Music

Inspired by Motown early in her career, she became an acclaimed singer-songwriter and backed the likes of David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Cat Stevens.Linda Lewis, a critically acclaimed soul singer and songwriter whose pyrotechnic voice propelled four Top 10 singles as a solo artist in her native Britain and led to work as a backup vocalist on acclaimed albums by stars like David Bowie, Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart, died on May 3 at her home in Waltham Abbey, outside London. She was 72.Her sister Dee Lewis Clay confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Ms. Lewis drew raves for her soaring five-octave vocal range and impressed listeners with her genre-hopping instincts, drawing from folk, R&B, rock, reggae, pop and — with more than a nudge from label executives — disco.She grew up studying Motown hits note by note, and her first single, “You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet” (1967), was a joyous up-tempo number that sounded straight out of Berry Gordy’s recording studio on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit.After that she joined the Ferris Wheel, a rock and soul band that was popular on Britain’s club circuit, before moving on to a solo career as a guitar-strumming singer-songwriter and signing with Reprise Records in 1971.“That was a great time,” she said in a 2007 interview with Record Collector magazine. “I was living in a sort of commune, and loads of people were popping in and out. Cat Stevens turned up a lot, as did Marc Bolan and Elton John. There was a lot of jamming going on there, some very creative vibes.”She ended up touring the world with Mr. Stevens (who later took the name Yusuf after converting to Islam), as well as lending her voice to albums like David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” (1973) and Rod Stewart’s “Blondes Have More Fun” (1978).Ms. Lewis in concert in 1981. Her record company chose to package her as a disco diva in the late 1970s, but she saw herself differently.Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesHer first solo album, “Say No More,” released in 1971, failed to make a splash commercially. The next year she released “Lark,” an album marked by a California breeziness that received strong reviews and included the song “Old Smokey,” which the rapper Common sampled in his 2005 song “Go!” An American tour in 1973 helped create buzz.But still, she needed a hit.She found one that same year, with the buoyant, racy single “Rock a Doodle Doo,” which hit No. 15 in Britain (although it failed to chart in the United States). It showed off her range with vocals that swung from husky lows to shimmering highs, to the point that the song could be mistaken for a duet.In the mid-1970s, she signed with Arista Records, whose founder, Clive Davis, chose to package her as a disco diva like Gloria Gaynor. That decision paid dividends, at least commercially. Her 1975 single “It’s in His Kiss,” a Studio 54-ready spin on Betty Everett’s 1964 hit “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss),” reached No. 6 in Britain, although it, too, barely made a splash in the United States.But Ms. Lewis bristled at the forced career turn. “I didn’t really stick to my guns, I’m afraid,” she later said. “I saw myself as a singer-songwriter; they didn’t.”Even so, the album with the single, “Not a Little Girl Anymore,” hit No. 40 in Britain, with Rolling Stone noting that it brought “this multi-styled English artist into the mainstream of contemporary R&B.”By the 2000s, her music had crossed over to a new generation, as she sang on albums by Oasis, Basement Jaxx and Jamiroquai.Ms. Lewis at a festival in Chichester, England, in 2010. By the 2000s, her music had crossed over to a new generation.Chris Jackson/Getty ImagesLinda Ann Fredericks was born on Sept. 27, 1950, in Custom House, an area in the docklands of East London. She was one of six children of Eddie Fredericks, a musician, and Lily Fredericks, who worked as a bus conductor and managed pubs. (It is unclear why the singer chose Lewis as her stage surname.)Her mother had great ambitions for her as a performer and enrolled her in stage school, an experience on which Ms. Lewis did not look back fondly.Her compass was set toward music. She got her first taste of the limelight in her early teens, when her mother took her to see John Lee Hooker perform at a club and pushed her to the stage to belt out, with the blues titan’s permission, a rendition of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.”In addition to Ms. Lewis Clay, she is survived by two other sisters, Shirley Lewis and Patsy Wildman; her brothers, Keith and Paul Fredericks; and her son, Jesse. Her three marriages ended in divorce.While Ms. Lewis angled to escape stage school at the earliest possible opportunity, her flirtation with acting was not a complete waste. She made a brief appearance in the Tony Richardson film “A Taste of Honey” (1961). She also popped up as a screaming fan in the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964).She was not the only future musical notable in the crowd of hysterical Beatlemaniacs. Phil Collins, in his schoolboy jacket and tie, was also on set as an extra. “Many years later, I bumped into him and said, ‘Hey, we made a film together,’” Ms. Lewis told Record Collector. “He gave me a very funny look. I think he thought I was a nutter.” More

Freese, a veteran musician, appeared with the rock band ahead of its upcoming tour and album release, the first since its drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died last year.The Foo Fighters introduced a new drummer, Josh Freese, just before the release of their album next month and their first tour since the death last year of the rock band’s previous drummer, Taylor Hawkins, which devastated the group and its fans.Freese, 50, was featured Sunday in an hourlong streamed rehearsal, “Preparing Music for Concerts,” which featured a mix of jokes, surprise cameos by other drummers and a couple of poodles.It started with the group’s lead singer, Dave Grohl, and other members of the band standing around with their instruments in a darkened studio, bantering about whether any of them ever punched someone onstage.Suddenly there is a knock on the door. There are greetings of “hey!” as Chad Smith, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, enters. He gestures with his drumsticks. “There’s a white Mercedes blocking me,” he says, and then leaves.Then Mötley Crüe’s drummer, Tommy Lee, bursts in, carrying bags of P.F. Chang’s Chinese takeout. Cheers all around. “Put it in the kitchen for us,” Grohl says.Danny Carey, from Tool, is the next to come through the door, twirling his drumsticks in one hand and in the other, clutching a leash tethering a pair of large poodles that he says he has just groomed. He then leaves.This, apparently, was a buildup to the appearance of Freese. The poodles are part of his family, according to his Instagram posts. He has also posted about his excitement over P.F. Chang’s.A frustrated voice suddenly calls out from the darkness, from someone who had seemingly had enough of the intrusions: “Excuse me!”The camera swings in his direction. It was Freese, seated behind an array of drums. “Guys could we just like, I don’t know, play a song? Or two? Something?”And they did.The successive appearances of one top rock drummer followed by another were a way to tease the big news after, as Variety reported, the band went to “great lengths” not to reveal the identity of its new drummer.Freese is a veteran drummer who has performed with the Offspring, Sting, Weezer, Nine Inch Nails and others.The Foo Fighters were devastated after Hawkins died in a hotel in northern Bogotá, in Colombia, where the band had been scheduled to play. A beloved member of the group, Hawkins joined the band for its “There Is Nothing Left to Lose” album, which was released in 1999, and played on its next seven albums.The streamed event on Sunday included “Rescued,” the band’s first new song since Hawkins’s death, which appears to reflect their lingering grief.Last September in London, Hawkins’s teenage son, Shane, performed “My Hero” with the band in a tribute concert to his father. At that concert, Freese, on drums, said he wanted to play on Hawkins’s set. More

The premiere of Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer’s six-hour opera was presented by the orchestra — an institution at an inflection point.The composer Dylan Mattingly’s cheeks turned red, and he held a hand up to his eyes, as he began to cry late Saturday night during the bows for the world premiere of his opera “Stranger Love.”It was an understandably emotional moment. “Stranger Love,” created with Thomas Bartscherer, had been in development for over a decade and performed piecemeal, but was now being presented in its entirety at Walt Disney Concert Hall, by the perhaps the only orchestra that could do it: the Los Angeles Philharmonic.That’s because “Stranger Love” is a six-hour, durational opera, an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small. It requires the kind of pipe-dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been characteristic of the Philharmonic.Characteristic in large part thanks to the work of Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive and one of its longtime administrators, who said last week that he would leave Los Angeles for the Boston Symphony Orchestra this fall. That news followed another recent blow: the announcement that the Philharmonic’s superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would depart for New York in 2026.The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now at an inflection point. At stake is the preservation of an ethos that has made this orchestra the kind that can throw its ambition, and deep pockets, into projects like John Cage’s outrageous “Europeras” at Sony Studios; regular commissions at the length of symphonies and full