Everything I Know About Self-Improvement I Learned From Music Memoirs
Let Keith Richards show you the way
In 1979, Debbie Harry informed the world that she, like many of us, was prone to heartbreak. The song “Heart of Glass,” which she co-wrote and sang with her band Blondie, went to number one in the United States and around the world. It made her internationally famous, but it didn’t necessarily solve her problem.
We know this because Debbie Harry’s new memoir, Face It, recounts the singer’s rise from playing the grotty clubs of New York to rubbing shoulders with giants like Andy Warhol and, literally, Andre the Giant. One way she was able to achieve and sustain success — and eventually work through some of those personal issues — was by constantly moving forward.
“I don’t like to dwell in the past,” Harry writes. “You do something, if you’re lucky you learn from it, and you move on.”
Like all the best rock memoirs, Face It is loaded with the kind of school-of-hard-rocks wisdom and inspirational messaging that makes the genre more than just a guilty pleasure. I should know. I’m addicted to the rise-fall-and-redemption stories of musicians. Over the past two decades, I’ve read around 150 of them.
