Praise for Truckload of Art

The Allen family’s life has been as much an inspiration for me as Terry’s wonderful art and music. I wondered to myself, “How does a creative person navigate family life, and life with friends, with their creative life?” This book is the instruction manual.

– David Byrne, author of How Music Works

Terry Allen’s creative depth has guided his life, leading him to become the great artist, writer, and musician he is. Like a tornado, he has swirled a community around himself, drawn together by his generosity and inclusivity. It is wonderful that Brendan Greaves has written a book that is as complex and compassionate as Terry and as moving and raw as his art and music. 

– Kiki Smith

Blending West Texas fiction, hearsay, memoir, anthropological dig, and journalistic fact, Brendan Greaves has fashioned a biographical narrative that skillfully frames the life and times of the visual artist, singer-songwriter, playwright, raconteur, and beautiful dreamer known as Terry Allen. Only a Truckload of Art could do him justice. I couldn’t put it down.

– Rodney Crowell

Terry Allen is my hero, and Brendan changed my life when he introduced us. It’s about time they change your life too.

– Kurt Vile

Brendan Greaves is an unusually deft and perceptive historian of music and art, but he writes with so much heart and verve that after a few chapters, his prose starts to feel like its own song: wild, intelligent, rhythmic, true. His subject here—the inimitable Terry Allen, one of the deepest and most wonderful American artists I can think of—is so well-served by Greaves’s adventurousness and smarts. What a gorgeous, necessary book.

– Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker; author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records

Masterful … An endlessly fascinating biography of an endlessly fascinating artist. – Booklist (starred review)

[A] rollicking debut biography … a thrilling whirl … Scrupulous detail and raucous picaresque merge with evocative discussions of the artist’s work … It adds up to a fascinating portrait of an American original. – Publishers Weekly

Dazzling … [Greaves’s] research is as meticulous and exhaustive as his writing is inspired … He deftly moves between biography and criticism, unpacking Allen’s famously inscrutable drawings and verses, capable of spooling in and out of one another for decades as if gliding along a Möbius strip, through empathetic understanding of where the artist has been … A true testament to commitment from both artist and biographer. – MOJO

Like Allen’s best work in picture and song, the book moves between elements of crisply saturated clarity, softly distant silhouettes, truth and legend, political critique and radical honesty, pain and laughter, sex and death, music and noise, sound and vision. Allen is a unique kind of artist and this is the unique kind of book his life and work deserve … Greaves manages to transcend the flawed-genius tropes and instead flood the zone with warts-and-all humanity — which is what we want not only out of biography but also out of plays, films, novels, songs, and art. – The Village Voice

A long, detailed, and fascinating book … Greaves does an excellent job illuminating the probable sources for some of [JUAREZ’s] abiding enigmas … For fans, this book will be revelatory. Greaves has done his homework and presents it beautifully … Use this book as a codex to untangle [Allen’s] wonderful web. – The Wire

“[An] exhilarating investigation of a life spent in the act of constant creation … [Greaves] is a compassionate biographer with the perceptive eye of an art critic.” – Aquarium Drunkard

Greaves does an admirable job describing the ecumenical contexts and nuances of what are often indescribable works. But he does an even grander job, with clear but measured affection, getting onto the page the contexts and nuances of Terry Allen, an utterly unique figure at the crossroads … of American art, however you define it. – Garden and Gun

9/10. [Greaves] assembles a persuasive argument in which Allen can be viewed as the godfather of alternative country. – Uncut

In Greaves, Allen has found a meticulous and empathetic Boswell … Truckload emerges not as a standard tale of the rise and fall (or fall and rise) of a tortured genius outsider/outlaw, but a patient study in artistic process and memory, the cultural intricacies of the twentieth-century West, and in people, how they scar and save you, like the lightning in Allen’s song “Cortez Sail”—“tearing the clouds, then closing the tear.” – 4 Columns

Written with the narrative verve of a great novel and a poet’s eye for enchanting detail, Truckload of Art is an inspired, definitive illumination of the life and genius of a vital American artist.

– Wells Tower, screenwriter and journalist; author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Once upon a time when I lived in Pasadena and Terry and Jo Harvey were in Fresno, I was there with my wife working at a stone quarry and had dinner and stayed the night with them. We cleaned squid, and Jo Harvey made a lovely dinner.

The next morning all of us had violent diarrhea and we quickly ran out of toilet paper and then every possible useable paper-like material. 

When we returned home, I bought and shipped a large box of toilet paper from a restaurant supply store. Terry sent one back painted black, which still sits on my dining table, used as a candlestick holder. 

Terry and Jo Harvey—friends as long as we last.

– Bruce Nauman

Terry Allen is our modern Michelangelo—a painter, sculptor, and conceptualist informed by honky-tonk sensibilities and a singer-songwriter of incisive, vividly-depicted songs who knows his way around galleries and museums. His Florence is Lubbock, Texas, where a local boast was “Lubbock Has More Sky.” This biography tells precisely how Terry Allen filled up all that empty space. It is the most detailed history of the making of a life in art that I’ve ever read. 

– Joe Nick Patoski, author of Willie Nelson: An Epic Life; director of Sir Doug & the Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove

With Greaves’s help, Allen tells his most compelling story yet, the story of his creative life. – Texas Highways

Greaves proves uniquely situated to understand Allen’s works … [He] has laid an invaluable foundation for understanding Allen’s life and work … drawing throughlines from Allen’s life across his intertextual artistic narratives. – Austin Chronicle

Masterful. – KUTX

This absorbing, brilliant biography … [is] more than just the definitive look. Greaves has, with meticulous research and a prose-like style, given us a template for all such books in the future—essential reading on one of America’s greatest artists. – The Big Takeover

A summation and exemplar of a collaborative art practice that is as much ethos as it is any single song or sculpture or image … part of the art vortex that is Terry Allen. – Observer

Greaves skillfully and sensitively tracks Allen’s life … [His] finest accomplishment in the book is his ability to capture Allen’s indelible and unique voice. – Recliner Notes

Greaves puts the reader in the shotgun seat for a drive through the entirety of Allen’s existence … it makes for quite the journey. – Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers