There are enough great books about music each year to fill a library. It can be a lot to get through, so we selected a handful that we really love, including memoirs, history tomes, and more. Below, find a list of personal favorites from this year, as picked by Pitchfork staffers and contributors. Happy reading!
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2024 wrap-up coverage here.
Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians
When summarized, Taste in Music: Eating on Tour With Indie Musicians sounds pretty straightforward: a document of musicians’ snacking habits on the road. Across its essays, though, some of the biggest artists in the indie world (Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz, Pavement’s Mark Ibold, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold) and beloved acts on the smaller circuit (Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline, the Beths, Sen Morimoto) use food as the entry point to tell some of the most entertaining and moving essays of the year.
Compiled by Real Estate bassist Alex Bleeker and former Krill and Frankie Cosmos drummer Luke Pyenson, Taste in Music pulls back the curtain on the cooking challenges of Phoebe Bridgers’ private chef, Lily Chait; Animal Collective’s Geologist and his complicated relationship with car meals; and Bob Mould eating “econo” in the 1980s with Hüsker Dü and pining for the avocado trees in Greg Ginn’s mother’s backyard. Be prepared for stories that get raw, too, like Dawn Richard on how eating well impacts body image, Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering on solo meals as a yardstick for self-perception, and PUP’s Steve Sladkowski on mourning his grandmother over pierogies in Poland. Taste in Music expands upon the best part of indie music: seeing ourselves in how these artists view the world.
–Nina Corcoran
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My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future
Before Nashville singer-songwriter Alice Randall touched a pen to paper to outline a memoir, she knew her book would represent more than just herself. Throughout My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future, Randall recounts her difficult ascent across the gendered and racial barriers of the music industry while drawing connections to Black artists who came before her, rose alongside her, and followed afterward to shape the genre’s landscape, with or without wider recognition.
Growing up in Detroit and Washington, D.C., Randall kept her ear to the ground for generational stories and read between the lines of recognized folklore. Mother Maybelle Carter is credited with changing the role of guitar in country music with her thumb brush technique, but what about Eslie Riddle, the Black guitarist from whom, documents suggest, Carter learned it? Later, Randall rhapsodizes about eccentrics Swamp Dogg and Stoney Edwards, who refused to adhere to cultural codes, and Rhiannon Giddens and Lil Nas X, whose work challenges the modern cannon in opposite ways. “My checklist is not a litmus test. It’s a likeness test,” Randall explains. As one chapter bleeds into the next, there’s a thrill to seeing her correct and expand this timeline of music history.
–Nina Corcoran
Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Those in search of a standard-issue Joni Mitchell biography had best look elsewhere. Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell is a document of obsession, written for obsessives; a book whose first pages are dedicated to figuring out whether to call its subject “Joni” or “Mitchell,” eventually settling on a blend of the two. And author Ann Powers demonstrates how Mitchell and her music can embed themselves in our lives by weaving her own personal story into Traveling’s narrative.
Indulging in her passion for Mitchell, Powers actually manages to restore some mystery to the legendary artist, whose story and rough edges have been sanitized over time, especially by men, such as Robert Plant, Graham Nash, James Taylor, who wrote songs about her. Powers pointedly chose not to interview her central subject, but it ends up bringing Traveling closer to Mitchell and her “chords of inquiry”: free to contradict itself, free to ask questions and not answer them, free to follow its authors ramblings, whims, and fascinations, wherever they may go.
–Walden Green
Health and Safety: A Breakdown
Health and Safety: A Breakdown, journalist Emily Witt’s memoir of Brooklyn nightlife, boasts an archive’s worth of underground DJs and extinct rave nights, drug-addled epiphanies and forest overdoses, charming local bodegas and sensations of fleeting bliss. The book begins slowly—Witt recaps a 2016 presentation she gave about “altered consciousness” and walks us through an ayahuasca session—before ramping up as the author meets a younger man named Andrew, at a bar after the presentation, and fully flings herself into the sweaty vortex of Bushwick’s club scene.
The narrative refracts through three lenses: Witt’s delirious rave odysseys, her day job as a New Yorker writer traveling to Trump rallies and towns plagued by school shooter crises, and her relationship with Andrew. The latter thread is the most compelling, as Witt brings the reader through her destructive love affair, from joyous optimism to something far worse than a breakup: a partner becoming warped, deranged, and totally unrecognizable.
Like a comedown sunrise set after a night of feverish debauchery, Health and Safety is an elegy, both for the halcyon days of Witt’s youth and a musical ecosystem that has changed rapidly and dramatically. Even in my own short time in Brooklyn, I’ve observed how much has already shifted since Witt began her book—whether it’s clubs shuttering, new ones spawning, or an arson attack. Reading Health and Safety, I’m glum at what I’ve missed, yet amped for the nights to come.
–Kieran Press-Reynolds
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
The key talking points of Kathleen Hanna’s career—Bikini Kill frontwoman, pivotal figure in the riot grrrl movement, the liberating “Girls to the front!” call—that turned her into a household name are also guilty of boiling her down into a 2D pulp of third-wave feminist music. Although zines and documentaries like The Punk Singer have tried to capture Hanna’s influence and contextualize it in the modern day, it wasn’t until this year, with her engrossing memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, that Hanna fully set the record straight firsthand with candor and clarity.
An addictive read, Rebel Girl is filled with behind-the-scenes tour stories from Hanna’s time in Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin, and still examines broader topics like the lingering consequences of sellout culture, the debilitating side-effects of autoimmune diseases, and the lack of intersectionality in her early feminist efforts. “If you don’t process your own traumas,” she warns, “you may dump them onto others.” The stories Hanna dislodges from the recesses of her brain are raw enough to be plucked from a diary, and that frankness, once again, renders Hanna’s life story in its full three dimensions.
–Nina Corcoran
A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time
The New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s heralded series of projects to revive the United States after the Great Depression, is well-documented and still lauded nearly a century on from its creation. One program, however, has gone overlooked, and music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz with her new book A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, aims to re-educate Americans. A vivid and thoroughly researched breakdown of the Federal Music Project, the book recounts the origin story of the Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division, which developed art activities on American homesteads, in remarkable detail through a focus on its music unit and attempt to shift the country’s ideology from “rugged individualism to a new sense of collective purpose.”
With three federal workers—musicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger), composer and instructor Margaret Valiant, and folk-music collector Sidney Robertson—as its primary players, A Chance to Harmonize is a nonfiction historical story that unfolds like a gripping thriller, complete with secret goals, compelling missions, and a years-long operation that believed music can build a progressive, cooperative society.
–Nina Corcoran
Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion
In her book Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion—a late 2023 release recently made available on paperback—music journalist Sowmya Krishnamurthy taps into her network of designers, stylists, and rappers for a densely reported look at rap and luxury clothing’s coevolution. She examines a rich history that includes Dapper Dan, Missy Elliott, Kanye West and Louis Vuitton, Nicki Minaj “really sitting with Anna,” A$AP Mob, Young Thug and his Jeffery dress, and plenty more. It’s impressive how much information Krishnamurthy packs into her prose while still feeling evocative: You can practically smell the spray paint and taste the Barneys New York salads, and it all may as well be set to the sounds of “Merry-Go-Round” breaks at a DJ Kool Herc block party.
–Walden Green
