The Rodney Graham Songbook

The complete and illustrated songbook

“The Rodney Graham Songbook” is a compilation of 39 songs from Graham’s CDs and records including “The Bed Bug,” “Love Buzz, And Other Short Songs in the Popular Idiom,” “Getting it Together in the Country,” “Rock is Hard,” and “Never Tell a Pal A Hard Luck Story.”

Graham’s songs are transcribed into sheet music with musical notation for piano, guitar tablature and lyrics. Taking the form of a popular songbook, the book features images of the artist, his band and new artwork. In addition the book contains a CD compliation of rare cover songs with two brand new tracks.

Vancouver artist Rodney Graham is an internationally acclaimed artist. He is known for literary and conceptual artworks, cinematic installations, costume dramas, and also as a singer-songwriter. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with projects such as “Parsifal Score,” “Parsifal (1882-38,969,364,735),” and “School of Velocity,” Graham began to make artworks whose central subject was music or the concrete objects of music such as musical scores and CDs. Since then, the line between his visual art practice and his music practice has become blurred and eventually completely conflates in works such as “How I Became a Ramblin Man,” “Zabriskie Point” and “The Phonokinetoscope.”

First volume of the Vancouver Special series of artists’ books, edited by Kathy Slade and Christoph Keller, and published in collaboration with the Charles H. Scott Gallery/Emily Carr Institute Press, Vancouver.