Electrify My Soul
by Dan Kimpel
Price: $21.99

Songs are funny things; they so often just materialize out of thin air. Sometimes an artist will unwittingly plagiarize another, sometimes a few magic chords and lyrics just appear at first take and sometimes bands spend months trying to get it all to turn out right. Electrify My Soul, by Dan Kimpel, explores another source for this material: spirituality.
Kimpel’s idea of spirituality avoids the typical stigma of religious soul searching. Here, “spiritual sources” range from the palpable to impalpable, from personal to cultural, and are never the same in any two cases. Some artists find spirituality through the good times while others find it through troubling times. For instance, Melissa Etheridge attributes her success and first Grammy award to a spiritual awakening that came only after a battle with cancer. In retrospect she says the spiritual aspect was always there; she just never realized it. Marcus Hummon (who wrote Grammy-winning “Bless the Broken Road” for Rascal Flatts), on the other hand, was always aware of the spiritual backing of his song craft. He draws inspiration form his Christian beliefs and religious texts.
Other cases are more everyday and spirituality is only vaguely apparent. In his own spiritual quest, Kimpel, at times, gets lost in his own spiritual journey to find awe-inspiring artists. It becomes more of a book about writing a book than a book purely about spirituality. The individual’s accounts come together to form a scatter-plot graph of what Kimpel calls inspiration. Just because a spiritual reference creeped into a writer’s subconscious or came to them on a napkin in a roadside dinner doesn’t necessarily electrify the soul. The book becomes an anthology of spirituality that is more based on the individual artist’s writing processes than on any solid spiritual ground. Don’t be fooled by the soul stigma. (Cengage Learning)

-Jill Gaynor


The Musician’s LegalCompanion
by MichaelA. Aczon
Price: $26.99

Entertainment lawyer and Guitar Player columnist Michael A. Aczon takes a shot at a topic that tends to befuddle band members even more than paying rent on time: music contract law. Yes, it’s been covered over and over in past books, but given today’s ever-changing business climate, it’s always worth a look at new legal textbooks. Aczon gets into a lot of topical issues including last year’s favorite buzzword, the 360 agreement (“as you proceed in your career, do so with caution and evaluate the pros and cons of ‘packaging’ yourself prematurely”). Aczon covers all the usual bases in a clear and concise manner — paying your manager, negotiating deals with labels, getting through songwriting and publishing agreements — and runs through a sober list of how to deal with investors and lendors. “Fear or loathing of success is one of the main reasons people fail in the music business,” he writes. In the last section, geared toward bands and labels releasing records independently, he offers a checklist of bases to cover while making sure all your business is in order before the record comes out (Do you have the copyright for the artwork? Have you dealt with consignment agreements? Have you straightened out the master licenses for any compilations your recordings will be involved in?). All in all, Aczon’s book makes a great, quick read and would be a handy resource for anyone getting into the business. (Cengage Learning)

-Matt Parish