Aurelia Butler

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    in Music

    How Alison Krauss Found the Song That Rekindled Her Distinctive Band

    After 14 years between albums, the singer and fiddler has regrouped Union Station to sing about darkness and light. The group is carrying on without a key member.Alison Krauss never stops searching for songs. But she only records them when she’s ready.“She does it 24/7/365,” said Barry Bales, the bassist in her band Union Station since 1990. “She’s on the lookout for songs, and she’s a song hoarder. She’ll hear a song she likes, and it may never see the light of day for 15, 20 years. But she’ll remember it.”A decade after Krauss’s last tour with Union Station, and 14 years after the band’s previous studio album, the singer and fiddler has reconvened the group for “Arcadia,” an album due Friday. “I’ve been gathering tunes for this since the last time we recorded,” Krauss, 53, said in a video interview from the Doghouse, a Nashville studio where she has recorded for decades. “I’m just waiting for the first song to show up, until ‘Ah, here it is — it’s time to record.’ It’s always been that way.”That first song was Jeremy Lister’s “Looks Like the End of the Road,” a bitterly mournful waltz about disillusionment and despair: “The lines that were drawn a long time ago / Are buried and gone in lies and ego,” she sings. It sets the dark tone for “Arcadia,” an album of 10 tracks, all but two of them in minor keys, with lyrics full of bleak tidings. At the end, the album offers a glimpse of redemption in another Lister song: “There’s a Light Up Ahead.”When Krauss heard “Looks Like the End of the Road,” during the peak of the Covid pandemic, her intuition told her it was the starting point of that long-awaited album. “It just has to be the right timing, for things to be the most truthful representation,” she said. “Had I not found that song when I did, who knows when we would have gone in?”“Arcadia” reconvenes and reconfigures a band that has transformed the sound of modern bluegrass by constantly drawing new subtleties from old-time roots. Union Station can easily muster the quick-fingered virtuosity required for upbeat, foot-stomping bluegrass tunes that punctuate its albums and live sets. But what makes the band so distinctive is its quietly incandescent restraint: the hushed concentration it summons behind Krauss’s pristinely melancholy soprano, which can sound haunted even when she sings about true love.Union Station, from left: Ron Block, Jerry Douglas, Krauss, Russell Moore and Barry Bales.Allister Ann 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

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    In Alain Guiraudie’s Films, Sex Leads to Unexpected Destinations

    Alain Guiraudie broke through with “Stranger by the Lake.” In his new movie, “Misericordia,” eroticism and death are also intimately entangled.Carnal urges drive the characters in the films of the French director Alain Guiraudie toward absurd and sometimes dangerous mishaps. In his sexually audacious narratives, which usually play out in the countryside, the temptation of the flesh is a potent catalyst.“I don’t know if you can say that desire is what drives all of cinema, but it’s certainly what drives my cinema,” Guiraudie said via an interpreter during a recent video interview from his home in Paris.That artistic mandate guides his latest picture, “Misericordia,” which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday. When it came out in France, it received eight nominations for the César Awards, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, and was named the best film of 2024 by the renowned French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.The movie follows Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) as he returns to the small rural town of his youth, where he soon becomes the prime suspect in a murder, while also awakening the lust of the local Catholic priest.For Guiraudie, 60, eroticism and death are intimately entangled. “There are two situations in which we return to our most primitive instincts: sex and violence,” he said. “I see an obligatory connection.”Félix Kysyl and Jacques Develay in “Misericordia.” Like most of Guiraudie’s movies, it is set in the countryside.Sideshow/Janus FilmsWe 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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    Trump Reimagines the Kennedy Center: Elvis, ‘Cats’ and Babe Ruth

