The singer and songwriter who rose from the ’60s British folk-rock scene lost her vocals to a neurological disorder. So she wrote a batch of tracks for others to voice.For years, the singer Linda Thompson faced a problem that, for someone in her line of work, seemed insurmountable.Slowly over time, and then suddenly all at once, she lost the ability to hold a note surely enough to sustain even the simplest tune. “I first noticed something wrong back in 1972 when I got pregnant for the first time,” she recalled recently. “My voice became precarious — in and out.”Consultations with doctors eventually brought a brutal diagnosis: spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder in which the muscles in the larynx tighten or lapse into spasms, strangulating speech while making singing a significant challenge. (It’s an entirely different diagnosis from stiff person syndrome, which Celine Dion announced she has in 2022.) “It’s a progressive disease,” Thompson said of her condition. “So, for the first 20 years or so I could live with it. Up until my 60s, I could still sing in the studio, at least on good days.”Now, at 76, that ability has withered entirely for Thompson, one of the most vaunted artists to rise from the British folk-rock scene of the ’60s and ’70s that brought the world Sandy Denny, John Martyn and Nick Drake. Between 1974 and ’82, she released six albums in tandem with her ex-husband, the master guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson, culminating in “Shoot Out the Lights,” a work consecrated by critics, in part because of its forensic dissection of the couple’s own crumbling marriage. Thompson’s advancing dysphonia made her subsequent solo career fraught and sporadic, though she did manage to release four LPs before falling silent 11 years ago.Even so, losing her voice didn’t mean forsaking her songwriting, a talent that led to a resourceful strategy for a comeback. Because almost everyone in Thompson’s extended circle of family and friends is a gifted vocalist, she thought, why not engage them to perform the songs and make an album from that? “It wasn’t exactly a brilliant idea,” Thompson said. “It was the only idea.”What clinched it for her was the pun-y name she devised for the result: “Proxy Music.”Richard and Linda Thompson onstage in 1975. The two married three years earlier.Brian Cooke/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe 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

Usher is headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, inspiring a playlist of fantastic “yeah” tracks.Usher said “Yeah!” to the Super Bowl halftime show.Scott Roth/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,On Sunday, the N.F.L., Roc Nation and Apple Music announced that Usher will headline the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show. Only one reaction will suffice: “Yeah!”Such was the refrain heard everywhere in 2004, when the singer’s enthusiastically titled club banger “Yeah!” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a whopping 12 weeks (only to be dethroned by “Burn,” the next single from his blockbuster album “Confessions”). Slick, strobe-lit and infectious, the smash featured a dexterous guest verse from Ludacris and production and assorted yeah!s and OK!s from Lil Jon. “Yeah!” remains irresistible — and among the most successful homages to one of pop music’s trustiest syllables.The word “yeah” — or, even more emphatically, “yeah!” — is so entwined with the history of modern pop that when the critic Bob Stanley published a 2014 book charting “the story of pop music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé,” he titled it “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Stanley was probably referencing the specific yeah!s that punctuate the iconic chorus of the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” but the phrase also captures something quintessential about the exuberance of popular music.“Yeah” is slangier, more irreverent and often more musical than “yes,” and it bypasses that pesky hissing sound, for one thing. “Yeah” is also younger than its stuffier counterpart “yea” (as in the opposite of “nay”); its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1905 — not too long before the popularization of recorded music, incidentally. “Yeah” is both question (“yeah?”) and answer (“yeah!”). “Yeah!” can be used in a song as a vehicle for both percussion and melody, an easy call for audience participation or an ecstatic place holder for those moments when more complex language just won’t suffice.Am I suggesting that this glorious word is worthy of its own playlist? Oh, yeah!With Usher, Lil Jon and Ludacris as my inspiration (and with all due respect to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), I have chosen to limit today’s playlist to songs with “yeah” in the title, and specifically songs that revolve in some way around that particular lyric. This still left me with an eclectic collection to pull from, including songs from Daft Punk, Blackpink, LCD Soundsystem and the Pogues.Does this playlist also include a certain zany theme song from a certain 1980s teen comedy about playing hooky and hanging out with Connor from “Succession”? I think you know the word I’d use to answer that question.