Mike Ayers s book One Last Song: Conversations on Life, Death, and Music. (Jay Gabler/MPR)
When I first started at Minnesota Public Radio, I worked at both The Current and our sister station, Classical MPR. Multiple times even during the few years I worked at the classical station, we heard from grateful listeners who reported that when family members were literally on their deathbeds, they chose to have Classical MPR playing as a final soundtrack.
What would
your final soundtrack be? In researching his book
One Last Song (buy now), Mike Ayers learned to phrase the question as, What would you want to hear as your last song on earth? That made it less about the circumstances of the death (though some of his respondents thought about those anyway) and more about the nature of life.
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From BTS to Dolly Parton: the 2020 books that tell the stories of some of music s biggest names
This year saw the release of a number of titles that pull back the curtain on the music industry Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by Nate Patrin Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year by Michaelangelo Matos Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics , by Dolly Parton with Robert K. Oermann Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar , by Oliver Craske Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS , by Maria Sherman
You don t expect to get a lot of laughs from a book with a title like
This Isn t Happening: Radiohead s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century (buy now). I had a literal LOL moment early on, though, when author Steven Hyden asked rhetorically, Is it possible that I take
Kid A way too seriously?
There is, of course, virtually zero chance that anyone who would even contemplate cracking a book about the music of the 2000s would accuse any critic of taking any Radiohead album,
especially that one, too seriously. Both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone named
Kid A (2000) the greatest album of the decade 2000-2009, and there are still plenty of critics who would argue it s not as good as