Aurelia Butler

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    12 Key Music Collections, From Future to the Who

    Whitney Houston’s gospel music, Future’s prolific mixtape run, a chunk of Joni Mitchell’s archives and a soundtrack of Brooklyn’s early discos arrived in new packages this year.Artists were eager to revisit the past in 2023 — some tweaking recent albums (like Taylor Swift), others revisiting long-dormant work in the vaults (like the two surviving Beatles). Boxed sets and reissue collections serve a different purpose, helping put catalogs and musicians into context, and bringing fresh revelations to light. Here are a dozen of the best our critics encountered this year.Julee Cruise, ‘Floating Into the Night’(Sacred Bones; one LP, $22)The absorbing, unconventional debut album from the deep-exhale vocalist Julee Cruise, who died in 2022, was produced by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch; the three had previously collaborated on music for Lynch’s 1986 alt-noir film “Blue Velvet.” This batch of songs, released in 1989, plays as an extension of that fun-house mirror, lightly terrifying universe, with twisted 1950s melodies meeting destabilizing, plangent guitars meeting Dali-esque shimmers. “Falling” became the theme song for “Twin Peaks” in instrumental form, but its full vocal version is the essential one. Songs like that, “The Nightingale” and “Into the Night” feel, even now, sui generis — not exactly dream-pop or new age, but something utterly amniotic. And lightly harrowing, too. JON CARAMANICADeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’(Jagjaguwar; five LPs, four CDs, 120-page book, $130)Anna Powell Denton/JagjaguwarBon Iver didn’t come out of nowhere. Before he started that project, Justin Vernon was in DeYarmond Edison, a pensive, folky but exploratory band that made two albums before splitting up; other members formed Megafaun. DeYarmond Edison — Vernon’s middle names — delved into folk, rock, Minimalism and bluegrass, learning traditional songs but also experimenting with phase patterns. It made two studio albums and left behind other songs, including “Epoch.” This extensively annotated boxed set includes songs from Mount Vernon, DeYarmond Edison’s jammy predecessor, along with DeYarmond Edison’s full second studio album (though only part of its first), unreleased demos, intimate concerts, collaborations outside the band and Vernon’s 2006 solo recordings. It’s a chronicle that opens up the sources of a style getting forged. JON PARELESWe 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?  More

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    Angelina Jolie and the Ghosts of New York Past

    Her new store, Atelier Jolie, occupies an unassuming building on Great Jones Street with an illustrious history.When Angelina Jolie opened her first fashion boutique in a squat, two-story building at 57 Great Jones Street in Lower Manhattan this month, she joined a long line of notable New Yorkers, including gangsters and artists, who lived or worked at that unassuming address.Atelier Jolie, which has an appointment-only fitting room on the second floor, sells clothes made from vintage and deadstock materials and offers Turkish coffee and Syrian mini pies in its chic cafe. “I hope to see you there, and to be one of the many creating with you within our new creative collective,” Ms. Jolie wrote in a founding statement. “Bear with me. I hope to grow this with you.”Atelier Jolie’s branding is tied to the artistic heritage of 57 Great Jones Street. Andy Warhol bought the building in the 1970s. Everyone from Keith Haring to Madonna dropped by. Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and painted in the upstairs studio loft, producing some of his most significant works, before he died there of a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988.Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, artists with ties to 57 Great Jones Street, at a 1984 benefit in Manhattan.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesIf you dust off more of the structure’s past, you find the bones of New York. The brick building once housed mobsters and bare-knuckle boxers.It was built in the 1860s, architect unknown, and its first known use was as a stable, according to Village Preservation, an advocacy group. Great Jones Street, a two-block lane in NoHo named after the lawyer and politician Samuel Jones, was a home for the city’s affluent merchant class that counted the mayor and diarist Philip Hone among its early residents. During the Civil War, the 69th Regiment gathered on the street to march toward a steamer on the Hudson. Crowds looked on as the young men headed off to battle.As Manhattan grew and wealthy residents moved uptown, the neighborhood began its slump into a skid row. At the east end of Great Jones Street lay the Bowery, a once-reputable boulevard that had become a notorious thoroughfare lined with brothels, beer gardens, flophouses and pawn shops.An 1897 map of Great Jones Street, which was named after Samuel Jones, a New York lawyer and politician.Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public LibraryThe Bowery of old.The building became a saloon and dance hall, the Brighton, which The New York Times called a “notorious dive.” The place was nearly blown to smithereens in 1901 after some men making a beer delivery disturbed a gas jet in the cellar. When the establishment’s owner, Charles Deveniude, went to investigate, he lit a candle. The explosion was heard “several blocks away,” The Times reported, and Mr. Deveniude suffered burns to his face, hands and shoulders.The Brighton was sold a few years later to Paul Kelly, whom The Times described in a 1912 article as “perhaps the most successful and the most influential gangster in New York history.” In a nod to his Italian heritage, Mr. Kelly, a onetime pugilist born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, renamed the saloon Little Naples.Mr. Kelly ran the Five Points Gang, one of the most feared street gangs of its day, and Little Naples served as his association’s headquarters and as a gathering place for the city’s political elite. He was an enforcer for the corrupt Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall, and his henchmen helped provide paid voters, known as “floaters,” to cast ballots for Tammany candidates. The gang’s members included future underworld leaders like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone.A 1905 article in The Times recounted a “desperate fight” at Little Naples in which a man was killed and several others were wounded. “Scores of shots were fired, but as far as is known to the police, only one man went to his death,” the paper reported, adding: “His body was found in the saloon nearly half an hour after the smoke of the battle had cleared away. There was a bullet wound in his left breast.” The man was discovered with his legs protruding from a swinging bathroom door. His dog, a spaniel, was whimpering beside him.The Times further reported that one of Mr. Kelly’s lieutenants, John Ratta, was wounded in another shootout at the saloon that same week. He refused to cooperate with the police, saying only that he “slipped and fell so hard on a bullet on the floor that it entered his flesh.” The Times noted: “Ratta will live to carry a revolver, and he says he will settle the difficulty in his own way.”The June 9, 1912, edition of The New York Times included a detailed report on the murderous goings-on at Little Naples, a night spot that once occupied the Atelier Jolie building.The New York TimesIn later decades, the building housed metalwork and kitchen equipment supply businesses. Don DeLillo wrote Great Jones Street into the annals of American literature in 1973, when he named his third novel after the street. The book’s narrator-protagonist, a disillusioned rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, slums it in an apartment there: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble.”Mr. Warhol purchased 57 Great Jones Street in 1970 under the corporation name Factory Films Inc., according to a report by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 1983, as he became a mentor to Mr. Basquiat, who was then a fast-rising art world star, Mr. Warhol rented the upstairs loft to him. In the next few years Mr. Basquiat produced works including “King Zulu” and “Riding With Death.”“Jean-Michel called,” Mr. Warhol wrote in his diary on Sept. 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he’s rented our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay his rent?”After Mr. Basquiat’s death, the building’s exterior became a mecca for street artists to leave tributes to him, and the site has been marked with renditions of his crown motif and “SAMO” graffiti tag ever since.The Warhol estate sold the building in the early 1990s. After that, as the gentrification of the neighborhood accelerated, and nightlife hot spots like B Bar and the Bowery Hotel thrived, a referral-only Japanese restaurant with no listed phone number, Bohemian, occupied the address. It was concealed, speakeasy-style, behind a butcher shop.In 2022, the building was put on the rental market by Meridian Capital Group for $60,000 a month. Its landlord, according to property records, is the noted real estate appraiser Robert Von Ancken, whose services have been used by New York real estate families including the Trumps, the Helmsleys and the Zeckendorfs. Reached by phone, Mr. Von Ancken clarified that he had bought the building with his business partner, Leslie Garfield, who died last year, and that he now owns the property with Mr. Garfield’s family.“When we first occupied the space, we didn’t really know much about the artist who’d been living there, because he wasn’t as well known then,” Mr. Von Ancken recalled. “There were all these drawings on the walls. We rented it as it was. A tenant painted all over it. That was all lost.”He added: “The building has been getting graffitied over for years. I’ve tried repainting the front, but I eventually gave up. It’s clearly still very important for young artists, even today, to put their mark on that facade.”About a year ago, Ms. Jolie and her teenage daughter Zahara started scouting for a downtown retail space, and their wanderings brought them to 57 Great Jones. They felt an immediate communion with the building, Ms. Jolie said in an interview with Vogue, so she quickly rented it. As the store approached its opening date, one of her sons, Pax, helped spray-paint the Atelier Jolie logo onto a canvas draping the doorway.Angelina Jolie, the latest tenant of 57 Great Jones Street, outside the building in August.Mega/GC Images, via Getty ImagesOne recent night, a security guard manned Atelier Jolie’s entranceway while two young employees explained the shop’s mission of promoting sustainable fashion to a visitor. Upstairs, in the same space that the Five Points Gang used as a meeting place, another employee worked on a laptop in the fitting room.Outside, a couple stopped to read the plaque that memorialized Mr. Basquiat’s residence at the address and noted its early use as a stable. Then they reminded each other that they were running late for a hard-to-get dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant. More