    A recording of President Trump’s private remarks at a Kennedy Center board meeting shows that he mused about bestowing honors on dead celebrities and people from outside the arts.The new chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts had a question for the board. Which musical is best, “The Phantom of the Opera” or “Les Misérables”? (Several trustees seemed to agree it was “Phantom.”)He mused about how great it could be if he hosted the Kennedy Center Honors (“The king of ratings,” he called himself). And he floated the idea of giving awards to dead figures in culture and sports, including Luciano Pavarotti, Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth.Monday was President Trump’s first visit to the Kennedy Center since he took it over last month by replacing all the Biden appointees on the board of the once bipartisan institution and having himself elected chairman.As he gathered members of the new board on the stage of its opera house he expressed strong and sometimes surprising opinions on a variety of matters, according to an audio recording of his private remarks obtained by The New York Times, which was confirmed as authentic by a participant.Asked about the recording, a Kennedy Center official pointed to a social media post by its new president, Richard Grenell, which said that Mr. Trump wants to save the center and “ensure it is the premier Arts institution in the United States” and a place where “EVERYONE is welcome.”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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    11 Songs to Keep St. Patrick’s Day Going

    Extend the holiday with tracks from Sinead O’Connor, the Pogues, Kneecap and more.Sinead O’ConnorPaul Bergen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,This year St. Patrick’s Day was on a Monday, a particularly cursed fate for a holiday associated with merriment. I propose extending the celebration all throughout the week — a feat of endurance that will require the proper soundtrack. Today, I offer you just that.This playlist contains tracks from 11 very different artists from Ireland.* It features some interpretations of traditional Irish tunes from legends like the Pogues (I’ll get to their origins in a moment) and the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem; a few superstars who put Irish rock on the global map in the 1980s and ’90s (U2 and the Cranberries); and some younger upstarts refreshing Irish sounds for a new generation (the imaginative post-punk group Fontaines D.C. and the raucous rap trio Kneecap, whose 2024 biopic I highly recommend).Whether you’re playing this while sipping a pint of Guinness or trying to conjure that pub atmosphere within the secrecy of your headphones, I hope this playlist keeps you in the St. Patrick’s Day spirit all week (and maybe even all year) long.Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake,Lindsay*Before you email me about their exclusion, a friendly reminder that the Dropkick Murphys are from Massachusetts. As for Hozier, well … something tells me that there are at least a few other playlists out there where you can hear his music.Listen along while you read.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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    ‘Ghostlight,’ ‘Watcher’ and More Streaming Gems

    A pair of carefully crafted character studies and three female-fronted thrillers are among the gems hidden on your subscription streaming services this month.‘Ghostlight’ (2024)Stream it on Hulu.So few films concern the daily lives of the working class, in any meaningful way, that it’s sort of astonishing when one comes along that feels so embedded there. That’s the case with this heart-tugging drama from the directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson (“Saint Frances”), in which a grieving father stumbles into a community theater production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Keith Kupferer is marvelous as the father, beautifully capturing the frustrations and emotional limitations of his class and generation, while Katherine Mallen Kupferer performs modestly as his wife, until a late moment that absolutely clobbers you. And that, in many ways, holds true for the entire movie.‘Goodrich’ (2024)Stream it on Max.“This midlife crisis is no walk in the park, I’ll tell you that,” snorts Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) near the end of this poignant comedy-drama, and while his daughter Grace (Mila Kunis) notes the mathematical improbability that 60-something is “midlife,” the sentiment stands. Andy, the owner-operator of a Los Angeles art gallery that’s seen better days, is in free-fall. His wife has just checked herself into rehab, much to his bafflement (he’s so checked out, he never noticed her addiction), leaving him to care for their elementary-school aged twins himself. Keaton is credited as an executive producer, and it’s easy to see why the project was important to him; the writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer hands him a stellar showcase, a guy who talks fast and thinks faster, and whose inherent likability helps soften his obvious flaws. The result is a poignant examination of getting older and wondering if you’ve lost it — whatever your particular “it” may be.‘Saint Maud’ (2021)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.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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    Jesse Colin Young, Singer Who Urged Us to ‘Get Together,’ Dies at 83

