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      Morgan Wallen’s ‘One Thing at a Time’ Is No. 1 for a Third Week

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      The country star’s hit-stuffed streaming blockbuster is just shy of one million equivalent sales. U2 opens at No. 5 with an album of acoustic rerecordings.Morgan Wallen is not budging from No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with the country star’s latest hit-stuffed double album holding the top spot for a third week in a row.Wallen’s 36-track “One Thing at a Time” racked up the equivalent of another 209,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate, bringing its three-week total to just shy of one million. In its most recent week, it had 256 million streams and sold 12,500 copies as a complete package.Two years ago, Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” spent its first 10 weeks at No. 1, even amid a media controversy and temporary radio ban after Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur. Can “One Thing at a Time” match the success of its predecessor? That album’s success, by the way, is ongoing; this week “Dangerous” holds at No. 7, logging its 112th week in the Top 10.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” climbs two spots to No. 2, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” rises three to No. 3; both are former No. 1s that got boosts from their creators being on tour. Miley Cyrus’s “Endless Summer Vacation” is No. 4.U2, the veteran Irish rock band, is No. 5 with “Songs of Surrender,” a retrospective project of mostly acoustic rerecordings of some of the group’s signature songs. It arrived with the promotion of a Disney+ documentary and the recent announcement of a concert residency this fall at a high-tech new venue in Las Vegas, the MSG Sphere.The most complete form of “Songs of Surrender” — standard on streaming services, and a “super deluxe” four-LP doorstopper — includes 40 songs over nearly three hours. The album opens with the equivalent of 46,500 sales, mostly from copies sold as a complete package. More

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      Scott Johnson, Playfully Inventive Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      In works like “John Somebody,” he mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Scott Johnson, a composer and guitarist who forged an original style involving the rhythmic cadences of speech and the gestures and timbres of popular music, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70.Mr. Johnson’s sister Susan Lee Johnson said the cause was complications of aspiration pneumonia. Mr. Johnson had also been diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2021.Mr. Johnson immersed himself in music and art from an early age and played in rock bands in high school. His artistic breakthrough came with “John Somebody,” a playfully inventive work for solo electric guitar with taped accompaniment, which he assembled from 1980 to 1982, and which, as performed regularly and recorded in 1986, won him considerable acclaim.To create that work, Mr. Johnson transcribed into approximate musical notation portions of a friend’s telephone conversation he had recorded in 1977 (“You know who’s in New York? You remember that guy, John somebody? He was a … he was sort of a…”), along with other snatches of speech and laughter.Mr. Johnson added dense layers of guitar, saxophone and percussion, and a virtuosic solo part for live guitarist, with pitches, melodic motifs and rhythms derived from the recorded vocalism. The result mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.“To these ears, the music mirrors the subterranean rumble, the welter of voices and other overlaid sounds of the city, with the cries of superamplified guitars hovering like angels above the fray,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote about “John Somebody” in 1986. “It’s a compelling marriage of rock elements and classical formalism that doesn’t shortchange either.”Mr. Johnson refined and extended the process he developed for “John Somebody” in several subsequent works. He also created purely instrumental works and, for a time, led an ensemble comprising three saxophonists, two electric guitarists, an electric bass guitarist and two drummers.The technical demands of Mr. Johnson’s music could make collaboration a daunting prospect. But he formed close bonds with younger artists and groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound and the guitarist and composer Mark Dancigers, who came of age at a time when fluency in rock and pop idioms became more prevalent among concert-music composers and performers.“He was a player who embraced complexity,” Mr. Dancigers said in a phone interview. “The writing is challenging from a number of perspectives: There are leaps, there are rapid virtuosic passages, there are chord voicings that change very rapidly.”Mr. Dancingers suggested that Mr. Johnson’s compositions paved the way for younger composers similarly inclined toward hybridity. “The first time I heard him present his music,” he said, “I thought, this guy’s a little ahead of his time.”Mr. Johnson developed a passion for electric guitar in high school, and his music mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Patricia NolanScott Richard Johnson was born in Madison, Wis., on May 12, 1952. His father, Robert Warren Johnson, worked in marketing, merchandising and sales positions for a battery company. His mother, Janet Mary (Stecker) Johnson, was a homemaker. They both belonged to a church choir and attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra.Intellectually inquisitive and artistically inclined, Mr. Johnson played clarinet before switching to electric guitar in high school. An early infatuation with folk groups like the Kingston Trio ceded to a passion for Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.