The late voice: time, age and experience in popular music

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, age, memory, innocence and experience in modern popular song. At the heart of the study are six extended case studies of singers and songwriters – Ralph Stanley, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell – whose work is discussed in relation to particular performance traditions and the articulation of lateness in various forms.