Jeff Burger has been a writer and editor for more than four decades and has covered popular music throughout his journalism career. His reviews, essays, and reportage have appeared in more than 75 magazines, newspapers, and books, including Barron’s, The Los Angeles Times, Family Circle, Melody Maker, High Fidelity, Creem, Circus, Reader’s Digest, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, All-Music Guide, and No Depression. He has published interviews with many leading musicians, including Tom Waits, Billy Joel, the Righteous Brothers, and the members of Steely Dan, and with such public figures as Suze Orman, James Carville, Sir Richard Branson, F. Lee Bailey, Sydney Pollack, and Cliff Robertson.
Burger has been editor of several periodicals, including Phoenix magazine in Arizona, and he spent 14 years in senior positions at Medical Economics magazine, the country’s largest business magazine for doctors. A former consulting editor at Time Inc., he currently serves as editor of Business Jet Traveler, which the American Society of Business Publication Editors named one of the country’s ten best business magazines in 2011.
Burger edited Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches and Encounters, which Chicago Review Press will publish in April 2013. He is at work on a similar anthology devoted to Leonard Cohen, which will also be published by Chicago Review Press.
He lives in Ridgewood, N.J., with his wife, puppeteer Madeleine Beresford, and son, Andre.
Desert Island Picks
1. Eric Andersen - Collection
2. Bach - Brandenberg Concertos (Johannes Somary & English Chamber Orchestra)
3. Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: 30 Years of the Beach Boys
5. Beatles - Rubber Soul
6. Tim Buckley - Happy Sad
7. Lloyd Cole & the Commotions - Rattlesnakes
8. Sam Cooke - A Man and His Music
9. Nick Drake - Bryter Layter
10. Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde
11. Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
12. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
13. Duke Ellington - Blanton-Webster Band
14. Elvis Presley - The Complete 50s Masters
15. Chris Isaac - Baja Sessions
16. John Phillips - John Phillips
17. Love - Forever Changes
19. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks
20. Mozart - Piano Concertos 20 & 21 (Geza Anda & Vienna Symphony Orchestra)
21. Elliott Murphy - Lost Generation
22. Pavlov's Dog - At the Sound of the Bell
23. Pink Floyd - Ummagumma
24. Pretenders - The Singles
25. Rolling Stones - Aftermath
26. Rolling Stones - Between the Buttons
27. Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends
28. Frank Sinatra - The Capitol Years
29. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
30. Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town
31. Bruce Springsteen - The River
32. Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
33. Various Artists - Phil Spector: Back to Mono (1958 - 1969)
34. Various Artists - The Doo Wop Box