“His bands practiced in the family basement,” his sister Susan wrote in an email, “and the practice sessions shook the house.”Hearing Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” sparked Mr. Johnson’s interest in modern classical composition. By college, he wrote in a biography on his website, “I was studying music theory during the week and playing in bars on the weekends.”Daunted by the serialist compositional style that held sway in academia, Mr. Johnson turned to visual art. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1974 and then drove a cab in Madison for a year to finance his move to New York City in 1975.By that time he had temporarily set music aside. But he quickly established himself among a rising generation of versatile, inquisitive Downtown creators, including the composers Rhys Chatham, Peter Gordon and Arthur Russell, the choreographer Karole Armitage and the interdisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, with all of whom he collaborated.On arrival, Mr. Johnson supported himself by demolishing and renovating lofts with a friend from Madison, Scott Billingsley, later known as the filmmaker Scott B. He also joined Mr. Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra.“It sometimes took Scott days to be able to use his fingers for guitar, after sanding floors all day” Mr. Gordon said by email. Like many other downtown composers, including Mr. Gordon, Mr. Johnson also worked as a tape editor for the sound artist and performer Charlie Morrow.Tape played a key role in Mr. Johnson’s oeuvre. For the earliest work he acknowledges on his website, “Home and Variations” (1979), he manipulated the voices of members of a dance company to accompany a dance.In the liner notes he wrote for a 2004 reissue of “John Somebody” on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Mr. Johnson said that germinal material for the piece dated as far back as 1977. At that time, he had to cut up strips of magnetic tape and then tape them back together. One particular passage in the work, he recounted, required a tape loop 25 feet long.Addressing the work’s development in a 2018 interview for the web publication NewMusicBox, Mr. Johnson cited several inspirations: early tape works in which Steve Reich looped and layered recorded speech, the call-and-response convention fundamental to the blues, and compositions in which Olivier Messiaen transcribed and notated bird song. In turn, “John Somebody” announced a signature style that anticipated Mr. Reich’s landmark 1988 piece “Different Trains,” and had a strong influence on other composers.Despite the seeming novelty of his approach, Mr. Johnson asserted his alliance to a historic lineage of rigorous formal composition. In his view, bringing elements of rock into the concert-music world extended a tradition of composers borrowing from vernacular styles, like folk songs. “John Somebody,” he wrote, resulted “when the partially developed elements laid out on my table met the animating idea of the Baroque dance suite, episodic but unified.”Mr. Johnson performed the work regularly. A 1986 recording made for the upstart record company Icon benefited from a partnership with Nonesuch, a more established label whose cachet was growing, and the commercial clout of that label’s corporate parent, Warner Bros.Mr. Johnson’s score for the 1988 Paul Schrader film “Patty Hearst” was released on Nonesuch. So were portions of “How It Happens” (1991-93), an evening-length composition for the Kronos Quartet with the recorded voice of the political commentator I.F. Stone, scattered across three different albums.Mr. Johnson, increasingly used his speech-manipulation technique to address social and philosophical concerns. In “Americans” (2003), he sampled the speech of immigrants recorded in Queens to examine cultural isolation and assimilation. For “Mind Out of Matter” (2009-15), a 75-minute work for Alarm Will Sound, he employed the voice of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has examined the history of religion.The Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson grew familiar with Mr. Johnson’s exactitude while preparing “Mind Out of Matter.” The percussion parts included some nearly impossible passages, and at one point players suggested altering a few notes.“Even as a conductor and a listener, I’m thinking you’re probably not even going to hear those notes,” Mr. Pierson said by phone. “But having to rethink that was so intense for Scott. Watching the amount of attention that he would put into reconsidering just a couple of notes, in a passage where there was so much going on, was really something to see.”In addition to his sister Susan, Mr. Johnson is survived by another sister, Lynne Ann Johnson. His wife, Marlisa Monroe, a classical-music publicist, apparently died on Friday: A Police Department spokesperson confirmed on Saturday that a 70-year-old woman was found unconscious and unresponsive, and later pronounced dead, at the Manhattan address where Mr. Johnson and Ms. Monroe lived. No cause of death has yet been determined; an investigation is ongoing.In his last months, Mr. Johnson completed a final composition: a wholly acoustic work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano. The piece, titled “Map,” features an elegiac text by Mr. Johnson, which reads in part:Every route is a branching fatewell worn path or departureshared inherited highwaysengineered exitsor unmarked dirt swervesaccidents, errors, discoveries. More

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      Review: In Chicago, an Opera Triptych Reaches for Connection

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      Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More

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      What’s Driving a Fresh Wave of Irish Music? Tradition.

