November 29, 2025

by Ann Powers

In honor of the arrival of the 2025 edition of NPR’s annual Books We Love list, our critic shares a bundle of new memoirs by musicians that might revive your faith in the form, or completely upend your expectations of it.

Hello avid readers,

My deepest wish for you this holiday weekend is that you get some alone time on the couch. Couches are busy in late November, I know, with family and friends cramming in to catch up on news, enjoy double features and scream at men throwing balls. (On the record, I have no opinion on Taylor Swift’s effect on the Chiefs.) That’s why it feels all the more luxurious when the crowds disperse and it’s just you pausing to relax and reflect. Send everybody out for a walk and if you’re so inclined, cuddle up with a furry friend. There’s a book in your future.

This past Monday, my intrepid colleagues at NPR’s culture desk published their annual interactive guide Books We Love, and honestly you could spend your couch time just poking around in it. Debuting in 2013 — it was then called the Books Concierge, a name I admit I still favor for its jaunty vacation vibe — and adding selections every year since, Books We Love now offers more than 4000 titles selected by NPR employees and freelancers, arranged in an enticing grid that rearranges itself when you plug in various filters like “For History Lovers” and “Seriously Dark.” I just applied those two myself, and came up with something very cool — witchy fine artist Katy Horan’s illustrated compendium of murder ballads. Every year I look forward to adding a couple of titles to the mix; my picks for 2025 are the best Beatles book I’ve read in ages and Neko Case’s fierce, luminous memoir of growing out of a tough childhood into her fierce creative self.

I’m happy to see those choices next to other essential titles like Liz Pelly’s earthshaking takedown of Spotify, Mood Machine, and J. Geils Band singer Peter Wolf’s way-better-than-you-might-expect rock star autobiography Waiting on the Moon. But you know I’m a super nerd, and my shelf goes way deeper than the 12 titles Books We Love offers in its “For Music Lovers” section. I have a few suggestions for my fellow deep divers, to augment your spelunking in Books We Love.

You’ve undoubtedly heard about splashy best-sellers like scribe-turned-film auteur Cameron Crowe’s The Uncool and country king Kenny Chesney’s Heart Life Music. Beyond that, what’s your pleasure? Band bios? Try Jonathan Gould’s wide view of Talking Heads, Burning Down the House. Song bios? I learned a lot from Maya Angela Smith’s brief epic on the Jacques Brel tune Nina Simone made a signature, Ne Me Quitte Pas. Genre forays? Dan DiPiero’s Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl deftly balances specificity and heart-rending poeticism. Restitution for underappreciated pioneers? Nothing better than my pal Gayle Wald’s meticulous argument for the importance of children’s music originator Ella Jenkins, This is Rhythm.

I’m here today, though, to expand your reading list in a specific way: by recommending some stories you might have not noticed from that most overloaded category, the memoir. 2025 was an incredible year for musicians telling their own stories — especially those who don’t inhabit the center of the discourse. Memoirs have flooded the market in recent years, and can often be banal (I get to harumph, I’ve written one and a half myself). Celebrity tomes, especially, suffer from banal writing and the habitual recalcitrance of those who’ve spent their lives devising canned answers to interview questions. Artists who work at a more grassroots level, however, offer unique perspectives into the scenes and historical moments they helped shape. And they’re also often just great on the page, bringing the inventiveness, sense of timing and poeticism they deploy musically to their prose.

Here are five musicians’ books that transported me this year. Each of them offers more than a great tale; it also shows what memoir can do when sharp and open minds take on the form.

Roddy Bottum, The Royal We

In 1980s and 1990s San Francisco, Roddy Bottum was a luminary who was also partly hiding: as a young gay man rising within an overwhelmingly straight punk subculture in the world’s queerest city, and as an upper class Southern California kid who’d embraced the dedicated poverty of bohemia. He would become a rock star in a new genre with his band Faith No More, making music that reveled in chaos and contradictions, as he himself did. This remembrance of his youth is juicy — he was lovers and then best friends with Courtney Love before and during her marriage to Kurt Cobain. But what makes it great is the loving detail and startling insight with which he describes his coming of age and unraveling within the underground community that he calls “the village,” which fostered unheralded creativity and joy and peril, and finally imploded, as he did, too. I ripped through this book the minute it arrived, partly because as a baby writer in the Mission District I grew into myself in circles adjacent to Roddy’s, but mostly because this is one of the most vivid and unsparing accounts of bohemia’s reckless beauty that I’ve ever read.

Lola Kirke, Wild West Village: Not a Memoir

The subtitle of this book reveals actor and singer-songwriter Lola Kirke’s healthy tendency to check her own presumptions, which causes her to season what could have been a flighty tale of mid-level jet-setting with self-awareness and lemon-splash humor. Yet if memoir is defined by the close view a participant in a story can bring, Kirke shows herself as a master, her voice intimate while still cultivating enough distance to make her unique story relatable. As the privileged but often thwarted youngest child in a family of “artistic wolves” (her dad is a rock legend, her mom renowned for both interior design and fashion; her sisters quite famously act and sing), Kirke had good tools, but still had to dig out a space for herself. She recognizes what’s universal in her unique life: sibling competition; the carelessness of “exciting” parents; the privileges and pain of being a highly attractive woman with a brain, an identity that many people still can’t comprehend. Come for the laughs. Stay for the tenderness. (A good companion for this book is Amy Rigby’s warmly conversational Girl To Country, the sequel to her account of the indie rock life Girl To City, which takes her to Tennessee, where Kirke now lives.)

