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      Sofia Coppola’s Best Needle Drops

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      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “The Virgin Suicides,” “Lost in Translation,” “Priscilla” and more.Finely chosen songs are the lifeblood in almost all of Sofia Coppola’s films, including “The Virgin Suicides.”Paramount ClassicsDear listeners,Few working filmmakers curate soundtracks with as much flair, style and intentionality as Sofia Coppola: Consider the melancholy dream-pop smeared through “Lost in Translation,” the new-wave tunes that give “Marie Antoinette” a playful modernity, or the eerie, weightless Air score that haunts the sleepy suburbs of “The Virgin Suicides.”Coppola’s latest film, “Priscilla” — based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis & Me” — comes out today, and it features some of her boldest and most unconventional musical choices yet. That’s apparent right from the movie’s opening scene, in which the celestial sounds of Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” fade unexpectedly into the Ramones’ 1980 cover of a Ronettes ballad, “Baby, I Love You.”These aren’t obvious choices when it comes to soundtracking a movie about Elvis, but since Presley’s estate did not grant Coppola permission to use his music in the film, the obvious choices were off the table. No matter. Coppola — along with the music supervisor Randall Poster and the band Phoenix, whose frontman, Thomas Mars, is Coppola’s husband — used those limitations to create something more distinctive and personal than a standard biopic carpeted wall-to-wall with Presley tunes. (Plus, you know, one of those already came out last year.) They have instead crafted a movie that re-centers a woman too often pushed to the side in her own life story, and found the music — some historically accurate, some imaginatively not — that reflects her own increasingly disillusioned perspective.“Priscilla” may be the Coppola movie most explicitly about music, but finely chosen songs are the lifeblood of almost all of her films. Coppola characters often use music as a tool of communication, to sing or suggest things they can’t say aloud. Think of the unforgettable karaoke scene in “Lost in Translation,” or the way the imprisoned Lisbon sisters in “The Virgin Suicides” use their record player to communicate with the forbidden boys of the outside world.Today’s playlist is a collection of some of the greatest needle drops in Sofia Coppola’s filmography. Pour yourself a glass of Suntory, gaze dreamily out a window and press play.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Jesus and Mary Chain: “Just Like Honey”Only I know what Bill Murray whispers to Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation”: “The Jesus and Mary Chain. ‘Psychocandy.’ It’ll change your life! (Don’t expect quite as much from the rest of the discography, though.)” (Listen on YouTube)2. Gang of Four: “Natural’s Not in It”This spiky, 1979 post-punk song that opens Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette” immediately signals that this isn’t going to be an ordinary biopic — it’s going to be one with a deliciously anachronistic soundtrack. There’s a sly irony to the way Coppola uses it here, too, since the politics that Gang of Four espouses on “Entertainment!” aren’t exactly simpatico with the excesses of Versailles. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Ramones: “Baby, I Love You”Ever aware of the importance of plunging the audience directly into a film’s atmosphere, Coppola sets the tone of “Priscilla” by running this swooning 1980 Ramones cover of the Ronettes over the opening credits. (Listen on YouTube)4. Heart: “Magic Man”The seductive, bowl-cutted Trip Fontaine (played by Josh Hartnett) blows into “The Virgin Suicides” to the tune of this period-specific Heart classic, indicating to the Lisbon family that he and his aviator shades are a very particular kind of trouble. (Listen on YouTube)5. Gwen Stefani: “Cool”From the 2010 film “Somewhere” — in my opinion, Coppola’s most underrated, and one of her best — this Gwen Stefani ode to getting along with your ex soundtracks a memorable scene between an absent, movie-star father (Stephen Dorff) and his preteen daughter (Elle Fanning). The girl practices an ice-skating routine while her father watches from the bleachers. That she’s framed in a wide shot, and in long, unbroken takes, emphasizes both the distance between them and the affection of her father’s gaze. “Cool” is a perfect accompaniment for such a bittersweet moment. (Listen on YouTube)6. Air: “Playground Love”The French electronic duo Air composed the gauzy, atmospheric score for Coppola’s 1999 debut, “The Virgin Suicides.” Variations on the lead melody of “Playground Love” wind through the film like a recurring theme, before the haunting song — featuring vocals from Coppola’s future husband, Mars — plays over the closing credits. (Listen on YouTube)7. Bow Wow Wow: “I Want Candy”One of the great montages in the S.C.C.U. (Sofia Coppola Cinematic Universe) is the pastel-hued, shamelessly indulgent shopping spree scene that comes midway through “Marie Antoinette,” to the tune of this early ’80s bop. Let them eat candy! (Listen on YouTube)8. Sleigh Bells: “Crown on the Ground”This blown-out, sky-scraping song from Sleigh Bells’ singular 2010 album “Treats” — an underappreciated founding document of hyperpop — opens Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring” with a time-stamped jolt. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Cure: “Plainsong”If you’re going to use the Cure’s achingly gorgeous “Plainsong” in a movie, the scene had better be epic. Coppola understood this, and made it the sumptuous soundtrack to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI’s coronation. (Listen on YouTube)10. My Bloody Valentine: “Sometimes”Kevin Shields, the famously slow-working singer and guitarist of the shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, wrote four original songs for the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack — some of the first music he’d released since his group’s landmark 1991 album, “Loveless.” But it’s My Bloody Valentine’s dream-pop classic “Sometimes” that underscores one of the movie’s most beloved scenes, as Johansson gazes out of a taxi window in the middle of the night, the passing neon of Tokyo rendered a romantic blur. (Listen on YouTube)11. Tommy James & the Shondells: “Crimson and Clover”In “Priscilla,” Elvis and Priscilla share their first kiss in the late ’50s to the tune of this woozy classic — which, in reality, came out in 1968. I like the way the critic Stephanie Zacharek describes this anachronism in her review of the film: “After Elvis bestows his first, gentle kiss on Priscilla’s lips, she enters a fugue state, having shifted to a new plane of existence. At that point, it’s Tommy James & the Shondells’ ‘Crimson and Clover’ that cocoons around her like a whisper, a song from the future, a haunting in advance.” (Listen on YouTube)12. Roxy Music: “More Than This”A spot-on choice — world-weary, full of ennui, still showing off some taste — of what Murray’s “Lost in Translation” character Bob Harris would sing at karaoke. (Listen on YouTube)13. Dolly Parton: “I Will Always Love You”I don’t want to spoil exactly when this song plays in “Priscilla,” but I do want to give you some context that will make the moment hit even harder. Elvis loved Dolly Parton’s 1974 hit and wanted to record it himself, but his manager, Col. Tom Parker, asked for at least half of Parton’s publishing rights. Though it killed her to turn him down — Elvis! — selling off her publishing was a bridge too far. So she said no. Karma took until 1992 to arrive. “Then when Whitney’s version came out,” Parton said, “I made enough money to buy Graceland.” (Listen on YouTube)Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Sofia Coppola’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Just Like Honey”Track 2: Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not in It”Track 3: The Ramones, “Baby, I Love You”Track 4: Heart, “Magic Man”Track 5: Gwen Stefani, “Cool”Track 6: Air, “Playground Love”Track 7: Bow Wow Wow, “I Want Candy”Track 8: Sleigh Bells, “Crown on the Ground”Track 9: The Cure, “Plainsong”Track 10: My Bloody Valentine, “Sometimes”Track 11: Tommy James & the Shondells, “Crimson and Clover”Track 12: Roxy Music, “More Than This”Track 13: Dolly Parton, “I Will Always Love You”Bonus TracksOn this week’s new music Playlist, we’ve got fresh tracks from Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion, Torres and more. Listen here.Also, there’s a new Beatles song? Sort of? In a Critic’s Notebook from earlier this week, Jon Pareles considered the wistful, uncanny “Now and Then.”And finally, regretfully, in Tuesday’s newsletter I provided the wrong link to Sam Sodomsky’s wonderful Pitchfork interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. For real this time: Read it here. More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s Haunting ‘Hunger Games’ Tune, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Megan Thee Stallion, Torres, Mount Kimbie and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Can’t Catch Me Now’A latticework of acoustic guitar and a building intensity drive “Can’t Catch Me Now,” Olivia Rodrigo’s brooding new song from soundtrack for (deep breath) “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” “You think that you got away,” Rodrigo sings through gritted teeth, adding an eerily pastoral feel to another of her signature tales of heartbreak and revenge. “But I’m in the trees, I’m in the breeze.” LINDSAY ZOLADZMegan Thee Stallion, ‘Cobra’Megan Thee Stallion’s raps have constructed a persona that’s carnal, competitive and invincible even on bad days. But on “Cobra” — her first self-released single after leaving her old label — she hits “rock bottom,” admitting, “Yes, I’m very depressed/How can someone so blessed wanna slit they wrist?” The video shows Megan shedding her skin, but the song itself doesn’t declare victory; instead, a rock-guitar outro summons the bitterness of grunge. JON PARELESTorres, ‘I Got the Fear’Torres — the stage name of the singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott — sullies organic folk sounds with a mechanized, industrial crunch on “I Got the Fear,” the second single from her sixth album, “What an Enormous Room,” due in January. Images of panic attacks and climate catastrophe haunt the song, but love provides a sliver of hope: “The dread doesn’t pay any rent money,” Torres sings, “But as long as it doesn’t get ahold of my honey, think I’ll be all right.” ZOLADZMount Kimbie, ‘Dumb Guitar’The English group Mount Kimbie keeps figuring out different ways to fuse meditation, confession and snarl. Its latest single, “Dumb Guitar,” promising a new album, taps through three chords with ever-evolving loops and waves of synthesizers, keyboards and guitars. As it churns ahead, Dominic Maker and Kai Campos sing lines like “Find a suit to wear out/Take the selfish side out,” “Another day I’ll kill myself” and “Lose it all in silence/Dig a hole in my mind.” The estrangement keeps growing, even as the music ebbs into a calm coda. PARELESWillow, ‘Alone’A shuffle rhythm, usually the sound of jaunty confidence, gets pushed and pulled into nervous, angular permutations in Willow’s “Alone,” a seething and then explosive two-minute distillation of a relationship full of need, betrayal and confusion. “I’m so tired of being a liar, it’s true,” Willow sings, well before the final rupture. PARELESEl Búho & Nita, ‘Cenizas de Agua’Robin Perkins, who records as El Búho (the Owl), is an English electronic producer who has devoted himself to Latin American rhythms, natural sounds and environmental activism. He collaborated with the flamenco-influenced Spanish singer and songwriter Nita (Cristina Manjón), from the group Fuel Fandango, on “Cenizas de Agua” (“Ashes of Water”). The track smolders with suppressed agitation about the fate of the planet. Over a subdued cumbia beat, surrounded by glimmering, time-reversed sounds, Nita’s lyrics contrast cherished memories with dire expectations: “I open my chest,” she sings. “I break the silence.” PARELESMajid Jordan, ‘Slip’Majid Jordan — the Canadian duo of the singer Majid Al-Maskati and the producer Jordan Ullman — makes hypnotically self-effacing R&B: pondering, contemplating, doubting, never raising its voice. In “Slip,” from the new album “Good People,” the beat is muffled and the keyboards are like distant radar blips as Al-Maskati struggles to stave off a temptation, though it’s clear he longs to succumb. PARELESJames Elkington, ‘A Round, a Bout’James Elkington, an English guitarist based in Chicago who has worked with Jeff Tweedy and Eleventh Dream Day, made his new instrumental album, “Me Neither (LP 1)” — the first of two parts — on his own, mostly with folky acoustic guitars but not ruling out electronics. In “A Round, a Bout,” melodies slowly materialize above, and then below, a serene picking pattern, sounding reticent but somehow inevitable. PARELESPeter Evans, ‘The Cell’On “The Cell,” Nick Jozwiak’s bass and Michael Shekwoaga Ode’s drums buckle in together, creating a pulpy beat for the trumpeter Peter Evans to dive beneath and around. Joel Ross finds the open space that’s left and lets his vibraphone ring there, one or two notes at a time. Ross and Evans are both dexterous players who can blow your hair back: The vibraphonist is known for his prolix soloing, and Evans for his extended technique. On “Ars Memoria,” the second album from the quartet that Evans calls Being & Becoming, both simmer down and submit themselves to the group imperative. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAnthony Pirog featuring Wendy Eisenberg, ‘Night Winds’If you know Anthony Pirog, it’s probably as a fearless guitar slasher with a rack of effects pedals that let him encase himself in a turbulent cocoon. But on his newest album, “The Nepenthe Series, Vol. 1,” Pirog invites others to control the environment. During the pandemic, he asked peers and mentors to record one track each that they considered “ambient,” then he would play his way into the sound. The list of collaborators is impressive: Andy Summers, Nels Cline, John Frusciante. He made “Night Winds” with Wendy Eisenberg, another youngish guitar innovator; it is the album’s most cluttered and inclement-sounding track, and the most absorbing. Eisenberg’s growling, pseudo-industrial backdrop adds a high contrast to Pirog’s twinkly long tones, which pile up gradually until it all washes out into silence. RUSSONELLO More

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      Review: Ligeti’s Fascinating Polyrhythm at the New York Phil

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      The conductor Susanna Mälkki led a program centered on Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, propelled by the soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.On Thursday, the conductor Susanna Mälkki led the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall in an unusually cohesive program built around the bizarro sound world of Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. It was part of the orchestra’s centennial celebrations of the composer.Written in the 1980s, the piece draws its lifeblood from Ligeti’s remarkable rhythmic sense. The piano soloist works out asymmetrical accents from interlocking metrical units while also maintaining composure in scales and running 16th notes. On the surface, there’s a high degree of independence among the wailing strings, fluorescent woodwinds and intricate percussion, but as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the Philharmonic’s soloist, recently told The New York Times: “It’s a work that renews polyphony through fascinating polyrhythm.” The chaos has a way of coming together if a listener stops resisting it.The concerto seems frozen between states, its harmonic center melting away without ever evaporating, but in Mälkki’s expert hands, it could sound almost traditional in structure. In the first movement, she lined up emphatic pizzicati with the accents that Aimard plucked out of the solo part. In the second, a siren crescendoed into a blaring signal whistle to herald the piano’s violent re-entry — a satisfying climax built from unusual means. The music seemed to levitate with the centrifugal force of rampaging bongos. The strange postludes that close out the second movement (scored for Chromonica) and the fifth (a duet for xylophone and piano) were gripping afterthoughts.The crisp acoustic of the recently renovated hall enhanced Ligeti’s