Same Old Song

Popular music and its listeners are strongly associated with newness and youth. Young people can stay up late dancing to the latest hits and use cutting-edge technology for listening to and sharing fresh music. Many young people incorporate their devotion to new artists and styles into their own developing personalities. However, if popular music is a genre meant for the youthful, what are listeners to make of the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past? In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form. In chapters ranging across the landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, Meyers finds indications of historical consciousness at work in multiple genres. Rock music canonizes its history in tribute performances and museums. Jazz and pop musicians cover tunes from the “Great American Songbook.” Hip-hop and contemporary R&B singers invoke Black popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the work of influential artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Prince, D’Angelo, and Janelle Monáe, Meyers argues that contemporary artists’ homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.

Aidan Callahan knows that potential is not what drives him when it comes to music. It's his passion, his ambition, and the love for the girl he meets at a college party his brother has to drag him to. He is young and very naive, blind to whatever downside there is to life. After gaining an audition of a lifetime, everything falls into place for Aidan. He peaks, he is at the top of the world and he has everything any man could ever wish for... Until his world collapses onto itself, destroying everything he was once grateful for and the life he once lived is no longer the same.

An illuminating history of the song for every kind of music lover Often today, the word ‘song’ is used to describe all music. A free-jazz improvisation, a Hindustani raga, a movement from a Beethoven symphony: apparently, they’re all songs. But they’re not. From Sia to Springsteen, Archie Roach to Amy Winehouse, a song is a specific musical form. It’s not so much that they all have verses and choruses – though most of them do – but that they are all relatively short and self-contained; they have beginnings, middles and ends; they often have a single point of view, message or story; and, crucially, they unite words and music. Thus, a Schubert song has more in common with a track by Joni Mitchell or Rihanna than with one of Schubert’s own symphonies. The Song Remains the Same traces these connections through seventy-five songs from different cultures and times: love songs, anthems, protest songs, lullabies, folk songs, jazz standards, lieder and pop hits; ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ to ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Jerusalem’ to ‘Jolene’. Unpicking their inner workings makes familiar songs strange again, explaining and restoring the wonder, joy (or possibly loathing) the reader experienced on first hearing. ‘As much about singing, musicianship and recording as it is about songwriting, this eclectic ride through a unique choice of songs (everyone will argue for alternatives) is cleverly curated and littered with intriguing details about the creators and their times, filled with loving cross-references to other songs and deft musical analysis. I defy anyone not to leap online to listen to the unfamiliar, or re-listen to old favourites in light of new detail. One of the best games in this book is figuring out why one song follows the other: there’s always an intelligent, often very funny, link.’ —Robyn Archer

Ariel and her sisters are bored at the thought of singing in the Under the Sea Musical Gala. They suggest performing a play instead, but Sebastian, the royal court composer, says absolutely not.

Organizational change literature often focuses on the leaders role in giving sense to others of the need for change and there is a plethora of models and recipes on how to influence employees thinking about change, organizational design and performance. Notwithstanding this ready supply of advice, research has shown that up to 90% of change programs fail to deliver their expected outcomes. One of the reasons for this which has been neglected in the literature is that successful change in thinking starts with how leaders first make sense of the need for change and the challenges this poses to their own thinking. This book surfaces the elements behind leader sensemaking that add to or detract from their ability to critically question their current thinking. Leaders and interventionists have lacked practical and pragmatic advice on how to influence the process. This book is the culmination of 10 years of research spent working with leaders in organizations as they interpreted the need for change and made choices about engaging, or not, with transformational change methodologies. It reveals nine elements of sensemaking displayed by organizational leaders as they grapple with challenges to their current orthodoxies about how to lead and organize in times of change. The book shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of leadership, change, and organisational development.

If you know country music, you know Bobby Braddock. Even if you don't know his name, you know the man's work. "He Stopped Loving Her Today." "D-I-V-O-R-C-E." "Golden Ring." "Time Marches On." "I Wanna Talk About Me." "People Are Crazy." These songs and numerous other chart-topping hits sprang from the mind of Bobby Braddock. A working songwriter and musician, Braddock has prowled the streets of Nashville's legendary Music Row since the mid-1960s, plying his trade and selling his songs. These decades of writing songs for legendary singers like George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Toby Keith are recounted in Bobby Braddock: A Life on Nashville's Music Row, providing the reader with a stunning look at the beating heart of Nashville country music that cannot be matched. If you're looking for insight into Nashville, the life of music in this town, and the story of a force of nature on the Row to this day, Bobby Braddock will take you there.

For more than three decades, Joel and Ethan Coen have produced some of the most memorable and influential American roots music soundtracks in film history. From Raising Arizona (1987) to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) to Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), the Coens, along with musical archivist and producer T-Bone Burnett, have curated half-forgotten yet unforgettable genres, artists and songs from America's cultural past for new audiences. This book is the first devoted to giving a full account of this rich cinematic legacy.