Jean Grae, In My Remaining Years

Please, even if you don’t think you like audiobooks, put on your headphones for this one. Grae, who built a dazzling body of work as an underground rapper before leaving her cipher and becoming a multidisciplinary artist, has produced one of the most musical and enjoyable narrated books I’ve ever binged, writing original music and displaying her genius as a vocalist and character creator. In My Remaining Years is technically not a memoir but an essay collection, with subjects ranging from the complexities of identity (Grae is the biracial daughter of artists, a South African-born American and a nonbinary person who’s been married to men twice) to the temptations of the yuppie life and the harsh realities facing independent artists and the tough but rewarding experience of being a single person in midlife. Its chapters hang together remarkably well, though, bound by Grae’s taut wit and welcoming tone. I love a memoir that lands and lives firmly in the present — it’s hard to do that with real, steady self-awareness. Grae does so with a sparklingly light touch.

Alice Gerrard, Custom Made Woman: A Life in Traditional Music

This title is a little niche, most likely to attract folkies who know Alice Gerrard via her long musical partnership with fellow bluegrasser Hazel Dickens and her work in many aspects of Southern folklife, as a teacher, writer, editor and community organizer. But open its busy, bright cover collaged with pictures of Gerrard playing her banjo and interacting with other musicians, friends and family members, and you’ll find a whole world. (The book is lushly illustrated, including many candid shots of folk heroes Gerrard herself took.) Gerrard’s life has taken her from her home state of Washington to myriad outposts of traditional music and the folk revival, finally landing her in Durham, N.C., an epicenter of folklife in the 21st century. Her marriages to fellow musicians Jeremy Foster and Mike Seeger and her legendary duo with Dickens helped her master the art of collaboration, while fieldwork and co-founding the Old-Time Herald magazine — whose first issues she laid out and hand-mailed in the late 1980s — cemented her approach to building and preserving community. As Gerrard tells her personal story, intertwined with all kinds of musicians and makers, with the ease of a longtime raconteur, the book’s rich illustrations and sidebars offer pocket views into the diversity and vibrancy of the folk world.

John Darnielle, This Year: A Book of Days

Leave it to The Mountain Goats’ restless spirit John Darnielle, who’s always challenged himself as a singer-songwriter by seriously playing with form, to turn a fairly standard money-making proposition into something different and distinctively rewarding. He’s not the first to publish a book of lyrics with commentary (Sir Paul, for example, did one in conversation with the poet Paul Muldoon), but by applying the almanac idea to songs from across his decades-long career, he imposes a structure that required both discipline and imagination to execute. Darnielle is an award-winning novelist as well as one of his generation’s great talespinners; he understands how form directs subject matter, and how stories unspool like spiders’ threads, taking unexpected shapes. Annotating his songs, he offers insights into his multifaceted life: musicological, highly personal, dreamed-up, painfully true. “My misconception, for the first several years of this effort, had been that I was writing a book, but in truth I was making a book,” Darnielle writes in the introduction. “To make a book rather than write one is to assemble something whose external form masks its more flexible potential.” I think that’s a great description of memoir — and of a life well lived.

Newsletter continues after sponsor message

Put your book down for a moment and check out these other things that made me happy this week

In 2023 I saw my favorite Irish folksinger Lisa O’Neill perform an original song about the radical activist legend Mother Jones, and wished she would release it. Now my dream has been fulfilled — the song appears on her new EP The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right, alongside one you might recognize from Peaky Blinders, one she wrote with Pete Doherty and several other covers and originals, all characteristically mind-blowing. Stream on your favorite service or order the physical copy here.
If you’re looking for something lush and involving for your holiday weekend binge (it’s not too late!), tune into the Criterion Channel: the streaming service has acquired Blossoms Shanghai, master filmmaker Wong Kar Wai’s dazzling saga about China’s 1990s financial boom. This is crazy expensive, richly melodramatic TV; let yourself sink in.
Speaking of East Asia, Taiwanese prog-electronic folk indescribables Mong Tong have released a new album, Sun Moon Darkness, that takes the duo’s wild sensibilities into new regions from Armenia to Cyprus.
I regret missing Austin punk band Die Spitz at Nashville’s Blue Room last week, but I’m comforting myself by playing the band’s recent KEXP session on repeat.
Happy slightly belated birthday David Amram! The 95-year-old musical polymath had an inspiring conversation with Jon Pareles for The New York Times.
It’s cold out there. Should I buy this for my dog?

NPR Classical

Symphonic affordability ...

Listen sponsor free to All Songs Considered & Alt.Latino with NPR MUSIC+

Introducing NPR Music+, a new way to support what you love and explore new music and conversations sponsor-free. NPR Music+ includes two podcasts with one convenient subscription: All Songs Considered and Alt.Latino, both sponsor-free.

In addition, you'll have access to a brand new podcast series from Ann Powers and editor Daoud Tyler-Ameen about how the songs we love survive over decades. Learn more and support us at plus.npr.org/NPRmusic

Get NPR Music+

Listen to your local NPR station.

Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream.

Need a new playlist?

Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music

What do you think of today's email?

We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org

Enjoying this newsletter?

Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

Looking for more great content?

Check out all of our newsletter offerings
— including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more!

You received this message because you're subscribed to NPR Music emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002

Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy