Traveling Music: Playing Back the Soundtrack to My Life and Times FROM THE PUBLISHER
In March 2003, Neil Peart, the international bestselling author of Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, a haunting, critically acclaimed, and award-nominated memoir, was thinking about life's eternal "Now what?" questions. The previous year, Peart, the lyricist and Hall of Fame drummer of the legendary rock band Rush, and his bandmates, Alex and Geddy, had released a bestselling album, Vapor Trails, and toured North, Central, and South America. Now he was enjoying some time at home in California with his wife, Carrie, but at the same time feeling an author's creative urge to write a new book, without knowing yet what it should be.
Needing time to think about book ideas and other "Now what?" questions, Peart decided to drive his new dream sports car, a BMW Z-8, on a six-day, 2,500-mile roundtrip journey to Big Bend National Park, in southwest Texas, and listen to "traveling music" all the way, by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Linkin Park, Miles Davis to Radiohead, Patsy Cline to Madonna. As he drove and listened, he experienced the traveling essence of music itself, and the songs took him on voyages of memory, imagination, emotion, sensation -- and when he reached Big Bend Park on the third day, creative inspiration: "A story could be written just around the music I've listened to on this trip."
Written with the most resonant distillation of words and rhythm, in the poetic sense of being suggestive of meaning, but allowing the reader's own music to create the soundtrack, Traveling Music is Peart's exhilarating, inspiring, appreciative celebration of excellence in the artists who inspired his own creative odyssey, from childhood to maturity -- growing up in Ontario, Canada, living in London and the United States, and a near-lifetime of constant world travel as an adventurer, including a characteristic, month-long bicycle trip through West Africa and drumming with an African master. Through the power of his storytelling, all of the past and present comes alive, in music and memory, songs and stories.
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