evenings; and “Stranger Love,” whose first act alone is as long as Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (also programmed there this season), but which doesn’t have a fraction of its marketability.So, as Mattingly cried onstage, his triumph felt bittersweet, with a tinge of fear about the Philharmonic’s next phase. “Omnia mutantur,” someone says in the opera, nodding to Ovid: Everything changes. Yet it’s also natural to want more from the Smith-Dudamel era — to “tarry a while” and “linger in this moment,” to pull another line from the show.No matter what happens, “Stranger Love” deserves life beyond its one-night-only run at Disney Hall, which was hosted by the Philharmonic and performed by Mattingly’s ensemble, Contemporaneous. The most natural fit in New York, where epically avant-garde opera has all but vanished from earlier bastions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center, would be the Park Avenue Armory, the city’s most generous promoter of large-scale work.If anything, the Armory would be a more appropriate space than Disney Hall, its vastness able to accommodate Mattingly’s musical and emotional sprawl — the way his score does nothing but linger, luxuriating in the good and the bad, the spiritual and the doubtful, and above all the ecstatic.The largely abstract opera follows a pair of lovers: Tasha, sung by Molly Netter, and Andrew, sung by Isaiah Robinson.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingLike most works of extreme ambition and magnitude, “Stranger Love” isn’t perfect. When it name-checks the likes of Anne Carson and Octavio Paz, it behaves more like creative nonfiction than opera and yanks its audience from an experience of pure feeling. Some stretches of the score are more trying than transporting, and the second act seems destined to torment any director.That 80-minute act — in which singers exist more as instrumentalists than traditional characters — certainly appears to have stumped Lileana Blain-Cruz, an imaginative, effective director who wasn’t in full control of the material here, or much of elsewhere. There were references, in her modest staging, to the work’s lineage of opera and durational art. In Matt Saunders’s scenic design, a tall backdrop (made of threads that formed a canvas for Hanna Wasileski’s projections) was at one point illuminated with Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s celestial, forced-perspective set for “The Magic Flute.” As if playing off an “Einstein on the Beach” reference in the line “These are the days my friends,” Blain-Cruz has two people carry and sit in chairs that could have been used in Robert Wilson’s original “Einstein” production.That’s far from the only tip of the hat in “Stranger Love,” but it may be the most explicit. Mattingly has internalized a wealth of musical styles: the gamelan-influenced, West Coast sounds of Lou Harrison; the propulsive cadences of John Adams; the vocal technique and poetic dramaturgy of Meredith Monk. Three female voices — Holly Sedillos, Catherine Brookman and Eliza Bagg, often employing woodwind-like vocalise — could have been pulled from a Minimalist ensemble.But Mattingly doesn’t quote. Instead, his influences surface subtly, abstracted in, say, a rhythmic gesture. In the end, the language is entirely his own. Although his score often instructs singers to “sound as beautiful as possible,” his writing calls for the directness of pop rather than an operatic color. His 28-piece orchestra includes restless percussion and three pianos: one with standard tuning, one roughly half a tone lower, the other in between. The microtonal effect, in Mattingly’s polyrhythms, can be that of a gently melodic choir of wind chimes.The plot is narrated by an otherworldly character named Uriel, played by Julyana Soelistyo.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingIn each scene, Mattingly prolongs a musical idea with mantra-like focus, relishing and delicately transforming it. Bartscherer’s poetic and slim story follows a couple, Tasha and Andre, through the seasons, a vague timeline guided more by mood than chronology: fresh, promising spring; pleasantly lethargic summer; suddenly shifting autumn; suffocatingly glacial winter. This general arc is narrated by Uriel — a charismatic Julyana Soelistyo, whose otherworldliness is emphasized in Kaye Voyce’s costume design — and accompanied by two allegorical figures, Threat from Without (temptation) and Threat from Within (doubt).David Bloom conducted Mattingly’s pitfall-ridden score with a sure hand. Occasionally, his hips betrayed an urge to groove, but even then he remained unflappably precise. As Andre, the tenor Isaiah Robinson had a bright purity that served the score with an egoless instrumental timbre similar to the soprano Molly Netter’s Tasha. As the Threat from Without, Jane Sheldon sang with birdlike leaps redolent of Monk’s “Atlas”; Luc Kleiner, as the Threat from Within, was gloomier and darkly seductive.Blain-Cruz’s production