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      Jim Gordon, Top Rock Drummer With a Troubled Life, Dies at 77

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      He was an elite studio musician who played with A-list artists and helped write the Eric Clapton hit “Layla.” But his life was shattered by mental illness and a murder conviction.Jim Gordon, a talented but troubled drummer who was ubiquitous in the recording studios of the 1960s and ’70s and who, as a member of Eric Clapton’s band Derek and the Dominos, helped write the romantic ballad “Layla” — but who suffered from schizophrenia and spent nearly 40 years in prison, convicted of murdering his mother — died on Monday in a prison medical facility in Vacaville, Calif. He was 77.His death was announced by Robert Merlis, a publicist for Joel Selvin, the author of a forthcoming biography of Mr. Gordon. Mr. Selvin said he did not know the cause.“When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived,” Mr. Clapton wrote in “Clapton: The Autobiography” (2007), “I think it’s true, beyond anybody.”Tall and muscular, with a head full of curly hair, Mr. Gordon first attracted attention in 1963 on an English tour with the Everly Brothers. Over the next 15 years, he worked on studio recordings with A-list artists, including John Lennon (“Imagine”), George Harrison (“All Things Must Pass”), the Beach Boys (“Pet Sounds”), Harry Nilsson (“Nilsson Schmilsson”), Carly Simon (“No Secrets”) and Steely Dan (“Pretzel Logic”).As part of the informal group of elite Los Angeles studio musicians that came to be known as the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Gordon could book several sessions a day around the city. .He backed Joe Cocker on his “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour and performed with Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa, who nicknamed him Skippy for his All-American demeanor and his all-American looks. And for several months in 1971 he was a member of the British rock band Traffic.“He had a surgical, scientific skill on the drums,” Mr. Selvin said by phone, “and he had an extraordinary gift of intuition. Every time he played on a record, he brought something special to it.”After Mr. Gordon did a stint with the white soul band Delaney & Bonnie, with whom Mr. Clapton also recorded and toured, Mr. Gordon became a member of Derek and the Dominos, the band Mr. Clapton formed in 1970, along with the singer and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock and the bassist Carl Radle. The band released  only one studio album, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” featuring Duane Allman on second guitar, in 1970.“Layla,” released as a single, rose to No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the next year.    The credit for writing “Layla” went to Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon, but its instrumental second movement, called the “Piano Exit,” was composed by Mr. Gordon and the singer Rita Coolidge, his girlfriend at the time. As she recalled in her autobiography, “Delta Lady” (2016, with Michael Walker), Mr. Gordon created a melody, to which she responded with a countermelody “that answered and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo.”Mr. Gordon and Ms. Coolidge made a cassette demo of what they intended to be a separate song and gave it to Mr. Clapton. Ms. Coolidge did not know what became of it until she heard “Layla” on the radio and learned that she had received no credit.  She was infuriated.“What they’d clearly done,” she wrote, “ was take the song Jim and I had written, jettisoned the lyrics, and tacked it on to the end of Eric’s song.”When Mr. Clapton released the album “Unplugged” in 1992, his acoustic version of “Layla” peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. When “Layla” received the Grammy Award for best rock song the next year, Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon shared the award as songwriters, but Ms. Coolidge’s role received no acknowledgment.Derek and the Dominos around the time they recorded their one and only album, in 1970. From left: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Mr. Gordon and Carl Radle.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesJames Beck Gordon was born on July 14, 1945, in Elizabeth, N.J., and grew up in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His father, John, was an accountant. His mother, Osa Marie (Beck) Gordon, was a pediatric nurse.As a boy, Jim made a set of drums from garbage cans and played them until his parents bought him a drum kit. He started performing professionally as a teenager. In 1963, he was playing with Frankie Knight and the Jesters when Joey Paige, the bassist for the Everly Brothers, scouted him at a club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Soon Jim, at just 17, was off to England with the Everly Brothers for a tour that also included Little Richard and Bo Diddley.At some point during the next 15 years, Mr. Gordon started hearing voices — most menacingly and hauntingly, that of his mother — and displaying erratic behavior. He interrupted a recording session by telling his fellow musicians, “You’re the devil”; he punched Ms. Coolidge in the eye with such force that she was lifted off the floor and slammed into a wall.The sound of his mother’s insistent voice in his head tormented him, causing him pain and leaving his unable to play his drums, according to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994. He was treated at hospitals. Work dried up, but he was able to get by on the royalties from “Layla.”“The symptoms were getting so powerful, starting about 1975 and 1976,” said Mr. Selvin, a former pop music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. “It was an extraordinary battle. Command hallucinations are the most extreme in all of mental illness.”Mr. Gordon was also taking drugs. “I guess I was an alcoholic,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Before, I was drinking every night, but I wasn’t getting up in the morning for a drink; I would put a needle in my arm. When I stopped taking the heroin, I began to drink all day.”On the night of June 3, 1983, he attacked his mother at her home in North Hollywood, first banging her head with a hammer and  then stabbing her with a knife. “When I remember the crime, it’s like a dream,” he told The Inquirer. “I can remember going through what happened in that space and time, and it seems kind of detached, like I was going through it on some other plane. It didn’t seem real.”He told Rolling Stone that he had felt that he was “being guided like a zombie.”He was found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite having been diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic, he did not qualify for an insanity defense based on California law at the time. He was sentenced in 1984 to 16 years to life and later denied parole several times.“This is not a murder case,” Scott Furstman, Mr. Gordon’s lawyer, told The Los Angeles Times after the verdict. “This case is a tragedy.”Mr. Gordon is survived by his daughter, Amy, and his brother, John Jr. His marriages to Jill Barabe and Renee Armand ended in divorce. More

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      Met Opera Ordered to Pay Anna Netrebko $200,000 for Canceled Performances

