Sound of music autobiography examples

Back in 2012, The A.V. Club asked if there was life left in the world of music memoirs. On one hand, it was obviously a rhetorical question—is anyone really going to say, “No, no more autobiographies from musicians, please”?—but the larger point was salient.

Namely, that this young century had seen a glut of shoddily written and poorly edited books by famous artists (whether ghostwritten or not), that did the genre no favors. (Paging Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace.)

Lucky, then, to have so many counterexamples.

The past 22 years have seen the release of not only tremendous memoirs and musical biographies, but among them some that belong in the highest echelons of the field—books that should be essential reading even for those who aren’t fans of the artist.

The following are the ones that rose to the top when The A.V. Club looked back upon which music bios and memoirs were the most impactful, the most artful, and resonated far beyond