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| "The best foreign correspondent of his generation." —P.J. O'Rourke
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"Andrew Mueller's piece on my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favorite thing ever written about us. It comes closest to capturing the hard work, craziness and ridiculous fun we have doing what we do. The fact that he is a war correspondent (although 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. The fact that he also is such a great storyteller and does so with such an acute (albeit black) sense of humor makes him that rare beast whose byline I seek out every month."
—Patterson Hood from Drive-By Truckers |
"Andrew Mueller knows the best stories usually linger at the edges of the main event. No matter if it is a rock show or a war, Mueller finds the longest way there. This is not a gimmick, or by accident. This is just good story telling. He conveys a sense of world-weary cynicism and sublime humor in the same paragraph and I imagine he has distaste for happy endings, even though he seems to keep living them, over and over."
— Bill Carter, author of Fools Rush In and Red Summer
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| “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, on I Wouldn't Start from Here |
| His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company. —The Los Angeles Times, on I Wouldn't Start from Here | |
Rock and Hard Places: Travels to Backstages, Frontlines and Assorted Sideshows
Andrew Mueller
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| Paper | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 320 pgs. | ISBN: 1-59376-268-2 | List: $15.95 | 03/1/2010 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: Andrew Mueller is Australian by birth, Londoner by choice, wanderer by nature, and journalist by profession. Unable to decide between being a rock critic, travel writer, or foreign correspondent, he hit upon the novel, if time-consuming, solution of trying to be all three at once.
In Rock and Hard Places, a collection of Mueller’s best journalism from the early nineties to the present, he travels to Lebanon with the Prodigy, visits Canada with Green Day, comes to America with Radiohead, and roams all over the place with U2. He ventures to Bosnia and Herzegovina with an aid convoy in the middle of the war, sees Def Leppard play in a cave in Morocco, attempts to ask the Taliban what they think they’re up to and takes his own country band on tour to Albania. He visits Tupelo, Mississippi, where the greatest of American entertainers was born, and Branson, Missouri, where the rest of them go to die. He ventures into radioactive Chernobyl, chases ambulances through Moscow, sloshes miserably through the mud at Woodstock II, wakes up at least once in a park in Reykjavik, flies the world’s least commercially sensible air route (IranAir, from Tehran to Caracas) and strongly advises avoiding the seafood salad in Sapporo Airport. He’s funny. Occasionally, he makes a point.
About the author: Andrew Mueller was born in Wagga Wagga, Australia, and lives in London, England. He writes about various things for various titles, including The Financial Times, Monocle, The Guardian, The Times, Esquire, Uncut, Australian Gourmet Traveller, New Humanist and, frankly, anyone else who’ll have him. Another book of his, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong, was lauded as “Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga,” by The Wagga Wagga Advertiser. Andrew Mueller is also the singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist with The Blazing Zoos, an incipient alt-country phenomenon who released their debut album, I’ll Leave Quietly, in 2010. Mueller plans to spend the royalties generated by its success on an immense and triumphantly gauche Nashville mansion with rhinestone-studded gates and a guitar-shaped swimming pool. Or, a sandwich. His hobbies include swearing at televised sporting fixtures, sighing at newspapers, and the maintenance of a minutely annotated list of people who’ll be sorry when he’s famous. Form an orderly queue, ladies.
Visit the official website: |
