Albums & Songs

This vibrant book celebrates the cultural history of the vinyl record, album cover art and collectibles. With its demise predicted over and over, the good old record is still spinning and has shown itself triumphant over technology trends, beloved by music professionals and fans,...

Rare & Collectible All copies signed by Bill Smith Bill Smith and his Studio have been designing record covers since 1976. In those five decades they have worked with over 200 bands and artists, creating hundreds of album covers, singles bags, and CD covers....

Take a deep dive into one of the best-selling albums ever with this beautifully produced and authoritatively written slipcased edition. Veteran rock critic Martin Popoff leaves no stone unturned in taking apart The Who’s generation-spanning masterpiece, Quadrophenia, while exploring each of the album’s 17 tracks and...

Rare & Collectible Personally compiled and curated by Yoko Ono, Imagine John Yoko is the definitive inside story-told in revelatory detail-of the making of the legendary album and all that surrounded it: the locations, the creative team, the artworks and the films, in the words of...

Led Zeppelin released only eight studio albums and no singles over the course of their 12-year career, but to date there are more than 1,000 official singles and 2,000 LPs in the market.  This definitive volume illustrates in full colour some of the rarest...

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more - iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also alter the direction of music. Writer and music historian Marc Myers tells the stories behind fifty-five rock,...

Everyone loves music. But what is it that makes music so universally beloved and have such a powerful effect on us? In this sweeping and authoritative book, Dr. Nolan Gasser - composer, pianist, and musicologist, and the chief architect of the Music Genome Project,...

The life of the Man in Black is revealed through his lyrics and by rare photographs and ephemera, in this beautifully illustrated official hardback edition, fully authorised by the Cash estate and featuring 125 of his most iconic songs.Johnny Cash is one of the...

When Tom Breihan launched his Stereogum column in early 2018, "The Number Ones" - a space in which he has been writing about every #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, in chronological order - he figured he'd post capsule-size reviews...

One of the most pivotal albums in the evolution of rock music, few other recordings have had more impact than the 1965 Bob Dylan classic, Bringing It All Back Home. In the mid-sixties, rock music was about to explode into psychedelia, prog and jazz...

Released in 1969, Let it Bleed was The Rolling Stones’ eighth studio album (tenth in the USA). The second in a sequence of four consecutive records that comprised their creative peak, it is considered by many to be their best. After a period of...

Bob Dylan's 1983 album Infidels was a departure from his previous works in so many ways - lyrics, music, production and spirit. It is unique amongst Dylan albums, and while songs like Jokerman and I and I are well known, the album is less...

Selected and arranged by the authors themselves, and featuring an introduction by Jarvis Cocker, Side by Side presents the lyrics, poems, writings and drawings of innovative musician Robert Wyatt and his creative partner, English painter and songwriter Alfie Benge.As a founding member of influential English...

In the mid-1980s the Happy Mondays emerged as the prime mischief makers on the Madchester scene. Chief protagonist was Shaun Ryder, a man whose lyrical street swagger in songs like Kinky Afro, 24 Hour Party People and Performance, would come to define a generation....

Selected and arranged by the author, and featuring a foreword by revered record producer Glyn Johns, The Weakness In Me presents the lyrics of Joan Armatrading for the first time in one unique volume.Since the release of her debut album Whatever's For Us in...

Keep 'Er Lit is the second volume of Van Morrison's collected lyrics containing one hundred and twenty songs from across his storied career. It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual...

'There is something quite moving about seeing the lyrics of these fifty-six songs collected and assembled this way. You can see the evolution of the minds and hearts at work behind the lyrics' Brandon Taylor, from the IntroductionSince the release of their breakout debut...

Unlike all previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds...

Between the late '60s and early '80s, design house Hipgnosis created some of the most iconic and ubiquitous album artwork of all time. Their original lifespan coincided with the golden age of the 12-inch LP, beginning just as the Beatles' Sgt Pepper made the record sleeve...

Released in 1977 during the height of disco fever and punk rock, Bat Out of Hell is an ambitious debut album that bucked the trend and confounded critics. With the help of several hit singles, it struck a chord with record buyers and became...