This paper considers how climate-concerned singer-songwriters in Melbourne are utilizing music in attempt to contribute to a climate crisis response. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with young people who are developing careers as singer-songwriters, as well as members of a support group for musicians who are concerned about climate. I bring into focus the types of stories these people tell through song in relation to their motivations for telling them. This includes stories that are intended to provide a call to action, stories that offer space to grapple with difficult emotions, and stories that attempt to reinforce cultural change. In exploring the perspectives of these singer-songwriters and the music they make, I examine the ways in which they presume music works, their assumptions about the political efficacy of music and its capacity to influence the world, and the creative decisions they make based on these assumptions. This involves highlighting participants’ emphasis on the affective dimensions of musical production and reception, locating political action at the level of bodily experience. Understanding how and why singer-songwriters in Melbourne are telling these stories at this particular moment in time reveals important insights into music’s entanglement with the politics of the climate crisis and contributes to moving ideas forward in existing research around the functions of music in social change.

Among the dump trucks, bulldozers, dogs, and vultures in Oaxaca, Mexico’s garbage dump, the workers’ union known as Los Pepenadores, practice multisensory listening and sound-making. As frontline recyclers, they earn their living with pride. For these descendants of the Zapotec, listening is an active, multisensory practice used to daily mine discarded waste. Combining my fieldwork in Oaxaca with literature on listening (Kapchan 2017), materialism (Bennett 2010), and the “coaxing”, or organic emergence of a corrido (McDowell 2010), I argue that Los Pepenadores’ multisensory listening and engagement, combined with the corrido’s dominant regional presence as a cultural genre, resulted in a collaboratively and multisensorially written corrido – a song that now serves as a proud connection among community members and their environment. In this paper, I offer an example of how Los Pepenadores’ listening practices gave rise to a collaborative songwriting process that produced a corrido – a song form and genre ubiquitous throughout Mexico (Madrid 2013; McDowell, Glushko, and Fernández 2015). Situating this corrido within the community’s 42-year embodied working history emplaced in the dump, reveals an organic progression from multisensory listening to collaborative songwriting. This corrido expresses Los Pepenadores’ shared memories, history, and collective voice, just as the corrido – as a wider genre – expresses diverse stories. The dump was closed without notice in 2023, disrupting the community’s labor and day to day unity, and prompting Los Pepenadores to record and share their corrido in a way that binds, honors, presents, and empowers their long-lasting community.

Women throughout the Sahara Desert make music about water, near water, using water. As water grows scarce deeper into the desert, women’s ad hoc instruments, made from water receptacles, incorporate less and less water as sonic and lyrical depictions of water develop and increase. Women’s social music parallels water’s centrality to life and artistic expression in Tuareg communities from Niger to Morocco. Water is space, source, and subject in women’s participatory music across the Sahara desert. I examine women’s sonic depictions and uses of water in participatory song and ad hoc instrumentation in Tuareg communities throughout North and West Africa. First, I describe how, depending on the availability of water, women incorporate water and water receptacles into the instruments which keep the beat for participatory songs. I draw on field recordings from my 2024 ethnography of Saharan women’s songs in Guelmim, Morocco, and commercial recordings by Tuareg artists Tartit and Les Filles de Illighadad to share hermeneutic analyses of the rhythmic, formal, and lyrical features of musical examples which incorporate water. This presentation contributes to a growing oeuvre on women’s participatory song traditions in the Sahara, which, like water, lack significant scholarly attention due to perceptions that they are unremarkable. But, like water, women’s social song traditions may seem quotidian until they disappear. I finish by showing how desertification due to the climate crisis parallels the disappearance of oral traditions like guedra and tende. As the rivers of Guelmim dry up, young Tuareg women stop singing songs about water.