|
menu
 "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
|
|
Why Country Music Rules
The Sun-Herald, June 2007
AN old joke. What happens when you play a country record backwards? You find a job, your truck starts, your wife comes home and your dog rises from the dead. It’s a funny gag, but it assumes that its audience will subscribe to a common prejudice: that country music is maudlin, cliched, reactionary schlock exclusively purveyed by dim hicks in daft hats, of interest only to drooling yokels seeking something simple to hum between roasting squirrels and fucking their sisters. Country-hatred is the last acceptable cultural bigotry: one may venture generalisations about the form and its fans that would provoke uproar if one made them about reggae and Rastafarians. Well, to hurl the blanket discrimination back whence it came: any preening snob who gazes down his nose at country is a gormless, soulless sock-puppet who – more to the point – doesn’t know what he’s missing.
Before establishing the case for country, it is necessary to define the term. I’m not arguing in favour of modern alt.country – though this tendency has produced many fine records, they’re usually freighted with sufficient post-modern trappings to avoid affronting the self-consciously sophisticated. What I am urging upon you is old-school tears-in-the-beer country, the palette of twanging guitars, crying violins, lonesome lap steels, duelling banjos and the peremptory interring of feckless exes beneath convenient sycamore trees. Despite the best efforts of sneering ignorami to tar the genre with a reputation for moronic sentimentality and nasal whining, it has produced some of the sharpest writing, and magnificent singing, in all popular music.
The best description of country was coined by Harlan Howard: “Three chords, and the truth”. As Howard – who wrote the imperishable “Heartaches By The Number” and “I Fall To Pieces” – appreciated, those strictures focus a writer to formidable effect. Country lyrics are as terse, disciplined and compelling as a tabloid news story – and as any journalist will confirm, those are way harder to write well than a florid broadsheet thinkpiece. Country titles are an art in themselves, the teasing headline above the copy: “Is She All You Thought She Would Be?”, “I’m Wasting Good Paper”, “My Shoes Keep Walking Back To You”. Crucially, the words are also funny – and, yes, deliberately so.
Country songs are the thing you sing because if you weren’t laughing you’d be crying. Country understands and underscores that the cruellest aspect of tragedy, especially of the romantic variety, is that it’s also comedy. No man with a slow-healing heart could mistake the morose truth of George Jones’ characteristically wry yet lachrymose reading of Dickey Lee’s “She Thinks I Still Care”: “Just because I rang her number by mistake today/She thinks I still care.” And this crisp lyrical realism, along with the wide open spaces of the tunes, gives the great country singers room to sing it like they mean it – and they mean it like no other singers. Measured against Jones, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, Jean Shepard or Tammy Wynette, any given opera star is just a bellowing ponce with frilly sleeves. Mere rock and pop vocalists, meanwhile, sound like the bloodless wretches they generally are.
A little over a year ago, I made the transition from country fan to country singer. This ensued from a peculiar sequence of events which are outlined in sections of my 21st century travelogue and memoir “I Wouldn’t Start From Here”; I am led to believe this is presently available from reputable booksellers. In giddyingly swift sequence, I was imprisoned in West Africa, if mercifully briefly, trod on something of a romantic landmine back home, and then, at the precise point at which enthusiastically drinking oneself to sleep would have been the natural recourse, was dispatched on assignment to Libya, where booze is illegal. A new career in country is by some stretch the least peculiar thing that will occur to a man towards the end of the fourth night’s gawping blankly into the Mediterranean from a 21st-floor Tripoli hotel suite while huddled in foetal communion with the George Jones albums on his iPod, as he cradles a bottle of alcohol-free lager and desperately wills it to ferment.
Since then, I have played solo in Nashville, where another hack turned country singer, a talented and wise man named Billy Cerveny, imparted the credo which has guided my steps ever since: “Because,” as it says on his stickers, “the ass ain’t gonna kick itself.” I have taken my band, The Blazing Zoos, on tour in Albania – this seemed reasonable, at the time. We are gigging semi-regularly in London. And we’ve been surprised and delighted as the rough demos which thus far comprise our recorded oeuvre have been played on the radio in the USA, Ireland and Poland. I can now attest that while listening to country music is potent balm for the hurting heart, writing it and singing it is even more so. The modern Nashville star Dierks Bentley is a little polished for my unreconstructed tastes, but he was as right as a man can be when he said that “Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy.”
That’s why country is great. It’s because country is what life is like – often surprising, though within broadly predictable parameters, cruel and amusing in random measure. Country is songs of experience, music for grownups, sadder and wiser than the adolescent yelpings of rock’n’roll and the juvenile simpering of pop. Truly, where country music is concerned, if you are not – to paraphrase Tommy Collins as sung by Faron Young – lovin’, you ain’t livin’.
PRINT PAGE | BACK TO TOP
|
|
