Aurelia Butler

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    Dwight Yoakam, Country Rebel, Has a New Attitude

    With the sun setting over the vast expanse of Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam sighed softly as tears rolled down his cheeks. For a moment, the scene played like one of his own portraits of honky-tonk heartache and regret. But sitting in the country star’s 12th-story offices above the Sunset Strip, it became clear that the emotion gripping him was not sadness, but joy.Forty years ago this month, Yoakam arrived with his debut, the indie EP “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.” The record — later expanded to a full-length — helped shake country music from its mid-1980s doldrums while starting a career filled with more than a dozen Top 10 radio hits and six platinum albums, even as Yoakam took a rebel stance, operating largely outside the Nashville establishment.At 68, as he prepares to release his 18th studio album, and his first on his own label, the ambitious Yoakam has found meaning in something other than his career: his wife, the photographer Emily Joyce, whom he quietly married during the pandemic, and their 4-year-old son, Dalton.“I’ve known the two of them since before I ever met them,” Yoakam said, drying his eyes. “Not to get overly metaphysical, but our connection in the universe, to one another, precedes us and will continue beyond us.”Dwight Yoakam at the Rainbow Room in Los Angeles. He has called the city home since the late 1970s.Wray Sinclair for The New York TimesThe vibe shift is evident on “Brighter Days,” (out Nov. 15), his first album of original material in nearly a decade, where Yoakam’s music takes on a sun-dappled optimism. It features a twangy, pedal-steel-laden track with Post Malone, a fan turned friend and collaborator who likewise made his name outside of country’s embrace.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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    Book Review: ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,’ by Rob Sheffield

    HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob SheffieldIt’s possible that I know too much about Taylor Swift. I know the words to all her singles and every name on her long list of ex-lovers. Thanks to her current relationship with Travis Kelce, I know details about the various social entanglements of his Kansas City Chiefs teammates that I would prefer not to. I listen to her music about as much as the median American, which is to say: all of the time. Swift has become America’s Muzak, her songs the soundtrack to our Starbucks lines and her life the fodder for our tabloid stories.In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” Rob Sheffield charts how Swift, who rose to fame writing songs for teenage girls (when she was still one herself), became ubiquitous — and he makes the case that even as her cultural dominance can work to obscure her skill, everything always leads back to her virtuosic writing.Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he publishes consistently glowing reviews of Swift’s seemingly limitless offerings. Here he steps back to consider the roots of her appeal. Swift has “always had a unique flair for writing songs in which people hear themselves — her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in ways that are often mystifying,” he writes. She makes her “experiences public property, to the point where she makes the world think of her as a character.”Swift’s self-mythologizing stretches beyond her music to become a collaborative storytelling prompt, one that manages to absorb even her critics. As her superfans brand themselves as “Swifties” and build an extended Taylorverse of analysis and intrigue on social media, they recruit her haters into their project, using them to cast their billionaire idol as a complex and scrappy protagonist.A character becomes more interesting when she has challengers and flaws. “Taylor’s hubris, her way-too-muchness, her narcissism disguised as even more narcissism, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond — it’s a lot,” Sheffield writes. “You can’t fully appreciate her without appreciating the wide range of visceral reactions she brings out in people.”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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    $7 Million Deal Is Reached for Upper West Side Movie Theater, Nonprofit Says

    A nonprofit group says it has reached an agreement to buy the shuttered Metro Theater from its owners, but the deal is contingent on raising the money by the end of the year.A group trying to restore a landmark Upper West Side movie theater says it has signed an agreement to buy the building for $7 million if it can raise the money by the end of the year.The nonprofit corporation Upper West Side Cinema Center said on Friday it had reached the agreement with the current owners of the Metro Theater, which is on Broadway near 99th Street and closed in 2005. The building, known for its pink terra-cotta Art Deco facade, is owned by the estate of its former owner, Albert Bialek, who died last year. The owners could not immediately be reached for comment.Attempts in recent years to reimagine the space as a Planet Fitness gym or Alamo Drafthouse cinema were unsuccessful, and development options are limited because of the theater’s landmark status and because Bialek sold the air rights above the building. The nonprofit is spearheaded by Ira Deutchman, an independent film producer, and Adeline Monzier, the U.S. representative of the French film promoter Unifrance and a guest programmer at the Metrograph, a Lower East Side theater.Deutchman said that there was already funding pledged to cover about one-third of the sale price. The nonprofit is hoping to raise the rest with a mix of philanthropic support from major donors, government financing and individual contributions from current and former Upper West Side residents who may be nostalgic about the theater’s golden days, he said.If the nonprofit is successful in securing the money to cover the sale price, the next step would be to raise an additional, estimated $15 million to $25 million for its restoration.“I’d never worked on a project before where every single person I tell about it, their response is, ‘Oh, that is so needed,’” Deutchman said. “My joke is that they’ve never said that about a movie I’ve made.” More

