Aurelia Butler

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    Daniel Nigro’s Path to Hitmaker for Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo

    The songwriter and producer has helped craft huge albums with Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo. What’s the key to his success? “Dan always believed in me,” Roan said.When Daniel Nigro and Chappell Roan wrote and recorded “Pink Pony Club” back in 2019, Nigro knew they had something special. The problem was, no one believed him.It was the second song the pair had written together, a stirring origin story of Roan’s self-awakening from the Missouri-born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz to the burgeoning queer artist Chappell Roan, spurred by her home away from home, a Los Angeles gay bar where “boys and girls can all be queens every single day.”At the time, Roan was signed to Atlantic Records, which had released her downcast debut EP to little notice. Nigro was scuffling, too; he’d left his middling Long Island emo band to try his hand at songwriting in L.A., where he had some success with credits on songs by Sky Ferreira and Carly Rae Jepsen, among others. But in his mid-30s, he was still paying the bills in part with money he’d earned writing commercial jingles.When Atlantic executives heard “Pink Pony Club,” they were not impressed. “I was convinced the song was incredible,” Nigro recalled, “and then they told me it wasn’t.” The label suggested excising the song’s ebullient guitar solos, played by Dave Stewart’s son Sam, that Roan had pushed for and Nigro helped compose, “and I was like, nope,” he said. Atlantic dropped Roan, and in 2021 Nigro started his own label, Amusement Records, just to release her music. In August, her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200.“Dan always believed in me,” Roan said in an email. “He has been there from the beginning, and brought me into realizing what makes me feel good to perform, what makes me feel good to sing, to write about. Because he believed in bringing that part of myself to life, I started to believe in it, too.”Nigro performing in 2010 with As Tall as Lions, the emo band he formed with high school friends on Long Island.Joey Foley/FilmMagic, 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

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    Liam Payne Vigil in London Brings Fans Together

    His death has been particularly profound in Britain, where Payne, a member of the boy band One Direction, first achieved fame. “We don’t know loss like this,” one fan said.Hundreds of fans gathered in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon to mourn Liam Payne, 31, a member of the British group One Direction, who died after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires last week.Somber adults and teenagers waited — some, for hours — to lay flowers and handmade signs at the base of the bronze Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens to honor Payne. It was one of several memorials held around the world in the days after his death.“We don’t know loss like this,” said Brooke Kurzeja, 18, who traveled three hours to attend the vigil. “This is what it was like when Prince died, my mom said.”The loss is profound in Britain, where fans watched Payne, from Wolverhampton, a town in central England, twice on the British talent show “The X Factor”: first in 2008, at 14, when he was eliminated after a few rounds, and then two years later, when he showed up with more confidence. The show’s judges shuffled Payne into a group with four other British boys who had auditioned as solo artists — Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan — and the group, One Direction, quickly captured the hearts of teenagers around the nation — before taking on the world.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesEllie Smith for The New York TimesAlicia Sinclair, 22, posted to X the day after Payne’s death expressing her desire to gather with other devastated fans. “If I need something, probably so many other people need something,” Sinclair said. As the weekend approached, she and a few other fans started a group on WhatsApp, which quickly grew to nearly 1,000 members.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

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    Review: A Choir Stands Out in a Multimedia Performance

    The Crossing is one of many elements in “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness,” which links pieces by Gabriela Ortiz in a five-movement meditation.“Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness,” which had its New York premiere on Friday evening at Zankel Hall, jams a lot into its 75 minutes.The piece includes, in shifting combinations, the Crossing, a superb contemporary-music choir; a flutist who wanders the stage; a quartet of percussionists; two actors; dancers from a pair of troupes; projections of drawings and photographs; poetry in English and Spanish; and, throughout, the suggestion of themes of profound societal import, like war, migration and environmental destruction.What pulls together all these elements — or is supposed to — is one composer, Gabriela Ortiz. Ortiz, in residence at Carnegie Hall this season, makes music of bright, energetic colors, and “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” offers a selection of her pieces, loosely linked in a five-movement multimedia meditation and directed by Stephen Jiménez.Solemn dialogues for the two actors — not naturalistic scenes, exactly, but elegiac nods toward pained emotions — form interludes between the musical sections. Ortiz’s shining 2022 choral work “Tierra,” with an artfully enigmatic text by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, provides music for the first and final movements.The flutist Alejandro Escuer “plays in a breathily stark style that evokes Latin American wooden folk instruments,” our critic writes.Stephanie BergerWe 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

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    Cher, Dave Matthews Band and Others Inducted Into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

