Milwaukee’s Mario R. Martin has some pretty diverse experience in the music business. He’s worked as a record company publicist, as a DJ and with The Ghosts of Laura Palmer – a turntable duo he initially formed with Andy Gulotta – and as a freelance music critic.

Now, Martin is also an author, with a new book, "Growing Up Analog," out now in paperback and available on Amazon.

"I've been writing about music for a long time," says Martin. "I got married in 2012 and wanted to keep writing, this time about getting married. The only reason I ever even considered the topic is because I had a pretty public engagement in 2003 and people still asked me almost 10 years later what happened. So I started writing."

The book he wrote is a memoir of a live lived to a soundtrack. Really, it’s a book nearly every one of us music fiends could write. But each book would be completely different. Martin, born in 1976, has long nurtured catholic (with a small "c") music tastes and his life OST runs the gamut from the "Grease" soundtrack to Michael Jackson to Ministry to Ice Cube and beyond.

Despite the fact that he wrote about the subjects he knows best – his life and the music that has affected him – Martin says penning the 220-page memoir was no easy feat.

"I hated it," he admits. "I hated everything I wrote. I mean, I was like six months in to documenting and I realized I'm really boring. You can't blow out, ‘made chicken carbonara and watched How I Met Your Mother...’ It was lame."

His solution was to step back and think back to advice he used to give musicians when he worked in the music business.

"I thought about how I counseled so many bands and artists about how the product has to be a labor of love," Martin says. "It was through a conversation with my wife where I told her I was quitting the documentation. I followed it up with how I told bands to only release records when they have something to say, but I had nothing to say. She told me, ‘that's what you should write about...’ I took it and ran with it really. The rest was just telling stories really."

Some of those stories are about growing up – about how he devoured music from a very young age. But the most interesting ones dip into Martin’s career in the music business, working as a publicist for Virgin/EMI subsidiary Narada Records. When he writes about The Pixies, for example, he does so as someone who worked with Frank Black and saw him from a different angle than the rest of us did.

"The approach was the hard part. I was originally writing in story form," Martin says. "Very third-person. I asked my wife to read it and ... she said it just didn't sound like me. So I dumped another stack of pages. Then finally, I just started writing as if I were emailing someone. I imagined myself at a bar telling a friend a story. I would use authorial intrusions on myself, like as if I was interrupting another self. Basically, if I were diagnosed with multiple personalities, this would be the thesis on it! But honestly, it's how I talk. But it was honest, and that was coming through when I asked my wife to read it again."

"Growing Up Analog" really does read like an email – a really long email – to a friend, with Martin walking down memory lane. But instead of stopping to smell the roses, he’s rewinding cassettes, dropping the needle on a 45.

But, fortunately – and unlike many self-published books – it’s cleanly executed, a fact that is indebted to Martin’s hiring an editor to comb through the text. It added more time to the already long-in-progress work, but it makes a difference and is especially important because Martin hopes a publisher will pick up the book and re-publish it.

"The result is a streamlined version of my jumbled thoughts and experiences," says Martin on that process. "It bounces between memories and kept me on my toes. It also kept me honest in my delivery of content.

"It's crazy how long this took me, from start to finish. I have to say that it's a relief that it's done. It consumed so much of me. So many nights. It's surreal to see it completed. It scares me, despite being a bit of an extrovert, that I'm no longer private. My deepest emotions are in those pages and while I'm proud of what I completed, I'm absolutely terrified about what others will say about it. It's the ultimate in disarming oneself. It's cathartic."