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      Lizzo Returns With a Throwback-Rock Bop, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Benson Boone, Jenny Hval, J. Cole and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lizzo, ‘Love in Real Life’“It’s been a while,” Lizzo sings in “Love in Real Life,” after more than a year of commotion involving her social media, her weight and lawsuits from employees. The video (though not the song itself) opens with Lizzo saying she needs “no views, no likes, real love in real life.” Backed by a swinging beat and rock guitars, Lizzo heads out for a drunken night at a dance club, with a chorus topped by a Prince-like scream. For a few minutes, pleasure solves everything. JON PARELESBenson Boone, ‘Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else’The back-flipping upstart Benson Boone runs into a former flame who upends his current relationship on the lively new single “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.” Amid driving percussion, pulsating synths and an escalating sense of urgency, Boone unfurls a satisfying narrative of love lost and regained in a sudden moment of clarity. The only problem is that he has to break another girl’s heart in the process. “Benny, don’t do it, Benny don’t do it!” he tells himself — but he does it, and lets her down easy with that classic line, “It’s not personal.” LINDSAY ZOLADZLittle Simz featuring Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly, ‘Flood’“Flood” exults in percussive low end: a Bo Diddley drumbeat meshed with a syncopated bass line, below Little Simz rapping in her most hard-nosed bottom range. She lashes out at anyone who’d interfere with “my genius plan, and that’s being as free as I can” and offers career advice: “Don’t trust all the hands you shake.” She’s righteous and cynical, with her defenses well fortified by rhythm. PARELESModel/Actriz, ‘Cinderella’Agitation is built in to “Cinderella,” from the where’s-the-downbeat intro to the dissonant note that repeats — irregularly — through nearly the entire track. As an industrial dance beat assembles itself, crumbles, and reappears, the vocalist Cole Haden wrestles with the vulnerability of revealing himself to a partner, finally deciding, “I won’t leave as I came.” PARELESJenny Hval, ‘To Be a Rose’The Norwegian pop experimentalist Jenny Hval takes on a familiar lyrical image — the rose — and turns it into something highly specific and alluringly strange on this first single from her upcoming album, “Iris Silver Mist.” “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” she sings atop a spare track that features light, hypnotic percussion and subtle blasts of brass. As the arrangement gradually builds into something fuller, Hval sketches a vivid childhood memory of her mother smoking on a balcony, “long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography over our dead-end town.” ZOLADZWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Katy Perry and Gayle King Are Among Blue Origin’s All-Female Space Crew

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      They will be aboard the New Shepard, the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin’s space tourism business, in a launch this spring.The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin.Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this spring, though no specific date has been announced for the launch. It will also include Aisha Bowe, a former NASA engineer; Amanda Nguyen, a research scientist; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, who is Mr. Bezos’ fiancée and a helicopter pilot.The company has garnered attention for its flights by including celebrities or highlighting new milestones in spaceflight.The spring launch will be the 11th flight carrying passengers and the 31st mission overall for New Shepard. The suborbital rocket is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts who walked on the moon.Flights on the fully reusable vehicle last just over 10 minutes and take participants to an altitude higher than 62 miles. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, by contrast, orbit about 250 miles above the Earth.Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men on the planet, was among the first passengers on New Shepard in 2021, the year of Blue Origin’s first crewed flight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Benmont Tench, Still a Heartbreaker, Is Carrying on Solo

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      Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub’s, and they’d finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.“I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. “I mean, it was that close.”More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” will be released on March 7.The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.Benmont Tench’s first solo album since 2014 was born in a tumultuous period that included the death of his longtime collaborator, Tom Petty.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Billy Hart Has One Foot in Jazz’s Past and the Other in Its Future

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      Onstage at Smoke in late January, the all-star septet the Cookers were surging into high gear. The catalyst: their drummer, Billy Hart, who stirred up rhythmic eddies and punched out stinging cymbal accents while fixing the saxophonist Azar Lawrence with an eager, heat-of-battle grin.On “Just,” a new album by Hart’s own long-running quartet, out Friday, he reveals some of that intensity in a more understated guise, playing alongside vanguard musicians a quarter century or more younger — the saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street — and pulling off what has become, across his six-decade-plus career, a trademark Billy Hart feat: sounding effortlessly and perpetually contemporary.“He’s a continual, consummate student of the music,” Turner said of Hart, 84, in a phone interview. While Hart’s style draws on the many eras in which he has been active, he continued, “he hasn’t changed his language into something that is based in a period.”The bassist Buster Williams has worked with Hart since the early ’60s, first meeting him on a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter and later aligning with him in many other contexts, including the Mwandishi band, Herbie Hancock’s trailblazing electric-jazz sextet of the early ’70s. “He’s got that fresh understanding of things,” Williams said in a phone interview. “His vision is always looking forward.”Could the young Billy Hart, growing up in Washington, D.C., have envisioned such a long and thriving career? “Of course not,” he said with an incredulous laugh.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOutside the jazz world, Hart is largely unknown. But within the genre — where peers and fans refer to him as Jabali, or “rock,” one of the Swahili monikers bestowed on the members of the Mwandishi band by their associate James Mtume — his esteem is near-universal, a status reflected in a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master designation and his staggeringly broad discography, encompassing more than 600 albums.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Drake Postpones 4 Australia and New Zealand Tour Dates

