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February 28, 2012

Coming Soon: "The First Time I Heard..."

For the past six months, I've been working hard on a new project. For those people who only know me through my novels, the details of this might come as an oddity, but for those who follow my music posts or Facebook profile and know my music-nerdiness, this won't be all that surprising.

I've been compiling and editing a series of books that collect short, first-person essays by musicians & writers telling about their "first time" hearing a specific iconic musician or band. The first five books in this ongoing series are focusing on (1) David Bowie, (2) Joy Division/New Order, (3) Kate Bush, (4) The Smiths, and (5) Cocteau Twins. (Future editions, if the project goes well with its first five installments, will cover Kraftwerk, REM, The Pixies, Abba, My Bloody Valentine, & more.)

So far I've received essays from many excellent musicians and writers--too many to list here, and I'd like to keep it mostly a surprise until the books come out--but so far I've collected pieces by members of Throwing Muses, Lamb, Swervedriver, Lush, The American Analog Set, Electrelane, Slowdive, The Wedding Present, Mercury Rev, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Shudder To Think, Gang Gang Dance, Curve, Trash Can Sinatras, Bedhead, Isan, Pale Saints, Benoit Pioulard, 'til tuesday, And Also the Trees, Joan as Police Woman, Implodes, Earlimart, Engineers, The Third Eye Foundation, In the Nursery, The Teardrop Explodes, Microfilm, Clan of Xymox, The Aluminum Group, The Names, Breathless, John Grant, Annette Peacock, Mark Van Hoen, Harold Budd, & many others, as well as from several novelists/poets.

(Above: the covers for the Cocteau Twins and Joy Division/New Order books, designed by the excellent Joel Westendorf. The additional three books will have a similar typeface to fit the series, but with different background imagery.)

This project is almost finished (three of the five books are very close to being completed, containing about 40 essays in each book). The individual collections will be published solely as e-books; they should be available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes in the next few months, gradually, before the end of spring. I'm really happy with the results. I'll update again when these are available.