni Mitchell has always given great interview — blunt, provocative, iconoclastic, occasionally unkind — so this collection of her most memorable media encounters, plus selected quotes spanning her career, is an entertaining read. It begins with a couple of articles in the Detroit News in 1966, shortly after Mitchell left Toronto’s Yorkville for Detroit with her new husband, Chuck Mitchell. It ends with a transcript from an appearance on PBS in 2014, months before the brain aneurysm that for a time left her incapacitated. Susan Whitall is a veteran music writer and brings a deep well of understanding in her introductions to each of the 27 interviews. For Joni fans, a must-read.
My Love Story, Tina Turner
Right from the get-go of her heartfelt memoir, Tina Turner observes that she’s had an exciting life in the 42 years since her much storied uncoupling from her abusive ex-husband, Ike Turner. To prove it, she begins the book by telling us how boyfriend Erwin Bach, 17 years her junior, proposed to her when she was about to turn 50. She put him off, he persisted, and 23 years later, age 73, she finally said yes. Here’s a woman who has managed her life well, both on stage and off.
Best Seat in the House: My Life in the Jeff Healey Band, Tom Stephen, with Keith Elliot Greenberg
This freewheeling memoir is by Tom Stephen, the drummer and co-manager of the Jeff Healey Band. During the ’80s and early ’90s, the three-man group was a mainstay, first in the city’s clubs, later across Canada and beyond. By the time of Healey’s death in 2008, age 41, the blind frontman, “the best blues guitarist in the world,” had had a parting of ways with Stephen — a falling-out Stephen says made him a “pariah” on the Canadian music scene. This no-holds-barred reminiscence is the story of this quintessential Toronto band and a straightening of the record.
Sarah Murdoch, special to the Toronto Star