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    St. Thomas Church Will Outsource Choir School in Bid to Save It

    The Manhattan church said it would turn over administration of its boarding school for choristers, one of only a few of its kind remaining, because of financial woes.St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, which has been grappling with serious financial problems in recent years, said on Friday that it would outsource the administration of its renowned boarding school for choristers in a bid to preserve the 105-year-old program.Starting in 2025, the Professional Children’s School, an independent day school in New York, will manage St. Thomas Choir School’s academic program. St. Thomas, an Episcopal church, will continue to provide housing for the school’s 26 students, as well as offering music and religious instruction. Some of the school’s 24 faculty and staff members are expected to lose their jobs, the church’s leaders said.The Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, the church’s rector, said, “We’ve found a way to preserve our school in a different form through collaboration, which will not only deepen the music making but also help us make it more sustainable financially.”St. Thomas Choir School has had financial problems for decades, balancing its budget with the help of donations and bequests, and by dipping into investment funds. Tuition, at $20,570 per year, is heavily subsidized, and many students receive scholarships.St. Thomas’s leaders warned earlier this year that the church was considering closing the choir school, one of only a few remaining boarding schools for young choristers in the world. The church said at the time that its endowment, annual fund-raising and tuition fees were no longer sufficient to cover the roughly $4 million a year it costs to operate the school, about 30 percent of the church’s $14 million annual budget.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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    André 3000 on 3 Grammy Nods for ‘New Blue Sun’: ‘Super Duper Cool’

    He was half of Outkast, the last rap act to win album of the year — 20 years ago. His latest nominations are for “New Blue Sun,” an expression of ultimate freedom.An album of the year nomination at the Grammys? André 3000 has been here before.Two decades ago, he and his Outkast partner Big Boi won the prize for “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below,” their multifaceted hip-hop opus that became a crossover pop breakout. This year, though, André has been recognized for something quite different: “New Blue Sun,” the improvisational flute-led album he released last November, which on Friday was honored with nods in three categories: best alternative jazz album, best instrumental composition and, perhaps most shocking, album of the year, competing against Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift and pop’s heaviest hitters.The album is a thoughtful musical excursion and also a statement of creative purpose — a demonstration that even one of the most storied figures in pop music can rewrite their own script in real time. André 3000 has spent the bulk of this year touring with the band who recorded the album, putting jazz-influenced experimental music on grand stages around the world. But he’s still working far from the pop and hip-hop forms that formed the foundation for his success. Relative anonymity is a trade-off he was willing to make for creative freedom, but the reception to the album has also shown that fans — and now Grammy voters — are interested in welcoming him back to the spotlight.After gathering his thoughts early Friday afternoon, André 3000 spoke about how the seed for his current adventure was planted back in the Outkast era, using the audience as an instrument, and what it’s like to make it all up as you go. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Big day. Where were you when you heard?I’m in Virginia today, we’re playing tonight. I was just waking up and I heard that the nominations came in. We were trying to be nominated in some type of way for alternative jazz or ambient, possibly. But I was totally surprised by this. So yeah, it was super, super, super duper cool.We’re 20 years past “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” winning album of the year, and it’s the last rap album to take that top prize. Do you think that’s still on voters’ minds? That they’re seeing your creative evolution?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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    Did Beyoncé’s Grammy Nominations Really Break Michael Jackson’s Record?

