RavePopMattersLingan brings more to his tale than just mastery of prose...Though he caps A Song For Everyone with a meticulous set of endnotes to corroborate every statement, for most of the text he opts for a straight narration, without citations...Freed from the formatting restrictions that see a biographer’s words acting as mere connecting tissue between long quoted passages, Lingan displays his flair for storytelling unencumbered...This stylistic choice adds an almost novelistic flavor to A Song For Everyone, as Lingan’s imagination enters the minds of his subjects, becoming less a biographer than an omniscient narrator...Vivid retellings of intra-band drama make a worthy addition to the Creedence Clearwater Revival canon...However, as he demonstrated in his previous book Homeplace (2018), Lingan’s natural talent lies in his wide-angle view of his subjects...In the same way, A Song For Everyone pulls out from the Creedence Clearwater Revival story, bringing in points of view sourced directly from Vietnam vets, student activists, fellow artists, and blue-collar workers, many of whom can point directly to Creedence Clearwater Revival as a source of comfort or inspiration...Where other biographies pay lip service to these groups in sentence-long bites to establish context, Lingan has no compunction about setting Creedence Clearwater Revival aside for entire pages, painting peripheral characters in detail before circling back to connect them to the band’s story he came to tell...Thus, we see the specter of the draft hanging over young American men, the often violent pushback threatening student activists, and a dark cloud of racial and class discord, all serving as a massive human backdrop to the proceedings.
Peter Guralnick
PositivePopMattersUnlike his previous biographies and music histories, Looking to Get Lost is, on its face, simply a collection of profiles and essays (plus one adapted commencement address), cultivated from across Guralnick\'s half-century career. Individual chapters feature a variety of musicians, record-business icons, and even a couple of literary figures, but the absence of an overarching genre theme creates a void at center-stage, into which the author is drawn time and again to insert personal opinions and anecdotes. Even in chapters which retread memorable narratives from previous books, Guralnick\'s more pronounced presence in the retelling adds a welcome new layer that makes them worth reading again ... If this is what it means to get lost, it\'s a wonder anyone would ever care to be found.
John Lingan
RavePopMatters\"Homeplace tells the story of Winchester\'s present moment through its current crop of residents, using the famous figures of its past to provide the history that has shaped it to this point. Lingan uses his own travels, in town and throughout the surrounding area, as a narrative frame. Like JudySue Huyett-Kempf, the tour guide who leads Lingan through the Patsy Cline Historic House and Museum, and later on around the rest of Winchester, Lingan freely inserts himself into his story. It\'s this overarching account of an outsider discovering the wonders and mysteries of an out-of-the-way American town that keeps the pages turning ... By searching with an open heart, and writing with a frank honesty, Lingan manages an impossible feat: to make Homeplace an antidote to the divisive anger of today\'s America and to the unrealistic nostalgia that our current despairs inspire.\
