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      Lucinda Williams Tells Her Secrets

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      The singer-songwriter reveals herself in a memoir that captures her adventures with charming rogues, puzzled music executives and her own demons.NASHVILLE — “Bless your heart!”Lucinda Williams delivered the Southern benediction in her distinctive drawl. She has a memoir coming out soon, and Ms. Williams, the celebrated singer-songwriter who has been compared to Raymond Carver for the acuity of her work, was nonetheless not too sure about this particular literary endeavor. So when a visitor complimented the book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” she beamed. Like many a writer, she said she had a hard time letting go. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and turn it in when I’m done,’” she said. “Much to my dismay it doesn’t work that way.”She wanted more time, and she missed the editorial eye and encouragement of her father, the poet and literary scholar Miller Williams, who died in 2015. Like his daughter, he was known for the gritty realism of his work, and they often performed together. For years he had looked over her lyrics — he was the king of grammar, she said — until she sent him “Essence,” the title song from her 2001 album, and he told her, as she recalled: “‘Honey, this is as close to pure poetry as you’ve come.’ And I said, ‘Does this mean I’ve graduated?’”It has been 25 years since Ms. Williams’s breakthrough, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” That collection of anthems to love, loss and yearning made her an overnight success, as she said wryly, at age 45. Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge (she takes it slow these days) and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.About that voice. Emmylou Harris once said Ms. Williams could sing the chrome off a tailpipe. Bonnie Raitt, in a phone interview, called it “unique, truly American and drenched in raw grit and soul and vulnerability.”Steve Earle, Ms. Williams’s occasional collaborator and old friend, described it this way over Zoom: “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom? There’s a moment when the scent just permeates everything and there’s a viscosity to it and it’s substantial and that’s what her voice has always reminded me of. There’s an automatic atmosphere. Chet Baker was like that. Merle Haggard. The mood happens as soon as they open their mouths.”Ms. Williams, 70, and her husband, Tom Overby, who is also her manager and collaborator, live in a white clapboard bungalow with a peaked roof, gingerbread trim and a neat square of lawn. They moved to East Nashville from Los Angeles in February 2020, after which came a series of blows: the tornadoes that tore through the city in early March, flattening neighborhoods and shearing off part of their roof; the coronavirus pandemic, which shut things down a week later; the Covid death of her dear friend John Prine; and the stroke, which bludgeoned her in November.Ms. Williams onstage at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe house was sparsely furnished with a pair of velvety sofas; metal shelves and storage containers spilling over with books, CDs and vinyl albums; and lots of audio gear. On the kitchen island, a bright yellow vase was filled with yellow button flowers. The gray walls were bare, save for a white board that proclaimed, “Lu’s Schedule. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”“I have a bit of brain fog from the stroke,” Ms. Williams said, nodding at the board, “dates and days and such, but I think I always had that.”Mr. Overby, a loquacious man with bushy gray hair, rolled his eyes in assent. He’s the memory in the marriage, she added.In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” Ms. Williams writes of her decades playing for tips and spaghetti dinners and the perfidy of the record companies that didn’t know how to characterize her roots-inspired, renegade rocking style and her novelistic writing. “We don’t know what to do with this,” she said she was told over and over again. “It’s too country for rock and too rock for country.” It was somehow fitting that a British independent label, Rough Trade Records, signed her for her 1988 album, “Lucinda Williams.”She writes of the Hollywood director hired to make a video for “Right in Time,” the languid ballad about a woman’s desire from the “Car Wheels” album. As she recounts, he arrived for dinner at a restaurant thoroughly drunk before propositioning her, sloppily, while her boyfriend was in the bathroom. When she found his idea for the video corny, she sent him packing. She goes on to tell the story of the six-year odyssey to get the album made — the setbacks caused by vacillating record company executives and her dogged commitment to her own high standards. For her troubles, Ms. Williams was labeled a perfectionist, which, for a woman in a male-dominated industry, was not a compliment.“She just stood her ground and emerged a gleaming, burnished jewel,” Ms. Raitt said. “It doesn’t make you popular when you stand your ground, and that’s why she’s excellent.” A strong woman in the music industry is seen as “a control freak and a bitch,” she added, while a strong man is hailed as “an auteur and a genius.”Ms. Williams performing with Steve Earle at Town Hall in New York in 2007.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesMs. Williams turned to Mr. Earle to help her get the album finished. “He’d say, ‘It’s just a record, Lu,’” she said. “He was trying to help me get perspective. I was losing my perspective. He’d be like: ‘The vocal is great. You’re singing your Louisiana ass off. When are you going to trust somebody?’ I had hardly made any records before, compared to other artists, so the whole process of being in the studio was terrifying. It was my own neuroses. It’s not like I was brave or anything.”She has often been bedeviled by jitters. In 1994, when she won a Grammy thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit version of her song “Passionate Kisses,” she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. Rosanne Cash had sent her to a Nashville boutique for an outfit, but she bailed at the last minute.“The truth is I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes in the memoir. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life. It’s a riddle I believe many artists have been trying to solve for centuries. It takes enormous fortitude to create the work in the first place, but then once it’s time to put it out in the world, the confidence required to go public is unrelated to the audacity that created the work.”“It was my fear of the unknown,” Ms. Williams said. “Of being around people with money and nice clothes and nice teeth or whatever.”She managed to make it to the Grammy ceremony in 1999, when “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was honored as the year’s best folk album. But when her name was called, she found herself walking away from the stage. Mr. Earle, who was up for the same award, yelled out to her, as she told it: “‘Lulu! You’re going the wrong way!’ I was horrified. God. Thanks, Steve!”“Lucinda is one of the great geniuses of popular music, so how could she have struggled?” Ann Powers, a music critic for NPR, said. “A lot of it is personal and a lot of it is structural. The dynamic of how to corral a bunch of guys was complicated, it still is, but even more so then when women were relatively sparse in rock ’n’ roll circles.”It can be hard for bandleaders like Ms. Williams to be the only woman in the room. Ms. Raitt called it the problem of “women’s voices,” which “hits the mom button” for many men.Ms. Powers added, “In her music, she’s often questioning herself, expressing her vulnerability in profound ways.”