Writing

BOOKS

DJs Do Guetto, 33 1/3 Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). More.

The Sound of Nonsense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). More

The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). More

Nina Simone (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013). Series: ‘Icons of Popular Music’. More

Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Ashgate, 2010). More

JOURNAL ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS

‘Fado’s Evocative Objects’, in Nostalgia in Portugal and Spain Since the Nineteenth Century: Longing in Iberia, Longing for Iberia, ed. Tomás Espino Barrera and Moisés Prieto, Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-19264-6_8.

‘Authenticity as Physicality: Energy, Endurance and Longevity in Bruce Springsteen’s Late Career’, Rock Music Studies 12, no. 3 (2025): 98–112. doi:10.1080/19401159.2026.2616086.

‘“You’ll Need a Good Companion for This Part of the Ride”: Navigating Bruce Springsteen’s Sonic Persona in the Born to Run Audiobook’, in Rereading Musicians and Their Audiences: Popular Music Autobiographies, edited by Tom Attah, Kirsty Fairclough and Christian Lloyd (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), 131-42.

‘Leaving the Table: Intimations of Mortality in Leonard Cohen’s Late Work’, in Music and Death: Funeral Music, Memory and Re-Evaluating Life, edited by Wolfgang Marx (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2023), 134-49. https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781837650644/music-and-death/.

James Barker, Richard Elliott, and Gareth Longstaff, ‘“Standing in Your Cardigan”: Evocative Objects, Ordinary Intensities, and Queer Sociality in the Swiftian Pop Song’, in Disrupted Knowledge: Scholarship in a Time of Change, edited by Tina Sikka, Gareth Longstaff and Steve Walls (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 259–79. https://brill.com/display/book/9789004536418/BP000014.xml.

‘The Reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen: Dystopian Lateness and Speculation in Nina Simone’s Afrofuturism’. Jazz Research Journal 15, no. 1-2 (2022): 25-50. https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JAZZ/article/view/22863.

‘The Most Annoying Noise of All Time’. Australian Humanities Review 70 (2022): 58-66. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2022/11/30/the-most-annoying-noise-of-all-time/.

‘Aneka, “Japanese Boy” (1981)’, in One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, edited by Sarah Hill (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 129-37.

‘Brilliant Disguises: Persona, Autobiography and the Magic of Retrospection in Bruce Springsteen’s Late Career’, Persona Studies 5/1 (2019): 17-32.

‘Sounding Out Popular Music History: A Musicological Approach’, in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon (London: Routledge, 2018), 46-54.

‘Species of Sonic Spaces’. Literary Geographies 3/1 (2017): 69-86.

‘“Words Take the Place of Meaning”: Sound, Sense and Politics in the Music of Robert Wyatt’, in The Singer-Songwriter in Europe: Paradigms, Politics and Place, edited by Isabelle Marc and Stuart Green (London: Routledge, 2016), 51-64.

‘“My Tongue Gets t-t-t-”: Words, Sense and Vocal Presence in Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now’. Twentieth-Century Music 13/1 (2016): 53-76.

‘Words from the New World: Adventure and Memory in Patti Smith’s Late Voice’, in Patti Smith: Outside, edited by Claude Chastagner (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2015), 113-35.

‘Across the Evening Sky: The Late Voices of Sandy Denny, Judy Collins and Nina Simone’, in Gender, Age and Musical Creativity, edited by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 141-53.

‘“Time and Distance Are No Object”: Holiday Records, Representation and the Nostalgia Gap’, Volume! 11/1 (2014): 131-43.

‘You can’t just say “words”: Literature and Nonsense in the Work of Robert Wyatt’, in Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, edited by Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 49-62.

‘The Choreography of Longing: Songs, Screens and Space in Carlos Saura’s Fados’, Quaderns de Cine 9 (2014): 71-8.

‘So Transported: Nina Simone, “My Sweet Lord” and the (Un)folding of Affect’, in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 75-90.