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      As Ireland reimagines itself, musicians including the singer Lisa O’Neill and the band Lankum are reimagining the island’s music with an ever-growing sense of pride.DUBLIN — The 40-year-old Irish singer Lisa O’Neill’s north Dublin flat is filled with books, records, instruments and talismanic chachkas. A Sinead O’Connor photo flanks a Johnny Cash portrait on a shelf next to a ceramic teapot; a Patrick Kavanagh poetry collection tops a pile of paperbacks; a Margaret Barry LP jacket gets pride of place on her upright piano’s rack.Barry was a street singer “discovered” by the folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1950s; she busked with a banjo and a beautiful bray of a voice, brazenly Irish, singing songs of the day alongside traditional ballads. Her work has become a touchstone for O’Neill. “I kind of really learned to sing from these recordings,” she said in an interview in her high-ceilinged kitchen last month. “She was like the Edith Piaf of Ireland.”O’Neill is a cultural hero in her own right. She has released five albums since 2009, building a reputation as a modern artist tapped into the ancient. In song, her voice becomes a wild thing, cutting the air like the cry of Dublin’s omnipresent sea gulls; it can silence a noisy pub crowd when it lays into a ballad, swooping boldly into high notes or creaking fiercely. She spent Ireland’s strict lockdown largely by herself here in one of the city’s weathered Georgian townhouses, writing the incantatory songs that inform her recent album, “All of This Is Chance,” which was released in February.“Folk” might not be the best word to describe O’Neill’s striking mix of originals and interpretations, which echo singer-songwriter, alt-country and indie-rock traditions. In this, she is not alone. Over the past decade she has found community and common cause with a Dublin tribe leaning into Ireland’s older traditions.There’s the sublimely harmonizing brother duo Ye Vagabonds, who opened shows for Phoebe Bridgers last summer; the mighty bass-baritone singer-songwriter John Francis Flynn; Eoghan O Ceannabhain, a master of Irish-language song in the sean nos tradition; and Lankum, a gang of drone-loving experimentalists who have become a lodestar for the scene, and released their fourth album on March 24.This creative bounty has been echoed in other Irish arts resonating abroad despite — and arguably because of — their rich, resolute Irishness: the TV series “Derry Girls” and “Bad Sisters,” the films “The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin)” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” both part of the so-called Green Wave at this year’s Oscars.All this has coincided with significant sociopolitical change in Ireland. The legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage — alongside the exposure of the horrors inside the religious institutions known as “mother and baby homes” that proliferated until the 1990s — have marked the diminished power of the Roman Catholic Church alongside the greater empowerment of women. Brexit, while further complicating Ireland’s ever-fraught relationship with England, has perhaps sharpened the Irish sense of self.Lankum’s singer and multi-instrumentalist Radie Peat, 36, sees this cultural churn accompanying a resurgence of interest in Irish folklore and language “with absolutely zero sense of embarrassment,” describing an atmosphere where artists are “confident about their identities as Irish people, and not trying to recreate things they’ve seen done somewhere else.” She credits the abortion and marriage referendums, driven by decisive popular vote, as giving people “a sense of pride.”Her bandmate Ian Lynch, 42, a singer who plays contributes both uilleann pipes and tape loops, added a clarification. “Not a jingoistic, blinkered sense of pride,” he said. “Not like some right-wing, ‘oh, we’re the best,’ but actually a sense of pride for good reasons.”The Lankum crew, who often finish each other’s sentences, mulled this notion on a blustery February afternoon at Guerrilla Sound, the workshop of the group’s producer/low-key fifth band member John Murphy, 39, who’s known as Spud. The catacomb studio is stocked with esoteric electronic instruments, some of which shaped the band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album, “False Lankum.”The band’s “folk song” approach, which can equally suggest the vast dronescapes of the composer Sarah Davachi and the experimental metal band Sunn O))), appears in microcosm on their nearly nine-minute single “Go Dig My Grave.” Peat’s piercing delivery of the centuries-old “forsaken girl” ballad, which has many variants (“The Butcher Boy,” “Died for Love”), charts a bottomless grief as the track layers instruments alongside other sounds: minor-key hurdy-gurdy notes, steely fiddle harmonics, witch-coven murmurs, potato-chip crunching and the subliminal flicker of Murphy digging holes for tomato plants in his garden.Spider Stacy, 64, the English musician and actor who exploded the possibilities of Irish traditional music with the Pogues in 1980s and has performed with Lankum, admired the group’s “profound understanding of the possibilities of sound” and “intimate knowledge of their art” in an email exchange. “For me anyway, they surpass pretty much anyone,” he added. “They’re the best band in the world.”