Voices

How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life

Nick Coleman

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What it is that makes some singers' voices magically change your emotional state?

***ONE OF BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN MUSIC BOOKS OF 2018***

'A brilliant book about singing. I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it' Nick Hornby in The Believer

What happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing?

The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences - as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself.

Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn. Above all, it is a story of what it means to feel.

Published: 7 March 2019
ISBN: 9781784701338
Imprint: Vintage
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
RRP: $37.00

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About the author

Nick Coleman

Following a brief spell as a stringer at NME in the mid-1980s, Nick Coleman was Music Editor of Time Out for seven years, then Arts and Features Editor at the Independent and the Independent on Sunday. He has also written on music for The Times, Guardian,Telegraph, New Statesman, Intelligent Life, GQ and The Wire. He is the author of The Train in the Night, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize.

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Praise for Voices

Voices isn’t just illuminating and thought-provoking and clever; it is exciting.
Roddy Doyle

A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it
Nick Hornby, The Believer

A deeply personal hymn, aria, sea shanty and saloon bar serenade… Voices is not merely an elegantly written study of a parade of fabled artists, but a long, heartfelt song of gratitude. It’s well worth hearing.
Graeme Thomson, The Mail on Sunday

Unusual and affecting… An elegant, controlled writer whose curiosity is as engaging as his whooping passion.
Jane Graham, Big Issue

Exhilarating… Coleman hears better and more clearly with half an ear than the rest of us do in a lifetime with two.
Alexandra Coghlan, Spectator

Not just a gallery of pen portraits of [Nick Coleman's] favourite singers but an impassioned examination of why certain voices ‘speak’ to us… Like the best music criticism of yore, [Voices] tangentially covers the history of popular music… He’s enjoyably sniffy about Jagger; insightful on Joni… but mostly Voices believes in magic.
Chris Roberts, Classic Rock