So I just finished Bill Bruford’s autobiography (unofficial subtitle: Tea & Drumpets) and I can report that I loved it for all the reasons you might expect, along with some wholly unanticipated ones.

I suspected the book would be full of juicy anecdotes about Bruford’s forty years in the business, but it also contains some very sophisticated assessments of the current state of the music industry, the various schools of music pedagogy, the effects of a musician’s professional life on his personal one, the promises and perils of recording technology, the differences between rock, jazz, and classical, and a hundred other facets of music-making. What’s more, unless he’s hired the best ghostwriter in the business, Bruford is as good a writer as he is a drummer.

Sure, he sounds a little out of touch at times—he uses Whitney Houston as an example of a glossy pop star, and the Arctic Monkeys as the hot sensation all the kids are listening to these days, but then, he is sixty. (Oh Dad.) But he also describes the current state of the music industry more accurately than any other assessment I’ve read, so he has been paying attention.

He comes off as grumpy a lot of the time, and even skates perilously close to sounding ungrateful when he laments some of the undesirable side effects of being an internationally renown drummer: the phone interviews, the hotels, the clueless roadies, the fans—oh god! the fans. (I was relieved when he didn’t mention or mock the overeager nineteen-year-old with a ponytail and King Crimson t-shirt who accosted him outside the stage door of the Orpheum in Minneapolis in 1995, asking for an autograph [He was very nice, by the way].)

But in between all that, and a lot of hilarious shit-talking about his former bandmates in Yes and the notoriously mercurial Robert Fripp—he dispatches some terrific advice for the aspiring or seasoned musician, drummer or otherwise. The final chapters, where he explains his decision to retire from public performance, are quite moving. Meanwhile, diehard King Crimson fans will get a few more insights into that strange band. Students of a music industry in crisis will get the perspective of an experienced insider. Drummers will be privy to a printed master class from one of the best. And Anglophiles will collect a few more priceless Britishisms (e.g. death = “popping one’s clogs”).

I read the book knowing that I’ll never be the drummer Bruford is, in terms of chops or accomplishment, but his writing and his message had the weird effect of helping me be okay with that, and wanting to return to my instrument with a fresh perspective, a robust work ethic, and most importantly, a sense of joy.