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      Kelsea Ballerini Is Ready for Lift Off

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      The country singer and songwriter has long tested Nashville’s boundaries while revealing herself to her listeners. Touring behind a recent album and a surprise EP, she’s finding new heights.Ever since Kelsea Ballerini saw Shania Twain soar into a theater on a flying motorcycle wearing a catsuit and closer-to-God hair, the rising country star has known she wanted to be a boundary-breaking daredevil. But, like Kelly Clarkson, she also wanted to be a bare-it-all open book — hitting the big notes and still cracking self-effacing jokes onstage in jeans and a T-shirt.On Ballerini’s latest tour, she’s got the glittery jumpsuit and the denim, the vulnerability — and the push she needed to lift off.Ballerini’s set includes upbeat, pop-inflected songs from her fourth album, “Subject to Change” from 2022, and adroitly crafted hits from her early days, like “Peter Pan” and “Love Me Like You Mean It,” that put her on the map in Nashville as a sassy young talent. But new heartbreak anthems from “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” a spare, emotional EP she dropped in February, after she went through a high-profile divorce from the Australian country singer Morgan Evans, supercharged the show. Fans full-throatedly sang along, having memorized lyrics that were only out in the world for a few weeks, exhaling the release along with her. Ballerini gladly shared the mic.“It’s not about me singing the song,” she said in an interview after the tour’s recent opening date. “It’s about us singing the song.”Over the past few months, Ballerini, 29, has entered new territory, including a potent performance on “Saturday Night Live,” her debut there. The EP has intensified interest in her personal life, as she was photographed with a new beau (the actor Chase Stokes) and joined the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy” to describe, in full girl talk detail, the unraveling of her relationship with Evans, whom she married when she was 24 and he was 32. It wasn’t easy to publicly air all this, Ballerini said, but “I don’t want to lose the openness that I’ve always tried to have.”Where once the country ideal — at least musically — was to “Stand By Your Man,” as Tammy Wynette famously put it, lately younger artists have been charting their wifely disappointments: Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce chronicled their respective relationships’ demises, too. Operating in the wake of songwriter-performers like Musgraves and Maren Morris, who upended Nashville’s traditional male tilt and pop suspicions, Ballerini is not coy about her career goals.“I want to play arenas,” she said — which she is, on an upcoming tour with Kenny Chesney. But, she continued, “I want to be the main draw. I want the pyrotechnics. I want to cross over, dare I say.”It was a day off, between “S.N.L.” and her tour, and Ballerini was cross-legged and barefoot on a chair in a Manhattan hotel room, her shearling-lined sandals tucked below. In forest colors and fuzzy corduroy sweatpants, she was cozy personified — a star that seemed soft to the touch. She’s a hugger, and an over-sharer. When I complimented the mane of blond hair beneath her pizza shop baseball hat, she explained that it was extensions.“I lost so much hair last year — just stress,” she said. “It’s growing back, in, like, little sprouts. It’s a whole thing.”Then she laughed. “I could’ve just said ‘thank you.’”Ballerini grew up in Knoxville, Tenn., the only child in a fairly religious household; she occasionally led the singing at worship service. Her rhythmic sensibility revealed itself early: Her mother has told her, she said, smiling, that even as a baby, she bounced along to music so intently that she would scoot her high chair clear across the room. At home, the stereo was tuned to Top 40 (thanks to her mother), and classic crooners (for her father).“Any time I smell Bolognese, I hear Tony Bennett,” Ballerini said, “because my dad would be cooking some beautiful Italian meal and blaring that all through the house.”Her parents split when she was 12 — she used to bad mouth their divorce, she said, but now that she’s gone through one herself, “I have a lot more grace for them” — and she found a refuge in songwriting. “It’s the truest love in my life,” she said.It helped her get through another trauma, when she witnessed the death of a classmate in a school shooting in 2008. By then, she had started voice lessons and picked up the guitar. She performed her first original song onstage at a recital in high school; she and her mother moved to Nashville when she was 15. “I just had this, like, stupid little knowingness,” she said, that she would find her way in.She filled her days studying tour documentaries and credits on CMT music videos, searching for names online to learn “who worked where, and what was a Sony, and who was a Hillary Lindsey,” the chart-topping songwriter. By 19, she was signed as a songwriter herself, to the independent label Black River Entertainment, where she remains. Within four years, she was a Grammy nominee.But being an artist with pop ambitions on an indie label has had its challenges, she admitted, and there was a learning curve to being a female artist in a field that’s often hostile to them. She was 21, with her first Top 5 single, just after “Tomato-gate” happened — the brouhaha over a radio consultant calling women merely the garnish on the scene — and she suddenly realized how many yearslong gaps there were between female stars. “I was naïve and unaware,” she said, “part of a conversation that I wasn’t even ready for.” For her last two albums, she has chosen more female collaborators. “It really freed up this new creative space for me,” she said.She makes a point to have at least one solo-written song on each project — for herself, and for the industry. “I have this insecurity that because I’m blond and I’m glittery and I like production, that people don’t take me seriously as a songwriter,” she said. With the solo song, “The underlying tone is, ‘Hey, I did this by myself. I didn’t have a man in the room.’”“I want to play arenas,” Ballerini said. “I want to be the main draw. I want the pyrotechnics. I want to cross over, dare I say.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesBallerini drafted “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” mostly solo late last year, and finished and recorded it quickly, with just one collaborator. It came after Evans unexpectedly put out a single before their divorce was finalized last fall, claiming to be surprised at the breakup (his video is heavy on adoring female fans). Was her album a response to his track?“Yes and no,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have written a song like ‘Blindsided’” — which checks off their troubles and uses the chorus, “Were you blindsided / or were you just blind?” as a retort — “had I not been responding to something that was already out there.”Writing was a salve for her, she said, but she wasn’t expecting the music, with glimmers of the hip-hop syncopation that have been her hallmark, to connect so deeply.Alysa Vanderheym, a songwriter and producer whose credits include Little Big Town and Blake Shelton, worked with Ballerini on the surprise release. “She knew exactly what she wanted to say — she had her titles, her concepts,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s so unfiltered — she just went there, she didn’t even second guess it — which is so inspiring to me.”Ballerini was grateful, she said, that her label has never tamped down her ideas. In December, she called Patrick Tracy, the creative director she worked with on “Subject to Change,” and told him that, surprise, she was about to release a new EP, and that she wanted him to direct a short film to accompany it.Their timeline was brief, but Ballerini’s vision was so clear, down to a shot where a stack of dirty dishes collapses, that she was credited as a co-director. “The story line from the very beginning was hers and hers alone,” Tracy said.