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      The company cut ties with the star Russian soprano for her refusal to denounce Vladimir Putin after the invasion of Ukraine. An arbitrator said it must pay her under the terms of her contract.The Metropolitan Opera has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko more than $200,000 for performances it canceled last year after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.The arbitrator, in a decision issued last month that has not been previously reported, ruled that the Met should compensate Netrebko for 13 canceled performances — including appearances in “Don Carlo” this season and “La Forza del Destino” and “Andrea Chénier” next season — because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay performers even if they later decide not to engage them.The Met had argued that Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, was not entitled to payment because of her refusal to comply with the company’s demand after the invasion of Ukraine that she denounce Putin, which it said had violated the company’s conduct clause. Netrebko had endorsed Putin for president in 2012 and had spoken glowingly of him before the invasion.The arbitrator, Howard C. Edelman, found that “there is no doubt she was a Putin supporter, as she had a right to be.” But he added that aligning with Putin was “certainly not moral turpitude or worthy, in and of itself, of actionable misconduct.”Netrebko had been seeking an additional $400,000 in fees for engagements in coming seasons that had been discussed but not formally agreed to, including leading roles in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and “Tosca,” as well as Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” Netrebko earned the Met’s current fee for top artists of about $15,000 a performance.But the arbitrator found that Netrebko was not entitled to fees for those performances because the contracts had not been executed. In addition, he imposed a penalty of nearly $30,000 on Netrebko for making “highly inappropriate” statements after the invasion, including sharing a text on social media that used an expletive to refer to her Western critics, whom she called “as evil as blind aggressors.”In addition to endorsing Putin, Netrebko has occasionally lent support to his policies. When in 2014 she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by Russian separatists, she was photographed holding a separatist flag.The Met did not comment on the specifics of the ruling but defended its decision to cancel Netrebko’s performances.“Although our contracts are ‘pay or play,’ we didn’t think it was morally right to pay Netrebko anything considering her close association with Putin,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.He added: “It’s an artistic loss for the Met not having her singing here. But there’s no way that either the Met or the majority of its audience would tolerate her presence.”Netrebko’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Sam Wheeler, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union that represented Netrebko, praised the decision, saying it would help protect the rights of artists seeking compensation for canceled engagements.“‘Pay-or-play’ is the bedrock of our collective bargaining agreements across the country, and we will always defend ‘pay-or-play’ provisions to the fullest extent possible,” he said in a statement.Netrebko, a major star and box office draw, still has a relatively busy performing schedule, though she continues to face protests and calls that she be banned from the global stage. A planned concert this month in Taiwan was canceled at the last minute because of concerns about her connections to Putin. She is set to perform a recital at La Scala, in Milan, on Sunday, and will return there this summer for a production of “Macbeth.” Her engagements next season include a concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus, and appearances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria.Facing a series of cancellations in the West last year, she sought to distance herself from Putin, issuing a statement saying that she had met the president only a few times and that she was not “allied with any leader of Russia.” She also canceled her appearances in Russia. But she has avoided directly criticizing Putin or addressing her record of support for him.Separately, the Met announced on Friday that it was firing Netrebko’s husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, from a production of “Tosca” set to open on March 30. Eyvazov, who had been engaged to play the role of the painter Cavaradossi in six performances, will be replaced by Matthew Polenzani. Rehearsals for the production are to begin on Monday.Gelb said that he had hoped Eyvazov would withdraw from the production but that he had decided to fire him primarily because of comments he made last year criticizing the soprano Angel Blue, who withdrew from a production of “Aida” at the Arena di Verona after photos of Netrebko and other artists performing there in dark makeup circulated on social media.Gelb also said that Eyvazov’s association with Netrebko was problematic and that he did not want to disrespect the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who will sing the role of Tosca in four performances.Eyvazov’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment; the Met said he would be compensated for the canceled “Tosca” performances. More

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      The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen

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      Listen to This ArticleAs soon as Martin Sharp opened the file, he knew the ice had been singing all summer.Several months earlier, Sharp — at that point, in 2009, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta for nearly two decades — had burrowed a cache of microphones into the Devon Ice Cap, a frozen mass in far northern Canada the size of Connecticut. Seven large microphones and GPS sensors monitored the rate of the melting ice atop the cap, while several seismic monitors sensed how the ice moved along the Earth, too. Almost as an afterthought, Sharp set up a little Sony hand-held recorder, hoping it might capture the essence of the frigid stillness where he often worked.The result teemed with surprises: A snow bunting perched on the rig and sang. Gulls circled above. And below, as deep ice gradually thawed, an unexpected symphony unspooled. Water trickled past the microphone, creating a vertiginous drone, while tiny bubbles — air trapped inside the ice, perhaps for centuries — exploded incessantly, creating an allegro of snaps and pops that conjured the electronic productions of Autechre and Aphex Twin. Sharp began playing a 20-minute tape during lectures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked for a copy, hoping to add sonic context to dry discussions about data and policy.“It gave people a different way into what I was talking about, other than just showing slides,” Sharp, 64, said with a chuckle by phone. “The sound conveyed what it was like to be there.”Between 1990 and 1993, Thomas Köner made a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked.Erinn SpringerIn recent years, the assorted and unexpected sounds of ice have periodically gone viral — the laserlike phenomenon of someone skating across thin ice, the shootout sensation of ice being dropped into a frozen hole, the meditative sighs of ice forming and popping inside a Swedish lake. But several scientists and musicians believe it all could have power beyond being mere online curios. Recordings of melting ice, splintering glaciers and cascading runoff could help predict the rate of climate change and sea-level rise; music made with such sounds, some hope, could lead listeners to rethink their relationship to nature. If more people can actually hear climate change through the once-unknown songs of failing ice, can they be inspired to help prevent it?