Writing Lyrics, Leonardo, and Music Business

From time to time, I share here some interesting readings. If you're curious, see what I was reading in 2011 and 2013. Here are three books I really enjoyed this year; I learnt a lot out of them!

In July, I read Writing Better Lyrics (amazon links). Pat Pattison explains very clearly his vision on writing song lyrics. The book is well illustrated with analysis of song lyrics and practice exercices directly connected to the content of the different chapters. Moreover, as I am not a native English speaker, this book helped me understand song-specific concepts of meter and rime, which are very different than meter and rime in French poetry!

As you can see in my work, I've been passionate about art and technology: it was almost obvious for me to read Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. It turns out that I had lost of pleasure throughout the book, even more than I expected. I learnt a great deal about Leonardo's life, and more generally about the history of art. I highly recommended this reading to the students of my Digital Arts: an Introduction course. Art and technology were intertwined in Leonardo's time; they still are and will be for a long time!

More recently, I picked-up All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald Passman. This fourth edition was quite enlightening. I had previous knowledge about copyright and music publishing, of course, but I still learnt a lot. This book is a good introduction, and quite fun to read!