For more than thirty years, David Hajdu has been a leading critic, casting light on artists past and present and on culture high and low. The Night Before is a collection of his writing on music, comics, and popular culture, in which he brings historical perspective and a keen critical sensibility to unraveling underappreciated or misunderstood works. These essays encompass an extraordinarily wide range of artists—from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish—and themes, from the wails for racial justice by the “blues queens” of the 1920s to the role of new technologies in the making of twenty-first-century pop hits.

In piercing but lively prose, Hajdu explores how women singers of three generations upended gendered expectations. With insatiable curiosity, he tackles topics from Bulgarian folk music to the cartoons of Roz Chast, and from the racially mixed roots of country music to the unhinged comic strip that foreshadowed Peanuts. Turning inward, Hajdu reflects on subjects such as his fascination with the Hudson River, whose waters flow in both directions. The Night Before reveals how the currents of art and culture run forward and backward too, uniting past, present, and future in a ceaseless conversation.