Amanda Petrusich

Amanda Petrusich is the author of Pink Moon, a short book about Nick Drake's 1972 album for Continuum's 33 1/3 series, and It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music.

From Judy Berman's interview with Petrusich at Salon.com:

As a young critic who has written mostly about new, independent music, what drew you to such an old tradition?

I grew up listening to grunge and pop radio, and I found it the way a lot of people find it. You listen to enough Led Zeppelin and you eventually hear the name "Robert Johnson," and from there it's a treasure hunt through the record store. When I first started hearing that stuff, especially Delta blues, I fell in love with it. And when Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" was reissued on CD in 1997, I was 17 years old. Through that, I hunted things down. Around 2003, I started hearing a lot of bands in the indie-rock area that were drawing from Americana in really interesting ways.

Read the complete Q & A.

Writers Read: Amanda Petrusich.

--Marshal Zeringue