“Hadley Lee Lightcap is ostensibly about Acetone, a largely forgotten, could-have-been rock band from the mid-nineties. Exhaustively researched and lovingly rendered, it’s also a tale of postwar L.A., surf riffs, Chet Baker translated through psychedelia, and the tragedy and strife that produced music that was so beautifully still.”

Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

“21st Century culture is so category-driven that even to call a work of art ‘uncategorizable’ can be its own sort of pigeonholing. But Sam Sweet’s ineffable Hadley, Lee, Lightcap really does cross all sorts of wires. It’s a book about sound that’s actually about place; a meticulously researched piece of nonfiction that carries the piercing emotional weight of a novel; a synesthete’s dream with a patient, documentary gravity. It’s as perfect, and as melancholy, a portrait of Los Angeles as The Long Goodbye, and it’s one of the most affecting books I’ve read in years.”

Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

Before starting the series All Night Menu—a collection of historical vignettes and character profiles based on specific addresses throughout Los Angeles—Sam Sweet was drawn to write about Southern California through the music of Acetone, three musicians who played and recorded together between 1992 and 2001. Though they were an anonymous and little heard band in their time, the trio’s music captured something timeless and essential about the character of Los Angeles. Over the course of ten years of research and countless interviews with the two surviving members of Acetone, a singular portrait emerged. His nonfiction novel Hadley Lee Lightcap is more than an intricate character study of three friends and bandmates—by the end, it reveals a larger image of an unnoticed Los Angeles layered with echoes from the city’s past.

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