Even dads who never rapped, weren’t in bands and didn’t go to hardcore shows did this: At some point they tried in various endearing dad ways to get their kids to listen to “their” music. Efforts by fathers everywhere to ratify their own taste by imprinting it on their offspring might or might not have succeeded, but here at Tertulia we applaud the impulse to hand down generational wisdom and heirloom copies of Straight Outta Compton. 

And what better time than Father’s Day to return the gesture? To help you show your love for the awesome parent who took you to see Foo Fighters or bought you your first David Bowie record, we’ve assembled a guide to new, recent and enduring books about music. We’re queueing up rock bios, rap histories, album profiles and impressionistic dives into music as a source of power, truth, beauty and belonging. It’s a playlist of books not just for music-geek dads but anyone with a reader’s curiosity about culture and the arts.

For the dad who knows his scotch whiskey from his bourbon

Quantum Criminals by Alex Pappademas

Few acts signify “dad rock” more than the brainy twosome from the ’70s known as Steely Dan. Theories abound as to why, decades later, college classmates Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (1950-2017) keep finding new champions for their literary, jazz-adjacent classic rock. In Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, writer Alex Pappademas and painter Joan Lemay — Dan fans both — go beyond explanation to produce the definitive Danomicon with this expansively argued and vibrantly illustrated survey of the songs, lyrics and characters populating the whole Steely Dan catalog.   

For the dad who doesn’t think Blake Shelton is country

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams

A singer and songwriter as pure as the alt-Americana queen Lucinda Williams was bound to write a book someday. Sure enough, Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir is a hardy self-portrait rendered in tough melodic prose and the musical backstory for the unique, gothic-electric Southern voice behind Sweet Old World and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

For the dad with the “Run DNC” novelty campaign T-shirt

The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop by Jonathan Abrams

Before “genre” became a menu heading in streaming playlists it had some basis in time, place and local conditions. With The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, bestselling author Jonathan Abrams gives a lively, deeply reported and researched account of one world-changing genre’s birth. As told by the people who were there, we see the emergence of rap, DJing and breakdancing at parties in the hard-knock South Bronx of the 1970s, and then a first wave global phenomenon powered by the music of Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow and more.

For the contrarian dad

Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

Let’s talk about the new Bob Dylan book, Philosophy of Modern Song: An “enthralling farrago of fabrications and tangents” (Slate) or “awful” and “awash with misogyny and crusty old man rants” (PopMatters)? The reception for Dylan’s 66 essays about 66 recordings by other people — from Nina Simone to Marty Robbins to Perry Como — is more divided than the generalized acclaim for Dylan the folk-rock pioneer and Nobel laureate. But if your dad likes an argument, he’ll find a few in these discursive and Dylanesque takes. (A safer bet for the non-contrarian dad might be Dylan’s critically lauded and much more autobiographical Chronicles: Volume One.)

For the dad who only dated women who liked early Cure records

Love Is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield

The writer Rob Sheffield met the love of his life in a bar in Virginia with a song by the band Big Star playing over the speakers. The relationship that began there, in a moment of shared recognition, and ended a few years later with his wife Renée Crist’s sudden death, is the heart of Love Is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. Sheffield’s emotional, intimate and often funny memoir of a love set to music — each chapter is prefaced with songs — is also a testament to how we define ourselves and find one another through the albums, tracks and bands we cherish.

When you want your dad to know you understand him even though you're emo

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

Essayist, poet, concert series curator, emo die-hard and Twitter force for good, Hanif Abdurraqib writes about society and culture in the 21st Century with a bracing clarity and lyrical air informed by his freewheeling love of music. Abdurraqib’s range and depth as an observer, thinker and listener are in full effect in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, his breakthrough essay collection about growing up Black in the Midwest, surviving in America, and finding community and consolation in Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Chance the Rapper, Carly Rae Jepson, The Weeknd and Fall Out Boy.

For the dad who listens to NPR’s “Science Friday”

This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

What’s going on up there when a person hears a song? The interplay between listening, physiology and social cues will occupy scholars across multiple disciplines for decades to come. But a great starting point is This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Daniel Levitin’s foundational yet accessible explainer draws on cognitive research to describe how arrangements of notes and rhythms get into our cerebral pathways — and sometimes past our defenses — to produce profoundly emotional reactions.

For the dad who lost his glasses in a mosh pit in high school

Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad

Like the Velvet Underground’s first album, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 puts anyone exposed to it at risk of starting — or restarting — a band. With its select portraits of rock ’n’ roll life on a shoestring, Our Band is also a work of amazing foresight. Azerrad singles out 13 influential American acts  — including Dinosaur Jr., Black Flag, Minutemen, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and Butthole Surfers — whose music enjoys more widespread cultural currency today than when the musicians were out there in the wild, bridging the gaps between punk and grunge.