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    Amp Fiddler, Versatile Keyboardist, Singer and Mentor, Dies at 65

    A mainstay of Detroit’s soul, funk and electronic music scenes, he also offered guidance to young hip-hop and electronic music aspirants, notably J Dilla.Amp Fiddler in performance at an electronic music festival in Detroit in 2016. He was a versatile keyboardist, a prolific session player and a mentor to younger musicians.Laura McDermott for The New York TimesAmp Fiddler, a former keyboardist with Parliament-Funkadelic who became a fixture of Detroit’s soul, funk and electronic music scenes, and whose tutelage of the young rapper J Dilla helped alter the trajectory of hip-hop, died on Dec. 18 in Detroit. He was 65.His death, in a hospital after a long battle with cancer, was announced by his wife, Tombi Stewart.Mr. Fiddler was a versatile keyboardist, equally adept at playing warm Fender Rhodes grooves or squiggly synthesizer arpeggios, skills honed during his decade with P-Funk, from 1986 to 1996. He was also a prolific session player, working with artists like Seal, Maxwell and Raphael Saadiq.“The thing that I was always keen on as an artist was to leave my ego at home,” Mr. Fiddler said in a 2003 Red Bull Music Academy lecture. “I think that humility, having that sense of just being there for people and giving, is what got me more into getting more.”Mr. Fiddler had a striking, stylish presence — he favored flamboyantly psychedelic attire and wore his hair either in an expansive Afro or sculpted vertically into a Mohawk — that could make him seem even larger than his 6-foot-2 frame. In the early 2000s he began recording under his own name on neo-soul albums like “Waltz of a Ghetto Fly” and “Afro Strut,” showcasing his raspy but soothing voice. He also played keyboards for numerous electronic music producers in Detroit, including Moodymann, Theo Parrish and Carl Craig.But Mr. Fiddler’s most crucial role may have been as a bridge between generations of Detroit musicians — first as a wide-eyed wunderkind among veteran P-Funk players, then as a beloved mentor to the hip-hop and electronic music aspirants of the 1990s and 2000s. “It’s just so rare, especially in the entertainment business, to see figures who give without the expectation of getting something back,” Dan Charnas, the author of the 2022 book “Dilla Time,” said in an interview. “A generation of folks were blessed by Amp’s generosity.”The most notable of these disciples was James Dewitt Yancey, better known as J Dilla. Mr. Fiddler lived near the high school attended by several members of a fledgling rap collective, one of whom — drawn by the music booming out of his basement studio window — knocked on the door to inquire whether Mr. Fiddler could help produce a demo tape.Mr. Fiddler agreed, and the next day, seven teenagers arrived, including Mr. Yancey. Mr. Fiddler introduced him to the Akai MPC60 sampling drum machine and left him alone to learn by experimenting. Soon Mr. Yancey was skipping school to study in the gear-packed basement studio Mr. Fiddler called “Camp Amp.”“I would teach him something different just about every day until he got it,” Mr. Fiddler said in a 2015 interview with Sam Beaubien, a friend and collaborator. “I knew he was talented. He heard things in a different way.”A few years later, in July 1994, when Mr. Fiddler was on the Lollapalooza tour with the P-Funk All Stars, he introduced Mr. Yancey to Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, which was also on the tour. Mr. Yancey slipped Q-Tip a demo tape, beginning the chain of events that ultimately catapulted him into the hip-hop pantheon as a major innovator. (Mr. Yancey died at 32 in 2006.) “My happiness about the introduction,” Mr. Fiddler told Mr. Beaubien, “was for him to become successful and put Detroit on the map as once again a force to be reckoned with in the music industry.”Mr. Fiddler was equally adept at playing warm Fender Rhodes grooves or squiggly synthesizer arpeggios, skills honed during his decade with Parliament-Funkadelic.Laura McDermott for The New York TimesMr. Fiddler himself was a protégé of the Parliament-Funkadelic impresario George Clinton. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Clinton heard one of Mr. Fiddler’s demo recordings and offered him the keyboard chair in P-Funk once held by Bernie Worrell. Mr. Fiddler “helped me do amazing things,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his 2014 memoir, “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You?” “Amp was a jazz musician, and he helped create some of these extended pieces.”Joseph Anthony Fiddler, the youngest of five siblings, was born in Detroit on May 16, 1958, to Cleophas and Christine (Young) Fiddler. The nickname “Amp,” which he used throughout his career, was a playground variant on his middle name. His father, a mill operator for the U.S. Rubber Company, was originally from the Caribbean island St. Vincent; his mother, who was from Virginia, worked as a salesperson at the J.L. Hudson department store.Mr. Fiddler began playing music on the family baby grand piano in his late teens. The pianist Harold McKinney, a founder of the Detroit jazz collective Tribe, lived down the street, and the young Mr. Fiddler began studying with him. After brief stints at two colleges, he started playing with Detroit-based touring acts, including Enchantment, RJ’s Latest Arrival and Was (Not Was).Was (Not Was) brought Mr. Fiddler to Europe for the first time, but the globe-trotting never stopped. Among the experiences he cherished most, he told Mr. Beaubien, were playing at the Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria, with the Afrobeat percussionist Tony Allen, and recording at Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare’s studio in Jamaica (for the three men’s 2008 joint project, “Inspiration Information”).He shared a passion for music with his brother Thomas. In the late 1980s, they formed a group named Mr. Fiddler, conceived as a cross between Cab Calloway’s 1940s swing band and 1980s new jack swing. They signed a deal with Elektra Records; their 1990 album, “With Respect,” wasn’t a commercial success, but Amp Fiddler used his $10,000 advance to build a state-of-the-art home studio.Mr. Fiddler is survived by Ms. Stewart, whom he married this year after a 16-year on-and-off relationship. His siblings all died before him, as did a son, Dorian, from a relationship with Stacey Willoughby.Despite his illness, Mr. Fiddler gigged regularly in Detroit until last year, with up-and-coming groups like Will Sessions, Duality/Detroit and Dames Brown (a female vocal trio whose debut album, for which Mr. Fiddler was executive producer, will be released in 2024).“He was always teaching you stuff,” said Mr. Beaubien, the founder of the band Will Sessions. “Sometimes people don’t want to share their secrets, the things that they’ve learned, but Amp was never afraid to share his lessons. Saying that he taught me a lot is an understatement. I’m forever grateful.” More

