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Sathnam Sanghera’s Tonight The Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael will land with a narrow audience of the pop star’s aficionados. Rather than a straight recounting of the musician’s life – a lacuna ably filled by James Gavin’s 2022 biography – author Sathnam Sanghera structures his text around major aspects of the musician. Each chapter serves to explore a general theme: Michael’s controlling approach to his craft, his sexuality in a repressive time, the crush and cruelty of fame, his scandals and substance abuse, an assessment of his genius, etc.

Certainly, a general audience reading this book will engage in some eye rolling and skimming, but those with a strong allegiance to George Michael’s work will find enjoyment in these pages. Sanghera takes frequent asides to explore his self-conscious experience as a George Michael fan. Some may find this distracting, but as a fellow fan around the same age as Sanghera, I appreciated the author’s self-reflexivity. When the author states that as a teenager, he appreciated Michael because “unlike most men in my life, he didn’t seem allergic to expressing actual feelings,” this illuminated and reflected my own sentiments about the pop star. 9 years old when the Faith album dropped, I moved into my teen years and clung to songs like “Father Figure” and “One More Time” – songs that expressed a yearning and heartache often absent from the work of other male pop performers.

Sanghera admits that researching and writing this book was intended as a break from earlier projects that delved into heavy topics. His love for Michael’s work, no matter how tempered by middle age and self-consciousness, show through in this text and will please sympathetic readers. Most fans will appreciate this deep deconstruction of George Michael’s life and work and welcome it in the canon about the pop star.

Sanghera, Sathnam. Tonight the Music Seems So Loud. Pegasus Books, 2026.