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris: “Yeah!”What van Gogh is to sunflowers, Lil Jon is to yeah!s. I cannot imagine — and do not even want to imagine — this song if he had not produced it and blessed it with his gravelly, prodigious exclamations. (Listen on YouTube)2. Daft Punk: “Oh Yeah”Perhaps the greatest musical qualifier of “yeah”: “Oh.” Gently ups the ante but doesn’t take too much attention from our prized word. (That attention-seeking “ooooh” is another story.) Daft Punk certainly knows how to spin that titular refrain into mind-numbing bliss on this hypnotic, bassy track from the duo’s 1997 debut, “Homework.” (Listen on YouTube)3. The Pogues: “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”Five yeahs in a song title? These guys mean business. This 1989 single finds the English rockers the Pogues at their most jubilant, leading the way toward a fist-pumping, shout-along chorus. It also features a midsong saxophone solo, which is basically the nonverbal sonic equivalent of “yeah!” (Listen on YouTube)4. Pavement: “Baby Yeah (Live)”The phrase “baby, yeaaaaahhhhh” comes to hold an almost talismanic power in this Pavement B-side (a personal favorite), released only as a live cut on the deluxe reissue of the band’s 1992 debut album, “Slanted and Enchanted.” (Listen on YouTube)5. The Magnetic Fields: “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”A (very) darkly funny duet between the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt and Claudia Gonson that relies upon the tension created by their contrasting vocal styles, “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” appeared on the group’s 1999 epic, “69 Love Songs.” (Listen on YouTube)6. Yolanda Adams: “Yeah”“Yeah” becomes a spiritual affirmation on this uplifting song from the gospel singer Yolanda Adams’s 1999 album, “Mountain High … Valley Low.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Blackpink: “Yeah Yeah Yeah”“Yeah” also transcends language barriers, as the K-pop girl group Blackpink remind us on this track from the 2022 album “Born Pink.” Most of the lyrics are sung in Korean, but the quartet deliver that catchy chorus in the universal language of “yeah.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Yello: “Oh Yeah”An early exploration of pitch-shifted vocals, the Swiss electronic group Yello’s absurdist “Oh Yeah” was used heavily, and memorably, in the 1986 comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Yello’s Boris Blank once recalled that the group’s vocalist Dieter Meier initially came up with more lyrics, but Blank told him that would make the song “too complicated.” Said Blank, “I had the idea of just this guy, a fat little monster sits there very relaxed and says, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah.’” Sure! (Listen on YouTube)9. LCD Soundsystem: “Yeah (Crass Version)”Our grand finale is a nine-minute extravaganza of yeah (extravaganz-yeah?) from LCD Soundsystem. By the end of this mesmerizing 2004 single, on which James Murphy and company chant the titular word ad infinitum, “yeah” has transcended language, and maybe even music itself, to become a state of mind. (Listen on YouTube)Yeah, yeah,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“9 Songs That Will Make You Say ‘Yeah!’” track listTrack 1: Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris, “Yeah!”Track 2: Daft Punk, “Oh Yeah”Track 3: The Pogues, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”Track 4: Pavement, “Baby Yeah (Live)”Track 5: The Magnetic Fields, “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”Track 6: Yolanda Adams, “Yeah”Track 7: Blackpink, “Yeah Yeah Yeah”Track 8: Yello, “Oh Yeah”Track 9: LCD Soundsystem, “Yeah (Crass Version)”Bonus Tracks“Baby yeah: a seductive and sentimental call for human connection.” I thought I was alone in my obsession with that live recording of Pavement’s “Baby Yeah” until I read this beautiful, heart-wrenching n+1 essay by Anthony Veasna So.And, on a much lighter note: Watch the “CSI: Miami” star David Caruso, compelled by the power of Roger Daltrey’s “Yeah!” to deliver an endless string of mic-dropping one-liners. This video has 7.5 million views, and I believe that over the past decade or so I have been responsible for at least two million of them. More

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‘CMT Celebrates Our Heroes: An Artists of the Year Special’ will also see the likes of Florida Georgia Line, Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, Lady Antebellum and many others honoring the real heroes.
Apr 28, 2020
AceShowbiz – Country superstars Miranda Lambert, Thomas Rhett, and Florida Georgia Line are set to salute essential workers in a new TV special.