“The way she rallies her team around her ambition,” he added, “to me it’s sort of unmatched — it always feels collaborative.”For the EP, Ballerini said, she abandoned “the commercial country artist” part of her brain, the awareness of how things would fit into radio or playlists. The last track, “Leave Me Again,” is just her voice and acoustic guitar, plaintive and hopeful.“I feel really seen, and understood, as an artist right now,” she said.And she’s getting a taste of what she dreamed of. “I have a little baby hydraulic lift on this tour,” she said. “I think it brings me 10 feet in the air. And all of a sudden, my legs are, like, Bambi. I’m terrified. But I like it.” More

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      Review: Protecting and Defending Ukraine’s Cultural Identity

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      A festival responds to the assaults and insults of war by celebrating the composer who shaped the nation’s contemporary music, Borys Liatoshynsky.The shadow of the war in Ukraine once again hovered over the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival on Friday when it began its three-day tribute to the 20th-century composer Borys Liatoshynsky at Merkin Hall.Hours before the opening-night program, which highlighted composers who influenced Liatoshynsky, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, of war crimes, and issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine’s consul general in New York, recounted that news to the audience on Friday and was greeted with applause.When the 2022 festival took place, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was fresh, with Putin attempting to justify his actions in part by claiming that Ukraine had no independent cultural identity. Holubov, in his remarks on Friday, said that this year’s festival, the fourth, comes at a time “when our cultural identity, our history and our music are at stake.”On Saturday, the second day of programming traced a pedagogical lineage from Liatoshynsky to several living composers. The Sunday afternoon program pairs two Liatoshynsky quartets with works by Bartok and Copland, composers who, like Liatoshynsky, are credited with defining a national style. Again and again, reclamation resists erasure.Born at the end of the 19th century, Liatoshynsky lived through the Ukrainian War of Independence, the rise of Lenin and Stalin and both world wars. He embraced expressionism early in his career and became an influential teacher at Kyiv Conservatory, where his students included Valentyn Sylvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer.Liatoshynsky, a composer with an intensely volatile style, wrote music that didn’t comply with the Soviet Union’s aesthetic of socialist realism. He was dogged by censors and branded a formalist. After Stalin’s death, he found his way back to his original compositional voice late in life and is now remembered as the father of Ukrainian contemporary music.Liatoshynsky’s Violin Sonata (1926), a thorny work full of short bursts of agitation, opened the program on Friday. The violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv gave the piece’s core thematic material — a melody that skitters, scrapes and then leaps upward — a bold arc, and she applied an eerie calm to passages marked sul ponticello (a technique of bowing near the bridge that produces a high, scratchy sound). At times, though, she and the pianist Steven Beck seemed to set aside interpretive matters just to get through a piece of hair-raising difficulty.Following the Violin Sonata, Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1913) sounded almost lissome, with the clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich shaping long melodies with a full, lovely tone and understated warmth. The violist Colin Brookes and the pianist Daniel Anastasio likewise cultivated the beauty of Liatoshynsky’s Two Pieces for Viola and Piano (Op. 65), with Anastasio painting a dappled night sky in the Nocturne and Brookes hinting at a mixture of solitude and disturbance.The conductor James Baker made perfect sense out of the unusual instrumentation for Liatoshynsky’s Two Romances (Op. 8), which uses voice, string quartet, clarinet, horn and harp. He highlighted Liatoshynsky’s text painting in the first song, “Reeds,” with strings that rustled like paper and then refracted like shards of light. The bass Steven Hrycelak was a genial narrator with an oaken timbre.Liatoshynsky’s avant-garde-minded students inspired him, and they were represented by two pieces. Sylvestrov’s “Mystère” was a symphony of percussion in which the alto flutist Ginevra Petrucci elegantly snaked her way through a battery of timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, marimba, Thai gong and more. Each instrument cut through the air with its own vibrations — splashes, thwacks, tinkles, knocks — for a cumulative effect that was captivating to experience live. The brief “Volumes,” by Volodymyr Zahorstev, blared forth with a chaotic play of instrumental timbres.The concert closed with Liatoshynsky’s “Concert Etude-Rondo,” a devilish showpiece given a crisp performance by Anastasio. This was a late piece, written in 1962 and revised in 1967, a year before Liatoshynsky’s death. Its stubborn character extends from driving octaves in the bass to shattered-glass effects in the piano’s delicate upper reaches.The transliteration of composers’ names in this review follows a 2010 resolution adopted by the government of Ukraine, according to Leah Batstone, the festival’s founder and creative director. As Holubov said at the start of the concert, Ukrainian language is the heart of the Ukrainian nation — and Ukrainian music, its soul.It was hard not to see — or rather, hear — a symbol for the persistence of the Ukrainian people in the uncontainable, endlessly restless music of a composer who refused to concede his identity to the state. More

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      Three Convicted in 2018 Murder of Rapper XXXTentacion

