Joe McEwen with Joel Selvin on ‘Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars’ (San Francisco)
September 9, 5:30 PM PT • San Francisco, CA: Book Passage | 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA 94111
Join ZE Books at Book Passage’s Ferry Building store for an evening with Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars: Affections and Reflections 1973–2025, Joe McEwen’s half-century record of a life spent listening to soul music. McEwen will be joined in conversation by the writer Joel Selvin.
Tastykakes, Soul Songs & Shining Stars is a labor of love, half a century in the making, for music industry veteran Joe McEwen. A Philadelphia native and A&R executive for Columbia, Sire/Warner Brothers, Verve, and Concord Music Group, McEwen gathers a lifetime’s worth of encounters, essays, and reveries into one radiant collection—a love letter to the rhythm-and-blues and soul music that shaped him.
Its pages are bursting with vivid, up-front and personal profiles of Pops and Mavis Staples, George Clinton, Allen Toussaint, Betty Wright, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Don Covay, and many more, alongside heartfelt musings spanning the 1960s through the ’80s. Interwoven throughout are reflections on basketball, memory, and movement—parallel sources of rhythm, improvisation, and joy. The book culminates in an extended 2024 conversation with Peter Guralnick.
About the Author
Joe McEwen was born in Philadelphia and raised in the near suburbs, where his affection for soul, R&B, blues, and jazz thrived. His first major experiences as a music writer, critic, and radio DJ took place in and around his college years in Boston, writing for the Boston Phoenix and Real Paper, and graduating to the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and other outlets in the US and UK. He contributed five chapters to the original Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (1976) and to Greil Marcus’s Stranded (1978). His first book was Sam Cooke: The Man Who Invented Soul (1977). He lives in Laguna Niguel, California.
About the Interlocutor
Joel Selvin wrote about popular music for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1972 to 2009, and has since written or co-written more than a dozen books, among them Summer of Love, Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns, Altamont, Hollywood Eden, and Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon. Red, his collaboration with Sammy Hagar, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. He lives in the Bay Area.
About the Venue
Book Passage has sold books in Marin since 1976 and stages more than eight hundred author events a year, along with classes, conferences, and writing workshops. The Ferry Building store, its second location, sits on the Embarcadero among the market halls and hosts events in the shop itself. bookpassage.com
Tastykakes, Soul Songs and Shining Stars is a rich and passionate record of a life-long obsession with soul music and Rhythm & Blues from music industry stalwart and legendary A&R man Joe McEwen. At various times in his lengthy career McEwen has worked with Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, K.D. Lang, Wilco, Nick Lowe, Built To Spill, Queen Latifah, the Frank Sinatra catalogue, and many others.
Release: Apr 28, 2026
Paperback ISBN: 9798988670124 • 272 pages
UK release: Jun 11, 2026 • UK Price: £14.99