Aurelia Butler

The Brooklyn venue replaced Ticketmaster, the industry leader, in 2021 in favor of SeatGeek, a competitor. It is not clear why it changed direction again.In 2021, Barclays Center in Brooklyn made a surprising announcement about its business: After nearly a decade with Ticketmaster, the industry leader, as its ticketing vendor, the arena was switching to SeatGeek, an aggressive upstart.Now, barely a year into what had been a seven-year contract, BSE Global, the parent company of Barclays — the home of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty basketball teams, and a destination for major concert tours — is canceling its partnership with SeatGeek and returning to Ticketmaster.The change was revealed on Friday when Barclays announced a concert by the singer and producer Jackson Wang on May 11 with a link to Ticketmaster. SeatGeek, which remains the ticketer for many events already on Barclays’s calendar, will gradually be replaced by Ticketmaster in coming months as new concerts and sporting events go on sale.The abrupt switch, at a high-profile venue in one of the biggest markets in the world, is head-spinning news in the lucrative ticketing business, where Ticketmaster’s dominance has long been a matter of debate and scrutiny.“It’s very rare for such a cancellation,” said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.“Ticketing platform deals with venue owners are not of short duration,” Mr. Miller added. “I can’t think of a time over the last decade where a major venue has dropped a ticketing platform early on in the deal cycle.”The reasons for the change at Barclays were not immediately clear. Neither BSE Global nor SeatGeek would comment about whether there were any problems with ticketing that may have prompted a switch.In a statement, a spokeswoman for BSE Global said that SeatGeek “provided our fans with a first-class game day ticketing experience, and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”The president of SeatGeek, Danielle du Toit, expressed no upset at Barclays’ change of direction. “It’s never easy to part ways with a client,” she said in a statement, “but as we look to the future, SeatGeek is grounded in our strategy and road map that are geared towards solving the challenges that plague the live entertainment experience.”Since its founding in 2009, SeatGeek has positioned itself as an industry disrupter. Initially just a resale platform, it has sought to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance in the so-called primary market — sales directly from a venue’s box office, on behalf of sports teams or performing artists. When BSE Global announced its SeatGeek deal, which took effect in October 2021, the venue company praised its new partner’s “best-in-class mobile platform.”SeatGeek’s clients include major sports franchises like the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints, as well as Jujamcyn Theaters, one of Broadway’s major theater owners.But SeatGeek, and other ticketing companies, all still lag far behind Ticketmaster, which sold 485 million tickets in 2019, the last year of business unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic, an amount that swamps its competitors. Regulators have been monitoring Ticketmaster’s market share since it merged in 2010 with the concert giant Live Nation in a deal that critics suggested would damage competition in the ticketing industry, a consequence that Live Nation has denied.As a condition for its approval of the merger, the Justice Department entered into a regulatory agreement with Live Nation that, among other things, prohibited it from retaliating against venues that do not sign with Ticketmaster by withholding shows it controlled. The agreement, known as a consent decree, was extended by five years in 2020 after federal regulators found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated it. At the time, Live Nation did not admit to any wrongdoing, and said that extending the decree was “the best outcome for our business, clients and shareholders.”In an interview, Joe Berchtold, the president of Live Nation, acknowledged that the company is always under scrutiny for its actions in the marketplace. In recent weeks, for example, lawmakers have expressed concern over Ticketmaster’s botched ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s latest tour, and the company was widely condemned for its mishandling of a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.But Mr. Berchtold was unequivocal in stating that the company did not break any of its regulatory guidelines with Barclays Center.“I can absolutely confirm,” he said, “that there was no retaliation at Barclays for not using Ticketmaster, in terms of the routing of any concerts.”Tracking the blips and dips in tour dates for concert venues can be an inexact science. But data from Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the live music business, shows that Barclays Center received 13 Live Nation-promoted tours in the year after SeatGeek took over the venue’s ticketing business — a drop for Barclays, which in the years before the pandemic had tended to get about two dozen Live Nation events annually.However during the same period, from 2016 through 2019, the data also indicates the venue hosted fewer shows from independent promoters — those not associated with Live Nation or its major competitor, AEG Presents — from an average of more than 50 a year to less than 20 in the year after SeatGeek took over.SeatGeek and BSE Global declined to comment on the data.Barclays Center competes with Madison Square Garden, as well as the Prudential Center in Newark and the new UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., for major concert tours to fill out its schedule. Since 2019, BSE Global has been owned by Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born tech billionaire, who bought out its previous owner, the Russian mogul Mikhail Prokhorov. More