rhythmic vivacity. The orchestra sounded warm and precise, with a tone that was full but not fatty. In the Lento e deserto, the work’s only slow movement, the lonely yowlings of piccolo, bassoon and slide whistle formed a tender yet humorous trio.Mälkki folded the piano into the texture like a firing engine, enabling Aimard, a longtime friend and champion of the composer, to propel the piece. Aimard, something of an elegant mathematician, handled polyrhythms with a through line and sense of ease. Pianistic effects, like scales, crunchy chord clusters and running 16th notes with multiple voicings, had unfussy finesse. The “leggiero, non legato” (“light, but not connected”) passage in the Presto luminoso had a discrete, glockenspiel-like tone that didn’t turn percussive. Aimard and Mälkki were unable to reach the finish line in the Presto in three minutes or less, as Ligeti requests in the score, but it was nonetheless a bravura performance.The Ligeti crowned the first half of the program, which was themed around Hungarian composers. The Budapest-born musician Jeno Lisztes opened the concert with a dazzling solo arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for cimbalom, a traditional Hungarian instrument in the dulcimer family that utilizes a pedal mechanism and mallets that resemble cotton-padded bar spoons. His performance had melancholy grace and a rollicking climax that left me wondering where this symphony of notes was coming from. In Bartók’s brief Romanian Folk Dances, the orchestra sounded sturdy and grounded.After intermission, Mälkki and the orchestra leaned heavily into the grotesquerie that characterizes half of the images that Mussorgsky depicts in “Pictures at an Exhibition.” “Gnomus” had a dangerous agility, both aggressive and surprising, and “Bydlo” was moody and theatrical. The brasses, summoning deep, forbidding power, made a meal of “Catacombae.” The penultimate movement, “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” — and not Mälkki’s muscular take on the magnificent “The Great Gate of Kiev” — provided the piece’s true finale. The hut, which houses a witch of Russian folklore, lurched in gleeful, monstrous ways as its inhabitant sniffed out young children to devour.Mälkki and the players dug into the fantastical elements of “Pictures” as if possessed, almost as though they couldn’t shake off the Ligeti — and after such a tremendous performance, neither could I.New York Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna MälkkiThrough Saturday at David Geffen Hall; nyphil.org More

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      Noah Kahan’s Rootsy Rock Revival

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicNoah Kahan’s song “Stick Season” currently sits at No. 43 on the Billboard Hot 100. On its own, that’s a moderately impressive feat. But it’s more remarkable because “Stick Season” is the title track of an album released just over a year ago. Via diligent touring and an instinctual grip on how to leverage TikTok, Kahan has squeezed a fan favorite so hard it became a hit.That success arrives a few years into Kahan’s career, which began with more straight-ahead pop and shifted into rootsier territory during the pandemic. He inflects his songs with bits of Vermont attitude and lore, and has collaborated with Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how Kahan’s niche stardom has given way to pop acclaim, how Vermont figures into his songwriting and sound, and how he revisits the rustic mainstream rock of the early 2010s.Guests:Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at VoxJason Lipshutz, executive director, music at BillboardConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      What the Suburbs Did for Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen

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      A new book by the author Jim Cullen explores the uncanny parallels between the careers of these two musicians, and how they were products of their time and place.It was the 25th anniversary concert celebrating the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Madison Square Garden in 2009 when Bruce Springsteen bellowed to the crowd: “Are you ready for the bridge-and-tunnel summit meeting right here, right now? Because Long Island is about to meet New Jersey on the neutral ground of New York City!”Out came Billy Joel, and the two performed a set together of their greatest hits. Springsteen crooned on Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” while Joel returned the favor on Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” The two had crossed paths occasionally in their hit-making careers, but never in such a high profile way.In retrospect, it was surprising it had taken so long. The author Jim Cullen argues in his new book released in October, “Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century,” that Springsteen and Joel’s careers had more uncanny parallels than most realize, and that their rise was a product of socioeconomic conditions of the era, particularly the growth of the suburbs. In fact, the author argues, it’s likely that Joel and Springsteen could only have become famous at the time they did.Both were born within months of each other. Both are intrinsically identified with their home states — Springsteen with New Jersey, Joel with New York. They both came from the suburbs — Freehold, N.J., for Springsteen, and Hicksville, N.Y., for Joel. Both were signed to Columbia Records and released their first albums the same year. Their careers started off slow — and almost sputtered completely — but broke through around the same time with records that would make them famous — Springsteen’s “Born To Run” (1975) and Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977).Mr. Cullen, a historian who has written several academic books about pop culture, discussed the connection between the two that formed the thesis of his latest book.