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      After more than 27 hours of deliberation, a Florida jury found three men guilty of killing the rising rapper during a robbery in the parking lot of a motorcycle shop.Nearly five years after the killing of the rising rap star XXXTentacion, who was fatally shot in broad daylight during a 2018 robbery just as his polarizing career was exploding, a jury in Florida on Monday ended more than a week of deliberations when it found three men guilty of first-degree murder in the case.Prosecutors said that Michael Boatwright, 28, and Trayvon Newsome, 24, were the gunmen that June afternoon, with Boatwright firing the fatal shot during a struggle over money. The third man convicted, Dedrick Williams, 26, was said to be the getaway driver and mastermind behind the robbery.All three face mandatory life sentences; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty in the case, which was tried at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Surveillance video played in court showed the rapper’s BMW being blocked by an S.U.V. as he tried to leave a motor sports store in Deerfield Beach, Fla., leading to a confrontation with two masked assailants, who escaped with $50,000 in cash.The trial turned largely on the jury’s interpretation of testimony from a fourth man present that day, Robert Allen, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last year and testified against his alleged co-conspirators. The Broward County prosecutors also relied on surveillance video from the store that showed two of the men inside, seemingly observing XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy), as well as cellphone and Bluetooth data tying the men to the location and the S.U.V.XXXTentacion onstage in 2017. The rising rapper was shot and killed during a robbery in 2018.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service and Getty ImagesThe evidence also included videos that prosecutors said showed the defendants dancing and posing with cash hours after the killing.During more than 27 hours of deliberations across eight days, jurors had asked to review more than 1,000 text messages, along with photos and videos, seized from the cellphones of two of the defendants, including a picture of a news story about the shooting.Defense lawyers for Boatwright, Newsome and Williams, who were tried together, argued that DNA evidence failed to link them to the shooting. (The jury was asked to decide separately on each man’s guilt or innocence, and could have convicted just one or two of those accused.)The defense pointed vaguely to other theories of the crime — including behind-the-scenes wrangling that attempted to include information about XXXTentacion’s online beef with the megastar Drake, who fought successfully to avoid being deposed in the case. They also said that Allen, who had previous felony convictions, was an unreliable witness.“Plans hatched in hell do not have angels for witnesses,” Pascale Achille, the lead prosecutor, said in her rebuttal after closing arguments.The foursome had been planning to commit robberies that day, prosecutors argued, when they happened upon XXXTentacion at the motorcycle shop, where they had hoped to buy a mask. After confirming the musician’s identity inside, the men then waited for him in the parking lot and pulled in front of his car, allowing the two gunmen to attack, their faces covered. A passenger riding with XXXTentacion fled, and a scuffle over the rapper’s Louis Vuitton bag containing the $50,000 ended when Boatwright shot the rapper, prosecutors said.XXXTentacion, 20, a singer, songwriter and rapper who blended genres and first took off on the streaming platform SoundCloud, was high up on the roller coaster of viral fame when he was killed.In the 18 months before the shooting, he had gone from a little-known, troubled teenager making music in his bedroom to the top of the Billboard chart thanks to the success of his anarchic breakout single, “Look at Me!,” and a follow-up album, “?,” which debuted at No. 1.At the same time, he was awaiting trial on charges of battery, false imprisonment and witness tampering stemming from the alleged violent assault of a former girlfriend.“If I’m going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy, or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life, regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me,” the rapper said in a video posted to social media before his death.Since his killing, XXXTentacion — whose striking visage has been absorbed into modern hip-hop’s iconography — has been the subject of a documentary, “Look at Me,” and been featured on albums by Kanye West and Lil Wayne, in addition to the posthumous music released in his name. More

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      Morgan Wallen Holds at No. 1 With Strong Streaming Numbers

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      “One Thing at a Time” had the second-biggest streaming total for a country album, after its debut last week. The nine-woman K-pop group Twice opens at No. 2.After a big opening last week, the country star Morgan Wallen easily takes No. 1 again with his latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” holding off new releases from Miley Cyrus and the K-pop group Twice.The 36-track “One Thing at a Time” tops the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 259,000 sales in the United States, including 308 million streams and 21,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Its total is down 48 percent from last week, when it started with 501,000. But “One Thing at a Time” still had the second-best streaming week ever for a country album, topping even the debut of Wallen’s last blockbuster album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” more than two years ago. (“Dangerous” remains a hit, landing at No. 7 this week.)Twice, which comprises nine women, opens at No. 2 — a new peak for the group — with “Ready to Be,” a seven-track EP. It had the equivalent of 153,000 sales, mostly from copies sold as a complete package, of which there were a variety of collectible offerings on physical media, including 11 CD versions and two vinyl LPs. Of the 145,500 copies of “Ready to Be” sold as complete units, 86 percent were on CD, according to Billboard. Songs from “Ready to Be” were also streamed 10 million times.Cyrus’s latest, “Endless Summer Vacation,” starts at No. 3 with 119,000 equivalent units, including 55,000 sales in album form and 81 million streams. SZA’s “SOS” falls two spots to No. 4 and Karol G’s “Mañana Sera Bonito” is No. 5. More

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      An Oklahoma Town’s Rescue Plan Has a Big Name: Reba McEntire

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      The country-music star is trying to revive her childhood home in Oklahoma with a restaurant, concert stage and lots of Reba memorabilia.ATOKA, Okla. — Year after year, eight million vehicles drove through this sleepy town just off U.S. Highway 75, which stretches from Texas to Canada. Almost none of them stopped.Atoka had fallen on hard times: Residents had moved away, and downtown buildings were decaying. Carol Ervin, its economic development director, began to plot how the city might lure even a small fraction of those drive-by travelers to visit.In the past two months, half a million guests have come to this southeastern Oklahoma community of 3,000. The reason can be summed up in four letters: Reba.Reba McEntire, the country-music star, grew up in Atoka County, and in January, she made good on a pivotal investment here. In a once-dilapidated former Masonic temple, she opened a restaurant, Reba’s Place — a 50-50 partnership with the Choctaw Nation, whose reservation includes Atoka. Upstairs is a gift shop selling Reba shot glasses and her clothing line for Dillard’s. Front and center is a concert stage, where Ms. McEntire headlined the grand opening with a performance of her greatest hits.In coming years, if all goes according to plan, Atoka will get an airport, a small water park, an amphitheater and boutique hotels. Several manufacturing and green energy companies are already setting up headquarters here.No one was more skeptical than Ms. McEntire when Ms. Ervin and her team broached the idea of a restaurant as a means of reigniting the local economy.