“So it makes sense that she would have struggled to claim her authority,” she continued. “So often with artists the very thing we love about them is what poses a challenge for them in their life and work.”In any case, in addition to earning a Grammy, “Car Wheels” hit the Billboard charts, a first for Ms. Williams, and went gold. Critics reviewed it in ecstatic terms, and the record producer Joe Boyd called it “the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ of the 1990s,” referring to Bob Dylan’s canonical record.At home in Nashville.Kristine Potter for The New York TimesAs Ms. Williams’s fame grew, so did the dedication of her fans. She writes of the woman who began masturbating at a show in New Orleans and kept at it even as she was removed by security. (When Ms. Williams and her band heard the story after their set, they were fascinated, as she recalled: “Was she wearing pants? How did it work?”) There was the couple that sent her lingerie. The woman who delivered a crate of Vidalia onions because she’d heard Ms. Williams liked them. One fan, a drug counselor who credited his sobriety to Ms. Williams, had one of her songs tattooed in its entirety on his back. Then there are those who have sent her letters saying how much they appreciate “Sweet Old World,” her mournful lament for someone who died by suicide.Ms. Williams was born in Lake Charles, La., and grew up in New Orleans, Mexico and Chile, with stopovers in towns in Mississippi, Utah and Georgia. Her father, the son of a Methodist clergyman and early civil rights activist, sold encyclopedias and refrigerators before his mentor, Flannery O’Connor, recommended him for a poetry position at Loyola University in New Orleans. Hence the constant moving.“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Williams said when he first heard “Car Wheels,” which paints a picture of tense domesticity and a peripatetic family life. Her mother, Lucille, a thwarted pianist, was also the child of a minister — of the fire and brimstone variety — and she suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. Lucinda and her siblings were mostly raised by their father and stepmother, his former student and the family’s babysitter. (Awkward at first, as Ms. Williams notes in the book.)Theirs was a Bohemian academic household, imprinted by the politics of the era. Mr. Williams was the host of a bibulous literary salon that included Charles Bukowski, the hard-living poet. As a teenager, Lucinda handed out “Boycott grapes” leaflets in front of a grocery store and played protest songs at demonstrations. When she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her New Orleans high school, her father said, “Don’t worry honey, we’ll get you an A.C.L.U. lawyer.” And when she was finally thrown out, after joining a civil rights march, he was unfazed.“To hell with it,” he told her. “You weren’t learning anything there anyway.” She spent a semester at the University of Arkansas, where her father was then teaching, but she dropped out to play music for tips at a club in New Orleans.Ms. Williams took the title for her memoir from the chorus of “Metal Firecracker,” a song from the “Car Wheels” album, one of her many compositions about “the poets on motorcycles” who are her preferred type.These men fill the pages of her memoir. There was the gentle crew member who turned violent after he moved in with her and made away with her third Grammy — for best female rock vocal performance in 2002 — and a good bit of her collection of folk art. And the erudite charmer who was her first long-term boyfriend and who died of cirrhosis of the liver in his 40s. The haunting “Lake Charles” is an elegy for him.Ms. Williams and Tom Overby, her husband and collaborator, at the Americana Music Association Honors and Awards Show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.Terry Wyatt/Getty ImagesThe man in “Metal Firecracker” was a charismatic bass player who doggedly pursued her while they were touring for her 1992 album, “Sweet Old World.” (“Metal firecracker” was his nickname for the tour bus.) Against the advice of bandmates, Ms. Williams succumbed, which meant breaking up with her boyfriend at the time, who reacted by busting up the furniture in their hotel room. The new suitor had a few irons in the fire, as she learned later, and when the tour was over, he vanished. He told her, in a wince-inducing phone call, “I love you but this relationship doesn’t fit my agenda right now.” At any rate, as she writes, she got a song out of it. Three, as it happens.Ms. Williams and Mr. Overby, a former music executive who is not a rogue but a bit of a poet, married onstage in Minneapolis in 2009. (When they were dating, she writes, his male colleagues warned him off: “Be careful. Our reps on her label tell us she’s literally insane.” He ignored them.) Her father wrote their vows and performed the ceremony. When they both declared, “Loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know,” the audience roared with laughter.There is some dispute about who proposed to whom. Ms. Williams claimed it was Mr. Overby. In her recollection, he turned to her during a tour and asked if she wanted to go shopping for diamonds.Mr. Overby shook his head. “We were on the bus and out of nowhere you go, ‘So when are you taking me shopping for diamonds?’”Ms. Williams: “I did?”Mr. Overby: “You did!”Ms. Williams: “But you liked it.”Ms. Williams suffered a stroke in 2020, but her voice is intact. Her next album comes out in June.Kristine PotterMr. Overby organized a trip to a jewelry store owned by friends in Omaha, lining it up with a performance, but Ms. Williams was so nervous she couldn’t get off the bus until just before the store closed. When she saw the array of rings, she panicked. Mission aborted. They tried again the following year, and again she was flummoxed. Years later, they bought a pair of rings in Los Angeles — and Ms. Williams promptly lost them, her husband said.“Misplaced them,” she said, correcting him.The couple may not be the best jewelry collaborators, but lately they have worked nicely in the studio on Ms. Williams’s new album, “Stories From a Rock ’n’ Roll Heart,” out in June. As they did in their homage to John Prine, which they wrote after he died of Covid. Ms. Williams performed it last year at a tribute to him. It tells the story of a night long ago when Ms. Williams and Mr. Prine thought they might write a song together. They spent many jolly hours careering from bar to studio but never quite got down to the task.John and me were going to get togetherAnd write a song one timeGot about as far as the midtown barAnd ordered up a bottle of wineWhat could go wrong, working on a song?Then we got to talking, not looking at the timeTelling stories about folks we knowHad another bottle of wineWe were having funWhat could go wrong? More

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      Taylor Swift Fans Get Married at Her ‘Eras’ Tour