featured six dancers, who during the first act are made to behave with unpredictably fast and slow stylized movement that snaps into focus only when Tasha and Andre spot each other and sustain eye contact from across the stage. But in the second act, the dancers merely retell the lovers’ story through Chris Emile’s tiresomely obvious choreography.Most impressive were the members of Contemporaneous, which Mattingly founded with Bloom while students at Bard College. These are players well versed in Mattingly’s idiom, and well suited to take on such an immense, difficult score for one night: exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing, as full of personality as any singer.They are the stars of the purely instrumental third act, repeating versions of earworm phrases for about 20 minutes. As the score ritualistically stretches a kind of communal love to the cosmos, one melody begins to spread out as well, until, in the final seconds, it unfurls slowly, ending before it reaches its last note.And why should it? When something is this special, you can’t help but want to tarry a while and linger in the moment.Stranger LovePerformed on Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. More

The country star’s chart run with “One Thing at a Time” puts him in a league with Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder and the “Titanic” soundtrack.There was snow on the ground when Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” arrived at No. 1 in early March. Now, in balmy late spring, the country superstar’s latest LP is racking up its 11th consecutive week on the chart — a feat that puts Wallen in the company of Whitney Houston and Stevie Wonder.The 36-track “One Thing at a Time” has been a streaming blockbuster since it came out, and its numbers have cooled only modestly since then. Week after week, it has fended off competition from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Metallica and two members of BTS to remain music’s most popular album. In its latest week, “One Thing” had the equivalent of 134,500 sales in the United States, including 165 million streams and 8,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Long runs on the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship album chart, are not unheard-of. Bad Bunny, Drake and the “Frozen” soundtrack have all notched a total of 13 weeks; Taylor Swift has gotten 11 twice before. But none of those were for consecutive streaks, which are far more rare.According to Billboard, the last album to hold No. 1 for at least 11 weeks in a row was the “Titanic” soundtrack, which reigned for 16 back in 1998. But the last to spend its first 11 weeks at the top — to open at No. 1 and hold there 10 more times — came in 1987 with Houston’s “Whitney,” which featured hits like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “So Emotional.” Before that, Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” logged its first 13 weeks at No. 1 back in 1976 and 1977.Wallen’s accomplishment surpasses even his own record, after the singer’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” topped the chart for its initial 10 weeks in early 2021. That run came amid an industrywide rebuke after Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur, resulting in his temporary disappearance from radio and streaming playlists.Also this week, the Jonas Brothers open at No. 3 with “The Album,” while the hyper-prolific Louisiana rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again comes in at No. 4 with “Richest Opp,” his third release to reach the Top 10 this year alone — the last time just three weeks ago.Swift, whose triumphant stadium tour comes to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., for three shows this weekend, is No. 2 with her latest, “Midnights,” and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 5. More

Performing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the superstar maestro conducted the orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.Gustavo Dudamel began his reign at the New York Philharmonic on Friday with an ending.Greeted with a roar from the audience as he appeared with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall for the first time since being named its next music director, this superstar maestro conducted Mahler’s ninth and final completed symphony, one of the repertory’s great evocations of farewell. Few works survey the span of a life — its highs and lows — more thoroughly and unsparingly, from the pastoral to the hysterical, from raucous existence to pianississimo death.The program was planned long before Dudamel’s appointment, but it turned out to be ideal for this moment. Nearly an hour and a half long, Mahler’s Ninth fills a concert on its own. No overture; no soloist; no intermission.On Friday it provided a long, focused communion between a conductor and the players he’ll be leading in the years to come. (Dudamel’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, finishes