The Globe and Mail
An aptitude for bass guitar, a beer bottle tossed against a wall, a letter mailed to a major record label and a backstage selfie with Billy Corgan. That’s no surefire plan for rock ’n’ roll success, but it worked for Melissa Auf der Maur.
The former bassist for Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins has written Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir, one of the more intriguing music titles coming to shelves and shippers in 2026.
Books we're reading and loving in January
What is not coming is another book on Bruce Springsteen, ending a three-year streak. In 2025, it was Peter Ames Carlin’s Tonight in Jungleland; 2024 brought us Steven Hyden’s There Was Nothing You Could Do; and in 2023, Warren Zane’s Deliver Me from Nowhere inspired last year’s Boss biopic starring Jeremy Allen White.
Tramps like us, baby we were born to read.
Other music book highlights in 2025 include Cameron Crowe’s The Uncool, Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels, Peter Goddard’s One Foot on the Platform; Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine, Tom Piazza’s Living in the Present with John Prine, Peter Guralnick’s The Colonel and the King, Jason Schneider’s That Gun In Your Hand, Jeff Pearlman‘s Only God Can Judge Me, Paul Rappaport’s Gliders Over Hollywood, Stephen T. Lewis’s Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson’s Insomnia and Sam Sussman’s Bob Dylan-steeped novel Boy From the North Country.
The following is a list of much-anticipated titles for 2026.
The Work of Our Hands: A Cree Meditation on the Real World, Adrian Sutherland (Viking, Dec. 30, 2025) Although not specifically about his music, the Juno-nominated Cree artist ruminates on his extremely rural upbringing in Attawapiskat on James Bay and how it shaped his understanding of himself and his culture.
Ways of Listening: Building a Deeper Relationship with Music in the Streaming Era, Rollie Pemberton (McClelland & Stewart, May 26) According to the publisher, the adroit Canadian hip-hop artist Cadence Weapon (a.k.a. Rollie Pemberton) delivers “a love letter to music, a sharp analysis of our current cultural reality and a joyful celebration of the artists who keep creating against all odds.”
The Beatles in Canada: The Evolution − 1964-1970, Piers Hemmingsen (Self-published, December, 2025) The Beatles last performed in Canada on Aug. 17, 1966, when they gave two screamy concerts at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. But their story here did not stop with those shows, as illustrated by the follow-up to 2016’s The Beatles in Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania!. The stylish and informative coffee-table tome on the Fab Four this time concentrates on the post-yeah-yeah-yeah years.
Kiss ’76: Twelve Months That Defined the Hottest Band in the Land, Martin Popoff (Motorbooks, Feb. 24) In 1976, everybody moved their feet, left their seat and lost their mind when the grease-painted rockers Kiss released their breakthrough studio album Destroyer. With photos and text, Popoff charts the band’s revolutionary impact in the year of the U.S. Bicentennial.
Playing the Changes: A Musician’s Memoir, Colin James (Random House Canada, September) We know him as the Juno-winning blues-rock star who famously “just came back to say goodbye.” The coming-of-age memoir is his origin story: the hypochondriac son of Saskatchewan social workers who was mentored and befriended as a teenager by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
It’s No Wonder: The Life and Times of Motown’s Legendary Songwriter Sylvia Moy, Margena A. Christian (Grand Central Publishing, Feb. 10) A biography of the first woman to write and produce for Motown, the Detroit-based hit factory. Moy’s co-writes include Stevie Wonder’s Uptight (Everything’s Alright) and My Cherie Amour.
How Black Music Took Over the World, Melvin Gibbs (Basic Books, April 14) What connects Robert Johnson, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Beyoncé, John Coltrane and Nina Simone? Jazz and punk-funk bassist Gibbs explains the musical inheritance of Africa.
After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace, Robert Polito (Liveright, Jan. 27) The “voice of sixties” hasn’t had a top 40 hit since the 1970s, and his music in the 1980s was particularly unpopular. Since then, Dylan has thrived, his resurrection formally recognized in 2016 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Poet and educator Polito surveys Dylan’s ambitious later years.
Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir, Melissa Auf der Maur (Da Capo, March 17) From the Hole bassist and daughter of Montreal journalist Nick Auf der Maur comes what the publisher describes as “part rock memoir, part travel diary, part psychedelic scrapbook.”
Cher: Part Two: The Memoir, Cher (HarperCollins, Nov. 17) The second instalment of the singer’s two-part story picks up in the 1980s, when a momentarily stalled career was revitalized by several significant film roles and the fitting single If I Could Turn Back Time.
The Four Lads Book, Hans Jeff Borger (Self-published, January) Before the Fab Four, pop charts were ruled by male vocal quartets such as the Four Freshmen, the Four Aces, the Four Preps and Toronto’s the Four Lads. The latter foursome, whose string of hits included Istanbul (Not Constantinople) and Standing on the Corner, gets the bio treatment.