    Gratitude flowed at the 39th induction ceremony in Cleveland, where Mary J. Blige, Peter Frampton, Ozzy Osbourne and the bands Foreigner and Kool & the Gang were honored.Superstar power arrived early at the 39th Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cleveland on Saturday night, as Cher strode onstage and joined Dua Lipa, who opened the show with “Believe,” the 1998 dance-pop smash that revitalized the singer’s career.In a candid, conversational acceptance speech, Cher joked about her long wait to induction (she was first eligible more than three decades ago), telling the crowd at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse and those streaming the show online, “It was easier getting divorced from two men than it was getting in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.” She assessed her own vocal abilities (“I’m a good singer. I’m not a great singer,” she decided, but added, “I changed the sound of music forever”), and reflected on the many reinventions that have sustained her career across 60 years.“My life has been a roller coaster, and the one thing that I have never done is I never give up,” Cher, 78, said, addressing women directly: “We’ve been down and out, and we keep striving, and we keep going, and we keep building, and we are somebody. We are special.”Perseverance was a recurring theme across the five-and-a-half-hour ceremony, which also honored two mainstays of the ’70s and ’80s: the funk and disco powerhouse Kool & the Gang and the pop-rock band Foreigner. Peter Frampton, 74, who is battling the degenerative muscle disease inclusion body myositis, thanked David Bowie for rescuing him from a low point — “I had no idea what a huge gift David was giving me” — and performed a short set from a chair. Mary J. Blige, 53, spoke about having faith throughout her ups and downs (“You don’t have to wait until you’re perfect to feel worthy. You are worthy”) before a sterling three-song performance.And Ozzy Osbourne, 75, who has paused touring because of health challenges, appeared onstage in a suitably sinister black throne adorned with skulls and bat wings to offer a brief collection of thank yous and introduce a rendition of his de facto theme song “Crazy Train” with a raucous shout of his famed intro line, “All abooooard!”Jack Black, left, gave a passionate speech for Ozzy Osbourne, who attended the event in an appropriately sinister throne.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWe 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

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    Hollywood Can Be Hell for a Writer, as Two New Books Remind Us

    Dorothy Parker worked on the script for “A Star Is Born,” but the tragic ending was all hers, while Bruce Eric Kaplan manages to find the mordant laughs in today’s industry foibles.This week the former magazine queen Tina Brown started a Substack called Fresh Hell, after an expression oft-attributed to Dorothy Parker. Of course I subscribed immediately, considering Brown’s book “The Vanity Fair Diaries” one of her crowning achievements. Chattiness is her idiom. But also because of the Parkerly promise.This archetype of archness, whose death in 1967 at 73 was front-page news, persists into the 21st century partly because of her pith, eerily well suited to the slicing and dicing of contemporary online culture. Long before X she was dishing out quotes of 280 characters or fewer: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and other tablespoons of hot honey diluted into shampoo commercials and beyond.Less known is her work for the movie industry, Gail Crowther’s focus in DOROTHY PARKER IN HOLLYWOOD (Gallery Books, 291 pp., $29.99). Parker’s copious if frequently forgotten credits include Oscar nominations a decade apart for the original “A Star Is Born” (1937) and “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (1947), both with alcoholic protagonists.She was writing what she knew. Booze pickled her career and second and third marriages, both to the actor and screenwriter Alan Campbell, who died swathed in a dry-cleaning bag and surrounded by Seconal capsules. In a late, sad photograph enlisted as caution by at least one recovery organization, alcohol almost seems to be dissolving her, as water did the Wicked Witch of the West.Parker wasn’t wicked but she could be very, very cruel, Crowther reminds readers (there have been several previous, fuller biographies, from which she draws, along with archival material). To the 11-years-younger Campbell, whom she called “pansy,” “fairy” and worse; to acquaintances she’d butter up in person, then roast at scorching temperature the minute they left the room; and to a literary community that kept coming back for more abuse. Esquire kept the older Parker on retainer as a book reviewer for years, though her copy rarely materialized. (Click forthwith on Wyatt Cooper’s unpaywalled homage to her there, “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t.”) She agreed to judge a University of Michigan poetry competition, but “upon receiving the shortlisted poems,” Crowther writes, “she replied that none were worthy of any award or indeed of any consideration whatsoever.”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

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    Libby Titus, Introspective Singer and Songwriter, Dies at 77