‘Free, Confused and Lonely: On Age, Pop, Fashion and Incompatibility‘, Radical Musicology Volume 6 (2012-2013), http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2012/Elliott.htm. PDF

‘Public Consciousness, Political Conscience and Memory in Latin American Nueva Canción’, in Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives, edited by David Clarke and Eric Clarke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 327-41.

‘The Same Distant Places: Bob Dylan’s Poetics of Place and Displacement’, Popular Music and Society 32/2 (2009): 249-70.

‘Popular Music and/as Event: Subjectivity, Love and Fidelity in the Aftermath of Rock ’n’ Roll’, Radical Musicology 3. (2008). https://web.archive.org/web/20160812020648/https://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Elliott.htm.

‘Reconstructing the Event: Spectres of Terror in Chilean Performance’, British Postgraduate Musicology 8.
PDF

Unpublished Essays

‘The Testimonial Imperative: Reflections on Saer’s The Witness, written in late 2003 as an exercise in bringing together ideas arising from postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis as preparatory work for my doctoral thesis on loss, memory and nostalgia. PDF

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES

‘Aging and Popular Music’, in Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, edited by Danan Gu and Matthew E. Dupre (Cham: Springer, 2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_259-2

‘Beatboxing’, in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

I am the revising author for the following entries in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World originally authored by Richard Middleton:

• ‘Singing’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Solo’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Song’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Songwriter’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Vocalized Tone’ (revised 2018)
• ‘Voice as Instrument’ (revised 2018)

BOOK REVIEWS

Jens Gerrit Papenburg, Listening Devices: Music Media in the Pre-Digital Era, paperback edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). Popular Music History 17/1 (2025): 91-93.

Jordan Alexander Stein, Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke University Press, 2024). Popular Music 44, no. 1 (2025): 106-108.

Alessandro Portelli, Hard Rain: Bob Dylan, Oral Cultures, and the Meaning of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). Oral History (September 2024). External link.

Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (eds), Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke University Press, 2016). Reviews in Cultural Theory 8/1 (2019): 17-22

Jocelyne Guilbault and Roy Cape, Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Perfect Beat 17/2 (2016): 192-94]. Link

Lila Ellen Gray, Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Popular Music 34/2 (2015): 337-338. Link

Salwa Castelo-Branco (ed), Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX (Lisbon: Temas e Debates/Circulo de Leitores, 2010). Popular Music 33/1 (2014): 161-164. PDF

Keith Negus, Bob Dylan (London: Equinox, 2008). Volume!, 9/1 (2012): 181-83.

Tony Tost, Johnny Cash’s American Recordings (New York: Continuum). Tiny Mix Tapes (1 July 2011).

Trevor Schoonmaker, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). PopMatters (15 April, 2011).

Edward Hollis, The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (Picador, 2010). PopMatters (10 Mar 2011).

Viscount Lascano Tegui, On Elegance While Sleeping, translated by Idra Novey (Dalkey Archive, 2010). PopMatters (10 Feb 2011).

Leonard Brown (ed.), John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (Oxford University Press, 2010). PopMatters (7 February 2011).

José Saramago, The Elephant’s Journey, translsated by Margaret Jull Costa (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). PopMatters (28 November 2010).

Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Popular Music, 29/3 (2010): 506-509.

Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum, 2010). PopMatters (12 October, 2010).

Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). PopMatters (24 September, 2010).

Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (U. of North Carolina Press, 2008). Popular Music 29/2 (2010): 320-22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143010000218

Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). PopMatters (14 June, 2010).

Bill Minutaglio, In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas (University of Texas Press, 2010), PopMatters (16 May 2010).

Rosalind E. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). PopMatters (29 April, 2010).

Richard E. Stamz with Patrick A. Roberts, Give ‘Em Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2010). PopMatters (21 April 2010).

Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh (eds), Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (Los Angeles: Getty, 2010). PopMatters (2 April).

Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). PopMatters (18 November, 2009).

Rob Kirkpatrick, The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen (Westport: Praeger, 2007) Popular Music, 27/2 (2008): 336-38.

Monte Dutton True to the Roots: Americana Music Revealed (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska, 2006). Popular Music, 27/1 (2008): 179-81.