A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2021

“Thompson is a master showman . . . [Beeswing is] everything you’d hope a Richard Thompson autobiography would be . . . It’s both major and minor, dirge and ditty, light on its feet but packing a punch.”

 —The Wall Street Journal

 Now Featuring an Interview with Elvis Costello

 In this moving, immersive, and long-awaited memoir,beloved international music legend Richard Thompson recreates the spirit of his early years, where he found, and then lost, and thenfound his way again. Considered one of the top twenty guitarists of all time, Thompson also belongs in the songwritingpantheon alongside Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, andRandy Newman. Herethe British folk musician takes us back tothe late 1960s, a period of great change and creativity for both him and the world at large.

 During the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, justas he was discovering his passion for music, heformed the band Fairport Convention withsome schoolmates and helped establish thegenre of British folk rock. It was a thrilling period of massive tours, whereThompson was on the road in both the UK andthe US, crossing paths with thelikes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and JimiHendrix, as well as a time of heady and explosive creativity for Thompson, who wrote some of his most famous songs during this time. But as Thompson reveals, those eight years were also markedby upheaval and tragedy. Honest, moving, and compelling,Beeswingvividly captures the life of a remarkableman and musician during a period of artistic intensity, in aworld on the cusp of change.

 “An absorbing, witty, often deliciously biting read, as all rock memoirs should be.” —Los Angeles Review of Books