Aurelia Butler

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    Bryan Ferry Enjoys the Kansas City Chiefs’ ‘Outfits’

    As the Roxy Music frontman readies a boxed set of his solo work, he reflects on the cultural inspirations that keep him fueled with glamour and drama.While Bryan Ferry was picking songs for “Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023,” — a new boxed set recapping his long solo career apart from Roxy Music, the pioneering British art-rock band he led — the singer noticed a recurring theme. “There’s a lot of love songs, a lot of romantic songs,” he said, speaking by video from his London recording studio.Ferry’s love songs, though, tend to be fraught with anxiety and blue with longing. The boy doesn’t get the girl; instead, the boy pines for the girl and can’t get her out of his mind. “But those are always the best love songs, aren’t they?” he asked with a chuckle. “I do like music that’s introspective, and a bit on the sad side.”The set begins with material from “These Foolish Things” (1973), on which Ferry brashly covered a broad array of songs, including one of Bob Dylan’s prolix metaphorical rambles and “It’s My Party,” Lesley Gore’s campy teen heartbreak lament. Ferry had studied at art school with the British Pop Art provocateur Richard Hamilton, who believed there was no hierarchical distinction between high and low culture, an idea the singer has sustained throughout his work.Last month, Ferry turned 79, and he’ll have a new album next year, but indicated that his touring days might be over: “As you get older, the travel is a bit tiring.” The singer grew up working class outside Newcastle — his father tended to horses that worked in local coal mines — but as Roxy Music gained popularity and cultural cachet in the 1970s, he developed appreciations for all things luxe. His list of 10 essential inspirations mixes the urban and the rural, the modern and the old-fashioned, with a consistent eye for glamour and drama. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1His own recording studioI’ve worked in a lot of studios and it’s great to finally have this place. Prince used this studio for an album he did with a girl band [“Plectrumelectrum,” by Prince and 3rdEyeGirl], and they were really good. I like to think some of it might’ve rubbed off.2His gardenOn weekends, I get out of London and go to the country for fresh air. If you’re a musician, you can be trapped indoors for days on end and it’s nice to have some respite from that. I’ve got a beautiful garden with an apple orchard, and at this time of the year, the fruit is getting ready to pick.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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    Phil Lesh’s Life in Pictures

    Phil Lesh, the bassist and a charter member of the Grateful Dead who was 84 when he died on Friday, will be remembered as a versatile musician and a pioneer for his instrument of choice.Lesh co-wrote songs and was an occasional lead vocalist across his 30-year career with the rock band. But his skill at soaring improvisation and his chemistry with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, ensured that Lesh would also be seen as a main character.Here are some snapshots from Lesh’s life and career.Paul Ryan/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesPhil Lesh, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia in 1965 as the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo ArchiveLesh on Ashbury Street in 1968.Associated PressThe Grateful Dead with reporters in San Francisco in 1967.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFrom left, Bill Kreutzmann on drums, Lesh and Weir at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York in 1967.Leni Sinclair/Getty ImagesFrom left, Garcia, Lesh and Weir in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1967.Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1968.Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe Dead in 1970, clockwise from top left: Weir, Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Ron McKernan, Mickey Hart and Garcia.Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1970.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dead in the late ’60s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesFrom left, Garcia, Weir and Lesh in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1975.Ron Rakow/Retro Photo ArchiveLesh at Hollywood Bowl, 1974.Mark Sullivan/Getty ImagesLesh, at right, with David Crosby, left, and Ned Lagin, who both played briefly with the Dead.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSan Francisco, 1978Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesWeir and Lesh.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesWeir and Lesh at a recording studio in San Rafael, Calif.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesThe Dead in 1982, from left: Brent Mydland, Lesh, Kruetzmann, Weir, Garcia and Hart.Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesRed Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado in 1987.Thearon W. Henderson/Getty ImagesHart, Wier and Lesh with the mascot of the San Francisco Giants in 2011.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLesh at Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif.Associated PressThe Dead at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2015.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLesh at Terrapin Crossroads in 2015.Astrida Valigorsky/Getty ImagesAt the Great South Bay Music Festival in Patchogue, N.Y., last year. More

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    Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher.

