Chronicles

What it’s like

Loose, rambling and confiding, the voice moves in long conversational sweeps through rooms, roads and recording studios, with sudden sharp cuts to a single image before drifting off again. The prose is wry and self-mocking, full of tangents, half-remembered names and the gritty texture of 1960s New York coffeehouses, cheap hotel rooms and Minnesota winters. Its mood is nostalgic and restless, a sort of unhurried melancholy with flashes of dry humour, best read in short sittings: a slow weekend afternoon, a long train ride, or late at night with a record on low. Pacing is digressive rather than linear, so it rewards dipping in and out. Violence and sexual content are essentially absent; the emotional weight comes from ambition, friendship, loss and the wearing-down of a restless creative life. It suits readers who love music history, enjoy a memoirist's shifting perspective, and don't mind a book that wanders on purpose.