Field Recordings from the Inside: Essays

Bonomo’s latest book incorporates autobiographical themes of his previous collection, This Must Be Where My Obsession with Infinity Begins, and an obsessive desire to understand how artists do what they do . Bonomo is fascinated with the ways in which songs are “less a tune than a field recording from inside your body, your heart chambers’ vérité” as he looks at the ways music influenced and underscored events throughout his life. The best essays here extend that gaze beyond his own life and into those of other artists and their audiences; especially good is “Bafflement, Clarity, and Malice,” a reverie on the power of lyrics that express “their profound simplicity, their old newness.” Another standout in this great collection is Bonomo’s warm look at the late novelist Larry Brown and Brown’s love of music, as well as is his 584-page screenplay about Hank Williams. (Feb.)