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      René Hurtado was able to snag front-row seats to the second night of Taylor Swift’s tour — and it was there that she married Max Bochman.Ask René Maria Avalos and Maxwell P Bochman why they chose to get married on March 18, and their answer is simple: “Taylor chose for us.”In November 2022, when tickets (rather infamously) went on sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the bride, a self-described “die-hard Swiftie” who goes by René Hurtado, got lucky, snagging four front row seats (for about $1,000 each) for the second show on March 18 in Glendale, Ariz. — about 20 miles from Tempe, Ariz., where the couple lives. Moments later, the Ticketmaster site crashed. (A Senate hearing and lawsuits followed.)Tickets in-hand, the couple thought they might elope during the day and then attend the concert as a kind of reception. A friend upped the ante: “She said, ‘Why don’t you just get married at the show?’” said Ms. Hurtado, 30. “I thought it was crazy at first, but then I thought, why not?”The couple first met in the summer of 2014. Ms. Hurtado was selling Ghirardelli chocolate chip cookies in the stands at the Stockton Ports baseball stadium (now known as Banner Island Ballpark) in Stockton, Calif., while earning her bachelor’s degree in geology at the University of the Pacific. Mr. Bochman, who goes by Max, was working in stadium operations, his first job after graduating from the University of Massachusetts Amherst earlier that year.“I remember when I first saw her working there — I talked to one of my co-workers and I was like, ‘I need to meet her,’” Mr. Bochman, 32, said.They hit it off over drinks with co-workers, and two days later, had their first official date at an Italian restaurant. “We knew immediately that we were very important to each other,” she said. Within three weeks, he was meeting her mother. Four months later, she flew to Taunton, Mass., to spend Christmas with his family.[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]Rene HurtadoBoth love sports and rap music, and share a similar sense of humor. They also agreed that Northern California didn’t feel right to them, so in 2018, they moved together to Arizona. On the drive down, Mr. Bochman received a job offer as an account manager at Barton Associates, a medical staffing and recruiting company based in Massachusetts, where he still works today.On Sept. 6, 2021, after seven years together, Mr. Bochman proposed at sunset to Ms. Hurtado, who is a workplace operations manager at Flare, a client-attorney software start-up based in San Diego, on South Mountain in Phoenix.On March 17, the opening night of the Eras Tour and the eve of their wedding, Ms. Hurtado wrote down all the songs Ms. Swift played in preparation for the next night. “Right after ‘All Too Well,’ she goes to costume change,” Ms. Hurtado said. “So we knew that was the best moment.”When the next evening arrived, the couple was joined by two friends, Alicia Witmer and her fiancé, Josh Wineriter. Ms. Witmer, who was ordained for the occasion by the American Marriage Ministries, served as officiant and maid of honor.The groom wore a black tuxedo, and the bride wore a midi-length white satin dress and a mid-length veil. They both topped their outfits with a crucial accessory: an Eras Tour V.I.P. pass on a lanyard, which was included in the steep ticket price. (The V.I.P. package includes early entrance and separate merchandise stands.)When Ms. Swift disappeared from view mid-show for the costume change, as well as a set change from the “Red” era to the “Folklore” era. Ms. Witmer started reading the vows from her phone, and the couple exchanged rings and a kiss. The whole ceremony took about three minutes.“At first, none of the fans around us really knew what was going on, but after our first kiss, everyone burst into cheers,” Ms. Hurtado said. “They really did create that moment for us by their support.”Ms. Swift didn’t seem to know what had happened, but a couple of songs later, someone from the stage team came up and handed them one of the singer’s guitar picks. The next day, Ms. Swift liked an audience member’s TikTok video of the wedding. A “Good Morning America” appearance followed, and the bride’s own TikTok post has gone viral.The couple is planning a larger wedding for 2024, one you don’t need an impossible-to-get ticket to attend, with a soundtrack full of their favorite Taylor Swift tunes.Mr. Bochman said he has never considered himself a Swiftie, even though “it’s the music that is always playing in my house.” Is he a fan now? “Yes, I think I have to be after she sang at my wedding.” More

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      Spotlighting Lady Macbeth’s Anguish: Can What’s Done Be Undone?

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      With radical adaptations of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” Heartbeat Opera shows why it’s so vital to New York’s music scene.Heartbeat Opera, a small, nimble company that has received its share of plaudits over the years, is on the cusp of a milestone birthday: its 10th. But there was a time recently when it didn’t know whether it could go on, its artistic director, Jacob Ashworth, said.Speaking from the stage after opening night of Heartbeat’s two-part spring festival on Tuesday, Ashworth said that the departure of the company’s founding artistic directors during the pandemic put its future in doubt.On the evidence of the new, radical reconceptualizations of Puccini’s “Tosca” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” — Heartbeat’s first mainstage shows since 2019, which opened this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center — the company hasn’t skipped a beat.Taken together, the operas demonstrate the strengths that make Heartbeat so vital to New York’s opera scene. “Lady M,” an utterly original recreation of Verdi’s opera that places Lady Macbeth’s doubts and moral quandaries at its center, is an astonishing display of the company’s musical imagination, theatrical instincts and intellectual firepower. “Tosca,” more ambitious but less successful, shows how Heartbeat, agile and daring, can quickly align with an issue as urgent as the women’s rights movement in Iran, where uprisings in the fall captured international attention.A scene from “Lady M,” with Algozzini and Kenneth Stavert as Macbeth.Russ Rowland“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. The production’s director, Emma Jaster; its music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg; and its original adapters, Ashworth and Ethan Heard, have reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. Macduff, the chorus, Macbeth’s big Act IV aria — all scrapped.In typical stagings, Lady Macbeth comes across as an unsubtle, unrepentant harridan whose abrupt crisis of conscience in the opera’s final act stretches credulity. The soprano role offers a string of marvelous set pieces — a hell-raising letter scene, a chaotic drinking song, a spellbinding sleepwalking scene — but they rarely form a coherent arc.Heartbeat starts with Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as the essential truth of her character and then molds the narrative to fit it. The show begins with Lady Macbeth in bed, sobbing uncontrollably, full of remorse for all the blood she has helped to shed. Her crying is so relentless that Macbeth, irritated and unmoved, gets up to go sleep on the couch. Then, the action flashes back to the score’s beginning, in which Macbeth — often treated as a weak-willed hero buffeted by supernatural forces and a monstrous wife — appears as a cool, calculating, sociopathic yuppie handing out his business card to members of the audience. The witches prophecy that he will climb the corporate ladder.In Heartbeat’s telling, Lady Macbeth, no longer the scapegoat for her husband’s foul behavior, is the one who is led astray by an avaricious spouse. The Macbeths’ desire for public glory finds an outlet in the hollow vanities of social media, represented throughout the show by a ring light, its bright cast a reminder of manipulated reality rather than truth.As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it. Algozzini simplified the cabaletta in the letter scene and skipped the high D flat in the sleepwalking scene, but her performance was still filled with gripping details. Kenneth Stavert, as Macbeth, showed a bright, open baritone sound that had depths of strength and propulsion.Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). Samuel George’s trombone playing was jauntily demonic and, in its brief imitations of a French horn, somehow noble. Paul Wonjin Cho’s wild, soused clarinet solo in the drinking song injected instability into a predictable aria form. At one point, the percussionist Mika Godbole bowed a vibraphone to make it sound like a glass harmonica. They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.Anush Avetisyan and Chad Kranak in “Tosca,” set in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms.Russ RowlandThe orchestrations for “Tosca” never quite rose to that level. Schlosberg started with an unassailable idea to feature three cellos and a double bass — a nod, probably, to the famous cello quartet in Act III — but despite the handsome string playing, the instrumentation was too bare to deliver the score’s romance.“Tosca” had one of those Heartbeat concepts that lends itself to a zeitgeist-y epithet, along the lines of its Black Lives Matter “Fidelio” in 2018 and a #MeToo “La Susanna” in 2019. But the depth and ingenuity of the company’s engagement consistently erases any suspicion of topical opportunism.Staged by the Iranian American director Shadi G. and adapted by her in collaboration with Ashworth, “Tosca” had a show-within-a-show structure. They set Puccini’s opera — a melodrama roiled by sex, murder and the abuse of power — in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms. Even the ushers and musicians wore head scarves. We see a cast of singers staging a traditional production of “Tosca,” set in Rome, under the watchful eye of security forces and morality police, who stalk the edges of the stage and take note of the performers’ violations of the country’s moral code.Shadi’s framing introduced a fresh sense of danger. At one point, the police drag the actor portraying Cavaradossi (the tenor Chad Kranak) offstage and beat him. He desperately lunges back onto the stage only to be clawed back into the wings. It was harrowing to watch.Still, the staging could feel forced and, at times, risible, as security forces popped up, Whac-a-Mole style, in unexpected places. The singers — including Anush Avetisyan (a Tosca with a dark-hued voice), Gustavo Feulien (an elegantly underplayed Scarpia) and Joseph Lodato (a vocal standout as Angelotti) — brought a sense of scale and subtlety to their assignments that suited Baruch’s black box theater.In a way, “Lady M” expresses a more compelling sense of displacement. In its final minutes, Lady Macbeth and the witches sang the refugee chorus. As a choice it felt unusual, then somehow inevitable. Here was a woman mourning a homeland that wasn’t gone but still unavailable to her, because she had lost her way — proof, if any were needed, that Heartbeat certainly hasn’t. More

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      Alison Goldfrapp Dials Up Her Own Disco Fantasy

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      The singer of the London duo Goldfrapp is going solo with “The Love Invention,” an album of dance music that reflects her craving for euphoria.For nearly 25 years, the name Goldfrapp has represented the musical partnership between the singer Alison Goldfrapp and the keyboardist and producer Will Gregory.The duo recorded seven stylistically varied studio albums that drifted from trip-hop to glam rock to disco to indie to folk, sometimes crossing back, with a common thread: the airy-yet-hearty multi-octave voice of its namesake. Aside from some early shows, Gregory didn’t tour with the group, operating so far out of public view that he joked about being paranoid that people didn’t know he existed.But for Goldfrapp, going it alone for the first time — at age 56 — “feels very different,” she said from behind round sunglasses in a video interview. The vocalist and producer was speaking from her London home as she prepared for the release of her debut solo album, “The Love Invention,” out May 12. The music sounds different, too, teeming with maximalist, ecstatic club bangers crafted with the help of Richard X (Erasure, Róisín Murphy) and James Greenwood (Daniel Avery, Kelly Lee Owens).“I don’t think maybe I had the confidence to go and do something on my own,” Goldfrapp said in a second conversation via phone from a vacation in Spain. “Maybe I didn’t think I could.” (Her group, she clarified, has not disbanded.)Resisting self-mythology, Goldfrapp was more inclined to chalk her solo era up to a confluence of circumstances. Maybe most crucial is that she had the time: After the release of “Silver Eye,” the group’s last album, in 2017, and a subsequent tour, Goldfrapp decided to “check out for a bit” in a self-imposed musical sabbatical. Also, she explained, “Silver Eye” “had a kind of seriousness to it, and a sort of darkness” that she wanted to offset when her musical itch finally returned, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.“The Love Invention” is an ebullient collection of 11 songs focusing on ‌‌pulse, both of the cardiac and club varieties. Its ethos can be boiled down to a line Goldfrapp purrs on “The Beat Divine” over a walloping sleaze-disco throwback: “Only love can make the beat divine.”The album does not so much rewrite the book on women singing over four-on-the-floor rhythms (pop music’s chocolate and peanut butter) as turn in an immaculate draft on its sonic ideals. Its exuberance is unfettered and its low end is uncommonly deep for an album driven by a star vocalist. Though love is the message, Goldfrapp laces the euphoria with social commentary and life experience: “Fever” plays like an ode (“You are the one thing here/I really need/We are the fever now/This is the real thing”) though it was partly inspired by climate change, and the title track, which imagines a supreme dopamine rush from a doctor’s magical concoction, was inspired in part by her use of hormone replacement therapy for menopause.While “The Love Invention” hasn’t been tested in a big room, “it’s my fantasy of it,” ‌Goldfrapp said.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesGoldfrapp traced her love of dance music to her youth. While enrolled at Alton Convent School in Hampshire, England, she sang in the choir, and in her early teens, she listened to disco and dressed like a punk, a look she said was “really unfashionable.”To manifest her clubby destiny, she turned to the seasoned Richard X, who has been making dance music for more than 20‌‌ years and contributed to the 2010 Goldfrapp album “Head First,” ‌and she made a conscious decision to refrain from using acoustic instruments on the ‌LP. Instead of the dance divas that one might expect had a hand in informing “The Love Invention” — like Robyn, or Róisín Murphy — Goldfrapp cited the musician Kelela, post-punk, Italo disco and bossa nova as inspirations.She doesn’t get out to many clubs these days, though she did visit Berlin’s infamous Berghain while on tour, which she said was “a bit scary, but I kind of loved it.” So while “The Love Invention” hasn’t been tested in a big room, “it’s my fantasy of it,” ‌Goldfrapp said while beaming. The album’s loved-up themes create a double fantasy, a “craving,” she said, for euphoria rather than memoirist reportage. (She cautioned against reading the LP as an ode to her current relationship, with the architect Peter Culley.)