“I thought it was a pipe dream,” the singer said over the phone from her home in Nashville as she prepared to kick off her 2023 nationwide tour. Yet “you have got to dream big to make it big.”Ms. McEntire signed on to the project because she thought it would help spur Atoka’s struggling economy.Choctaw NationCall it a convenient convergence: a music superstar, a well-resourced tribal nation, a heavily trafficked highway and an ambitious local government. “I put my money in on them,” Ms. McEntire said, “and they made things happen that I never thought could have happened.”The project is not so far-fetched in Oklahoma, which has a number of other celebrity-fronted businesses. In Pawhuska, where the Osage Nation is headquartered, the Pioneer Woman Mercantile, a restaurant opened seven years ago by the Food Network star Ree Drummond, draws about 6,000 guests a day. The country singers Blake Shelton and Toby Keith own bars within a two-hour drive of Atoka.But Ms. McEntire, 67, is arguably a bigger attraction than the others, with a 47-year career and 24 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. She has starred in films, Broadway musicals and several TV series, including her own hit sitcom, “Reba.”On a Saturday afternoon this month, that star power was on display in downtown Atoka. Crowds of McEntire fans — many of them dressed in glittery tops and tasseled jackets to mimic her signature style — lined up outside a stolid three-story brick building whose only trace of glitz was a tall red electric sign reading “Reba’s Place.” The wait time for a table was four hours.Inside was a shrine to the singer. Under a soaring ceiling, diners packed into booths made from old church pews and gazed at posters showcasing Ms. McEntire’s albums, movies and shows, which have traded on her friendly, just-plain-folks image.Dresses from Ms. McEntire’s most famous performances are on display in the restaurant.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesOn the third floor, guests can shop for all manner of Reba T-shirts.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesMemorabilia from Ms. McEntire’s concerts, movies and television shows cover the restaurant’s walls.Zerb Mellish for The New York Times“Reba is about faith, she is about family, she is about culture,” said Gary Batton, the chief of the Choctaw Nation, the third-largest tribe in the United States. He knew Ms. McEntire from her performances in Choctaw casinos, and jumped at the chance to partner with her again.Diners lucky enough to snag a table dug into slabs of chicken-fried steak slathered in a pleasantly sweet gravy, and pinto beans served with a towering wedge of cornbread — Southern foods that reflect Ms. McEntire’s life and career. They ogled the bedazzled red dress the singer wore on her 1995 tour, one of several outfits on display. Onstage, a local musician, Wyatt Justice, crooned country songs next to a wall-size American flag.“I saw the big sign and then kind of slowed down,” said Donita Clay, who had driven about 90 miles from Broken Bow, Okla. “I am a Reba fan. Who isn’t?”Down the street, Boggy Bottom Antiques & Collectibles was filled with customers browsing “Dolly/Reba 2024” T-shirts while they waited for a table. Tracy Jones, a co-owner, said sales had at least doubled in the last two months. At the Vault, a wine bar across the street from Reba’s Place, Saturday sales had quadrupled, said the owner, Janny Copeland.“We are getting a Starbucks,” she said. “I don’t care what anybody says, we wouldn’t get a Starbucks here if Reba’s wasn’t coming here.”Atoka wasn’t always a small town. In the 20th century, it was home to a booming coal-mining industry and a stop along the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway. In the 1970s, the furniture retailer Ethan Allen and the Wrangler jeans company opened factories in Atoka, but closed them in 2006. The city lost almost 600 jobs. Last October, according to census data, nearly one in five Atoka County residents lived in poverty.“A city is a living, breathing entity,” Ms. Ervin said. “It is either growing or it is dying. And we were dying.”She said she tried to persuade companies to set up shop in town, but they told her, “We need a place where our people will want to live, and that is not Atoka, Oklahoma.”A downtown street is named for Ms. McEntire, who grew up in Atoka County.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesSince opening in January, Reba’s Place has attracted 500,000 visitors.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesCarol Ervin, Atoka’s economic development director, saw Reba’s Place as the first step in an ambitious plan to redevelop the city. Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesAbout five years ago, Ms. Ervin and other city officials, including Mayor Brian Cathey, began working on a plan to revive downtown. Then the pandemic hit. Ms. McEntire moved home to take care of her mother, who was dying of cancer, and spent several months here in quarantine.The singer had a history of helping out locally. Starting in 1987, she staged several concerts in nearby Denison, Texas, to raise money for the Texoma Medical Center, whose rehabilitation clinic is known as Reba Rehab. Now she was looking for “a legacy project,” Ms. Ervin said.Presented with the proposal for Reba’s Place, Ms. McEntire agreed to put up half the money, and the Choctaw Nation provided the remainder. The total investment was “several million,” said Kurtess Mortensen, the restaurant’s chef and the Nation’s executive director of retail, brand and merchandising. Any profits will be split between the Nation and Ms. McEntire, but Mr. Mortensen said, “This is not going to be a big moneymaker.”Ms. Entire concurred. “I know it is a very tough industry.,” she said. “There is more to life than money.”The Choctaw Nation draws most of its revenue from its 22 casinos throughout Oklahoma, and plans to spend the earnings from Reba’s Place on health, education and housing initiatives for the reservation. In Atoka, the Nation has already established housing, a health clinic, a community center and opened franchises of chain restaurants, like Chili’s.At Reba’s Place, about half of the 134 employees are members of a federally recognized tribe. The restaurant also serves beef raised and slaughtered on the Choctaw Nation, and its gift shop will soon sell items made by tribal members. Mr. Batton, the chief, said he hopes to open more locations of Reba’s Place in other parts of the reservation.Gary Batton, the chief of the Choctaw Nation, said Reba’s Place is bringing jobs and revenue to the reservation, which includes Atoka.Choctaw NationThe city has also invested in the project. The Atoka City Industrial Development Authority bought the building for $200,000 in 2020, then turned it over to the restaurant in return for an equal value in payments and services. Reba’s Place also receives rebates on a portion of city sales tax. (Ms. McEntire provided the restaurant with her money, name and memorabilia, but is not involved in daily operations.)Mr. Mortensen, the chef of Reba’s Place, is no stranger to bringing a big-time restaurant to a small town. He ran the Pioneer Woman Mercantile for five years.With the Mercantile, he said, “we were creating Disneyland, Main Street U.S.A.” But many Pawhuskans were unhappy with the sudden surge in traffic. In Atoka, Mr. Mortensen has held several community meetings to allow residents to voice concerns.