1 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX, 1976), 92.

2 I am exceedingly grateful to my co-workers on that project, Patty Schmidt and Ruth Dockwray, for their penetrating critiques of earlier versions of this essay, and to members of the project workshop for further insightful comments and ideas; and I have also learnt much (and incorporated perhaps a few of the ideas) from this article's referees, Ian Biddle and Robert Fink.

3 Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT, 2002), 82.

4 Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (New York, 2007), 28.

5 Jody Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Mediations’, The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 129–50 (p. 130).

6 Jody Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Mediations’, The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 133.

7 Jody Berland, ‘Locating Listening: Technological Space, Popular Music, and Canadian Mediations’, The Place of Music, ed. Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (New York, 1998), 130.

8 Allan F. Moore, Patricia Schmidt and Ruth Dockwray, ‘The Hermeneutics of Spatialization in Recorded Song’ (forthcoming).

9 Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text (2nd edn, Aldershot, 2002), 120–6.

10 Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900–1960 (Middletown, CT, 2005).

11 See Ruth Dockwray and Allan F. Moore, ‘Configuring the Sound-Box 1965–72’, forthcoming in Popular Music, 29 (2010), on the diagonal mix; and David Gibson, The Art of Mixing (2nd edn, Boston, MA, 2005), for the cross-genre norm.

12 Schemas are ‘mental representations of the properties that concepts usually have’. Mike Rinck, ‘Spatial Situation Models’, Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking, ed. Priti Shah and Akira Miyake (New York, 2005), 334–82 (p. 337).

13 David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 103.

14 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 104. Azimuth, in this context, refers to what I am calling laterality.

15 Elena Rusconi et al., ‘Spatial Representation of Pitch Height: The SMARC Effect’, Cognition, 99 (2006), 113–29 (p. 113). The experiments reported in this article dealt with the apparent misdirection of decades of earlier studies, where respondents had generally been asked to estimate the spatial height of pitches, thereby prejudging the conclusion. I am very grateful to Nicola Dibben for bringing this area of research to my attention. Peter Doyle is typical of writers who state that ‘to call shorter wavelength, higher frequency sounds “high” is mostly convention’ (Echo and Reverb, 27). It appears that simple convention may play less of a part than we hitherto supposed.

16 This concept forms part of Philip Tagg's interpretative apparatus: Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Music, <http://www.tagg.org/xpdfs/semiotug.pdf> (accessed 17 April 2008).

17 For example, James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, MA, 1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (London, 1979).

18 Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (New York, 2005).

19 As argued in Allan F. Moore, ‘Interpretation: So What?’, Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Aldershot, 2009), 411–25.

20 Eric F. Clarke, ‘Subject-Position and the Specification of Invariants in Music by Frank Zappa and P. J. Harvey’, Music Analysis, 18 (1999), 347–74.

21 Allan F. Moore, ‘The Persona/Environment Relation in Recorded Song’, Music Theory Online, 11 (October 2005), <http:www.music-theory.org/mto/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.moore_frames.html>.

22 I refer for instance to issues of cadence, of modulation, of melodic contour, of speed and direction of harmonic motion, and of how they are read in the light of the specifics of a song's narrative.

31 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 29 (emphasis original).

23 Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension: Man's Use of Space in Public and Private (London, 1969), 110–19. The term ‘interpersonal distance’ is currently more common than proxemics in the psychology literature, referring to the conceptual area which Hall initiated, and which continues its useful life almost in its original formulation.

24 Doyle, Echo and Reverb, 57, incorporating his quotation from Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tinfoil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph (2nd edn, Indianapolis, IN, 1976).

25 Contra George Lakoff (Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago, 1987), 215–16), we do not see that ecological perception and cognitive sciences are at odds: see Moore, Schmidt and Dockwray, ‘The Hermeneutics of Spatialization in Recorded Song’. See also Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge, 2005), who has recourse to both ‘affordance’ and ‘image schemata’ (pp. 19–20).

26 Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Constructions in Natural Language (Cambridge, MA, 1985).

27 Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thoughts and Language (Cambridge, 1997).

28 This model has been employed for musicological discussion in Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford, 2002).

29 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, IL, 1987) and The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, IL, 2007); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, IL, 1989), 90ff.

30 Leonard Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

32 By convention, in the literature, individual schemas are capitalized.

33 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 87. His discussion of BALANCE can be found on pp. 73–98.

34 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL, 1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, 1999).

35 For instance, Janna Saslaw, ‘Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 40 (1996), 217–43, and Mark Johnson and Steve Larson, ‘“Something in the Way She Moves” – Metaphors of Musical Motion’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18 (2003), 63–84.

36 Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford, 2001), esp. pp. 132ff.

37 ‘Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)’, Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007).

38 In the sense given by Clarke, Ways of Listening.

39 Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 93.

40 Operative distinctions between these characteristics are explored in Allan F. Moore, ‘Categorical Conventions in Music-Discourse: Style and Genre’, Music and Letters, 82 (2001), 432–42, and in Franco Fabbri, ‘Browsing Music Spaces: Categories and the Musical Mind’, Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, ed. Allan F. Moore (Aldershot, 2007), 49–62. I do not accept the common assumption that style is an aspect of genre, but consider that each operates relatively autonomously.

41 For example, I have in mind the extended demonstration of such genre characteristics offered in Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music (Middletown, CT, 2006).

42 Originally 1956. The Best of the Sun Sessions (Music Club, 1994).

43 Doyle, Echo and Reverb, 199.

44 From Doyle's subtitle; see note 10 above.

45 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH, 1997).

46 Steve Jones, Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication (London, 1992).

47 Albin J. Zak III, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

48 For example, William Moylan, The Art of Recording: Understanding and Crafting the Mix (Woburn, MA, 2002).

49 For example, Maureen Droney, Mix Masters: Platinum Engineers Reveal their Secrets for Success (Boston, MA, 2003).

50 I am grateful to Ian Biddle for pointing out the importance of this direction of thought.

51 See Marina Yaguello, Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics (Oxford, 1998).

52 Blood on the Tracks (Columbia, 1975). A similar comment could be applied to the remainder of the tracks on the album, although ‘Jack of Hearts’ is particularly extreme.

53 David Boucher, Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (New York, 2004), 93.

54 Originally 1956. The Magic of Alma Cogan (EMI, 1997).

55 Of course, at the time, it would have been a tape recording of a train, but it functions in the same way as the samples with which we are nowadays familiar.

56 Well, I hear it left to right, which I suspect is a factor of the localization of brain functions with respect to left and right hemispheres.

57 Roxy Music (Virgin, 1972).

58 Howard Horne and Simon Frith, Art into Pop (London, 1987), 118.

59 Examples of such stereotypical oboe description in relation to ‘Laugh! Faithless one!’ from Act 2 of Handel's Ariodante may be found at <http://www.eno.org/src/baylis_ariodante.pdf>; to Saariaho's La passion de Simone at <http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article2061246.ece>; and to Barber's Violin Concerto at <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E2DA133AF935A25751C0A96F958260> (all accessed 22 April 2008). Many others could be cited. I make these references as a telescoped form of Philip Tagg's interobjective comparison technique.

60 PENDULUM is not a widely referenced image schema (as far as I am aware, it does not appear in the work of Mark Johnson, Mark Turner or George Lakoff), but it is discussed in Christopher Schmidt, ‘Metaphor and Cognition: A Cross-Cultural Study of Indigenous and Universal Constructs in Stock Exchange Reports’, Intercultural Communication, 5 (2002), <http://www.immi.se/intercultural> (accessed 22 April 2008), and elsewhere. I return to this schema below.

61 Skylarking (Virgin, 1986).

62 ‘The clock at Waterloo station is well known as a meeting place for people going on blind dates’, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A11682317>; ‘the landmark meeting point, like the famous clock at Waterloo station […]’, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2030682,00.html> (both accessed 22 April 2008).

63 Vehicles and Animals (EMI, 2003).

64 Bells, Boots and Shambles (Castle, 1973).

65 Phasing is a production technique that was widely used in the 1960s to connote psychedelia.

66 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 207.

67 Susan Henking, review of Johnson, The Body in the Mind, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 58 (1990), 503–6 (pp. 505–6). My thanks to Patty Schmidt for this reference.

68 David Sless, In Search of Semiotics (London, 1986), 158.

69 David Sless, In Search of Semiotics (London, 1986), 99.

70 Clarke, Ways of Listening, 51.

71 Clarke, Ways of Listening, 40.

72 Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes (New York, 2003). Unfortunately, in their experiments, they did not note differences of response according to gender (p. 117), since they were interested simply in the degree of similarity of response within a shared culture.

73 Diane F. Halpern and Marcia L Collaer, ‘Sex Differences in Visuospatial Abilities’, Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking, ed. Shah and Miyake, 170–212 (pp. 176–7). Note that this is no more than a (statistical) tendency; though male, I use landmarks almost exclusively.

74 Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Cambridge, 2003).

75 Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Cambridge, 2003), 20.

76 See, for instance, Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (London, 1984), 203–4.

77 Gillian Brown, Speakers, Listeners and Communication: Explorations in Discourse Analysis (Cambridge, 1995), 108.

78 Sally McConnell-Ginet, ‘Language and Gender’, Language: The Socio-Cultural Context, ed. Frederick J. Newmeyer (Cambridge, 1995), 75–99 (p. 82).

