Voicing passion: The emotional economy of songwriting

Abstract

This article examines articulations of the role of passion in accounts of the life and work of the songwriter. It draws upon a range of interviews with successful artists captured in the Sodajerker On Songwriting podcast. It is suggested that these interviews capture the 'voicing' (Toynbee, 2003) of the conventions of creativity in popular music, exploring a context in which passionate motivation, expression and understanding of the (potentially) affective responses to songs are paramount to the labour of the songwriter. The article explores how the core of this labour deals in emotion, attempting to articulate feelings in recognizable, tradable form. This is a process that is both instrumentally rationalized but often felt to be a deeply authentic process, understood (and believed) to spring from the individual's emotional experience, so conferring identity in a generic field. In light of current debates about the nature of creative work and emotional labour, the accounts drawn upon here can be seen to epitomise many of the qualities of what constitutes 'good work' through a mode of self-actualisation.

Can Music Make You Sick? Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition

“…Working with and in music has been characterised as an environment where passions, emotions and feelings are an ingredient of musical practices -they are, quite literally, part of what is being worked with (Long and Barber, 2014). In a musical setting, many of the social and professional boundaries that might apply in other areas of one's life are much more entangled and so are far more difficult to identify and unravel.…”

“Essential—Passion for Music”: Affirming, Critiquing, and Practising Passionate Work in Creative Industries

“…Certainly they attest to the idea that support for its continued public and political legitimacy has been sought by binding commercial structures more intimately with the emotional and ethical concerns of 'the passions'. But, as in Long and Barber's (2015) appraisal, there appears a priori a chasm between the emotion, intensity and expressive performativity of passion (as mediated through the creative work of songwriting) and the deployment of such qualities in relation to corporate machinations. Acknowledging this industry's complex entanglement of art and commerce, they suggest that the former, in the process of making music for money, use passion as a means of navigating different modes of valuation: between deeply-felt emotions, audience expectations and market conventions.…”

Music Entrepreneurs in a Linguistic Minority Context: Effectuation as Adaptation to the Paradoxes of Digital Technologies

“…For example, in making the choice to work for the cause of preserving and promoting their language and culture while affording the risk to not earn a living from their music activities, and in focusing on building strategic alliances with other individuals and organizations rather than considering them as competitors, the entrepreneurs expressed moral considerations about their work, which could be highlighted by a moral economy perspective (Banks, 2006). This could also be explained by the passionate labour perspective, which has been much explored in literatures on cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011;Hermes, 2014;Hope and Richards, 2014) and on the music industry (Long and Barber, 2014). These literatures try to explain why workers willingly allow themselves to be exploited (in the eyes of some) because they love the work they do.…”