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    ‘Down in the Delta’ at 25: When Maya Angelou Considered Reverse Migration

    The memoirist’s sentimental film speaks to Black Americans returning to the South.Consumed by fears of inner-city violence and the traumatic effects of the crack epidemic, “Down in the Delta” didn’t lead to a career in filmmaking for the writer Maya Angelou. Instead, 25 years later, the inspiring yet uniquely flawed film remains her lone directorial feature.Though a Black fantasy unbound by a specific place and time, it’s a film whose conversations with the socioeconomic realities of the 1990s, the proliferation of hood movies, and the strategy for Black resistance, now, would appear dated. But the script’s idyllic return to the South has newfound resonance for the contemporary reverse-migration taking place in many northern Black neighborhoods affected by the consequences of decades of redlining, deindustrialization and divestment.“Down in the Delta” opens on the South Side of Chicago, where the sound of blaring sirens and hovering helicopters pierce apartment windows, such as the one belonging to Rosa Lynn Sinclair (Mary Alice), the steady mother of Loretta (a perceptive Alfre Woodard), an unemployed single mother who feeds her autistic daughter, Tracy (Kulani Hassen), soda in lieu of milk and, through her drug use, persistently disappoints her only son, the artistically inclined Thomas (Mpho Koaho). To save her family, a vexed Rosa Lynn pawns “Nathan,” a silver-plated candelabra dating to the antebellum period, for bus tickets, sending Loretta and her children to Mississippi to live under the care of their Uncle Earl (Al Freeman Jr.). The sojourn isn’t a cakewalk for Loretta. Not only is she there to sober up, but she must also earn enough money working at Earl’s chicken joint to buy Nathan back, or else permanently lose the heirloom.Considering Angelou’s autobiographies — particularly, “Gather Together in My Name” — you can see why Myron Goble’s script about the power of family appealed to her. Cinematically, kin as a restorative force for Black folks was covered in George Tillman Jr.’s “Soul Food” (1997). And since “Down in the Delta,” “Kingdom Come,” “The Secret Life of Bees” and Tyler Perry’s Madea character have walked similar paths.From the moment Loretta arrives in the Delta, Angelou broadly juxtaposes the opportunities lost and gained between North and South. In the South there’s no crime, poverty, squabbles or gossip. Unlike the young Black men of Chicago, flatly depicted as predators, the people of this genteel town emit rural warmth: The cinematographer William Wages’s honeyed lens captures inviting dirt country roads and lush beds of grass; the composer Stanley Clarke’s tender score further beckons repose.In this town, crack houses, a staple of urban angst cinematically depicted in “New Jack City” and “Jungle Fever,” are replaced with manicured family plots and quaint Queen Anne-style homes. This community longs for the past, whether it’s Earl yearning for Nathan or Earl’s wife, Annie (Esther Rolle), who has Alzheimer’s and pines for her mother. The area’s lone worry is the impending closing of the chicken plant, a threat quietly swept away almost as quickly as it appears.Maya Angelou in the director’s seat on the set of “Down in the Delta.” A quarter of a century later, it remains an inspiring film that is not without its flaws.Ben Mark Holzberg/Miramax Films The importance of the South as a site for restorative justice resides in Nathan, whose frame, in a film prizing trees as markers of time and lineage, carries obvious symbolism. The candle holder’s back story, the bounty for the selling of an enslaved Sinclair, ultimately repossessed by another descendant for recompense, bears in mind the fracturing of Black families during bondage. Earl believes the return of Nathan to Mississippi might revitalize the town, reuniting the family while metaphorically mending the rift between North and South. It’s a wish that inspires the film’s desire for a reverse Great Migration.As early as the 1970s, Black people were already returning South. Though millions of African Americans arrived North to escape Jim Crow violence, in their new communities they discovered some of the same prejudices. The era’s hope and optimism felt by those first migrators, recorded in the painter Jacob Lawrence’s indelible “Migration” series, has been replaced. For instance, in Llewellyn M. Smith and Sam Pollard’s documentary “South to Black Power,” Charles M. Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, hopes by reclaiming the South, political weight can be consolidated on a state level by Black people.In Angelou’s hands, however, reverse migration isn’t a subversive strategy. Rather it’s an uncomplicated balm. Loretta’s return to loving arms in Mississippi ends her drug habit, gives Tracy her first words, and helps this single mother, who just learned how to add and subtract, envision a future totally unencumbered by institutional racism.Because in “Down in the Delta,” the road to racial uplift is a youth movement cleanly paved by economic self-reliance. When the town’s chicken plant closes, the entrepreneurial Will hopes to acquire it for his dad’s chicken restaurant, a Black-owned small business, to revitalize the area. When Loretta learns how Will helps Black businesses, she dreams of running the factory herself.Financial independence becomes a method for memorializing a storybook past for future generations while imagining newfound prosperity; a dream that has reverberated since 40 acres and a mule were first promised, and then became a nightmare when Tulsa, Okla., burned in 1921. Angelou’s “Down in the Delta” is a retelling of a broken contract that still speaks to migrators today. More

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    ‘Rose’ Review: My Sister’s Keeper

    Niels Arden Oplev’s drama about two sisters, one of whom is a woman with schizophrenia, on a bus tour of France brims with genuine feeling.In the honest and heartfelt Danish drama “Rose,” two sisters take a bus tour to France. The elder, Inger (Sofie Grabol), lives with schizophrenia, and resides in a psychiatric clinic where she receives care from staff and coddling from her mother. The younger, Ellen (Lene Maria Christensen), sees the vacation as an chance to bond with her sister, whom she believes could benefit from more independence.The writer-director, Niels Arden Oplev, based the film in part on his own experiences, and the movie keenly illustrates how stigma surrounding mental illness hurts neurodivergent people and their families. Oplev locates a source of this strain in Andreas (Soren Malling), a fellow bus tourist bent on treating Inger as a liability and a nuisance. Outside-world triggers for Inger are multifarious — she refuses to bathe and often carps about walking — but none prove as potent as Andreas’s scorn, which sets hurdles throughout the trip.“Rose” is partly a road movie, and there is a fascinating dissonance in staging small moments of friction on grand stages like Versailles and Normandy. That the film takes place in the weeks after Princess Diana’s death adds an extra layer of tension; the theme of accidents and the morbid curiosity that attends them hovers like a specter.But the ultimate power of “Rose” lies with Grabol, who inhabits Inger with grace. Using facial expressions and body language, she brings to life the character’s mood swings, her divided impulses toward anxiety and adventure. Alongside Oplev’s commitment to genuine feeling and complexity — you won’t find easy solutions here — Grabol’s performance shines.RoseNot rated. In Danish, French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    In 2023, Movie Audiences Wanted Comfort, Not Superhero Spectacle