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What does the rise of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen in the 1970s say about the era they were living in?They lived in what you might call the golden age of the American dream. This was the period when the American dream was most realizable on a mass basis. As products of suburbia, they were sort of in the cockpit of this.One of the things I found interesting when I started to look into their lives was that they were actually products of downward mobility. Their immediate families had suffered reverses in the generation before they were born. And then, of course, they caught the wind of this massive economic and social current in the aftermath of World War II.Mr. Cullen, a historian, has written several academic books about pop culture.Frances F. Denny for The New York TimesWhat were the conditions in the music industry that helped make someone like Joel or Springsteen such a success?The record business had been immensely profitable in the years prior to these guys making it. And so there was just a lot of money floating around to invest in new acts in a way that there really hadn’t been before or after this.Another is that the business was designed at that point to reward the thing that these two guys did really well, which was to perform live. This was an era when touring supported records — rather than the age we live in, which is the other way around.The last thing I would say is that the industry was much more tolerant of failure than it had been before or since. So both of these guys could literally afford to make a couple of records that stiffed before they built up enough of a head of steam to really take off commercially.People might argue that when we talk about the rise of the suburbs, we’re really talking about the rise of a white middle class. I don’t think there’s any question that these guys were beneficiaries of their racial identity. Broadly, their relative affluence gave them a leg up. That’s inarguable.I will say that both of these people had a very strong vision of integration as sort of the aesthetic basis of their work.Are there modern-day equivalents to Joel and Springsteen?One of the ways in which they were also really beneficiaries of their time is that they were products of what I’ll call generally an age of broadcasting. And I mean that not just in terms of television, but especially in terms of radio. There was a kind of shared national audience.I did a book on “All in the Family,” a television show [in the 1970s] that got 50 million viewers a week. The finale of “Game of Thrones,” people got excited because it got 10 million viewers. It’s just a different world. So it’s not easy for anybody to continue to do what Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen did. Not because Springsteen or Joel were sort of Promethean artists, but because they were beneficiaries of a media infrastructure that was very rewarding to them.Having said all that, I do think that there are figures who approach what they did. Beyoncé comes to mind as someone who’s built a very large, broad audience over a long period of time and inspires a level of commitment and engagement that I think is comparable. The obvious other example is Taylor Swift, who in commercial terms, has probably exceeded them. More

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      Gen Z Beatles Fans Come Together on TikTok

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      “Can’t believe it’s 2023 and I get the joy of hearing a new Beatles song for the first time ever,” a 23-year-old says in a video post.Eloise Smith, 23, posted a reaction video on TikTok immediately after listening to “Now and Then,” the Beatles song released on Thursday.“Can’t believe it’s 2023 and I get the joy of hearing a new Beatles song for the first time ever,” Ms. Smith, who has a forearm tattoo rendering of the band’s “Abbey Road” album cover, wrote in the video’s caption.In an interview, she added that she was a third-generation fan: Her grandmother introduced her father to the Beatles, and her father introduced them to her.“I was 1 when George Harrison died,” Ms. Smith said.Ms. Smith, a civil servant who lives in Manchester, England, said she was “thrilled” weeks ago when she heard about “Now and Then.” The ability to immediately react and connect with other fans of the band through social media has made the experience of hearing a new Beatles song richer, she added.“Rather than just being in the kind of bubble of your friends, you can speak to people all over the world about it,” she said.The Beatles came late to digital media. The group did not sell downloads of its songs at Apple’s iTunes store until 2010, seven years after it had opened for business. When streaming became the main medium for music fans, the Beatles held out once more, waiting until 2015 before making the band’s work available on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms.The decision to go digital allowed new generations of listeners to more easily discover a group that had won the adoration of mobs of screaming fans in the 1960s. Now, Gen Z listeners regularly post Beatles-related videos on social media platforms.

