Holding the Note

Essays on Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2023

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor of The New Yorker, writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.

He portrays a series of musical lives – Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more – and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

‘This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature . . . He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal – New York Times