    Movie audiences flocked to Taylor Swift, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” but were cooler toward returning superheroes like the Flash, Captain Marvel and Aquaman.Hollywood’s movie factories run on conventional wisdom — entrenched notions, based on experience, about what types of films are likely to pop at the global box office.This year, audiences turned many of those so-called rules on their heads.Superheroes have long been seen as the most reliable way to fill seats. But characters like Captain Marvel, the Flash, Ant-Man, Shazam and Blue Beetle failed to excite moviegoers. Over the weekend, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” which cost more than $200 million to make and tens of millions more to market, arrived to a disastrous $28 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada. Overseas moviegoers chipped in another $80 million.In the meantime, the biggest movie of the year at the box office, “Barbie,” with $1.44 billion in worldwide ticket sales, was directed by a woman, based on a very female toy and spray-painted pink — ingredients that most studios have long seen as limiting audience appeal. An old movie-industry maxim holds that women will go to a “guy” movie but not vice versa.“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” collected $1.36 billion, a second-place result that also stunned Hollywood; studios have a troubled history with game adaptations. “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour period drama about a physicist, rounded out the top three, taking in $952 million and contradicting the prevailing belief that, in the streaming era, films for grown-ups are not viable in theaters.“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” stunned the film industry by bringing in $1.36 billion.Nintendo/Nintendo/Universal Studios, via Associated Press“Without question, change is afoot — audiences are in a different mood,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “The country and the world are not in the same place. We’ve had seven years of divisive politics, a severe pandemic, two serious wars, climate change and inflation. Moviegoers seem less interested in being overwhelmed with spectacle and saving the universe than being spoken to, entertained and inspired.”The biggest box office surprises of the year fell into the “spoken to” category. “Sound of Freedom,” a crime drama that cost $15 million to make, catered to the far right, an audience largely ignored by Hollywood, and generated $248 million in ticket sales, on a par with “The Eras Tour,” which targeted Taylor Swift fans and also cost about $15 million.“Sound of Freedom” came from Angel Studios, an independent company in Provo, Utah, that supported the film with an unorthodox “Pay It Forward” program, which let supporters buy tickets online for those who otherwise might not see it. In a big break from Hollywood norms, Ms. Swift cut out the middle company (a studio) and made a distribution deal directly with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator.“Our phone has been dancing off the hooks since the day we announced the ‘Eras Tour’ project,” Adam Aron, AMC’s chief executive, told investors on a conference call in November, referring to “alternative content” opportunities.Comscore, which compiles box office data, projected on Sunday that North American ticket sales for the year would reach about $9 billion, a 20 percent increase from 2022. (Before the pandemic, North American theaters reliably sold about $11 billion in tickets annually.) The average price for an adult general admission ticket in the United States was $12.14, up from $11.75, according to EntTelligence, a research firm.Worldwide ticket sales are expected to exceed $33 billion, an increase of 27 percent, partly because of a surge in Latin America. (Before the pandemic, worldwide ticket sales easily exceeded $40 billion annually.)Hollywood’s climb back from the pandemic is expected to stall in 2024. With fewer movies scheduled for release — studio pipelines were disrupted by the recent strikes — ticket sales will decline 5 to 11 percent next year, depending on the market, according to projections from Gower Street Analytics, a box office research firm.Reading box-office tea leaves is like pontificating about symbolism in works of fiction: Any halfway plausible theory works. But studio bosses need something, anything, to guide them as they make billion-dollar judgment calls for the seasons ahead.Here are five takeaways from this year:Moviegoers want comfort.People reach for nostalgia in times of stress, and movies that reminded audiences of the past — while also managing to feel fresh — have been succeeding. “Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Wonka” and the retro-feeling “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” allowed people to revisit their childhoods. “Insidious: The Red Door” hit pay dirt by bringing back the franchise’s original stars.“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” could have tapped into nostalgia to become a hit. Instead, a huffing and puffing Harrison Ford, 81, simply reminded Indy fans that they, too, are getting old. “Dial of Destiny” cost Disney $295 million to make and took in a flaccid $384 million. (Theaters keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales.)Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan in “Creed III.”Eli Ade/MGMArt film has a pulse.Sophisticated dramas with modest budgets and aimed at older audiences have been showing signs of life after two years in the box office I.C.U.The streaming era has forever shifted the bulk of prestige film viewing to the home, analysts say. But theaters found a modicum of success in 2023 with offerings like “Past Lives,” a wistful drama with some Korean dialogue, and Hayao Miyazaki’s animated “The Boy and the Heron.” The bespoke “Asteroid City” managed $54 million.Early box office results have also been promising for Oscar-oriented films like “Poor Things,” a surreal science-fiction romance, and “American Fiction,” a satire about a writer who puts together a fake memoir that turns on racial stereotypes.Bigger is not better.For the past decade, Hollywood has kept audiences interested in sequels by making each installment more bloated and often nonsensical than the last. Bigger! Faster! More!That strategy may need rethinking — it’s just too expensive, analysts say, especially with Chinese moviegoers souring on American blockbusters. “Fast X,” the 10th movie in the “Fast and Furious” series, cost an estimated $340 million and took in $705 million worldwide, including $140 million in China. By comparison, “Furious 7” in 2015 cost $190 million and collected $1.5 billion, including $391 million in China.Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick.”Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesTom Cruise’s seventh “Mission: Impossible” spectacle, released in July in the wake of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” cost roughly $290 million to make and collected $568 million, including $49 million in China. The sixth “Mission: Impossible” in 2018 cost $178 million and generated $792 million, with Chinese ticket buyers chipping in $181 million.Increasingly, franchise sequels and spinoffs need to feel fresh to succeed. Lionsgate, for instance, delved deeper into the High Table underground crime organization in “John Wick: Chapter 4” and introduced “Hunger Games” fans to a new story line (and cast) in the prequel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” Both movies were hits. Lionsgate even revived its “Saw” horror franchise by shifting the narrative back in time.“Each of those movies did something different than the prior,” said Adam Fogelson, vice chair of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group. “It wasn’t just ‘spend more, make it bigger, make it louder and cram in more action.’”Some audience patterns remain intact.Horror continued to be a reliable performer, with “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “M3gan” starting new franchises for Universal and its Blumhouse affiliate. Together, the two films cost $32 million. They collected a combined $469 million. Also notable was “The Nun II,” which cost Warner Bros. about $22 million and took in $366 million.Superheroes may be down, but they’re not out. Marvel’s rollicking, well-established “Guardians of the Galaxy” series returned for a third chapter and generated $846 million against a $250 million budget. Sony’s bold, anime-influenced “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” cost an estimated $150 million and collected $691 million.Stars matter.The conventional wisdom in Hollywood has been that movie stars are essentially part of the past. A celebrity name above the title no longer carries that much weight with ticket buyers. The underlying “intellectual property” is what fills seats.People pay to see Barbie, not Margot Robbie.Except that Mattel and various studios tried for at least 20 years to turn the toy into a live-action movie star. It took Ms. Robbie in the role (and Ryan Gosling as Ken) to finally make it happen. Other movies that benefited from star power in 2023 included “Wonka,” with Timothée Chalamet, and “Creed III,” anchored by Michael B. Jordan.Stars don’t have heft? Try telling that to the producers of “Gran Turismo,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Dumb Money” and “Strays,” all of which disappointed at the box office and arrived when their casts were barred from promoting their work because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. More

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    Mildred Miller, Stalwart of the Metropolitan Opera, Dies at 98

