Aurelia Butler

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    Alan Sparhawk of Low Lost His Other Half. He’s Learning to Sing Again.

    Alan Sparhawk did not think his new song was any good. It was early 2017, and he was working on “Double Negative,” the 12th album by his longtime band, Low. The record would become a late-career breakthrough, the intimate harmonies between Sparhawk and his wife, Mimi Parker, supplanted from their slow, soft acoustic settings into beds of brittle noise.But at that moment, Sparhawk was still wrestling with “Always Trying to Work It Out,” an elliptical portrait of a faltering friendship. He played it for Parker, whom he forever called “Mim.” When, unbidden, she began singing, he knew he had a keeper.“That was as much approval as I ever needed. That was the way she communicated,” Sparhawk said during a phone interview, pausing often to cry. “When Mim would sing, that was all I needed to know.”“I’m going to wrestle with the universe and generate art, because that’s what I do,” Alan Sparhawk said. On his new album, he processes his voice through an effects pedal.Erinn Springer for The New York TimesSparhawk no longer has that filter or confidant. Parker died in November 2022, two years after learning she had ovarian cancer on Christmas Eve. Across three decades, Sparhawk, Parker and a succession of bassists built Low into one of indie-rock’s most mesmerizing acts, their voices moving in tandem like the blowing wind or a flickering candle. Self-diagnosed with autism and borderline personality disorder, Sparhawk also depended upon Parker as an emotional anchor, the person who could help him understand his frustrations simply by listening.He is now trying to find his voice and language anew, to find ways to move forward in life and music without the person who guided so much of his past. Made with a drum machine and minimal guitar, his first record since her death — “White Roses, My God,” out Friday — routes his oaken baritone through an effects pedal, rendering him alternately robotic and animalistic. His second, due next year, is a collaboration with the bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles, fellow Minnesotans that Low took on early tours.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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    Sean Combs’s Arrest Has the Music World Asking: Is Our #MeToo Here?

    Activists and survivors are hopeful for change after the industry, which has a pervasive party culture, largely avoided the accountability that swept Hollywood and politics.The arrest of Sean Combs last week, on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, represents a stunning reversal of fortune for the hip-hop impresario, who as recently as a year ago was feted as an industry visionary before a sudden series of sexual assault accusations.The indictment against Mr. Combs accuses him of running a criminal enterprise centered on abusing women, and of using bribery, arson, kidnapping and threats of violence to intimidate and silence victims. He has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty to the charges.But Mr. Combs’s arrest has also stirred the hopes of activists and survivors of sexual violence that his case may finally lead to lasting change in the music industry. Though long seen as inhospitable to women, the business has largely avoided the scrutiny and accountability that swept Hollywood, politics and much of the media world at the peak of the #MeToo movement in the late 2010s.There is no single explanation for why music dodged a similar reckoning. Some point to the industry’s decentralized power structure, its pervasive party culture and a history of deference to artists and top executives.“Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, the looseness with sexuality — that is baked into the culture of the music industry,” said Caroline Heldman, a professor at Occidental College and a longtime activist. “Unfortunately, that means that rape culture is baked into it, because there aren’t mechanisms of accountability.”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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    Drugs, Sex, Baby Oil: The ‘Freak-Offs’ at the Core of Sean Combs’s Troubles

    Prosecutors say the sexual encounters in hotel rooms were coercive and abusive and are the heart of their sex trafficking case. The music mogul’s lawyers call them consensual.A woman and a male prostitute gather for sex in a luxury hotel suite that, in the government’s telling, has been lit for filming and stocked with baby oil and drugs. Another man watches and sometimes captures the events on video. These sexual marathons, complete with a cleanup staff, sometimes went on for days.To the people involved, they were known as “freak-offs.”The 14-page federal criminal indictment of Sean Combs, the music mogul known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, accuses him of participating in many crimes including arson, bribery, kidnapping and obstruction of justice. But the heart of the government’s case is the premise that the criminal “enterprise” he ran as an alleged racketeer was responsible for coordinating these “freak-offs,” and then covering up any damage to hotel rooms, or people, when they were over.In the government’s portrayal, they were horror shows — “elaborate and produced sex performances,” according to the indictment — that involved copious drug use and coerced sex, leaving participants so exhausted and drained that they were given fluids intravenously to recover. Then, the government said, Mr. Combs weaponized the videos he had shot to keep any participants from complaining.“Freak-off activity is the core of this case, and freak-offs are inherently dangerous,” Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at a hearing last week.The government’s depiction closely mirrors allegations made by the singer Cassie in a bombshell civil suit she filed last fall against Mr. Combs, her former boyfriend. The indictment attaches no name to its account of the freak-offs, instead referring only anonymously to a “Victim-1.”Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, said in her lawsuit that Mr. Combs directed frequent “freak-offs” at high-end hotels around the country, directing her at the events to pour “excessive” amounts of oil on herself and telling her where to touch the prostitutes while he filmed and masturbated.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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    Kathryn Crosby, Actress and Bing Crosby’s Widow, Dies at 90

