Check Me Out - Haven April 2025

THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE

By Susan Rogers & Ogi Ogas

Have you ever been moved by a piece of music? So much so that you danced like no one was watching, sang at the top of your lungs, or were possibly even brought to tears? Award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers (also one of the most successful female record producers of all time) explains the science of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. Rogers also pulls from her insider knowledge to illuminate the music of Prince, Kanye West and many others. A mustread for any musicophile.

THE ROAD TO WOODSTOCK

By Michael Lang

In August 1969, four inexperienced promoters gave music lovers something they didn’t even know they wanted, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. The event got off to a shaky start but ended as one of the most significant moments in music history with an unexpected 460,000 people attending what ended up being a free concert. Michael Lang, one of the more experienced promoters, provides his backstage pass account of the hectic road to that historic weekend.

THE JAZZ MEN

By Larry Tye

The kings of jazz – Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie – share their path of becoming the most popular entertainers on the planet by way of a history lesson of Black America in the early-to-mid 1900s. Breaking boundaries of race and discrimination, they singlehandedly wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement using the techniques that have come to define the genre, including improvisation and complex chords.

IT’S A LONG STORY: MY LIFE

By Willie Nelson

Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993, Willie Nelson has lived anything but a boring life. Here, the nonconformist shares his journey from Texas to Nashville to Hawaii and back. His eight-decade career and life journey include songwriting, marriages, selling vacuum cleaners, and fires all while laying the groundwork for what would explode into country music’s Outlaw movement – blending country, rock, and folk.

ABSOLUTELY ON MUSIC

By Haruki Murakami

Crack open this conversation between bestselling author Haruki Murakami and his friend Seiji Ozawa, former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The two share a passion for music and over the course of two years discuss everything from Brahms to Leonard Bernstein, to Murakami’s ten-day visit to the banks of Lake Geneva to observe Ozawa’s retreat for young musicians. Full of insight, this read will delight fans of classical music.

TUPAC SHAKUR

By Staci Robinson

Controversial? Yes. Misunderstood? Yes. Influential? Yes. Nearly thirty years after his death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, Tupac Shakur continues to be one of the most influential figures in modern music history. Author Staci Robinson, who personally knew Tupac, unravels the myths and complexities that shadowed his life and career, and reveals the man that was unafraid to tell the raw truths about race in America through song.

GIRLS LIKE US

By Sheila Weller Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon blazed a trail, collectively impacting a generation of girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Confessing their lives through songwriting and becoming rock superstars, this triple biography that reads like fiction, shares their three distinct stories. With beginnings that range from Canadian farmers to the Manhattan intellectual upper crust, their life stories provide the rare glimpse into the female version of the mythic sixties’ generation.

ME

By Elton John

By the age of twenty-three, the shy boy from the London suburbs was performing his first show in America and the music world would never be the same. Through vivid storytelling, Elton John shares his struggles with addiction, his journey of acceptance and finding his true self, and countless anecdotes with stars from across the decades. One of the top-selling solo artists of all time (and also one of the most philanthropic), Sir Elton John does not disappoint.