    In her 23 years at the Met, she sang with the greatest stars of her day. She had a second career as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh.Mildred Miller as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera, which was said to be her favorite role. Sedge LeBlanc/The Metropolitan OperaThe mezzo-soprano Mildred Miller Posvar sang opera’s so-called trouser roles so many times that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Ms. Posvar, known in her professional life as Mildred Miller, was Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” a record-breaking 61 times at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her warm, even tone and clear diction became associated indelibly with the composer’s amorous page in the way that Kirsten Flagstad was with Isolde and Feodor Chaliapin with Boris Godunov. She “defined that role for a generation of opera lovers,” Opera News said about her. And there were many other roles as well.Ms. Posvar died on Nov. 29 at her home in Pittsburgh. She was 98.Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Posvar Rossi and by the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang in 338 performances, including the title role in “Carmen,” Suzuki in “Madama Butterfly” and Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier,” which was said to be her favorite.After her debut at the Met on Nov. 17, 1951, the New York Times critic Noel Straus wrote that she had “scored heavily” as Cherubino and that she had “a handsome magnetic stage presence; a fine, fresh voice expertly produced; and pronounced histrionic ability.”Ms. Miller would go on to perform with the company for another 23 years; her final performance was on Dec. 3, 1974, as Lola in “Cavalleria Rusticana.” In Europe as well as the U.S., she sang with the greatest stars of her day: Nicolai Gedda, Leontyne Price, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and others. She was already broadly known in the U.S. by the end of the 1950s, thanks to appearances on television shows like “Voice of Firestone” and “The Bell Telephone Hour.”Ms. Miller and Lawrence Davidson rehearsing the Met’s production of Gounod’s “Faust” in 1953. She was with the Met from 1951 to 1974.Sam Falk/The New York TimesPerhaps the highlight of her career was the recordings she made of Mahler’s great orchestral song cycles with Bruno Walter, the magisterial conductor who had given the premiere of one of them. Walter handpicked the young Ms. Miller for his 1960 recording of “Das Lied von der Erde,” 49 years after giving the first performance in Munich; afterward, according to the 2001 book “Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere,” by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, he said, “I don’t think we can improve on that.” A 1963 recording she made with Walter of “Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen” won the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in France.Her reviews were mostly excellent throughout her career, with a few quibbles here and there. “My impression is that she was a really solid singer who sang well and was really important to the company,” said Peter Clark, the former archives director at the Metropolitan Opera. “The kind of solid singer that the Met really depended on. She could sing whatever the Met asked her to.”Ms. Miller also had a second career, as a leading figure in the artistic life of Pittsburgh, which assumed more importance after her retirement from the Met. In 1967 her husband, Wesley Posvar, had become president of the University of Pittsburgh, and 11 years later Ms. Miller founded, with Helen Knox, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, now known as the Pittsburgh Festival Opera, which has been notable in the development of emerging opera stars. The company established the Mildred Miller International Voice Competition in 2011.Mildred Müller was born on Dec. 16, 1924, in Cleveland, the daughter of immigrants from Germany, Wilhelm and Elsa Müller. Rudolf Bing, the Met’s imperious general manager, later insisted that she Americanize her surname, given the proximity of the war years. Her father owned a household decorating store in Cleveland and was, she later recalled, “very strict” about her piano practicing.She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1946 and from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied under the famous midcentury opera conductor and impresario Boris Goldovsky, in 1948. “He taught me to sing and act,” she later said.She made her opera debut at the Tanglewood Music Festival in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” under Leonard Bernstein, who she later said conducted with his fists. She was beginning to be noticed.When Mr. Bing contacted her for the Met, she turned him down because she wasn’t satisfied with the role he offered. She later turned him down a second time. It wasn’t until the third try that he snagged her, for the role of Cherubino, which she would go on to make her own.Ms. Miller played so many so-called trouser roles in her career that one of her daughters once told a friend, “My mommy is a boy.”Opera VictoriaHer husband died in 2001. In addition to her daughter Lisa, she is survived by another daughter, Marina Posvar; a son, Wesley William Posvar; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.Ms. Miller also made her mark in the world of lieder. Critics remarked on the naturalness of her diction in German and, as was typical of music criticism at the time, her striking appearance: She “seems to acquire more of the accouterments of glamour with each passing year,” the critic Allen Hughes wrote in The Times in 1966, going on to offer a mild complaint that her lieder recital had “created a hunger for simplicity,” before offering the condescending observation that “one wondered how Miss Miller would sing these songs if she wore a simple sweater and skirt.”All that notwithstanding, he concluded, the “recital was virtually flawless from start to finish.” More

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    boygenius Is Having All the Fun