      @earlgreylou i am having a big ol’ emotional moment rn #nowandthen #thebeatles ♬ Now And Then – 2023 Mix – The Beatles “This song is my Roman Empire,” one listener wrote in a TikTok post, referring to a meme claiming that men think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. In the comments of the video, several people replied that the video was making them teary. “Sobbing,” they wrote. Others said that they were excited to listen to the song with their grandparents.Skylar Moody, 24, said she spent most of Thursday trying to avoid “Now and Then” spoilers. A superfan whose social media presence is almost entirely devoted to all things Beatles, she wanted to record her reaction to her first listen, which meant waiting until she was finished with work. She kept her phone on silent all day, lest she accidentally hear a snippet of “Now and Then” while scrolling online.Ms. Moody, who lives in New Jersey and goes, fittingly, by @lucyinthesky.lar on TikTok, said she became a Beatles fan after watching “A Hard Day’s Night,” the group’s 1964 film, during a music history class in high school. She described the Beatles’ online fandom as “very diverse and also unified.”“No matter what age or demographic you’re in,” she said, “we can all come together in one agreement that we love the Beatles.”She continued: “This is where we find our people now. It’s so easy to go on social media and find a fan community of people to talk to that will understand you.”Late on Thursday afternoon, she made a reaction video of herself listening to “Now and Then” in her car. “I’m listening to the Beatles! In 2023!” she exclaimed, clutching her face through a two-minute clip in which she describes what she’s hearing.The Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, has billed “Now and Then” as the group’s “last song.” It’s the third Beatles release since John Lennon’s death in 1980, after “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” in the mid-1990s. All three were built on home demo recordings made by Mr. Lennon.“My heart feels so heavy right now, but in a good way,” Ms. Moody said in another TikTok video, adding, “We are experiencing their last song together, and this is going to go down in history. I’m so happy that we get to share it all together and that we’re able to share our thoughts like this online with people who get it.”Ms. Smith, the civil servant in England, said that she would try not to wear out “Now and Then” in the coming days. “I’ve been kind of listening to it every once in a while, to savor it,” she said, “because it’s such a big deal.” More

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      Britney Spears escribió sus memorias con otros autores. Entérate aquí

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      El libro de la estrella del pop es una obra colectiva. Otros tres autores participaron.“Si me sigues en Instagram, pensabas que este libro iba a estar escrito con emojis, ¿no?”, escribe Britney Spears al final de su libro de memorias, La mujer que soy.Britney Spears ha declarado que completar el libro publicado hace poco —un relato de su periplo desde Luisiana hasta la cima de las listas de éxitos del pop y una tutela que le negó el control de su carrera y sus finanzas— requirió una enorme cantidad de terapia. Y para llevar la historia al papel, contó con la ayuda de “colaboradores”, como ella los llama en los agradecimientos del libro.“Ustedes saben quiénes son”, escribe sin dar nombres.Según dos personas cercanas al proyecto, que hablaron bajo condición de mantener su anonimato porque no estaban autorizadas a declarar públicamente, tres escritores —todos autores de éxito por derecho propio— colaboraron de manera significativa con el libro de memorias de Spears.Ada Calhoun, autora de cuatro libros de no ficción, entre ellos Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, ayudó a crear el primer borrador, dijeron las dos personas. Sam Lansky, exeditor de la revista Time, autor del libro de memorias The Gilded Razor y de la novela Broken People, fue el siguiente en unirse al proyecto. El libro se completó con la ayuda de Luke Dempsey, un escritor fantasma y editor que ha publicado libros bajo su propio nombre y trabajó con Priscilla y Lisa Marie Presley en Elvis by the Presleys.Ada Calhoun fue parte del equipo que le brindó ayuda a Spears con sus memorias.Laurel Golio para The New York TimesEs práctica habitual que los famosos colaboren de cerca con autores de probada valía cuando deciden contar su vida, afirmó David Kuhn, codirector ejecutivo de la agencia literaria Aevitas Creative Management.“¿Cuánta gente crees que trabaja en un libro de memorias presidenciales, o en uno de los libros de Michelle Obama?”, preguntó Kuhn, que ha representado al autor ganador del premio Pulitzer Liaquat Ahamed y a la comediante Amy Schumer. “Porque si eres Michelle Obama, parte de lo que creo que pedirás de tu colaborador o de tus editores son diferentes perspectivas de diferentes lectores”.