Holding the Note

Writing On Music

By: David Remnick

Narrated by: David Remnick, Matt Godfrey

‘Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious’ The Times

This audio edition is read by the author, David Remnick, and Matt Godfrey.

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years. He portrays a series of musical lives – Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more – and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

Critic reviews

Remarkable, not just for the essays' expertise and vividness, but for the aeons he spends talking to his subjects and those around them

This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature. ... He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal

Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious

[A] standout collection of pieces . . . What’s most remarkable is [Remnick's] ability to give due at once to the artists’ larger-than-life musical legacies and their all too human fallibilities

Written over the past three decades, these are keenly observed, deeply felt, and judiciously detailed encounters of genuine communion mixing interviews, biography, and analysis, all lyrically and radiantly composed . . . There is acuity here, bemusement, tenderness, and gratitude (Donna Seaman)

Remnick, the intellectually nimble editor of the New Yorker, has lately been focusing closely on world politics, but he finds time to profile a number of artists who, having enjoyed early success, ‘were all grappling, in music and in their own lives, with their diminishing gifts and mortality.’. . . There’s dish here . . . and plenty of astute observation . . . A perceptive pleasure for literate music lovers