Instead of the annual CMT Artists of the Year event, network bosses will instead present CMT Celebrates Our Heroes: An Artists of the Year Special on 3 June, when the line-up will also feature Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, Lady Antebellum, Brothers Osborne and Little Big Town, among others, all filmed in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The CMT Artists of the Year franchise has always been reflective of the important issues of our time, and this year, we all felt it necessary to shift our focus to honoring the real heroes during these unprecedented times,” reads a statement issued by Leslie Fram, CMT’s senior vice president of music and talent.
“From the first responders and healthcare workers to members of the military, our educators, food industry workers and so many more, the country music community will come together to honor these heroic men and women.”
“The evening of unity will feature incredible performances, uplifting tributes and a salute to those risking their lives on the frontlines of this crisis.”
The 11th annual show, which typically celebrates the achievements of the country community, won’t be the first to turn the spotlight on real-life issues – in 2017, the TV event became a fundraiser to provide relief for those affected by Hurricane Harvey and the Las Vegas concert massacre at the Route 91 Harvest festival.

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The Borealis experimental music festival in Norway has become a space for lively exploration in a famously self-serious field.BERGEN, Norway — Little could be predicted about a premiere by the young experimental Norwegian-Tamil composer Mira Thiruchelvam. But it was held at a fjord-facing heated pool, so the presenter had a suggestion: Bring a swimsuit.It was par for the course at Borealis, the experimental festival here that has achieved renown as a launchpad for eclectic projects by musicians from Norway and beyond. If in recent decades, the Nordic countries — facilitated by enviable government funding for the arts — have proved a hotbed of musical activity, punching above their weight in the classical world, Borealis has become the region’s warmhearted fringe festival, showcasing a blossoming experimental classical scene.A sound installation in the traditional Sami construction, Borealis’s coziest concert hall.Elina Waage Mikalsen, Borealis’s artist in residence, had a sound installation in the hut.Led by Peter Meanwell (artistic director) and Rachel Louis (the managing director), Borealis, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in a five-day festival that ended Saturday, has created a rare space for lively exploration in a notoriously self-serious field. It is the festival that’s “nothing to be afraid of,” as the local paper Bergens Tidende called it in a headline during the week, right down to its “eksperimentell”-themed tube socks.Part of what gives Borealis its accessible feel is its use of Bergen’s tightly grouped cultural centers, separated by cobblestone alleys, short and often wet — a given in Europe’s rainiest city. On opening night, the United Sardine Factory, a repurposed cannery, hosted short commissions by composers across the festival’s history to honor its anniversary. Listeners could then meander over to a 13th-century royal banquet hall, whose medieval splendor was the backdrop for the Indonesian ensemble Gamelan Salukat, performing works by the experimental composer Dewa Alit.The singer Juliet Fraser in “Plans for Future Operas.”Borealis found its coziest space in a small wooden structure on the mountain of Floyen, built in the style of the Sami, the Indigenous people of the Sapmi region (encompassing parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Accessible via a short funicular trip and winding hike, the structure was home to a sound installation by the Borealis artist-in-residence, the Norwegian-Sami Elina Waage Mikalsen — the work’s thrumming bass seemingly keeping pace with the churning flames in the building’s wood-burning stove. Given the Norwegian government’s recent acknowledgment of continuing human rights violations on Sami lands, Mikalsen’s exploration of Sami experimentalism — the subject of her talk later in the week, featuring performances by the Sami musicians Viktor Bomstad and Katarina Barruk — felt especially potent.This year’s festival also saw a number of works investigating the nature of instruments, probing their materials and extending their boundaries. The quietly intense Norwegian violin and contrabass duo Vilde&Inga, collaborating with the composer Jo David Meyer Lysne, presented “NiTi,” a dialogue between the duo and Lysne’s metal and wood kinetic sculptures that moved silently back and forth throughout the performance — a poetic distillation of the action of playing a string instrument.a performance of “Glia,” by the American composer Maryanne AmacherAt first, the musicians produced subtle flickering textures using their own instruments, then gradually integrated the fixtures beside them, including a violin harnessed to a contraption that tickled its strings. Much like Vilde&Inga’s forest-inspired collaboration with the composer