Times A-Changin' : Flexible Meter as Self-Expression in Singer-Songwriter Music

In 1960s and 1970s singer-songwriter music, some artists used malleable metric settings alongside other features of self-expression in performance.

This resulted in songs with extremes of self-expressive timing flexibility that cannot be accounted for using a single conception of meter.

This book proposes a theory of flexible meter that recasts metric structure as encompassing the variety of metric scenarios presented by the self-expressive performance practice of singer-songwriters, from metric regularity to metric ambiguity, and vacillations between these two possibilities.

Author Nancy Murphy explores performances by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Simon, and Cat Stevens to investigate the individual metric style of each artist and how their flexible metric techniques contribute to the self-expressive rhetoric of the singer-songwriter performance tradition.