About this item
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.
About the Author
David Rowell grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the deputy editor at the Washington Post Magazine and has taught literary journalism at American University and creative writing at the Harvard Extension School. He is a former executive editor at the award-winning magazine DoubleTake, and his short stories have appeared in the anthologies Virgin Fiction and Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by Sixty-Five of North Carolina's Finest Writers. The Train of Small Mercies is his first book.