“Go Dig My Grave” is a song Peat had plumbed for years at casual pub sessions, social hubs that remain central to Irish music tradition. The tradition got a boost in the late ’00s, when the financial crisis left young people with more time on their hands than cash. Lankum’s members met at a Dublin session. Diarmuid and Brian Mac Gloinn, of Ye Vagabonds, found a home in them, as did O’Neill. For a time, she and the Mac Gloinns anchored separate nights at Walsh’s, in the north side Stoneybatter neighborhood.O’Neill sat in on a recent session there, a lively assembly that ran until 1 a.m. and nearly veered into a brawl when a bystander picked up a concertina without asking. A labor-themed sequence included O’Neill’s “Rock the Machine,” about a Dublin dockworker losing his job to automation. Kilian O’Flanagan, a rising talent, sang Ewan MacColl’s “Tunnel Tigers,” about the digging of the London Underground, and Paddy Cummins, taking a night off from his band Skipper’s Alley, delivered “McAlpine’s Fusiliers,” another rueful worker’s tale popularized by 1960s folk revivalists the Dubliners.The mother ship of Dublin session pubs, however, remains the Cobblestone in nearby Smithfield. In a scenario echoing the 1970s New York punk crucible CBGBs, a dive bar in a rough neighborhood was transformed by a music lover — here, in the late 1980s by Tom Mulligan, who now runs the Cobblestone with his children. Roughly 10 years ago, the bar began hosting “The Night Larry Got Stretched,” a monthly session in the back room aimed at involving younger people in traditional singing. It’s been going strong ever since.But Dublin has changed. Smithfield became a desirable district, and the Cobblestone was the locus of a civic controversy in 2021, as developers planned to build a hotel on top of it, eliminating the pub’s back room and courtyard. Community protest was swift; petitions circulated, and a media savvy march included musician pallbearers parading a coffin inscribed “RIP Dublin.” The hotel project stalled, and developers withdrew an appeal last year.The Cobblestone’s cause, like that of the Dublin scene writ large, has been furthered by a dedicated network of culture workers. Filmmakers have been key. Luke McManus is a local who shot a moving clip for Lankum’s 2016 breakthrough single, “Cold Old Fire,” gratis; his new documentary, “North Circular Road,” is a musical love letter to hardscrabble North Dublin. “Song of Granite,” Pat Collins’ haunted 2017 biopic of the sean nos legend Joe Heaney, featured vivid performances by O’Neill and Damien Dempsey, the north side singer-songwriter who just completed a run of his “Springsteen on Broadway”-style “Tales From Holywell” at the venerable Abbey Theater. The filmmaker and musician Myles O’Reilly, possibly the hardest-working man in Irish trad, maintains a YouTube Channel that’s a master course in how to present, preserve and promote a nascent music scene.From left: Ian Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada, Radie Peat, Daragh Lynch of Lankum. The band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album is titled “False Lankum.”Ellius Grace for The New York TimesImaginative boutique festivals (Quiet Lights in Cork, Roise Rua on the island of Arranmore) have helped, too, as well as the Irish Arts Council’s traditional arts arm, who have lent support in spite of grumbling from some folk music old-schoolers skeptical of the current scene.Perhaps the biggest boost to international outreach has been the attention of Rough Trade Records, founded by Geoff Travis; the label was known for signing post-punk acts like the Smiths and the Raincoats in the 1980s. The label’s co-owner Jeannette Lee sharpened her appreciation of traditional music touring with Public Image Limited, whose frontman, John Lydon, liked blasting Irish folk alongside dub reggae in its van. She started the folk-adjacent River Lea label with Geoff Travis as, in his words, “a labor of love, to a degree,” but also as a proving ground for young artists. Flynn, Ye Vagabonds and O’Neill debuted on River Lea; with a growing audience, her latest album was issued on Rough Trade proper.While the tide of interest is lifting many boats, no one’s getting especially rich. Ian Lynch felt so priced out of Dublin’s ballooning housing market, he moved back in with his parents. (“I get to see them, which is good,” he said. “But, I mean, I’m 42.”) Side hustles help. Along with lecturing on Irish folklore, Lynch produces “Fire Draw Near,” a fascinating and often very funny Patreon-funded podcast devoted to modern and historic Irish traditional music. O’Reilly supports his video work in part via Patreon, too, with enough success that he can often film emerging musicians without charge, helping grow the scene.O’Neill, one of the first musicians O’Reilly ever filmed, back in 2010, is an object lesson in how the collective work bears fruit. She quit her barista job at Bewley’s, the famous Grafton Street tearoom, and after years of shares, was finally able to get a flat of her own. Her February album release concert at the town hall in Cavan — her hometown, roughly a 90-minute drive from Dublin — felt like the homecoming it was. On a stage made homey with vintage table lamps, guest artists came and went as old songs flanked new, and the show ended on a spectacular, dissonance-spiked version of “All the Tired Horses,” her remarkable Bob Dylan cover that recently capped the popular period crime drama “Peaky Blinders.”Afterward, naturally, a session bubbled up, in the lobby of a small hotel down the road. O’Neill’s father ferried in rounds of Guinness from the pub next door. A young man spoke of health struggles, and beautifully sang “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.” The Corkonian legend John Spillane, a national treasure who is something of Ireland’s John Prine, reprised an earlier onstage duet with O’Neill on his aching “Passage West,” then laid into the raucous WWI lament “Salonika,” with hearty accompaniment from the novelist Patrick McCabe, a friend and fan of O’Neill’s who came in for the show.And on it went until sometime after 3 a.m., when the holdouts finally called it a night. More

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      Lana Del Rey Talks Back to the Songbook

