Music for Girls Online Symposium

I'll be participating in the 'Music for Girls' online symposium on Wednesday 18 May 2022. I'm planning to present material from my ongoing Songs and Objects project, specifically looking at how song lyrics foreground evocative objects and how these reflect the importance of such objects in everyday life, memory and life-writing, as well as considering… Continue reading Music for Girls Online Symposium

Recent presentations

Below are two videos of presentations I gave at online conferences in 2020. The first is my paper for the IASPM UK & Ireland biennial conference. The second is a keynote presentation for the conference Urban Nostalgia: The Musical City in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Texts of these and other papers are available via… Continue reading Recent presentations

Nina Simone’s tribute to Martin Luther King – fifty years ago today

Fifty years ago today, Nina Simone and her band performed at Westbury Music Fair in New York. Three days had passed since the murder of Martin Luther King and Simone used her concert to stage an act of collective mourning and outrage. Below is a re-post of a 2013 entry from my blog So Transported:… Continue reading Nina Simone’s tribute to Martin Luther King – fifty years ago today

The Late Voice now available in paperback

The paperback edition of my book The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music has been published. In the eighteen months since the publication of the hardback edition, two of my major case studies have died (Ralph Stanley and Leonard Cohen), as well as two artists whose work had a profound influence on… Continue reading The Late Voice now available in paperback

Thoughts on Merle Haggard

Merle Haggard has died. In a year already rife with notable deaths in the music industry, I felt this one deeply, for reasons both objective and subjective. Objectively, Haggard was a colossal figure in country music, as a singer, songwriter, hitmaker and soundmaker (by which I mean there is particular country sound that is distinctive… Continue reading Thoughts on Merle Haggard

New article on Patti Smith published

My essay 'Words from the New World: Adventure and Memory in Patti Smith’s Late Voice’ has been published in the book Patti Smith: Outside, edited by Claude Chastagner (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2015). ABSTRACT: Patti Smith’s late work is invariably connected by critics and fans to the work of her ‘classic’ era (the 1970s… Continue reading New article on Patti Smith published

New book: The Late Voice

This week sees the publication of my third book, The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music. The book is being published by Bloomsbury Academic initially in a hardback edition. A cheaper paperback edition will be published at a later date. From the book's blurb: "Popular music artists, as performers in the public… Continue reading New book: The Late Voice

Upcoming talk: A Dream Deferred

'A Dream Deferred: Nina Simone and the Work of Mourning' Tuesday, 19 November 2013, 16:15, Arts A155, University of Sussex I'll be giving a talk hosted by the Centre for American Studies, University of Sussex. This talk presents work from my recent book about the late singer, songwriter, pianist and civil rights activist Nina Simone.… Continue reading Upcoming talk: A Dream Deferred

Víctor Jara: 40 years

It's forty years since the events that led to the murder of the Chilean singer, songwriter, theatre director and activist Víctor Jara (1932-1073). Here is a PDF of an article I wrote about Jara (and the Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez) while researching my doctoral thesis. I was, and remain, as interested in Jara's posthumous career… Continue reading Víctor Jara: 40 years