Category Archives: Music History

Tuesday Night Music Club: A case study in collaborative work and the distribution of recognition acknowledgement and ownership

Posted on October 21, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive summary Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club illustrates how a collaboration can be commercially successful while leaving its participants divided over what that success means. The central difficulty was the relationship between a shared creative process and a public … Continue reading →

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Borrowed Light: Sincerity, Restraint, and Critical Disdain in Enrique Iglesias’s “I Like It”

Posted on October 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Enrique Iglesias’s 2010 single “I Like It,” featuring Pitbull, is commonly treated as disposable club pop: commercially successful, critically dismissed, and remembered chiefly as a relic of the Jersey Shore era. This paper argues that the song’s actual … Continue reading →

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Received Simplicity: Why Artists Disdain the Plain Songs They Are Handed and Revere the Plain Songs They Are Given

Posted on October 11, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary A recurring pattern runs through popular music history. Performers frequently resent straightforward songs written for them by outside writers, especially when those songs become their biggest hits. Yet the same performers often describe their own most successful and … Continue reading →

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Psalms 120 and 140 for the Road Home

Posted on October 2, 2026 by nathanalbright

[Note:  This the prepared text for a sermonette given to the brethren at the Feast of Tabernacles in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Thursday, October 1, 2026.] Good morning, brethren.  The Feast of Tabernacles is nearly over. As much as we … Continue reading →

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“As Certain Also of Your Own Poets Have Said”: Greek Poetic and Philosophical Truth in Scripture and Its Implications

Posted on September 28, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary On at least three occasions, the apostle Paul quoted Greek poets, and his words, including those quotations, now stand in the inspired text. In Athens he cited two lines associated with Epimenides and Aratus (Acts 17:28). Writing to … Continue reading →

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Closing the Distance: Artists’ Songs About Their Working Lives and the Audiences Who Prefer Not to Hear Them

Posted on September 25, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Popular musicians regularly write songs about the conditions of their work: the isolation of touring, the strangeness of hotel life, the transactional side of performance, and the unequal intimacy between performers and fans. Artists often treat these songs … Continue reading →

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Album Review: Word Of Mouth

Posted on September 2, 2026 by nathanalbright

Word of Mouth, by Mike & The Mechanics This album, released in 1991, was the third album released by Mike & The Mechanics, and its official AllMusic review suggested that the album’s presence in remainder bins may have been due … Continue reading →

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Word of Mouth: Reputation, Report, and the Selective Regulation of Informal Speech: A white paper on a single phrase and the two problems it holds

Posted on August 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract One phrase does two kinds of work. In music criticism, “word of mouth” names an unmeasured cause invoked to explain a measured outcome; in institutional life, it names a good that organizations purchase eagerly in one direction and punish … Continue reading →

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Three Offices, One Prescription: Notes toward disentangling the opioid question

Posted on August 21, 2026 by nathanalbright

I. The compound noun We speak of “the opioid crisis” as though it were one thing. It is at least four, and the habit of naming them with a single phrase has cost us more than any individual policy error … Continue reading →

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Rented and Owned: Male Crisis, Sincerity, and the Price of Admission in Cinema and the Adult Contemporary Ballad: A White Paper on Frame Devices, Instrumentality, and the Asymmetric Reception of Male Emotional Exposure

Posted on August 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract American popular culture maintains two large archives of the same subject: the man whose competence does not reach his predicament. One archive is cinematic and is exemplified with unusual clarity by the filmography of Ryan Gosling, whose roles constitute … Continue reading →

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