
Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter by Alyn Shipton
Harry Nilsson was either a self-sabotaging musical savant, or a savvy, scheming genius. Perhaps that's why his legacy, like his career, has flirted with obscurity, even as the music retains a cult following.
Harry Nilsson was a ramshackle musical savant with a weakness for misbegotten life decisions and career-sabotaging swerves. Or maybe he was a scheming genius whose monastic devotion to idiosyncrasy made him a visionary in ways that have not yet been fully revealed. Either way, he was maybe the most innately talented rock star of the 1960s and ’70s— among stiff competition—as well as an enigma who jams the signals of standard stories of rock-star rise and fall.
As told in Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter, the artist’s story follows a long, curving, more or less conventional arc with