What does music mean to you? Is it entertainment? Background noise? Or a consuming passion and constant presence in your life for as long as you can remember? For Daily Vault editor Jason Warburg, the answer has never been in doubt. Collecting more than 100 album reviews, artist interviews, and essays, My Heart Sings the Harmony: Twenty Years of Writing About Music is a love letter to rock and roll—and progressive rock, and power pop, and jazz, and Americana, and, truth be told, popular music itself. If you’ve ever experienced a moment when it felt like music changed your life, this book was written for you.
The pages of My Heart Sings the Harmony are populated by artists that range from the iconic—The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder—to the niche—Ronnie Montrose, the Jayhawks, Fountains of Wayne, Les McCann, Yes—to the relatively unknown. The book includes a chapter plus devoted to explorations of highly regarded independent artists like Arms of Kismet, Jill Knight, David Corley, Butchers Blind and Casey Frazier.
Album reviews are interspersed with a series of interviews with artists ranging from well-known names like Jon Anderson (Yes), Ronnie Montrose, Danny Federici (Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band), and Jonathan Foreman (Switchfoot) to emerging artists like Greg Spawton (Big Big Train), Chris Cubeta, and Jean-Paul Vest (Last Charge of the Light Horse).
Curated from two decades of reviews, interviews, and essays, My Hearts Sings the Harmony sums up one passionate music writer’s take on the classic albums, brand-new crushes, and unexpected discoveries that have fired his musical imagination. Warburg is also the author of Believe in Me, a novel set in the world of music, and its sequel Never Break the Chain.
Interview with Sloane Spencer of Country Fried Rock about My Heart Sings the Harmony
Praise for ‘My Heart Sings the Harmony'
“Jason Warburg writes with an unreasonable amount of velocity and heart. My Heart Sings the Harmony is a gentle, funny and thoughtful reminder about why music makes us feel so much, and offers the kind of emotional honesty that we rarely see anymore. Each piece here is like a sepia snapshot of a forgotten time, but one that can be called back immediately in just one note—and it’s in that one note where we feel most at home.”
— Alex Green, editor of Stereo Embers magazine and author of Emergency Anthems
“Jason Warburg is one of the finest music writers out there. My Heart Sings the Harmony demonstrates in a clear, passionate and unpretentious way the process of ‘acquiring musical memories’—Warburg is out to celebrate and share what he loves and why. You’ll more than likely be re-visiting some albums you may have given short shrift to, or searching for a new artist or album that, as Jason puts it, stops him in his tracks.”
— Bernadette Quigley, music publicist, QuigleyMedia