Linn emailed me in September 2017. She was writing her memoir, she had her top hundred songs from a lifetime of performing, and she wanted lead sheets in the finished volume. She had tried setting one herself and got through the first A section in a few hours. Could I take on sixty of them to start.

It went to print in July 2025, at 101 songs and 290 pages: lead sheets, piano parts, vocal harmonies, standalone lyrics, performance notes, and an appendix of her English translations of five Edith Piaf songs. It is published alongside her memoir, The Redhead Gets the Gig.

Linn grew up on a dairy farm near Tokoroa, dropped out of the Sorbonne to sing, played Ronnie Scott's in London with her own trio, and spent eight years playing piano bar in New York, which is where she started writing. In 2023 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to music.

Most of these songs had never been fully written down. They lived in Linn's head and in the playing, and for this book she and her husband Herschel Herscher wrote them out by hand, often for the first time. What arrived was manuscript in various states, corrected and reworked, alongside audio recordings. Where the page ran out, the recordings filled it in, and everything had to be deciphered before it could be set.

Some of my favourite titles: Ponsonby Road Mambo. I'm From Tokoroa. Helping Dad Milk The Cows. I Should Be A Star In Las Vegas But Tonight I'm Sleeping In Grey Lynn.