7 Books About Music for a New Nostalgic Generation

Deep Cuts

Brickley debuts with a refreshing story of love and ambition in the early 2000s indie music scene. The narrator, Percy Marks, meets aspiring musician Joe Morrow at a bar in Berkeley, Calif., where they’re both in college. Joe, who has a “flawless jawline,” appreciates Percy’s discerning taste, and asks for her feedback on a song he’s working on. She then helps with another song, which winds up launching his career a year later. She’s happy for him, but wonders if she should have received a songwriting credit. Her bittersweet feelings intensify after she makes her first pass at him and he rejects her, preferring to keep her as his “critic.” After she moves to New York City to study music writing, she enters a new relationship with a fellow writer. Though she knows Joe is sleeping with other women on tour, she still has feelings for him. Joe and Percy’s saga reaches a tipping point after Percy has become a successful blogger and Joe, adrift without Percy’s input on his music, takes to plagiarizing her writing. Brickley’s sharp commentary on aughts indie rock will please music fans, but what makes this special is her portrayal of how Joe and Percy are bound by their creative drive even more than by romantic love. It’s a banger. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Feb.)

The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits

The irresistible latest from Weiner (The Getaway) chronicles a pop group’s brief career and their impact on a new generation. It’s the early aughts, and Zoe, conventionally pretty at 20, longs for fame but lacks the talent for singing and songwriting of her younger sister, Cassie. They form a group called the Griffin Sisters with songwriter Russell D’Angelo, with whom awkward Cassie shares a spark, until Zoe manipulates him into marrying her out of envy. The short-lived band breaks up when Russell dies in an accident, after which Cassie flees to remote Alaska and Zoe fails at a solo career before becoming a mom in suburban New Jersey. The Griffin Sisters’ music remains influential 20 years later, however, and gains new fans when one of their songs is used in a TV show. Now, Zoe’s 18-year-old daughter, Cherry, enters a TV singing competition, in defiance of her mother’s wishes, and tracks down Cassie for help. Weiner connects the parallel plot threads as Cherry finds out what happened the night Russell died. Though the story ends on a saccharine high note, the author breathes new life into the love triangle trope and offers a nuanced view of sisterhood’s complexities. Weiner’s fans will be delighted. Agent: Celeste Fine, Park & Fine Literary. (Apr.)

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert

Bob the Drag Queen, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, debuts with a vivacious narrative that sees Harriet Tubman magically brought back to life. Revived in the present day along with a handful of other famous historical figures (Cleopatra has reinvented herself as an Instagram model), Harriet teams up with the narrator, legendary hip-hop producer Darnell Williams, to connect Black people to their ancestry through music. She introduces Darnell to her band, the Freemans, made up of people she freed from slavery. Among them are Odessa, who has a talent for singing and rapping; Buck, a strong and silent guitarist with an intelligent mind; DJ Quakes, so nicknamed because of his Quaker beliefs; and Moses the drummer, who’s Harriet’s younger brother. Darnell helps finish their album, and in turn, Harriet helps Darnell find self-acceptance, having fallen into obscurity after been outed as gay in 2010. Darnell’s reverence for Harriet, “America’s first Black superhero,” makes her feel alive on the page (“She sings as if Dr. Dre and Ella Fitzgerald had a daughter. Angry, strong, and smooth all at once,” Darnell thinks) and the pair’s dialogue provides a nuanced and quick-witted tour of Black history (discussing Black peoples’ complex attitudes toward Frederick Douglass in his lifetime, Harriet says, “I didn’t say ‘hate.’ You up here adding stuff. Everybody respected Frederick Douglass. Even racist white folk”). It’s a knockout. Agent: Tom Flannery, Vigliano Assoc. (Mar.)

