About the Author

Greetings and welcome! I’m a music analyst who studies various musical traditions, but in recent years Bob Dylan has been my main focus. I began the work that led to What Did You Hear? over twelve years ago, and I’m delighted to share it with you now. 

I have taught music theory and analysis at the University of Chicago since 2005, with recent courses focusing especially on popular music, voice, and Black experimentalism. Like Bob Dylan, I’m from Minnesota, but from the Southeastern corner of the state, very far from Hibbing, his home town. (I have, though, performed a couple times in Northrup Auditorium, the site of a 2008 Dylan concert that I discuss in Chapter 1.) My first career was as a guitarist: I taught at a conservatory in the Azores in the 1990s, before pivoting to academia. I also co-founded City Elementary—a school for neurodiverse kids on Chicago’s South Side—in 2014.

I’d love to hear from you! Let me know if there is content you’d like to see on the site—a song or performance you especially cherish and would like me to discuss, or an explainer video on some concept or analysis in the book. Feel free to reach out to me at srings@uchicago.edu. For now, thanks for visiting!