Wherever the Sound Takes You: Heroics and Heartbreak in Music Making

by David Rowell

David Rowell is a professional journalist and an impassioned amateur musician. He’s spent decades behind a drum kit, pondering the musical relationship between equipment and emotion. In Wherever the Sound Takes You , he explores the essence of music’s meaning with a vast spectrum of players, trying to understand their connection to their chosen instrument, what they’ve put themselves through for their music, and what they feel when they play.

This wide-ranging and openhearted book blossoms outward from there. Rowell visits clubs, concert halls, street corners, and open mics, traveling from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to a death metal festival in Maryland, with stops along the way in the Swiss Alps and Appalachia. His keen reportorial eye treats us to in-depth portraits of musicians from platinum-selling legend Peter Frampton to a devout Christian who spends his days alone in a storage unit bashing away on one of the largest drum sets in the world. Rowell illuminates the feelings that both spur music’s creation and emerge from its performance, as well as the physical instruments that enables their expression. With an uncommon sensitivity and grace, he charts the pleasure and pain of musicians consumed with what they do—as all of us listen in.
 

Genres: Music

248 pages, Hardcover

Published April 12, 2019

About the author

David Rowell is an editor at The Washington Post Magazine and has taught literary journalism at American University. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife and their two sons. The Train of Small Mercies is his first novel.

Reviews

[Beth Castrodale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rowell's love for music and his fascination with the ways in which it's made are at the heart of this entertaining, perceptive, and heartfelt book. Through in-depth interviews and thorough research, he explores the instruments and other tools through which musicians express themselves, sometimes in refreshingly unconventional ways. Rowell examines, for instance, the signature sound of Peter Frampton's Talk Box, and how it became such a defining aspect of Frampton's music. We also follow Rowell to Switzerland, on his mission to find an elusive percussion instrument known as "the hang," its sound like "a message from outer space."

In these stories and others, Rowell gives us fresh insights into how the means and ends of music-making connect, and into the people who forge those connections.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is interesting, but not very engaging to me. As a musician, and a composer, the author's search for rare instruments and sound-making devices was occasionally interesting. However, it just doesn't pull me in. Not enough of general interest.