LOS ANGELES — Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said in the industrial but cozy lounge of his studio on a recent afternoon, recalling the first meeting with the pop-art power broker who would become the band’s manager. “The atmosphere of that place was really special,” he added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”The musician, now 80, was reminiscing on an uncharacteristically gloomy January day in Los Angeles. Cale seemed to have summoned the Welsh weather along with his memories, and sat bundled up in a black puffer jacket and wool socks. “That’s the first thing you remember: all the work that was being done,” Cale said. “Andy was nonstop. We were nonstop. And it paid off.”It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished résumés in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risk-taking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity. He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.“Something snapped, in a good way,” Cale said of a creative streak during the pandemic.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIt’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch. Two months before his 81st birthday, he is still spry, sneaking in a pre-interview workout in his studio’s gym. (He’s been a disciplined exerciser since the late 1980s, when he kicked drugs by taking up the most physically demanding sport he could think of: squash. “It got me through,” he said.)On Cale’s new album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist, due next week — he occasionally glances back, on songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day (one song is titled “The Legal Status of Ice”) and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: The celestial crooner Weyes Blood, the punky provocateurs Fat White Family and the art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” said the Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), in a phone interview. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”Cale has always been a man of contradiction: a classically trained violist with a penchant for chaos. In our conversation, he casually referenced such thinkers as John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell and Henri-Louis Bergson, but was just as quick to ad-lib a flatulence joke. When interrupted midsentence by a deafening gurgling coming from the building’s pipes, Cale grinned impishly and said “Excuse me” with impressive comic timing.“He could be so formal in a certain way — he’s so learned and classical,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Cale produced her landmark debut album, “Horses,” in 1975.) “But he could also be as wild as any of us.” She recalled a kinetic 1976 gig in Cleveland when Cale played bass with her band during a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” and “it got to such a fever pitch and the ceiling was so low that John put his bass through the ceiling of the club.” Cale in 1963, studying a musical score.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesThe breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe. “If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in a phone interview. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’” he added, referring to Cale’s 1989 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.For all his creative triumphs, Cale never quite became a household name like Reed, his collaborator and sometimes antagonist. Todd Haynes’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “The Velvet Underground,” though, served as a corrective, arguing that Cale was the band’s secret weapon.“There was no way to overstate John’s absolutely primary role as a conceptual and creative partner with Lou Reed,” Haynes said in a phone interview, describing Cale as “the most elegant flamethrower of ’60s utopianism that I can think of.”Cale loved the film (“The minute I heard Todd was going to be doing it, I relaxed”), but he’s not one to sit around and think too hard about his legacy — he still has work to do. “I think that came to me from Wales and my mother,” he said. “She was a teacher, and I got it all basically from her: You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCALE, THE ONLY child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, spent the first 18 years of his life in Garnant, a small village in South Wales, “a strange, remote, some said mystical land,” as he wrote in his autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen.” When he was 7, he started learning English, and classical piano. A few years later, the BBC came to his school and recorded the precocious youngster playing a composition he’d written himself. The sheet music went missing, so Cale had to wing the ending. It was a thrill: his first improvisation.