79 Allan F. Moore, ‘The Act You've Known for All These Years: A Re-Encounter With Sgt. Pepper’, Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles, ed. Olivier Julien (Aldershot, 2008), 139–46.

80 Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition, 294.

81 Brown, Speakers, Listeners and Communication, 110.

82 Explored in Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN, 1994).

83 Originally 1969. Best of T. Rex (A&M, 1998).

84 An inert personic environment does not intervene between the listener and a conventionalized, matter-of-fact reading of the persona; see Allan F. Moore, ‘The Persona/Environment Relation in Recorded Song’.

85 Originally 1968. She Flies Like a Bird (Castle, 2002).

86 Revolver (Parlophone, 1966).

87 Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (London, 1995), 168.

88 Originally 1963. Gold (Universal, 2003).

89 Andrew Moore, Pragmatics, 2001, <http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/pragmatics.htm>, (accessed 14 December 2009).

90 A Song for Me (Mystic, 1970).

91 Perhaps surprisingly, bearing in mind its historical location, there seems to be no slang reference here to a mule as smuggler of drugs.

92 Comparison with ‘Summer's Cauldron’ (above) demonstrates that atmospheric heat can be specified both by too much precision (the artificial vibrato of the string pad) and too little, depending on the listener's perspective: the first specifies, for example, the way sweaty clothing seems to constrict one's movements in excessive heat, while the second specifies, for example, the loosening of that clothing one undertakes in order to try to escape the effect of such heat.

93 Originally 1980. The Godfather (Universal, 2002).

94 Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City (London, 1983), 235.

95 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 21–3.

96 John Wesley Harding (Columbia, 1968).

97 As is my invariable practice, music examples, all of which are analytical transcriptions from the relevant recording, cite performer only. This is simply intended as a means of identification, for I argue throughout that the text instantiates the identity of the persona only, not that of any writer or producer. The identification of a popular-music track as that of an individual writer, producer or performer is a means of distributing money, not a reliable indicator of any labour involved.

98 Electric Ladyland (MCA, 1968).

99 Albin J. Zak III (‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation “All Along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2005), 599–644 (p. 631)) hears the downbeat a quaver later than I do. His analysis allows the maintenance of a regular 4/4, but I would maintain that the unsettling nature of Hendrix's recording is amplified in my hearing, whereby the regular metre is interrupted as early as bar 4, with an additional half-beat.

103 Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop (London, 1989), 150 (emphasis original).

100 Albin J. Zak III (‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation “All Along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2005), 599–644 (p. 631)) hears the downbeat a quaver later than I do. His analysis allows the maintenance of a regular 4/4, but I would maintain that the unsettling nature of Hendrix's recording is amplified in my hearing, whereby the regular metre is interrupted as early as bar 4, with an additional half-beat., 631.

101 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 85 and 21–3.

102 William Echard, ‘An Analysis of Neil Young's “Powderfinger” Based on Mark Johnson's Image Schemata’, Popular Music, 18 (1999), 133–44 (p. 141).

104 Grace of the Sun (Stormy Forest, 2004).

105 Rattle and Hum (Island, 1988).

106 This is true, I think, of every cover I have noticed, with the exception of a recent one by the Fratellis, which uses both articulations at different points in the track. Radio 1: Established 1967 (UMTV, 2007).

107 It's a Wonderful Life (Capitol, 2001).

108 Abbey Road (Parlophone, 1969).

109 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 113–17.

110 How Long is Forever (Castle, 1974).

111 Brian Kehew and Kevin Ryan, Recording the Beatles: The Studio Equipment and Techniques Used to Create their Classic Albums (Houston, TX, 2006), 522.

112 Peter Gabriel I (Virgin, 1977).

113 For instance, at <http://rec.horus.at/music/gabriel/Songs/here-comes-the-flood> (accessed 22 April 2008).

114 ‘The Monkees' (1966), Greatest Hits (Rhino, 1995).

115 Gillett, The Sound of the City, 331.

116 This concept also forms part of Philip Tagg's interpretative apparatus; see note 16.

117 I refer specifically to the film.

118 Disco Mania (Crimson, 1976).

119 I assume these two, normal lead singers for Tavares, were indeed singers on this track, but have been unable to corroborate this.

120 Space Oddity (EMI, 1972).

121 See Allan F. Moore, ‘In a Big Country: The Portrayal of Wide Open Spaces in the Music of Big Country’, Contemporary Music Review, 13 (Musica Significans: Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Musical Signification, ed. Raymond Monelle, 1998), 1–6. Doyle locates the origin of this signifier in mid-century cowboy films, where a shout may echo from distant mountains. Echo and Reverb, 106ff.

122 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York, 1995), 10.

