The singer-songwriter’s third solo album, “Age of Apathy,” is filled with personal touchstones and musical surprises.“I still, to this day, don’t even really think of myself as a songwriter,” Aoife O’Donovan said in a video interview from her home in Orlando. In conversation, as in her songs, her voice often carried a tune, with bursts of syncopation as she explored an idea or a feeling. “I think of myself as a band person, someone you can call to be in your band or play a show. It’s an identity crisis,” she added with a laugh.Her prolific catalog suggests otherwise. This week, O’Donovan (her first name is pronounced EEE-fa) will release her third solo studio album, “Age of Apathy,” a set of quietly startling songs that are at once intimate and ambitious, autobiographical and metaphysical. In “B61,” named after a Brooklyn bus route, she recalls the beginnings of a romance but then muses, “How will I know if I’m the last one alive?”O’Donovan’s songs are rooted in folk tradition but full of musical surprises: daring melodic leaps, unexpected chord progressions, subtle rhythmic shifts. “I’ve always just been drawn to melodies and chordal structures that were unexpected,” she said. “They’re just more fun. When you have the whole arsenal of the tone row in your head, you can just have a lot more freedom to mess around with it.”Her voice is at once open and mysterious, compelling in its understatement. Where another singer might head for a showy, dramatic peak, O’Donovan often eases back, letting her phrases evaporate like mist. “Sometimes I feel like, ‘In order to to be heard, do I have to be the loudest person in the room?’ But I think I’ve come to the realization that I don’t, and I don’t want to be,” she said. “The goal is to create a listening environment for people with your words or with your sounds, or with the song itself, where they want to be right there with you, and they’re willing to go along with everything you’re saying.”The mandolinist Chris Thile, who welcomed O’Donovan as a regular performer on his public radio show “Live From Here,” said, “She’s not selling us anything. She’s telling us secrets — kind of a secret about the magic in the world that she’s finding.”O’Donovan’s three studio albums represent only a fraction of her songwriting. She has also written for and with her groups Crooked Still, Sometymes Why and I’m With Her (whose “Call My Name” won a Grammy in 2020 as best American roots song) and as a collaborator with the chamber-Americana project Goat Rodeo, which includes Yo-Yo Ma and Thile.During the pandemic, along with her album, O’Donovan completed two song cycles: “Bull Frog’s Croon,” based on poems by Peter Sears and recorded with a string quartet in 2020, and “America, Come,” a group of orchestral songs drawing on century-old letters and speeches by the women’s suffrage crusader Carrie Chapman Catt. O’Donovan performed it in October 2021 with the Cincinnati Pops. And one day in May 2020, sequestered at home when she was living in Brooklyn, O’Donovan recorded her own versions of the songs from Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska”; she released “Aoife Plays Nebraska” online last year.When quarantine restrictions eased enough to allow concerts in summer 2020, O’Donovan recorded a live album, “Live from Black Birch,” with her husband, the cellist and conductor Eric Jacobsen, and his brother, the violinist Colin Jacobsen. At that show, she recalled, “I remember having a moment of panic when I said, ‘Sing along!’ And then I spent the rest of the song being, like, ‘No, don’t sing, don’t open your mouth!’”Until the pandemic, O’Donovan, 39, had been a working, touring musician for nearly two decades. She grew up in an Irish family — her father came to the United States in 1980 — that regularly sang old songs together, and she soaked up Celtic traditions and their American offshoots along with adventurous songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega and Joanna Newsom. She also studied music more formally at the New England Conservatory.O’Donovan onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2021. In addition to her solo work, she plays with the groups Crooked Still, Sometymes Why and I’m With Her.Douglas Mason/Getty ImagesIn Boston in 2001, O’Donovan and some fellow music students started Crooked Still, a string band that offered radical rearrangements of Appalachian-rooted songs and, over the next decade of playing clubs and folk festivals, added some of O’Donovan’s new songs to its repertory. In 2005, O’Donovan also found time to form another group, the folky trio Sometymes Why, which released albums in 2005 and 2009. And along the folk circuit, she found plenty of chances to collaborate onstage and in the studio.