“Creatively it liberated me,” he wrote. “I started to take chances.”The viola, the crucial element that would later transform the Velvet Underground’s sound, came into Cale’s hands by chance: When it came time to choose an instrument for the school orchestra, it was the only one left. The local library was his portal to other worlds, especially when he realized he could request sheet music. “I was able to put my fingers in all these scores of the avant-garde,” he said at his studio, citing Webern, Berg, Haubenstock-Ramati and, of course, John Cage.When Cale was 15, he caught “Rock Around the Clock” at the local cinema; all his classmates rushed the screen and started to bop. He was electrified, bewildered — up until then, Stravinsky had been his idea of rock ’n’ roll — and a little scared that everyone was about to get in trouble. After that, he said, “I was confused. Did I want to go into the avant-garde, or did I want to go into rock ’n’ roll?”He went to Goldsmiths’ College in London, a suitable place to figure that out. Cale’s incendiary student performances — including one that involved playing a piano with his elbows — scandalized some of the faculty, but he was already dreaming of America. After exchanging letters with Cage and Copland, Cale received a scholarship from Leonard Bernstein to study at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. In 1963, he came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music, joining them frequently to play meditative drones that lasted for hours. At last he’d found community, and the mind-expanding experiences he’d always longed for.“I knew what I wanted from New York,” he said. “And I got it.” Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lou Reed had been born exactly a week before Cale; “I always knew he had an edge on me!” Cale quipped in his memoir. So began one of the most generative and — still, almost a decade after Reed’s death — tumultuous partnerships in rock.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesEach time I asked Cale about Reed, he slyly rerouted the conversation: “We drifted apart,” he finally said. But maybe everything that needs to be known is right there in the music. As he wrote in a statement shortly after Reed’s 2013 death, “Unlike so many with similar stories — we have the best of our fury laid on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse.” Last year, the archival label Light in the Attic released a collection of 17 previously unreleased tracks from Reed’s earliest recordings, including a May 1965 tape that features folky, self-recorded demos of future classics like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (Cale, who was Reed’s roommate in a drug-fueled Ludlow Street loft at the time, sings backup on some of them.) It’s revelatory to hear the material in this larval stage: They are unmistakably Lou Reed songs, yes, but they’re not yet Velvet Underground songs. “You see that he really hadn’t begun to imagine the potential of this music,” Haynes said of Reed, “and that what he was doing in content and lyrics hadn’t found a correlative energy and sensibility yet in the music.” Enter Cale, with his interest in drone, his connection to the avant-garde, and the low, sonorous viola that melted down traditional rock-song structures like molten lava.“That dialectic, that tension, that attraction, that romance that brought the two of them together,” Haynes said, “therein lies the mystery of this music.”THE GLORY DAYS didn’t last long. “I didn’t quite know how to exist outside the environment of the Factory,” Cale said. Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum, and insisted that the guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the V.U. released without Cale are quieter and more conventional. (“Who gets kicked out of the Velvet Underground for being too avant-garde?” Murphy mused. “I love that. That’s John Cale.”)Cale, left, and Lou Reed performing in the Velvet Underground. In 1968, Cale was forced out of the band he had helped found.Adam Ritchie/Redferns, via Getty Images“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. That Welsh work ethic, and his mother’s humble advice, saved him: “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.” The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” (the recording that made Smith seek him out as a producer) and embraced post-punk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981. “There’s this counterpoint of Lou going and doing Zen,” he said and laughed, referring to Reed’s interest in meditation and tai chi, “and then I’m going and doing rock ’n’ roll.”Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1989, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed.Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture. In the early 1990s, a small French record label asked him to contribute to a Leonard Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the quietly received 1984 album “Various Positions” that he’d first heard Cohen perform at the Beacon Theater — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied. “I know it by John Cale.”Cale said he inherited his work ethic from his mother: “You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCale has remarkably open ears for an octogenarian: He often speaks of “what a boon to music” hip-hop is and, in our conversation, expressed admiration for rap producers like Mike Will Made-It and Dr. Dre. “Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here?” he said to his imagined peers. “Better ideas of mixing, better ideas of melodies — it’s like, get on the train or get off.