next season and, because of classical music’s ludicrously slow planning cycles, Dudamel, currently at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, won’t officially start his five-year contract until 2026.)The Ninth was ideal for the moment, too, because this orchestra has a particular claim on Mahler, who briefly but indelibly served as its chief conductor around the time he was finishing the symphony, just before his death in 1911. While hardly a rarity, the Ninth is a piece that the Philharmonic has mostly entrusted to its music directors — including Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, two of the 20th century’s most influential Mahlerians.With the weight of this history palpable, Dudamel achieved in this sprawling, complex and bracing score a kind of casualness. He gave a sense of this as just another piece.This Ninth wasn’t a hothouse flower or a religious rite. Leading with easy flow and, especially in the great Adagio fourth movement, a tendency toward briskness, Dudamel had no interest in the self-seriousness that can easily bend this symphony toward exaggerated solemnity. The goal seemed to be bright freshness more than autumnal glow.Conducting without a score in front of him or a podium railing behind — there are, he seemed to be saying, no barriers between me, the players and the audience — Dudamel persuasively and naturally guided the score’s many slight, important shifts of pace. The deceleration to the end of the first movement was artful, and the complicated transitions at the close of the third were lucid. The music never felt bullied, manipulated or artificially inflated.At the start of the finale, the strings that interrupt a funeral dirge in the bassoon weren’t a slap in the face, but a swift tidal inundation. Those strings had earlier played with mossy darkness in the first movement’s passionately strange “Leidenschaftlich” passage.Throughout the symphony, the trumpets had the right coppery bite. The principal harp, Nancy Allen, brought the smooth, slightly unearthly resonance of temple bells to her music. Ryan Roberts, on English horn, played with his usual flawless poetry in small yet meaningful solos, especially near the end. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, offered both tenderness and tanginess.And yet missing from the evening was a certain degree of personality and depth.If the beginning of the first movement was clear and straightforward, it also lacked mystery and poignancy — an establishment of mood beyond mere accuracy. The murky, brooding music later in that movement, a nod to Wagner’s depiction of the magical, shapeshifting Tarnhelm in his “Ring,” passed without phosphorescent eeriness.There was a sense of celebration as Dudamel took the podium for the first time since being named the Philharmonic’s next music director.James Estrin/The New York TimesWhile there was understandably a sense of celebration in the sold-out hall on Friday, which bled into the performance, it’s not clear that love-fest is the right mood for much of Mahler’s Ninth. In the second movement, bouncing up and down at the knees and making smiling cues with a flared left hand, Dudamel led a ländler dance that was more sweetly rustic than ominously rough. And there was a breezy, circuslike feel to the waltz it transforms into, rather than anything sinister. This was not a rendition of the Mahler who prefigured Shostakovich.Some restraint in that second movement — even some sunniness — might make sense so as to leave somewhere to go in the unquestionably more explosive third. But on Friday, that Rondo-Burleske third movement wasn’t really intense, either.While the first measures were sumptuously grand, there was no sense of grotesquerie, self-mockery or more than slight pepperiness in what followed, so the sudden slowing into the consoling, contrasting theme — like a roof opening to reveal the full expanse of the starry night sky — didn’t have the necessary impact. Dudamel hadn’t brought us to a place from which we needed to be consoled.This wasn’t particularly light-textured playing, but the feeling was nevertheless almost airy, with a reticence in the lower strings. Eighty minutes seemed to pass quickly — perhaps too much so.With the orchestra’s principal horn position currently vacant, Stefan Dohr, who fills that role for the Berlin Philharmonic, was a guest, to uneven effect. In his crucial part here, Dohr was steady, but the mellow solidity of his tone, shading into leadenness, didn’t seem quite in the same sound world as his colleagues. The passing around of solos through the winds in the fourth movement offered a feeling of humanity but, like this performance as a whole, felt a bit stranded: neither elegant nor raw.The Philharmonic still tends to gesture toward super-soft playing rather than really achieving it, let alone relishing it. And with an edgy thinness to the orchestra’s sound at full cry, rather than rounded, blended warmth, I felt a revival of my concerns from the fall opening of the renovated Geffen Hall about the space’s clear but stark acoustics.Under Dudamel’s baton, the symphony’s final minutes, as the strings gradually dim to nothingness, were as sensible as I’ve ever heard them. This was a pleasantly even-keeled lullaby rather than a radical or wrenching depiction of life draining away. The playing was poised, but it left a ways to go in profundity.It was an ending. But for this conductor and this orchestra, it felt like a place to start.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