    She was a Texas-born starlet when she married the beloved crooner, but put aside her career at his urging.Kathryn Crosby, a Texas-born beauty queen and aspiring actress who put aside her movie career when she married Bing Crosby, the movie star and honey-voiced baritone, died on Friday at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.Harlan Boll, a publicist speaking for her family, announced her death. The pair met cute on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles in 1953. Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, was a new contract player rushing to deliver a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department while on her way to a tennis game. Mr. Crosby, the laconic, blue-eyed heart throb, was already an American institution.“What’s your rush, Tex?” Mr. Crosby asked, standing in the door of his dressing room. She stopped short, and down went the petticoats and her tennis racket.They kept colliding, though less dramatically, in the days that followed — Ms. Crosby even tried out for a part in one of Mr. Crosby’s big hits, “White Christmas.” When she asked to interview the star for her column, “Texas Girl in Hollywood,” which was running in several Texas newspapers, he finagled the appointment into a dinner date at Chasen’s, the Hollywood canteen. On the drive home, he took her hand and sang “You’d Be So Easy to Love.” She was 19; he was 49.Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, with Mr. Crosby at the 27th Academy Awards in 1955.Bettmann/Getty ImagesTheir courtship was far from easy, though Mr. Crosby proposed that year. The star, beloved for his public image as a laid-back everyman, was diffident and mercurial. He disappeared for months at a time, set wedding dates and broke them — once because, as he joked, he’d left his toupee at home, and once because another romantic entanglement had threatened suicide. He was also involved with Grace Kelly, his co-star in “The Country Girl” and “High Society.” The couple finally married in a Las Vegas courthouse in 1957.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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    Only Connect: Meredith Monk’s Antidote to What Divides Us

    As the story goes, Indra, the king of the gods, takes a net and stretches it across the universe. At each joint is a jewel, unique and infinitely faceted, that reflects all the others in an endless web of interdependence.This tale, from Indian myth, and shared by Hinduism and Buddhism, is the basis for Meredith Monk’s immense, interdisciplinary “Indra’s Net,” which has its North American staged premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday. The concluding installment in a trilogy about connectedness and the natural world, it arrives at the start of Monk’s 60th performance season, and in New York, where her idiosyncratic artistry has long been synonymous with the downtown scene and spirit.“I just am really grateful that I’ve had a life where I’ve done what I’ve loved all these years,” said Monk, 81, a polymathic avant-gardist who has long eluded categorization, and has composed, choreographed, directed, sung and played in her works. “I’ve held out this long, and my voice is holding out.”Listen to Meredith Monk sing a theme from “Indra’s Net.”“Indra’s Net” is preceded in the trilogy by “On Behalf of Nature” (2013) and “Cellular Songs” (2018), but it was the first to enter Monk’s mind. Nearly 15 years ago, she was working on “Weave” for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; written for two vocal soloists, an orchestra and chorus, its structure recalled, for her, the myth’s story. But the title “Indra’s Net” didn’t feel right for that piece, so she held on to it for later.Still, she was haunted by the title and the story. Monk is an artist who embraces humanity with Whitmanesque generosity, and her earlier works have shared themes with the interconnectedness of Indra’s net. It was at the front of her mind as she made drawings after the premiere of “Weave.” And then again one afternoon as she sat at her piano and came up with eight-bar themes for “jewels” in the net. But she put all that away and wrote “On Behalf of Nature” instead.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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    A Note From Irving Berlin, the ‘Nation’s Songwriter’

