| I just watched “Daisy Jones and the Six” and like everyone else, I loved it! It’s the streaming series made from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 novel about what happens when a talented, charismatic, damaged singer joins an up and coming but struggling band from Pittsburgh. The book and the series are cleverly told in “mockumentary” style with members of the band looking back on the heady and chaotic days of their early success. If you’ve seen MTV’s “Behind the Music” you’ve got the idea. So, in a nod to Daisy Jones, here are three other books about being in a band. “We Sold Our Souls” was published in 2018 by Grady Hendrix and gives us an inside look at a rising metal band in the 1990s. It’s all screaming fans and power ballads until the lead singer decides to go solo. Reeling, the other band members disperse back into ordinary lives until Kris Pulaski, the former guitar player, decides to find out what really happened. The novel asks what it takes to be famous and once someone has sipped from the cup of fame, how far they’ll go to hang onto it. My second book is Kim Gordon’s terrific memoir from 2015, “Girl in a Band.” Gordon, the bassist for Sonic Youth, opens the book in Brazil on the night of their last show. Gordon’s marriage to Sonic guitarist Thurston Moore is failing over an affair and her life is about to go sideways. She remembers looking out on a huge crowd of ecstatic concert-goers and thinking she’d never felt so alone.
And finally, Rachel Kapelke-Dale’s novel “The Ingenue.” We meet Saskia Kreis, a prodigy at the piano, as she goes home to close her late mother’s house. While she’s there, she finds that she must reevaluate the relationship that shaped her adolescence and young adulthood was truly consensual.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 