PAUL ON THE RUN: The Best Music Books of 2025: Cameron Crowe, Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne and More

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The Best Music Books of 2025: Cameron Crowe, Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne and More

By Jem Aswad

VARIETY

Dec 16, 2025

We say this every year, but any list of the year’s best music books is even more of a losing proposition than best albums or songs, primarily because of the time investment — so any such list is doomed to being “some of the best music books.” With that inevitable caveat, although this year lacked a jaw-dropping must-read along the lines of Cher’s “The Memoir” or Elton John’s “Me” — which are arguably the most continually satisfying music memoirs of the last decade — there’s still plenty to dig into.

What we music-memoir junkies are usually seeking is, if not the dirt, then at least great anecdotes, especially ones that we haven’t read before. Which brings us to a second caveat: A couple of books in this tally aren’t necessarily compellingly written and would have benefited from a skilled editor, but the stories in them largely deliver the goods. However, that is most certainly not the case with the first on this list…

“The Uncool” Cameron Crowe

“The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told” Bill Janovitz

“The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World” Peter Guralnick

“Wings” Paul McCartney / “The McCartney Legacy Volume 2: 1974-1980” Allan Kozinn / Adrian Sinclair

If anyone ever felt that that 1970s/ Wings-era Paul McCartney was insufficiently documented, they’re drinking from a firehose this year. While Tom Doyle’s 2013 book “Man on the Run” is a concise and compelling overview that should suit most fans just fine, these two imposing tomes fall under the “everything you could ever want to know and then some” category. Like his first volume (covering 1969-73), Kozinn’s doorstop goes into near-daily detail about McCartney’s recording sessions, tours, business and life. While the attention to detail is formidable in its execution, this era covered the peak of McCartney’s ‘70s popularity although not the peak of his creativity (that was in the previous volume) so these graduate-school-level deep-dive details on albums like the treacly 1978 set “London Town,” or mediocre peripheral efforts like his brother Mike McGear’s solo album, can sometimes strain one’s attention.

More digestible is “Wings,” an oral history of those years told via interviews with dozens of musicians and friends, as well as McCartney himself and his late wife and Wingsmate Linda, who died in 1998. It is no understatement to say that she was unfairly Yoko’ed, and while her skills as a keyboardist were rudimentary, her singing in particular remains an essential component of McCartney’s music at that stage, and her personality emerges vividly in these pages — her commentary is often more engaging and revealing than that of the man himself. — Jem Aswad

“Ozzy Osbourne: Last Rites” Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres

“Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City” Mark Ronson

“Yoko: A Biography” David Sheff

Sheff has walked this road before: He wrote the famous expansive Playboy interview with Yoko and John Lennon at their Dakota apartment just months before Lennon’s assassination, and even titled his own memoir “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction,” after a song from “Double Fantasy.” Yet over the years, he befriended Ono and came to a rare understanding of her life and art: Her family’s Tokyo home being destroyed by U.S. bombers and their ensuing poverty; her work with avant-garde art groups in New York before meeting Lennon; her broken marriage to American film producer Anthony Cox; her custody battle and the subsequent loss of their daughter, Kyoto, for over 25 years. And not least the ongoing nightmare of Ono’s demonization by Beatles fanatics who saw her as the cause of the group’s breakup — even after Lennon admitted to conceling Ono’s credit for co-writing songs such as “Imagine” (which was rectified in 2017) due to his own fragile male ego. While Ono’s stature as an artist has largely been rehabilitated, Sheff brings hue and shading to her story. —A.D. Amorosi