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.