New Books in Music

How can music change people’s lives? In Music Refuge: Living Asylum Through Music (Oxford UP, Press 2025) Ailbhe Kenny, an Associate Professor in Music Education at Mary Immaculate College Ireland, explores music programmes for, with and by people seeking asylum in Ireland and Germany. In doing so, the book offers new understandings of the use, practice and meaning of music in people’s lives, whether as musicians or as listeners. Exploring a range of settings for music, from listening on phones and shared music making experiences, to parties and performances, the book demonstrates music’s profound impact. Filled with stories of refugees’ experiences, alongside rich and deep analysis, the book is essential reading across the arts and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in music’s place in promoting our shared and common humanity.
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Rebekah Buchanan talks with Ani DiFranco about her latest collaborative work The Spirit of Ani: Reflections on Spirituality, Feminism, Music and Freedom (Akashic Books, 2026). In this powerful collaborative work, the legendary folk-rock star and feminist icon is in conversation with author, artist, and cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen. In these exchanges, Ani is remarkably open about her creativity, spirituality, personal experiences, and evolving consciousness. She is vulnerable and unapologetic, offering an unprecedented window into her fiercely prolific journeys. Rebekah 

Expanding on themes from her best-selling memoir, Ani also offers fascinating reflections on contemporary popular culture—ranging from gender and queer politics, to the music industry in the virtual age, to climate change. The book includes previously unpublished photographs and journal entries, song-birth sheets, paintings, and the lyrics for some of her most treasured songs. The coauthors explore how Ani’s music and art are profoundly tied to her experiences of the interconnectedness of all consciousness and tuning in to receive creative inspiration. Ani’s striking openness produces a book that is both meditative and activating. This is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the dedication, intuition, and vision that drive Ani’s lifelong journey of creating art that not only reflects, but also empowers, transforms, and heals.
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In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration.
Dr. Magaña is sociocultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Mexican American studies at the university of Arizona.
Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.
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A deep dive into one of the most overlooked -- and fascinating -- sides of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature winner: Bob Dylan, the filmmaker. While his music and lyrics have been studied endlessly, his work behind (and in front of) the camera remains largely unexplored. No other book has taken this angle, and with Dylan's legend still growing, the audience is more than ready for a bold new take.

Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think (McNidder and Grace, 2026), the first book of its kind, opens up exciting new ways to think about the artistry of Bob Dylan. It offers a captivating exploration into movies that, according to Michael, showcase Bob Dylan not just as a subject, but as the primary author. These include Eat the Document--a short, experimental television film shot in 1966 and released in 1972; the sprawling, genre-blurring epic Renaldo and Clara (1978), both directed by Dylan himself; and the darkly surreal Masked and Anonymous (2003), directed by Larry Charles but co-written by and starring Dylan. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker explores what these movies reveal about "how it feels" to be Bob Dylan during three defining eras of his career: the revolutionary 1960s, the introspective 1970s, and the enigmatic early 2000s. Just as crucially, they illuminate Dylan's remarkable instinct for using film not merely as a medium, but as a deeply personal mode of expression.

The book also provides an essential survey of Dylan's most recent movie projects, including those by other directors, in which Dylan's influence is less overt but no less powerful. Here, Michael argues that Dylan operates as a kind of "invisible co-author" in Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), where Dylan appears as a slippery, self-mythologizing interviewee; Alma Har'el's haunting Shadow Kingdom (2021), a stylized livestream performance; and James Mangold's A Complete Unknown (2024), the Timothée Chalamet-led biopic shaped in part by Dylan's behind-the-scenes "script approval."

Michael Glover Smith is a Chicago-based filmmaker, author and teacher. Michael's most recent movie, Hekla, starring Elizabeth Stam, will have it’s festival premiere in early 2026. Michael is also the director of four award-winning feature films, the most recent of which, Relative, stars Wendy Robie (Twin Peaks) and is distributed by Music Box Films. His previous book, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (co-written with Adam Selzer), was published by Columbia University Press to acclaim in 2015. He has seen Bob Dylan 100 times in concert.

Michael on Twitter and Bluesky.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.
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What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Stephen Stacks considers this question in The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968 (U Illinois Press, 2025). He argues that the cultural myths around the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968, which are partially supported by the appeal of Freedom Songs, have hindered and inspired later activists as they grappled with the shadow of a simplistic and sanitized memory of what it takes to create political change. Stacks’s analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre—freedom song—to process and practice—freedom singing. In a wide-ranging book, he contemplates the role of nostalgia in political advocacy, investigates the work of one of the movement’s great singers, Bernice Johnson Reagon after 1968, and explains how the media and crucial musical figures shaped and sometimes complicated the collective memory of the Civil Rights movement and its music. The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.
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