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, andOther Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998).

Reviews

'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

'The eight pieces have a depth and expansiveness that transcend their origin as book reviews, several of them cannily commissioned by someone at the London Review of Books who saw his potential as a long-form essayist. ... What gets us home, as it were, is Penman's verve, and his eagerness to make us listen to the records as attentively as he does. ... his essays on James Brown, Charlie Parker and Prince aren't definitive; they are only inimitable.' - Anthony Quinn, Guardian