Will Hermes's Love Goes to Buildings on Fire creates a group portrait of musicians who made New York City's sound in the years 1973 to 1977. Hermes, a music critic, alternates between scenes featuring artists including Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, the Ramones, Grandmaster Flash, and the New York Dolls, as well as figures from salsa, jazz, and classical music. The city itself is a character: bankrupt, burning, dangerous, and endlessly generative. Hermes shows how artists who would become canonical often played the same clubs, knew each other, and influenced one another across genre lines. The book captures a moment when the economics of live music still allowed risk-taking and when New York's chaos created space for innovation. Hermes writes with a critic's analytical precision and a fan's enthusiasm. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is not biography but cultural history, demonstrating how a time and place produced an astonishing concentration of creativity. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in punk, hip-hop, disco, or the culture of 1970s New York, and for anyone curious about how artistic movements emerge from particular conditions.