    There’s a scene in the movie “Help!” where the Beatles roll up to a row of terraced houses and approach their adjacent front doors — four separate entrances, one for each Beatle. Then the camera cuts inside, and we see that all four doors lead into one immense mid-1960s playhouse, where the Beatles live together. This was and is the fantasy of a rock band: boys, together, reveling in a world of their own making. Beastie Boys. Beach Boys. Backstreet Boys. They are cute. They are straight. They are inseparable and nearly indistinguishable, like sitcom characters. They seem to travel with their own center of gravity. All for one and one for all. “The boys” is how the three members of the band boygenius refer to themselves. Over the past year, they have emerged as a fresh incarnation of that classic fantasy: the right band with the right synergy at exactly the right moment, with the most exhilarating record and the most emotional shows and the most exultant fans. Each boy even inhabits a classic boy-band archetype. Lucy Dacus, 28, is the thoughtful dreamy poet boy; Julien Baker, 28, the tattooed rocker heartthrob boy; and Phoebe Bridgers, 29, the wry, preternaturally charismatic boy. The music press often calls them a supergroup — which is technically correct, because all three are successful indie solo artists with fan bases of their own. But “supergroup” conjures images of ego-mad 1970s dudes in their cocaine phase, capturing a little magic on record before discovering that they hate one another. And this particular supergroup is made up of women who actually like one another, and who get off on reimagining what a rock band looks like and what it feels like to be in one. “There’s a very specific framework of the history of dudes and rock,” Dacus says. “People just know it, so it’s easy to play with.” I first met the boys at the conclusion of a stuff-of-dreams tour, the day before a final Halloween concert at the Hollywood Bowl. They had spent nearly a year crisscrossing the United States and Europe, selling out Madison Square Garden, headlining festivals, racking up critical acclaim. It had just been announced that in less than two weeks boygenius would be the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live,” with Timothée Chalamet hosting; they would be in New York, trying on clothes for the show, when they learned that their debut LP, “The Record,” had been nominated for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year. Over oak-milk lattes and breakfast tacos in Studio City, Baker joked that the end-of-tour energy felt like “the Macy’s one-day sale” — an event that, despite its name, seems to exist in perpetuity.The boys were discussing Bridgers’s Halloween party, which went down over the weekend. Baker dressed as the pop star Ariana Grande, based on a much-memed paparazzi photo from when Grande was dating Pete Davidson: Disney-princess ponytail, a thigh-skimming sweatshirt worn as a dress, winged eyeliner, signature lollipop. Dacus, who is tall and ethereally elegant, went as Davidson, in a giant flannel hoodie. Just that morning, she had posted pictures on Instagram — she and Baker in their costumes, side by side with the original — driving fans crazy with even a mock suggestion that these two might be dating. (The boys’ potential romantic involvement is something they seem to enjoy neither confirming nor denying.) “This has completely obliterated an entire dimension of my mind,” one comment read.The band’s fans, a passionate and highly amped population, love it when the boys do stuff together: play guitar, make out onstage, dress up. Then the fans do those things, too. There’s “a lot of gay kissing” at boygenius shows, Dacus noted happily. The band identifies, individually and collectively, as queer, and they’re proud of the freedom fans feel to use boygenius as an avenue for exploring gender and sexual identity. “Safety and sexuality can inhabit the same space,” Bridgers said. “It’s tight that it’s both — it’s tight that there are friends just hooking up for fun and also people who actually [expletive] each other.” She paused and smiled. “It is hot and also safe.” The others laughed. “The hottest safest band of all time!” Dacus joked.Even when it’s not Halloween, fans like to come to boygenius shows dressed as highly specific iterations of the boys. The three of them in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone (itself a nod to Nirvana in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1994) or Bridgers, in boxers, standing in the middle of a monster-truck arena, in the Kristen Stewart-directed music video for the dreamy, twisted “Emily I’m Sorry.” “When I see the crowd dressing up like boygenius, I think it is so wonderful that these kids have people in rock music to dress ‘like’ instead of people to dress ‘for,’” says Haley Dahl, frontwoman of the avant-pop band Sloppy Jane and a friend of Bridgers’s from high school. One fan recently dressed as a teenage Baker in 1990s skater regalia, based on a photo of the guitarist as a pouty Tennessee high schooler. “The ‘Rocky Horror’ element of it was never — like, we can’t make that happen,” Bridgers said. “Yeah, I didn’t anticipate that,” Baker added. “I thought kids would just come in their normal clothes.”This year’s boygenius shows have felt like art-school prom: sincere, theatrical, joyfully subversive. As decidedly rock as the group’s sound is — full of loud-quiet-loud guitar jams — it’s also welcoming and interior, the songs little pockets of sometimes-soft, sometimes-hard beauty that offer fans a place to land in an often bereft-feeling world. The intimacy boygenius projects tempts fans to imitate them, to try to replicate the aspects of their friendship that seem rare and magical. It’s a sensation the band members can relate to, because they feel the magic, too. As Bridgers once put it, “I like myself better around them.”This is what sits at the core of what the boys sometimes call the “project” that is boygenius: creating a container for self-expression and exploration, a permission structure for identity, and then watching in wonder as that very private process winds up introducing you to your best friends, as well as to yourself. “In this band I get a license to live into parts of myself I’m curious about,” Baker said, as Dacus and Bridgers nodded in agreement. “We choose our most ideal versions of ourselves. And then the kids are dressing up as the persona that we’ve constructed — because they recognize something of their own in that.”The band performing at the Hollywood Bowl on Halloween.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIf the boygenius boys come across like old friends who know deep secrets about one another, that’s because they are. Dacus and Baker first met in 2016, when both were 22. Baker was doing a small club tour in support of her debut album, “Sprained Ankle.” Dacus was an opening act. “I met Lucy in the greenroom of a venue called DC9,” Baker says. “Lucy was reading ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ maybe? Henry James.” Both were very green, very young musicians raised in religious homes in small Southern towns — Dacus outside Richmond, Va., in a neighborhood she proudly describes as “across from a cornfield and next to a goat farm,” and Baker in Bartlett, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis. They bonded.Bridgers was another opener on Baker’s tour. They met before a show at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center in Los Angeles. Because Bridgers was from the area, and because the songs she had put out at that point struck Baker as “less amateur” and “more developed” than Baker’s own, Baker was expecting someone sophisticated, someone “more cultured.” But Bridgers “was a little bit of a hesher — in a leather jacket and a NASCAR T-shirt.” Bridgers was savvy and urbane, yes, but what mostly came across was her “sweetness,” Baker says. “I was just like, Do you want to go get some pizza and doughnuts? And so we went and got late-night pizza and doughnuts and stayed up talking about bands. It was very pure.”There are friends you meet in your early 20s — a fragile, formative stage — who become foundational. They are the people who know you on the edge of adulthood but before you’ve decided on a grown-up persona. They are the people who know who you are before anyone else cares who you are, an especially precious perspective if you later become famous. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best, cutthroat at worst and full of shady, dubious people. “Especially at that time, when everything feels like it’s happening really quickly around you, to have somebody that just had time for you,” Baker says — somebody who gives you her number and says she wants to hang out the next time you’re in the same city, and she means it — that, Baker says, was kind of everything. “I was just like, OK, I really trust these guys.” Before boygenius officially became a band, they were a text group, talking often about what they were reading, inaugurating what still feels like one long book-club meeting from which they occasionally break to play music. (Current selection: Leslie Jamison’s addiction memoir, “The Recovering.”) In the two years after they first met, all three of their careers took off. Bridgers released her debut solo album, “Stranger in the Alps,” while Baker and Dacus each released their second (“Turn Out the Lights” and “Historian”). All three were touring like crazy, while keeping in touch throughout. In the fall of 2018, the boys found themselves booked on a short tour together and decided that they might as well record some music to promote it. Four days after they began, they had recorded the six songs that became the “boygenius” EP. On tour together, they would do a mix of solo songs and songs they’d written together. They had their share of fans, but nothing like the level of interest or personal fascination that boygenius inspires now.The arrival of that personal fascination has been predictably disorienting. Over coffee in Studio City, for instance, there was a moment when a scowl washed over Bridgers’s face. “Were we just being filmed?” Dacus asked, following her bandmate’s gaze to a young woman who was sitting stiffly, staring intensely into her coffee, her phone face up on the