Top ten music books

Jarvis Cocker is a musician, singer-songwriter, radio presenter and editor. He may be best known as frontman for the band Pulp.

One of Cocker's top ten music books, as shared at the Guardian:

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

I ripped this off royally for the song "Big Julie" from my first solo album. The description of Mick Kelly hearing Beethoven's Third symphony for the first time, while hiding beneath a neighbour's window and eavesdropping on their radio, is still the only piece of writing I've found that comes close to describing the effect that a great piece of music has on the human organism. The rest of the book isn't bad either…

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see: Greil Marcus's five top books on rock music, Nile Rodgers's top ten music books, Samuel Muston's ten best music memoirs, and Kitty Empire's ten best rock autobiographies.

--Marshal Zeringue