Sequel

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
– John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy,” 1980.

For quite a while now I’ve been certain that the next book I published would be a sequel to my debut novel Believe in Me.

I just didn’t think it would be this sequel.

It seems the powers that be—in the form of a certain A-list musical quintet that spent calendar year 2015 touring rather than responding to queries about lyric permissions, imagine that—have determined that the sequel I’ve had in mind will not be published this year. And in the meantime, I’ve gone and written something else that simply must, for reasons of obsessive chronological neatness, come out in 2016.

So, to those awaiting a new chapter in the lives of Tim Green and company, don’t fret, it’s going to happen, but more than likely it won’t hit the streets before early 2017. That might seem far away right this moment, but really, it’s just around the corner.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce a sequel of a different sort. Most fiction is ultimately rooted somehow, someway, in actual experience, whether had by the author personally or passed down to him/her by others. Sometimes that works in both directions, though; fiction imitates life, and then life turns around and imitates fiction.

Isolated open book

From early on in the process of writing Believe in Me, I knew that one of the ways Tim would ultimately honor his father’s memory would be to collect highlights from his career of writing about music and publish it. What hadn’t really come into focus for me until last fall was that I could, and maybe should, do something similar as I approached 20 years of writing about music (the bulk of it as editor of the album review website the Daily Vault).

I did have one distinct advantage over Bernie Green, being alive and all. Which meant I was able to craft an introduction for the book, as well as new essays introducing each of its nine chapters. These essays delve into my personal musical history and philosophy of reviewing—including my not entirely rational aversion to the title “music critic”—and while most of the book focuses on album reviews, I’ve also slipped in a chapter featuring reviews of concerts and music-related books and films.

The new book will be published in both trade paperback and e-book form early next year. There will be much more to talk about in the weeks ahead, but for now, I’ll leave you with two things: my thanks for joining me on the journey, and the new book’s title, which for once isn’t a quote from a song lyric, but rather a line of my own:

My Heart Sings the Harmony:
Twenty Years of Writing About Music

See you again soon.