It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track: Objects Essays, 2012-2018 [Paperback]

When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. WithIt Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and cross-colour awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince  black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points (Brian Dillon,frieze), Ian Penmans first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at theNMEin 1977, later contributing to various publications includingThe Face,Arena,Tatler,Uncut,Sight & Sound,The Wire, theGuardian, theLRB, andCity Journal. He is the author ofVital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias(Serpents Tail, 1998) andFassbinder Thousands of Mirrors(forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions).

Ian Penman is popular musics Hazlitt  its chief stylist  and his sound is often equal to what he writes about. Each of his essays is an event, so this book is indispensable.
 Andrew OHagan, author ofThe Secret Life

It Gets Me Home, This Curving Tracksummons the lives and times of several extravagantly damaged musical geniuses and near-geniuses in (mainly) the brutal context of mid-century America  its rac