    The lyricist and composer wrote thousands of compositions — and one stern letter to The New York Times.Few songwriters and composers were as prolific as Irving Berlin, whose vast musical catalog includes well-known songs such as “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Cheek to Cheek” and “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better).” By some accounts, he wrote well over 1,200 songs during his career, including the scores for 18 films and 19 Broadway shows.His 1942 song “White Christmas,” most famously performed by Bing Crosby, remains a holiday classic, and his patriotic hit “God Bless America,” released in 1938, is considered an unofficial national anthem.Berlin’s legacy survives not only in tunes, but in organizations he created that influenced the musical world. In 1914, he helped found the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP, a music licensing agency that today, per its website, secures the royalties and legal rights for over one million songwriters, composers and music publishers. In 1919, he broke away from Ted Snyder and Henry Waterson, with whom he had built the successful music publishing company Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., and established his own. He was also behind the Music Box Theater in Manhattan.In the Morgue, The New York Times’s physical clippings library, there’s a thick file on Berlin. One of the items inside is a letter, dated April 14, 1924, that Berlin sent to The Times. In the letter he made clear that he had no existing ties to Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., which had recently filed a lawsuit against ASCAP. The lawsuit, in part, “sought to compel the defendants to account for all of the licenses issued permitting the broadcasting of the songs and musical compositions belonging to the plaintiff,” as The Times had reported days earlier.Berlin explained that he had “severed” his connection to the firm years earlier. He implored The Times to make this distinction in forthcoming articles: “I would consider it a special favor if you make it perfectly clear that I, Irving Berlin, have no connection whatsoever with the firm of Waterson, Berlin & Snyder.” (The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1929.)Berlin lived to be 101; when he died in 1989, The Times called him the “nation’s songwriter” in his obituary. More

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    Billy Edd Wheeler, Songwriter Who Celebrated Rural Life, Dies at 91

    His plain-spoken songs were recorded by Elvis Presley, Kenny Rogers and many others. The duo of Johnny Cash and June Carter made his “Jackson” a huge country hit.Billy Edd Wheeler, an Appalachian folk singer who wrote vividly about rural life and culture in songs like “Jackson,” a barn-burning duet that was a hit in 1967 for June Carter and Johnny Cash as well as for Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, died on Monday at his home in Swannanoa, N.C., east of Asheville. He was 91.His death was announced on social media by his daughter, Lucy Wheeler.Plain-spoken and colloquial, Mr. Wheeler’s songs have been recorded by some 200 artists, among them Neil Young, Hank Snow, Elvis Presley, and Florence & the Machine. “Jackson” — a series of spirited exchanges between a quarrelsome husband and wife — opens with one of the most evocative couplets in popular music: “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout/We’ve been talkin’ about Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”From there the husband boasts about the carousing he plans to do in Jackson, as his wife scoffs at his hollow braggadocio. “Go on down to Jackson,” she goads him on, emboldened by the song’s neo-rockabilly backbeat. “Go ahead and wreck your health/Go play your hand, you big-talkin’ man, make a big fool of yourself.”Written with the producer and lyricist Jerry Leiber, with whom Mr. Wheeler had apprenticed as a songwriter at the Brill Building in New York, “Jackson” was a Top 10 country hit for Ms. Carter and Mr. Cash and a Top 20 pop hit for Ms. Sinatra and Mr. Hazlewood. The Carter-Cash version won a Grammy Award in 1968 for best country-and-western performance by a duo, trio or group.The 1967 album “Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter” included Mr. Wheeler’s song “Jackson,” which would reach the country Top 10 as a single and win a Grammy.ColumbiaMr. Wheeler’s original pass at the song, though, was anything but auspicious. In fact, when Mr. Leiber first heard it, he advised Mr. Wheeler to jettison most of what he had written and to use the line “We got married in a fever” in the song’s opening and closing choruses.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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    Bad Bunny Commemorates a Hurricane, and 11 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Jane’s Addiction, Bon Iver, Yola and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Bad Bunny, ‘Una Velita’On the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which left lasting damage to Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny has released the mournful, resentful, adamant “Una Velita” (“Little Candle”). “It’s going to happen again,” he warns in Spanish. “Here comes the storm, who’s going to save us?” Faraway guitars, deep Afro-Caribbean drumming and a choir back him as he recalls the insufficient government response to Maria: “Five thousand were left to die, and we’ll never forget that.” Before the next storm, he calls for God’s protection and for self-reliance: “It’s up to the people to save the people.”Jane’s Addiction, ‘True Love’The reunited original lineup of Jane’s Addiction has just canceled its tour and announced a band hiatus after an onstage fistfight midway through a Boston concert. But that hasn’t precluded the release of “True Love,” the second single from the reconvened band. It’s an unironic, even romantic tribute to “basking in the glory of true love,” free of anyone else’s judgments. The minor-key, relatively subdued arrangement — reverb-laden guitar, mallets on drums — only underlines the song’s sense of commitment, even if the band has fractured again.Bon Iver, ‘Speyside’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