FRERE-JONES, Sasha
Earlier

Shuttling between 1967 and 2020, Earlier is a glorious sequence of moments, a record of the experiences that set the shape of a life. Sasha Frere-Jones’s prose floats between clinically precise fragments and emotional impressions of revelations, pleasures, and accidents. It’s a book about how lives happen and sensibilities form.

As fellow music critic Alex Ross observes, “It is weird to write a book about yourself, as this book is well aware. Gazing in the mirror is not mass entertainment. Sasha Frere-Jones, a writer of nonchalant, rope-a-dope power, drops the illusion of self-knowledge and instead offers up a kaleidoscope of memory shards, faithful to the chaos of inner and outer worlds. Earlier is funny, cool, raw, wise, and secretly sublime.”

Earlier is fundamentally a musical book, rooted in the interaction of rhythm, line, and voice. The main characters are 1 place and 3 decades: New York City, as seen in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

[publishers’ note]

Published by Semiotext(e), 2023
Memoirs / Music & Sound