Turn My Head Into Sound

Turn My Head Into Sound: A history of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine tells the story of one of the great sonic innovators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

My Bloody Valentine have released only three albums in their forty-year career, but each of them has made a seismic impact. Isn’t Anything (1988) is often cited as one of the Ur-texts of shoegaze and dream rock; Loveless (1991) is an undisputed masterpiece heralded by many as the best album of the 1990s; m b v (2013) is one of the best-loved comeback albums in recent memory.

For those who know Kevin Shields and his work already, he is an indie-rock icon, but by other measures he’s still a relatively obscure figure in the musical mainstream, and to date there has been no full-length appraisal of his work or his band’s career. Until now. Shields is truly a one-of-a-kind musician, and this book—which fills in the gaps, corrects errors, and takes an objective look at the band’s entire career, warts and all—paints the full picture of one of the most revolutionary sonic artists of our time.

Turn My Head Into Sound is based on numerous interviews with people who were there (some of them speaking on the record for the first time) as well as an exhaustive archive of band-related material that the author has been assembling since 1990. Longtime fans of the band will find plenty of new information here, including the full story of the tumultuous period at Island Records following the release of Loveless.

The lost years that followed would see Shields employed as engineer, producer, and remixer while also becoming an auxiliary member of Primal Scream. The book’s analysis of this diverse but lesser-known work offers reader a much fuller picture of the relentless creativity and perfectionism at the center of his process, which simply could not have come from any other artist.