Ebook: Voices: how a great singer can change your life

Preface -- Introduction: Hearing voices -- 1. The horsemen in the box: Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley, with Led Zeppelin, Suzi Quatro, and Patti Smith -- 2. Boys and girls and girl groups: The Ronettes, The Marvelettes, and the Shangri-las, with The Four Pennies, Bananarama, and TLC -- 3. Vulnerable: Marvin Gaye and Roy Orbison, with Aretha Franklin, The Ramones, and Mary Margaret O'Hara -- 4. Class acts: John Lennon and Mick Jagger, with The Kinks, David Bowie, Robert Wyatt, Richard and Linda Thompson, Kirsty MacColl, and The Smiths -- 5. The urge for going: Joni Mitchell, with Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Rickie Lee Jones, and Steely Dan -- 6. What is soul?: Wilson Picket, Gladys Knight, Joe Cocker, Paul Rodgers, Elki Brooks, Terry Reid, Jess Roden, Frankie Miller, and Rod Stewart, with Dexys Midnight Runners, Kiki Dee, and Tedeschi Trucks Band -- 7. Croon: Iggy Pop, Gregory Isaacs, Kate Bush, Luther Vandross, and Frank Sinatra, with George Jones, The Carpenters, and Prince -- 8. So, what?" Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Hank Mobley, with Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin, and John Surman -- 9. The spectacle of anguish: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, and Ian Curtis, with Chris Bell and Amy Winehouse -- 10. Psalms and raptures: Van Morrison, Burning Spear, Alex Harvey, and John Lydon, with Bob Dylan -- Epilogue: Harvest.;A personal exploration of what singing means and how it works, Voices is a book about our deepest, most telling relationships with music. Nick Coleman examines the act of singing not as a performance, but as a close, difficult moment of hopeful connection. What does it do to us, emotionally and psychologically, to listen hard and habitually to somebody else's singing? Why is human song so essential to our lives? The book asks many other questions, too: Why did Jagger and Lennon sing like that (and not like this)? Billie, Janis, Amy: must the voices of anguish always dissolve into spectacle? What makes us turn again and again to a singing human voice? The history of postwar popular music is often told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices offers a different, intimate perspective. In ten discrete but cohering essays, Coleman tackles the arc of that history as an emotional experience with real psychological consequences. He writes about the voices that have affected the ways he feels about and understands the world--from Aretha Franklin to Amy Winehouse, Marvin Gaye to David Bowie. Ultimately, Voices is the story of what it is to listen and be moved--what it is to feel emotion.