BIO

Tim Riley (trileyATartsjournal.com) is the music commentator for NPR's HERE AND NOW, a nationally-syndicated show out of WBUR Boston(carriage list is here). In addition to extensive radio work for MONITOR RADIO and STUDIO 360, his work has appeared in the WASHINGTON POST, NEWSWEEK, and BOSTON MAGAZINE.

His Leonard Bernstein piece was singled out by Perfect Sound Forever for its Best Music Scribe 2005 list, compiled by Jason Gross, and his books are assigned in a variety of college courses on pop culture at schools like Eastman, Vanderbilt, the University of Michigan and Indiana University. Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1988) was hailed by Jon Pareles in the New York Times as bringing "new insight to the act we've known for all these years..." It is currently available in an updated second edition from Da Capo. Other titles include Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1992, Da Capo 1999), Madonna: Illustrated (Hyperion 1992). His latest book, Fever: How Rock'n'Roll Transformed Gender in America, appeared in paperback in June of 2005 from Picador.

In addition to over nineteen years on the campus speech circuit with his popular multi-media discussion of censorship in the arts, Riley appeared as a keynote for BEATLES 2000, the first international, cross-disciplinary academic conference on the band in Jyvaskyla, Finland. He is working on a biography of John Lennon for W.W. Norton slated for 2009.