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom. “I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appear on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-for-music swap.”Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. (The wildlife surprised him: “Korean rattlesnakes!”) In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first-ever orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that. “He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way,” he continued. “They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he’s written around 80 new compositions in the past few years. “Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this, this is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.” More

At the stone wall outside Elvis Presley’s estate, his only child was remembered as a kind of rock star royalty.MEMPHIS — Some wrote messages on the stone wall in front of Graceland, the storied Memphis mansion that housed Elvis Presley’s studded jumpsuits and his private plane, the Lisa Marie, customized with gold bathroom fixtures. Others left flowers.A day after the death of Lisa Marie Presley, 54, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis, fans mourned her loss and recalled how the Presleys had touched their lives.At Graceland on Friday, Stephanie T. Perez, whose great-aunt taught Elvis in high school and whose grandfather worked for him as an upholsterer, said she had visited the same spot with her mother years ago, when the king of rock ’n’ roll had died. She was 2.“I just felt it was important to be on this street the day his daughter passed away,” Ms. Perez, now 47, said. “You hate it for them. You hate it for Elvis’s legacy. You hate it for her life that was cut short. But most of all, just sorrow for the kids and Priscilla.”Now Lisa Marie Presley, who owns the mansion and original grounds at Graceland, will be buried there, according to the Lede Co., which represents her daughter Riley Keough. “Lisa Marie’s final resting place will be at Graceland, next to her beloved son Ben,” it said in a statement.It was not immediately clear on Friday what had caused Ms. Presley’s death. Her mother, Priscilla Presley, said in a statement on Thursday that her daughter had been receiving medical attention but did not share more information. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known,” Ms. Presley said.Lisa Marie Presley was born to Elvis and Priscilla in 1968. He died when she was 9.Keystone/Getty ImagesLisa Marie Presley was famous from the moment she was born, the daughter of one of the biggest stars in the world. And while she would go on to try to forge her own path as a singer, she remained best known as a kind of rock star royalty: She was the only daughter of Elvis and, from 1994 to 1996, she was married to Michael Jackson.But she led a tumultuous life, one that was buffeted by loss. She lost her father when she was 9. Married and divorced four times, she also struggled with opioid addiction. Her son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020. Less than six months before her own death, she wrote about grieving his loss, saying that it had “destroyed” her but that she kept going for the sake of her three daughters.Fans mourned her outside Graceland, the eclectic eight-bedroom residence in Memphis that Ms. Presley inherited after her father’s death and which opened to the public as a museum in 1982.The plane that Elvis named after his daughter sits at Graceland.Lucy Garrett for The New York TimesGraceland has housed more than a million artifacts, among them a fake-fur cocoon bed with a stereo in the canopy. Then there is Mr. Presley’s private plane, the Lisa Marie, which had four TVs and a stereo with 52 speakers.Within hours of the announcement of Ms. Presley’s death late Thursday, about a dozen Elvis fans arrived at Graceland, bundled up in coats and gloves on a blustery chilly nightKimber Tomlinson, 49, recalled how Elvis fans in Memphis had been smitten from the start with Lisa Marie, who was so well-known here that nobody seemed to feel the need to use her last name. Her first memory of Elvis, she added, was when her mother took her to Graceland about a week or so after his funeral.“It’s sad, so sad,” Ms. Tomlinson said. “Her life was always in the spotlight,” she added, referring to Lisa Marie. “That family has had their share of heart attacks and heartbreaks.”Ms. Tomlinson recited the long history of loss among the Presley family: Gladys, Elvis’s mother died at age 46 in 1958; Elvis died in 1977 of heart failure at age 42; Lisa Marie’s son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020 at age 27; and now there was Lisa Marie’s death.The sprawling estate opened for business as usual on Friday, just days after Ms. Presley had joined fans at the mansion on Sunday to celebrate what would have been Elvis’s 88th birthday.Jason Hanley, the vice president of education at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, observed that Ms. Presley’s death was a cultural touchstone of sorts because she was the daughter of the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” and had been married to the “King of Pop.” Her death, he said, was imbued with a particular wistfulness and nostalgia for an era that had changed American music.