“Aoife finds a way to make the people around her sound better,” Thile said. “She can find family anywhere via music.”But O’Donovan has brought her boldest material by far to her solo albums: “Fossils” in 2013, “In the Magic Hour” in 2016, both made with the producer Tucker Martine, and the new “Age of Apathy.” All three open with songs contemplating death, and her other solo songs explore desire, myth, memory and transfiguration: as narrative, as images, as parable. They also stretch accepted structures of verse, chorus and bridge and push against genre.For “Age of Apathy,” O’Donovan enlisted the producer and songwriter Joe Henry, who has worked with Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Bettye LaVette, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint. They recorded the album under pandemic conditions. Instead of working alongside her musicians in one room for a limited time, as she had with Martine, O’Donovan recorded her voice, guitars and piano in a studio in Florida and sent the results to Henry, in Maine, who in turn sent them to his core studio musicians. They sketched ideas, consulted with O’Donovan and Henry, and then layered on their parts, one by one.The process took most of a year. “It allowed me and Aoife the opportunity to really listen to each element as it came in,” Henry said from his home in Maine. “And to decide, you know, do we need more? How much farther do we take this?”Amazingly enough, the resulting album sounds cohesive and intuitive. “It does feel very collaborative, but it also feels just bizarre and futuristic,” O’Donovan said.For O’Donovan, “Age of Apathy” is her most personal album. Unlike her other solo albums, it’s full of specifics: a bus route, a highway, the sense of a historical moment. “I’ve never really written so literally before,” she added. “In the past, I would shade it in a way that would try to make it a little bit more universal. But all these things really did happen.”In the title song, O’Donovan mentions the Taconic Parkway, which runs into upstate New York, and continues, “Go east on 23, past the farms and the festival memories.” She’s citing the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, N.Y., along Route 23 at the foot of the Berkshires, where Crooked Still found its first eager audience of folk listeners and the band sold a miraculous 1,000 independent CDs, kick-starting its career. The song also recalls her going to a vigil at the Christian Science Center in Boston a few days after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and wondering, “Was it the end or the beginning?/All I remember is the singing and the music, trying to drive away the fear.”The album’s centerpiece, O’Donovan said, is “Elevators,” a brisk waltz that sometimes skips a beat, as if it can’t wait to leap ahead. O’Donovan sings about “this big experience of being a touring musician, the kind of amnesia that you get when you’re on tour, the comfort of having no idea where you are, and yet knowing exactly where you are,” she said. “Is it going to go back to this? Am I going to be back there saying like, where am I? Who is that person running out the door? Is that me? Is that just my ghost of tours past?”O’Donovan’s personal touchstones are swept into the mood of the album: pensive, determined, ambivalently and then determinedly hopeful. “Age of Apathy” ends with “Passengers,” a quick-strummed, major-key song that glances back toward Joni Mitchell. It imagines a journey through interplanetary space: a way forward, post-pandemic, post-uncertainty, happily in motion again.“Music is everything to me — it’s literally the most important thing,” she said. “When I think about where do I want my life to go, where do I want to be when I’m older, what’s going to happen after we die — the music is the thing that will get us through to the end. And music is what will be there after we’re gone.” More

The dream-pop singer and songwriter from Jackson, Miss., tries out a range of sounds and speaks from the heart on his upcoming debut album, “Crescent.”In his music videos, several of which have lately become tastemaker manna, Prentiss looks more like a kid brother than a rock-star rebel. Many show him out in nature wearing hippie-ish hand-me-downs and singing sweetly heartbroken lyrics that sometimes come from poems he writes on his phone. “I try not to overthink it,” he said on a recent video call from his Jackson, Miss., home just after his daily workout, his hair a bounteous bushel of curls. “My purest emotion comes from my first thought.”It has been just two years since Prentiss started posting songs and videos online, but already the 15-year-old pop singer has over 50,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, half a million views on YouTube and a record deal. He has gotten a shout-out from Justin Bieber and made music with the Kid Laroi, the Australian singer-rapper, who gave him advice about navigating the music business as a teenager. He also made it onto the lineup of Lollapalooza, his first festival.And now Prentiss — his full name is Prentiss Furr — is recording his first album, “Crescent,” which is full of thoughtful, personal songs. Prentiss said that when he first started making music at age 11, “I didn’t know what my feelings were. I’m getting more grasp on what I’m feeling now.” On “Where It Hurts,” a song about self-doubt from “Crescent,” he sings with sadness, “I’m trying to be a different version of me/because every version of you wants to see me leave.”While finishing his debut album, Prentiss is taking high school classes online and experimenting with new sounds.