# The Wyoming Sessions *A Biography of Kanye West* — Legendary Biographies No. 042 - **Subject:** Ye (born Kanye Omari West) - **Written by:** Reggie Trayton - **Shelf:** Music / Hip-Hop - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 166 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 166 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 166 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-029-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-010-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/042-the-wyoming-sessions.html ## About this book On November 10, 2007, Donda West died on a surgical table in Beverly Hills. Everything that follows is the long aftermath — the records, the marriages, the breakdowns, the public ruin — of a son who could not bury his mother. Reggie Trayton traces the arc of the twenty-first century's most influential and most destructive artist across fifteen albums, from the chipmunk soul stitched out of Donda's record collection to the slurred provocations of his late period. Trayton writes about the music with genuine sonic literacy: how the beats are built, what the sampler is doing under the vocal, why a snare in 2010 reorganized the sound of pop radio for a decade. He writes with the same precision about everything else. The Kardashian years and their reality-television logic. The bipolar diagnosis and the refusal of medication. The MAGA hat, the White House visit, the Hitler song. The slow loss of collaborators, of a marriage, of a public. The question running underneath is older than any of it. What does a man owe the dead? What does grief produce when it is given a hundred-million-dollar budget and no one left to say no? Trayton offers no verdict, only the closest reading we have of an artist who built a cathedral and then, with the same hands, set it on fire. ## Contents 1. The Mother 2. Atlanta to Chicago 3. Donda's Curriculum 4. Polaris 5. Chipmunk Soul 6. The Blueprint 7. Through the Wire 8. The College Dropout 9. Late Registration / Graduation 10. November 10, 2007 11. 808s and the Exile 12. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy 13. Yeezus and Watch the Throne 14. Kim 15. 2016 / The Hospitalization 16. MAGA 17. October 2022 18. Bully 19. The Apology ## Questions **Who is The Wyoming Sessions about?** Ye (born Kanye Omari West). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Wyoming Sessions — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,033 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 51,500 words, 19 chapters, 166 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Reggie Trayton is a New York-based music journalist whose writing explores the cultural intersections of twentieth-century American music. He writes about the artists whose work crossed the colour line of mid-century American radio, analyzing how sound waves helped dismantle social barriers. His debut work of biography, The Wyoming Sessions, examines the collaborative recording environments of the late nineteen-sixties. By focusing on archived studio logs and fresh interviews with session musicians, Trayton reconstructs the daily realities of historic recording booths. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he spends his weekends browsing local record shops and restoring vintage audio equipment.