Meet Me in the Bathroom

Music journalist Lizzy Goodman assembled an oral history of how New York rock came back to life after 9/11. The book follows bands such as the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Vampire Weekend, and the forces around them: a declining music industry, the internet, and a real estate boom that pushed artists from the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Goodman spent six years on it and carried out 200 or more interviews with musicians, journalists, bloggers, managers, DJs and others. Maggie Rogers and Eva Hendricks, then students who later became musicians, helped with editing and transcription. The title comes from a Strokes song, and Dey Street Books published it in 2017.

Austin Kleon said how much a reader enjoys it probably depends on knowing the music, and that having seen The Strokes in Newport, Kentucky, in 2001 as a college freshman, it left him feeling nostalgic.