“She was the heir to Elvis’s empire and rock ’n’ roll royalty, and she recorded three great albums in which she wanted to say something about herself in the shadow of her father’s legacy,” he said. “Her death is heartbreaking for us because it marks the passage of time.”A bouquet of flowers for Lisa Marie Presley at Graceland.Lucy Garrett for The New York TimesOne of her former husbands, the actor Nicolas Cage, told The Hollywood Reporter he was devastated by Ms. Presley’s death. “Lisa had the greatest laugh of anyone I ever met,” he was quoted as saying. “She lit up every room, and I am heartbroken.” The Michael Jackson estate said in a statement that Jackson had “cherished the special bond” he and Ms. Presley shared and that he was “comforted by Lisa Marie’s generous love, concern and care during their times together.”Ms. Presley released three albums in which she set out to forge her own musical path while drawing from the music of her father, whose singular cocktail of blues, gospel, pop and country made him the first huge rock star and transformed American music.She said she had been hesitant to lean on her family name. But she was overruled by her record label, which made the personal “Lights Out” — “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis. That’s where my family’s buried and gone” — her debut single in 2003.Her father’s larger-than-life legacy remained with her right until her final days. On Tuesday, she was again conjuring him at the Golden Globes, telling a television host that Austin Butler, who won the lead acting award for drama for his performance in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis,” had perfectly embodied her father.But at Graceland on Friday, it was Lisa Marie that Presley fans remembered. Perez left her own message on Graceland’s wall: “Godspeed, LMP.”Cindy Wolff More

Her death in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a life tinged with tragedy, came after a medical emergency and brief hospitalization.Lisa Marie Presley, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley, died on Thursday in Los Angeles after a medical emergency and a brief hospitalization. She was 54.Sam Mast, a representative of Priscilla Presley, her mother, announced the death in a statement. Earlier in the day, Ms. Presley said her daughter had been receiving medical attention but did not provide more information. Ms. Presley lived in Calabasas, Calif., west of Los Angeles.The daughter of one of the most celebrated performers in music history, Ms. Presley followed her father’s career path. She released three rock albums, on which she set out to establish a sound of her own while also paying homage to the man who forever changed the American soundscape with his blend of blues, gospel, country and other genres.Hers was a life tinged with tragedy. She was 9 when her father died in 1977, and she lost others who had been close to her along the way, including her former husband, Michael Jackson. The suicide of her only son, Benjamin Keough, at age 27 in 2020 hit her especially hard, an episode she wrote about movingly last year in an essay for People magazine to mark National Grief Awareness Day.“My and my three daughters’ lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death,” she wrote. “We live in this every. Single. Day.”The enormous legacy of her father was a constant presence in her life. On Tuesday, she was again celebrating him at the Golden Globe awards ceremony, telling Extra TV that Austin Butler, who won the award for lead actor in a drama for his performance in the title role of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” had perfectly captured the essence of her father.“I was mind-blown, truly,” Ms. Presley said. “I actually had to take, like, five days to process it because it was so spot on and authentic.”In his speech accepting his award during the televised ceremony, Mr. Butler singled out the Presley family for its friendship and support as the camera panned to a visibly moved Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley seated at his table.Ms. Presley in 2012 beside a display of her childhood crib at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis. Lance Murphey/Associated PressOn Sunday, Ms. Presley was at Graceland, her father’s estate in Memphis, to commemorate what would have been his 88th birthday.Father and daughter were extremely close. Elvis once flew Lisa Marie to Idaho after she said she had never seen snow. He named his 1958 Convair 880 private jet the Lisa Marie.Ms. Presley owned Graceland and her father’s artifacts, as well as 15 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the corporate entity created by a Presley trust to manage its assets.Though Ms. Presley’s music career never reached the heights her father’s had achieved, his influence was evident in her music and lyrics. “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis,” she sang in “Lights Out,” a song from “To Whom It May Concern,” her debut album, released in 2003. “That’s where my family’s buried and gone.”In 2018, she co-produced an album celebrating Elvis’s love of gospel music and sang along with a recording of him on one of the songs. “I got moved by it as I was singing,” she said in an interview.If her albums produced no signature hits, her last name enshrined her as a celebrity. And her star-studded relationships only deepened that perception. Foremost among those was her marriage, from 1994 to 1996, to Mr. Jackson. Together, the pair — one the daughter of the king of rock ’n’ roll, the other regarded as the king of pop — attracted the glare of cameras and bountiful attention. In August 1994, The New York Times reported on the couple’s revelation that they had married.