    Some rock bassists make it their job to hold down the bottom of a song: to hone parts that crisply but unobtrusively stake out a harmonic and rhythmic foundation, that are felt as much as heard. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who died on Friday at 84, wasn’t one of them. Instead, Lesh’s playing carried songs aloft.In the telepathic tangle of the Grateful Dead’s arrangements — never played the same way twice — Lesh’s bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. Lesh’s playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.Jerry Garcia, left, and Phil Lesh rehearse with the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in the 1970s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesLesh wasn’t a rock-and-roller by training or inclination. His 2005 memoir, “Searching for the Sound,” notes that his first instruments were violin and trumpet, that he soaked up classical music and big-band jazz, that he studied music theory and composition and drew life-changing inspirations from John Coltrane and Charles Ives. He and Tom Constanten, the Dead’s early keyboardist, were the band’s avant-garde contingent, a key aspect of the Dead’s ever-evolving improvisational fusion.For all their free-form interludes, the Dead’s songs had clear landmarks and structures — some of them far trickier than the band’s nimble performances would let on. Lesh could stick to a riff, as he dutifully did in the intro to “Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only Top 10 (and only Top 40) single. But when the verse arrived, he was footloose again: nudging, scurrying, syncopating from below. His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.Phil Lesh performing with the Dead at Woodstock in 1969. Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWe 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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    Barbara Dane, Who Fought Injustice Through Song, Dies at 97

    She was highly regarded as a folk, blues and jazz singer. She was also ardently left-wing and prioritized social change over commercial success.Barbara Dane, an acclaimed folk, jazz and blues singer whose communist leanings and fierce civil rights and antiwar activism earned her both critical plaudits and a thick Federal Bureau of Investigation file, died on Sunday at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.Her daughter, Nina Menendez, said that after suffering shortness of breath for several years because of heart failure, Ms. Dane chose to terminate her life under California’s End of Life Option Act.Over the course of her long career, Ms. Dane, with her rich, woody contralto, built a reputation in a variety of musical genres.She established her bona fides as a folky of the first order while still in her teens, performing with Pete Seeger. “I knew I was a singer for life,” she recalled in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, “but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then. I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”Ms. Dane wore her convictions proudly, belting out worker anthems like “I Hate the Capitalist System” and “Solidarity Forever.” She performed at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan would often sit in with her when she was performing at Gerdes Folk City, the Greenwich Village club.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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    Phil Lesh Made Organ Donation His Personal Cause

    For the past 25 years, the founding member of the Grateful Dead made a nightly speech about a topic that helped him stay performing into his 80s.The Grateful Dead and its various successors and offshoots were famous for making sure no two concerts were the same, changing their set lists with each performance. But since the late 1990s, at most every show featuring the original bassist Phil Lesh, who died Friday at 84, there was one thing that kicked off each encore.It was not a song, exactly, but a brief monologue from Lesh urging everyone in the audience to declare themselves organ donors. The subject was personal to him: In 1998, at the age of 58 and suffering from chronic hepatitis C, he received a liver transplant.“I’m only alive today,” he said before a 2015 concert featuring the three other original living members of the Grateful Dead, “because a man named Cody decided he wanted to be an organ donor. And he did it in the simplest way possible: He turned to someone who loved him and he loved, and said, ‘Hey, if anything happens to me, I’d like to be an organ donor.’”As he told the music magazine Relix in 2002, “If you need an organ, or someone you love needed an organ and one was available, would you accept it? Of course you would. Well, fair is fair. If you’re willing to accept it, then you should be willing to be a donor, as well.”Lesh’s transplant came just three years after the death of Jerry Garcia, his fellow founding Grateful Dead member. Lesh insisted the transplant saved his life and enabled him to undertake a formidable touring schedule for the next few decades with Dead successors such as Furthur and his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends.The pre-encore speech became such a concert mainstay that fans and websites that track set lists for Lesh’s bands would often include it: “Donor Rap” or “Phil’s Donor Rap.”Six years ago, Phil Lesh and Friends played a benefit for the American Transplant Foundation at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver in honor of the 20th anniversary of Lesh’s transplant.“We didn’t need to sell him on anything,” the foundation’s executive director, Anastasia Henry, recalled in a brief interview Friday. “He had zero requirements — very simple.”At the encore, before renditions of “Fire on the Mountain” and perhaps the most notable Lesh-penned Grateful Dead song, “Box of Rain,” Lesh gave his donor rap. Referring to his liver donor solely by his first name, Lesh said that he wasn’t the only beneficiary of Cody’s decision, and that he helped half a dozen people live after his death. “Me and Cody,” he added, “have had a great relationship for 20 years.” More

