Part I: “Throw Little Things Off”: Affording Emotional Meanings in Björk’s Hyperballad This dissertation explores ways of affording emotional meaning(s) in popular recorded song through a case study of Björk’s song Hyperballad (1995). I argue that emotional meanings in song are a product of craft, of choices that can be analyzed at the level of the song track, even as we acknowledge that music is an inherently cultural and socially-situated act. By being exact in our usage of words like “emotion” and more specific about what attributes of a song track afford various affective responses, we can produce rich interpretations that are fair to all parties involved, restoring agency to the singer-songwriter as a skillful producer of signs and to listeners as interpreters of those signs. As a jumping-off-point, I address existing research that finds that Rolling Stone—an influential popular music institution with near-hegemonic consecrating power—has often tended to construct women artists' songs in terms of “emotional authenticity” even when legitimating them as canonic, glossing the songs’ emotional potency and convincingness as either unexplainable or provable via autobiographical verification. Given this history and popular music scholarship’s relative youth as a discipline, I contend that we need more thoughtful, thorough scholarship analyzing emotion in popular song—in order to better understand emotional meaning in music for its own sake, but also to reflect the value in studying supposedly “feminine” aesthetic traits that have often been marginalized. I take Björk’s song Hyperballad from the 1995 album Post as an unusually apt case study for this purpose. I conduct a reception history of Post and Hyperballad, showing that the song is often received as powerfully emotional by fans and critics, and addressing issues of genre and technology that crucially impact how listeners construct meanings within Björk’s idiosyncratic style. I also analyze what Post’s cover conveys about what we can expect to hear on the album, arguing that Björk’s visual choices position the album’s persona as communicating directly with us listeners. The cover also suggests that we are in for experiences of intense emotion, in which the dial is “turned up to 11.” My interpretation of Hyperballad utilizes the persona-environment (melody-accompaniment) distinction that popular musicologists Philip Tagg and Allan Moore employ, as well as research from music psychology and other disciplines, to address all the sounding layers of the song. Ultimately, I argue that the persona-environment relationship in Hyperballad can be understood in terms of changing states of consciousness. By attending to the detail of the song track at any given moment, including sounds’ relationships with one another both locally and across the full duration of the form, we can interpret Hyperballad as enacting the processes of emotional self-regulation the persona explicitly refers to in the lyrics. Finally, the dissertation zooms out to consider broader social and moral implications, arguing that songwriting is a form of emotional labor and song listening is a form of emotional play. Both activities are integral to being human, with very real implications for development of empathy, emotional intelligence, and overall mental health.

Part II: “I Hope You Stay Soft”: A portfolio of works exploring vulnerability through music & self-authored text

Part II presents and discusses a portfolio of compositions that explore vulnerability through compositions featuring self-authored text. In composing, writing, and at times performing these pieces, I examine various ways in which text and music can interact to address questions about vulnerability, intimacy, and “confession.”