“After announcing a union that might have been conceived in supermarket-tabloid heaven and proclaiming a need for privacy, the world’s most famous newlyweds were holed up last night in a place not known for its isolation: Trump Tower,” The Times wrote. “At 5:40 p.m., a few hours after the statement was released in Los Angeles, the developer Donald J. Trump emerged from Trump Tower to the kind of reportorial throng normally reserved for the likes of, well, Michael Jackson or Donald Trump, and confirmed that, yes, the couple were ensconced on the top floor of the Fifth Avenue tower.”There was speculation that the marriage was an effort to deflect attention from investigations into allegations by a 13-year-old boy that Mr. Jackson had molested him. For a time the couple portrayed a happy marriage — Ms. Presley said she wanted to be known as “Mrs. Lisa Marie Presley-Jackson.” But by the end of 1995 they had separated, and they divorced the next year.Ms. Presley was married three other times; those marriages ended in divorce as well. She married the singer and songwriter Danny Keough in 1988, the actor Nicolas Cage in 2002 and, most recently, in 2006, Michael Lockwood, a guitarist who was music director of her 2005 album, “Now What.” They divorced in 2021.Her survivors include her daughter with Mr. Keough, the actress Riley Keough, and twin daughters with Mr. Lockwood, Harper and Finley.In a foreword to the 2019 book “The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain” by Harry Nelson, Ms. Presley wrote about her struggle with addiction, which she said began when she was given a prescription for pain medication after the birth of the twins in 2008. She quoted her own response to a point-blank question about her problem posed to her on the “Today” show in 2018.“I’m not perfect,” she recalled saying. “My father wasn’t perfect, no one’s perfect. It’s what you do with it after you learn and then you try to help others with it.”Elvis and Priscilla Presley with their daughter, Lisa Marie, after her birth in 1968. Associated PressLisa Marie Presley was born in Memphis on Feb. 1, 1968. “I’m a shaky man,” her famous father told reporters when his wife was admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital for the birth, an occasion that made international news.In “Elvis by the Presleys,” a 2005 book of recollections by Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley and others, Lisa Marie wrote of her childhood memories of her father.“The thing about my father is that he never hid anything,” she wrote. “He didn’t have a facade. Never put on airs. If he was crabby, you knew it. If he was angry, he’d let you know. His temper could give Darth Vader a run for his money. But if he was happy, everyone was happy.”Home life had its odd moments.“One time in the middle of the night I’m awoken by this incredibly loud noise coming from my father’s bedroom, which was right next to mine,” she related. “I get out of bed and see the guys buzz-sawing down his door so they can move in a grand piano. He felt like playing piano and singing gospel songs.”In the same book, Priscilla Presley wrote of Elvis’s tenderness toward his daughter in her early years.“Twice he spanked her on her bottom,” she remembered. “Once she colored a velvet couch with crayons, and once she ignored his warnings and got too close to the edge of the pool. The spankings were restrained and also warranted. But poor Elvis was a mess afterwards. You would have thought he had committed murder.”As a performer, Ms. Presley, whose most recent album was “Storm & Grace” (2012), knew her name would always be impossible to escape. But she was eager to be taken on her own terms.“It’s my own thing,” she said of her career in a 2003 interview with The Times. “I’m just trying to be an artist. I’m not trying to be Elvis Presley’s child. And I’m not trying to run from it either.”Kirsten Noyes More

Hear tracks by Miley Cyrus, Vagabon, Lonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Everything But the Girl, ‘Nothing Left to Lose’Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt released their last album as Everything But the Girl in 1999. They announce a new one with “Nothing Left to Lose,” a song that shows its danceable desolation from its initial bass note and twitchy, echoey drumbeat, even before Thorn arrives to sing, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” The production opens up a hollow void between throbbing bass tones and just enough single notes to sketch the rhythm and harmony; Thorn’s voice fills it with melancholy longing. JON PARELESSkrillex, Fred again.. and Flowdan, ‘Rumble’Skrillex, PinkPantheress and Trippie Redd, ‘Way Back’On his first singles as a lead artist since 2021, Skrillex explores two different sides of the jungle family tree. On “Way Back,” he takes a pop approach, partnering with the dreamlike vocalist PinkPantheress on a bubbly, quick-stepping flirtation anchored by some anguished pleas from Trippie Redd. On “Rumble,” though, he leans in to a harsher sound more in keeping with the thundering dubstep he first made his name with, but refracted though a jagged lens, with Fred again.. manipulating samples and the grime veteran Flowdan declaiming