The Globe and Mail’s Josh O’Kane interviews DP. Read it here.

“To refer to Don Pyle as the drummer of the Toronto instrumental band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet would be a vast understatement, even though that gig granted him access to the Ramones, famed engineer Steve Albini and even the Kids in the Hall, for whom Shadowy Men served as house band.

Don Pyle’s new memoir is out May 26.

He’s been a constant presence in Toronto’s creative scenes, performing, recording, photographing and generally making art for five decades. (Among his other bands? Crash Kills Five, King Cobb Steelie, Phono-Comb and Fifth Column.) His photography book Trouble in the Camera Club (ECW Press, 2011) is a crucial document of early punk history in the city, authoritative and entertaining enough that it sometimes pops up in record stores across the world.

His new memoir, Rough Description: Love Letters and Ghost Stories from a Life in Music – also with ECW and out May 26 – turns the lens on himself and his relationships with loved ones. Many of those people are now dead – including Albini and Sadies co-founder Dallas Good, the latter of whom Pyle played with in several bands.

Pyle is a careful and caring writer, seeing the best in people and finding joy in their stories. But for a book by a man who professionally keeps time, Rough Description pays little heed to linearity. Tour tales toggle across bands and decades. An appreciation of vistas viewed from touring vans bleeds into tales of the humanity that drummers wring from their kits. Yet the book is less a stream of consciousness than a flood of memories tied together by a love of music”.