The Best Music Books of 2024

As longtime Rolling Stone readers know, David Browne can find the story in anything. His history of the music scene in New York’s Greenwich Village is an engrossing panorama — mostly folk, but moving well beyond — teeming with carefully researched detail. Terre Roche of the richly harmonic sister trio the Roches was a sheltered teen when she saw raggedy-voiced folk legend Dave Van Ronk at the Kettle of Fish: “I was a goody-two-shoes and all of a sudden I was hanging with Communists in bars.” Browne became a Village club regular in the late Seventies, and offers a longer and better view than the usual Dylan & Pals roundup: Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” has proven as classic as “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Between them, trad folkies merged into singer-songwriters, basket houses made way for rock clubs, rents skyrocketed, and everything from jazz to disco redefined itself within a mere half-mile radius. Plenty of in-fighting, too, as Browne notes, “Folk-music gentility didn’t always translate to the people backing or making the music.” —Michaelangelo Matos

Carlin, who has previously written biographies of Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson, offers a definitive account of the iconic alt-rock band, who rose from the 1980s college-rock scene to attain global superstardom. Though Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry didn’t participate in the book, Carlin still gives a detailed and nuanced portrait of the unique personalities and musical contributions that made them such an organic success. His section on the Athens, Georgia, music scene they came out of adds important context to R.E.M.’s origin story, and he patiently maps out this famously elusive and ethical band’s struggles with fame, which played a large role in their 2011 breakup. —Jon Dolan

Tyler Mahan Coe provided both country music scholars and everyday fans with hours of unmatched storytelling with his podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, which shed new light on figures both obscure (Ralph Mooney, Spade Cooley) and mainstream (Loretta Lynn, Wynonna). For his first book, Coe went even deeper, zeroing in on the romantic and creative partnership of George Jones and Tammy Wynette — the focus of C&R’s second season. But the book, with dazzling illustrations by Wayne White, isn’t simply a tale of two star-crossed country vocalists. It also weaves in the history of such seemingly left-field topics as pinball machines and bullfighters, which at first glance, may cause some readers to wonder, “WTF?” But Coe, a sly writer, makes their connection to country music as clear as white lightning. —Joseph Hudak

Reading Nick Corasaniti’s delightful book about the storied Asbury Park, New Jersey, club is like sitting at your favorite bar listening to the old regulars tell magnificent stories. In this case, the regulars happen to include Bruce Springsteen, who himself writes the book’s foreword and plays a huge role in the rock & roll club’s mythology. As Pony cofounder Jack Roig says, “We used to get mail from all over the world. Bruce Springsteen, USA. And it’d be delivered to us. Yeah. I bet we would get fifty, a hundred posts a week. And he’d come in and we’d say, ‘Here’s your mail.’” —Lisa Tozzi 

Josh Crutchmer has Red Dirt in his DNA. The author (and Rolling Stone contributor) is a native of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, an easy drive from the genre’s birthplace of Stillwater; a graduate of Oklahoma State University, where he recently delivered the commencement address; and, most of all, an unabashed champion of Red Dirt icons from the Great Divide to Turnpike Troubadours and future legends from Wyatt Flores to Kaitlin Butts. His latest book about the surging subgenre, Red Dirt Unplugged, mixes dashes of history with fly-on-the-wall POV of Red Dirt’s current moment of mainstream popularity. Through more than 100 interviews with over 40 artists (Flores, Butts, John Moreland, Dylan Gossett, and Cody Canada, of the recently reunited Cross Canadian Ragweed, among them), Crutchmer gives both longtime devotees and new fans alike the next best thing to a ticket to a concert — access. — J.H.

Marcus J. Moore, whose 2020 book The Butterfly Effect expertly dissected Kendrick Lamar’s influence on American culture, goes equally deep on the eclectic hip-hop of De La Soul in High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul, chronicling the trio’s origins and impact on the genre. Moore isn’t afraid to make it personal either: He shares how the Long Island rappers’ music provided comfort following the loss of his mother and recounts early memories of listening to songs like “Potholes in My Lawn” as a kid. Unfortunately, the surviving members of De La Soul (David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur died in 2023) didn’t seem to appreciate Moore’s reverence and disavowed the book as “unauthorized.” Authorized or not, High and Rising is a must-read for fans of the group and Nineties hip-hop. —J.H.