“The Love Invention” is not a quarantine album‌‌, but its roots can be traced to deep lockdown, when Goldfrapp began a collaboration with the Norwegian duo Röyksopp that resulted in two songs on ‌‌its “Profound Mysteries” album trilogy. Goldfrapp said she had emailed the duo because she thought working with new people would be fun and was heartened to receive a reply (other producers she contacted had “completely ignored” her). The group’s receptiveness to collaboration inspired her to install a studio in her home, ‌‌in which she would record much of “The Love Invention.”In a video interview, Svein Berge of Röyksopp said that Goldfrapp’s “inquisitive nature” and the unique “signature” of her voice made the group keen to work with her. “She has the chameleon aspect,” he said of her versatility, adding, “There is no ego,” simply “a mutual understanding that we want the output to be as good as it can be.”Goldfrapp’s influence over the past decade has been powerful, if often underacknowledged. If everyone who heard the Velvet Underground went on to form a band, a good portion of Goldfrapp’s audience in the aughts threw away their pants, donned leotards and made stompy electro-pop. (Some admirers kept their pants on: “I got very into Goldfrapp again,” Adele told Zoe Ball on BBC Radio in 2021, adding she couldn’t pull off “what Alison is the absolute queen of.”)Goldfrapp said she is “very realistic about my position in the music industry,” which means having a fan base that is both “very strong” and “quite small.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesGoldfrapp slinked onto the music scene with “Felt Mountain” in 2000, a Mercury Prize-nominated album that made no secret of its members’ trip-hop histories. (Goldfrapp had sung on Tricky’s debut, “Maxinquaye,” while Gregory played oboe and baritone sax with Portishead.) The tempos picked up on “Black Cherry,” from 2003, and again two years later on “Supernature,” which spawned the group’s highest-peaking single on the British charts, “Ooh La La.” It was eventually featured in a 2013 iPhone commercial; the group’s “Strict Machine” earlier appeared in a Verizon Wireless ad.With “Supernature,” the duo charted on the Billboard 200 for the first time, and its “slightly shy” and “a bit introspective” face, as Goldfrapp described herself, struggled with the attention. (She gets nervous during interviews, and she fidgeted with her wavy blond hair or the neckline of her black shirt during our video chat.) But she also noticed when that attention waned — she remembered having to be told “bluntly” that one of her records wasn’t selling too well when she inquired about a gig her group didn’t get.Now, Goldfrapp said, she is “very realistic about my position in the music industry,” which means having a fan base that is both “very strong” and “quite small.” “It’s not like I’m just at the beginning of my career and like, ‘Ooh, where’s it going to go?’” she said with sarcastic glee.She has resolved to ignore the music industry’s notorious ageism, and said that, at 56, she is more comfortable in her own skin than ever. “You do have to have a certain confidence to go, ‘Actually know what? I’m going to feel good about doing this,” she said.And feel good she does. “It feels all sort of very new and fresh to me, which is a great feeling,” she said of her solo album. And if it should yield a hit single or two, that’s all the better. “I mean, hey, who doesn’t want a hit?” More

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      An Avett Brother Meets a Founding Son: John Quincy Adams

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      Bob Crawford is part of the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers. He’s also the host of a new podcast about the sixth president.Some professional musicians spend their days on the tour bus staring out the window, sleeping or pursuing various routes to oblivion. For Bob Crawford, the bassist for the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, history has been his distraction of choice.“On the van, and later the bus,” he said recently in a video interview from his home near Durham, N.C., “I would read history books.”One day, he picked up Sean Wilentz’s mammoth study “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.” From there, he moved on to “several books about Martin Van Buren,” as well as studies of Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system and the knockdown congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s.Now, he’s put it all together in “Founding Son: John Quincy’s America,” a six-episode podcast about John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a man, Crawford argues, for our own fractured times.“He knows democracy is on the line, he knows slavery is a moral evil,” Crawford said of Adams, who became a leading antislavery voice in the House of Representatives, where he served after leaving the White House. “He’s one of those transcendent characters. He deserves to be in the pantheon.”“Founding Son,” available through iHeartRadio starting April 13, is the latest entry in the crowded field of history podcasts. But it’s one where Crawford (who composed and played the show’s old-timey mandolin theme) hopes to use his musical celebrity and serious historical chops to illuminate a complex, formative period in the evolution of American democracy.The Early Republic, as scholars call it, may be a rich field of study. But it’s largely a blank for most Americans, who are a bit foggy on what exactly happened between the American Revolution and the Civil War.Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving office, is a vehicle for tracing the arc of the period, which saw the United States transform from a nation dominated by its founding elites (like the Adamses) into an expansionist, populist democracy where every white male had the vote, regardless of property or station.“Founding Son” focuses on John Quincy Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving the White House (and the earliest American president to be photographed).Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAs a seven-year-old, Adams, the son of John Adams, witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, when his mother, Abigail, took him to the top of the hill to watch the gunpowder rise in the distance. And he lived long enough to serve in the House alongside Abraham Lincoln.And in an impossibly dramatic ending, Adams (spoiler alert!) died in the Capitol, after having a cerebral hemorrhage as he stood up to cast a vote relating to the Mexican-American War, which he opposed.“It’s almost poetic,” Crawford said. (Oh, Adams also wrote poetry.)Crawford, 52, grew up in Cardiff, N.J., where he recalled himself as an unimpressive student, although one with a passion for history. He recalled how one of his high school teachers, Mr. Lawless, would ask the class, “Does anyone who isn’t Bob know the answer?”If there was one person he wished he could have interviewed for the podcast, Crawford said, it was William Lee Miller, the author of “Arguing About Slavery,” who died in 2012.Kate Medley for The New York TimesOver an hour-long conversation about the podcast, Crawford, his upright bass visible on a stand behind him, regularly pulled books from the shelf to underline a point. (William Lee Miller’s “Arguing About Slavery,” he said, was a particular inspiration.) He repeatedly apologized for diving into a rabbit hole before diving into another one.With his neatly trimmed hair and soulful eyes, he gives off the vibe of the intense, idealistic high school history teacher who is also “in a band.” Except that Crawford (who earned a master’s degree in history online in 2020) really is in a band.Crawford joined with Scott and Seth Avett in 2001, after a decade of jobs that included selling shoes, working in movie production and slinging grilled cheese sandwiches “in the parking lot of Grateful Dead shows,” as the band’s official bio puts it. (In an email, Crawford clarified it was actually Phish.)Scott Avett, the band’s banjo player and co-writer, said that the podcast reflected Crawford’s steadfast character.