For the dad who knows who “The Placemats” are

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr

Tweeting out a comparison between families and bands, rocker David Lowery (Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven) recently observed that unlike families, in bands “no one ever grows up.” Consider The Replacements, young hellions from Minneapolis who made brash, brilliant rock records, mostly in the ’80s, before drug abuse and clashing egos pulled the band apart. (There were brief reunions in the 2000s.) Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr is unflinching without being lurid, and it articulates why the ‘Mats, as fans called them, were so great (see also Our Band Could Be Your Life) even if the greatness couldn’t be sustained.

For the dad who knows a good rock critic when he reads one

The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper

The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic consists of Jessica Hopper’s trenchant essays on Kendrick Lamar, Superchunk, Lady Gaga, Chief Keef, Lana Del Rey, Liz Phair, Warped Tour commerce, and the intrepid women who worked for Rolling Stone magazine in the ‘70s, among other well-chosen subjects. The book’s quippy title is a nod to the influence of the late Ellen Willis — whose writings about rock music in The New Yorker starting in 1968 saw a posthumous revival in the 2010s — and a reminder that women are still fighting for space in the male-dominated field of music criticism.  

For the dad who loved “Auntie Entity” in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

I, Tina: My Life Story by Tina Turner and Kurt Loder

The death of singer Tina Turner has sparked a run on her music and sent her autobiography, I, Tina: My Life Story, back on to bestseller lists. Written with journalist Kurt Loder, I, Tina is a model rock-era memoir: Eventful yet confessional in ways that bolster the legend while also telling a remarkable true story of small-town beginnings, fame, near-ruin and triumphant revival. Turner, with her electrifying, leonine presence and voice to match, was a rarity for her chart-topping success across decades in R&B, rock and pop, first as a member of Ike & Tina Turner and then as a women who exited a hellish marriage to rebuild her life and career as a solo artist.

For the dad who hasn’t deleted the GarageBand software from his desktop

Dilla Time by Dan Charnas

J Dilla’s gorgeously weird and wavy, thumping beats opened up whole new tonal and emotional frontiers for a generation of hip-hop and neo-soul artists in the ’90s and ‘00s. His sound is everywhere today. Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm gets its name from a phrase that admirers used to describe his quantum sense of tempo. Born James Dewitt Yancey in Detroit, J Dilla died in 2006 at age 32 in Los Angeles of complications from chronic illness. A bad draw in life’s medical lottery is the only thing that kept him from continuing to innovate and grow. Journalist Dan Charnas has delivered an epic and breathtaking survey of Dilla’s recorded work, painstaking methods, all-too-short life  and overwhelming legacy as a producer, musician and recording artist.

For dads who freak out about that scary choir music in 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

In The Rest Is Noise, classical music critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker draws his own through-line marking the evolution of 20th Century symphonic music. It starts with a pair of Teutonic titans of an older musical order, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, as the jumping-off point into a new world of dissonant, neoclassical thunder (Igor Stravinsky), ordered atonal strangeness (Alban Berg) and jarring modernist combinations of those and more (György Ligeti). 

Even for orchestral or operatic music novices, Ross provides a gateway into a creative realm of huge artistic stakes and towering ambitions, and reading him makes you want to listen to these composers and hear what he hears.

For the dad who still has Encyclopedia Britannica on his bookshelf 

Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia

Where music arises, change follows could be a tl;dr summary for Music: A Subversive History. Ted Gioia, reaching beyond his well-established brief as historian and scholar of jazz, posits a universal theory of music as an engine of social rebellion and ungovernable cultural upheaval throughout human history, from the first societies through the modern technological civilization that has given us recorded music of every kind.

For the dad who rebuilds vintage Italian motorcycles in his garage

Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir by Stevie Van Zandt

If anyone in Bruce Springsteen’s orbit was “Born to Run,” it was his bandmate Stevie Van Zandt. The boisterous dude on guitar, backing vocals, and on lead bandana did not content himself with being a standout in the Springsteen-led E Street Band; Van Zandt the solo artist, songwriter, record producer, radio host, actor and social activist has lived a nomadic, seeker’s kind of life, racing far afield of his signature gig.

Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir is Van Zandt’s rousing tale of the Italian-made, New England-born Jersey boy Steven Lento becoming Little Steven, Miami Steve, Silvio to Springsteen’s Tony (to put it in Sopranos terms), co-architect of the rollicking “Jersey Shore sound,” and the all-star “Sun City” protest anthem writer who rallied musicians against apartheid South Africa. Van Zandt the memoirist writes with amiably ass-kicking authority — equal parts raconteur, Beat Poet, music scholar and grumpy boomer who will tell you, straight up, that, no, music today really doesn’t sound as good as the analog explosion of rock ’n’ roll, doo-wopp, R&B, gospel and country that made him who he is.

>> Check out our Father's Day Gift Guide list for more great books for Dad