“Podrías querer la opinión de una persona de 30 años”, añadió, “porque quieres que los de la generación milénial se sientan identificados con el libro. Puede que quieras que un editor masculino ofrezca su perspectiva, porque quieres que atraiga en la medida de lo posible a un público masculino, además del público femenino más obvio”.Así pues, la creación de La mujer que soy no fue muy distinta de la de éxitos pop contemporáneos, que suelen contar con aportes de numerosos colaboradores.La columna Page Six del New York Post fue la primera en informar, en febrero de 2022, la noticia del “gran acuerdo” para el libro de memorias de Spears. Fue adquirido por Gallery Publishing Group, un sello de Simon & Schuster que ha llevado a muchos artistas y personalidades a las listas de los más vendidos, entre ellos Chelsea Handler, Tiffany Haddish, Olivia Newton-John y Omarosa Manigault Newman.Spears agradeció a “colaboradores” en sus memorias sin aportar nombres. Gallery Books, vía Associated PressUna de las principales personas implicadas en la adquisición, según tres personas con conocimiento de la operación, fue Cait Hoyt, agente literaria de CAA, quien es mencionada en los agradecimientos del libro. Otra figura clave fue el abogado Mathew Rosengart, socio del bufete Greenberg Traurig, que ayudó a Spears a librarse de la tutela en 2021. (Hoyt y Rosengart no hicieron comentarios).Tras la firma del acuerdo, Spears viajó a Maui, un viaje que documentó en Instagram. Mientras estaba allí, escribió extensamente sobre su vida en cuadernos y se reunió con Calhoun para una serie de entrevistas largas, dijeron las dos personas cercanas al proyecto. El borrador que Calhoun ayudó a elaborar se completó en primavera, poco antes de que Spears se casara con el actor y entrenador personal Sam Asghari en una ceremonia en su casa de Los Ángeles. (Calhoun no respondió a las peticiones de comentarios).A Spears le pareció en un momento que la voz del libro no se parecía lo suficiente a la suya, según una persona cercana al proyecto. Entonces apareció Lansky, cliente de Hoyt, cuyos dos libros fueron publicados por Gallery.Los antecedentes de Lansky parecen haberlo hecho idóneo para el proyecto. Hace una década, escribía para el sitio web musical Idolator, donde ejercía de “apologista residente de Taylor Swift, entusiasta de las divas y monstruo del sarcasmo”. En su libro de memorias, The Gilded Razor, dice sentirse “atrapado en algún lugar entre un niño y un adulto: lo bastante adulto como para hacer las cosas bien de vez en cuando, pero lo bastante joven como para no saber que eso no siempre sería suficiente”.Esas palabras también podrían describir a Spears, que empezó a trabajar en el mundo del espectáculo a los 10 años y lanzó la canción “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” a los 20. Antes de sumergirse en el proyecto, Lansky hizo otra ronda de entrevistas con ella a través de Zoom y por teléfono, dijeron las dos personas. (Lansky no hizo comentarios). Sam Lansky, autor de dos libros, trabajó en las memorias el verano pasado. Jeff Spicer/Getty Images para Atlantis The RoyalEn otoño, Dempsey se unió al proyecto, aseguraron las personas. Una colaboradora constante durante todo el proceso fue Lauren Spiegel, editora de Gallery que fue responsable del libro éxito en ventas de Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody. (Dempsey y Spiegel no hicieron comentarios).Spears solo ha concedido una entrevista a la revista People con motivo de la publicación de La mujer que soy. No describe los pormenores de ser autora por primera vez, pero tiene claro por qué decidió contar su historia.“Por fin llegó la hora de alzar la voz y hablar claro, y mis seguidores merecen oírlo directamente de mí”, señaló. “No más conspiraciones, no más mentiras: solo yo como dueña de mi pasado, presente y futuro”.Jacob Bernstein es reportero de la sección Styles. Además de escribir perfiles de diseñadores de moda, artistas y celebridades, ha centrado gran parte de su atención en temáticas LGBT, la filantropía y el mundo del diseño de muebles. Más de Jacob Bernstein More

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      Laufey’s Old-Time Pop Is Smooth. Its Relationship to Jazz Is Spikier.

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      The 24-year-old multi-instrumentalist found fame on TikTok with her nostalgic songs. But her dedication to her followers may be holding her music back.About 20 minutes into her set at Town Hall on Wednesday night — the first of two sold-out shows at the Midtown Manhattan theater — the nostalgic TikTok star Laufey put down her hollow-body electric guitar. With her hands free, she started singing “Dreamer,” the barbershop-pop tune that opens her second album, “Bewitched.” As she moved across the stage, she struck a new pose for each line: bending forward at the waist, as if to share a morsel of gossip; leg straight, hip bent; head turned sideways, as if mid-sigh.The act of posing is a key component in the Laufey equation. So is the big sigh.If you are one of the millions who have fallen for Laufey (pronounced LAY-vay) in the past 12 months, you are probably online enough to consume a good deal of your music through 15-second video clips; young enough to feel powerfully seen by a song about the catastrophe of a crush; and only vaguely aware of the midcentury pop repertoire that she so precisely draws upon.Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, 24, is a cellist and multi-instrumentalist who grew up between Washington and Reykjavik. Half-Chinese and half-Icelandic, she is a third-generation musician, and as a youngster she often tagged along to her violinist mother’s orchestra rehearsals. She studied music business at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and when the pandemic sent students home, she returned to Iceland and began posting videos of herself covering tunes by Billie Eilish and Chet Baker — always in a throwback style swelling with overdubbed vocal harmonies and jazzy acoustic guitar. (Mind that word, jazzy. We’ll come back to it.) Amid the pandemic, this content was a comfort, and a following developed fast.Laufey likes to remind interviewers that she considers herself “old-fashioned.