"Guitarist/sound artist David Grubbs's Good night the pleasure was ours is a happily unconventional take on what is now an almost tired genre: the musician's tour diary. . . . Good night is something very different. Most remarkably, the book is composed and laid out more or less as poetry, and not via the cynical trick of simply sprinkling unorthodox line breaks throughout the text. Grubbs's reminiscences . . . are frequently impressionistic, often delivered in koan-like half-thoughts and halting sentence fragments. That is, the way people think a lot of the time, especially when thrown into an unearthly, disorienting experience like touring. . . . Grubbs's stories manage to retain a warm and personal flavour despite the somewhat disembodied style and modernist flow of the text."
Dave Mandl, The Wire
"A generous, idiosyncratic book memorably illustrating the bifurcated nature of life on tour. . . . Grubbs excels at melding depictions of ephemeral artistic gratification with wry recollections of the many hours he is spent flying to far-off countries and idling in hotel rooms, bars and vans hurtling down interstate highways."
Kevin Canfield, New York City Jazz Record
"With dizzying impressionism, Good night the pleasure was ours is an enthralling portrayal of the delicate balance between performer, audience, and sound. "
Sadie Dupuis, Spin
