Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.
[This] volume find[s] Marcus doing what he does best: hearing what
you didn’t hear or nailing precisely what you did.
*New Yorker*
[Marcus’s] book is a prose poem describing American popular
culture’s embodiment in the media.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is] wonderful:
emblematic of Marcus’s interest in how words and melodies find
truths that survive the centuries, or appear likely to… He just
makes your spine tingle with the feeling he has for music and the
things he can perceive in it.
*Mojo*
Superb.
*Rolling Stone*
Greil Marcus may be the single most influential American music
critic of the past half century. A compelling stylist and seemingly
omnivorous listener, reader, and viewer of Americana, he teases out
echoes of American art and of U.S. history’s spiritual dimensions
to find a depth in pop forms that few others seek as seriously…
Brisk and brilliant.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is elegant and focused…
[It] examines the commonplace as a subject and a way of being, as a
language anyone might use and a way of listening that’s true to
ordinary life and all its plainness, order, customs, and moments of
the unexpected. The ordinary begins with performance, the singer’s
work, and in Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations, Marcus is
keenly attuned to the details of that work—to words but also to
sounds, the way notes drop off, rhythms shift, the way a guitar
(Wiley’s) can be ‘round, heavy, a stone that in an instant sinks to
the bottom of a lake.’ …Few risk writing this way about music
anymore; it’s alien, almost obscene to give inflection the weight
of meaning it receives here.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Wildly, lyrically, Marcus writes in Three Songs of seemingly
‘authorless’ compositions—songs by no one that belong to everyone,
that change as they appear and reappear with new interpreters… In
this alluring mystico-musicology, songs bend singers to their
disembodied will, not vice versa.
*New Republic*
Greil Marcus walks a fine line between grand, romantic, almost
dreamy poetic prose and analysis. The enterprise could easily have
turned purple, but he does it with consummate skill: distinctive
and readable, capturing the sense of a nation haunted by its songs.
And the notion that the ultimate accolade might be an artist’s work
acquiring anonymity is all the more resonant in an age of cheap
fame.
*Sydney Morning Herald*
Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is a beautiful and
hypnotic treatise about how songs journey from origin to ether,
from nowhere to everywhere, from a single voice to a common one. As
always, Marcus writes with an exhilarating musicality that posits
the reader inside the notes, directly upon the sonic road itself,
at once both visceral and transcendent.
*Carrie Brownstein*
Greil Marcus remains pop’s most visionary writer, following the
thread that flows like the ghostly Mississippi beneath America’s
musical traditions. He’s always essential reading.
*Bruce Springsteen*
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