Also of interest...in musings on pop music

Who Is That Man?

by David Dalton (Hyperion, $27)

For 50 years and running, Bob Dylan has been a shape-shifter, said Colin Fleming in The Washington Post. Veteran rock biographer David Dalton “has taken a more involved approach” than previous Dylan portraitists, considering each successive persona the artist has adopted and arguing that Dylan’s fabrications are his most interesting features. Dalton is also a penetrating critic. His take on Blood on the Tracks—“as gut-wrenching an album as there is in rock ’n’ roll”—is “the freshest you’ll find.”

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On Celestial Music

by Rick Moody (Back Bay, $16)

“Some of the best writing on music in recent years has come from fiction writers,” said Ted Gioia in the San Francisco Chronicle. Novelist Rick Moody is a “first-rate” music writer, and his new essay collection offers “probing assessments” of such usual-suspect alt-rock bands as Wilco and Sonic Youth. Still, he’s “at his best championing artists others deride or ignore.” The Lounge Lizards’ edgy New York jazz comes off well, as do some of the efforts of Depeche Mode and Jethro Tull.

Fear of Music

by Jonathan Lethem (Continuum, $13)

The best way to read this brief treatise on the 1979 Talking Heads album of the same name is to listen to the music simultaneously, said Jesse Jarnow in TheMillions.com. Yet Jonathan Lethem’s reverent dissection of the record enables any reader to hear it build track by track as the novelist’s observations open up “a much bigger conversation about art and life and music.” This is exactly what a monograph about a pop album should be: “not too abstract” and “a good introduction to an album’s culture.”

Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll

by Marc Dolan (Norton, $30)

The latest Springsteen bio “suffers from the fan’s obsession with completism,” said Ian Crouch in The Boston Globe. Across its 500-plus pages, “every record, bootleg, and live performance” of the Boss’s career seems to garner analysis. But obsessiveness is also the book’s strength, because Marc Dolan’s subject is the career-long dialogue between an audience and an artist who wrestles endlessly with the expectations that his music has engendered.