Conceived and created by Aurora Nealand and Jebney Lewis, City Songs began as a community engagement project of the  Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN. Starting in 2022, young writers and musicians from across Knoxville worked with beat-makers, improvisers, and composers to create new music rooted in their personal stories of specific places around Knoxville.

By collaborating with citizens to create art based on locations from within their personal mental maps, we uncover deep connections formed with the physical world - the things that are emotionally important in an evolving sense of place. Putting these individual experiences and the art they inspire onto a single map creates a tapestry of cartographic memory, rooted in the concrete spaces of a city that we can all experience and share.

The Knoxville edition launched in 2022 and is an ongoing project of the  Big Ears Festival .

City Songs is currently in the process of launching in other cities.