“I have been yelled at and thanked and everything in between,” he said.One of the restaurant’s signature dishes is chicken-fried steak, a favorite of Ms. McEntire.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesThe charcuterie comes with country ham and boiled peanut hummus, and is served on a board shaped like Oklahoma.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesThe cooks at Reba’s Place make well above the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13.Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesMany people worried that there wouldn’t be enough parking. But others were excited by the prospect of jobs that paid more than the state and federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 an hour. At Reba’s Place, servers start at $8 an hour, cooks start at $14 and every full-time employee is eligible for health benefits.Before she was hired as a server at Reba’s Place, Christy Pittman ran a spa that she had to shut down when the pandemic started.“I went to college, I had the degrees, I had everything I needed,” she said. But in Atoka, “there just wasn’t enough quality jobs.” She now makes enough to get her nails done.Wyatt Delay, who works in the gift shop, said he was amazed by how many people had traveled from outside the state to visit. “We have had somebody from the Virgin Islands, New York, Michigan, Oregon, Washington State.”Holly Gleason, a music critic in Nashville, said she wasn’t surprised, as Ms. McEntire has one of the widest audiences of any country star. “Everybody agrees on Reba: Black, white, Native American, Asian, L.G.B.T.Q., Bible-thumping Christians,” she said.And while other country musicians have collaborated with national corporations to open their establishments, Ms. McEntire chose a local partner in the Choctaw Nation. “She is really making it a tried-and-true, this-is-who-we-are experience,” Ms. Gleason said.Still, several locals said they can’t afford to eat at Reba’s Place. “Unless there were more cheaper prices for us common folk, I won’t be going over there,” said Ruby Bolding, a retired artist. She was eating dinner at Cazadorez, a Mexican restaurant where steak fajitas cost $12.99. At Reba’s Place, the chicken-fried steak is $27.“But that doesn’t mean I am not glad it is here,” she added, “because it does bring in a lot of people. I love Reba, and I so relate to her.”The illuminated sign for Reba’s Place is visible from U.S. Highway 75. Zerb Mellish for The New York TimesMax Lane, a retired teacher who was attending service at Cornerstone Church — where Ms. McEntire’s brother-in-law Mark Eaton is the pastor — said a “fancy” spot like Reba’s Place didn’t attract him. “I would rather go to the Dairy Queen.”Ms. McEntire defended the restaurant’s prices. “It is not quick, out of a bag, throw it in a microwave — it is quality, handmade food,” she said.Plenty of others agree. In February, Reba’s Place made about $130,000 a week in revenue, and since the restaurant started taking reservations in early March, “people have been calling pretty constantly,” Mr. Mortensen said. This month, a speakeasy will open on the third floor.Could Reba’s Place grow to become the next Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s Tennessee amusement park? “I don’t know if I could ever touch that,” Ms. McEntire said.Ms. Ervin, who helped hatch the project, is more optimistic. “I think Reba’s could be bigger than Pawhuska or Tishimingo,” she said, referring to Ms. Drummond’s and Mr. Shelton’s businesses. With the highway running through it, Atoka already has more drive-by traffic than those towns.And most important, she said, it has Reba.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      The Exquisite Darkness of Depeche Mode

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      SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Martin Gore, who is now 50 percent of Depeche Mode, works in a studio on a low hill near Santa Barbara, hidden behind jungle-green foliage and fragrant flowering shrubs.On a Tuesday morning in January, he sat at a console in the center of the control room, which was spacious and orderly and full of California winter sunshine — a clean, well-lighted place to make songs about power, desire, faith and a world spinning ever further off its axis.Gore wore black clothes and spotless black boots. He looked like an Englishman who’s spent decades in California — vibrant tan, straight white teeth. He had the haircut you’d get if you asked a knowledgeable barber to give you “the Martin Gore”: high and tight, with several inches of unruly tuft up top.Two summers ago Gore turned 60, and it “really slapped me in the face,” he said with a morbid chuckle. “I don’t particularly feel like I’m 60, but you have to accept the facts. It feels like you’ve got one toe in the grave, at least.”On Friday Depeche Mode will release its 15th album, mostly recorded in this studio, by a pandemic-era skeleton crew: Gore, the vocalist Dave Gahan, the producer James Ford (Florence + the Machine, Arctic Monkeys) and an engineer/co-producer, Marta Salogni. As always, the sound is foreboding and sleek, sardonic yet soulful — music for lovers in black-leather-upholstered bullet-train compartments, racing toward ominous destinations.The title is “Memento Mori,” and the dominant theme is mortality — which isn’t, in itself, a departure. “Death is everywhere,” Gore wrote years ago, in a song called “Fly on the Windscreen,” whose narrator goes on to beckon, “Come here, kiss me, now,” because you never know.“Memento Mori,” though, is death-obsessed even by Depeche standards, with lyrics full of ghosts, angels and funeral flowers. Gore said that his own mortality had been on his mind, along with Covid-19, which was still cutting a swath through the world’s population as he wrote in 2020.But Gore knows the album and its title are destined to be read through a different lens. In May 2022, Andy Fletcher, known as Fletch, died at 60, suddenly and quickly, of an aortic dissection. Fletcher was a founding member of Depeche Mode; he and Gore had been friends since grade school.From left: Gahan, Andy Fletcher, Gore and Alan Wilder. Depeche Mode’s breakthrough in the U.S. came with the album “Some Great Reward” in 1984 and the single “People Are People.”David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNominally a keyboardist, Fletch’s true role in the band was nebulous, yet spiritually indispensable — somewhere between manager, quality-control supervisor and designated superfan.“Without Andy, there would be no Depeche Mode,” the longtime radio broadcaster and Depeche fan Richard Blade said in a video interview. “He was not the one composing the music, but he was the one pulling them together.”Gore saw Fletcher in person for the last time in 2019, at a wedding in England. He died just weeks before the band was scheduled to begin recording “Memento Mori,” the first collection of Depeche Mode songs he will never hear.Gore and Gahan say they both questioned whether they could or should continue without him. But Depeche Mode has survived potentially band-extinguishing events before — beginning with the departure of Vince Clarke, a founding member who left the group in 1981 after the release of its debut album, “Speak & Spell,” on which he’d been the principal songwriter.In the ’90s the band weathered the rise of grunge — which rendered synthesizers and drum machines temporarily taboo — as well as the departure of the keyboardist Alan Wilder and Gahan’s struggle with heroin addiction. (Technically, Gahan is the first member of Depeche Mode to die; in 1996, after an overdose, he said he flatlined for two minutes before paramedics revived him. He’s been clean and sober since.)Derided early on by the British rock press, Depeche Mode made converts in America, particularly in Southern California, where the band’s champions included Blade, then an influential D.J. at KROQ-FM. Its breakthrough in the U.S. came with the platinum album “Some Great Reward” in 1984 and the single “People Are People,” an uncharacteristically strident anti-prejudice lament that became a pop-radio hit as well as a gay club anthem.The gay community was only one of many disparate subcultures from which Depeche Mode built a fan base. On the West Coast, Blade said, the band made converts among “the white kids who would go surfing” but also connected with Latino listeners who heard a reflection of their own experience in Depeche Mode’s misfit anthems. “They might have been third-generation Americans, but a lot of people looked at them and said ‘No, you’re not one of us,’” Blade said.Gore agreed that the band had become common ground for those who felt like they didn’t belong: “I think humanity is made up of a lot of outsiders, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve managed to do so well.”By 1988, the group was big enough to pack the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a show documented in the director D.A. Pennebaker’s film “Depeche Mode 101”; the triple-platinum album “Violator,” released two years later, yielded hit singles like “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy the Silence,” which pulsed like techno but brought guitars to the front of the mix for the first time.That album was the band’s commercial peak in America; minus a 2005 singles collection, no new Depeche Mode album has been certified gold in the U.S. in 22 years. But as long as there are new teenagers, there will always be new Depeche Mode fans, primed to respond to lyrics like “It all seems so stupid it makes me want to give up/But why should I give up when it all seems so stupid?”And the band’s fans, Gore points out, “don’t turn 30 and then decide, ‘Oh, I don’t like that anymore.’” If you have ever been between 15 and 17 years old, alienated, and a little bit in love with your own sadness, a part of you will never stop being that way; no one who goes through a Depeche Mode phase ever quite outgrows it.This means the band remains a powerful draw; its latest worldwide arena tour begins on Thursday. Against all odds, Gore and Gahan’s group has become a legacy act, and an influence on musicians who’ve become veterans themselves.“I think humanity is made up of a lot of outsiders, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve managed to do so well,” Gore said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAs frontman of the venerable Sacramento alternative-metal band Deftones, Chino Moreno has covered Depeche Mode songs like “Sweetest Perfection” and “To Have and to Hold”; his keyboard-driven side project Crosses openly channels his heroes’ stylish gloom. In a video interview, Moreno described his first Depeche Mode concert — a 1988 show at what was then the Cal Expo Amphitheater in Sacramento — as a life-changing moment.“I was pretty claustrophobic growing up,” he said, “but I just fought my way through all those feelings, and made my way to the front barricade. And they came out, and I was just captivated by them. Dave in particular — just his stage presence. I can loosely credit me wanting to sing, and be in a group and make music, to that experience. It was larger than life for me.”In the HBO series “The Last of Us,” people are still listening to Depeche Mode’s music after a fungal outbreak kills or zombifies much of the world’s population; survivors signal one another by blasting “Never Let Me Down.” Given their real-life endurance, the idea of Depeche Mode persisting even after the apocalypse, still helping people feel less alone, does not seem totally implausible.But Gahan said that even before Fletcher’s sudden death, he wasn’t sure he’d ever make another Depeche Mode album.In a video interview from New York, where he’s lived since the late ’90s, Gahan appeared onscreen against what appeared to be a red-velvet wall. It resembled the lining of a coffin, which prompted a question about the rumor that Gahan slept in one during Depeche Mode’s reportedly bacchanalian Devotional Tour in 1993. (Not true, Gahan said — although he did own a casket-shaped bed around that time, and once took a nap in an actual coffin a carpenter left backstage for him. But only once.)In 2019, Gahan and his band Soulsavers recorded “Imposter,” a collection of 12 high-drama covers of songs made famous by artists including Nat King Cole and Cat Power, performed by Gahan in a manner evocative of both Tom Jones and Nick Cave. Shelved during the pandemic, the album finally dropped in November 2021. The following month, when Gahan played the songs at a few shows in Europe, it felt like the end of something; he spent that Christmas wondering if he’d continue making music at all.Depeche Mode onstage in 1986. In the following decade, the group would weather the rise of grunge and the departure of the keyboardist Wilder.Rob Verhorst/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDuring Covid, he said, he’d enjoyed being at home, surrounded by family and friends, finally spending time at a Montauk vacation house that he’d barely gotten to use. “I can walk along the beach in winter. You don’t see another soul,” he said. “I’m out there playing my guitar along to Stones records. I’m like, ‘I like my life right now. Why would I want to disrupt all this, to jump into a Depeche Mode record, which will take me out of that for the next three years?’”The recording sessions for the previous Depeche Mode album, “Spirit,” had been contentious. Ever since Clarke’s exit, there’d been a clear division of labor in the band. Gore wrote virtually all the lyrics, and Gahan sang Gore’s words. But in the early 2000s, Gahan started making solo albums, and began bringing his own songs into Depeche Mode sessions as well.As Gahan sees it, he’s always been the Depeche Mode member who’s pushed the band outside its comfort zone. After Nirvana broke out in the early ’90s, it was Gahan who showed up to record “Songs of Faith and Devotion” with hair down to his shoulders, advocating for a grittier sound. Without him, you might never have heard live drums or a gospel choir on a Depeche Mode track. “All those things were considered threats,” Gahan said.But when Gahan pushed, it was traditionally Fletcher who pushed back. “He would always stand up for Martin,” Gahan said. “If there was a vote, I would lose.”At the “Spirit” sessions in 2016, those creative tensions reached what Gahan called a “boiling point.”