    As the leader of the Youngbloods, he sang one of the enduring anthems of the peace-and-love era. He went on to have a prolific career as a solo artist.Jesse Colin Young, whose sincere tenor vocals for the Youngbloods graced one of the most loving anthems of the hippie era, “Get Together,” a Top Five hit in 1969, before he went on to pursue a solo career that lasted more than five decades, died on Sunday at his home in Aiken, S.C. He was 83.His death was announced by his publicist, Michael Jensen, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Young didn’t write “Get Together.” It was composed by the folk singer Dino Valenti, later a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service, under the pseudonym Chet Powers. But Mr. Young’s voice idealized it, and the chorus he sang — “Come on people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try to love one another right now” — became one of the best-known refrains of the 1960s.“The lyrics are just to die for,” Mr. Young told the website The Arts Fuse in 2018. “To this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.”He composed many other key pieces of the Youngbloods’ repertoire during their prime in the late 1960s, including the brooding “Darkness, Darkness,” which reflected the terror he imagined American soldiers were experiencing during the Vietnam War; “Sunlight,” a ravishing ode to passionate love; and “Ride the Wind,” a jazzy paean to freedom.The lyrics to many of Mr. Young’s songs celebrated the gifts nature gives, from the dreamy play of sunlight on skin to the unfettered sweep of wind in the hair.“Love of the natural world is as much a theme in my music as romantic love,” he told the website Music Aficionado in 2016. “I get more out of walking over the ridgetop in Marin and looking out at the national seashore than any drugs I ever did” — a reference to the Northern California county where he lived for much of his career.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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    Trump Visits Kennedy Center for First Time Since Taking It Over

    President Trump visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Monday for the first time since he stunned the cultural and political establishment nearly five weeks ago by taking over the institution.“We’re here to have our first board meeting,” he told reporters as he toured the center with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and a few of the people he has appointed to the center’s board, including the country singer Lee Greenwood (he sings “God Bless the U.S.A.”) and the Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo.He had some thoughts about programming.“I never liked ‘Hamilton’ very much,” he said, taking a poke at a show that canceled a planned tour there next year to protest his takeover of the institution, which had long been bipartisan.When he was a young man Mr. Trump had dreams of one day becoming a Broadway producer himself. Now, he said, the Kennedy Center’s focus would be on producing “Broadway hits.”“We’re going to get some very good shows,” he said. “I guess we have ‘Les Miz’ coming.” (Before he was elected to a second term, the Kennedy Center had announced that “Les Misérables,” a longtime Trump favorite, would be performing there in June and July.)Mr. Trump made himself chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board last month after dismissing all of the Biden-era appointees, upending a bipartisan tradition that had endured for decades.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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    Universal Music Calls Drake’s ‘Not Like Us’ Lawsuit ‘Misguided’

    The label behind Drake and Kendrick Lamar filed a motion on Monday to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit, which accused it of defamation and harassment over the diss song.With the Drake takedown “Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar, now officially the most celebrated rap diss ever, the record label behind both artists is seeking to dismiss Drake’s defamation lawsuit, arguing that its lyrics are merely “a series of hyperbolic insults,” the lingua franca of any hip-hop feud.In a filing on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the company, known as UMG, provided its first substantial response to the lawsuit brought in January on behalf of Drake, the artist born Aubrey Drake Graham. He accused the label of defamation and harassment, claiming that Lamar’s track “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”Last month, “Not Like Us,” which accuses Drake of liking young girls, among other personal attacks, won five Grammy Awards, including song and record of the year, and provided the centerpiece for Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance.According to UMG, Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated” and then “sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.” The label, citing in its filing lyrics by both artists tied to last year’s heavyweight fight, added that Drake had leveled “similarly incendiary attacks at Lamar” and that the tone and context of the back-and-forth made the defamation claim impossible to prove.The lawsuit, UMG said in its filing, “disregards the other Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded ‘Not Like Us’ as well as the conventions of the diss track genre,” adding: “diss tracks are a popular and celebrated artform centered around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”In the suit, lawyers for Drake had argued that “Not Like Us” was beyond the pale of a typical rap beef because the song’s accusations were framed as fact — for instance, using as its cover art a map of Drake’s home with sex offender markers superimposed on top — and that it led to real world violence, citing a shooting at the residence days after the song’s release that injured a security guard, calling it “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate.’” The claim also cited two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.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