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLaufey’s vibe is somehow both hopelessly nostalgic and ideally suited to our extremely online world, where huge feelings are best delivered in Pop Tart-size bites. Almost everything except her lyrics — which sometimes mention social media, or the disappointments of digital-age dating — would have sounded at home on the American radio waves between 1940 and the mid-1960s, before the Beatles and the Stones started breaking the rules.Before 2020, Laufey hadn’t written much original music, but as a talented, classically trained musician, she discovered a knack for piecing pleasant parts into a satisfying whole. (The jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely in September released an erudite explainer of the science of her music, and he had little trouble decoding its DNA.)One of the first original tunes Laufey wrote was “Street by Street,” which she recorded with the help of a music production major living across the hall, the day she left Berklee’s campus for lockdown. That song became popular in Iceland, and then all over the internet. It showed up on the EP that she released the following year, “Typical of Me,” which pulled some yellowy pages out of the old jazz and bossa nova books, but also felt lodged in a wishful dream of Laufey’s own making. With an unfussy drum machine sound and a Corinne Bailey Rae-adjacent grooviness, there was something distinct and precarious about this music. Like most of us in that moment, it wasn’t sure where it stood or what the future held.Since then, you could say that her process has become subsumed into her profile. She now has over three million followers on TikTok, plus another two million on Instagram, and her feed has gradually turned into a kind of direct-to-fan service. Putting a premium on relatability, posting almost daily, Laufey — who writes music primarily with the composing partner Spencer Stewart — says that her followers dictate much of what she writes and covers. When someone asked her to write a song about being a love interest’s second choice, she came up with “Second Best,” a doleful and catchy but hard-to-place tune from “Bewitched,” on which she laments, “You were my everything/I was your second best.”Onstage at Town Hall, Laufey sang in front of a dark-blue drape dotted with little stars and a set of big movie-set spotlights. It looked like a set from “La La Land.” (A follower recently said her music sounded “like if La La Land had a sequel”; she loved this feedback.) Joined by a four-piece band and a string quartet, she alternated between guitar, piano and cello, playing each one with an expert’s touch. She motored expediently through a set that fit 17 songs into almost exactly 75 minutes (not including a short encore).About 70 percent of the audience was in their 20s, but there was also a significant contingent of older listeners who seemed grateful to see that Laufey’s pleasant, everyday-can-be-Christmastime aesthetic had caught on with a younger crowd. We live, after all, in messy and anxious times. Laufey’s amalgam of bossa nova, romantic pop and show tunes is here to reassure us that, yes, some old standards do still apply. (Mid-set she played “I Wish You Love” and quoted “Misty.”)Laufey says that her followers dictate much of what she writes and covers. Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLaufey likes to remind interviewers that she considers herself “old-fashioned,” a term that, on her lips, sounds like it’s splitting the difference between quirky and virtuous. She talks often about her love for Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, and their influence is obvious. But the swooning syrup of her voice has a lot more to do with, say, Patti Page, the grande dame contralto of the 1950s, known for “Tennessee Waltz” and “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”None of this is necessarily a problem. But it can be off-putting to hear Laufey (and her now formidable P.R. apparatus) proclaim herself an ambassador of jazz, a genre that she says has been “gate-kept” by an older crowd. “Jazz music was created in the first place as kind of like a deviation from rules, and something that was meant to be free and for everyone,” she told the podcast host Zach Sang recently. “So the fact that it’s become something that feels like it isn’t for everyone is kind of sad, actually. And I think is the death of the genre.”Equal access, openness, nonjudgmentalism. All important. And yes, it’s possible that her music will bring some listeners to the very much alive and wide-open creative landscape that is jazz. But Laufey — who does not improvise on her instrument, play music with even an ounce of swing rhythm or engage with the chancy collaborative spirit that is the real joy of jazz — is not the music’s ambassador. She is, in fact, making a kind of antiquated radio pop and calling it jazz — precisely the kind of thing that holds the music back, and leaves casual listeners confused about how jazz could possibly still be relevant.Meanwhile, there is a bumper crop of young, alchemical jazz singers who are smartly engaging with the past, reinventing it in the present, and trying to figure out how its values might translate in our increasingly isolated, digital future. Samara Joy, who won the Grammy for best new artist this year, knows what it means to celebrate the classics while pushing ahead. Esperanza Spalding has been doing it with peerless creativity for over a decade, and she too has caught on with young people by the millions. Melanie Charles’s live show is bold and joyous and well-crafted, but anything but careful or predictable.The biggest tell at Town Hall was how Laufey played her own tunes: more or less exactly as they appeared on record. It seemed not unrelated to her process on social media: When your followers are dictating what you make next, then you’re trapped in a loop of familiarity. What’s known of you is also what’s expected, and that becomes what you make. To take her music to another level, Laufey may want to take a cue from Mitski — a musician she has covered and for whom she’s expressed admiration — and log off for a while. More