As the end of the year rolls around, so do the “best-of” lists. Overall, 2025 has been a good year for music books, with several outstanding biographies and autobiographies as well as some thoughtful critical analyses of music history. There is a book for everyone on this list of favorite music books of 2025.
Peter Guralnick, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World (Little, Brown):
Guralnick is the king of Elvis studies, and his two-volume biography of the King—Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley—remain definitive. Now, drawing on over 700 letters of Elvis’ manager Tom Parker, Guralnick offers an captivating study of Parker and the complex relationship between him and Elvis.
Barry Mazor, Blood Harmony The Everly Brothers Story (Da Capo):
Music historian and journalist Mazor is adept at providing thoughtful and deeply researched biographies of key figures in American music such as Ralph Peer (Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music) and Jimmie Rodgers (Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century). Here he delivers an in-depth biography of the Everly Brothers, illustrating the ways the two brothers—despite their complicated relationship—produced unforgettable music both with their songwriting and through their harmonies.
David Sheff, Yoko (S&S):
Sheff—a close friend of both Lennon and Yoko Ono—draws on interviews with Ono and her friends and family, offering an illuminating, and definitive, biography of a woman who, now in her ninth decade, continues to challenge and expand the boundaries of art and music and to create edifying and inspiring works.
