10 Essential Music Books That Also Make Great Gifts
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Books always make great gifts – and music books are especially good, since it’s easier to guess someone’s taste in music than in novels.
The past few years have been a booming time for rock books, including biographies and autobiographies, and some great titles came out in 2025, from memoirs by Patti Smith and Robbie Robertson, to biographies (Talking Heads) and oral histories (the Wings). They all go nicely with the music that inspired them.
Check out our favorite music books worthy of a placement underneath the Christmas tree.
Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run
By Peter Ames Carlin
Some rock icons loom so large that books about them are getting smaller – first a book about Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (which was adapted into Deliver Me from Nowhere), now one about Born to Run. Fans know the basic arc: Careerwise, Springsteen had one last chance to make it real, so he labored over the album that became his early-career triumph. Tonight in Jungleland fleshes out that story with reported details about the songs and sessions. It’s not only about how Springsteen made this album; it’s about how Springsteen became Springsteen.
Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
By Jonathen Gould
The Talking Heads deserve an ambitious biography and this is it. Gould, the author of books about the Beatles and Otis Redding, shows how the band formed in a Downtown Manhattan scene where punks mingled with visual artists, then recorded significant hits without losing its edge – and redefined the visual and cinematic possibilities of pop. The Talking Heads weren’t the only band that graduated from that scene to bigger things, but they did more than any other to bring an avant-garde sensibility to mainstream music.
Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World
By Peter Guralnick
This isn’t the most essential book about Elvis Presley – Guralnick’s justly acclaimed two-volume biography takes that crown – but it’s by the best writer about him. After devoting a book to Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, Guralnick turns his eye to the King’s manager and the relationship between him and his star, which was by turns triumphant and tragic. Guralnick was given access to Parker’s letters and papers, some of which are reprinted in the second half of the book. This story, like almost everything about Presley, is more complicated than many people realize. But like Presley, Parker has his own great story – about rock, about art and about America itself.
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World
A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman
By Robert Hilburn
This book came out in late 2024, but I’m cheating to include it – this is the first serious biography of Newman, and it’s a great treat. Robert Hilburn has written acclaimed biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon, and he brings the same rigor to Newman’s life, even though less of it was lived in public. It’s all here: His family’s work in film scoring, his early career as a professional songwriter, the making of classic albums like Sail Away and Good Old Boys and his return to prominence with satirical songs like the one that gave the book its title.
Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run
By Paul McCartney; edited by Ted Widmer
What do you do for an encore after the Beatles? For Paul McCartney, the answer was, form another band (after releasing an album under his own name and one as Paul and Linda McCartney). This oral history tells that story – how Wings played unannounced shows at universities and sold out stadiums, how McCartney tried to revive the camaraderie that defined the Beatles and how band members got mugged in Lagos, Nigeria, where they had gone to record Band on the Run. The band never fully escaped the shadow of the Beatles – a tall order – but Wings made seven studio albums, including two stone-cold classics, and their story is great fun to revisit.
Living in the Present with John Prine
By Tom Piazza
The novelist and essayist Tom Piazza wrote a profile of singer-songwriter John Prine in 2018, then started working with the artist on his memoir. It wasn’t finished when Prine died in 2020, of complications of COVID, so Piazza turned it into a book about the years they knew each other – about Prine’s poignant songwriting, his hilarious storytelling and his career on the edge of the music business, an artist who stayed independent for much of his career while writing hits for better known singers. There’s more to Prine than this, but this is a great place to start.
Insomnia
By Robbie Robertson
Aside from his other achievements as a guitarist for the Band and a solo artist, Robbie Robertson also wrote one of the best-ever rock memoirs, the 2016 book Testimony. Billboard called it – in an article I wrote “one long, grand adventure through rock’s golden age, as told by a world-class raconteur.” Robertson, who died in 2023, went on to score the Martin Scorsese movie Killers of the Flower Moon, which is dedicated to him, and write Insomnia, a second memoir focused on the time he spent as odd-couple roommates with Scorsese, as well as his musical work on the director’s films. This was the late seventies, so some of the insomnia may have been chemically induced, but Robertson’s ability to remember and recount a good story – and to give it a mythic dimension — is undiminished.
Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City
By Mark Ronson
Oh, the ‘90s – back when CDs were expensive and concerts were cheap and media companies had launch parties instead of wakes. Mark Ronson was there, especially at the parties, which brought together different social worlds to the sound of hip-hop and the music that grew out of it. For someone who was very much at the center of this social whirl, he brings an enthusiasm and a genuine love for music to his story of growing up with, in and for music. There was a time when there was an underground – when not everything was instantly accessible online – and it mattered.
Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed
By Ron Rosenbaum
Few journalists have spent more time, over more years, thinking about Bob Dylan than Ron Rosenbaum, a leading literary journalist who has also written books about how we grapple with both evil (Explaining Hitler) and enlightenment (The Shakespeare Wars). Some of Rosenbaum’s thinking comes from a 1977 interview with Dylan, one of the most detailed the artist ever gave. Some of it has roots in the sheer breadth of Rosenbaum’s knowledge, which ranges from the origins of computer hacking (really!) disputes over Shakespeare scholarship. Dylan presents questions that may not have answers, but it is a joy to read Rosenbaum think them through.
Bread of Angels: A Memoir
By Patti Smith
Over the last decade and a half, Patti Smith has gone from underappreciated rock artist to properly appreciated memoirist – first with Just Kids, then with M Train and Year of the Monkey. (She has also written other books and collections of lyrics and poetry.) This fall marks the 50th anniversary of her epic breakthrough, Horses – just reissued with some extra tracks, takes and demos – and her new book, Bread of Angels, focuses on her younger years and her family life as an adult in Michigan. It has less New York grit than Just Kids – but it has the same bold, lyrical writing.
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