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHe grew up listening to a wide range of music — Kesha, Justin Bieber, Pearl Jam, Taylor Swift, Zac Brown Band — and one of his biggest inspirations is Yung Lean, the rapper from Sweden. On “Crescent,” which will be released later this year, he’s trying out several different sounds in songs that have flashes of club music, pop-punk and hyperpop.“Where I’m from, there’s not a certain culture or a certain genre,” he said of his Jackson hometown. He figures he’d end up looking like a “weirdo” no matter what musical path he followed. “If I was worried about pushing a certain sound or image or hanging out with a certain type of musician,” he said, “I wouldn’t have built my own career.”One thing he isn’t afraid of embracing is imperfection. “Certain notes being off-key, a little offbeat, not making exact sense but you can make the picture in your head — the best artists are the ones who intentionally throw that curveball,” he said of trying to develop his own idiosyncrasies. “However long it takes — two, three, four, five years — the twist will be my own,” he added, “and I want it to be hard to replicate.”While finishing the album, Prentiss is taking high school classes online, teaching himself music theory, working with a vocal coach and experimenting with new sounds. He even has his eyes on a role model for his adulthood: the super-producer and guru Rick Rubin, known for his bucolic, blissful lifestyle.“At some point I’m just going to quit this all,” Prentiss said, “and have some random crib with like four different hammocks, seven different pigs, all in the middle of nowhere.”A version of this story originally ran in The New York Times for Kids, a special print section that appears in the paper on the last Sunday of every month. The next issue is on newsstands Aug. 28. More

Alexandre Kantorow made his Carnegie Hall recital debut after winning both the International Tchaikovsky Competition and the Gilmore Artist Award.The French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was supposed to make his Carnegie Hall recital debut on March 25, 2020, as a late replacement for the ailing Murray Perahia. We know what happened with that.When Kantorow, 26, finally made it to Carnegie on Sunday afternoon, it was again as a substitute for an eminent colleague, this time Maurizio Pollini. The symbolism of the rise of a new generation of performers was hard for me to miss, especially since after Kantorow’s recital, I walked to Alice Tully Hall to witness the Emerson String Quartet’s exquisite retirement concert.This wasn’t Kantorow’s first time playing at Carnegie; he performed two pieces at Zankel Hall in 2019, as one of the winners of that year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. But Sunday’s very fine recital, on the hall’s main stage, was a wholly different kind of platform.And he arrived with expectations ratcheted up even higher than if he had merely (ha) won the Tchaikovsky. Last month, he received the elusive, prestigious $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given to a pianist every four years after a secretive selection process akin to the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants; Kantorow didn’t know he’d been under consideration until he found out he had won.The stereotype is that competitions mint quick-fingered but mindless virtuosos, while the Gilmore rewards more mature, idiosyncratic artists. To win both the Tchaikovsky and the Gilmore suggests Kantorow has technical security as well as something to say.That felt true on Sunday. A quick glance at the lineup made this seem a potentially tired program: Brahms, Bach, Liszt, Schubert. But Kantorow chose Brahms’s Sonata No. 1, an unwieldy thicket of notes that is hardly a recital chestnut.And the Bach was Brahms’s austerely grand transcription for left hand of the great Violin Chaconne in D Minor, rather than the more popular, gaudier Busoni transcription for both hands. The Liszt was a set of his renderings of Schubert songs, none omnipresent and one never before played at Carnegie. Only Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy” could be called a true standard.As in his recordings of the other two Brahms piano sonatas, Kantorow approached this one with a poetically heavy use of rubato, the expressive stretching and pressing of tempo from moment to moment.It was often beautiful; in the first movement, the section before the recapitulation of the theme gave the sense of emerging from fire into quiet, snowy night. And — or, depending on your preferences, but — it conveyed atmosphere better than structure.Kantorow brought a peppery spirit to the Scherzo that turned it into something of a danse macabre. Both this and the fourth movement were exceptionally, even a little drainingly fast — more Presto than