Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (pdf)

Description

Poet, critic, and hybrid-genre artist Johnson tracks the use of trouble in word, concept, and practice in this debut of brief, elliptical, lyric essays. He moves through a wide swath of 20th- and 21st-century music, always alert to a sense of melancholy shared among songwriters, their songs, and their listeners in the ever-growing web of popular music. When we say trouble, we refer to the history of trouble whether or not we have it in mind. When we sing trouble, we sing (with) history, Johnson writes.