Photo by Groovehouse

Claudio Sanchez performing with Coheed and Cambria

We writers are a masturbatory bunch, if you don't mind me saying so. We love to talk about our own work, the works of others, and generally just get into a huge hubbub over the art of the written word. So I don't think it should come as any surprise that some of our favorite musicians are also acclaimed authors in their own right.

And hey, it comes with the territory. In every great lyricist resides a conflicted artist torn between two loves: writing and music. Well, why can't you have your cake and eat it too? Many have tried, some should probably just stick to music, but there's a good few who have a pretty good fallback career if they ever get tired of the whole music business.

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Photo courtesy of SXSW

Bruce Springsteen at SXSW, March 2012

Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters
Edited by Jeff Burger

Even editor Burger himself poses this question in his intro: Does the world really need another book on Bruce Springsteen? Especially in recent times when Boss Books have been flooding the marketplace (and Yours Truly would know, having covered most of them for this column...).

Well, the short answer is... no. But what makes Springsteen on Springsteen different -- and worthy -- is that it's one of the few tomes that mostly lets the artist speak for himself and in his own words.

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My Way: An Autobiography
By Paul Anka with David Dalton
St. Martin's Press, 384 pp., $29.99

Currently celebrating his 55th year in show business with this autobiography and the new CD Duets -- which finds him singing with artists like Celine Dion, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and (through the magic of tape) Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra -- Paul Anka is in the mood to look back.

While still a teenager, Anka had a string of charting records in the late '50s/early '60s, including "Diana," "Puppy Love," "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," "Lonely Boy," "You Are My Destiny." But what set the teen idol apart from the various Frankies, Bobbys and Fabians was that he wrote much of his own material.

It's a skill that would serve him well when the hits and the pompadour hair gel dried up after the British Invasion and when crooners went out of style.

Only Bobby Darin -- who had a similar skill at songwriting and appreciation for more adult singers -- similarly survived. And it is funny that Anka mentions how many people get him confused with Neil Sedaka still to this day.

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Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera
By Rex Brown
Da Capo Press, 304 pp., $15.47

Back in Pantera's '90s heyday, few fans would have guessed that the first guy to write a tell-all history of the band would be Rex Brown.

Though an indivisible component of Pantera's larger-than-life crunch, the bassist was always the band's most reclusive member, seemingly uninterested in the media coverage and controversy courted by the group's louder personalities.

Given the band's turbulent relations toward the end, however, maybe Rex was the only man for the job. He was there from the group's earliest days to its last, when band relations got so bad that frontman Phil Anselmo and brothers Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul found themselves unable to pick up a phone and call one another, let alone get together in the same room.

By his own assertion, Brown served as mediator and go-between through it all, giving him perhaps the most complete view of the band's greatest triumphs and most devastating losses.

In his new book, Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera, the bassist spills the goods on all of it, starting with the band's absolute nadir: the onstage murder of guitarist Dimebag Darrell at the hands of a mentally ill fan.

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Folks, recently one of my longest-awaited moments in music came to fruition: Pete Wentz, Fall Out Boy bassist and songwriter, finally decided to release his full-length prose narrative Gray. He first mentioned it seven years ago, and now we finally have our hands on the book.

With the recent reunion of Wentz's band, the book could not have come out with better timing. But truly, nothing could excite me more than reading the masterful writing of one of the greatest lyrical masterminds of our time. But could the novel possibly live up to the brilliance of songs penned by Wentz such as "Sugar We're Goin' Down," "I'm Like a Lawyer the Way I'm Always Tryng to Get You Off" and "Thnks fr th Mmrs?"

Unfortunately, to quote the Fall's "Cruiser's Creek," we only have this excerpt. It would be wrong for me to judge a book based on reading only an excerpt, especially when I could very easily simply buy the book, but that wouldn't be nearly as easy and fun.

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Photos courtesy of Christian Kidd

As the singer, guitarist and chief songwriter for the Hates -- Houston's most enduring punk rock band and a local institution -- Christian Kidd (nee Christian Arnheiter, Christian Oppression and Christian Anarchy) has seen a lot.