    Not exactly. But in Grammyland, nothing is simple.On Friday, as the news emerged of Beyoncé’s 11 Grammy nominations for her country-Beyoncé-style album “Cowboy Carter,” some fan accounts on social media trumpeted that it had become “the most Grammy-nominated album of all time,” and claimed that Beyoncé had even topped a record set in 1984 by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the mega-blockbuster against which all other hits have since been judged.Was that true? Not quite. But in some ways her accomplishment was equivalent to Jackson’s.In the sometimes confusing world of Grammy stats, nominations for an artist can be spread across multiple projects, and the performing artist on a song or an album is not necessarily an award’s nominee — prizes can (and often do) go to collaborators like songwriters, producers or engineers.And Beyoncé is not the only recent artist to receive 11 nominations in one year. Kendrick Lamar did so for the 2016 awards, as did Jon Batiste for 2022 — but in both cases, they were not all for work on a single album. (Lamar’s nods that year, for example, included his guest appearance on Taylor Swift’s song “Bad Blood.”)Officially, “Thriller” received a total of 13 nods when the 26th annual Grammy nominations were announced in early 1984. Jackson himself was cited in 11 of them. Of the two others, one was for Bruce Swedien, the album’s renowned engineer. The other cited Quincy Jones and James Ingram, the writers of the song “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),” which was up for best rhythm & blues song. In a sign of Jackson’s thorough dominance that year, two other “Thriller” songs were nominated in that same category: “Billie Jean” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” (“Billie Jean,” credited to Jackson as the sole songwriter, won.)Ultimately, Jackson collected seven awards for “Thriller,” including album of the year and record of the year (for “Beat It”). Swedien won best engineered recording, non-classical. That night was one of Jackson’s most iconic moments. He attended the show with Brooke Shields and Emmanuel Lewis as guests, and wore a sparkling blue-and-gold military-style jacket, with a crystal glove over his right hand.But that was not all. Jackson narrated a soundtrack album for the film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” with music by John Williams — which became a legal nightmare because MCA Records, which released the “E.T.” album, had not gotten the necessary clearance from Jackson’s label, Epic, for him to appear on it.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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    Grammys Snubs and Surprises: Charli XCX, André 3000, the Beatles and More

    A look at the nominations’ unexpected and intriguing story lines, including the role of an absent Drake, the validation of André 3000’s flute music and overlooked gems.The names headlining this year’s Grammy Award nominations make a lot of sense: Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are perennial favorites with imperial reach. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have stormed the mainstream. Shaboozey and Charli XCX made themselves inescapable.While there was once a time when it was easy to argue that the Grammys were out of touch, barely attempting to be an accurate representation of popular music in a given year, the major acts of 2024 are all accounted for. Shedding some of its fusty baggage under the Recording Academy chief executive Harvey Mason Jr. and a slate of new industry voters, the awards show has brought itself more or less in line with the Billboard charts, radio and streaming services, centering the celebrities of the moment.Still, it’s the Grammy Awards — not everyone can be happy. So after poring over the 94 categories that make up the 67th annual class of nominees, The New York Times’s pop music team — the reporter Joe Coscarelli, the chief pop music critic Jon Pareles, the pop music critics Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz and the Culture editor Elena Bergeron — were left with a few lingering questions: Is Beyoncé’s cross-genre domination really warranted? What are the Beatles doing here? And have the Grammys gotten too safe?We broke down the richest — and most baffling — story lines, snubs and surprises.Sabrina Carpenter’s success on the charts was mirrored in her Grammy nods: six of them.Emma Mcintyre/Getty Images for CoachellaA Mirror to the MainstreamJOE COSCARELLI I must admit, I’m almost sad at how predictable the Big Four categories — album, record and song of the year, plus best new artist — are these days, and this year in particular. Back in my day — not that long ago! — Beck was beating Beyoncé to close the night. And sure, you still have your occasional upsets by Jon Batiste (album of the year, 2022) or Bonnie Raitt (song of the year, 2023). But the odds of a truly destabilizing major win in February feel quite long now, likely by design.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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    Beyoncé and Young Women Pop Sensations Lead 2025 Grammy Nominations

    Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter will compete in the biggest categories, along with Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar.Beyoncé and Taylor Swift will face off in all top categories at the 67th annual Grammy Awards, leading a pack of nominees that also features buzzy young female stars who have dominated the pop charts over the past year.With 11 nods, Beyoncé has more citations than any other artist this year, for “Cowboy Carter,” her gumbo of country, R&B and acoustic pop that spurred conversations about the Black roots of many American genres, including country.The other top nominees, with seven apiece, are Billie Eilish, a onetime teenage disrupter who is now a Grammy and Oscar darling; Kendrick Lamar, the rapper laureate, whose nominations stem from a no-holds-barred battle of words with Drake; Post Malone, a pop shape-shifter gone country (and who appeared on both Beyoncé and Swift’s latest albums); and Charli XCX, the British singer-songwriter and meme master whose digital-nostalgic iconography was borrowed by the Kamala Harris campaign.Swift has six nominations, as do Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan — two of this year’s fresh pop sensations, each receiving their first Grammy nods.The awards ceremony is set for Feb. 2 in Los Angeles.The biggest contest this year, at least in terms of celebrity wattage, is Beyoncé vs. Swift. Both are juggernauts in the culture and at the Grammys. With 32 career trophies, Beyoncé, 43, has already won more awards than any other artist, and is now also the most-nominated person, with 99. Yet she has never taken album of the year, despite four previous nods.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