This year's most talked-about music book. Source: Financial Times

In this wildly entertaining oral history, Lizzy Goodman captures the glamour, excitement and sordid excess of New York's early-2000s, pre-gentrification rock scene. Fame, drugs and, most potently, the internet ruined everything, leaving Goodman's interviewees, including members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and the Strokes themselves, to reflect on their moment in the sun with humour, bitterness and an unusually large dose of honesty. Source: The Times Books of the Year

Beautifully paced, vivid, informative and compelling [...] A book primarily built on passion, love and homage - a drawled rock 'n'roll sonnet to the music, the bands, the city, the scene, the triumphs, the screw-ups, and, of course, 'the moment'. Source: The Observer

The cleverly constructed text captures the excitement of it all exploding. It's a sprawling testament, hilariously self-important, amusingly contradictory. Source: Uncut 8/10

Anecdotal magic is sprinkled through Lizzy Goodman's recently published Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history of the New York rock milieu that included the Strokes, the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs and Interpol. The usual rock'n'roll staples - drugs, hedonism, nervous crackups - are here, but so too is the overlooked story of the cultural impact of 9/11, and the way it gave thousands of Manhattanites the sense of a common generational identity. The story is 600 pages long, but you'll probably whizz through it in a matter of days Source: Guardian (Summer Reads Recommendation)

Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history by Lizzy Goodman, who arrived in New York from her native New Mexico in 1999 and was evidently immersed in everything that happened. Her interviewees - there are 161 - beautifully capture the era, and illustrate its tensions and contradictions. Author: John Harris Source: The Guardian

Life moves fast, but in this book's 600 pages Goodman pins down a remarkable cultural moment. Source: Mojo 5*****

This extraordinary collection of funny, clever, odd, difficult people ensures that Meet Me In The Bathroom is the kind of book that makes you glad you were there, or wish you had been. Author: Dorian Lynskey Source: GQ

Oral history is the perfect format to represent the messy, gossipy hubbub of a music scene. Goodman exercises shrewd editorial judgment but no authorial voice, allowing her scores of lively interviewees to expand, and occasionally contradict, each other's anecdotes [...] Goodman's interviewees truly believed that they were in the right place at the right time - and of all the exhilarations of youth, there is none more intoxicating than that. Source: Spectator

As a vivid, candid, compelling and beautifully rendered account of what New York was like before it became the city it is today, Meet Me In the Bathroom strikes all the right notes. As oral histories go, this is one of the very best. Source: Irish Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

In the early 2000s New York City served as the unlikely stage for a radical renaissance where bands like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the Moldy Peaches, LCD Soundsystem, and others, who had been honing their craft in obscurity, suddenly became reflections of a newly flush, newly booming town determined to recover from the devastation of September 11.

Meet Me in the Bathroom explores how during this era the music industry was dismantled and then reborn via technology--first by Napster and later iTunes--and by evangelist bloggers and edgier journalistic upstarts like Vice and Pitchfork. As the reshaping of the city--technological, aesthetic, cultural, and physical--spread from downtown Manhattan to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bands like MGMT, Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, and Dirty Projectors became the new stars, remaking the idea of New York in their own nerdy image, and establishing "I heart Brooklyn" as the mantra of a new generation.

Crafted from nearly two hundred original interviews and curated by a writer who remembers the hangovers herself, Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the first decade of the 2000s in all its epic and reckless glory. It is a brilliant portrait of a city, an industry, and a generation on the verge of seismic change.

--Uproxx --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Lizzy Goodman is a journalist whose writing on rock and roll, fashion, and popular culture has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NME. She is a contributing editor at ELLE and a regular contributor to New York magazine. She lives in upstate New York with her two basset hounds, Joni Mitchell and Jerry Orbach.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

In the early 2000s New York City served as the unlikely stage for a radical renaissance where bands like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the Moldy Peaches, LCD Soundsystem, and others, who had been honing their craft in obscurity, suddenly became reflections of a newly flush, newly booming town determined to recover from the devastation of September 11.

Meet Me in the Bathroom explores how during this era the music industry was dismantled and then reborn via technology--first by Napster and later iTunes--and by evangelist bloggers and edgier journalistic upstarts like Vice and Pitchfork. As the reshaping of the city--technological, aesthetic, cultural, and physical--spread from downtown Manhattan to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bands like MGMT, Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, and Dirty Projectors became the new stars, remaking the idea of New York in their own nerdy image, and establishing "I heart Brooklyn" as the mantra of a new generation.

Crafted from nearly two hundred original interviews and curated by a writer who remembers the hangovers herself, Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the first decade of the 2000s in all its epic and reckless glory. It is a brilliant portrait of a city, an industry, and a generation on the verge of seismic change.

--Uproxx --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.