In this PennSound podcast, Jeff T. Johnson and Emily Abendroth exchange perspectives on how modular, nonlinear writing can open into enactive relationships that press readers and listeners alike beyond individual experience toward “critical empathy” and its relational tactics and strategies for living in common amidst social struggles that require collective reflection and navigation.
Last May we published “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics,” Jeff T. Johnson’s sprawling “investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.” Announcing the piece on PennSound Daily, our own Michael Hennessey hailed the article as “a remarkably ambitious and capacious project that brings together the all-too-often disparate worlds of contemporary poetry and music.” “Within,” he continued, “we find Johnson deftly discussing John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Caroline Bergvall, and William Carlos Williams (among many others) with the same skill he dedicates to St. Vincent, Dock Boggs, Amy Winehouse, and Johnny Cash.”
Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics is an investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. It is a book-length project, comprised of three parts, each broken into modular chapters, or Trouble Songs, which build on one another as a series of albums, but are also intended as remixable and programmable singles. What follows is a compilation that spans those three parts.
Back to 'A Whole House'
A 'Trouble Songs' addendum
Jeff T. Johnson presents “A Whole House,” a new installment to his “Trouble Songs” project.
In 2015, we published “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics,” Jeff T.