“I’m privileged that I can go somewhere and study these glaciers, but what about people who have to use their imaginations?” asked Grant Deane, 61, a longtime researcher at the University of California‌‌, San Diego.Since 2009, he has plotted methods to use recordings of melting ice and calving glaciers — chunks splitting from the monolith’s edge above or below water — to document and predict the rate of loss and concomitant rise of sea levels. The planet is in a constant state of flux, of course, so melting ice and calving glaciers are natural processes, with changing seasons or epochs. But the glaciers Deane studies are receding at a rapid rate he attributes to greenhouse gases, and he believes it’s possible to hear that acceleration. He aims to build 12 substations along Greenland’s coast to chart the attrition of the island’s gargantuan ice sheet through sound.Such science, he warned, held only so much possible public sway. “When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems so far-off and unconnected from our everyday lives,” continued Deane, who has contributed recordings to immersive installations by the Canadian artist Mia Feuer. “How can people care about that when they’re dealing with immediate problems? Music can make those connections.”“These recordings may not be scientifically sound,” said the Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, “but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Erinn SpringerFOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Norwegian musician Jana Winderen has been at the forefront of transforming her straightforward recordings of glaciers and the land and water surrounding them into emotional records, poignant musical postcards from melting and cracking masses of ice. During a 2006 family vacation in Iceland, Winderen dipped a hydrophone — a sealed microphone that detects pressure changes underwater — under a glacier’s edge. She shushed her daughters, sloshing in nearby mud, so she could tease out the source of some plangent rumble.“It sounded like a loud engine, so I started looking for a tractor,” Winderen, 57, said recently, speaking by video in her studio from her family’s farm outside Oslo. “But I realized for the first time that the glacier is gliding — really, really slowly — on this water underneath sediments. And the sound has presence, like a creature. I totally fell in love.”A former aspiring marine biologist whose mother was an early member of the Norwegian environmental advocacy group Future in Our Hands, Winderen soon realized the transformative capabilities of such sounds. A photo of an iceberg, she recognized, was gorgeous; the brutal noise it made while breaking free from a glacier, however, could be harrowing. Even fusillades of tiny pops from escaping air proved evocative, as the frozen world gave way to heat. “People could close their eyes and be there with the ice, be present,” she said. “It wasn’t like I had just recorded something and brought it there.”Every time Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside. But she has never hoped to be a mere stenographer, simply playing back what she heard while suspended precariously in glacial crevasses or trying not to capsize off the coast of Greenland after icebergs hit the water. She processes raw recordings, turning them into extended collages. Her albums — particularly “Energy Field” from 2010, which occasionally calls to mind drum-less heavy metal or an untuned violin — unfurl as tone poems, giving her changing surroundings a spiritual gravitas.“I am not archiving that sound or this sound — that’s not interesting to me,” Winderen said. “It’s more interesting to be out there and listen, to figure out what’s happening and have an awareness of how much we don’t know.”For the veteran Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, it took an unprecedented Antarctic blizzard to accept the political potential of ice’s songs. Samartzis first visited the continent, through an arts fellowship in 2010, to map the acoustic environment of the Davis research station, one of Australia’s three outposts there. How, he wondered, did existence sound at this end of the earth?“I tried to render the experiences as authentically as possible,” Samartzis, 60, said by video during vacation in New Zealand. “So you have very detailed forensic recordings of the station — without wind, which I was very adept at removing.”But, as Samartzis admitted with a grin, bowdlerizing wind from the breeziest place in the world wasn’t very authentic. When he returned in February 2016, he intended to focus on wind itself, to log the ways it pulverized the place. He got his chance, during the strongest summertime blizzard ever witnessed there. As ice and snow pelted eight microphone stations through the 36-hour storm, the timbre of his work began shifting.Though Samartzis often talked with wonder about the way the Antarctic ice would “sing,” how dynamic and curious it always seemed, the roar he’d chronicled was terrifying, a bewildering testament to climate change’s ferocity. His “Atmospheres and Disturbances,” out in March, fastidiously presents the sounds of melting permafrost, contracting glaciers and human activity that seems to exacerbate both at a research outpost more than two miles above sea level in the Swiss Alps. Hearing the disappearance is haunting and hair-raising, like watching a television show about hunting ghosts.“When I talk to scientists about climate change, everyone’s all talked out. Essentially everyone knows, so it’s, ‘Why should I listen to you and your report?’” Samartzis said. “These recordings may not be scientifically sound, but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Still, at least one pioneer of portraying ice through music worries that all this work arrives too late — and that simply capturing these songs of surrender and playing them back through loudspeakers can never get to ice’s might or grandeur. More than three decades ago, the young German producer Thomas Köner sat at the foot of a Norwegian glacier and marveled as fog rose and fell above it, like enormous frozen lungs breathing deliberately.Between 1990 and 1993, Köner, who uses they/them pronouns, funneled such observations into a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked. But Köner believes that “Novaya Zemlya” — their 2012 album inspired in part by the glaciers of the Arctic archipelago of the same name — may be their final ice work. The Soviet Union tested the largest-ever atomic bomb there in 1961; for Köner, it represents humanity’s true relationship to nature.“This was the end of, if not the love affair, the loved object — the idea of this pristine world of ice,” Köner, 57, said by phone from an artist residency in Serbia. “It is very sad, like you lost somebody. But you keep going on.”Such presiding melancholy has motivated Eliza Bozek, 30, and a cadre of other young musicians to get to glaciers now, not later. An acolyte of the emotionally textured work of Winderen and Chris Watson (a prolific sound artist partly responsible for David Attenborough’s “Frozen Planet”), Bozek thinks that allowing people to hear ice creates an opportunity for awareness and, just maybe, altered behavior.