Dennis DeSantis — Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers (Ableton). Short problem-and-solution essays aimed at exactly the wall this chapter addressed: the eight-bar loop that refuses to become a song. The arrangement entries are mute-test thinking in book form.
Rick Rubin — The Creative Act: A Way of Being. A producer's philosophy book rather than a manual. Its core instinct — strip away everything that isn't serving the work — is this chapter's subtraction pass applied to an entire career.
Song Exploder (podcast, plus its companion television series). Artists take one song apart stem by stem and explain why each part exists and when it enters. The closest thing available to sitting in on someone else's mute test.
Switched On Pop (podcast). A musicologist and a songwriter deconstruct current pop in plain language — section functions, pre-chorus ramps, chorus payoffs — demonstrated on songs you already know by heart.

Intermediate

Mike Senior — Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio (Focal Press). Officially a mixing book, but its mix-prep material is brutally honest about arrangement: when too many parts fight, fix the arrangement before reaching for EQ. Read it now and Chapter 20 will feel like meeting an old friend.
Friedemann Findeisen — The Addiction Formula. An entire book about engineering energy across a song's timeline — effectively a deep dive on this chapter's energy curve, with concrete devices for building and releasing tension bar by bar.
Ralph Murphy — Murphy's Laws of Songwriting. A veteran hit-writer on the economics of attention: how long listeners give an intro, how soon a song needs to deliver, and what gets a track skipped. Blunt, commercial, and useful precisely because of it.
The companion volume, The Physics of Music (DataField). Where this book teaches the craft of WHEN, the companion volume covers the science underneath it — repetition, expectation, and musical time, and why the brain rewards a payoff it sensed coming.

Advanced

Paul Zollo — Songwriters on Songwriting (Da Capo). Long-form interviews with major songwriters across generations. Notice how often what they sweat isn't the lyric or the riff but the form — which section, how long, and what happens next.
Howard Massey — Behind the Glass, Volumes I and II. Producers and engineers walking through real records, repeatedly making this chapter's point from the other side of the glass: the decisions that matter most happen before a fader moves.
Don Sebesky — The Contemporary Arranger. A formal arranging text from the orchestral and big-band world. The instrumentation is different, but the lessons on register, voicing, and density — who plays where so that everyone gets heard — translate directly to your frequency budget.
Henry Mancini — Sounds and Scores. Score-level case studies in economy from a master of doing more with less: how few parts a great arrangement actually needs to sound enormous. Best read alongside the recordings.

John Covach & Andrew Flory — What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History (W. W. Norton). Gives a class shared vocabulary for song form — verse-chorus, AABA, twelve-bar — anchored to historical recordings. Pairs cleanly with this chapter's section-function framing.
Pat Pattison — Songwriting: Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure (Berklee Press). A teachable, exercise-driven treatment of how sections function and how form carries meaning. Written for lyricists, but it maps directly onto arrangement jobs and grades well.
Jimmy Kachulis — The Songwriter's Workshop: Melody (Berklee Press). Classroom-ready exercises connecting melodic choices to section roles — useful for turning "the chorus must pay off the promise" from a slogan into an assignment.
Hit Songs Deconstructed (subscription analysis service). Publishes detailed structural breakdowns of current chart hits — section timelines, instrumentation maps, energy profiles. Ready-made discussion material for an arrangement unit, updated as the charts move.