Two Music Books Worth Your Time — The Storyteller and Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)
I love to read. I made it a priority this year, a set a goal of reading 10 books in 2026 and I'm currently at 12. Next year's goal is going to have to be higher.
I like to read all kinds of different genres. My paternal grandmother (who was a retired librarian, brilliant and read about 12 a month) would tell me reading fiction was "rubbish". I do read fiction, but non-fiction, including books about some of my favourite musicians and bands are my favourites.
Here are two of the best. Jeff Tweedy is probably my favourite musician, and not surprising he's a great writer. Dave Grohl seems like one of the most relatable people in music, like a cool guy you could sit around and have a beer with. His writing is like that too and I hope he writes more books like this.
Dave Grohl — The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music (2021)
The Storyteller is not a conventional memoir structured around a chronological life story. It's more like sitting down with Dave Grohl while he tells you one great yarn after another — a series of episodes, memories, and vignettes that together paint a picture of a life defined almost entirely by a genuine, almost child-like love of music. The structure suits him perfectly. He's not a linear narrator — he's a storyteller, as the title suggests — and the book reads with the energy of someone who can barely get one story out before three more are lined up behind it.
What's interesting is what he chooses to focus on versus what he largely glosses over. You might expect a Grohl memoir to be wall-to-wall Nirvana and Foo Fighters mythology. There's some of that, of course — his relationship with Kurt Cobain is there, handled with care and evident love — but it's not the centrepiece. What Grohl keeps coming back to is the music itself, and the musicians. Story after story involves him meeting one of his heroes — Iggy Pop, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Little Richard, AC/DC — and reacting with the same slack-jawed, starstruck disbelief he probably had as a teenager, despite being one of the most famous musicians on the planet himself. It never reads as name-dropping. It reads as someone who genuinely cannot believe his luck and never stopped being grateful for it.
His family is woven throughout too — his mother, who he clearly adores, his wife, his daughters. There's a warmth to the whole thing that's hard to fake and impossible to manufacture. Either you're this person or you're not, and Dave Grohl clearly is.
This book is joyful and it moves fast, you want to get to his next story about Joan Jett putting his daughter to bed.
Who doesn't like cool music stories like that?
Jeff Tweedy — Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. (2018)
Now for something completely different.
Where Grohl's book is a celebration — exuberant, outward-facing, fundamentally happy — Tweedy's is something quieter, more internal, and in some ways more rewarding. Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) is the kind of music memoir that makes you think about creativity and struggle and what it actually costs to make art, and it does all of that in under 300 pages without ever feeling heavy-handed.
If you've read my Top 10 post, you already know how much Yankee Hotel Foxtrot means to me, which probably explains part of why this book hit so hard. But even setting aside the Wilco connection, Tweedy is a genuinely compelling writer — sharp, funny in a dry and self-deprecating way, and unflinchingly honest about some very difficult material.
He grew up in Belleville, Illinois, the son of an alcoholic father, in a household that was loving but complicated. He found music the way a lot of us do — as escape, as companionship, as the one thing that made sense when other things didn't. That thread runs through the whole book. The formation of Uncle Tupelo with Jay Farrar, the dissolution of that band (and that friendship), the building of Wilco, the legendary battle with Reprise Records over Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — all of it is covered, and covered honestly.
But the parts that stay with me are the ones I can relate to. Tweedy's struggle with addiction to prescription painkillers, his anxiety and depression, his migraines, his time in rehab — he writes about all of it with a clarity that never tips into self-pity or performance. He's not asking for sympathy and he's not mining trauma for dramatic effect. He's just telling you what happened, what it felt like, and what it taught him. Coming out the other side to his relationship with his wife Susie and their sons, including Spencer, who drums for him — there's a quietness to those parts of the book that hit harder than any rock and roll war story could.
There's also a thread throughout about creativity and songwriting — what it is, where it comes from, why it matters — that is genuinely insightful in a way that most musicians can't articulate. Tweedy has clearly thought hard about what it means to make music, not just how to do it, and those passages are worth the price of admission on their own.
If Grohl's book is the rock and roll party, Tweedy's is the long conversation afterward when everyone else has gone home. Both are worth having.
The Bottom Line
Read both. They complement each other beautifully — one all light and joy and forward momentum, the other more introspective and honest about the cost of things. Together they cover a lot of ground about what music means, why people dedicate their lives to it, and what that dedication looks like from the inside.
And if you're the kind of person who likes reading with a record on, both will send you straight to the turntable when you're done. That's the highest praise I know how to give.
