This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music

Musician Gordon (Girl in a Band) and essayist Gleeson (Constellations) join forces for this powerhouse collection that puts in the limelight “music’s ability to connect us to the recurring highs and lows of human life.” Liz Pelly’s “Broadside Ballads” is an insightful examination of the lesser-known members of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s Almanac Singers, including Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, an “organizer, music teacher and performer.” Jenn Penny’s “The Highway” is a rewarding look at Lucinda Williams’s career singing “sweet odes to fellow misfits.” Fatima Bhutto’s “Songs of Exile” is a lucid account of “anthems of resistance,” and is Simone White’s “What Is Going On in Rap Music, the Music Called ‘Trap’ and ‘Drill’?” smartly explores the genres’ relationship with criticism: “Criticism will not and cannot fuck with trap.” Some pieces feel a bit arcane, as in Juliana Huxtable’s “Praise Poem for Linda,” a somewhat clunky analysis of music writing, but the work as a whole strikes a chord: “We can’t help but surrender to what moves us in the sound even if it seems contradictory or irrational; in fact, our experience of music is full of contradictions,” Heather Leigh writes in the introduction. The result is a collection worth tuning in to. (May)