Product Description

Focusing on the lives and work of several prominent singers and songwriters from a wide range of musical genres, Inside the Music explores the influence spirituality has had on their lives and work. Includes profiles of Jeff Buckley, Billy Bragg, Leonard Cohen, Dead Can Dance, Perry Farrell, Michael Franti, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Al Green, Robyn Hitchcock, Ziggy Marley, Moby, Meredith Monk, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Iggy Pop, Joan Osborne, PM Dawn, Vernon Reid, and the Reverend Run of Run DMC.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #638937 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-25
• Released on: 1997-11-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Library Journal
Ehrlich, formerly music editor at Interview magazine and currently music editor for MTV, attempts to discover the spiritual underpinnings of the creative musical process. He selected 20 musicians whose diverse styles include rock (Mick Jagger, Joan Osborne, Perry Ferrell, and Moby), reggae (Ziggy Marley), rap (PM Dawn, Run, and Michael Franti), classical (Philip Glass), South Asian (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), and even the undefinable music of poet Allen Ginsberg. At times, the author directly connects various forms of Eastern and Western spirituality with the artists' music. Other times, he simply hints at the implicit effects of inner discovery. Though not always revealing much about his subjects, Ehrlich at his best prompts musicians such as Iggy Pop and Leonard Cohen to explain the emotional and spiritual motivations for a lifetime of creative progress. A fascinating if uneven look at the artistic process, this will be enjoyed by general readers.?David P. Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Dimitri Ehrlich is a musician and music journalist who has written about music for The New York Times, New York magazine, Vibe, Entertainment Weekly, Mademoiselle, Rolling Stone, and Spin. He was a music editor of Interview for five years and is now music editor at MTV.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
JEFF BUCKLEY: Knowing Not Knowing Early in the spring of 1997, singer and songwriter Jeff Buckley headed down to Memphis to begin pre-production on what would have been his second full-length album. A few weeks after Buckley arrived, his bandmates flew in from New York to join him. He was in high spirits: the songwriting was going well, and he was reunited with his group. The same night his band arrived Buckley went out for a late-night stroll to a Memphis harbor and waded into the river. He had always admired Led Zeppelin, and was singing "Whole Lotta Love" when a boat passed in front of him. He lost his footing, perhaps dragged into the water by the boat's wake, and was never seen alive again. He was thirty years old, two years older than his father, the folksinger Tim Buckley, had been when he died of a drug overdose.

I first met Jeff Buckley and saw him perform about two years before he passed away. It was near midnight and Buckley was sitting in the back office of a Tower Records store in lower Manhattan. Buckley had become a scion of the Lower East Side antifolk scene, and was preparing for an in-store performance in support of his album Grace.

But first he needed to do something: he insisted on listening to a crackly old recording of "The Man That Got Away" by Judy Garland, on the pretext that he wanted the store manager, who had given the CD to Buckley, to understand how magnificent a gift it was. Buckley needed to demonstrate the album's beauty. He had also picked up gratis CD reissues of vintage Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone records, and two albums by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who had a major influence on Buckley's singing. While Buckley could occasionally summon the same kind of ecstatic vocal power that was Khan's trademark, his singing had more in common with Garland's delicate, vulnerable warble.

Buckley was an unglamorous star. That night he was wearing a wretched pair of weathered combat boots - the sort you occasionally see homeless men selling - a frumpy gray cardigan sweater, and jeans that hadn't been washed in a long time. Ditto his hair. In an oddly white-trash bit of accessorizing, Buckley's wallet was attached to his belt by a chain, in the style favored by motorcycle gangs. Three days of beard growth rounded out his anti-coif, but his sex appeal remained intact: a nervous girl approached to ask if, as she suspected, he was a Scorpio. Another pressed a poem she had written for him into his hand. He folded it carefully and put it in his pocket, as though he would cherish it forever. Maybe he did.

"People talk all day in a practical way, but real language that penetrates and affects people and carries wisdom is something different. Maybe it's the middle of the afternoon and you see a child's moon up in the sky, and you feel like it's such a simple, pure, wonderful thing to look at. It just hits you in a certain way, and you point it out to a stranger, and he looks at you like you're weird and walks away. To speak that way, to point out a child's moon to a stranger, is original language, it's the way you originate yourself. And the cool thing is, if you catch people in the right moment, it's totally clear. Without knowing why, it's simply clear. That sort of connection is very empirical. It comes from the part of you that just understands immediately. All these types of things are gold, and yet they are dishonored or not paid attention to because that kind of tender communication is so alien in our culture, except in performance. There's a wall up between people all day long, but performance transcends that convention. If pop music were really seen as a fine art or if fine art were popular, I don't know what the hell would happen - this wouldn't be the same country, because if the masses of people began to respect and really open to fine art, it would bring about a huge shift in consciousness.

"Music is so many things. It's not just the performer. It's the audience and the architecture of the song, and each builds off the other. Music is a setting for poignancy, anger, destruction, total disaster, total wrongness, and then - like a little speck of gold in the middle of it - excitement, but excitement in a way that matters. Excitement that is not just aesthetically pleasing but shoots some sort of understanding into you."

Customer Reviews

Really interesting stuff! Not new age, but full of insight.
This book is full of interviews with musicians and the author got them all to talk about thieir inner expereince as creative people. The cool thing is, it's not too soppy or mushy. There's a sense of humor and a sharpness to the writing that makes it really readbale. I really recommend it to anyone inter4ested in music, spirituality, and the place where those two areas mix.

Nancy Jimenez