“He does hold a lot of facts, and it’s really impressive,” said Avett (who voices dialogue for Charles Francis Adams, one of John Quincy’s sons, and the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld). “But that’s not the point, which is how he carries those facts and who he is when expressing them.”Crawford, center, onstage with Scott and Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers.CrackerfarmAnd it’s not just Crawford’s friends who are impressed. Wilentz, who appears on the podcast, also praised his historical chops.“He’s really quite versed,” Wilentz said. “He had a lot of really specific questions to ask, some of which I didn’t know the answer to.”Crawford’s side gig as a history podcaster started in 2016 with “The Road to Now,” which he created with the historian Benjamin Sawyer. (Recent episodes have covered Benghazi, Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and the history of March Madness.)Last year, Crawford hosted “Concerts of Change,” a SiriusXM docuseries about human rights benefit concerts from the 1970s to the 1990s. While working on that, he got an invitation from a friend to pitch a show to iHeart, and suggested Adams.The initial response was lukewarm. “They asked, was he involved in any true crime?” Crawford recalled.But eight months later, they bit. Will Pearson, the president of iHeartPodcasts, said what ultimately sold him on the project was the combination of Crawford’s enthusiasm and knowledge and the unfamiliarity of the John Quincy Adams story.“In my opinion one of the strongest elements of a good history podcast is the element of surprise,” he said.Crawford wrote the show (a coproduction of iHeartPodcasts, Curiosity Inc., and School of Humans) himself, with help from James Morrison, a producer who also works on the Smithsonian podcast “Side Door.” (Adams is voiced by Patrick Warburton, familiar to some as Elaine’s boyfriend on “Seinfeld.” Andrew Jackson is voiced by Nick Offerman, of “Parks & Recreation.”)Crawford with notes for the podcast. “He’s really quite versed,” said the historian Sean Wilentz, who appears on the podcast.Kate Medley for The New York Times“Founding Son,” which takes a largely chronological approach, has a certain whiskery dad-history vibe. There are dramatic set pieces (some with Ken Burns-style voice-overs and sound effects) about events like the battle of the Alamo and the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meetinghouse in Philadelphia that was destroyed by a racist mob. (Burns himself pops up as the voice of Roger Baldwin, the lawyer who represented the enslaved people who revolted aboard the Amistad.)But even as Crawford focuses on elite politics and Congressional maneuvering, he makes clear that politics was far from just a white man’s game.He acknowledges the crucial role of Black abolitionists like David Walker, whom he likens to the Black musicians who inspired rock ‘n’ roll — the creative sparks who are rarely given enough credit.And he notes that the antislavery petition drives of the 1830s, which led to the notorious “gag rule” forbidding any mention of slavery in Congress, were largely the work of women, who played a growing role in national politics despite being denied the right to vote.“Founding Son” underlines the story’s resonance to contemporary politics, with terms like “one-term president,” “alternative facts” and “deep-state cabal.” There are even accusations of a “stolen election,” after Adams — despite losing the popular and electoral votes — was elevated to the presidency in 1825, following a back room deal in Congress.)But Crawford, who calls himself an “unaffiliated” voter, also allows plenty of room for those aspects of history that don’t satisfy a contemporary thirst for a simplistic morality play.Crawford said he wanted to avoid turning the past into an oversimplified morality play. In history, he said, “everyone’s a hero, everyone’s a villain.”Kate Medley for The New York TimesConsider the treatment of Adams’s archrival, Andrew Jackson. Today, Jackson — a slaveholder who pursued a brutal policy of Native American removal, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is anathema to Democrats who not so long ago celebrated him as a founder of the party. And Crawford seconds the opinion of Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian featured on the podcast: There’s a word for him, and it’s “not a nice one.”But he also notes that it was Jackson who blocked John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of “nullification,” which held that the Constitution allowed states to reject federal legislation.As for Adams, for all his noble fight against slavery, some of his rhetoric — like his lament that American leaders, unlike Europe’s, were “palsied by the will of our constituents” — does not sound great today.In history, Crawford said, “everyone’s a hero, and everyone’s a villain.”As for today’s politics, he laments the intensity of the polarization, and the loss of any connection with a “shared reality.” But the dysfunction, as he sees it, is not equally shared.“Today the parties are clearly out of balance,” he said. “And yes, it seems to be that the Republican Party of 2023 bears no resemblance to its former self.”What comes next, he said, “is a story for someone else to tell many years from now.” In the meantime, he’s outlining another history podcast he hopes to record.“It’s juicy and reflects this moment,” he said, launching into an enthusiastic elevator pitch. “I’m not dallying in presentism — not doing that! But man.”He paused: “And I’ve already got a whole shelf of books.” More

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      Caroline Rose Takes Her Indie Rock Show on the Road

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      On a chilly day in New England at the start of a 43-city tour, the indie singer kills time before falling into the arms of her fans.BURLINGTON, Vt. — “I don’t mind walking in the rain,” Caroline Rose said on a recent afternoon, looking through the window of Crow Bookshop.It was about 40 degrees outside and pouring. Ms. Rose wasn’t dressed for the weather, but at least she was wearing a hat, with a camouflage pattern and the words “Buck Fever” across the front. Burlington, she said, was much nicer in the summer.Ms. Rose, an indie rocker who grew up on Long Island and lives mostly in Austin, Texas, had spent about seven months in this city writing the songs that appear on her new album, “The Art of Forgetting,” which chronicles a difficult breakup. She was back in Burlington to play the fourth show of an international tour that will keep her on the road into August.Standing in the “Psychology” section of the bookstore, Ms. Rose, 33, referred to the breakup that had inspired her new record. “I didn’t even really plan on splitting with my partner,” she said. “I thought we were going to work on it. But at a certain point I was like, I have so much I need to work on myself. It just felt irreconcilable for me. It makes me emotional to think about.”Her manager, Ari Fouriezos, whose hair had recently been bleached blond like Ms. Rose’s, lingered by the door.Crow Bookshop was one of the spots Ms. Rose frequented when she was living in Burlington early in the pandemic. Oliver Parini for The New York Times“I hadn’t done a kind thing for myself in a long time,” Ms. Rose continued, her voice wobbling. “Investing time in myself, it felt like the first nice thing I had done for myself in a really long time. And then, after that, it was like a deeper and deeper dive into my own head.”