“They’re beautiful, but there’s a slow violence to the sounds, too,” said Bozek, who makes music under the name moltamole, from her Copenhagen apartment. “The sounds are political statements that are not available to our ears unless they’re recorded. They create space for empathy.”Every time Jana Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside.Erinn SpringerLATE LAST YEAR, Sharp’s 2009 recording atop the Devon Ice Cap, the one he played during lectures, enjoyed an unexpected reprise on an album called, simply, “Ice Records.” The London artist and filmmaker Susan Schuppli first encountered Sharp while making a documentary about the Canadian Ice Core Lab, where more than 1,300 samples pulled from glaciers shape a portrait of Earth’s climate history. He was the archive’s first director.Schuppli wove a portion of Sharp’s file into a 24-minute collage of ice recordings she and other researchers had made around the world by climbing into crevasses or sticking hydrophones beneath a glacier’s watery lips. The snippets are loud and vibrant, almost ecstatic, an atmosphere of ice offered with an exclamation mark. “I didn’t want to treat it as a mute witness,” Schuppli said by video from her home in London. “That sound gives us access to its change almost in real-time.”Toward the middle of “Ice Records,” as meltwater gurgles beneath India’s enormous Drang-Drung Glacier, several women laugh. In the village of Akshow, they’d depended on that water their entire lives; as the melting accelerates, however, they may be threatened by “outburst floods,” when the water overruns whatever reservoir previously held it. But these women had never visited Drang-Drung, let alone listened to it. Schuppli led them up the ice and handed them headphones, so they might hear it morph beneath their feet.“It was not about mourning this glacier but trying to understand what was going on,” Schuppli said. “How does science produce hospitality, so it’s not just scientists saying why their work is important? These women were enthralled. They didn’t want to stop listening.”Audio produced by More

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      Jerry Samuels, Creator of a Novelty Hit, Is Dead at 84

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      Under the name Napoleon XIV, he recorded “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” and, to almost everyone’s surprise, it stormed the charts in 1966.Jerry Samuels, who under the name Napoleon XIV recorded one of the 1960s’ strangest and most successful novelty songs, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” died on March 10 in Phoenixville, Pa. He was 84.His son Jason said the cause was complications of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Samuels had had modest success as a songwriter and was working as an engineer at Associated Recording Studios in New York when, in 1966, he and a fellow engineer, Nat Schnapf, set a bit of doggerel that Mr. Samuels had written to — well, “music” may not be quite the right word, since the song consists of Mr. Samuels rhythmically talking over a backing of tambourine, snare and bass drums, and clapping.The narrator laments that he has been left by a loved one and has been driven insane as a result:They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaaThey’re coming to take me awayHo-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha, to the funny farmWhere life is beautiful all the timeAnd I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coatsAnd they’re coming to take me away, ha-ha.Only in the last verse does the listener learn that it wasn’t a woman who left the now crazed gent, but a dog.Through recording studio manipulation that was innovative for the time, Mr. Samuels’s voice morphed into high-pitched lunacy as the choruses went along.In a memoir, Mr. Samuels wrote that he wanted to use a stage name for the record and a drummer friend suggested Napoleon. Someone else suggested adding some kind of appendage.“I picked XIV strictly because I liked how it looked next to Napoleon,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “Rumors were rampant about hidden meanings, but there were none, at least not consciously.”The record was released by Warner Bros. in July 1966 (the flip side was the song played backward), but no station would play it until WABC in New York, one of the nation’s leading Top 40 stations, broadcast an excerpt as a gag, Mr. Samuels wrote. Listeners began calling in wanting to hear the whole thing.After that, stations everywhere picked up on it; news accounts of the day said it sold half a million copies in five days. Britain caught the fever, too.“The Beatles don’t usually find it hard work hanging on to the top spot,” The Derby Evening Telegraph of England wrote in August 1966, when “Yellow Submarine” was No. 1 on the newspaper’s record chart, “but in Derby’s Top Twenty this week they face tough competition from the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and Napoleon XIV’s incredibly sick ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’”The record was too sick for some: The influential Detroit-area station CKLW, among others, stopped playing it after receiving many complaints that it mocked mental illness.“Those naysayers kept it up,” Mr. Samuels wrote, “and the record rapidly spiraled off the charts.”But not before peaking at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song has been covered by various artists, and in the 1980s Mr. Samuels recorded a follow-up, “They’re Coming to Get Me Again, Ha-Haaa!” It drew little attention, but it did yield a funny story that Mr. Samuels recounted in the memoir.When he recorded the original, he had asked friends to show up at the studio to do the clapping part, but only two did. Wanting a bigger clapping sound, he suggested that they drop their pants and slap their thighs, to double the noise. They declined, and he and Mr. Schnapf ended up using overdubbing to beef up the sound. But when he recorded the sequel, a dozen clappers turned out.“Some were in shorts,” he wrote, “others lowered their trousers, but the whole group was slapping their tender thighs in that little studio.”Jerrold Laurence Samuels was born on May 3, 1938, in Manhattan to Joseph and Lillian (Wandler) Samuels. He grew up in the Bronx.His parents had bought a piano for his older brother.“He never took to it, but I did,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “My parents said that I began playing recognizable tunes at around 3 years old.”By his teenage years he had begun writing songs and shopping them to publishers. One in particular had potential, especially after the lyricist Sol Parker helped him polish it: “To Ev’ry Girl — To Ev’ry Boy.” It was recorded in 1954 by Johnnie Ray, a teenage-idol singer.Another of his songs, “The Shelter of Your Arms,” was recorded by Sammy Davis Jr., who made it the title track of a 1964 album.In an interview quoted on Wayne Jancik’s website about one-hit wonders, Mr. Samuels said that nine years before recording “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” he spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital.“When I did the record, I knew it wouldn’t offend mental patients,” he said. “I would have laughed at it if I had heard it when I was in the hospital.”His first marriage, to Rosemary Djivre, ended in divorce in 1968. He had a relationship with Petra Vesters from 1973 to 1987. In addition to his son Jason, from his relationship with Ms. Vesters (now Petra DeWall), he is survived by his second wife, Bobbie (Simon) Samuels, whom he married in 1996; a son from his first marriage, Scott; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Eric, died in 1991.Mr. Samuels, who lived in King of Prussia, Pa., outside Philadelphia, said he made one public appearance costumed as Napoleon XIV but found the experience humiliating and didn’t repeat it. He had a long history of playing piano in bars and other venues, his son Jason said, including senior centers.“He knew all the old standards from George Gershwin and Irving Berlin,” Jason Samuels said in a phone interview. “They loved him.”He was getting so many bookings that he saw a business opportunity. In 1984, he formed the Jerry Samuels Agency to book other acts into retirement communities and other small venues. Bobbie Samuels joined him in the enterprise, which, Jason Samuels said, had booked some 30,000 shows in the Philadelphia area by the time they retired in 2021. More