table. “Don’t like it, don’t like it,” Bridgers fumed. Dacus was recently followed while shopping at Target. Baker discovered someone filming her through a display of Halloween candy at a CVS. “It was like a comedy,” she said, chuckling, “because they were filming through a gap in the candy and then it all fell down and they went like, [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive].” Bridgers smiled tightly but did not laugh. She leaned into the recorder: “And I just want to say to that person: ‘Die. Die!’” Bridgers is particularly sensitive to being watched because she, more than the other boys, has experienced the grosser side of notoriety. In the years between the “boygenius” EP and “The Record,” Bridgers got pretty famous. There were many reasons for this, including her relationship with the Irish actor Paul Mescal, her association with Taylor Swift — she was one of the Eras Tour’s opening acts and a guest on Swift’s single “Nothing New” — and her general ubiquity as an in-demand collaborator for artists including the National, Lorde and Paul McCartney. But mostly it’s because Bridgers made an astonishing second record, “Punisher,” that came out early in 2020, when people were stuck home feeling anxious and dislocated and thus perfectly primed to receive Bridgers’s distinctive mix of austere beauty and rage. She played “S.N.L.” solo in 2021 and was criticized for smashing her guitar onstage. (David Crosby called the move “pathetic” on Twitter; Bridgers tartly replied, “little bitch.”) When the boys walk the Grammy red carpet in February, Bridgers will have been there before; “Punisher” earned her four nominations. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best and cutthroat at worst.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York TimesSo it’s notable that it was Bridgers who sent the text that got the boys back into the studio in 2020, and that she sent that text the same week “Punisher” came out. “Can we be a band again?” she wrote.As in so many great romances, everybody involved wanted to return to one another, but each was afraid the others might not feel the same way. What Bridgers understood was the difference between carrying success on your own and getting by with a little help from your friends. “The boys are really good at community,” she says. “I’m more insular. I mean, I have community for sure. But the boys have had, like, more roommates in their lives. So I learned a lot from them. Like how to come into the front lounge of the bus and be like, ‘[expletive], I got this really stressful text last night!’ And just talk it out. It’s the best.” The boys see a band therapist. They have only ever had, as Bridgers puts it, one “for-no-reason bitchy” day on the road. It was in England, while they were touring the Brontës’ house; perhaps, she says, it had to do with the repressed “ghost of Charlotte and Emily Brontë within us, the shared trauma.” Now, whenever the boys are spinning out, they call it Brontitis. Dacus declared, “We could never make music again, and boygenius is just the title of this friendship that we had.”The thing about catching lightning in a bottle is that the glow lasts only so long. Before the Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl, the boys were backstage, getting ready to play in front of nearly 18,000 people. The energy in the dressing rooms had the frenzied excitement of an extremely well-funded high school theater production, but also an underlying anticipatory mournfulness: This was the big end-of-year performance before everyone graduates and is sucked into the what-do-we-do-now abyss. “I’m OK — sad!” Dacus said outside the makeup room when her manager asked how she was doing. “Every song is going to be like, Oh, that’s the last time.”The band had been secretive about what they would wear for this final show of the tour. What could boygenius dress up as that would satisfy their and their fans’ taste for cheeky visual statements? Three rolling racks of clothes, neatly labeled with handmade signs, made plain the plan: They would be the Holy Trinity — Father (Dacus), Son (Baker) and Holy Ghost (Bridgers). A friend asked Baker, who was raised in a deeply Christian family, how her mother was going to feel about her dressing up as Jesus for Halloween. “I told her,” Baker said, amused — though Baker did wonder, “What if I get to heaven and they’re like, ‘We were cool with you being gay and all the lying, but why did you have to come for me so hard at the Hollywood Bowl?’”‘To sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us.’Baker’s costume was simple, just a white robe, sandals and a crown of thorns, so she was able to dress quickly and wander the hallways, marveling at the comfort of Jesus’ footwear (“You’ve got to walk far in the desert!”) while her bandmates were still doing makeup (Dacus, in an Elvisesque bejeweled white suit) and hair (Bridgers, whose spectral halo and veil had to be carefully secured in her ice-blond mane). Then there was the matter of Dave Grohl’s neckwear. “Can you string up this cross?” Lindsey Hartman, the band’s costumer, asked her assistant. Grohl was the night’s special guest. “I’m putting the drummer of Nirvana in a priest costume,” Hartman said, grinning and shaking her head. “This is it.”Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus backstage before the band performed at the Halloween show where they dressed up as the Holy Trinity.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesPhoebe Bridgers backstage before the same performance at the Hollywood Bowl.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesThe 2017 “Wonder Woman” movie regularly brought female audience members to tears with scenes familiar from dozens of other action films — except that everyone onscreen was a woman. The tableau at the Hollywood Bowl stirred similar emotions in me. Boygenius has an all-female backing band (they were dressed as angels, in white Dickies jumpsuits and halos), and there were a lot of women around. It felt as if there were almost no men. When Bridgers’s boyfriend, the comedian and musician Bo Burnham, showed up with his plus-one — the actor Andrew Garfield, in a Cobra Kai karate uniform he sweetly described as “comfy” — you could feel the energy shift. “You do your thing, don’t worry about me,” Burnham said to Bridgers, ducking out just as Grohl appeared with two of his daughters. “I’ll text you when Mom gets here,” he told them, disappearing into his dressing room to change.A few minutes later, the band took the stage, to their standard walk-on music: Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Like everyone else, Grohl was there to serve the boygenius experience. He wanted to play drums on the propulsive “Satanist,” which meant coming on just a few songs into the show. The group sounded insane with Grohl behind them: big and bold, like a band that understood its power and was relaxed enough to fully enjoy it — but then it sounds that way without him too. “OK,” Bridgers said, shaking her body out and grinning. “I feel like the show is happening now. I feel like I just came online.” For the rest of the nearly two-hour performance, there was a sense of easy pleasure in the air, both onstage and in the crowd. Kristen Stewart could be seen in her box with her fiancée, Dylan Meyer, and a pack of fellow willowy motorcycle-jacket-clad Angelenos drinking Modelo with their feet up, singing along. “I’ve seen them twice now, and I tell myself every time to be cool, but I lose it,” Stewart says. “I don’t know why it’s so emotional. I think what it is, they are a real [expletive] band. There is something in the way they don’t negotiate. It’s embedded in a bond that feels like if you ‘get it,’ you’re allowed in. And allowed.” A few seats away, a lesbian couple in schoolgirl outfits smiled goofily amid bouts of making out. In between songs, Bridgers brought out Maxine, her famous-to-fans pug, dressed as a tiny sheep, and intoned, “Behold the lamb of God!” Just before the final encore, Dacus grabbed her microphone. “I have found it hard to figure out what to say to you this whole night,” she said, her voice full. “But to sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us. This is an absurd dream. Thank you.”Backstage after the show, Grohl and Billie Eilish and other assorted band insiders mingled in the greenroom. Elsewhere on the grounds, at the official after-party, Bridgers’s mother was milling around, beaming: “We have some friends from high school we need to check on, to make sure they’re not freaking out because they can’t get a drink.” (There’s no alcohol backstage on boygenius tours.) Bridgers eventually appeared with Burnham, a black hoodie pulled tight over her head, on guard once again.The night was still young, with lots of goodbyes to say, and then “S.N.L.” two weeks later, and then the Grammys early in 2024. What would come after that, however, was an open question. It’s unclear whether boygenius will make new music together anytime soon.The first thing the boys told me, on the first day we met, was that they were looking forward to their own obsolescence — a day, sometime in the future, when people would still be listening to their music, but without knowing or really caring about its makers.The boys said they were looking forward to their own obsolescence, when people would be listening to their music but not caring about its makers.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York Times“People will be like, Oh, yeah, I liked this song — a couple of years ago,” Baker imagined. “We talk about this all the time, because. …” Here she turned and asked Dacus: “Didn’t Louise Glück just die?”Dacus nodded, affirming the recent death of the Nobel-laureate poet.“OK,” Baker said, “but when she died, weren’t we like, Wasn’t she already dead?”Dacus smiled and nodded again.“That’s the dream,” Baker said.“That is my goal,” Dacus concurred. “I want, basically, for everyone to be so satisfied with what I could offer that they already think I’m dead.”Lizzy Goodman is a journalist and the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” an oral history of music in New York City from 2001-2011. Hobbes Ginsberg is a lesbian photographer based in Madrid, making vulnerable, hyper-saturated work exploring queer domesticity and the evolution of self. More