    Her “Love Has No Pride” was widely recorded, and she had high-profile relationships with Levon Helm and Donald Fagen. But she was uneasy with life in the spotlight.Libby Titus, a singer-songwriter known for her wistful ballad “Love Has No Pride,” covered by Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt, and for her collaborations with the likes of Burt Bacharach, Dr. John and her husband, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, died on Oct. 13. She was 77.Mr. Fagen announced her death on the Steely Dan website, but he did not cite a cause or say where she died.A highly regarded songwriter and backup vocalist in the 1970s, Ms. Titus never scaled the commercial heights as a solo artist. Still, she garnered critical praise for her first and only major-label album, called simply “Libby Titus” and released by Columbia Records in 1977, on which she was backed by an all-star cast of friends, including Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson of the Band, James Taylor and Carly Simon. Ms. Simon wrote or co-wrote four of the tracks.A showcase for Ms. Titus’s jazz leanings and her taste for torch songs, the album “immediately distinguishes her from the Hollywood cowgirls of the Ronstadt regiment,” the influential rock critic Dave Marsh wrote in a review for Rolling Stone. She is “a sophisticated pop singer,” he added, “closer to Bette Midler than anyone else.”The album included her version of “Love Has No Pride,” a heart-rending song about lost love and longing, written with her childhood friend Eric Kaz. Stephen Holden, reviewing a performance by Ms Titus for The New York Times in 1983, called it “one of the finest ballads of the rock era.”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

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    Toni Vaz, Stuntwoman and Founder of N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, Dies at 101

    She created a program to honor Black artistic success in the 1960s. But she spent decades trying to get its organizers to recognize her role.Toni Vaz, who cut a path as one of the first Black stuntwomen in Hollywood, with appearances in more than 50 movies, and then created the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards to recognize the often unsung work of Black writers and performers, died on Oct. 4 in Los Angeles. She was 101.Cheryl Abbott, her great-niece, said her death, at a retirement home for actors in the Woodland Hills neighborhood, was caused by congestive heart failure.The notion of a Black stunt performer did not really exist when Ms. Vaz began her career in the 1950s — she and others were officially cast as extras, received no training, and often did not know what dangers they might face on a set until the cameras began to roll.During the filming of “Porgy and Bess” (1959), Ms. Vaz was instructed to lean out a window to catch a glimpse of two of the film’s stars, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sidney Poitier. Unbeknown to her, a carpenter had purposely weakened the railing; it broke as soon as she leaned on it, sending her falling several feet onto a mattress.Shaken, she was handed a shot of brandy to recover.Throughout her career, Ms. Vaz played a critical part in support of Black actresses like Eartha Kitt, Cicely Tyson and Juanita Moore as they began to break out of the racially stereotyped roles that had long been their only options in Hollywood.But she and other Black stunt performers were typically paid less than their white counterparts for the same work. Standing in for Ms. Moore in a scene for “The Singing Nun” (1966), she and a white stuntwoman were directed to crash a jeep; Ms. Vaz got $40, she told the interviewer Amie Jo Greer in 2010, while the white performer got $350.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

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    Lynda Carter Never Played Wonder Woman: ‘I Was Always Just Diana’

    The actress and singer talks about mom jokes, Muppets, making music and marching for women’s rights.When Lynda Carter released the pop single “Pink Slip Lollipop” over the summer, she saw it as a way to give men who ghost and gaslight a candy-coated boot.“I just thought it was funny,” she said in a video call from her home outside Washington, D.C.Carter may forever be known as Wonder Woman from her 1970s TV series, but she started out as a musician, singing in clubs in Arizona when she was only 14. After winning the 1972 Miss World USA pageant, she took off for Los Angeles to stir up a record deal or an acting break, eventually landing the role that made her a feminist icon — even as a lot of men didn’t get her.“They don’t understand women — they never get it,” Carter said.“We understand why we get Wonder Woman,” she said, adding, “And how determined and how worthy our minds, our bodies are.” Tapping her chest, she also said: “We understand the 2,878 things we have in here at all times.” In her case, that’s the Muppets, Patty Jenkins’s “Wonder Woman” and the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Mom JokesGet to know me just a little bit, and what you’ll find out is that I think I have a very good sense of humor. My kids do not. I would be onstage and I’d say the same silly joke and people would crack up. My children would look at each other and go, “Ugh.”TurtlesI like land turtles. I like sea turtles. I like all kinds of turtles. I just think that they are fascinating. I have a place in Florida where sea turtles nest and it’s pretty exciting to see them. And we’ve got turtles that live in a little pond here, but I don’t disturb them.Guest-Starring on ‘The Muppet Show’ in 1980My Muppet experience — so great. Jim Henson was alive and there. “Orange Colored Sky” was an old ’50s song and they picked it for me. And then I did “Rubberband Man” with the band. A fantastic show to be on.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