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      The Cure Says Ticketmaster Will Issue Refunds After Fee Complaints

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      The band said it wanted to make its North American tour “affordable for all,” but after tickets went on sale this week, fans said that fees had ratcheted up the price.The Cure’s frontman, Robert Smith, said on Thursday that Ticketmaster will provide $5 and $10 refunds to fans who purchased tickets for the band’s North American tour after the band complained to the company about high fees.In recent months, Ticketmaster faced increased criticism from ticket buyers as well as from members of Congress who accused its owner, Live Nation Entertainment, of being a monopoly that hinders competition and harms fans.Mr. Smith said on Twitter that Ticketmaster would provide the refunds. “Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high,” he wrote.1 OF 2: AFTER FURTHER CONVERSATION, TICKETMASTER HAVE AGREED WITH US THAT MANY OF THE FEES BEING CHARGED ARE UNDULY HIGH, AND AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL HAVE OFFERED A $10 PER TICKET REFUND TO ALL VERIFIED FAN ACCOUNTS FOR LOWEST TICKET PRICE (‘LTP’) TRANSACTIONS…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 16, 2023
      Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Smith said that people who had purchased the lowest-priced tickets would automatically receive a $10 refund per ticket and that all other ticket buyers would get a $5 refund. He said that these refunds applied to people who had purchased tickets as a “verified fan,” a Ticketmaster system that requires people to register to gain early access to ticket sales.Fans who buy tickets during the general sale on Friday will “incur lower fees,” he said.This week on Twitter, Mr. Smith addressed questions and concerns from fans about buying tickets for the 30-show tour, which runs from May to July and includes three performances at Madison Square Garden in New York in June.The Cure had said in an earlier statement that it wanted tickets “to be affordable for all fans.” As part of this effort, Mr. Smith said that the Cure had refused to participate in Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system, which adjusts ticket prices based on demand.The system was criticized last year after it drove up the cost for Bruce Springsteen tickets, some of which were selling for thousands of dollars.After tickets for the Cure’s tour went on sale on Wednesday, fans shared screenshots that showed tickets priced at $20 with added fees close to or above the $20 base price.Mr. Smith said on Twitter later that day that he was “sickened” by Ticketmaster’s fees.“I have been asking how they are justified,” he wrote in all capital letters, his usual Twitter writing style. “If I get anything coherent by way of an answer I will let you all know.”Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have been under increased scrutiny since November, when the company botched its planned public sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour.In November, the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment focused on whether it had abused its power over the live music industry.In December, 26 of Ms. Swift’s fans filed a lawsuit accusing Live Nation Entertainment of anticompetitive conduct and fraud.In January, the company was the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which senators from both parties criticized the company’s handling of ticket sales for Ms. Swift’s tour as well as its wider business practices.Last month, on the same day Live Nation Entertainment announced it had made $651.3 million in ticket revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, the company responded to politicians in a statement.The company, which sold more than 550 million tickets last year, said it had submitted more than 35 pages of information to policymakers to provide context on the “realities of the industry” that it has dominated since Ticketmaster and Live Nation, an events promoter and venue operator, merged in 2010.“These include the fact that this industry is more competitive than ever: Ticketmaster has actually lost market share since the 2010 merger, not gained it; that venues set and keep most of the fees associated with tickets and are increasingly taking an ever-larger share; and Ticketmaster has for years been advocating for a federal all-in pricing requirement,” the statement said.Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have for decades been criticized for their business practices. The Justice Department said in 2019 that Live Nation Entertainment had “repeatedly violated” the terms of the regulatory agreement that the government imposed as a condition of the merger.The Justice Department investigated complaints of anti-competitive practices by Ticketmaster in the 1990s, after a dispute with the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam. More

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      For Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a Detour From Classical Is Business as Usual

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      Jean-Yves Thibaudet is playing Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” this week. But before, he debuted a night of jazz standards with Michael Feinstein.PALM DESERT, Calif. — “Jean-Yves, when did you start playing the piano?” Michael Feinstein asked from the stage of the McCallum Theater here on a recent Friday night.“I started when I was 5 years old,” said the star pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, whose instrument was interlocked with Feinstein’s for their cabaret-style show, “Two Pianos: Who Could Ask for Anything More?”“Oh, me too,” Feinstein responded.“We both took a different path with our approach to the piano,” Thibaudet continued, reading from an iPad on his music stand. “I studied classical music——”“And I,” Feinstein said, facing the audience, “studied nothing.”There was laughter throughout the auditorium, while onstage, Thibaudet looked tickled. Speaking during a concert, beyond introducing an encore, was new for him. But he was warming up to it quickly.Even if he was dipping into the unfamiliar on that first of many “Two Pianos” performances to come (including next season at Carnegie Hall), that’s business as usual for Thibaudet, 61, an artist who has, unusually for a classical musician, made a career of doing whatever he wants.Feinstein, left, and Thibaudet preparing for the debut of “Two Pianos” in California. The show will travel to Carnegie Hall in December.