Make Me Famous

In the smashing sophomore novel from Ventura (My Husband), an amoral singer reflects on her tortured past and trouble with stardom. Raised in Paris by intellectual parents, Cleo Louvent knew at four years old that she wanted to be “as famous as Celine Dion.” Now, at 33, she’s determined to take a break from the endless demands of life as a worldwide pop sensation, so she sequesters herself on an exclusive island retreat in the South Pacific to work on her fourth album. Alone at last, Cleo ruminates on her early determination to be successful and adored like her female idols and remembers how she self-harmed when she felt she deserved punishment for her failures. After her TikTok video of a Billy Joel cover went viral several years earlier, she seized the moment, sending her songs to managers and producers and hanging out in trendy clubs. Taking measure of her determination to stay on top of the charts no matter the cost, she reflects, “Extreme notoriety unleashed in me a beast, merciless and cruel.... Fame is a war trophy, and no one is ever ready to give it up.” Cleo’s voice is bracing and undeniable, and Ventura pulls it all together with a shocking and deeply satisfying ending. This is unforgettable. Agent: Marleen Seegers, 2 Seas Agency. (May)

No Names

This elegant debut novel from poet Hewett (Blindsight) blends a young man’s quest to unravel the mystery of his paternity with the story of an obscure 1970s punk band. Mike Adamcyzk and Pete Lac meet in high school in 1973 and form the Ramones-influenced No Names. They release one album, Invisible City, in 1978 before disbanding. Now, in 1993, Mike lives on one of the isolated Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, having spent the past 15 years in solitude. Over the course of the nonlinear narrative, Hewett explores the depth of Mike and Pete’s friendship and tortured, mostly unrequited romance, and the devastating reasons for Mike’s seclusion. In a parallel narrative also set in the ’90s, 18-year-old Isaac Burns comes across Invisible City while searching for in his mother’s attic for his birth certificate and becomes obsessed with locating the group’s surviving members. That journey takes him to Europe, where he has a fateful meeting with Daniel Beck, an internationally renowned classical pianist who owns the island where Mike has been living. Hewett poignantly conveys the band members’ passion, both for each other and for their music, as well as their music’s powerful effect on Isaac, to whose ear Pete’s guitar can “slice through walls.” It’s well worth a spin. (Apr.)

Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion

Stereogum managing editor DeVille debuts with a comprehensive and colorful account of the rise, fall, corporatization, and partial revival of indie rock. He traces the genre’s roots to 1990s grunge, and charts a rise fueled by internet fan communities and music sites like Pitchfork that catapulted unknown bands to fame. Soon artists like the Killers were riding that wave to success, while such shows as The O.C. popularized artists including Death Cab for Cutie, incentivizing bands to adopt a “softer, friendlier” sound. As indie rock expanded, diversified, and crept further into the mainstream, it forfeited a “coherent sense of identity”; by the 2010s, DeVille writes, indie had come to signify “so many things” that it effectively meant nothing. He also highlights the internet’s complex effects on the indie ecosystem—while the shift to Spotify and other streaming services crushed many bands’ revenue streams, the late 2010s also saw such artists as boygenius use their own platforms to bypass industry gatekeepers. Though excessive references to Pitchfork can sometimes make this feel more like a history of indie music journalism, the breadth of DeVille’s knowledge is impressive, and his analysis of what subcultures both lose and gain when they enter the mainstream is astute. Readers nostalgic for the days of the Postal Service and Passion Pit should take a look. (Aug.)

Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine

Collins debuts with a finely tuned tale of artistic ambition and cultural shifts in the 1970s Texas music scene. Married Austin bar owners Deanna and Wendell hire up-and-coming singer-songwriter Doug Moser to lead the house band at their Rush Creek Saloon, hoping to drum up business. Doug, along with his wife and son, move into a house on the bar’s property, and soon the Rush Creek is buzzing with a hip new clientele. Not all is hunky-dory, though. Regulars lose their barstools to hippies, an odd loner named Steven starts hanging around the band, Deanna stifles budding feelings for Doug, and Wendell sees his usefulness to the Rush Creek diminish (“This is my bar, Doug, ain’t it?” he angrily asks at one point). Collins mostly focuses on Doug’s and Deanna’s points of view, and she keenly captures their individual desires: Doug seeks fame and purpose, while Deanna wants a disruption from life’s routine. Though the narrative loses steam by its tragic final act, which turns on a gnarly rainstorm, Collins brilliantly conveys the nitty-gritty details of a working musician’s day-to-day. Music lovers will especially dig this. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)