Yes, it’s an academic book concerned with intellectual property and copyright law that ends, roughly, in the 1920s. But no book from this past year better explains American popular music than professor Matthew Morrison’s Blacksound, which he defines as “the sonic complement and aesthetic legacy of blackface performance.” To read Morrison’s exploration of race, blackface, and constructed whiteness in 2024 is to encounter a never-ending series of a-ha moments — from the minstrel roots of ice cream truck songs to the slaveholding roots of a prominent Tin Pan Alley publishing house — of all the ways in which, as Morrison puts it, “the sounds and legacies of blackface performance continued to shape popular music after the disappearance of the blackface mask.” —Jonathan Bernstein

Here’s an idea long overdue — the ins and outs of existence as a freelance music-maker, or the non-lead player in a band, by one of their own: Nicolay is the longtime keyboardist for the Hold Steady. From cult heroes like guitarist Nels Cline and bassist Mike Watt to band stalwarts like Fugazi bassist Joe Lally and Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero to studio first-calls like drummer Josh Freese and bassist Melissa Auf Der Mar, Band People shows the nuts and bolts of what they do and how they do it. These players out of the spotlight have memorable things to say about every aspect of their trade. “Who are these band people — the character actors of popular music?” Nicolay asks and then answers definitively. —M.M.

This critical exploration of Joni Mitchell’s art is nothing like the many standard traditional biographies that have already been written about the foundational 20th-century singer-songwriter. Rather, Traveling, from NPR’s Ann Powers, is a thematic exploration that is every bit as mercurial and resistant to categorization as her subject. “People are not definitive,” Powers writes in the introduction. “Neither is any one story.” Over 400 pages, Powers provides an essential overview of Mitchell’s work, from her intervention on the Sixties Laurel Canyon scene to her interrogation of Mitchell’s Blackface minstrel period, to her moving exploration of the songwriter’s creative and romantic partnership to Larry Klein in the Eighties and Nineties, to her less than fawning appraisal of Mitchell’s recent renaissance. This is an essential book for any fan of Mitchell, or of music, that resists the traps of biography and dives headfirst into the magical mess of the art itself. —J.B.

The latest book from novelist, scholar, and songwriter Alice Randall is hard to define, and intentionally so. It’s part straight autobiography, part cultural criticism, part memoir as alternative history, part reclamation of a lost history, and part gossipy Nashville tell-all. The end result is one of this year’s most gratifying music reads, and an essential addition to any country music fan’s collection. See how Randall frames the importance of Aretha Franklin’s 2010 gig at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, or how she recontextualizes forgotten pioneers like Lil Hardin (the pianist accompanying Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong on “Blue Yodel #9”) as the mother of what she calls “Black Country.” “A hundred years from now…when the next person full of vim is curious to see Music Row from the perspective of a Black woman,” Randall writes, “that story won’t exist if I don’t tell it.” —J.B.

Well before country music was having its current mega-moment, photographer Ed Rode was documenting the folks who were making it. His gorgeous book Songwriter Musician: Behind the Curtain with Nashville’s Iconic Storytellers and Players assembles three decades of his pictures, from portraits to candids to live shots. Kris Kristofferson and Cowboy Jack Clement embrace in a tender moment, Dolly Parton looks pensive in another, and Taylor Swift shoots a heavy glance into his lens. Rode was also there for spontaneous bursts of collaboration, like Steven Tyler crashing Keith Urban’s pop-up show at Nashville honky-tonk Tootsie’s in 2013. While those star moments will draw in the most eyes, it’s the images of the often anonymous, working creatives of the title that really distinguish Songwriter Musician among country books. —J.H.