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      Hear a companion to her sprawling new album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.”Neil KrugDear listeners,I love these lyrics from the title track of Lana Del Rey’s sprawling ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” which comes out today:Harry Nilsson has a song, his voice breaks at 2:05Something about the way he says “Don’t forget me”Makes me feel likeI just wish I had a friend like himSomeone to get me byDel Rey’s music is both vividly intimate and highly referential. She writes like a devoted but conversational fan of music history — talking back to the modern songbook and to many of her favorite artists, guided by popular song to her own personal epiphanies.Del Rey’s old-soul reverence collapses the distance between generations, too. People listening to Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” when it first came out — on “Pussy Cats” from 1974, the notorious chronicle of his “Lost Weekend” with John Lennon — were just as likely to be moved by that wrenching part when his voice breaks, but they probably wouldn’t have known its precise time stamp. Del Rey’s homage speaks the language of digital-era listening (“his voice breaks at 2:05”), but her emotional connection to Nilsson is so deeply felt, it seems to transcend time and turn him into a peer.Elsewhere on the album, the much-covered, centuries-old folk standard “Froggy Went a Courtin’” makes Del Rey feel connected to her ancestors when she hears it at a funeral. Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” echoes throughout “Ocean Blvd” like a cherished mantra. On “The Grants,” the album’s stirring, gospel-tinged opening number, she interprets the words of a pastor by likening them not to, say, a particular Bible verse, but to “‘Rocky Mountain High,’ the way John Denver sings.”“Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” is as rich, challenging and singular as anything Del Rey has released yet, and given that its run time is a daunting hour and 17 minutes, it’s going to require a little time to sink in. Today’s playlist puts some of its best songs in conversation with the other artists it references or, in the case of Father John Misty, features. May it serve as an entry point, or maybe just as a means to tunnel deeper into Lana Del Rey’s slow, subterranean sound.Maybe Del Rey would even say that these are some of the songs that explain her. Which reminds me: I’m still reading through your (many) great submissions from earlier this week, and I look forward to sharing some with you in Tuesday’s Amplifier.That’s how the light gets in,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Lana Del Rey Talks Back to the Songbook” track listTrack 1: John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High” (1972)Track 2: Lana Del Rey, “The Grants” (2023)Track 3: Tex Ritter, “Froggy Went a Courtin’” (1945)Track 4: Father John Misty, “Goodbye Mr. Blue” (2022)Track 5: Lana Del Rey featuring Father John Misty, “Let the Light In” (2023)Track 6: Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” (1992)Track 7: Lana Del Rey, “Kintsugi” (2023)Track 8: Harry Nilsson, “Don’t Forget Me” (1974)Track 9: Lana Del Rey, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” (2023)Bonus tracksLana isn’t the only artist to appreciate the broken beauty of Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me,” of course. Here are two cover versions I love: Neko Case’s spirited rendition, from her great 2009 album “Middle Cyclone,” and a faithful take from the Walkmen, on which the frontman Hamilton Leithauser sounds so much like Nilsson that it’s a little bit spooky.Also, if you’re looking for some newer music: On Fridays, our chief pop music critic, Jon Pareles, and I select some of the week’s most notable new songs for the Playlist, which you can listen to here. More

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      Review: Lawrence Brownlee Makes Room for Black Composers

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      Often seen onstage as a star of bel canto opera, this tenor crafted a recital of works by Robert Owens, Margaret Bonds and their successors.“Wow, I need to take you all wherever I go,” the tenor Lawrence Brownlee told the audience when his return to the stage was met with raucous applause after the intermission of his concert at Zankel Hall on Thursday.It seemed, even, like every blistering high note, well-turned melisma and swooning falsetto note was greeted with hums of approval and the occasional shout of “C’mon!” Brownlee gave a lot of himself, and the audience was there to receive it.Thursday’s program, “Rising,” performed with the pianist Kevin J. Miller, was, Brownlee said, conceived during the uncertainty of the pandemic. It was hard to tell what the future might hold, he said, but in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he sensed that allies were “beginning to make space” for Black voices.Brownlee wanted to make room, too. As an opera star, he regularly spreads the gospel of Strauss, Debussy and Mozart, but he also wanted to champion the music of Black composers such as Robert Owens, Margaret Bonds and their successors.That’s what he did at Zankel: With a coruscating tenor densely packed with vibration and lightly worn confidence, Brownlee engraved his voice on a vast collection of pieces with a sure sense of how they should sound.“Rising” traces an ancestral link among Black composers by focusing on the common inspiration of Harlem Renaissance-era poetry. The program’s first half featured song cycles by Owens (“Desire” and “Silver Rain”) and Bonds (“Songs of the Seasons”), as well as recent pieces from Jeremiah Evans. The second half included new commissions from Damien Sneed, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Brandon Spencer, Jasmine Barnes and Joel Thompson, plus Carlos Simon’s “Vocalise.”Brownlee’s singing doesn’t sparkle so much as it sparks. It’s very much a coloratura instrument rather than a lyric one — a voice built more for dexterity than warmth — with a narrow spectrum of brilliant colors. Song repertoire rewards a softer touch, and it took some time on Thursday for Brownlee to round off the cutting edge of his sound. Perhaps after years of laser-precision bel canto, Brownlee has cultivated an elegant