National Network for Equitable Library Service

“Motörhead, remember me now, Motörhead, alright!”

The Bayou is a world of its own — a marshy, sometimes treacherous, oft-times sinister land of creeping darkness and living shadows, secret legends and vivid mythology. It is that darkness and those shadows that permeate Bayou Underground, the first study of the Louisiana music scene ever to leave behind the bright lights of big city New Orleans, and plunge instead into the wilderness that not only surrounds the Big Easy, but which stretches for hundreds of miles on either side, from Houston, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama.

An American Demon is Jack Grisham's story of depravity and redemption, terror and spiritual deliverance. While Grisham is best known as the raucous and provocative front man of the pioneer hardcore punk band TSOL (True Sounds of Liberty), his writing and true life experiences are physically and psychologically more complex, unsettling, and violent than those of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk.

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?

In 1974, at the age of seventeen, author Glenn Berger served as "schlepper" and apprentice to the legendary recording engineer Phil Ramone at New York City's A&R Studios, and was witness to music history on an almost daily and nightly basis as pop and rock icons such as Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, Burt Bacharach, Bette Midler, and James Brown performed their hit-making magic, honed their sound, strutted their stuff, bared their souls, and threw epic tantrums.

Living in the Woods in a Tree is an intimate glimpse into the turbulent life of Texas music legend Blaze Foley (1949-1989), seen through the eyes of Sybil Rosen, the woman for whom he wrote his most widely known song, "If I Could Only Fly." It captures the exuberance of their fleeting idyll in a tree house in the Georgia woods during the countercultural 1970s. Rosen offers a firsthand witnessing of Foley's transformation from a reticent hippie musician to the enigmatic singer/songwriter who would live and die outside society's rules.

Jan Swafford's biographies have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the world's most iconic music.Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work.

When singer, musician, and broadcast journalist Malka Marom had the opportunity to interview Joni Mitchell in 1973, she was eager to reconnect with the performer that she'd first met late one night in 1966 at a Yorkville coffeehouse.

Rolling Stone ranked the Ramones at #26 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time." They received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Marky Ramone played a major part in this success-his "blitzkrieg" style of drumming drove the sound the Ramones pioneered. Now fans can get the inside story.Having outlived his bandmates, Marky is the only person who can share the secrets and stories of the Ramones' improbable rise from obtuse beginnings to induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In his timeless biography-written long before the significance of Mozart's work was fully realized-author Edward Holmes reveals the musician's character and genius, his struggles, his influence on art, and the brilliant reputation that surrounded him. Published in 1845 as the first authentic narrative of the life of Mozart to appear in English, it was also the first biography after the composer's death in 1791 to be based upon his letters. Holmes's exploration of Mozart's work comes from the perspective of a cultured mind of the era.