with cool detachment. JON CARAMANICABizarrap and Shakira, ‘Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53’Shakira’s revenge on her ex-boyfriend of 11 years, the soccer player Gerard Piqué, is as much a canny social media beef as a song. “I was out of your league,” she sings, going on to rap, “So much time at the gym/But maybe work out your brain a bit too.” Dozens of rappers and singers have collaborated with the Argentine producer Bizarrap, but unlike most of his sessions, “Vol. 53” isn’t a beat and a rap; it’s a fully produced electro-pop song with multitracked vocals and a contemptuous, self-branded hook: “A she-wolf like me isn’t for guys like you.” PARELESMiley Cyrus, ‘Flowers’Miley Cyrus exudes a cool confidence on “Flowers,” the breezy leadoff single from “Endless Summer Vacation,” due March 10. At first, the song seems like a brooding breakup post-mortem, but that turns out to be a ruse: “Started to cry, but then remembered I can buy myself flowers,” Cyrus sings, and the mood suddenly lifts. The relatively subdued chorus melody may not demand much of Cyrus, but her vocals are imbued with a laid-back maturity and convincing self-assurance. “I can take myself dancing, and I can hold my own hand,” she sings with her signature huskiness. “Yeah, I can love me better than you can.” LINDSAY ZOLADZParamore, ‘C’est Comme Ça’Latching on to the deadpan, spoken-word sarcasm of post-punk groups like Dry Cleaning, in “C’est Comme Ça” Hayley Williams takes on the isolation and enforced introspection of the pandemic era. “Sit still long enough to listen to yourself/Or maybe just long enough for you to atrophy to hell,” she deadpans over a disco thump with scrubbing guitars. The nonsense-syllable chorus — “Na na na na!” — is where Paramore’s pop-punk reflexes kick in. PARELESVagabon, ‘Carpenter’On her buoyant new single “Carpenter,” Laetitia Tamko, who records as Vagabon, opts for a sound that’s sleeker, lighter and more playful than her previous material. Rostam Batmanglij’s coproduction provides a reset, but the sweet melancholy of Tamko’s vocals gives the song an added emotional weight. “I wasn’t ready for what you were saying,” she sings on this tale of gradual maturity. “But I’m more ready now.” ZOLADZGracie Abrams, ‘Where Do We Go Now?’Here is pop’s verbal compression at its most distilled, to single syllables: “When I kissed you back I lied/you don’t know how long I tried.” Gracie Abrams, the definitive online sad girl, breathily sings, continuing a question — “Where do we go now?” — that has an open-ended answer. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Aselestine’The word “Aselestine” sounds like a cross between a crystal and an over-the-counter medication, but in Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo’s mouth, it becomes a conduit for mellifluous, vowel-y beauty. “Aselestine, where are you?” she sings with numb serenity. “The drugs don’t do what you said they do.” Like “Fallout,” the previous single from the indie legends’ 16th album “This Stupid World,” “Aselestine” is vintage Yo La Tengo, a timeless, quietly poignant distillation of the band’s singular essence. ZOLADZYahritza y Su Esencia, ‘Cambiaste’The teenage singer Yahritza Martinez of the family band Yahritza y Su Esencia is powerful and peculiar. She sings with preternatural theatricality and emotional heft, yet somehow maintains a youthful casualness. On “Cambiaste,” she yearns in stops and starts, lamenting someone who’s cast her aside. The song moves slowly, almost erratically, as if she’s staggering through sludge in search of refuge. It’s the latest in a slew of Yahritza songs that might be heard as unerringly odd if they weren’t so instinctually pop. CARAMANICAMoneybagg Yo featuring GloRilla, ‘On Wat U On’A tug of war of toxicity between two of Memphis’s finest rappers, “On Wat U On” is unsentimental and testy. Moneybagg Yo is the cad, rapping about needing freedom (“Tryna see me every weekend, damn/I need space to miss you”). And GloRilla is aggrieved, constitutionally fed up — she’s had enough: “I be busting out the windows/got him switching up his cars.” After two minutes of back and forth, there is, notably, no resolution — just recrimination and resentment. CARAMANICAIggy Pop, ‘New Atlantis’Most of Iggy Pop’s new album, “Every Loser,” circles back to the bone-crushing riffs and surly bluntness of his glory days in the Stooges — sometimes pointedly (in “Frenzy” and “Neo Punk”), and sometimes approaching self-parody. But there are glimmers of Iggy’s other eras in songs like “New Atlantis,” a cowbell-thumping, mock-admiring tribute to his current home, Miami. Being Iggy, he appreciates the city for its seaminess and its vulnerability to climate change: “New Atlantis, lying low/New Atlantis, sinking slow,” he sings. PARELESLonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe, ‘Oh Me, Oh My’The songwriter and outsider visual artist Lonnie Holley previews a new album, “Oh Me, Oh My,” with its elegiac title track: two slowly alternating piano chords underpinned by a bass fiddle and surrounded by echoes and, later, electric guitars and more mysterious sounds. Holley merges preaching and singing, as he declaims “I believe that the deeper we go, the more chances there are for us to understand.” He invokes family and faith, joined by Michael Stipe from R.E.M. intoning, “Oh me, oh my”; it’s thick with atmosphere and memory, offering no conclusions. PARELES More