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      Dates for Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland were postponed for a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said. The tour coincided with the release of his latest album.Drake, whose new album topped the Billboard 200 chart this week after Kendrick Lamar had made him a punchline at the Super Bowl halftime show, has canceled four tour dates in Australia and New Zealand because of a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said on Wednesday.It was not immediately clear what the conflict was, but Drake’s team said it would work to reschedule the dates along with adding additional shows.“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience,” Drake’s representatives said in a statement. “Drake and the entire team have had an incredible time doing these shows and are excited to return soon. We look forward to sharing the rescheduled dates with you as soon as possible.”The Anita Max Win Tour kicked off this month in Perth, Australia, and was scheduled to have 16 shows across major cities in the country and New Zealand.But Drake canceled a March 4 show in Brisbane, a March 7 show in Sydney and two shows in mid-March in Auckland, New Zealand.The tour coincided with the release of his latest album, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, a longtime Drake associate. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week.It was the first new album since his much-publicized beef with Lamar, whose diss track “Not Like Us” accused Drake of pedophilia. Drake sued Universal Music Group for defamation for releasing and promoting the song. His lawsuit called the allegations in the song false and accused the label of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”But the song has continued to grow. This month Lamar won five Grammy Awards for the song, including song and record of the year, and performed it to a huge global audience at the Super Bowl halftime show.Joe Coscarelli More

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      An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block

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      The reel-to-reel tape is from a Gaslight Cafe show in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Dylan was playing to audiences you could count in a glance or two.On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fyre Festival 2 Announces Dates, Location, Ticket Prices

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      Eight years — and one prison sentence — later, Billy McFarland is back with another attempt at the event.Luxury accommodations at a tropical resort. World-class hospitality. “Boundary-pushing” excursions by day. Beachside musical performances by night. And exorbitant ticket prices to boot.All of that might sound familiar to anyone who followed the well-chronicled saga of the Fyre Festival, an ill-fated musical carnival that, in 2017, was such a spectacular failure that it spawned dueling documentaries on Netflix and Hulu. Billy McFarland, the festival’s organizer, wound up going to prison for nearly four years after he entered a guilty plea to charges that included wire fraud.But Mr. McFarland, 33, a self-described tech entrepreneur, is back — and he is trying the whole thing over again.Mr. McFarland announced this week that Fyre Festival 2, replete with all the trappings listed above, is scheduled for May 30 to June 2 on Isla Mujeres, a Mexican island and vacation destination a few miles off the coast from Cancun. More specifically, the event will be staged at “Playa FYRE,” according to the festival’s website — though the GPS coordinates provided on the festival’s website appear to point to a landless spot to the west of Isla Mujeres.Skepticism would not be out of place when it comes to a sequel of an event where everything seemed to go wrong, but people willing to roll the dice can get started immediately, as some tickets are already on sale.What is planned for the sequel?The festival is being advertised as “an electrifying celebration of music, arts, cuisine, comedy, fashion, gaming, sports and treasure hunting — all set in the stunning location of Isla Mujeres, Mexico.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Woman Will Plead Guilty in Scheme to Defraud Presleys and Sell Graceland

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      Prosecutors had accused the woman of creating fraudulent loan documents and forging Lisa Marie Presley’s signature.A Missouri woman agreed to plead guilty to mail fraud on Tuesday for her role in orchestrating what the authorities described as a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s heirs by claiming ownership of Graceland, his Memphis home, and threatening to sell it in a foreclosure auction.The woman, Lisa Jeanine Findley, of Kimberling City, Mo., will have a count of aggravated identity theft dismissed as part of the plea agreement, which was filed in United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.The mail fraud count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but prosecutors said they would recommend a sentence of less than five years. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A public defender listed in court documents for Ms. Findley also did not respond.The case involving Ms. Findley burst into the public eye in May, when lawyers for the actress Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Mr. Presley, went to court to stop what they said was a monthslong, fraudulent scheme to sell Graceland, which is now a lucrative tourist attraction that draws 600,000 visitors a year.Court papers revealed that the attempt had been made by a company known as Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, but exactly who was behind that company remained a mystery for many months. Naussany Investments had claimed in court papers that Mr. Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in 2023, had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and put Graceland up as collateral.The company subsequently scheduled a sale of Graceland. But a Tennessee judge blocked the sale and the state’s attorney general said his office would look into the situation after no one showed up in court to represent the company.Eventually, federal officials came forward and claimed that the whole situation had been part of an elaborate fraud.In an affidavit filed in August in support of an arrest warrant, Christopher Townsend, an F.B.I. agent, wrote that Findley used “a series of aliases, email addresses and fake documents” to engage “in a scheme to defraud Elvis Presley’s family for millions of dollars by threatening to foreclose on the ‘Graceland’ estate.”Mr. Townsend said in the 30-page affidavit that Ms. Findley had created fraudulent loan documents and unlawfully used Ms. Presley’s name and signature as part of her scheme.The affidavit also said that Ms. Findley published a fraudulent “Notice of Foreclosure Sale” in The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, executed false affidavits that were sent to the Shelby County Register’s Office, and communicated with the news media through fake identities. More