Senior music major Liv Stripling will present her senior honors presentation as adapted from her honors paper "New words to an older melody: Contemporary Folk Music in America." This paper is an examination of contemporary folk music in America through two frames of focus: contemporary queer, folk and folk-adjacent non-male identifying singer-songwriters who play the acoustic guitar, and the intimate nature of live music in small-venue settings. This work examines how the presence of intimacy and affect in these two prongs provides the space for folk musicians with underrepresented identities to challenge dominant heteronormative, white and cis ideals of American culture and citizenship through their songwriting. Liv argues that contemporary folk musicians are able to do this due to their intimate, private relationship with their acoustic guitar; additionally, they are able to transmit this to the public through the intimacy of live folk performance.