When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. With It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and 'cross-colour' awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince - black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In "prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points" (Brian Dillon, frieze), Ian Penman's first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.

About the Author

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Uncut, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the LRB, and City Journal. He is the author of Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998) and Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions).

Reviews

'Ian Penman is popular music's Hazlitt - its chief stylist - and his sound is often equal to what he writes about. Each of his essays is an event, so this book is indispensable.'
- Andrew O'Hagan, author of The Secret Life

'It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track summons the lives and times of several extravagantly damaged musical geniuses and near-geniuses in (mainly) the brutal context of mid-century America - its racial atrocities, its venality, its murderous conformities. Ian Penman writes an exact, evocative prose as surprising as improvised jazz in its fluid progress from music criticism to social commentary to biography and back. He's found a way to be erudite without pedantry, entertaining without pandering. His ear for mesmerizing nuance is unmatched by any music critic alive.'
- Gary Indiana, author of Three Month Fever

'Consistently told me stuff I didn't know about stuff I thought I knew. No other 'music writer' combines such lightness of touch with such depths of diving.'
- John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

'Ian Penman's work has the tone, and the texture, and the complexities of the music and musicians he talks about, whether it's Steely Dan laughing up their sleeves, the thorny declines of John Fahey and James Brown, or Elvis's conflicted southern manners. It's sharp and incisive but also full of love; it is beautiful writing.'
- Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah

'How - in Penman's words - to be serious without being pompous, how to be simultaneously complex and seductive, how to give a hint of your own flaws and passions without being boorishly or presumptively autobiographical: such are the struggles of the high-end essayist-reviewer, and the tension at the heart of Penman's own pieces, since he started writing them, as a teenager, for the 1970s NME. The years have made his writing clearer, deeper, sadder, richer. This is a wonderful collection.'
- Jenny Turner, author of The Brainstorm

'Ian Penman is an ideal critic, one who invites you in, takes your coat, and hands you a drink as he sidles up to his topic. He has a modest mien, a feathery way with a sentence, a century's worth of adroit cultural connections at the ready, and a great well of genuine passion, which quickly raises the temperature. Penman writes about the monuments of popular music as if he had a personal stake in them - which of course he does.'
- Lucy Sante, author of The Other Paris

'Writing about music can often be a joyless and rather sterile exercise in point-scoring, fact-shaming and imposition of the party line, but rather than engage in musical vivisection, Ian Penman's mercurial, teasing, provocative prose presents him as a tap dancer - one who happens to use his fingers instead of his feet, and a keyboard instead of a sprung floor. Whether you agree with everything he says is beside the point. What matters is that he aspires to make the same shapes and rhythms on paper as his subjects do with particles of air.'
- Will Ashon, author of Chamber Music

Book Information
ISBN 9781804270110
Author Ian Penman
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions