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      ‘Good Night, Oscar’ Review: Sean Hayes With Demerol and Cadenzas

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      The “Will & Grace” star is unrecognizable in a Broadway biography of Oscar Levant: wit, pianist and “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.Certainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly. “America’s greatest wit.” “A goddamn lion.” A Horowitz at the piano “with a grace and an ease that even Chopin might envy.”Fulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.Pathos not being much of a dramatic engine, Wright works very hard, if fictionally, to crank up the stakes. It’s 1958, on the day during sweeps week when “The Tonight Show,” with its host, Jack Paar, will make its West Coast debut. Paar’s marquee guest, leading a lineup that also includes the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the ventriloquist Señor Wences, is Levant, who two hours before showtime hasn’t arrived. NBC’s president, Robert Sarnoff, threatens to replace him with the popular bandleader Xavier Cugat.But where Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) sees Levant as unreliably neurotic, and thus unappealing to the network and the audience, Paar (Ben Rappaport) sees him as an artist whose unreliability and neurosis are exactly his strengths. He’s the national id: the man Americans hope they’ll catch “saying something on television they know damn well that you can’t say on television.” He’s good for ratings; no wonder Paar calls him his favorite mental patient.That line is no joke. It is only thanks to the machinations of Levant’s wife, June (Emily Bergl, excellent), that Oscar has been sprung on a four-hour pass from the institution he currently calls home. When he finally arrives at the studio, with a miffed orderly (Marchánt Davis) in tow, he’s strung out, rumpled and morose. June calls him “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Hayes and Emily Bergl as Levant’s wife, June.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHayes, no longer the adorable sprite from “Will and Grace,” has clearly made a careful study of Levant’s mannerisms, many of them the result of a longtime addiction to painkillers. The work is startling, but the performance is less an inhabitation of character than a nonstop loop of perfectly rendered facial tics, trembling hands and compulsive gestures. His speech is pressured, his mood explosive, his target anything that crosses his path — including himself. Past this stockade of behavior, little of an inner life can get out.To address the built-in problem of revealing such a locked-down soul, and in the manner of period psychiatric melodramas like “Now Voyager” and “Bigger Than Life,” Wright gives Levant occasional reality breaks and hallucinations. Most involve George Gershwin: Levant’s friend, benefactor and bête noire, dead 20 years yet still a kind of Oedipal rival. “I’m scared to death of failure,” Gershwin’s glamorous ghost (John Zdrojeski) says. “But you? You don’t mind it.”Whether or not Levant minded it, it’s true that by Gershwin standards he failed; few people today remember him. Huge swathes of dramaturgically suspicious exposition must thus be rolled out to cover the gaps. “I know the critics all say your greatest performance was in ‘An American in Paris,’” a young production assistant (Alex Wyse) tells Levant, and us. “That musical sequence — the Concerto in F — it’s a showstopper!”When characters start informing other characters of what they would obviously already know, and (as often happens here as well) braying madly at mild jokes, something is wrong.What that is becomes clearer when, in the second half of the 100-minute play, Levant finally sits down for the live broadcast, after proving himself merely tiresome for the first half. The music starts, the curtain rises, the lights come up, and he’s still tiresome. Firing off one-liners, especially nasty ones, is no mark of special genius; thousands of comedians do it. Nor does the fact that the one-liners come from a man who is obviously deeply troubled make them especially funny. For me, watching Hayes as Levant — like watching kinescopes of Levant himself — is excruciatingly sad.The weight of shoring up the point of the play thus falls heavily on Levant’s pianism — and Hayes’s. Peterson, the director, has been building up to it from the beginning. The nested shoeboxes of Rachel Hauck’s handsome set, representing Paar’s office and, when that breaks away, Levant’s dressing room, now disappear entirely to reveal a fully padded television studio with a Steinway center stage. Hayes steps up to it and, after a last, mortifying fight with Gershwin’s ghost, proceeds to play a seven-minute excerpt from “Rhapsody in Blue.”The playwright illuminates Levant’s inner world with occasional hallucinations, most involving Levant’s long-dead friend and rival George Gershwin (John Zdrojeski).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s fine.Even if it had been mind-blowing, I don’t see how it would have given “Good Night, Oscar” a satisfying shape; issues raised in theatrical terms want to be resolved in them, too. Wright has followed that principle in “I Am My Own Wife,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, and in his book for the unconventional musical version of “Grey Gardens,” each of which uses the raw materials it was built from to fashion an organic conclusion.“Good Night, Oscar” can’t get there, but it understands the problem. A coda following the concerto may not tie up the larger themes of genius and insanity but does resolve some relationships in the way you would expect from a melodrama set in 1958. Selflessness and renunciation are involved. Jokes that were formerly just origami with words now become ways of slipping painful truths past the interpersonal censors.In those last few minutes only, you see into Levant’s soul. It is not a soul made for television, though that’s how most people of his time would have known him. Somehow they accepted him as he was, which may not have been a blessing. When asked, on a 1965 episode of “What’s My Line,” “Have you ever managed to make a great deal of use out of various illnesses that you’ve had?” he answered, “My health is the concern of the nation.” The blindfolded panel knew immediately who he was.I only wish after “Good Night, Oscar” we did.Good Night, OscarThrough Aug. 27 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; goodnightoscar.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. 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      How Fred again.. Jolted Dance Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe most rapid ascent in dance music over the past three years belongs to the British producer and songwriter Fred again.., a protégé of Brian Eno and a onetime songwriter for Ed Sheeran and others who has built a formidable catalog using found vocals — from YouTube, Instagram or regular conversation — as the skeleton for high-energy club-pop.Fred’s main innovations aren’t necessarily musical, though. They’re his open-eared and arms-outstretched approach to production, which has made room for a wide range of collaborators, and his sense of live whimsy — whether announcing a last-minute rave with Skrillex and Four Tet at Madison Square Garden, or playing a peculiarly intimate set on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about dance music’s new wave of big-tent ambition, how Fred again.. turns unlikely source material into catchy pop, and how far interpersonal good will can go as a music-making tool.Guest:Foster Kamer, the editor in chief of Futurism, who writes for New York magazine, The New York Times and othersConnect 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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      Morgan Wallen Fends Off Metallica for a Seventh Week at No. 1

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      The country star has two releases in the Top 5 of Billboard’s album chart, continuing a dominating run anchored by streaming.The country star Morgan Wallen fended off a challenge from Metallica to hold the top spot on the Billboard album chart for a seventh week with “One Thing at a Time,” his latest streaming blockbuster.In its most recent week out, “One Thing at a Time” had the equivalent of 166,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total, a composite that incorporates both streams and old-fashioned unit sales, included 202 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a complete package. Since its release, “One Thing at a Time” has been streamed nearly two billion times in the United States.For weeks, Wallen has stayed at No. 1 by holding off challenges from new releases by the alt-pop singer Melanie Martinez, the rapper NF and the K-pop acts Jimin and Twice.Metallica posed more of a threat to Wallen than any other with “72 Seasons,” its first studio album in seven years. It opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 146,000 sales, including 16 million streams and 134,000 copies sold as complete albums. The album’s publicity campaign included a four-night residency on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and an online “Metallica Logo Generator” that let fans render their chosen text in the band’s signature lightning-bolt font.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” is No. 3, Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 4 and Wallen’s last album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is in fifth place. More

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      Review: Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra Gets Ambitious at Carnegie Hall

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      After decades away, the musicians, led by Kent Nagano, were back in the United States to perform works by Sean Shepherd, along with Beethoven and Brahms.“Go big or go home” must have been the rallying cry for the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall Saturday night. The last time this group appeared in the United States was more than 50 years ago, in 1967. So for this program, the Hamburg musicians, led by the conductor Kent Nagano, went large-scale ambitious, performing the world premiere of the American composer Sean Shepherd’s t12- movement “An Einem Klaren Tag — On a Clear Day” for cello, choruses and orchestra.Here, that ambition demanded the participation of no fewer than five choruses culled from both Germany and New York: the Audi Jugendchorakademie (a youth chorus sponsored by the car manufacturer); Alsterspatzen (the children and youth choir of the Hamburg State Opera); the Dresdner Kreuzchor (a boys’ choir that dates back to the 13th century); the Young ClassX ensemble (a youth choir from Hamburg); and the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. By my count, more than 200 instrumentalists and singers were jammed onto the Carnegie stage, plus Nagano and the soloist Jan Vogler on cello, for the nearly hourlong work.The concert began with the music of a Hamburg native: Johannes Brahms. The orchestra performed his brief, sonically luminous and emotionally ambiguous “Schicksalslied” (Song of Destiny) with the Audi singers. Written in three movements with an ancient Greek-inspired text by Friedrich Hölderlin, “Schicksalslied” descends from radiant joyfulness into dark despair before resolving into something akin to solace. Nagano, deeply mindful of shape and phrasing, coaxed the strings into producing a warm glow that seemed to be lit from within.Nagano and the orchestra continued that careful, deeply intentional sculpting of rhythm, articulation and dynamics in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. In a work full of lithe charm, the Hamburg musicians, who also serve as the orchestra of the Hamburg State Opera, were able to showcase a more exuberantly playful side of their collective personality. After all, this is a symphony in which Beethoven, for all his callbacks to the structure and style of Haydn and Mozart, takes a radical tack: the Eighth lacks a slow movement, and dances at its own singular pace. Even with that whimsical spirit, the musicians created each moment with great deliberation.That pinpoint precision subsided in the sweep of Shepherd’s massive and earnest piece. Mostly using poetry by the German writer Ulla Hahn, Shepherd calls “On a Clear Day” both “a plea for compassion toward our fellow human” and an outcry against environmental calamity. Despite Vogler’s presence, it’s not a concerto per se; rather, Shepherd used the cello more as an actor who steps into a variety of roles to present occasional plaintive and virtuosic soliloquies against a colossal backdrop: here, a melancholic companion for the singers, trading a melody back and forth; there, channeling the spirit of a beleaguered Mother Earth.Shepherd has a fantastic gift for orchestral color; for example, in the sixth movement, he juxtaposes a rapturous, lyrical passage for solo cello with winds, brass, harp, piano and percussion — including glockenspiel and sleigh bells — to glittering, mysterious effect. The piece is so expansive in both size and scope, however, that it sometimes felt like Nagano was less a conductor than the captain of a giant cruise ship, wrestling his oversized vessel into a modest port. The even keel at which he had led the Brahms and Beethoven had vanished.Hamburg Philharmonic State OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Now Celebrated, Julius Eastman’s Music Points to a New Canon

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      The 92nd Street Y, New York and Wild Up presented a three-concert festival of works by this pioneering Black queer composer. What next?At last, it no longer feels accurate to describe the music of Julius Eastman as “long lost.”We’re firmly enjoying some new period of appreciation for the pioneering but once-overlooked work of this Black queer composer and multi-instrumentalist; archival recordings and new interpretations are widely available, and the art world more broadly has taken an enthusiastic interest in him. And at the 92nd Street Y, New York, this weekend, Eastman was celebrated with a three-concert series by the ensemble Wild Up, called “Radical Adornment.”

      Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy by Wild UpThe first two programs, both of which were well attended, presented works that, in recent years, have re-emerged as pillars of the American Minimalist repertoire. Friday’s show offered the evening-length “Femenine” — gentle at the outset, then thundering (if overamplified) as conducted by an energetic Christopher Rountree. And on Saturday afternoon, the rollicking, pop-aware “Stay On It” received a luxurious, 20-minute reading that was even better than on Wild Up’s recording of the piece.These concerts capitalized on Wild Up’s devoted attention to the Eastman catalog, which so far has included two portrait albums released on the New Amsterdam label. (A third volume, also excellent, is due for release in June, and a total of seven are planned.)As if to note that there is still work to be done in the Eastman revival, Wild Up spent Saturday evening performing an immersive, five-hour take on “Buddha” — an enigmatic piece built from spare melodic lines, written out within an egg-shaped oval that Eastman drew around the margins of a one-page score. Like “Femenine” and other works, it invites interpretive choices and improvisation; and by now, this group expertly responds to such calls.As you might expect, that meditative “Buddha” finale was the most sparsely attended of the three events. By the end — precisely at midnight — the audience had thinned out to only a handful of attendees, some of whom were musicians who had played in earlier shifts of the relay-style performance.Yet this marathon set also thrillingly shone a spotlight on the players who had done so much to make the prior concerts, and Wild Up’s recent recordings, so captivating. And it corrected some of the concerns I had had about amplification issues during “Femenine.” I had left that Friday show thinking that I hadn’t heard enough of the saxophonist Shelley Washington — in part because of the heavy prominence of electric keyboard in the amplified mix — but “Buddha” offered a form of redress. Specifically, I cherished the chance to hear her supple approach in moments of mellow melody as well as in passages of forceful group exultation.Tariq Al-Sabir during Eastman’s “Buddha” on Saturday night.Joseph SinnottElsewhere, the violist Mona Tian — an expert in the string quartet music of Wadada Leo Smith — was liable to place a dollop of edgy timbre or rhythmic pulsations into the dronescape whenever things threatened to go slack. And crucial to the opening hours of “Buddha” were the saxophonists Erin Rogers and Patrick Shiroishi. Rogers’s own music is often hyper urgent and fast-acting, but in the relaxed time scale of this performance, she savored every extended-technique tool in her embouchure. Shiroishi led fiery episodes and often grinned while listening to Rogers’s solo playing.For stretches of that performance, I longed for a recording of this “Buddha,” and had a similar sensation during the Saturday afternoon set, when Richard Valitutto took on Eastman’s through-composed, fully notated “Piano 2.” He gave the proper sternness to Eastman’s thick systems of melody, strewn between the hands in syncopated passages. But he also had a theatrical sense of swagger when encountering jaunty lines that press forward with parallel thrust — a quality not as present on an otherwise excellent recording of the work by Joseph Kubera, a contemporary of Eastman’s.And as the metaphorical curtain was coming down on Saturday, I started thinking about the kinds of Eastman concerts I have yet to hear. Up until now, the focus has reasonably been on simply presenting his music. That was the case at the 92nd Street Y, as it was in 2018 at the Kitchen for the festival “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental.” But now that bigger institutions have taken notice of Eastman, it is time to turn curatorial attention to the broader context in which he worked.In his time, Eastman was a rare Black artist in the otherwise mostly white classical avant-garde. But as George E. Lewis noted in his forward to the scholarly essay collection “Gay Guerrilla,” edited by Mary Jane Leach and Renée Levine Packer, Eastman was not the only one. Benjamin Patterson was a part of Fluxus. Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble, which played music by Eastman and counted him as a member in the 1970s, also worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective that also nurtured composers like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and Wadada Leo Smith. (Gallingly, Braxton’s 75th birthday passed in 2020 without an appropriate New York City retrospective, even after pandemic restrictions on performances were lifted.)What would an Eastman festival sound like that also included the works of all those artists, many of whom are still alive? They have written fully notated works like “Piano 2” and improvisatory, conceptual pieces like “Buddha.”The problem, as ever, is one of committed resources. Last season, the New York Philharmonic played Eastman’s recently reconstructed Symphony No. 2 during Black History Month. But there is no sign of a recording; for now, just a minute of that performance lives on YouTube. And what is stopping American orchestras from broadly taking up the music of Braxton and Mitchell while those artists are still around?The 92nd Street Y has a role to play in this as well. And the broad success of its Eastman festival with Wild Up should encourage it to continue along a similar path. That way, in addition to the small matter of putting on exciting shows, it might also help classical music avoid the future problem of needing to belatedly celebrate other American composers who died with too little recognition. More

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      Review: In ‘La Bohème’ at the Met, the Star Is in the Pit

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, is conducting a beloved production of Puccini’s perennial classic for the first time.Winter grips Paris at the start of the third act of Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The shock of the cold is there in the loud, abrupt pair of notes as the curtain sweeps open — a slap across a frozen face. A soft but terse march in the flute and harp is a pricking chill, which deepens in a muted chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings, then the woodwinds. The cellos shiver, almost inaudibly, below. In just a few seconds, Puccini has conjured February, frigid and lonely.The Metropolitan Opera has put on “La Bohème” nearly 1,400 times, more than any other work; its players could do this moment in their sleep. But rarely are those chords at the beginning of Act III as poised and precisely tuned as they were when the company revived Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved production on Friday evening, their resonance as they built so evocative of the echoing bells Puccini calls for soon after.That tiny refinement is the kind of effect that needs real rehearsal to achieve, but “Bohème” doesn’t usually get that. For an expensive repertory factory like the Met to function, not every piece can be given equal attention; some, particularly the core Italian standards, must be thrown onstage with very little attention at all. The result is that this Puccini chestnut tends to get done on a high level but not the highest, with experienced but not starry maestros.Not so on Friday, when “La Bohème” was led for the first time at the Met by its current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin — with the resources, energy and focus that always attend productions overseen by a company’s artistic leader.This hasn’t happened in decades. James Levine conducted “Bohème” more than 40 times at the Met, including the premiere of the Zeffirelli production in 1981. But not since Levine led a benefit performance in 1992 — about 400 “Bohèmes” ago — has a music director of the company been on the podium for it.So there was an overall sense of polish and verve on Friday, particularly in the orchestra: the tanginess of the winds when the bohemians’ landlord is regaling them in Act I, the delicacy of the strings at the beginning of Mimì’s aria introducing herself to Rodolfo. Like Nézet-Séguin’s approach to Verdi’s “La Traviata,” his “Bohème” is characterized by close juxtapositions of the sumptuous slowing down of tempos and furious bounding ahead. The goal of these back-and-forth extremes of speed seems to be feverish intensity, but the result is more often an atmospheric, even lightheaded dreaminess, beautiful and detailed but a bit unnatural.As Rodolfo and Marcello’s wistful duet began in the final act, for example, Nézet-Séguin pulled the reins until the music almost solidified into nostalgic amber: Time literally stopped. It is, he wrote on Instagram, “fulfilling my dream” to conduct this score at the Met, and there was throughout a sense of his lingering over it, however lovingly.The chorus, like the orchestra, was adroit, even in the Latin Quarter chaos of Act II. Best in the cast was the bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, his Colline solidly, capaciously and wittily sung. As Marcello, Davide Luciano seemed to be showing off the size of his substantial baritone by sometimes bellowing. Alexey Lavrov’s baritone, on the other hand, often vanished as Schaunard, and Sylvia D’Eramo had an expressive face but a wispy soprano as Musetta.There’s often a certain blandness to Stephen Costello’s calm, restrained tenor. But as his voice warmed through his performance as Rodolfo on Friday, what started off as coolness came to feel more like poignant reserve. The soprano Eleonora Buratto was a forthright rather than fragile Mimì, with muscular high notes tending toward the steel more often associated with Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”All in all, it was clear who the central figure of this “Bohème” was: the man waving the baton. These days, splashy contemporary operas and new productions get the spotlight — and get the music director. But for the sake of the company’s artistic health and vibrancy, it’s important to also have Nézet-Séguin in the pit for titles that too often get taken for granted.La BohèmeYannick Nézet-Séguin leads performances through May 14; the run continues through June 9 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Book Review: ‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,’ by Lucinda Williams

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      In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” the raw-voiced singer looks back on a contentious artistic life.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir, by Lucinda WilliamsLucinda Williams, the Grammy-winning 70-year-old songwriter, was born in Lake Charles, La. Her grandfathers were both preachers; one was a civil rights advocate. Her father, Miller Williams, was an award-winning poet. Her mother loved music and played the piano. Williams grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Utah, Chile and Mexico. On paper, it was an ideal upbringing for the artist she became: a nomadic touring musician whose songs draw on deep Southern roots, using matter-of-fact imagery to conjure tempestuous emotions.But her pedigree didn’t make her life fall neatly into place, as Williams recalls in her memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.” “I’ve held back from talking about my childhood over the decades of my life,” she notes. “I’ve written songs about it instead.” Williams’s mother was sexually abused as a child, she writes, and lived with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Her poet-professor father was a mentor and protector, but he also had a temper. Williams’s parents divorced after her father took up with one of his teenage students.In the title song of her best-selling album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” Williams sings about being a “Child in the back seat ’bout four or five years/Lookin’ out the window, little bit of dirt mixed with tears.” When her father first heard it, he told Williams that she was that crying little girl; until then, Williams hadn’t realized she was writing about herself. Williams’s memoir is as flinty, earthy and plain-spoken as her songs. She reveals the autobiographical underpinnings of some of her darkest lyrics, but she also tells a larger tale: of artistic determination battling personal insecurity; of misjudging and being misjudged by men and by the music business; and of steadfastly holding her own.She doesn’t give in: not on a trendy remix, not on her album cover photos, not on her instincts. She can handle being called difficult or “insane” even though, she admits, “There are times when I can bring an extra layer of unpredictable emotion to a situation that is already tough to begin with.” The lasting results are in her songs.Williams envisioned life as a musician soon after she picked up a guitar. She started performing folk songs in her teens. But even as she honed her own songwriting and built local reputations — in Texas and then in Los Angeles — she worked day jobs well into her 30s. Major labels rejected her, again and again, as being “too country for rock” but “too rock for country.”From the beginning — two low-budget Folkways albums she made in 1979 and 1980 — Williams sang about elemental subjects: desire, sorrow, love, traveling, survival, death. Some of her songs are kiss-offs; some offer regrets; some are elegies; some are takedowns. They’re always grounded in homely details. In “Hot Blood,” a bluesy outpouring of female lust, she sings about feeling “a cold chill” as she watches a guy just “fixin’ your flat with a tire iron.”It took an English punk label, Rough Trade, to release “Lucinda Williams,” her 1988 breakthrough album. A decade later, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” marked her commercial peak. But recording that album, she recalls in the memoir, was lengthy and fraught. Making records, she writes, “can test the limits and boundaries of everyone involved. I now understand that is normal.” Getting the sound Williams wanted on “Car Wheels” led to the breakup of her longtime band and clashes with two producers. Then contractual tangles delayed the release of the finished album for two years. Williams also nixed a video concept from the director Paul Schrader, deciding, “He was just another guy trying to impose his vision on a female artist. ‘Car Wheels’ did fine without a video.”Throughout her book, Williams recognizes her own appetites and mistakes. She writes about suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and bouts of depression, and she recognizes her weakness for the kind of boyfriend she calls “a poet on a motorcycle,” guys who often turned out to be cheaters, addicts or worse.She came through anyway. “That relationship was done, but I got a good song out of it,” she writes about one romantic debacle. Williams has been married since 2009 to her manager, producer and songwriting collaborator, Tom Overby.Although Williams finished her book in 2022, it doesn’t mention her 2020 stroke; she can no longer play guitar. But she returned to touring in 2021 and persists in writing songs; she’s releasing a new album in June. Her memoir shows how deep that grit runs.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir | By Lucinda Williams | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Crown | $28 More

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      Jessie Ware Centers Herself With ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’

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      The British singer and songwriter’s fifth album, “That! Feels Good!,” adds a soulful spin to her recent dance-floor music. Her offstage life is fueled by eggs, Lisa Vanderpump and musical theater.Onstage at Webster Hall in New York last fall, Jessie Ware glided through choreography in a faux-fur-trimmed turquoise caftan, and later swung a black whip while singing the title track from her 2020 disco LP, “What’s Your Pleasure?” Backstage, however, was a different vibe.“I had a bat mitzvah lesson in my dressing room,” the British singer and songwriter, 38, said in an interview last month. “That’s when your worlds are colliding.”Ware has become an expert at hilariously exposing the gap between the luxuriousness of her music and the realities of life as a touring musician, a mother of three young children, a cookbook author and a successful podcaster (“Table Manners,” co-hosted by her mother, Lennie, is in its 15th season).