And with the band nearing its 35th anniversary (with Kidd as the only constant), the man known even among non-music fans downtown as "the guy with the huge Mohawk" has put pen to paper for a memoir written with wife Alexis Kidd, Just a Houston Punk.

More a series of snapshots of his and the Hates' musical careers than straight bio, it offers a lot of recollection and reminiscences of the city's music scene of years gone by, from clubs like the Axiom, the Vatican and Pik-n-Pak to bands who once gigged across the city with names like Legionnaire's Disease, Jerry Falwell and the Vibrating Crosses, and Chernobyl Sunrise. The book takes the Hates story right up to the band playing recent Free Press Summer Fests.

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E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
By Clinton Heylin
Viking, 352 pp., $27.95.

Capping a trilogy of recent, impressive Springsteen bios that also includes Marc Dolan's Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock and Roll and Peter Ames Carlin's semi-authorized Bruce, noted music journalist Heylin digs a bit deeper for the hardcore fan in this tome originally published in England.

Heylin is a fine journalist, a writer whose Behind the Shades remains the definitive Dylan bio, but his strength has always lay in his near-obsessive attention to detail. So those looking for a more general or sociological bio might look elsewhere, as E Street Shuffle is mostly concerned with the minutiae of the music.

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Right about now young, budding rock writers and nerds are sitting on gift cards and credit from the holidays, and may need to know what books to pick up at the local bookstore or Amazon to further their education.

It's not enough to just read every new music blog or (gasp!) pick up a few music magazines whenever the mood strikes. At least it wasn't for this writer. It was spending hours at used-book stores and finding fellow nerds' leftovers. Rolling Stone, Nick Kent and Lester Bangs compilations, stuff like that.

A healthy dose of Chuck Klosterman ushered me along the path, too.

I still owe my local library a chunk of change for "relieving" them of a cool Stones book in 2003. I also acquired a handful of reference books, popular music guides, and encyclopedias from bookstores and garage sales.

So, what should you aspiring rock writers have in your personal curriculums? Well, stop aspiring and start being, for one thing. Start a blog. Make us sweat.

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The Best of Punk Magazine
Edited by John Holstrom
It Books. 372 pp., $30.

While the thought of a hardcover, slick-papered, coffee-table book anthologizing the decidedly low-rent, ragtag Punk magazine might seem the antithesis of punk, even a curmudgeon like Johnny Rotten would have to spit a gob in appreciation of the nicely done result.

Reprinting the best from the influential magazine's 1976-79 run -- much of it for the first time since original publication -- the book includes wild and suitably anarchic interviews with most major punk players, including Lou Reed, Ramones, Patti Smith, Sex Pistols, the Heartbreakers, Iggy Pop and David Johanssen. Add to that a wild amalgamation of underground comics, fakes ads, "Do It Yourself" songs, commentary, reportage, and even paper dolls.

Magazine co-founder Holstrom also includes contemporary reflections on the then-decrepit NY bowery, the punk scene (which he, staff reporter Legs McNeil and photographer Roberta Bayley were part of, not outsiders), how some articles came to pass, and the struggles of putting out a fringe magazine in the '70s.

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Photo courtesy of SXSW

Bruce Springsteen at SXSW, March 2012

Bruce
By Peter Ames Carlin
Touchstone Books, 512 pp., $28.

Let me start by saying that Carlin -- who has also penned books on Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney -- has written the definitive Springsteen straight-bio here with Bruce, an engaging, thorough, and compelling look at the man and his music.

Nothing against Dave Marsh's Two Hearts (a bit hagiographic and now out of date) or Marc Dolan's recent, masterful Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock and Roll (which includes more sociological/cultural-impact analysis). But Bruce has...well, Bruce himself.

Carlin writes in the afterword that he had been working on the book for about a year and a half --with word getting around Bruce's camp -- when he got a call from manager/guard dog Jon Landau.

And though not an authorized biography, Springsteen ended up giving hours and hours of interviews to Carlin, which opened up the door for the author to speak with many others in the form of current and former band members (including Clarence Clemons, just shortly before his death), friends, business associates, and Bruce's own family, including his octogenarian mother.

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