Lo Kristenson a few days later, though, the work felt inconclusive, less a finished product than a fantastical impulse that the collaborators would do well to keep pursuing.More successful in this vein was “I N T E R V A L L,” created and performed by the Norwegian percussion trio Pinquins with the artist Kjersti Alm Eriksen. Around a hollow wooden cube, with instruments and industrial and household appliances hung on ropes from its ceiling, the four performers began a sort of haywire scavenger hunt, hurling objects through the frame, blowing petulantly into plastic tubes attached to the cube, even grabbing long poles to bang on the theater itself, for an inexhaustible probe of the setting’s sound-making potential.A drawing by Oyvind Torvund’s for “Plans for Future Operas.”A young DJ at a family workshop at Borealis.A similar playfulness pervaded the Norwegian composer Oyvind Torvund’s imaginative “Plans for Future Operas,” performed by the soprano Juliet Fraser and the pianist Mark Knoop. Part of a continuing series in which ensembles perform the sounds of hypothetical performance situations, “Plans” is accompanied by a slide show of Torvund’s scribbled doodles. As various visions flashed on the screen — a “car horn” opera, for which Fraser issued honks; a “telepathic opera,” during which she kept silent, appearing to communicate songs by mind alone as Knoop played — the duo conveyed, with gusto and evident amusement, Torvund’s freewheeling musical language.Notable throughout the festival was its care for participants of all ages and backgrounds. A performance of the Torvund presented outside the concert hall was geared toward audience members with accessibility needs. In workshops, children created miniature versions of the “I N T E R V A L L” cube using carrots, beads and wire, and recorded shrieks to be played back on tape loops. On one night, four enthusiastic participants in Borealis’s Young Composer program, whose applicants needn’t be young or trained as composers, presented heartfelt premieres.After-hours dancing.After-hours audiences found delightfully earsplitting sets by the White Mountain Apache violinist Laura Ortman and the electronics and vocal duo Ziur and Elvin Brandhi; as the evening wore on, a group of young people began an impromptu residency on the dance floor. The next morning, bathers at — and in — the heated pool witnessed Thiruchelvam’s rollicking commission “External Factor” performed with the dancer Thanusha Chandrasselan — part of a series inspired by the Borealis office’s Sunday tradition of fjord swimming. Listeners bobbed to Thiruchelvam’s thumping electronics, interspersed with her improvisations on Carnatic flute and electric guitar, and cheered for Chandrasselan’s jerky choreography, her boots managing impressive friction against the pool’s wet ledge.One of the festival’s oldest works was among its most forward thinking: the pioneering American experimental composer Maryanne Amacher’s “GLIA” (2005), whose title refers to the nervous system cells that support communication across synapses, performed by the composer Bill Dietz, a former Amacher collaborator, and Ensemble Contrechamps. As Dietz explained in a preconcert discussion, Amacher would not likely have approved of the piece’s posthumous performance, viewing her works not as fixed sets of sounds, but rather as part and parcel with the circumstances in which they were originally produced. Yet ‌I could not help but be grateful to be wandering around the illuminated pyramid of players in the black box theater, letting the voluminous layers of sound course through my ears.Tourists and Borealis audience members enjoy the view above Borgen; nearby this perch, reached by funicular, is the Sami construction.Closing night began promisingly with the Norwegian sound artist Maia Urstad’s enigmatic “IONOS” — an atmospheric dialogue among three radio amateurs that resulted, at one point, in contact with another user somewhere out there. Much to its credit, Borealis is a place where artists can take risks, even if things will occasionally fall short of the mark — as in the final piece, the British composer (and former Borealis director) Alwynne Pritchard’s “Counting Backward,” for the Bergen chamber ensemble BIT20, conducted by Jack Sheen. “Counting Backward” was a bloated collage of predictable ambient ensemble writing and hokey prerecorded observations on time and nature, echoed by volunteers planted throughout the audience. As BIT20 played, four performers in the center of the theater tied a knot from thick ropes so they could repeatedly hoist a tree stump from the floor, an act that underscored the degree to which the work’s own threads were disconnected.The mind strayed toward what would have been a more satisfying conclusion to the week: the Pinquins show two nights before in the same space. At the climax of that work, the performers yanked open the wooden cube’s canopy, spilling a supply of sunflower seeds to the ground. The drizzle of seeds continued, and continued — a hypnotic, seemingly unending invocation of what a festival like Borealis can make possible. More