“What’s Your Pleasure?,” an album designed for escape, gave her music career a jolt. Her fifth LP — “That! Feels Good!,” out Friday — is a sequel of sorts, but the earlier album’s synth thump is joined by a new dimension: soulful, brassy warmth, often thanks to Kokoroko, an eight-piece band. “I’ve always longed to make soul music,” Ware said. “I’ve done bits and bobs of it, but this felt very focused and authentic.”Scrolling through a list of cultural influences on her phone in the bar of a New York hotel, Ware debated what to include. “You think Fran Lebowitz would be my friend if I put her in the Top 10?” she asked, before deciding, “She wouldn’t want to be my friend because I’m on my phone too much.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Photo BoothsI’m constantly trying to make my phone take pictures that look old and romantic, and the photo booth just does that. And also the fact that you can’t change it — I like that, and that they’re these four pictures that can take you back to a nostalgic moment. My husband did a photography degree but he’s [expletive] at taking photos of me: terrible angles, manages to always take them when my eyes are half open. What I’ve just started doing is taking selfies of myself, but pretending that I’m being caught off guard so that I can get really good photos with my children.2‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’It’s dirty and naughty and I probably should be doing something else, but I’m there, invested in the Kathy and Kyle drama. And I love it. It centers me. And my husband walks in and he’s like, What are you watching? And I’m like, Don’t judge me, these are really important women that are telling very important stories and they’re very entertaining. I love Mauricio. I live for the moments when he’s stoned. Dorit has really grown on me, I think she’s got real wit. I really miss Lisa Vanderpump. I loved her.3EggsBecause they’re versatile. Because you can have them at any meal. Because I wrote a book called “Omelet.” They solve a lot of problems. I feel at home with an egg anywhere. I said this in my book, but if there was a crisis, my mum would be like, “Do you want an omelet, darling?” So it became like this thing where like my brother was like, I don’t want a [expletive] omelet.4My Saved Places on Google MapsI hate missing out on good food in a new place. It’s kind of slightly stressful. When we were on holiday for our honeymoon, I wasn’t a bridezilla, I was a honeymoonzilla. But I didn’t have the Google Maps saved lists that could have made my life easier. So when I’m on tour, I save places that people recommend. It’s so good for being able to work out your route for the day, like, I’m going to go to this coffee shop, then I’m going to go to the famous cemetery in Buenos Aires, and then I’m going to walk from there.5MatineesJamie Lee Curtis said that whole thing about like, Why doesn’t Coldplay do a matinee? I completely agree with her. Apparently Little Mix have always been doing matinees. Much respect to them. The idea of going onstage at 9 p.m. sometimes fills me with total dread, when I’m usually in my pajamas watching “Real Housewives” or something. Can you call a lunch a matinee? Anything that’s, like, in the day. Then you have time to digest it, understand it, enjoy it. But also time for that eight hours sleep.6Handwritten LettersI don’t do it enough, but I appreciate them so much. And handwritten cards. Emails, I’m over it, I know that that’s how we function. Text messages, I get it. But there’s nothing more thoughtful than a handwritten letter. I think I read that Reese Witherspoon did this, but I write my children a letter every year. They’ve all got their own book, and I write them a letter, mainly so I can remember what they did in the year. Because I know that when they get to like, 21, then they’re going to ask me and I’ll be like, I don’t know what your first word was.7MusicalsIt’s kind of where I began singing. It’s something that’s really inspired how I make music — that idea of escapism and the idea of melodrama combined with emotion. I like that fantasy aspect of it, that it can kind of elevate. If you say you hate musical theater, I’m going to question our friendship, because I don’t believe that you’ve gone to see good enough musical theater.8‘The Traitors’I’m talking about the first season of the British series. If anybody played the game at university called Mafia, where you have to say who the killer is and they have to kill other people whilst you’re like, staring? The premise is that, and we would all be very rich if whilst we were getting stoned at uni, we thought that could be a great format for television.9Foreign PharmaciesThere was a time when you could get Valium in India when I was in my 20s. That was a fantastic time. But also for the products, particularly in the French pharmacies, the beauty products. I mean, you can now get Bioderma everywhere now, but there was a time where everybody would come back from Fashion Week with loads of Bioderma. I love perusing the aisles of a foreign pharmacy and getting any kind of insect repellent, sunglasses, chewing gum.10Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge, or the KnockoffI got it for my husband for Christmas, but I wear it. It’s obscenely expensive. One day my beautician came ’round to give me a wax, and I said, “You smell really good!” She went, “Oh babe, I got it in Zara.” I was like, You’re kidding me. Zara has done a knockoff, so you don’t need to spend the bloody amount of money that I did. It smelled exactly the same. More