These days, most music memoirs tend to be bleary-eyed and bloated chronicles in which artists recount who-slept-with-whom and tote up the quantity of the most mind-expanding, or mind-numbing, drugs swallowed or injected on tour. There’s a requisite tale of childhood, sometimes amidst ragged poverty and uncaring parents and sometimes in spite of supportive parents against whom the artists rebel. Then there’s the litany of life on the road and its pains and pleasures. If readers are lucky, somewhere in such memoirs the author writes a little about music and perhaps songwriting, but those moments are few and far between.
And then there is guitarist Mike Campbell’s Heartbreaker: A Memoir (Da Capo, March 18, 2025), a candid and lively reflection about his life and times as one of the world’s preeminent guitarists, focusing on his long tenure as guitarist and songwriter with Tom Perry and the Heartbreakers. Written with novelist Ari Surdoval (Double Nickels), Heartbreaker runs against the grain of the run-of-the-mill music memoir. Although Campbell carries readers through his career chronologically, he doesn’t dwell on the earliest chapters of his life nor how poverty shaped him. In two sentences, Campbell sets the scene, and it’s all readers need to know before he moves onto the music: “Jacksonville is where my mom grew up, poor as ragweed and pretty as Ava Gardner. She was a waitress in a diner and one day my dad came in, tall and handsome in his uniform, and whisked her away.”
