Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell — A Life assembles the archive of one of music's most unclassifiable figures, drawing on handwritten scores, photographs, letters, and original interviews to build the most complete portrait of Russell yet committed to print.
About This Book
Arthur Russell moved between New York's avant-garde, disco, new wave, art pop, and folk with an ease that confounded his contemporaries and continues to baffle categorisation. This volume, assembled by Richard King, goes beyond critical biography to work directly from Russell's personal archive — unseen scores, lyrics, drawings, photographs, and correspondence — alongside new interviews with collaborators, family, and friends. The result is less a conventional music biography than an archival portrait: a document that lets the ephemera speak. For anyone serious about postwar American music and the creative cultures of downtown New York, this is essential primary material.
Key Features
- 360 pages of archival visual material including handwritten scores, lyrics, photographs, letters, and drawings, alongside new critical texts
- Assembled and written by Richard King, with extensive original interviews with Russell's collaborators, contemporaries, family, and friends
- Published by Anthology Editions, 1992
What You'll Discover
- How Russell moved fluidly across the New York avant-garde, disco, art pop, folk, and new wave — and why that refusal of genre defined his legacy
- Unseen archival material drawn from Russell's personal papers: handwritten scores and lyrics that illuminate his compositional process
- First-hand accounts from those closest to Russell, offering insight into the creative communities he inhabited and shaped
- A portrait of an artist whose premature death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1992 cut short work that continues to influence musicians decades on
About the Author
Richard King assembled and authored this volume, contributing new texts alongside his curation of Russell's archive and coordination of original interviews with the artist's collaborators, contemporaries, family, and friends. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 360
- Dimensions: 25.4 x 20.3 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781944860608
- Publisher: Anthology Editions
- Publication Date: 1992
Perfect For: Music writers, cultural historians, and readers drawn to downtown New York's creative scenes of the 1970s and 80s — as well as anyone invested in the intersection of avant-garde practice, queer history, and American popular music.