Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Music

IN THEIR LIVES

Andrew Blauner

Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs

For readers who loved Tune In and Nick Hornby’s Songbook, an anthology of essays from a chorus of twenty-nine luminaries singing the praises of their favorite Beatles songs.

The Beatles’ influence—on their contemporaries, on our cultural consciousness, and on the music industry ever after—is difficult to overstate. We all have a favorite song from the band that made us want to fall in love, tune in, and follow our dreams. Arranged chronologically by the date of the song’s release, these essays highlight both the Beatles’ evolution as well as the span of generations their music affected. From Beatlemaniacs who grew up listening to the iconic albums on vinyl to new fans who download the songs on iTunes, each contributor explores a poignant intersection between Beatles history and personal history.

With contributions from twenty-nine authors and musicians—Roz Chast on “She Loves You,” Jane Smiley on “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Rosanne Cash on “No Reply,” Gerald Early on “I’m a Loser,” Rick Moody on “The End,” Maria Popova on “Yellow Submarine,” David Duchovny on “Dear Prudence,” Chuck Klosterman on “Helter Skelter,” David Hadju on “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” and more—the breadth of the band’s impact is clear. From musings on young love and family strife to explorations of racial boundaries and identity, these essays pay tribute to a band that ran the gamut of human experience in a way no musical group has done before or since.

Timed for the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, this anthology captures the full spectrum of reasons fans still love the Fab Four after all these years.

ANDREW BLAUNER is the founder of Blauner Books Literary Agency. His other anthologies are Coach, Brothers, Central Park, Our Boston, The Good Book, and (coeditor) For the Love of Baseball. A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia University School of Business, Blauner is a member of PEN American Center and the National Book Critics Circle, and a former intern at Rolling Stone.

Available products
Book Published 2016-05-23 by Blue Rider
Book Published 2016-05-23 by Blue Rider

Comments

Sharp, witty, incisive, revealing. I must have read millions of words on the Beatles, but there is always room and scope and desire to write even more as every generation discovers them. The writing, all the way through is, terrific. I enjoyed IN THEIR LIVES—and learned some new things about the ever-lasting appeal of the Beatles and their music.

So many of us learned the basics fromthe Beatles: how to listen, what longing feels like, the pleasure of loving and thinking about art. Here a stunning array of writers shares how that process worked in childhood and youth, and still works within memory and cultural history. Some first-rate music criticism's in here, too.

The Beatles—their music, their style—had an atomic effect on the old romantic traditions of the West, and Western civilization. hasn't been the same since. Here and now some of our best modern writers tell their fascinating stories of what the Beatles meant to them, and to those whom they loved, and everything rings so true. Yeah Yeah Yeah!

How lovely to have gifted writers put into words what I’ve been struggling to express for fifty years. The essays are as heartfelt and high-spirited as the songs themselves. As the Beatles would say, ‘I was gobsmacked!'