In its eighteen-year history, the journal Popular Music has published well over 200 articles on a wide variety of topics—a substantial contribution to the fast growing field of popular music studies. In the nature of things, essays on a particular aspect are scattered around the forty-odd issues. This is the first anthology of Popular Music writings. It is designed as a collection of articles on a particular theme—textual analysis—with the hope that it will serve as a focus for work in this area, useful both to students and teachers, and to other readers.