“The Art of Forgetting” is a departure from her previous albums, in which the singer, leaning into her theater-kid background, had often assumed alternate Caroline Rose-like personas. This time around she is simply, frighteningly, herself.She pulled down a book from a shelf: “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, a 2014 New York Times best seller about the physical and mental effects of trauma.“It changed my life, reading this,” she said. “It has to do with memory and the way our bodies might hold onto memories, even though our brain might forget. After reading this book, I realized there was a lot of stuff in my own life that my mind has just buried.”Outside the store, in the cold rain, Ms. Rose said she wanted to see if her favorite Burlington bar, Light Club Lamp Shop, was open. True to its name, lamp shades were strewn on the windowsill, but inside it was dark was empty.We kept walking — away from the restaurants and outdoor gear shops of the town center and onto the tree-lined streets of a residential neighborhood, dodging puddles and enduring several comically dreary splashes from passing cars.Ms. Rose onstage for soundcheck, practicing the song “Miami.”Oliver Parini for The New York TimesOutside a drab Victorian-style house with Halloween decorations on one of the front doors, Ms. Rose pointed to a window on the first floor.“That was my little room,” she said. Ms. Rose’s sound engineer, Jon Januhowski, had invited her to crash with him when her relationship in Austin was coming undone. It was April 2020, and Ms. Rose spent the quiet lockdown days messing around on her guitar and recording snippets of songs on her phone. A black and white cat named Rosie kept her company.“I felt very honored, because I didn’t learn how to pet a cat until I was 26,” she said.Someone else was living in the house now. Warm yellow light peeked through a gap in the curtains.Ms. Rose walked back to the town center, checking once more to see if Light Club Lamp Shop had opened. No luck, although it was after 4 p.m. The owners kept odd hours, she said, adding that it seemed like a nice way to live, to come and go as you please.Ms. Rose drinks a hot toddy with mezcal every night before she goes onstage. Her bandmate Lena Simon is on the sofa.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesTo some, it may seem as if the life of an itinerant musician assumes this shape. But Ms. Rose said she often longs for a simpler way of life. While making “The Art of Forgetting,” she said she unexpectedly fell in love with a woman whom she had met through mutual friends. She added that they’ll probably settle down in Los Angeles for a bit after the tour, which will take her to more than two dozen cities in the North America before stops in Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.“I want to live my life and take a break after this,” she said. “I don’t know what that will look like. But it’s the not-knowing part that excites me the most.”Ms. Fouriezos, her manager, reminded her that she was due at the club for soundcheck in about an hour. Ms. Rose suggested a quick bite first and started heading toward a small cafe, Stone Soup. Earlier that day, she said, she’d had breakfast there with her parents, who had driven up from Center Moriches, N.Y., with their dog, Paco, an 11-year-old mutt.At this hour, only Stone Soup’s buffet was available. We piled our plates with rice, sweet potatoes, salad and tofu. There was a silence as we ate. We were damp and cold.“So, how’s everyone feeling?” Ms. Rose said cheerily.Ms. Rose played the songs from “The Art of Forgetting” in the order in which they appear on the album. Before she went on, she talked through the transitions with her bandmates.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesShowtimeMs. Fouriezos was behind the wheel of a 2015 Subaru Forester, with Ms. Rose riding shotgun, as they pulled up to Higher Ground, a onetime movie theater that had been gutted and made into a music venue. A few people were sweeping rainwater off the roof. In the parking lot, Mark Balderston, Ms. Rose’s affable tour manager, told her that the club had sprung a leak.“It’s not dangerous or anything,” he added.Inside, a table had been laid with merch, including a pack of tissues that read, “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” During soundcheck, she played two songs: “Miami,” which starts softly before building into an edgy power ballad, and “Jill Says,” which is named for her therapist. Then Ms. Rose stepped down from the stage and practiced getting up and down from a trunk in the middle of the concert floor for a stunt that was meant to be a high point of the show.“Caroline loves antics,” Ms. Fouriezos said.In a narrow hallway backstage, a table wedged into a corner was laden with chili and cookies. Ms. Rose’s bandmates Riley Geare, Michael Dondero, Glenn Van Dyke and Lena Simon fixed tea, made drinks with the tequila and seltzer on the dressing table, and changed their outfits. Ms. Rose put on a red and white two-piece set with a spear-point collar.For her performance, Ms. Rose wore a two-piece set wit a spear-point collar created by Peter Heon and based on a design she drew on a napkin.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesIn the greenroom, Abbie Morin, the lead singer of the band opening, Hammydown, emphasized the importance of stretching before a performance to prevent a “bang-over” — a neck condition that can arise from headbanging during a show.Mr. Balderston, a tall man dressed in black, popped in and out of the room as the hall filled with about 450 people. Ms. Rose sipped from a hot toddy made with mezcal, her usual preshow drink. Then she dropped beads of various tinctures under her tongue. “Touring involves a lot of tinctures,” she said.At around 8, Mr. Balderston gave the two-minute warning, and the band pulled into a group hug, chanting, “Let’s have fun! Let’s have fun!”The crowd was rapt during the show, quiet for the quiet songs and loud for the loud ones. The concert was more stylized than the usual club show, with the singer separated from her bandmates by a scrim that cast their silhouettes against bright colors, creating a kind of Pop Art tableau.Ms. Rose had come up with the concept, and Ms. Van Dyke executed her vision with the help of a lighting director, John Foresman, who has worked with indie rock stalwarts like Car Seat Headrest and Mitski. The result, Ms. Rose said onstage, was “the most high-tech form of D.I.Y. you can imagine.”There were a few hitches. Ms. Rose asked to begin “Miami” again, after a false start; and there was an unplanned interlude before “Jill Says,” when her keyboard briefly stopped working. She made light of the snags, saying, “My ultimate goal for my career is to make music A.I. can’t reproduce. What you’re experiencing is a human performance.”Ms. Rose’s concert merch included a pack of tissues that read “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” It looked like some of her fans did.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesWhen it came time for “The Kiss,” a song about yearning “for the kiss of someone new,” Ms. Rose descended from the stage and wandered into the crowd. Her voice seemed to be floating, and the audience members undulated to make way for her. She stepped up onto the trunk.“We’re going to do a trust fall,” Ms. Rose told the room. “Get close.”As the music shimmered, she let herself drop, closing her eyes. Audience members caught her and gingerly passed her to the front of the hall.“Send me around again!” she said. “Send me around again!” More

