My Life's Playlist - Paperback

Some songs don't just play in the background - they pull you in.

For J.L. Taylor, it started with a Christmas playlist meant as a simple gift for his daughters. But the moment he began writing liner notes, the music dragged him somewhere he hadn't planned to go: back to a welfare hotel in El Paso, a dingy apartment in Michigan, a borrowed record player in his aunt's dirt-yard California house where he first heard Marty Robbins and felt, for four minutes, like his fractured life made sense.

My Life's Playlist is a memoir told in songs - the ones that found him at exactly the right (and wrong) moments. Growing up poor and perpetually uprooted, raised by a mother who crossed the border with almost nothing and a father who was Robert Redford handsome and just as hard to hold onto, Taylor learned early that music could be a door out of wherever you were. Sometimes it was the only one.

With warmth, humor, and hard-won honesty, this is a book about what songs actually do - not just soundtrack our lives, but carry the parts of them we can't say out loud.

For readers who believe the right song, at the right moment, can save you.