Holding the Note

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, turns his attention here to the musicians who have shaped the last half century of popular music. The book collects his profiles of artists including Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, along with others. The starting point is the way a great song lodges itself in memory. Hear Aretha Franklin sing "Respect" or Bob Dylan perform "Blind Willie McTell" and you are carried back to a particular place, a particular moment, a particular feeling. Remnick follows the people behind those songs and asks what happens to them as time moves on, since time is the one thing every piece of music has to work within and every musician eventually has to face. The portraits are personal and often vivid. One captures Leonard Cohen at his first performance, when stage fright was so crippling that he could not finish "Suzanne." Another recalls Aretha Franklin's famous mink-drop at the Kennedy Center. Throughout, Remnick writes as a lifelong listener, with real feeling for the music and a sharp sense of how it has left its mark on the rest of us.