“Martin wasn’t really keen on some of Dave’s songs,” the “Spirit” producer Ford said, “and Dave was pushing really hard for them to be on the record. It was very, very difficult.”Ford said he was told by Depeche’s management that the project was in jeopardy. His solution was to banish everyone except Gahan and Gore from the studio — including Fletcher, their traditional buffer. “Fletch did not like this,” Gahan said. “I think in the end our manager Jonathan had to literally, physically get him out.”Ford said the following day resembled a marriage-counseling session. Gahan recalled the confrontation “was really hard. After all those years — he said some stuff. I said some stuff.”They cleared the air enough to finish “Spirit,” released in 2017. And Gahan said any reservations he had about making the next album disappeared the moment he heard Gore’s demo for the song “Ghosts Again.” “I was like, ‘I can’t wait to sing this song.’”Then it was May, and suddenly Andy Fletcher was dead.“I felt, immediately, very supportive of Martin,” Gahan said. “Like, ‘I’ve got to take care of him — this is really much harder on Martin than it is on me.’”They decided to go ahead with “Memento Mori” — and according to both Gore and Gahan, Fletcher’s passing fostered an intimacy they’d never experienced in 40 years as bandmates.“Every decision that has to be made has to be made by the two of us now,” Gore said. “So we kind of have to talk things out when we disagree. I don’t think I’ve ever had a FaceTime with Dave before. Now we FaceTime.”Privately, Gahan said, Gore described their dynamic to him in more profound terms. “At one point — I always say too much, I’ll regret it later when I read this — he said to me, ‘It’s kind of like we’re long-lost brothers, isn’t it?’”Salogni, an Italian producer and engineer who’s worked with Björk, Frank Ocean and the xx — and the rare woman in this very male orbit — said it was “wonderful” to witness Gore and Gahan’s flourishing friendship, and the creativity it engendered. “With Andy being a filter — after he passed, the filter unfortunately disappeared, and suddenly the curtain dropped and they were there to face each other,” she said. “Honesty comes to the forefront, and you just face what you perhaps haven’t faced before.”The mood at the sessions, Ford said, “was very somber.” But there was also a lot of reminiscing — Fletcher stories told over long lunches. “It was honestly a really lovely, beautiful experience,” he said.Depeche Mode, Gahan suggested, has always survived by evolving. “Sometimes we’ve changed naturally, and sometimes change has been forced upon us,” he said, “and I think that’s what’s happening now. We lost an integral part of Depeche Mode, who’s irreplaceable. Circumstances forced us to be different, to think of each other in a different way. We need each other in a different way.” More

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      Review: Jaap van Zweden Returns to a Changed Philharmonic

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      Since the orchestra’s music director was last on the podium in November, his successor has been announced. He came back blaring with Messiaen.“What have I missed?” you could imagine Jaap van Zweden thinking as he stood on the podium at David Geffen Hall and looked out at the audience on Friday evening. It’s been months since van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led this orchestra in a furious burst of activity as it opened the renovated Geffen Hall.In the meantime, the world has swiftly turned: Last month, the orchestra announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would succeed van Zweden, who is departing after next season. The prospect of a Dudamel era — a throwback to the heady, celebrity-fueled, jet-set days of Leonard Bernstein — immediately overshadowed van Zweden’s comparatively modest tenure.Modesty was set aside on Friday, though, for Messiaen’s immense, very loud “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which van Zweden is ambitiously following this week with Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” for a brief residency the orchestra is calling “Spirit.”The spiritual quality couldn’t be more obvious in the austere severity of the “St. Matthew Passion.” It’s a little harder to discern in the hulking, gaudy “Turangalîla,” a 10-part, 80-minute paean to an erotic ecstasy that spills over into the realm of the cosmic.To keep things on a cosmic scale, Messiaen musters a solo piano part of concerto-level difficulty and variety. And the woozy, slippery wail of the theremin-like ondes martenot. And a glockenspiel, and a celesta. And a forest of percussion instruments, including shimmering tam-tam; curt wood blocks; and drums, both crisp and booming.Written in the aftermath of World War II, during which Messiaen spent time as a prisoner of war, the intricately conceived “Turangalîla” comes across as an explosion of long-simmering tensions: aggression and relief, energy and romantic longing, a celebration so huge it seems to encompass all the beauty and ominousness of nature, the delicacy and the granitic weight.The legacy of Stravinsky’s primal, euphorically muscular “Rite of Spring” is here, but billowing with the perfume of the French tradition of Ravel and blazing with the Technicolor brassiness of Broadway and Hollywood, returning to a few motifs — like a grim fanfare and a questioning four-note murmur — again and again.The quieter parts were the most memorable on Friday. The oscillating buzz of piano and celesta in the “Chant d’Amour II” section seemed to cast a blur over a lush melody in the violins. In “Turangalîla II,” a solo cello had the burnished strength of a horn. There was beautifully mellow playing in the winds throughout the “Jardin du Sommeil d’Amour,” the longest section, with the piano gently frisking, like a dancer in the moonlight on a foggy summer night.With van Zweden conducting, the score was forceful but slightly smudged, the textures both less lucid and less blooming than I’ve heard. I was aware, as I hadn’t been since earlier days in the renovated hall, of a hard, blaring quality to the orchestra’s sound in this space, a sense of being not surrounded, but almost assaulted.This performance felt heavier than some. But the work’s trippy grandeur and over-the-top virtuosity come through no matter what. And van Zweden’s build from misty mystery to density in the “Turangalîla I” section was persuasive, as was that from spare, forbidding march to ferocious dance in “Turangalîla III.”Jean-Yves Thibaudet, experienced at the daunting solo piano part, was both crisply powerful and self-effacingly suave. Cynthia Millar was a subtle presence at the ondes martenot — to the point that the instrument could have been more assertively amplified. We get to hear this retro-sounding relic of early electronica so rarely: Let it rip.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour: Pop’s Maestro of Memory Returns to the Stage