The 81-year-old songwriter ruminates on mortality, faith and meaning in an album that could be a farewell.What do songwriters do when they feel death approaching? As time runs out, some choose to spend it by determinedly creating music to outlive them.“Seven Psalms” sounds like a last testament from the 81-year-old Paul Simon. It’s an album akin to David Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” which those songwriters made as mortality loomed; they each died days after the albums were released.Their generation of singer-songwriters has dedicated itself to chronicling their entire lives, biographically and metaphorically, from youth through last words. “Blackstar” was turbulent and exploratory; “You Want It Darker” was stoically bleak. “Seven Psalms” stays true to Simon’s own instincts: observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing.The album is constructed as a nearly unbroken 33-minute suite, nominally divided into seven songs that circle back to recurring refrains. It has places of lingering contemplation and it has sudden, startling changes; its informality is exactingly planned.Simon begins the album in his most casual tone. Over calmly precise and rhythmically flexible guitar picking, he sings, “I’ve been thinking about the great migration.”Almost immediately, it becomes clear that the migration is from life to death, a transition the singer is preparing to make himself. He’s thinking about time, love, culture, family, music, eternity and God, striving to balance skepticism and something like faith. “I have my reasons to doubt/A white light eases the pain,” Simon sings in “Your Forgiveness.” “Two billion heartbeats and out/Or does it all begin again?”Simon’s songwriting has never been particularly religious. Over the years, he has drawn on gospel music for songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Loves Me Like a Rock,” which bring religious imagery to secular relationships, and his 2011 album, “So Beautiful or So What,” had touches of Christian imagery — but also imagined “The Afterlife” as one last bureaucracy, where arrivals have to “Fill out a form first/And then you wait in a line.”“Seven Psalms” is more humble and awe-struck. Its refrains return to, and work variations on, the album’s opening song, “The Lord.” As in the psalms of the Bible — which, as Simon notes in “Sacred Harp,” were songs — Simon portrays the Lord in sweeping ways: wondrous and terrifying, both protector and destroyer, sometimes benign and sometimes wrathful. The Lord, Simon sings, is “a meal for the poorest, a welcome door to the stranger.” Then he turns to naming 21st-century perils: “The Covid virus is the Lord/The Lord is the ocean rising.”Much of the music sounds like solitary ruminations: Simon communing with his guitar, which has been the subtly virtuosic underpinning of most of his lifetime of songs. As his fingers sketch patterns, he latches onto melody phrases and then lets them go, teasing at pop structures but soon dissolving them. And around him, at any moment, sounds can float out of the background: additional supportive guitars, the eerie microtonal bell tones of Harry Partch’s cloud-chamber bowls, the jaunty huffing of a bass harmonica and, in the album’s final moments, the voice of his wife, Edie Brickell.In the course of the album, Simon sings about personal distress and societal tensions. In “Love Is Like a Braid,” a song of gratitude and vulnerability, he sings, “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows until the real deal came/Broke me like a twig in a winter gale.” In “Trail of Volcanoes,” he juxtaposes youthful exploits with adult realities: “The pity is the damage that’s done/Leaves so little for amends”Meanwhile, Simon’s tartly aphoristic side reappears in “My Professional Opinion,” a swipe at social media context collapse set to a country-blues shuffle. “All rise to the occasion/Or all sink into despair,” he sings. “In my professional opinion/We’re better off not going there.”He ends the album — possibly his last — with a song called “Wait.” He protests, “My hand’s steady/My mind is still clear.” Brickell’s voice arrives to tell him, “Life is a meteor” and “Heaven is beautiful/It’s almost like home.” At the end, he harmonizes with her on one word, extended into five musical syllables: “Amen.” It sounds like he’s accepting the inevitable.Paul Simon“Seven Psalms”(Owl Records/Legacy Recordings) More

