Sonic Book Cover Intrigue!

After two plus years of birthing throes, my installment in Continuum's 33 and 1/3 series on Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, is headed to press! It's true--Gabriella, Continuum's awesome production coordinator, has confirmed: we will see bound copies by April 1st at the latest. And it appears as though, based on the image above, the book will even have a cover. Be warned, however, there are some unresolved, dramatic tensions currently surrounding the layout and color scheme!...More on that in a bit.

First, look closely! Located beneath the 33.3 logo and album cover shot, in fine print, you'll notice an announcement indicating that the volume comes fully loaded with a foreword from Lee Ranaldo. I'm totally thrilled to include his piece in this project. Lee strikes just the right tone, properly setting the mood for the rest of the book. If his foreword isn't incentive enough for you to preorder multiple copies, then maybe this will help: If you order now, I promise to inscribe each copy with a personalized, secret author's message!

A couple of intrigues concerning cover elements:

Careful observers will notice that the layout version above deviates from the standard 33.3 format. Usually, color elements from the respective album's front cover art are matched and reproduced on the book's cover. Opening up the palette a bit, this model includes the crimson-ish red Sonic Youth used for the spine, back, and inserts of the DGC and Blast First releases of Daydream. Gerhard Richter's candle image, for all its stark power, leaves little in the way of color options for the purposes of the book's design; unless, of course, you count vapor, tears, and November as colors. Anyway, to give the layout some impact, we're trying out this brick-y scheme. What do you think; vapor/tears/November or bricks? I'll post the alternate, standard-format version soon...Then we can have a fight about which one to use!

Color fights! Fun!

Also, the author bio you see on the cover will have its cheekiness chopped out in the printed version. For now, enjoy it here as an online content exclusive! In the end, I feared the snarky quality of this entry would wear me out over the years (50, 100 reprints down the line). So it's being brutally axed before we publish.

I guess it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: I'm not asking you to read my book (but you should!) so much as I'm asking you to buy ungodly quantities of it. That said, should you wind up cracking its spine, I hope you'll find yourselves pleasantly surprised by its readability. I tried very hard to make it zippy and accessible for both the seasoned music crit freakers of the world and those of you who have more important things to do with your time than sit around reading books about and listening to amazing records all day long (though it's beyond me as to what those things could possibly be).

By way of further enticement, here's a short list, left tantalizingly vague, of some items you can expect to encounter within the book's pages:

Hornets
Bullets
Perverts
Teeth/Ears
Russians
Nihilists
Murderers
Juvenile Delinquents
Cucumbers
Hookers
Calvin Coolidge

No shit!

Anyway, we're getting real close to this baby actually hitting shelves! I'll be using this site as a venue for posting urgent updates, emergency reading announcements, and more must-see, web-only exclusives (including extra transcript material from my interviews with Sonic Youth).

Thanks for reading!