If you’re anything like me and have spent time combing your girlfriend’s Netflix account for Philip Glass shit while she’s at work and you’re at home unemployed, you may have come across the film Glass: A Portrait of Philip Glass in Twelve Parts, a delightful documentary in which you can get a good glimpse at how piss-poor the man’s personal relationships are/were at the expense of his his all-consuming music career. And again, if you’re anything like me, you probably found that fascinating/horrifying and ached to know more about the man behind all of those arpeggios.
Well good news, fellow obsessives. As The New York Times reports, the 74-year-old composer has signed a deal with publisher W.W. Norton & Company to write a memoir (the book will be published by the Norton division Liveright & Company). Unfortunately, the publishing date has not been announced yet, but Norton did indicate that Glass would be using the blank pages to “explore his youth and musical influences, including working in his father’s record store in Baltimore and collaborations with Ravi Shankar and Allen Ginsberg.” Considering that, in addition to palling around with Ginsberg and Shankar, the dude drove a New York cab until he was in his 40s, studied with 20th-century composition queen Nadia Boulangier (who I’m told taught everyone from Aaron Copeland to Quincy Jones to the guy from Wavves), has had his fair share of wives, and used his hypnotic sax, synth, flute, and organ creations to literally invent the genre now known as Chillwave, the guy’s probably got a lot to gossip about.
• Philip Glass: http://www.philipglass.com
• Norton: http://www.wwnorton.com