His sinewy bass lines were a vital — if, as one writer put it, “habitually unsung” — part of the influential British rock band’s success.Andy Rourke, the bass player who provided the muscle and drive behind the darkly poetic musings of the Smiths, one of the most influential bands of the 1980s, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 59.A representative said he died of pancreatic cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center.While Mr. Rourke — along with the band’s drummer, Mike Joyce — received a tiny share of the accolades (and revenues), his sinewy bass lines provided both heft and melodicism behind Morrissey’s lachrymose vocals, which bounced between elegiac and funereal, and Johnny Marr’s intricate, layered guitar work, which could be almost symphonic in its complexity.“The nature of the music that we were playing in the Smiths meant that the sound needed a bit more of a kick,” Mr. Rourke said in a 2019 interview with Bass Player magazine. “And because it’s me,” he added, “every time I do something, I do it big.”Mr. Rourke’s playing, influenced by Paul McCartney and John Entwistle of the Who, was always “habitually unsung,” David Cavanagh, an Irish journalist, wrote in 1993, but it was also “incontrovertibly top drawer.”Discerning listeners understood Mr. Rourke’s value. Morrissey once said that Mr. Rourke was good enough to have been in Elvis Presley’s band. “He didn’t ever know his own power, and nothing that he played had been played by someone else,” Morrissey wrote in a tribute on his website after Mr. Rourke’s death.Mr. Rourke’s nimble, often effervescent bass lines were often foregrounded in landmark songs like “This Charming Man,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “Cemetery Gates,” all of which transformed the Smiths into a cult act in the United States and a chart-topping group in their home country.The Smiths — from left, Mr. Rourke, the singer Morrissey, the guitarist Johnny Marr and, in the back, the drummer Mike Joyce — in performance in 1984.Getty ImagesAndrew Michael Rourke was born in Manchester, England, on Jan. 17, 1964. He met Mr. Marr at school in Manchester in 1975.“We were best friends, going everywhere together,” Mr. Marr wrote in a recent Instagram post, adding, “I soon came to realise that my mate was one of those rare people that absolutely no one doesn’t like.”The Smiths formed in Manchester in 1982. The group had a couple of bassists before Mr. Marr brought in his childhood friend.In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Rourke recalled playing his first show with the band in a tiny gay club. The Smiths always “rehearsed to death,” he said, so it was not surprising when they quickly soared in popularity.As they rose to prominence, the four Smiths were inseparable. “We were a gang,” he told Mojo. “A very tight band of brothers. When we were at our peak, nobody could penetrate that.” Within two years, the Smiths had their first Top 10 hit in Britain with “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”But success brought problems, including a heroin habit that Mr. Rourke developed. “You start getting a bunch of money and you don’t know what to do,” he recalled in a 2011 interview. “You start spending it on drugs.”In 1986, Morrissey fired Mr. Rourke, reportedly via postcard, because of his drug use. But he soon rejoined the band.The Smiths broke up for good in 1987 after releasing four albums. Two years later, Mr. Rourke and Mr. Joyce, the drummer, began legal proceedings against their former bandmates, claiming that they had been equal partners and should have been paid a bigger split of the royalties. (They had been given only 10 percent.)Mr. Rourke eventually dropped his case after being offered 83,000 pounds (about $100,000). But Mr. Joyce went to court and a judge found in his favor, saying that Morrissey should pay him compensation of around a million pounds, according to news reports at the time.As late as 2007, Mr. Rourke told the BBC that the Smiths’ breakup “still smarts a bit.” Still, not long after the split, he laid down bass tracks for solo singles by Morrissey like “Interesting Drug” (1989) and “Last of the Famous International Playboys” (1990).Post-Smiths, he also played on albums by Sinead O’Connor and the Pretenders and toured with Badly Drawn Boy. In 2009, Mr. Rourke moved to New York, where he performed at clubs with the D.J. Olé Koretsky in a duo called Jetlag, which evolved into a band called D.A.R.K. when they enlisted Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Long after his Smiths days, Mr. Rourke was asked about the origins of his melodic style. “It was just my love of bass playing,” he said.“If I wasn’t eating or in the bath,” he added, “I had a bass in my hand.” More

