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 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
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George Jones' "The Grand Tour" revisited
Uncut, October 2008
“STEP right up,” he starts, “come on in.”
Anybody harbouring the mildest doubt that George Jones ranks, as an interpretive singer, among the finest to bless a microphone, a veritable Sinatra in rhinestones, should listen to those six words again (and, if necessary, again). There’s little else happening at this early stage of the opening cut and title track of 1974’s “The Grand Tour”, just a lone piano answering each phrase, and a lot is being asked of Jones. He has half a dozen syllables to introduce an album that will become country’s answer to Sinatra’s own “In The Wee Small Hours”, or even, assuming the ingestion of necessary quantities of Jack Daniel’s, country’s answer to the Taj Mahal: a resounding monument to heartbreak, desolation and grief.
Play it once more: “Step right up, come on in. . .” Jones is resigned, defeated, kicking open the door, inviting us to look around and help ourselves, for all he cares anymore. “. . . if you’d like to take the grand tour, of a lonely house, that once was home sweet home.” It is, instantly, classic country, the elevation of ordinary trauma to heroic melodrama, and Billy Sherrill’s gorgeous production rises to it. “I have nothing here to sell you,” Jones continues, as a symphony of strings and pedal steel assembles behind him, “just some things that I will tell you. . . some things, I know, will chill you to the bone.” Jones limps and whimpers from one room to another, pointing out the fixtures and fittings, but only really able to see what is no longer there: there’s the chair he sat in while she brought him the newspaper, the bed they shared, the closet full of her clothes. “As you leave,” promises Jones near the end, choking like someone determined to tell his story despite sensing that his audience is backing nervously away, “you’ll see the nursery. . . Lord, she left me without mercy, taking nothing but our baby and my heart.”
The reasonable reaction might well be to leave Jones festering in his snot-caked dressing gown until he sorts himself out, were it not for the fact that he has just unburdened himself of one of the very greatest country singles, and – more to the point – has barely started. Though Jones had little hand in writing this album, the songs could scarcely have reflected his personal circumstances more intimately. His superstar status was becoming tarnished by his erratic personal conduct. His tumultuous – to understate matters wildly – five-year marriage to Tammy Wynette was foundering. “If you saw me sober,” wrote Jones of this period in his autobiography “I Lived To Tell It All”, “chances are you saw me asleep.”
Jones was, at least, alert enough to wring buckets from each of the 11 tracks on “The Grand Tour”. The songs that follow that stunning opening are masterclasses in tears-in-the-beer songwriting: Ray Griff’s “Darlin’”, Hillman Hall’s “Pass Me By (If You’re Only Passing Through)”, Hank Cochran & Glenn Martin’s “She’ll Love The One She’s With”, Johnny Paycheck’s “Once You’ve Had The Best”. Possibly recognising that this epically lachrymose salvo could induce a recent lottery winner to sling a noose over a light fitting, the mood is lightened with “The Weatherman” – a giddily cheesy throwaway, penned by the same, clearly versatile George Richey/Norro Wilson/Carmol Taylor trio who wrote “The Grand Tour” – but only briefly. Jones, distracted but momentarily from his grief, takes another sobbing breath, and plunges to his grimmest depths yet.
Mel Street’s “Borrowed Angel” is a portrait of the torment of infidelity so fabulously wretched that one might assume that it dripped from the pen of an alcoholic depressive just a few years from suicide (one would, sadly, be correct). Bobby Braddock’s “She Told Me So” is an unimprovable study in the blindness caused by Cupid’s less inspired target selection, utterly heartbreaking yet bleakly funny: “There’s roses blooming in the Arctic Circle/Icebergs in the Gulf of Mexico/There’s not one star in Heaven/And eight don’t follow seven/But I’d believe it, if she told me so.” Earl Montgomery and J.R. Richards’ “Mary Don’t Go ’Round”, featuring a notably stellar performance from backing vocalists The Jordanaires, dares to contemplate reconciliation and redemption, but Jones’ wounded growl in the choruses suggests that he knows he’s kidding himself. He surrenders finally, and utterly – “I thought my life was so complete, but how wrong can one man be?” – on Carmol Taylor and Norro Wilson’s “Who Will I Be Loving Now?”.
This would have been an appropriately helpless closing, but instead “The Grand Tour” ends by rearing up and biting. The Jones/Wynette composition “Our Private Life” is bracingly vicious, sneering at fans who pore pruriently over the celebrity rags chronicling the travails of George, Tammy and similar: “You’re all excited, all uptight about our private life,” Jones spits, “But we gave it up for people just like you.” Intentionally or not, it’s an astute line: giving it all up for people just like us is what Jones has just spend 10 tracks doing.
“The Grand Tour” didn’t mark the nadir of Jones’ self-destruction – although 43 when “The Grand Tour” appeared, Jones still hadn’t, by his own account, discovered cocaine, for which he would develop a legendary enthusiasm. But he would, eventually, pull together both himself, and a creative partnership with his ex-wife, the inspiration for “The Grand Tour” – and she, four years after its release, would marry one of the authors of the title track. Such is the greatness of country, and the greatness of this album: soundtracks for the everyday stuff you still couldn’t make up.
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