What Chronicle Music Writers Are Reading This Summer

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir

“Did an angel whisper in your ear?/ And hold you close and take away your fear?” Lucinda Williams wrote those words about foundational Chronicle music scribe Margaret Moser, who sat with the singer’s ex Clyde Woodward during his “long last moments,” listening to his favorite songs. (Revisit “Going Back to ‘Lake Charles,’” Oct. 23, 1998, for the mixtape). In her memoir, Williams links the lines straight to the hospital scene with an unflinching, matter-of-fact style, no embellishment needed. Woodward joins a fiery lineage of ill-fated relationships with “poets on motorcycles” in a story equally shaped by complex foundations in her poet father and unstable mother, who set up the Louisiana native to live “a southern gothic story.” Through her 20s in Austin working at health food stores far into musical success, most persistent is Williams’ radical openness, sometimes to her own detriment. Whether via books, travel, crushes, or lyrics delivered in a dream, her inspiration isn’t self-generated, but hard-won over years as a steadfast, true-blue rambling artist. Alongside the wealth of LP recommendations, her Texas tales are superb – from a night spent at Mance Lipscomb’s house in Navasota to an Annie Leibovitz shoot at Hotel San José. Insecurities become fuel, like this localized nugget: “A few people in Texas actually told me when they learned I was moving to L.A., ‘We’ll see you back here in six months or a year.’ That sticks in my craw today.” Still sticking it (to execs who called her “too country for rock and too rock for country”), Williams names her incoming June 30 album Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart.  – Rachel Rascoe

Williams offers an in-store performance and signing at Waterloo Records on Monday, July 3, 5pm.

Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music

“I find that the less I say about music, the better,” writes Henry Threadgill at the halfway mark of his memoir. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Pulitzer Prize, the Chicago-born composer and saxophonist/flautist actually spends a great many pages talking about music – what it means, how it works, the ways he innovates creative expression. He tackles other subjects – travel, spiritual studies, the art scenes in Chicago and New York, day jobs, the “blinkered conception of the European concert tradition,” harrowing experiences in Vietnam. But the subtitle is A Life in Music – no matter what he considers, music is the connection, if in oblique ways. Like his compositions, his chapters shift from subject to subject with the idiosyncratic nature of thought, entrenched in its own distinctive logic and trusting us to find meaning. The prose is so indicative of Threadgill’s personality that one wonders what role literature professor Edwards played. It certainly wasn’t to encourage his co-author to practice traditional narrative autobiography. Threadgill notes his awesome catalog with cursory or limited explanation, skipping the Pulitzer Prize-winning In for a Penny, In for a Pound to spend time on unrecorded ensembles central to his evolution. When he finally goes into detail about the “intervallic” language he developed for his current “sound world,” he’s trusting readers to get his points. “Take me out of the equation,” Threadgill says. “It’s on you to come to the sound curious and open-eared to hear what you find.”  – Michael Toland

Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters

Sinéad O’Connor’s cutting vocals have long been overshadowed by her public image. UT Press’ recent Music Matters series release reckons with the Irish powerhouse’s dismissal as an unhinged artist. A survivor of child abuse, O’Connor bled vulnerability when MTV eyes were first cast on her, and author Allyson McCabe paints her as a knight who stomped on the boxes that curtailed female pop stars. Recognizing O’Connor’s allyship toward Black artists, whose oppression she connected to Ireland’s own colonization, McCabe isn’t wholly uncritical of her, nor her sometimes contradictory statements or teetering on appropriation. Still, McCabe offers an empathy to O’Connor she’s rarely been extended, even pulling back the curtain on her own traumas to inform her authorship. Hauling insights of other maligned figures including Whitney Houston and Britney Spears, who’ve similarly been cannibalized by the industry, she marches through O’Connor’s story, a case study of the culture that repeatedly chews up and spits out complicated women. Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters remembers the artist as a harbinger of personal and cultural reckoning – not the crazy, bald woman – who symbolically ripped up the exact photo of the Pope that hung in her childhood home on Saturday Night Live in 1992. Her urges to “fight the real enemy” have been disregarded, mocked, and vilified for over 30 years – but McCabe’s reexamination of O’Connor’s treatment is both a tough lesson and a promising step forward.  – Laiken Neumann

Her Country

Marissa Moss’ Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Busted Up the Old Boys Club hit like a refreshing jolt to country music with last year’s publication, and now, newly released in paperback, it remains as necessary and relevant as ever. That jolt is charged by the Nashville journalist’s candid and unflinching examination of the industry’s deeply ingrained systems designed to keep female and minority artists tightly boxed in, if those voices are even given an opportunity to be heard in the first place. From standard contemporary radio programming rules that play women artists only 10% of the time to outright ostracization of artists who step out of line (e.g., the Chicks), the past two decades of country music have flamed a reactionary backslide to the incredible promise flashed by female superstars in the Nineties. Yet for all the maddening systematic inequalities that Moss lays bare, Her Country is ultimately an incredibly empowering, moving, and triumphant chronicle, even as so much work remains. Through the lens of three Texas artists (Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris, and Mickey Guyton), Moss traces women artists carving their own path, circumventing the industry’s old white boys club and facile expectations to reach new heights. Moss writes with a wonderfully breathless energy, all propulsion into a story or scene that takes granular details and unfurls them into wider cultural touchstones, creating a work at once riveting, infuriating, and inspiring.  – Doug Freeman

Flashback Summer Reads

Fast Times at Ridgemont High by Cameron Crowe (1981)
Hunter S. Thompson upended journalism in 1971 with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a single graph about the death of the Sixties delivered in a 23,000-word torrent of surrealistic despair. And yet, predecessor Hell’s Angels, wherein he went undercover with the murderous motorcycle gang, stands as the greater reportorial feat – one matched by Cameron’s Crowe’s debut novel, 1981’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Posing as a senior at San Diego’s Clairemont High after profiling an essential Lone Star clinched the deal (“Principal Gray eased back in his chair, ‘You know Kris Kristofferson?'”), the 22-year-old former teen music scribe proved every bit as gonzo. Director Amy Heckerling’s Library of Congress bow, with screenplay by Crowe, comes to life in greatest-hit performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, and Phoebe Cates, but Jeff Spicoli and Mark Ratner, based on future For Dummies author Andy Rathbone, transcend adolescent archetypes in print. Why the book is out of print – mine cost $200 at Half Price Books on North Lamar – remains anyone’s guess, because they should teach this singular storytelling stunt in every collegiate J-school.  – Raoul Hernandez

Horror Stories: A Memoir by Liz Phair (2019)
Rock & roll memoirs are known to recount the good, the bad, and the ugly, but male rockers usually divulge those messier details with a sort of “Hey, that’s showbiz” ambivalence that chalks up asshole behavior to the name of the game. Not Horror Stories. As in her career-defining album Exile in Guyville – which she’ll play in full December 1 at the Moody Theater – Liz Phair bares all, offering neither a cherry-picked compilation of career highs nor a whitewashed account of minor faux pas. She shares her lowest moments with palpable shame, though never expects your sympathy. She simply tells the truth; that’s who she is.  – Carys Anderson

This article appears in The Books Issue.