propriety, staying true to rhythm and seldom straying from a polished, ringing tone.As such, the subtleties in his singing only deviated minutely from his essentially brilliant timbre — a touch of duskiness here in “Juliet,” an echo of wistfulness there in “Night Song,” both by Owens. Bass-clarinet tones, warm yet reedy, emerged in Bonds’s “Winter Moon.” With an opera singer’s theatricality, he held the stage in the romantic expansiveness of Owens’s “In time of silver rain” and ended the program’s first half with a victorious high C.Miller’s playing was kinetic, especially in Owens’s vivid writing — efficiently obstinate in “Desire,” with a lovely pitter-patter of raindrops in “In time of silver rain.” He seemed to relish putting a little dirt into the opening of Evans’s “Southern Mansion.”Among the new pieces, Barnes’s “Invocation,” which turns Claude McKay’s poetic address to an “Ancestral Spirit” into an incantatory refrain, drew intense applause. Spencer showed a wonderful sense of prosody and storytelling in “I Know My Soul,” and Thompson sounded an exultant, if sometimes strident, call to celebration in “My People.”There is a compelling will to melody and mood, reminiscent of Owens, in the work of Sneed and Okpebholo. Okpebholo’s “Romance” — a sensual, desultory evening come to life from a blissful McKay poem — unwound in an aimless but seductive way. Miller and Brownlee brought out the piece’s mingling of desire and vulnerability.Brownlee had an enchanting way of cascading through the highly pitched melody of Sneed’s “Beauty That Is Never Old.” And his “To America” was a gut punch. “How would you have us, as we are?” begins James Weldon Johnson’s poem. “Rising or falling? Men or things?”The title of Brownlee’s program provides an answer — rising, always rising — but his encores made that point, too. Crossing himself before launching into two spirituals arranged by Sneed, Brownlee was positively infectious as he took his voice high and leaned into gospel-style runs: joyful, and sure of his place in the world.Lawrence BrownleePerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Myke Towers Is Seizing His Moment

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      In just a few years, the rapper has become one of the most sought-after collaborators in Latin music. His new album, “La Vida Es Una,” surveys his many aesthetics.Myke Towers could tell you that he never knew he would make it big, but that wouldn’t be true. Because back in 2014, six years before the rapper would put out his debut, he was preparing for a make-or-break show in his hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and breaking wasn’t an option.“Puerto Rico is the most difficult crowd to please,” he said this month, video-chatting from a Miami hotel room a few weeks before the release of his new album, “La Vida Es Una” (“Life Is One,” a reminder that we only live once). “They don’t just give out approval, you have to show that you are good enough. If you make it in P.R., you’re going to make it anywhere.”Over the course of two back-to-back albums, he did just that. “Easy Money Baby” from 2020 went triple platinum, building off the success of his 2016 mixtape, “El Final del Principio” (“The End of the Beginning”), while incorporating reggaeton, Brazilian funk and Colombian melodies. “Lyke Mike,” released in 2021, was a firm statement of purpose that strung together harder trap bangers. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart and cracked the Top 50 on the all-genre Top 200. With his new album, out Thursday, Towers aimed to marry the two approaches, striking a balance that illustrates his creative flexibility.“In this album, I want to make music to perform live,” he said, speaking animatedly in a casual white tee and a gold chain. “I want to give energy to people so they can go out and forget about their problems, forget about what’s stressing them.”Almost a decade ago, Towers, now 29, was still waiting for his shot. Raised in the barrio of Caimito in south San Juan, he grew up surrounded by music, mainly his grandmother’s: salsa, merengue, old school boleros — if it was classic Latin music, she was playing it. But Towers wanted to cut his own path in rap, and by the time he graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud, initially fairly anonymously. “At the beginning, I didn’t even want to show my face,” he said with a laugh. “I just wanted to show my skills. I knew that I had to put in a lot of work to be in the mix.”“Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico,” Towers said. “When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.”Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesHe didn’t just practice music, he analyzed it, dissecting every move idols like Daddy Yankee and Jay-Z made, and seeing how he could apply them to his own life. “I studied the game,” he explained. “I have my own identity, but I started with them, and the respect that I had for them.”As his SoundCloud releases gained more traction, he began putting his name on the tracks — styling “Mike” as “Myke” — and performing around the city. He viewed his first shows as tests, and by 2014 he was ready for graduation: that important hometown performance, in La Perla.For artists who grew up in the area, performing in La Perla, the island’s famous slum — located on a stretch of rocky coastline in Old San Juan — is a rite of passage. In video of Towers’s set posted to YouTube, the rapper is dressed in all black, standing under a white beach canopy as he confidently delivers the verses of the aspirational “Dinero En Mano.” (He later released the track, filled with ominous strings, on “El Final del Principio.”) By the end of the song, the crowd is singing along with him.“It was one of my most important shows,” he recalled. He shook his head and grinned, almost as if he was still in disbelief that he had pulled it off. “A lot of people, they didn’t even know my songs, but they were like, ‘Who’s that? Why is he confident performing like that?’”Even before he released his first full-length album, Towers had already teamed up with Bad Bunny and Becky G, laying the groundwork that would make him one of Latin music’s most in-demand collaborators. Since then, the rapper’s features with Rauw Alejandro, Luis Fonsi and Farruko have all been certified platinum.With “La Vida Es Una,” Towers agonized over the track list, sifting between more than 50 songs to select the set that could demonstrate his transition from a vanguard of Puerto Rico’s grass-roots trap scene to a self-assured hitmaker. His versatility is what first grabbed the attention of Orlando Cepeda, known as Jova, one of Towers’s frequent co-writers and the co-founder of the Puerto Rican label that first signed him in 2018. After hearing his rap music, Cepeda asked if Towers had anything more commercial. He was impressed.“He’s an artist without limits,” Cepeda said in a phone interview. “He’s a writer, he’s a composer, he’s a lyricist. I think that hearing someone who comes from the hood like he does, when you listen to his music, it inspires, it excites, it makes people want to work with him.”By the time Towers graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud.Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesIn addition to tapping some of his past collaborators, including Ozuna and J Balvin, for “La Vida Es Una,” Towers also enlisted producers from across the Latin music diaspora, including Sky Rompiendo (from Colombia) and Tainy (Puerto Rico). “I want to show my fans the difference between ‘Mike’ and ‘Myke,’” he said, explaining his efforts to blend his grittier rap roots with his mainstream ambitions. “In the beginning, my fans would say things like, ‘Oh, you went commercial. What are you doing?’ Those comments would get in my head, and I felt like I was losing who I am, but I like to challenge myself. I took a lot of risks on this album, but I feel confident that when people listen to it, they’ll hear something they needed from me before.”The new album includes songs for his more pop-minded fans: “Sábado” and the Daddy Yankee collaboration “Ulala (Ooh La La),” two dance-floor-ready tracks produced by the Texas duo Play-N-Skillz. Towers heats things up on “El Calentón,” a sparse track that begins as a reggaeton jam before building to a display of his lyrical dexterity. And as its title might suggest, “Flow Jamaican,” produced by Di Genius, dives into reggae rhythms, with Towers switching up his flow in the lead-up to the song’s earworm of a hook.The album was primarily recorded in Puerto Rico, a place with such a long, diverse musical history, Towers said, that anyone who taps into it comes away overflowing with ideas, influences and potential: “Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico. When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.” He lit up, a wide smile spreading across his face as he described his usual routine of returning home from tour to his wife and son, and then heading to the studio.“My family is my home base,” Towers said. “Going back to them is spiritual to me. Before I had my son, I would be in the studio until 7 a.m., every day. I’ll always have that hustler spirit, but when I found out I was going to have a kid, it was about working smarter, not harder.”Towers ends the album with a triumphant celebration, “Lo Logré” (“I Made It”). “It’s an anthem that a lot of people are going to relate to,” he said.“People think I made it and it was easy, they forget the process, everything that it took to make it happen. I value every moment in my career because years ago I was even crying trying to make it come true. There are trials you go through, but when you come out on the other side, people just see that you made it. And I have, but I haven’t. I have more dreams to achieve.” More

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      Renée Fleming Adds a New Role to Her Repertoire: Pat Nixon

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      The superstar soprano discusses her debut in John Adams’s “Nixon in China” at the Paris Opera. For starters, she spends the second act with a dragon.In May 2017, the star soprano Renée Fleming sang the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” for the last time — and with that, said goodbye to one the roles that had defined her career.Since then, Fleming, 64, has appeared in concerts and on Broadway, and premiered a new opera, “The Hours,” which was written for her. Now, for the first time in a decade, she is preparing a role debut in the established repertoire: Pat Nixon in John Adams’s 1987 opera “Nixon in China,” which opens at the Paris Opera on Saturday in a new production by Valentina Carrasco.Some sopranos in their 50s and 60s have voices that darken and thicken, making them perfect for character roles, often vengeful older women like Klytaemnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra” or the Kostelnicka in Janacek’s “Jenufa.” Fleming, who has always had both a fastidious technique and a strong instinct to protect her voice, still sings with her characteristic pure, blooming tone.This makes Pat Nixon, the former first lady whose musings on “the simple virtues” and “the fruit of all our actions” are the beating heart of the opera’s second act, a logical, though initially surprising, choice. Fleming has thrown herself into preparation with her typical studiousness: reading books and articles about the Nixons, studying film reels to capture what Carrasco called Nixon’s “gestures, smoking — she was a heavy smoker — and slightly constricted and strained smile.” Fleming discussed her approach to the role in a video interview from Paris. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Nixon in China” is defined in so many people’s heads by the iconic original production by Peter Sellars that came to the Met. How does this staging differ?It’s a bit madcap, I would say, in a good way. There’s a lot of creative choices to bring this piece alive that are quite different than anything I’ve seen. I’ve watched most of what’s available, at least on the internet; it’s just been tremendous fun. People have treated the piece in an insistently serious way. This is the first time where — I think enabled by the passage of time — a director could say, “We all know what happened, we’re familiar with the piece, and now we can think about it in a different way.”In Valentina Carrasco’s production, Fleming spends Act II with an onstage dragon, “which is quite delightful,” Fleming said. Here they stand behind a screen of scattered Ping-Pong balls.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisWhy Pat Nixon?I’ve been a tremendous fan of John Adams forever. There was a period when I was emailing him on a regular basis to see if there was anything of his that he thought I could do. I’ve always loved new music and have been performing a lot of it since I was a student. But nothing worked out until this.How is it to play someone like Pat Nixon who — as opposed to a princess, or mermaid or other standard opera heroine — is in our cultural memory?It’s really different. These are people who lived during my lifetime. I don’t remember them well. I was in middle school around the time all of this happened; I wasn’t paying attention. But there’s all this archival material to look at — and they come to life once you start reading. There were books about the Nixons and their marriage that were quite interesting, especially “Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage,” by Will Swift and “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” by Julie Nixon Eisenhower.In every single video or photograph from the visit, Pat stands out because of her fashion, which was all very carefully chosen. I get to wear the red coat, which is helpful. I had a talk, thanks to a friend, with Frank Gannon, who knew the Nixon family for about five years and was a special assistant in the White House at the time of the trip. He was able to shed light on their marriage — on how crazy they were about each other, especially him for her. She was extremely protective of him and of their children.The piece is not mocking her.On the contrary, I think the creators genuinely respected her. I was surprised, too, because they really aren’t as kind to some of the other characters, namely Henry Kissinger. Alice Goodman’s text is so exquisite. Especially for Chou En-lai, and for Pat Nixon it’s beautiful and poetic. The images in Pat’s main aria, “This is prophetic,” are a vision for what this alliance could look like in a positive sense.I love singing it, and I love portraying her — and in this production, I spend the whole second act with a dragon, which is quite delightful, and which exemplifies her positive vision for this alliance. There are so many beautiful vibrant pictures created in this scene, and all of them heartfelt. It feels to me like a particularly feminine point of view.What is it like to sing this score, in Adams’s distinctive style?It’s challenging to learn, because it changes meter every bar pretty much, and the aria has a quite high tessitura; it sits consistently too much up at the top of the staff. It’s beautiful music, and what makes it possible is that the higher phrases are separated by a few bars so you can relax, get a rest. I also love the unique use of the orchestra. Just to look down into the pit and see five or six saxophones and two pianos creating an extraordinary texture gives me an enormous pleasure. The top of the second act, Pat’s act, is such a joy. It has a sparkling quality to it that you just can’t help but respond to.Playing Pat Nixon is different from typical opera for Fleming: “These are people who lived during my lifetime,” she said.Elisa Haberer/Opéra national de ParisAdams insists that singers in his operas are enhanced with microphones given the thickness of the orchestral textures. How does that feel?I find being miked helpful. I think that as orchestras and conductors have less time to work on balance, and the demands being made on singers just to be loud — if that continues to increase, I don’t think it’s helpful to the art form to insist that there never be any enhancement on the stage. There’s a huge difference between a subtle enhancement — already being used in a lot of theaters because the acoustic is poor — and full-blown amplification. I appreciate it, especially because a lot of what I’m doing is way upstage. And many set designers don’t want to be forced into building boxes all the time to help us with the acoustic.When “Nixon” premiered, it was sometimes dismissively called a “CNN opera” because of its engagement with current events and politics. Now, this production premieres amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China and protests in Paris.Travel to China for artists had just opened up — but now surveillance balloons, or the American discovery of surveillance balloons, seems to have messed that up. I hope that communication continues. It serves everyone, and both sides know that. It’s a really sensitive time. There are a lot of Chinese artists in the show, some of whom live in China, and even doing this piece is sensitive for them. There were images to be used in a montage at the end of the opera that had to be changed or modified because of those sensitivities. The montage is trying hard to be objective about these conflicts and their relationship to what happened at the time the opera is set. It seems to be more sensitive to discuss what’s happening now than what happened in Mao’s time.Outside of our dressing rooms last night, there were fires on the street. There were demonstrators running from the Place de la République to the Bastille. That’s what it’s been like every day. It’s ironic, because my [1991] debut here in “Figaro” had demonstrators outside, who then during the show broke into the theater. It was quite uncomfortable, because someone actually came onstage with a huge machete. So thus far, it’s really been not too terrible. More