The eminent U.K. pop scholar Jon Savage is most famous for studies of major cultural transformation like 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Teenage, and his punk history England’s Dreaming. But The Secret Public is his ambitiously illuminating epic tale of how queer artists — and audiences — created pop from the inside out. Savage follows rock & roll visionaries from Little Richard to Esquerita to Brian Epstein, from Dusty Springfield to Sylvester to David Bowie, from glam excess to punk uproar to disco ecstasy. “Homosexual sex in sound,” he calls Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” “Unfettered and unashamed, insistent and hallucinatory; a gay bathhouse in music, a masterpiece of synaesthesia.” —Rob Sheffield

If the human body is 60 percent water, Rob Sheffield’s is 40 percent Taylor Swift. The Rolling Stone contributing editor lets his fandom loose in Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, his dissertation of the most famous woman on the planet. But this isn’t fawning beatification; Sheffield balances his own Swiftie status with critical explorations about what aspirations and insecurities alike might inform the tortured poet’s first-person lyrics. In dissecting “Cornelia Street” and “Champagne Problems,” for instance, he writes that Swift “spends these songs looking into her future, wondering how her older self will feel about her turmoil now.” While Swift’s own Eras Tours Book is being criticized for its mistakes, Sheffield’s passion project gets this era right. —J.H.

Turns out the heavily tattooed guitarist and founding member of hardcore titans Agnostic Front is a heckuva tour guide. In this brief but unforgettable memoir, written with Howie Abrams, the man born Vincent Capuccio leads readers not only through the birth of the New York hardcore scene of the Eighties, with all its Sunday matinees and colorful characters, but also shares some hard-won secrets to making the most of your time above ground. “Life ain’t about tweeting to see how many likes you get, that much I know,” writes Stigma. So how’d he get that scarlet letter of a moniker? It’s a punk thing. “Everybody back in the old school punk days had a nickname… I picked ‘Stigma,’” he writes. “I figured I wanted to make sure the name was believable, so I picked what sounded like an Italian name.” Stigma may have some competition for the title of “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” but his entertaining book makes the case that he’s in the conversation. —J.H.

Professor Joseph Thompson’s exploration of the longstanding ties between the U.S. military and country music doesn’t just help you rethink country music, but the ways in which America uses popular music to its own ends. Thompson’s immaculately researched book upends expectations while diving deep into the previously unreported ties — “more complex than artists acting as ‘cheerleaders,'” as Thompson explains — between the army and Music Row. It probes “how the Pentagon and the country industry created an economic relationship that benefited the growth of the genre’s commercial power while also encouraging country listeners to enlist in and support the Cold War military.” Thompson’s perspective-altering chapter on Elvis Presley alone makes this essential reading. —J.B.

No music writer riffs on the page like David Toop — nobody can replicate his sinuous line. He’s a spell-caster, often finishing off a chapter with a jolting will-o’-the-wisp, giving the rigorous research laid out before it a bit of smoke and glitter. Dr. John’s Gris-Gris (1968), Mac Rebennack’s first recording under that moniker, was a New Orleans reunion in L.A.’s Gold Star Studio, masterminded primarily by producer Harold Battiste, who ran with the Black Arts Movement when not arranging for schlockmeister Sonny Bono. Gris-Gris was made primarily by Black musicians, with Rebennack singing in character as a “conjuring” medicine man, a figure of Black New Orleans lore. Here, Toop unwraps every strand of the album and its historical roots, with special attention to the racial dynamics at play. Rebennack’s frequent fact-fudging in interviews, Toop writes, “amounted to a strategy — conscious or unconscious — of legerdemain that allowed him to sell stolen goods to a young, mostly white audience of rock fans and scribes lacking in the knowledge, experience, and curiosity to challenge either their provenance or ethical substance.” —M.M.

The Glaswegian critic Steven Vass’s passion for the golden era of synth-driven R&B — 1978 to 1986, ’twixt disco and house — is evident on every page of his first book. Sometimes he overreaches: One chapter is titled “No Parking on the Ladies’ Candy Freakfloor.” But few writers, even in academia, describe music with such granular detail. On Aurra’s “Are You Single?” (1981): “There’s a nice cold shine to the production, which leaves plenty of space for the bass without going to the ultra-bright extremes that would make some 1980s records unlistenable.” Vass is also invested in the lore of this period — his chapters on Prince and the team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis are particularly revelatory, climaxing with Prince tossing his copy of Janet Jackson’s Control on Jam’s lawn. —M.M.