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Musical Intimacy: Construction, Connection, and Engagement
Discourse on popular music frequently describes artists’ recordings and performances as “intimate.” Yet that discourse often stops short of elucidating how a mass-produced commodity such as popular music is able to elicit feelings of intimacy with and among its audience. Through detailed analysis of popular music’s composition, performance, production, and promotion, Musical Intimacy examines how intimacy is constructed and perceived in popular music via its affective and technological affordances. From the recording studio to the concert stage, from collective experience to individual listening and perception, this book presents a working understanding of musical intimacy.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published September 7, 2023
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August 4, 2025
I'm writing this review so that any musicians who want to read this book know what they're picking up. I'm a classically trained pianist and singer who performs as a collaborative pianist and church musician for a small chamber chorus, so I'm in plenty of spaces that demand musical intimacy. I bought this book looking for an exploration of the topic, and I'm not the target audience for this book.
This book is primarily written for those behind the boards: sound mixers, music engineers, and album producers. The secondary audience for this book are singer-songwriters who record their own albums. Five of the six chapters are dedicated to the hallmarks of an intimate album: ambient sounds from recording sessions left in the final mix, boosting human vocalizations like breaths and mouth clicks, placing the microphone as close to the singer's mouth as possible, etc.
The authors give analyses of intimate recordings made by music icons like Prince, Johnny Cash, Fiona Apple and Billy Eilish, but much of that analysis is dedicated to the production of the music over the performance of the music. They consider the arrangements of the musicians, the placement of the microphones, the difference between studio and at-home recordings, production choices in levels. As a music lover and a fan of those artists, it was interesting to read; however, I'm not a recording artist, so these analyses don't help me.
The final chapter was devoted to creating intimate performance spaces, but much of it was obvious to any performing musician. Smaller spaces, such as coffee shops and listening rooms, engender intimate performances through aesthetics and proximity to the musician. They did give some consideration to the phenomenon of artists like Bruce Springsteen producing an intimate performance for 30,000 of your closest friends at a stadium concert, but most of us musicians have neither the resources nor the fandom to create that experience.
In short, this book was written well and was an interesting read, but it was ultimately useless for a musician like me. In fact, I was put off by a quote on p. 110 of the book, in which the authors quote another scholar: "What musicians perform first and foremost is not the music, but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae." While I don't argue that we musicians are presenting a curated version of ourselves for the audience, we are doing so through music. If we have a musical personae, we crafted it and performed through our music.
The book I was hoping for would be a meditation on how musicians create musical authenticity not through recording technologies but the public performance of private reflection and self awareness. We all agree that we're looking for musical sincerity, but it's such a difficult thing to define. You know it when you hear it, and you can't force it. As the authors confess that there hasn't been much writing on musical intimacy, maybe such a book has yet to be written. Here's hoping that some brave musician or intuitive musicologist will explore how musicians create an intimate sound before any music engineer produces it for audience consumption.
This book is primarily written for those behind the boards: sound mixers, music engineers, and album producers. The secondary audience for this book are singer-songwriters who record their own albums. Five of the six chapters are dedicated to the hallmarks of an intimate album: ambient sounds from recording sessions left in the final mix, boosting human vocalizations like breaths and mouth clicks, placing the microphone as close to the singer's mouth as possible, etc.
The authors give analyses of intimate recordings made by music icons like Prince, Johnny Cash, Fiona Apple and Billy Eilish, but much of that analysis is dedicated to the production of the music over the performance of the music. They consider the arrangements of the musicians, the placement of the microphones, the difference between studio and at-home recordings, production choices in levels. As a music lover and a fan of those artists, it was interesting to read; however, I'm not a recording artist, so these analyses don't help me.
The final chapter was devoted to creating intimate performance spaces, but much of it was obvious to any performing musician. Smaller spaces, such as coffee shops and listening rooms, engender intimate performances through aesthetics and proximity to the musician. They did give some consideration to the phenomenon of artists like Bruce Springsteen producing an intimate performance for 30,000 of your closest friends at a stadium concert, but most of us musicians have neither the resources nor the fandom to create that experience.
In short, this book was written well and was an interesting read, but it was ultimately useless for a musician like me. In fact, I was put off by a quote on p. 110 of the book, in which the authors quote another scholar: "What musicians perform first and foremost is not the music, but their own identities as musicians, their musical personae." While I don't argue that we musicians are presenting a curated version of ourselves for the audience, we are doing so through music. If we have a musical personae, we crafted it and performed through our music.
The book I was hoping for would be a meditation on how musicians create musical authenticity not through recording technologies but the public performance of private reflection and self awareness. We all agree that we're looking for musical sincerity, but it's such a difficult thing to define. You know it when you hear it, and you can't force it. As the authors confess that there hasn't been much writing on musical intimacy, maybe such a book has yet to be written. Here's hoping that some brave musician or intuitive musicologist will explore how musicians create an intimate sound before any music engineer produces it for audience consumption.
Displaying 1 of 1 review