123 Elmore James, ‘Dust my Broom’ (originally 1951). Dust my Broom (Charly, 2006).

124 Originally 1931. The Voice of the Mississippi (Prism, 1996).

125 Originally 1954. Queen of Gospel (Music Club, 1993).

126 For example, Ebony Three, Buster Bailey and Sam Price Trio, Gospel Truth (Castle, 2000). They make the most of the injunction to the chariot to ‘swing’.

127 Originally 1947. Queen of Gospel (Music Club, 1993).

128 Originally 1933. Down Hearted Blues (Golden Options, n.d.).

129 Originally 1927. Match Box Blues (Indigo, 1998).

130 Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues (Urbana, IL, 1977), 63.

131 Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge, 1984), 266–71.

132 Originally 1929. Atlanta Strut (Snapper, 2004).

133 Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (London, 1972), 126.

134 Originally 1958. Good ‘Uns: The Classic Cobra Recordings (Demon, 2000).

135 Originally 1954. Father of Chicago Blues (Primo, 2006).

136 Spirit of the Century (Real World, 2001).

137 Kimono my House (Island, 1974).

138 The News (Castle, 1979).

139 My own literary reference point is Anna Kavan's terrifying Ice (London, 1973), but this reference may well be purely personal.

140 Originally 1939. Goodnight Sweetheart (Disky, n.d.).

141 David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (2nd edn, Berkeley, CA, 2000), 54–5.

142 Yellow Moon (A&M, 1989).

143 The refusal of Rosa Parks (a co-worker of Martin Luther King) to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, highly influential in the US civil rights movement, the ‘mother’ of which she was later dubbed by the US Congress.

144 Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First, 170.

145 Return of the Boom Bap (Jive, 1993).

146 Taken from 4' 20″ of their cover of The Animals' ‘Inside – Looking Out’. Grand Funk (Columbia, 1969).

147 Home Invasion (Rhyme Syndicate, 1993).

148 Rock Island (Chrysalis, 1989).

149 Michele Kort, ‘Judee Sill's Holiest Dreams’, sleeve-note to Abracadabra, collected recordings (Rhino, 2006).

150 Judee Sill (Asylum, 1971).

151 Halpern and Collaer, ‘Sex Differences in Visuospatial Abilities’, 185.

152 Of course, a great deal of listening would be necessary to substantiate this assumption, and it is outside the purview of this particular article.

153 Sheer Heart Attack (EMI, 1974).

154 Serge Lacasse, ‘Listen to my Voice’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 2000), 139, note 216.

155 Allan F. Moore and Ruth Dockwray, ‘The Establishment of the Virtual Performance Space in Rock’, Twentieth-Century Music, 5 (2009), 63–85.

156 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 119–21.

157 Paranoid and Sunburnt (One Little Indian, 1995).

158 Originally 1941. Greatest Hits (RCA, 1999).

159 Single release (Parlophone, 1968). It was used as the theme tune to the first four of her Saturday night television series.

160 Loveless (Creation, 1991).

161 On <http://www.mybloodyvalentine.net> (accessed 25 April 2008), a piece of journalism originally published in Hype in 1992.

162 The Woman in Me (PolyGram, 1995).

163 Spirit (Sony, 2007).

164 Originally 1970. At the Close of a Century (Motown, 1999).

165 As demonstrated in Allan F. Moore, ‘What Story Should a History of Popular Music Tell?’, Popular Music History, 1 (2006), 329–38.

166 Originally 1967. Four Tops at their Very Best (Universal, 2002).

167 Originally 1967. Motown Gold (Universal, 2001).

168 Originally 1976. Endless Summer (Mercury, 1994).

169 Originally 1938. The Best of Vera Lynn (Delta, 2003).

170 Originally 1945. Sentimental Journey (Carlton, 1996).

171 Originally 1942. Sentimental Journey (Carlton, 1996).

172 Peace in Our Time (Track, 1988).

173 Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966).

174 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, xiv.

175 Greatest Hits (RCA, 1984).

176 You've Come a Long Way, Baby (Skint, 1998). Fat Boy Slim is the stage name of Norman Cook.

177 According to the (anonymous) Wikipedia article on the track, the lyric ‘Right Here, Right Now’ is taken from the sci-fi film Strange Days, spoken by actor Angela Bassett at 1:39:08; see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Here_Right_Now_(song)> (accessed 6 November 2008). Identification of the source will impact on the track's import, but does not affect this persona's spatial placement.

178 James Gang Rides Again (ABC, 1970).

179 Doubt (Food, 1990).

180 According to the band's own publicity: <http://www.jesusjonesarchive.info/1990.php> (accessed 25 April 2008).

183 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 79.

181 The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967).

182 Unstudied, that is, except through content analysis, which so often seems to forget that lyrics are only one aspect of song.

184 Hopes and Fears (Island, 2004).

185 Sentimental Journey (Carlton, 1996).