MixedThe Washington PostRemnick’s music essays are detailed close-ups of aged heroes; sometimes, as with a 2016 profile of Cohen, published mere weeks before the subject’s death. By virtue of their subjects’ legacies and the scarcity of opportunities to read long features about any given pop musician these days, they are journalistic events ... As events go, however, they’re a bit stiff. Holding the Note is a music book that doesn’t raise its voice, an odd fact considering the shouters, belters, bluesmen, poets and one Italian tenor whom Remnick studies ... Repetition is an understandable risk for any collection like this, though that doesn’t make the patterns less noticeable ... [There] are go-to riffs, as it were, easy enough for any music writer to fall back on. More disappointing is Remnick’s flat descriptions ... Composure has its place, but music deserves our heedless attention.
Howard Fishman
RaveThe Washington PostReaders might reasonably wonder if such an artist merits a doorstop like this one ... Fishman, a songwriter and musician as well as a cultural journalist, answers the question by turning Converse’s very lack of acceptance into its own subject. To Anyone is the grandly researched portrait of a talent who didn’t get her due, a kind of worst-case study of why this indignity remains a brutally common occurrence ... Fishman’s passion for this music and his devotion to uncovering its origins are infectious, and form a secondary plot of the book ... Simultaneously the record of an obsession and its ultimate payoff. It’s hard to think of any book that grants such loving attention to an artist who has otherwise been denied it ... Connie Converse may never reach the broad audience that those projects found; her music is gorgeous but low-key and elusive, like candid black-and-white photos from a time when everyone smoked indoors. But To Anyone Who Ever Asks is a rich paean to it, and to the profound connections that art can form between individuals, even decades apart.
Booker T. Jones
PositiveThe New York Times... emphasizes not only his Memphis roots and role in Stax’s reinvention of R&B but his second act here in Los Angeles — as a wide-ranging session man and producer who remains, in his eighth decade, a sought-after sonic guru ... an ethos [Jones] captures well.
