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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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Cash & Haggard: An Appreciation
The Independent, October 2000
LAST Monday saw the release of “If I Could Only Fly,” a new album by Merle Haggard. Next Monday will find “American III: Solitary Man”, a new album by Johnny Cash, on the racks. This, you would have to think, is an auspicious moment for country music. The genre-defining genius of Hank Williams aside, there are no stars in the country firmament more revered than Haggard and Cash, and quite rightly: both are unimpeachable singers, incalculably influential songwriters, and benchmarks for unreconstructed rock’n’roll behaviour (beneath the veneer of old-school southern politeness, most country performers of Cash and Haggard’s generation made Ozzy Osbourne look like Ned Flanders.)
Most crucially, in a genre which professes to prize authenticity and experience above all else, the 68-year-old Cash and the 63-year-old Haggard are survivors, even if the aforementioned rock’n’roll behaviour has threatened this status more than once (Cash suffers from Shy-Drager syndrome, a neurological disorder related to Parkinson’s disease, and has also experienced bouts of pneumonia; Haggard recently told American magazine Spin that “I don’t mean to say I’m only buying half a loaf of bread, but I have to be realistic. I have dental problems. When the teeth fall out, the show is over.”). The two old friends and sometime collaborators now possess facial features that look like they were hewn from blasted oak, sing in voices laden with grim, time-wearied portent (Cash, at this point, could bring a mournful gravitas to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl”), and both have just proved themselves still abundantly capable of making terrific albums.
Haggard’s “If I Could Only Fly” is a beguiling mix of styles and moods, from playful rockabilly rave-ups to lachrymose country ballads of the sort that first made him famous. Cash’s “Solitary Man” is a thing of awesome power and beauty, including fine Cash originals alongside covers of songs by some of the uncountable artists he has inspired, some obvious (Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat”), some less so (U2’s “One”). Yes, you’d reckon, back on Nashville’s Music Row – the suburb of gleaming low-rise office blocks that functions as the self-proclaimed capital of all things country – it must be all but a public holiday.
Except that it won’t be. Though Nashville pays lip service to the likes of Cash and Haggard, hawking the posters and t-shirts, enshrining them in its hokey Hall of Fame museum, the town doesn’t have an awful lot of time for them or their legacy. Indeed, if Cash and Haggard hadn’t devoted such a proportion their mis-spent youths to proving otherwise, it might be possible to suggest that neither could get arrested in Nashville.
Cash was dropped by CBS in Nashville in 1986. As he recalls in his commendably plain-spoken autobiography, “Cash”, he had “got tired of hearing about demographics, the ‘new country fan’, the ‘new market profile’ and all the other trends supposedly working against me, that I just gave up. . . the last record I gave CBS was called ‘Chicken In Black’, and it was intentionally atrocious. . .”. Cash’s career was resuscitated in 1993 by his signing to Def American, the label owned by pioneering hip hop producer Rick Rubin. Haggard, after a similar period in the wilderness, is now with Anti-Inc, a subsidiary of the Los Angeles-based hardcore punk label Epitaph, better known for releasing albums by Rancid, NoFX and The Offspring.
“I read in a newspaper article that Merle didn’t have a label,” says Epitaph president Andy Kaulkin of his unlikely new signing, “which was completely mind-boggling to me. He belongs up there with Ray Charles and Bob Dylan. . . I guess he’s just not pop enough for Nashville.”
The exile of figures as colossal as Cash and Haggard from the country mainstream to the alternative sector is driven by two factors. First, the sense displayed by people like Rubin and Kaulkin in realising that a market exists among left-field music consumers wanting something that is at once appealingly nihilistic and rebellious, yet unarguably genuine and rootsy – there is no danger, at this stage, that Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard, of all people, will be revealed as a passing fad. Secondly, the grotesque banality of Nashville’s Music Row machine, as exemplified by last week’s annual Country Music Awards. Three prizes at this overwhelmingly fatuous parade of ten-gallon hats on half-pint heads were awarded to The Dixie Chicks, who are basically B*Witched with banjos, and the Female Vocalist Of The Year award went to Faith Hill, an alluringly windswept practitioner of the big radio ballad who is every bit as much a country great as Cher.
There is a reason for the current diabolical state of mainstream country. It was born in Oklahoma in 1962, and its name is Garth Brooks. Brooks – whose university degree, significantly, is in advertising and marketing – wedded the 60s country ballad form defined by Merle Haggard with the production values of 80s pop and the live theatrics of 70s metal, and sold more albums to Americans than any act in history bar The Beatles. Nashville has since committed all its resources to replicating this success, churning out a succession of barely distinguishable male solo artists who have far more in common with Billy Joel than they do with Hank Williams.
The happy irony is that outside of Nashville, if not in spite of Nashville, country music has never been in a healthier state. In the last few years, the still-burgeoning alt country scene has delivered great records by Willard Grant Conspiracy, 16 Horsepower, Sparklehorse, The Bottle Rockets, Slobberbone, The Old 97s, Calexico and Lambchop, among many others (and yes, though Lambchop are actually from Nashville, they’re as un-Nashville as could be imagined). If these are the acts with whom the likes of Cash and Haggard now find themselves sharing record labels, concert bills and fans, it’s appropriate: it’s in this milieu that the traditional country virtues of lyrical richness and understanding of musical heritage are preserved best, coupled with a reckless, post-punk sense of possibility and adventure that can only appeal to two veteran outlaws. For Cash, Haggard and any others of their vintage still more interested in the possibilities of their music than a slice of Garth Brooks’ financially lucrative but spiritually worthless action, the apparently incongruous career moves they’ve made recently are not desertions but homecomings.
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