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      The opening night of the star’s Eras Tour traversed her 10-album career, revisiting crossover hits, rowdier experiments and more restrained singer-songwriter material.GLENDALE, Ariz. — The most meaningful Taylor Swift recording of the past few years is almost certainly “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault),” as layered and provocative as its title is unwieldy. A revision and expansion of one of her most gutting songs — the original appears on her 2012 breakthrough pop album, “Red” — it dissects a problematic, lopsided and ultimately scarring relationship with forensic detail. It’s a scathing commentary on the ex who inspired the track, and it also has something to say about the version of Swift who first committed this story to song over a decade ago: Swift now understands things that Swift then couldn’t possibly have known.Around halfway through Swift’s three-hour performance at State Farm Stadium here on Friday — the opening night of the Eras Tour, her first roadshow in five years — she was at the center of the long runway stage, elevated on a platform, holding 70,000 people rapt with this tale of righteous fury and anguish. Plenty were singing along with her, but somehow, the accumulated voices sounded like one huge hush, students in awe of the master class.Swift opened the show with a run of songs from “Lover,” including “The Man,” performed in full office cosplay.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThere were plenty of peaks during this concert drawn from the full arc of Swift’s career — the first of a sold-out 52-date national tour that made news for its disastrous rollout of ticket sales — but none quite like this. Throughout the night, she zigzagged between stretches of high-octane hits from older albums and mixed-bag selections from more recent ones — celebration with splashes of duty. What this ambitious and energetic if sometimes scattershot performance underscored, however, was just how many pivots Swift has undertaken in her career, and how the accompanying risks can have wildly different consequences.In modern pop parlance, album rollouts are often described as eras, but Swift’s career hasn’t always been that cleanly delineated. She’s made a few key turns over the years, though — on “Red,” when she divebombed into gleaming, centrist pop; on “Reputation,” when she made some of her sleekest and most au courant music; and on “Folklore” and “Evermore,” when she transformed into a woodland fairy.Songs from “Red,” one of Swift’s most acclaimed albums, arrived mid-show, and they were potent wallops — a jubilant and cheeky “22” followed by the indignant “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.” And when Swift, in a one-legged bodysuit embroidered with a snake motif, performed selections from “Reputation,” she showed just how wrongly maligned that album was upon its release. “Don’t Blame Me” was husky and alluring, while “Look What You Made Me Do,” performed in front of dancers trapped in glass boxes dressed as old versions of Swift, brimmed with attitude.Swift was cheerily, proactively defensive about “Evermore” — “an album I absolutely love despite what some of you say on TikTok” — but that segment of the show was particularly limp, especially the gloomy and spare “Marjorie” and “’Tis the Damn Season.” And the jolt from the melancholia of that restrained singer-songwriter release to the brazen stomp of “Reputation” was awkward. Songs from “Folklore” fared slightly better, especially “Cardigan” and “Betty,” but this section teetered toward melodrama, as if compensating for the less assured production on those songs.The set list over-indexed on the four albums Swift released after her last major tour, supporting “Reputation” in 2018 — the chipper and jaunty “Lover,” the one-two bucolic swaddle of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and “Midnights,” released last October. But the Eras conceit also meant that Swift wouldn’t have to exclusively lean on songs from these albums, which have in general been less popular, consistent and ambitious than her earlier ones.Sometimes, Swift joined her dozen-plus dancers in crisp choreography.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesShe opened the show with a run of songs from “Lover,” a hit-or-miss album that still yielded some excellent tracks. “The Man,” performed in full office cosplay, was biting and hilarious, and “Cruel Summer” had an almost ecstatic chill to it. From there, she jumped back to “Fearless,” her second album, and the first one made with an understanding that her relationship with country music might only be a dalliance. The earnest pleas in “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story” still had their old bite.Before “You Belong With Me,” she asked if the crowd was “ready to go back to high school with me,” both a dare and a legitimate question. Of late, Swift — obsessive about memory and even more obsessive about lore — has made revisiting her old work integral to her public presentation. Her ongoing rerecordings project layers a veneer of artistic liberation atop a business tug of war with the owners of her master recordings. And the very notion of the Eras Tour suggests a desire to thread Swift’s many selves into one, to find common cause between the 16-year-old who first shocked Nashville, the 33-year-old who has since become one of the defining pop stars of the 21st century and all the Swifts in between.If this show was an opportunity to perform songs from all of those phases, she did not always choose the tracks that are truly the most emblematic of those moments in time — sometimes specificity doesn’t age terribly well. (For what it’s worth, a song it would have been great to hear from each album, chronologically: “Picture to Burn,” “White Horse,” “Dear John,” “Stay Stay Stay,” “This Love,” “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” “Paper Rings,” “Exile,” “No Body, No Crime,” “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”)Fans did not appear to be playing favorites — many of them were dressed as Swift from various eras, or as song titles or specific lyrics, or as Swiftie inside jokes. And Swift herself tackled each period of her career — the dynamic ones and the flaccid ones alike — with real gusto, in outfits covered in glitter, or fringe or glittery fringe. Her stage was set up for both big-tent power and maximum intimacy; it jutted out into the crowd for almost the entire length of the floor. Sometimes, she joined her dozen-plus dancers in crisp choreography, like on “ … Ready for It?” “Bad Blood” and, most vividly, “Vigilante ___,” for which she performed an enthusiastic chair routine.She concluded with a selection of songs from “Midnights,” a challenging album to wrap a show of this magnitude — it’s more an amalgam of old Swift ideas than a harbinger of a new direction. During “Anti-Hero,” the screen behind Swift showed a version of her as a kind of King Kong, bigger than everyone and unfairly besieged, and on “Lavender Haze,” she was surrounded by dancers hoisting huge cloudy puffs.Swift tackled each period of her career with real gusto, in outfits covered in glitter, or fringe or glittery fringe.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThere was a distinct shimmer that ran through the night’s final three selections, the tinny “Bejeweled,” the spacey “Mastermind” and the needling “Karma.” All of those songs, which can be brittle from a lyrical perspective, benefited from the scale of the production here.But something far more meaningful had come just before that show-closing run. During an acoustic segment, she came out to the very farthest point of the stage, sat at a small piano and played her very first single, “Tim McGraw” (the only song she performed from her self-titled 2006 debut album).In addition to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” it was the night’s other pillar performance. It’s a song about memory and the ways in which people fail each other, and she sang it heavy with regret and tinged with sweetness.But unlike “All Too Well,” which now benefits from the wisdom that time affords, “Tim McGraw” remained as raw as the day it was recorded. No real tweaks, no rejoinder from the new Swift to the old one — just a searing take on the sort of love that makes for a better song than relationship. There are some things Swift simply has understood all along. More