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    Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Dies at 84

    One of the first rock bassists whose instrument regularly took a lead role, he also had a hand in writing some of the band’s best-known songs.Phil Lesh, whose expansive approach to the bass as a charter member of the Grateful Dead made him one of the first performers on that instrument in a rock band to play a lead role rather than a supporting one, died on Friday. He was 84.His death was announced on his Instagram account. No further information was provided.In addition to providing explorative bass work, Mr. Lesh sang high harmonies for the band and provided the occasional lead vocal. He also co-wrote some of the band’s most noteworthy songs, including ones that inspired adventurous jams, like “St. Stephen” and “Dark Star,” as well as more conventional pieces, like “Cumberland Blues,” “Truckin’” and “Box of Rain.”Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing lines of the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen.A source of particular excitement was the relationship between Mr. Lesh’s instrument and Mr. Garcia’s. At times they mirrored each other. At other times they contrasted, in the process widening the music’s melodic nuances while helping to create the kind of variety and tension that allowed the band to improvise at length without losing the listener.Mr. Lesh’s bass work could be thundering or tender, focused or abstract. On the Grateful Dead’s studio albums, his lines held so much melody that one could listen to a song for his playing alone. At the same time, he shared his bandmates’ love for unusual chord structures and uncommon time signatures. In constructing his bass parts, he drew from many sources, including free jazz, classical music and the avant-garde.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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    We Ranked the 25 Jump Scares That Still Make Us Jump

    The floor creaks, the music turns ominous and an uneasy quiet sets in. Then BAM! It’s the classic jump scare. This staple of horror movies, when done well, is instantly memorable. With Times film writers, filmmakers and stars weighing in, we ranked the 25 jump scares that still get us every time. WARNINGThis article contains […] More

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    Lady Gaga’s Dance-Floor Antidote, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear Sade’s first new track since 2018, plus songs from Soccer Mommy, Tyler, the Creator and more.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lady Gaga, ‘Disease’Lady Gaga sets aside her forays into analog-era styles — which included duets on pop standards with Tony Bennett and an Oscar for best original song, from “A Star Is Born” — and returns to electronic dance-pop with “Disease,” a sequel to her career-making hits like “Bad Romance” and “Judas.” It’s a four-on-the-floor thumper, with wordless vocal hooks, bulldozing bass and promises to turn around the most dire situations. “Screaming for me baby like you’re gonna die,” she belts. “Poison on the inside / I could be your antidote tonight.” It harks back to her hits from the 2000s, but she sets aside her gimmick from back then: There’s no consonant-repeating stutter.Sade Adu, ‘Young Lion’Sade’s first song since 2018 is dedicated to her transgender son, Izaak, and appears on the compilation “Transa” from the Red Hot Organization. Set to minor chords, the song is an apology from a parent who didn’t understand her child’s needs at first: “You must have felt so alone / The anguish and pain, I should have known,” she sings. “Forgive me, son.” Strings swell behind her as she affirms, “You shine like a sun” and “See how far you’ve come.” But the final tolling piano chords suggest irreparable regrets.Soccer Mommy, ‘Abigail’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