Craig Havighurst – Book Event
July 9 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm CDT
July 9 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm CDT
Veteran Nashville music journalist Craig Havighurst will discuss “Discovering a ‘Sound First’ Life in Music” in the context of his latest book, Musicality for Modern Humans: How to Listen Like an Artist, on Thursday, July 10, 2026 at the Memphis Listening Lab.
The book talk and Q&A will start at 6 pm. Books will be available for sale from Novel bookstore at the event.
The Listening Lab is the perfect home for Craig’s talk and indeed the non-profit’s ethos of raising public consciousness about attentive listening was a point of inspiration for the book itself.
In Musicality for Modern Humans, Havighurst encourages readers to deepen their relationship with music by learning to “listen like an artist”—offering new tools and frameworks to shift from passive, song-centered consumption to active, sound-focused engagement.
Musicality is about how composers and musicians manipulate tone, time and timbre to reach us emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, he says. The book guides readers toward active, engaged listening with the goal of enhancing our well-being, capacity for empathy, and bonds to family and community. The work is for anyone looking to shake up their habits, get free of streaming algorithms, and listen for more across all genres and time periods.
A musician since childhood, the Nashville-based Havighurst has been covering the art, tech and commerce of music as a reporter, author, filmmaker and broadcaster for more than 25 years.
Since 2016, he has been the editorial director for WMOT Roots Radio 89.5 FM, where he hosts the weekly interview show “The String,” covering “culture, media and American music.” He has reported for NPR, WPLN-FM, The Wall Street Journal, Acoustic Guitar, No Depression and other magazines. As staff music writer at The Tennessean from 2000 to 2004, he won the Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism.
Havighurst was senior producer and co-host for “Music City Roots,” a nationally syndicated weekly live radio show and public TV series that ran from 2009 to 2018. He currently writes the Substack newsletter String Theories. He is also the author of Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City, which documents how Nashville was transformed by one of the nation’s greatest radio stations.
