My Book Is Out Today

33 1/3 on Leonard Cohen, tribute albums, and cover songs

Hi all, I hope you’ll forgive a little self-promotional interlude - won’t become a regular thing, promise - but my new book is out today! It’s not explicitly on Bob Dylan, but he comes up. A lot. I wrote about how he comes up in this newsletter last month.

The book is in the 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums (they did Highway 61 Revisited a decade ago, and have done other Dylan-adjacent albums like Music from Big Pink). Mine, though, looks at the history of the tribute album through the lens of one tribute in particular: 1991’s I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen. It’s got R.E.M., Pixies, Ian McCulloch… but its main claim to fame is, without it, you wouldn’t know “Hallelujah.” (Which, in weird timing, was just played twice after Trump’s convention speech. So maybe right now you wish you didn’t know “Hallelujah”…)

I won’t belabor this - again, that earlier newsletter has way more info - but if you enjoy reading these newsletters, I think you’ll like my new book too. It’s my second, after 2017’s Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time, which also features a lot of Dylan content. You can find that one at this link, and a bunch of places to buy the new I’m Your Fan right here:

Bloomsbury | Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes and Noble | Bookshop

If you do buy it, head over to my main site, Cover Me, where you can claim a free mixtape I made of great lesser-known Cohen covers.

Thanks for indulging me. Be back to our usual business this Sunday - with the earliest Bob show I’ve covered to date, no less!

Ray