The Audiophile's Book Nook

Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" It sometimes surprises people to hear all of the music that I thoroughly enjoy. I have a fondness for some "oldies" of jazz and rock from the 1950s, the beginnings of rock in the 1960s as well as the continuation of these genres in the 1970s and 1980s. So it shouldn't be a complete surprise that one of my favorite albums is Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours", an album released in 1977 that still holds up today. The year of 1977 was an interesting one for music, featuring the releases of "The Stranger" by Billy Joel, The Clash's debut album, "News of the World" by Queen, "Low" from David Bowie, as well as the magnificent "Star Wars" score from John Williams. Amidst all of these iconic albums, Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" was released and made its way into this upper echelon of music. As soon as you sit down to listen to this album in full, it becomes clea...

Find the album at the bottom of this page and listen along! Anyone who knows me well knows that I'm a sucker for a good emotional hardcore album. Of course, listening to the first track of this album, you might think I'm insane for throwing the word "hardcore" anywhere near Jimmy Eat World. And yet, that's the genre this album lives in. As the genre of emo grew broader, Jimmy Eat World's "Clarity" became a touchstone of the genre, blending the power-pop/pop-punk of the mid-late 90s with lyrics akin to the emo bands that came before them. This album was another one that I found at the age of fourteen and it's still one of my absolute favorites. Its versatility and production help it to stand the test of time in a genre that lives in it. Jimmy Eat World was formed in 1993 in the town of Mesa, Arizona. Jim Adkins, Tom Linton, Zach Lind and Mitch Porter came together to record a debut album that has been since lost to time (and ...

For those who are unaware, I'm a big fan of Ice Dance. The sport, a sub-discipline of figure skating, first caught my eye during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, when Canadians Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir performed their short dance in the team event. I've been hooked ever since. Ice dance is often not as popular as the singles and pairs skating when the Olympics rolls around. Ice dance doesn't contain the jumps, the solo spins or the over-the-head lifts that pairs does and instead focuses more on the technical aspects of skating as pairs translate ballroom onto the ice. It's a sport with a rich history, both good and bad, and many rules that the casual viewer isn't often familiar with. However, I absolutely love it. I want to give it proper attention, give an overarching history and perhaps introduce some to a new sport to tune into during the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. Ice dance, in its current form, consists of two dances: a short dance and a free dance. The sho...

Starting this blog with fantasy only seems right, and what book has influenced the fantasy genre more than The Hobbit ? J.R.R. Tolkien's debut novel made fantasy a viable genre for kids and adults alike in a pre-World War II climate. I personally first read this book in middle school and it's no accident that its story and characters have stuck with me ever since. The Hobbit is a classic in its own right and deserving of the praise it gets. Tolkien was a man of Britain who had served in the First World War some years before the publication of this novel. Tolkien was a linguist and found pleasure in playing with language and making up languages of his own, most featured in his Lord of the Rings  trilogy. Tolkien first wrote The Hobbit as a stand-alone novel, starting it from the simple sentence, "In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit." Once he was finished with his novel, Tolkien sent it to many of his peers for critique, including C.S. ...

To start my analyses of books and music, I thought I'd start from the beginnings of my love for both. To do this, I have to talk about Paramore and their first album "All We Know is Falling." I first listened to this album as a fourteen-year-old girl in my basement. As soon as the first guitar chords blasted through the speakers, my taste in music was irrevocably changed. Buckle up, because we're going into the recesses of mid-2000s pop-punk for this analysis. Paramore was formed in 2003 by then-teenagers Hayley Williams, Josh Farro, Zac Farro and Jeremy Davis after Williams met the Farro brothers at school and bonded with them over their shared music interests. It was only a year after their formation that Hayley Williams was tapped by Atlantic Records and signed to a record deal, with the full intention of making her a Kelly Clarkson/Avril Lavigne type. However, Williams insisted that she wanted to make music with a band. Soon, the rest...