Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks

Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks is a collection of essays dedicated to the study of recorded popular music, with the aim of exploring "how the record shapes the song" (Moylan, Recording Analysis, 2020) from a variety of perspectives. Introduced with a Foreword by Paul Théberge, the distinguished editorial team has brought together a group of reputable international contributors to write about a rich collection of recordings.

Examining a diverse set of songs from a range of genres and points in history (spanning the years 1936–2020), the authors herein illuminate unique attributes of the selected tracks and reveal how the recording develops the expressive content of song performance.

Analyzing Recorded Music will interest all those who study popular music, cultural studies, and the musicology of record production, as well as popular music listeners.

William Moylan is Distinguished University Professor (2019–2022) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he is a Professor of Music and Sound Recording Technology and served as Chairperson of the Department of Music. As a recording engineer and a producer, he has worked with emerging and leading artists across a broad spectrum of popular and classical genres. William Moylan is the author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix, 3rd Edition (Focal Press, Routledge, 2015) and Recording Analysis: How the Record Shapes the Song (Focal Press, Routledge, 2020).

Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa. Burns’ interdisciplinary research merges musical analysis and cultural theory to explore representations of gender in the lyrical, musical, and visual texts of popular music. Her monograph, Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music (2002), won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2005). She is co-editor of two previous essay collections: The Pop Palimpsest (2018) and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (2019). She is co-editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series and Associate Editor of Music Theory Spectrum.

Mike Alleyne is Professor Emeritus with the Department of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) and a Visiting Professor at the Pop Akademie in Germany. His work has been published in Popular Music & Society, Rock Music Studies, and Billboard magazine. His books include The Essential Hendrix (2020) and The Encyclopedia of Reggae (2012), and a co-edited collection entitlted Prince and Popular Music (2020). He also writes and edits for the SAGE Business Case Series in Music Marketing and contributed liner notes to the groundbreaking 9-CD box set, The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap (2021).