Eleven years after her death, the disco legend’s family has combed through her possessions, deciding to sell many of her glittering dresses, manuscripts and paintings.For nearly a decade after Donna Summer’s death in 2012, her home in Nashville remained like a shrine to the Queen of Disco’s decades-long music career.Beaded gowns that she had worn onstage remained tucked away along with designer pumps in the upstairs closet; ephemera such as an annotated album cover design for “She Works Hard for the Money” were stored downstairs; and in the basement, there was an accumulation of brightly colored paintings, awards and gold records.Never eager to talk about death, Summer — who died of lung cancer at 63 — had not given directions for what should be done with her possessions, her husband, Bruce Sudano, said recently. It was only in the past few years that Summer’s family was ready to fully comb through her belongings at the Nashville home, many of which will go up for sale at Christie’s next month, the auction house announced Friday.“You’d go into these spaces and it would be almost a time capsule of your life,” said Brooklyn Sudano, one of Summer’s three daughters.One of the items up for sale is a silver goblet that Summer often had onstage with her, filled with caffeine-free Pepsi. Brooklyn Sudano remembered that when she and one of her sisters were on tour with their mother in the 1990s, one of their jobs would be to stir the soda inside the goblet to get rid of any bubbles. (“While she’s singing she can’t be burping,” she explained.)The singer drank flat, caffeine-free Pepsi from this silver goblet during performances, her family said. Christie’s estimates that the cup will sell for between $400 and $600.Courtesy of Christie’sA versatile singer-songwriter whose music spanned funk, dance, rock and gospel, Summer shot to fame in 1975 with the erotic extended cut of “Love to Love You Baby,” followed by the pioneering electronic song “I Feel Love,” whose pulsating club beat can be heard in Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance.”The announcement by Christie’s comes shortly before HBO’s release on Saturday of a new family-backed biographical documentary, directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano. Chronicling Summer’s rise from a cast member in a German production of “Hair” to an international superstar, the film, called “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” is as much about her personal life as her career, discussing her struggles with depression, physical abuse by a boyfriend, and her chapter as a born-again Christian.The auction includes glamorous possessions and others that are more mundane. On the glamorous end: a glittering blue and green dress Summer wore in the music video for her 1983 song “Unconditional Love,” a rhinestone-studded dress and bolero jacket that she wore at a concert in 1995, and a collection of the diva’s sunglasses.As for the mundane — but perhaps intriguing to the most devoted of fans — the sale includes unworn shoes and a dozen unused Louis Vuitton towels.“There are people in the world who love her,” said Bruce Sudano, who is in charge of caring for her estate. “It felt like we can’t just hoard all of this stuff for ourselves.”An early draft of Donna Summer’s 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written by the singer on hotel stationery.Courtesy of Christie’sSummer’s rhinestone-spotted evening dress, worn onstage in 1995, is estimated to sell for between $1,500 and $2,500.Courtesy of Christie’sThe online sale, which Christie’s expects to garner about $200,000 to $300,000, begins on June 15. A portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Save the Music Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the auction house said.One item, a poster for a 1998 concert supporting the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis, gestures to the history of Summer’s at times strained relationship with L.G.B.T.Q. fans, many of whom boycotted her music in the ’80s after they had helped to fuel its rise.The documentary briefly addresses that history, with Summer’s husband recounting how an off-the-cuff comment onstage — “God didn’t make Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve,” he recalled her saying — deeply hurt many gay fans. Summer worked to repair her relationship with the fan base, especially after New York magazine wrote that she had described the AIDS crisis as a “divine ruling” on gay people, a report she fiercely denied and ultimately sued over.The sale also includes about 15 paintings and manuscripts with scrawled lyrics, including for the 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written on stationery from a hotel in Munich, as well as edits in pencil to the lyrics for the hit “On the Radio.”Brooklyn Sudano scrutinized documents like those while piecing together the HBO film, which she said bolstered her belief that her mother was not a pop star engineered by outside forces, but rather an artist who was deeply involved in creating the hits that made her famous.“People just saw her as this persona,” she said. “I don’t think that they truly understood that she was an artist and had an active role in creating the Donna Summer that people knew.” More