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Voices

Voices

How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life

Summary

***ONE OF BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN MUSIC BOOKS OF 2018***

‘A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it’ Nick Hornby in The Believer


What happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing?

The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences – as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself.

Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn. Above all, it is a story of what it means to feel.

Reviews

  • Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.
    Roddy Doyle

About the author

Nick Coleman

Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid-1980s, Nick Coleman was Music Editor of Time Out for seven years, then Arts and Features Editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. He has also written on music for The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, New Statesman, Intelligent Life, GQ and The Wire. He is the author of The Train in the Night, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize.
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