Slate - Carl Wilson
“Full of vivid material, beautiful language, and wise observations, Good night the pleasure was ours captures the embodied practice of music making and living as a musician in a mode that has never been written quite this way before. It opens up possibilities for me as a music writer and I imagine for anyone else seriously engaged with creative nonfiction, poetry, and the arts in general. It will set off creative ripple effects.”
John Darnielle
“I’ve been touring since 1994, and I’ve read dozens if not hundreds of tour diaries. This one is special. David Grubbs’s insights into the ephemeral quality of playing live music are razor-sharp, having a ‘yes, exactly’ quality for me page after page.”
The Cheerful Scapegoat - Wayne Koestenbaum
“David Grubbs, dazzlingly protean, turns musical-time into poetry-time by streaming condensed, sonorous phrases through his own magical verse-machine, Dantean in its three-pronged approach to paradise. Grubbs takes the entire experience of music making—listening, practicing, improvising, recording, performing, touring, reconsidering, remembering—and gives these complexities a porous and filigreed poetic form, transforming an evanescent panoply of acoustic events into a bravura verbal monument, as if Cage and Mallarmé had found a way to build a singing cathedral together.”