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      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      8 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      A dive into tracks by Tyler, the Creator, Feist, Bully and more recent highlights.Tyler, the Creator released a new track as part of an expanded edition of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”Luis “Panch” PerezDear listeners,I have a constantly replenishing playlist on my phone called “Thursday Nights and Friday Mornings.” It’s named for the time I do some of my most focused new-music listening, in preparation for the publication of the Playlist, a weekly feature that I compile with my colleagues Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica.* Each Friday, we recommend a handful of songs released in the past week, a task that helps me stay on top of all (well, most) of the new music that comes out in a given week, and often the Jons’ picks point me toward what I missed.Every few weeks, I’ll be sending out an Amplifier digest of recent Playlist highlights. Today, we’ve got a mix of some possibly familiar names (Lucinda Williams; Feist; Tyler, the Creator) and hopefully some new ones, too.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Jess Williamson: “Hunter”This is one of my favorite new songs right now. It’s from the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, whose music I’ve been following since her haunting 2014 debut, “Native State.” Last year, she teamed up with a fellow musician from the South, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and formed a country duo called Plains. Williamson’s contributions to Plains’ excellent record “I Walked With You a Ways” felt like a step forward for her as a songwriter, and I hear that growth on “Hunter,” the first single from her next solo album, “Time Ain’t Accidental,” out in June. It’s a bittersweet song about the spiritually exhausting process of looking for love, but on the chorus Williamson sounds hopeful and replenished, reminding herself, “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Bully: “Days Move Slow”My former colleague at Vulture Jesse David Fox once compared an early song from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy power-pop band Bully to “Sugarhigh,” the fictional alt-rock hit that Renée Zellweger’s character sings at the end of “Empire Records” — and now I will never un-hear that similarity as long as I live. (It’s definitely a compliment.) I interviewed Bognanno over video chat in August 2020, and I remember a very sweet dog named Mezzi dozing behind her. (A dog lover myself, I always ask my interview subjects about their pups. Always.) Sadly, Mezzi has since passed on, but “Days Move Slow,” from the forthcoming Bully album “Lucky for You,” is both an ode to her memory and a chronicle of Bognanno trying to propel herself out of the muck of grief. That probably makes it sound like a downer, but the song has a resilient, upbeat energy about it — sort of like an excitable canine. Rest in power, Mezzi! (Listen on YouTube)3. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro: “Beso”Some couples announce their engagement with a ring pic on Instagram. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, two of the brightest Spanish-language stars in the current pop firmament, hinted at theirs in a music video. Their sweet and sultry duet “Beso” is a highlight from their recently released collaborative EP, “RR” — and proof of their musical chemistry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Tyler, the Creator: “Sorry Not Sorry”Fun fact: In 2021, only two albums made appearances on all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists — Olivia Rodrigo’s head-turning debut “Sour” and Tyler, the Creator’s sprawling rap odyssey “Call Me if You Get Lost.” Last week, Tyler released an expanded edition featuring a few new tracks, including this one, the gregarious “Sorry Not Sorry.” I really like this song’s Jekyll-and-Hyde energy, as a repentant Tyler apologizes for a number of personal and professional slights and then, occasionally, a brasher version of himself takes it right back: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Mahalia: “Terms and Conditions”I’m a total mark for any song that mines and cleverly updates the sounds of Y2K pop or “TRL”-era R&B. (See also: The entire output of the young British girl group Flo.) “Terms and Conditions,” from the 24-year-old singer Mahalia, does just that. It’s giving me hints of Mya, Destiny’s Child and a whole lot of J. Lo’s glimmering millennial time capsule “If You Had My Love.” But it’s also got a contemporary twist, as Mahalia tells a potential suitor what she won’t tolerate (“If you look at her, consider bridges burned”), flipping the dry language of contractual agreements into something confident, fun and flirty. (Listen on YouTube)6. Lucinda Chua featuring yeule: “Something Other Than Years”Like the Mahalia song, I have my colleague Jon Pareles to thank for this next Playlist pick, from the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua. “Something Other Than Years” is a sparse, hypnotic duet with the Singaporean musician yeule, which finds Chua pleading in a glassy voice, “Show me how to live this life,” a request that seems to be answered by yeule’s celestial melody. Jon describes the rest of Chua’s new album “Yian” as a collection of “meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Feist: “Borrow Trouble”I love it when Feist — an artist often associated with calm and quietude — lets loose and makes a ruckus, as she does on this stomping tune from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Wait for her primal screams at the very end! (Listen on YouTube)Two Lucindas in a single playlist? Better believe it. The country-rock legend Lucinda Williams’s voice has sounded defiant since at least the 1980s, but since recovering from a 2020 stroke, her survivor’s rasp has taken on a whole new gravitas. “New York Comeback” — from the upcoming album “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” — has Williams’s characteristic grit and lack of sentiment (“No one’s brought the curtain down,” she sings wrly, “maybe you should stick around”) but there’s something poignant about hearing Amplifier fave Bruce Springsteen (along with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa) singing backing vocals to support her as if he’s just one more rock ’n’ roll lifer nodding to another. (Listen on YouTube)These are my terms and conditions,Lindsay*If the grammatically correct plural of “attorney general” is indeed “attorneys general,” maybe I should say “Jons Pareles and Caramanica.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Jess Williamson, “Hunter”Track 2: Bully, “Days Move Slow”Track 3: Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, “Beso”Track 4: Tyler, the Creator, “Sorry Not Sorry”Track 5: Mahalia, “Terms and Conditions”Track 6: Lucinda Chua featuring yeule, “Something Other Than Years”Track 7: Feist, “Borrow Trouble”Track 8: Lucinda Williams, “New York Comeback”Bonus TracksA few of you have written in to ask if we archive previous Amplifier playlists on Spotify. We do! The easiest way to find them is through our account page, where we also archive all the weekly Friday Playlists, too.And speaking of reader emails: Special thanks to Sharon Smith for — after I mentioned that Bob Dylan won his first Grammy nearly two decades into his career, for his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — directing me to this blistering performance of Dylan playing the song live at the 1980 Grammys. (Kris Kristofferson, as you’ll see, was loving it.) Apparently the producers asked him to cut the song down to three or four minutes; he played for six and a half. Classic Bob! More