Publishers Weekly
05/23/2022
Legendary songwriter Loggins brings the energy of his live performances to the page in this exhilarating look at his career. His lively recollections whisk readers from his rise to fame as a member of the 1970s rock duo Loggins & Messina through his peak as a solo artist, his decline into drug addiction and depression, and his triumphant return to the stage as a legacy artist. While he hits all the requisite details—writing his two most famous songs (“House at Pooh Corner” and “Danny’s Song”) at age 17, the creative differences that led him and Jim Messina to dissolve the band and later cut ties, his “post L&M life,” the excesses of touring (including an addiction to benzodiazepines)—Loggins’s frank reflections on his craft are what beg an encore. In one particularly memorable passage, in which he fondly recalls the recording sessions that led to the release of his 1977 hit album Celebrate Me Home, he even admits to “blow it” with James Taylor: “I’d brought the guy in specifically because nobody plays acoustic guitar like James Taylor, then, through some combination of ego and insecurity, proceeded to tell him how to play.” Fans won’t want to skip this one. (June)
From the Publisher
A wonderfully written book…very honest and very entertaining.”—Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post
“A page-turning memoir…The book is an honest, straightforward account of [Loggins’] rock n’roll career.”—Margaret Hoover, PBS’ The Firing Line
"Highly entertaining."—Spin
“A good beach read for the yacht-rock generation.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Legendary songwriter Loggins brings the energy of his live performances to the page in this exhilarating look at his career.... Loggins’ frank reflections on his craft are what beg an encore.... Fans won’t want to skip this one."—Publishers Weekly
“Still Alright seems almost perfectly balanced in that includes plenty of words of all three legs of a good Rock Memoir Stool: creative/recording process, personal revelations/insight, and stories/anecdotes.”—HoustonPress
“Loggins’ thoughtful reflections on the process of songwriting turn this memoir into more than a run-of-the-mill rocker’s reflections on a life of sex, drugs, and, oh yeah, rock and roll. Songwriting occupies the center of Loggins’ narrative…His appealing memoir celebrates him home in fine form.”—No Depression
Library Journal
06/01/2022
Loggins has had a highly successful career, moving from the gentle folk/pop of his Loggins and Messina days, to becoming king of the 1980s film soundtrack with songs like "Footloose" and "I'm Alright." At 74, he looks back over a life fairly well lived, recounting his burgeoning music career in California in the late 1960s and his meetings with almost every major star of the 1970s. Loggins takes readers on an informative but fairly familiar ride through the life of an American rock star. An interesting through line is his older brother, about whom he wrote "Danny's Song" when Danny first realized he was going to be a father. Danny was also instrumental in his brother becoming a recording artist as he worked in A&R for Columbia Records in 1970. Some of Loggins's anecdotes are surprisingly shallow, but he does provide great stories about songwriting and the recording process, and he's very candid about his two marriages and his relationships with people like Jim Messina, Michael McDonald, and many other musicians and writers with whom he's collaborated. VERDICT A sure hit, but just for devoted Loggins fans.—Peter Thornell
Kirkus Reviews
2022-04-08
A breezy journey through a prolific musical career and some personal turbulence.
Loggins (b. 1948) comes across as a genial guy who is eager to please. He details relationships in which he was the disciple who followed the leader only to resist and resent that sort of direction. Case in point: Jim Messina, the author’s longtime collaborator. Loggins had the voice, songs, and onstage charisma, but Messina was indisputably the leader who retained control (and had a more lucrative contractual detail). We also see this pattern in the breakup of Loggins’ second marriage, to a younger woman who had served as a kind of therapist and spiritual guide. When he developed ideas of his own about the relationship that conflicted with hers, she left him. With such narrative framing suggesting a lot of soul searching, the author mostly keeps things light, hitting all the marks common to rock-star memoirs: family struggles during childhood; the salvation through rock music, especially the Beatles; confidence gained through successful performing; and the drugs, groupies, depression, and dependence on antidepressants. Loggins doesn’t come across as the deepest thinker, but he’s clearly someone who works well with others, as his relationships with Michael McDonald, Stevie Nicks, Barbra Streisand, and a host of top-flight producers and studio musicians attest. As changing trends scuttled the careers of so many of his peers, he was able to navigate his way from country-tinged rock to blue-eyed soul to what would become known as yacht rock. In addition, Loggins scored big with soundtrack hits such as “Footloose” amid the music industry’s upheavals through disco and MTV. It has been decades since the author’s commercial peak, and he lost his major-label contract in 1998, but he has a fairly interesting story to tell, and he enjoys telling it. “At this point in my life,” he writes, “the struggle for the kind of acclaim I knew in the ’80s is a waste of energy.”
A good beach read for the yacht-rock generation.