With a new memoir, the singer-songwriter from a famous musical family says she is happy to be “letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”When Martha Wainwright was 14 years old, she moved to New York from her home in Montreal to live with her father, the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Her mother, the Canadian folk star Kate McGarrigle, was busy with a new album and a concert tour, and so it was decided that Loudon would watch over Martha for a year. The New York experiment turned out to be something of a failure, though, according to Ms. Wainwright; she did poorly in school and stayed out late, as if in competition with a father who was sometimes out even later. But the year definitely had its upsides: “I became more like my father, as if the DNA in me that came from him started to wake up,” she writes in a new memoir, “Stories I Might Regret Telling You.”A few years later, she went with him on a tour of Britain, serving as his warm-up act and joining him onstage for father-daughter duets. One night she heard him introducing “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” a song she had figured was about an old girlfriend. So she was surprised when he told the audience it was about the year he had spent living with his teenage daughter. As Ms. Wainwright listened to him sing the key lines — “You’re still living here with me / I’d rather be lonely” — she began to cry.“A part of me wanted to jump to my death from my tiny seat,” she writes in the memoir. “Or, better yet, take off into the night, leaving him standing there waiting for me. But the show must go on, so I dried my tears and went down the stairs and on to the stage.”The new book, cigarette and all.HachetteConfessional art always comes at a cost, for its creators and subjects alike, as people in the Wainwright-McGarrigle family know all too well. Loudon, who rose to sudden success with the novelty hit “Dead Skunk,” has included songs about his family on a majority of his more than 25 albums, many of them devastatingly personal. Ms. McGarrigle, who made 10 albums as part of a duo with her sister Anna before her death in 2010, also wrote a number of autobiographical songs that touched on her marriage to Loudon, which ended in divorce, and their children.When Martha and her older brother, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, came of age, they joined what was by then an established family tradition. The first song Ms. Wainwright wrote was about the birth of a new half sibling, a wry welcome to her singular family; and a song on her brother’s 1998 debut album delved into his relationship with his mother.As children, Martha and Rufus sang for paying audiences at folk festivals. Later, when he had a deal with the DreamWorks record label and started touring the world, she was often his backup singer, an arrangement that eventually came to an end. “He needed to cut the fat and I needed to get out of his shadow,” she writes.Rufus and Martha Wainwright sing their father’s hit “Dead Skunk” at a show in London, circa 1984.Martha Wainwright Collection In New York, Ms. Wainwright performed in dive bars while putting herself through a series of crushes on unavailable men. She was by turns ambitious and self-destructive. On nights when she knew a label scout or producer was in the crowd, she would go onstage drunk or high. “I created an impossible situation for myself,” she writes. “I was afraid to fail but I kept setting myself up to fail.”As her brother’s fame grew, she struggled with her status as the least famous member of her nuclear family. And while her parents provided inspiration, she says in the book that they could have been more helpful. “I don’t know if you’re wondering where my dad was during those New York years,” she writes, “but at the time, I was wondering, too.”For a while Rufus was running around as part of a “sons of” club, a group that included Sean Lennon, Chris Stills and Harper Simon. “They were all getting signed and written about and had publicists and photo shoots and beautiful girlfriends,” Ms. Wainwright says in the memoir. “Were their songs better than mine?” The chip on her shoulder led her to write a grand statement song, its title a vulgar epithet. Contrary to what she has told journalists in the past, the song isn’t about her father — or, rather, it isn’t exclusively about him.In addition to the attention-grabbing title, the song had perhaps the closest thing to a pop hook to be found in her oeuvre up till then. Whereas the typical Martha Wainwright melody meanders as it showcases her acrobatic whisper-to-scream vocal range, this one was different: a folky strum-and-shout with straightforward lines like “Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I was born a man.”The Guardian called the song a “masterpiece” when it appeared in 2005 as the centerpiece of “Martha Wainwright,” her first album. Critics admired her debut but couldn’t resist comparing her with the rest of her family. A Pitchfork reviewer praised her voice and her songs, only to add the caveat that her ability to write about personal matters with such candor “would be more remarkable if it weren’t a genetic trait.”Her next album, “I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too,” was