Allegro — but never muddied.His account of Brahms’s Bach was rigorous yet rich, with well-judged ebbs and flows of intensity and amplitude. Of the five Liszt-Schubert transcriptions, most interesting was the one new to Carnegie: “Die Stadt,” a collision of the song’s moodiness with Lisztian extroversion, sprays of notes drizzling out of the gloom.It attests to Kantorow’s subtlety and focus that there was no applause between these pieces and the “Wanderer Fantasy,” which felt as if it had emerged from Schubert’s songs — the opening more modest and lyrical than the usual bombast. This was assured, eloquent playing, the lines clear and balanced in each hand even in the chaos near the end of the piece.There is intriguing tension between Kantorow’s lucid, pearly touch and the Romantic wildness of his music-making. The two sides were in memorable balance in his encores: transcriptions of “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” and the finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” They brought together suavity and showmanship.Alexandre KantorowPerformed on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

When the Rilo Kiley singer and guitarist Blake Sennett wrote them 25 years ago, he concurred with the lyrics of “Pictures of Success,” a song about longing to arrive at a destination despite, or because of, the inability to fully imagine it.“I’m ready to go / Ready to go / Ready to go,” he howls on the track’s refrain, harmonizing with the song’s co-writer and the band’s lead singer, Jenny Lewis, over a bed of chiming guitars.But the words hit him differently now.“I’m not as ready to go as I was then,” joked Sennet, 51, on a recent video call from Los Angeles with his bandmates: Lewis, 49; the drummer Jason Boesel, 47; and the bassist Pierre “Duke” de Reeder, 52.“You already went,” Boesel quipped.“We should license that song to, like, Cialis, or something,” Lewis suggested. “Ready to go!”Life comes at you fast. Since the release of the first Rilo Kiley EP in 1999, the band has survived affiliation with Hollywood, straddled mid-aughts indie exuberance with its third album, “More Adventurous” (2004), graduated to mainstream popularity with a follow-up, “Under the Blacklight” (2007), split up under tense circumstances and — after the marriages, children and self-reflection of early middle-age — found its way back together again.Rilo Kiley, from left: Pierre “Duke” de Reeder (lying down), Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett (seated) and Jason Boesel (standing in foreground).Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

One of the most performed and reimagined works of English literature becomes a fourth-wall-breaking musical revue.“You gon’ rework a 400-year-old play just for your ego?” asks one of three witches in the new show “Macbeth in Stride.” Whitney White, who stars as Lady Macbeth in this quasi-feminist concert reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, smugly responds: “Yup. Sure did! Sure did!”I don’t fault “Macbeth in Stride,” which is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for its ego. We can always use work exploring what it means for a woman to proudly assert herself, to show her agency, to dare to grasp at power in spaces where she is meant to be secondary to a man. In this show, the artist invites us to see her through the role of Lady Macbeth, breaking the fourth wall to bring us into her process of recreating a character from one of the most frequently produced and remade works of English literature. But “Macbeth in Stride” is more ego than execution, more gestures than statements. And White’s heroine is much less substantial than the very character she’s critiquing and reworking in her own image.White, who wrote and performs this piece, is one of the city’s essential director-performers and is having an extended moment on New York stages this spring. Throughout her career she has focused on directing works by and about women and Black artists, including Bess Wohl, James Ijames and Aleshea Harris.In this work, White is centered as a kind-of Lady Macbeth (she’s just called “Woman” in the script) who’s a glam queen, a lead singer in a black bodysuit. She’s on a concert stage with a live band (the effortlessly talented Bobby Etienne on bass; Barbara Duncan, a.k.a. Muzikaldunk, on drums; and Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar), and those three witches (played by Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway and Ciara Alyse Harris) are her backup singers and commentators.The main medium here is song, and “Macbeth in Stride” is an almost perilously eclectic mix of genres. The first song, “If Knowledge Is Power,” features the show’s music director and conductor, Nygel D. Robinson, on piano singing with glossy John Legend-style vocals. The melody suggests something lush and romantic, like a nocturne, but when the witches join in, they evoke the TLC days of 1990s R&B, with matching dance moves courtesy of Raja Feather Kelly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More