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesBrazenly himself — openly gay before many of his colleagues, abandoning traditional concert attire for couture — he has long been an eminent interpreter of classical music, but also a prolific collaborator and a soloist on movie soundtracks like Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch.” Through it all his tastes have been eclectic; he’s as likely to take on lieder as he is the Great American Songbook and the jazz of Bill Evans. Characteristically, he is following “Two Pianos” with something like its opposite: Messiaen’s thorny, monumental “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” with the New York Philharmonic, beginning on Friday.“There are soloists who only play one or two concertos a season,” Thibaudet said during one of three interviews. “I couldn’t do that. I would stop practicing. I always want to try things.”THIBAUDET WAS BORN in Lyon, France, in an environment he described as “fortunate.” His parents were music lovers who supported him through the conservatory system — including studies at the storied Conservatoire de Paris — and didn’t make much of his coming out.At school, he learned a Mozart sonata, but would also experiment with something else if it interested him. That open-mindedness is reflected in his 2021 album “Carte Blanche,” which starts with a new suite from the “Pride and Prejudice” soundtrack and continues with works from the Baroque period through the 20th century. The recording’s program, Thibaudet said, was “like going to a restaurant and having all your favorite dishes in one meal — with a lot of desserts.”Such a broad scope, and a willingness to give almost anything a chance, is essential to Thibaudet’s artistry. “Obviously if I don’t like it I won’t do it again, but I at least tried it,” he said. “My life has been so enriched by all that. Your brain is like a computer — you’re constantly feeding it. So if I play some jazz and then some Chopin, the jazz gives the Chopin a certain freedom and relaxation.”Relaxation, yes, but Thibaudet is also a proud Virgo whose lack of tension in performance would be impossible without a perfectionist’s rigor. “He is an exquisitely gifted technician,” Feinstein said. “And yet it is always the overarching intelligence behind an interpretation that makes his playing for me so special. He understands how to make any kind of music living and breathing, and never clinical.”Thibaudet won competitions as a teenager, and early in his 20s signed a recording contract with Decca. Young artists often face pressure from varied competing interests: managers, administrators, label executives. Even then, though, Thibaudet insisted on making critical decisions himself.“Two Pianos” consists largely of new arrangements, by Tedd Firth, of music by Gershwin and his contemporaries.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesDuring rehearsals, both Feinstein, left, and Thibaudet have been nudged out of their comfort zones.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesEarlier in his career, Thibaudet faced criticism for his unconventional fashion choices on the concert stage.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesHe didn’t want his first concerto recording with Decca to be of French music — “It’s not your passport that makes your repertoire,” he said — so, he programmed Liszt. He traveled with his partner at the time, and declined dinner invitations abroad, no matter how prominent the company, if he couldn’t bring him. “I was thinking,” Thibaudet recalled, “if I had a wife, of course they would invite her.”Hiccups like that, though, were rare, and overall, Thibaudet said, being open about his sexuality has made him a happy, open person. Perhaps more remarked upon, back then, was Thibaudet’s fashion. “I decided more than 35 years ago that I was not going to wear tails,” he said. “That was a battle.”Thibaudet’s clothing collection — rivaled only by those of his fine wines and Champagnes — is rich with museum-quality pieces. He had a fruitful relationship with Gianni Versace, and an especially prolific one with Vivienne Westwood before her recent death. For many years, though, writers often couldn’t resist a disapproving comment about his outfits.That cooled over time. There was one critic — Thibaudet wouldn’t name names, saying only that the newspaper was from a major city — who, after reviewing his concerts for more than two decades, wrote something along the lines of: At the end of the day, if you’re playing so well, you can wear whatever you want. “And I was like, there you go,” Thibaudet said. “It took you 25 years. Finally.”ANOTHER PILLAR of Thibaudet’s career has been collaboration. In film, one partner has been Dario Marianelli, who featured him on his Academy Award-winning soundtrack for Joe Wright’s “Atonement” in 2007. More famous is their work together on Wright’s adaptation, two years earlier, of “Pride and Prejudice,” which opens with an elegant piano solo redolent of the Classical era, “Dawn.”“All over the world people know that score,” Thibaudet said. “Then they go to hear Chopin or Debussy, and they tell me, ‘This is my first classical concert.’ I could play ‘Turangalîla,’ but they still come. It’s great.”Some of Thibaudet’s most treasured partnerships have been with singers. “The human voice produces something that you cannot do with any instrument,” he said. “It touches your soul.”He has recorded with Renée Fleming, the superstar soprano, with whom he became fast friends in the 1990s. She recalled that when she bought an apartment in Paris, he offered to take her to Ikea to help her furnish it; what she didn’t know until he pulled up was that he drove a Maserati with no trunk.“Jean-Yves is an ideal collaborator,” Fleming said. “He has tremendous personality and charm, both on and offstage, that he brings to the music, but he’s also extremely flexible and sensitive.”Sensitive, but unwilling, she added, to “put something before the public unless it is prepared to the very highest standard.” That much has been evident in his project with Feinstein, the reigning, de facto keeper of the Great American Songbook. Thibaudet and Feinstein already knew each other’s work when they met a couple of decades ago as neighbors in Los Angeles. What started as dinner-party fun — Richard Rodgers waltzes at the piano, and some improvisation — became a formal program inspired by their mutual love for Gershwin and his contemporaries.“Two Pianos” started as dinner-party fun before Thibaudet and Feinstein assembled a formal program inspired by their mutual love for Gershwin and his contemporariesRoger Kisby for The New York TimesFeinstein already knew Thibaudet’s work when the two met a couple of decades ago as neighbors in Los Angeles.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesAs a model they also looked to Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli’s classical-meets-jazz collaborations, Feinstein said, in which Menuhin’s parts were precisely notated while Grappelli’s left room for improvisation. To pull off something similar with two pianos, Feinstein turned to his music director, Tedd Firth, who wrote most of the arrangements.“I really wanted to focus on what they do best,” Firth said, adding, “I didn’t want to make Jean-Yves into a jazz player or Michael into a classical player, or water down either to create a neutral territory.”The result is a fantasia-like program of Lisztian virtuosity. Firth’s arrangements have orchestral heft, with the melodies of each piece flowing freely between the two pianos. Sometimes Feinstein sings; sometimes Thibaudet plays alone; always, the music has the energy and showiness of an encore.They rehearsed in Los Angeles before the McCallum Theater shows, putting in the hours of a full-time job in the days leading up to the premiere. During one of those sessions, Thibaudet behaved for a moment like a fan: He just wanted to hear Feinstein sing “Pure Imagination,” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” When the two fell out of sync during a Gershwin medley, Thibaudet said to follow the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” because at roughly 120 beats per minute, it was nearly the same tempo. (“My whole life is in that piece,” he added.)By the sound check on opening night, both artists had been visibly nudged out of their comfort zones. But once the show started and the audience heard a familiar melody from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the auditorium resounded with applause. “That was the greatest gift that either of us could have,” Feinstein said. “It showed how excited they were to hear this music.” Feeling the energy of the house, Thibaudet said, he became “dangerously comfortable” with speaking onstage — even more so at the more assured performance the following night.“Two Pianos” seemingly has a long life ahead of it, with dates still being booked at least two seasons ahead. An orchestrated version will play this summer with the Boston Pops at Tanglewood, the Cleveland Orchestra at its Blossom Music Festival and elsewhere. But before that, its two stars will continue with their separate careers. Feinstein has a Judy Garland celebration at Zankel Hall in New York later this month. And Thibaudet, of course, has “Turangalîla.”“Maybe I need a week to readjust, but this is me,” Thibaudet said, adding with a giggle, “It’s perfectly normal for me.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Outtake, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear songs from Alison Goldfrapp, 100 gecs, Luke Combs and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Starting next week, Lindsay Zoladz will be writing a new newsletter devoted to music discovery. Sign up below!Taylor Swift, ‘All of the Girls You Loved Before’Here’s Taylor Swift at her most forgiving. Of course her guy has a past, and so does she, but she’s willing to consider that a learning experience. “Every woman you know brought you here,” she reasons. “All the Girls You Loved Before” — no relation to a similarly titled Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias hit — have just “made you the one I’ve fallen for.” The previously unreleased track from her “Lover” era is one of four songs, the rest re-recordings, Swift put out on Friday ahead of the start of her Eras Tour. Its easy-rolling beat and doo-wop chord progression underline the eternal cycle of falling in and out of love before finding The One. JON PARELESFeist, ‘Borrowed Trouble’Leslie Feist makes boisterous, joyful noise on “Borrow Trouble,” the latest single from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Atop a bed of echoing, droning strings that recall, unexpectedly, the John Cale era of the Velvet Underground, the Canadian singer-songwriter bemoans the entrenched anxiety that follows from day to day: “Even before your eyes are open,” she sings, “the plot has thickened ’round your fear.” In the song’s final minute she finds potent catharsis, flinging her cares to the wind as she lets loose some primal screams: “Trouble!” LINDSAY ZOLADZAlison Goldfrapp, ‘So Hard So Hot’On May 12, Alison Goldfrapp — the longtime voice of the beloved electro-pop duo Goldfrapp — will release her first solo album, “The Love Invention.” Its debut single, “So Hard So Hot,” is a blissed-out dance floor reverie, as shimmery synths and Goldfrapp’s breathy vocals drift over a thumping beat. “Don’t know why, don’t know why, don’t know why we love this way,” she sings, before deciding the best course is not to ask too many questions but simply lose herself in the rapture of the groove. ZOLADZTiwa Savage, Ayra Starr and Young Jonn, ‘Stamina’Here’s a friendly challenge to men: “You gonna need more stamina,” the Nigerian songwriters Tiwa Savage and Ayra Starr declare. In the programmed, crisply percussive track, shared with the male voice of Young Jonn, they sing about ecstasy enabled by permission: deeply carnal but ethical. PARELES100 gecs, ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’“10,000 gecs,” the long-awaited major-label debut from the hyperpop hellions 100 gecs, opens with a pretty hilarious sonic joke: a sample of the nostalgic and evocative THX Deep Note, as if to say, 100 gecs: Now in Glistening Hi-Fi. Even with a bigger budget, though, a scrappy, anarchic spirit and the duo’s unpredictable sense of humor course throughout the exhilarating album, which features a dark, snaking ditty sung from the perspective of a serial killer and a song that sounds like Less Than Jake covering Crazy Frog. The crunching, Godzilla-sized riffs and absurdist one-liners (“put emojis on my grave”) of the first track, “Dumbest Girl Alive,” set the scene for the album’s loving embrace of alternative rock while slyly shooting a confetti cannon at the haters: “I’m smarter than I look,” Laura Les sings, in a cadence that’s almost cartoonishly melodic. “I’m the dumbest girl alive.” ZOLADZMatthew Herbert featuring Theon Cross, ‘The Horse Has a Voice’The composer and producer Matthew Herbert often constructs his music around a set of found sounds — industrial, animal, human, urban. His album due in May, “The Horse,” uses instruments made from a horse’s skeleton and hair, along with the London Contemporary Orchestra, jazz musicians and sampled horse sounds. “The Horse Has a Voice” features Herbert playing a flute made from a thigh bone, the orchestra and the tuba player Theon Cross. It’s a fast (around 151 beats per minute), steady-thumping stomp, with handclaps, a huffing thighbone-flute riff, gusts and flurries from the orchestra and leaping, scurrying tuba improvisations — frantic and relentless, high-tech and primitive. PARELESPieta Brown and JT Bates, ‘Thing or 2’“Thing or 2” drifts in and out of formlessness. Pieta Brown — the daughter of the longtime Iowan folk songwriter Greg Brown — sings about love and trust over the producer JT Bates’s edgeless electronic chords and sputtering 6/4 beats. “In my heart you sing clear and bright/It makes me feel like things will be all right,” she intones, convincing both herself and anyone listening. PARELESLuke Combs, ‘5 Leaf Clover’The country star Luke Combs perfects the humblebrag in “5 Leaf Clover.” It’s a sturdy waltz that exults in a good life: hometown, partner, friends, a truck in the driveway, healthy parents and “a fridge full of cold beer,” not to mention a tail-wagging dog. The track is grounded in country, complete with fiddle fills, but it’s also pointed toward a wide pop audience. PARELESEsther Rose featuring Hurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Safe to Run’“How does it feel to blow a kiss to the wind?” the singer-songwriter Esther Rose wonders on “Safe to Run,” a poignant country-folk song with a wandering spirit. Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff harmonizes with Rose on the chorus, on which the pair dispense some bittersweet wisdom: “You know there’s no place safe to run/Angels surround everyone.” ZOLADZ More