partly produced by Brad Albetta, a bass player who, by the time of its 2008 release, was also her husband. Their relationship had always been tumultuous, but she had pushed for marriage anyway, partly because she wanted to “grow up” before losing her mother, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.Martha Wainwright with her mother, Kate McGarrigle, in London, 2009.Martha Wainwright Collection Her memoir goes deep into her mother’s illness and death, which coincided with the premature birth of Ms. Wainwright’s first child. In less capable hands, such material could come across as maudlin, but Ms. Wainwright has a light touch and an eye for telling detail. She describes wanting to put her mother’s cancer-ridden body in the same kind of incubator that was keeping her son alive, as well as the moment when she and Ms. McGarrigle compared their damaged bodies — her own fresh C-section incision, the chevron scar from chemo that covered her mother’s torso.Ms. Wainwright’s marriage limped along after her mother’s death. She clung to Mr. Albetta as a source of stability (not to mention bass playing). “I really like the makeup sex / It’s the only kind I ever get,” she sang from the stage while on tour for the album “Come Home to Mama,” with her husband close behind onstage.An early draft of “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” that contained more details about those years was used as an exhibit in their divorce proceedings in 2018. That version — “the whole enchilada,” as Ms. Wainwright described it in an interview — was pared down considerably before publication.Rather than zeroing in on the father of her children (a second son was born in 2014), Ms. Wainwright, 46, concludes the memoir by focusing on her creative and personal renaissance of recent years. She describes the aftermath of a show she gave in Los Angeles, when she emerged rumpled from the house of “someone everyone in the world wants to sleep with” full of joie de vivre and “glad to know that rock ’n’ roll was still alive and I was still a part of it.”The extended musical family in New York, 2012, from left to right: Martha Wainwright, the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III, and the singer-songwriter Lucy Wainwright Roche.David Corio for The New York TimesOn a recent Zoom call, she looked and sounded exactly as she does onstage: beautifully unvarnished, full of open-mouthed laughter. In the past few weeks she has been preparing to go on tour with a show that combines readings from the memoir and performances of songs on her fourth album, “Love Will Be Reborn.” She said a documentary filmmaker has been following her around, adding that she sometimes wished she had a larger-than-life persona to hide behind, like Tom Waits’s or Laurie Anderson’s.Lately, she added, she has been in the mood to do some serious spring cleaning in her building in Montreal, which she inherited from her mother. “There’s a back room that’s filled with the Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle archive and crap,” she said, gesturing toward a door behind her desk. “I feel like I’m almost about to light the whole thing on fire. I’m not going to do it literally, but I’m like, ‘OK, let’s call a museum and have them take it away.’ And I think that I’m kind of excited about it. And maybe I’m excited about letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”She said that when she thinks about her earlier albums, filled with so many songs referring to her marriage, she wonders whether she had created the situation in order to mine it for material. Now she’s in a relationship that inspires lyrics like “I got naked right away when I saw you / And my love was like the rain when I saw you.”If her contentment threatens her creative output, she’s fine with that. “I’ll keep the love and forgo the material, if need be,” she said.But later in our conversation, she revised that assessment, after mentioning her plan to pick up her guitar later in the day and try to write some new songs: “I haven’t in a while, so I’ll see if I’m too happy and I made a terrible mistake.”Ms. Wainwright said she has been wondering if she’s too happy to write songs.Alexi Hobbs for The New York TimesEven her relationship with her father seems in a good place. “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” begins with the story of her own birth, or, rather, the story of how she almost wasn’t born. Her father, she writes, tried to persuade her mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her, which is something he confessed to Ms. Wainwright when she was a teenager. “It hurt my feelings,” she writes with an understatement that makes the story sort of hilarious. “I had always felt a little out of place in the world, and knowing that I’d only just barely made the cut didn’t help matters any.”Three days before our interview, her father called her to say he loved the book.“I mean, his voice was a little tight when he said it,” Ms. Wainwright said. “He told me he didn’t see things exactly the same way, and I asked him if he could accept my version, and he said that he could accept it. And so that was a really nice moment for us.” More