Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

Musician Nicolay (The Humorless Ladies of Border Patrol) paints a perceptive portrait of musicians who are not known “as the authors of the works in which they participate, but without whom those works would not exist.” Drawing on interviews with a mostly male, mostly white group of bassists, horn players, backup singers, and accompanists who comprise the “support staff” of the music industry, Nicolay dissects such challenges as cutting business deals in a world of “handshake agreements and vague ‘understandings,’ ” navigating power dynamics in bands, and striking the right balance between working for other musicians and pursuing one’s own artistic ambitions. The interview subjects shed fascinating light on the complications of dedicating one’s life to another’s music—one guitarist observes that “there’s such a physical aspect to music that my musculature will have changed after playing [certain music] hundreds of times” (“In the most literal, embodied way,” Nicolay comments, she’s “been shaped by those songs”). Taken as a whole, these profiles succeed in complicating the “lone genius” narrative of artistic creation and raising provocative questions about how society values the production of music. It’s a captivating look at what it means to occupy the complicated space “between a career and a calling.” (Sept.)