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      In ‘Songs of Surrender’, U2 Revisits Its Past

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      With “Songs of Surrender,” an album of 40 reimagined songs, and “A Sort of Homecoming,” a documentary on Disney+, the Irish band pauses to reflect.For decades, U2 refused to rest on its catalog. A rarity among bands for having kept the same lineup since its formation in 1976 — Bono on lead vocals, the Edge on guitar and keyboards, Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen Jr. on drums — U2 has headlined arenas since the early 1980s. It determinedly brought new songs to huge audiences as recently as 2018, when it mounted its Experience + Innocence Tour.The band did allow itself a 30th anniversary stadium tour to reprise its biggest release, the 1987 album “The Joshua Tree,” in 2017 and 2019. And now, in the pandemic era, U2 is looking back even further.Its new album, “Songs of Surrender,” remakes 40 U2 songs with largely acoustic arrangements. U2 has also booked a Las Vegas residency for the fall, when it will revisit its 1991 masterpiece, “Achtung Baby,” in a newly built arena, the MSG Sphere. In a startling change, the band will have a substitute drummer, Bram van den Berg, rather than Mullen, who has been dealing with injuries to his elbows, knees and neck.Bono, 62, published his memoir, “Surrender,” in fall of 2022, using 40 U2 songs as chapter headings. On St. Patrick’s Day, the (Irish) band is releasing a Disney+ documentary, “Bono & the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman,” alongside “Songs of Surrender.”U2’s career has been one of triumphs, misfires and moving on. In the 1980s, the group was earnest and expansive, creating a chiming, marching, larger-than-life rock sound that countless bands would emulate. In the 1990s, leery of its own pretensions, U2 remade itself with electronic beats and artifice until it came to a dead end with its 1997 album, “Pop.” In the 2000s, it circled back to rock beats and sincerity, but its music was pervasively infused with the latest technology.From the beginning, U2 has worked on the largest scale: sometimes to magnificent effect, like its 2002 Super Bowl halftime show that memorialized Sept. 11, and sometimes badly backfiring, like the giveaway of its 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence,” that forced the album into iTunes libraries worldwide, often unwanted. “Songs of Surrender” is an act of renunciation, drastically scaling down songs that once strove to shake entire stadiums.Remake albums are always fraught. They offer second thoughts rather than discoveries, revisions rather than inspirations. They also remind listeners, and no doubt performers, of time slipping away.In recent years, extraordinary songwriters like Paul Simon and Natalie Merchant have made albums that revisit their old songs with decidedly different arrangements; they’re thoughtful and musicianly, but wan. Even Taylor Swift’s ongoing series of “Taylor’s Version” remakes — reclaiming her old albums by making every effort to replicate them note for note — can’t quite match her more youthful voice or the precise overtones of every mix.Among U2’s three retrospective projects, Bono’s book is by far the most vivid. “Surrender” leapfrogs through Bono’s and U2’s improbable story in vignettes that zigzag between poetic and prosaic, devout and skeptical, privileged and conscientious, mystical and political.The book’s messages about faith, friendship and family are reprised — sometimes in near-literal quotes — in “A Sort of Homecoming.” It’s an awkward project that skims through U2’s career while David Letterman serves as both modest interlocutor and celebrity star-tripper.The documentary mixes biographical interviews and bits of Ireland’s history, and it stages two performances: a concert by Bono and the Edge with a choir and strings at Dublin’s Ambassador Theater, and a singalong at a pub that’s not exactly impromptu. It just happens to include U2-influenced Irish musicians like Glen Hansard, Imelda May and Dermot Kennedy. “A Sort of Homecoming” also digresses, pointlessly, with attempts at comedy recalling Letterman’s “Late Show” shticks. A new Bono-Edge song, dedicated to Letterman, isn’t exactly prime U2.“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. Some get different lyrics: changing present tense to past tense in “Red Hill Mining Town,” clarifying that “Bad” is about drug addiction, swapping in new verses in “Beautiful Day” and “Get Out of Your Own Way,” rewriting “Walk On” to allude to the war in Ukraine.The album sets out to recast U2’s arena anthems as private conversations. Bono croons as if he’s singing quietly into your ear, and most of the arrangements rely on acoustic guitar or piano — like MTV’s old “Unplugged” shows, but by no means devoid of studio enhancements.“Unplugged” was MTV’s tribute to the recording-business cliché that a great song only needs chords and a voice to reveal its quality, as if everything else is embellishment. Yes and no. Melody, harmony and lyrics say a lot, but production can be transformative. Songs engrave themselves in fans’ memories — and lives — not just for their words and music, but for their sheer sound. We can recognize a favorite oldie from an opening guitar tone or a drumbeat. And the more we’ve taken a song to heart, the more its sonic details resonate.U2 got together in the era when punk insisted that anyone, trained or not, could make vital music. But even during that movement, musicians and producers understood how much texture matters. Recording in the analog era was a costly, intentional effort, and low-budget, lo-fi recordings could still create high intensity.One of U2’s enduring strengths has been the way its songs ennoble yearning and turbulence. Bono sings about self-questioning and contradictions with a voice that might scratch or falter but pushes ahead, unabashedly working itself up to shouts and howls. And the band’s martial drums, chiming guitars and inexorable crescendos create arena-size superstructures filled with rhythmic — and emotional — crosscurrents.The remakes on “Songs of Surrender” often strip away too much. In the original 1983 “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a song about a terrorist bombing during Ireland’s “troubles,” the track evokes sirens and gunshots while Bono sounds both desperate and furious, right in the middle of the strife. The remake, with a lone acoustic guitar, recasts the song as something between a lullaby and lament, crooned as if it’s a learned memory.“Out of Control,” which in 1979 had jabbing, buttonholing electric guitar and bass lines, has become a cozy, cheerfully strummed self-affirmation, very much in control. And the surging, cathartic peaks of songs like “With or Without You,” “Vertigo,” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” are far too muted in the remakes.“Songs of Surrender” does have a few clever second thoughts about U2’s catalog. A brass band lends historical gravity to “Red Hill Mining Town,” while “Two Hearts Beat as One” — with lyrics that insist, “Can’t stop to dance” — gets a wry disco makeover. The album’s subdued arrangements and upfront vocals offer a chance to focus on lyrics that were obscured in the onrush of U2’s original versions.But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness. And U2, like most artists, is better off looking ahead than looking back. More