Music

The educational snippets are the ultimate font of Gen X nostalgia. But what is it we’re nostalgic for?When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s. I was one of them. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. I learned it from “Schoolhouse Rock.”It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest.If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy-cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia.That last lesson stuck best. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.On Wednesday, ABC will tap into that spirit with a prime time “50th Anniversary Singalong,” in which the Black Eyed Peas, the Muppets, Shaquille O’Neal and others will hook up the words, phrases and clauses of the Saturday-morning favorites.The Muppets are among the many guest stars who will appear in the ABC special “Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong.”Christopher Willard/ABCThe special promises wholesome family fun, and I can think of worse things to do on a weeknight than musically unpacking my adjectives in the judgment-free zone of my living room. But nostalgia is not just a fun emotion. Like some of the best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, it carries a note of wistfulness.More on U.S. Schools and EducationHeavy Losses: A new global analysis suggests that children experienced learning deficits during the Covid-19 pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills.Police in Schools: Footage of a student’s violent arrest by a school resource officer has raised questions about the role of armed officers on campuses.Transgender Youth: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.In Florida: The state will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, citing examples of what it calls “woke indoctrination.”In this case, it’s a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics, before we were sliced into subcultures and demographics. Pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-DVD — pre-VHS, even — “Schoolhouse Rock” convened a classroom of millions for three-minute servings of revolutionary art alongside installments of “The Great Grape Ape Show.”Like much classic kids’ TV, “Schoolhouse Rock” was brought to you by Madison Avenue. The ad executive David McCall, who noticed that his son could memorize pop songs but struggled with arithmetic, suggested to George Newall, a creative director, and Thomas Yohe, an art director, that they figure out how to set math to music.As Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said.Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. The facts and figures made it educational. But they weren’t what made it art.That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. Above all, there was the sophisticated music. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.”The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples; it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.)The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song.The short “Conjunction Junction” was referenced in the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” a sign that nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.ABC, via Everett CollectionThe words and numbers in “Schoolhouse Rock” were never just words and numbers. Like the early years of “Sesame Street,” the shorts had an anarchic spirit and a pluralistic sensibility. “I Got Six” is a funk explosion whose Afrocentric animation includes a dashiki-ed African prince with six rings on all 10 fingers. “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” — imagine if Curtis Mayfield taught your English class — depicts a Black superhero long before Black Panther made it to the movie screen.When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.)Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time.The songs are as catchy as ever. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Consider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good.Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination.A scene from the anniversary special. Whatever its flaws, “Schoolhouse Rock” told children that they counted with the same numbers and were entitled to the same rights.Christopher Willard/ABC(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)And that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. (In 2009, a climate-focused season, “Earth Rock” went straight to DVD.) When “Schoolhouse Rock” showed kids a three-minute video on how the body worked, there was no internet algorithm to suggest a rebuttal by someone who “did his own research.”That said, I wouldn’t romanticize the “Schoolhouse Rock” era as a paradise of educational consensus. In 1974, the year before the “America Rock” season began, protesters against desegregation in Boston threw rocks at buses carrying Black students. And the series had its own blind spots, which historians and educators have since pointed out.In particular, “America Rock,” an upbeat celebration of the bicentennial, covers the American Revolution and women’s suffrage but skips over the Civil War and slavery. (The Roots filled in this hole in a 2017 episode of “black-ish” with “I Am a Slave,” about Juneteenth.) “Elbow Room” is a jaunty story of westward expansion from the point of view of white settlers, with little note of who got elbowed out. (One scene shows a settler taking a toy arrow through his hat.) America’s unflattering history didn’t make the cut because mass broadcasting meant not alienating the masses.But whatever its limits, “Schoolhouse Rock” at least told us we were equal: We counted with the same numbers, our hearts pumped the same blood, we were entitled to the same inalienable rights.And it operated in a period when people saw the same media and accepted the same facts. Months after its premiere, the Watergate hearings also aired on national TV. They were able eventually to turn even many Republicans against President Nixon, in part because Americans watched the same story together, without a partisan cable and internet ecosystem to spin the investigation as a witch hunt.It’s tempting to say that you couldn’t make “Schoolhouse Rock” again today. But I’m sure you could, even if it would be slightly different. Current kids’ shows like Netflix’s “We the People” are in a way exactly that. What you couldn’t create again today is the mass audience, or the context in which we assembled, one nation, sitting cross-legged in front of our cathode-ray teacher.Instead, we have “Schoolhouse Rock” binge-watches and sing-alongs, which, like all exercises in nostalgia, offer the tantalizing pleasure of stretching to touch yesterday, though we know we can’t. The past is like infinity, a concept that “Schoolhouse Rock” also introduced to my generation. “No one ever gets there,” as “My Hero, Zero” taught us. “But you could try.” More

NASHVILLE — Wynonna Judd was almost late for her date to sing with Joni Mitchell.It was July 2022, and the country star had rented a yacht off the Rhode Island coast while she rehearsed for her idol’s first public performance since a 2015 brain aneurysm. That Sunday afternoon, the captain struggled to find a dock, forcing Wynonna to race to the Newport Folk Festival. She arrived a minute before showtime, squeezed into a spot toward the rear of the onstage throng and sighed with relief. Maybe people wouldn’t know she was there.A dozen songs into the secret set, Mitchell began to purr “Both Sides Now,” the tune Wynonna — who with her mother, Naomi, made up one of Nashville’s most indelible duos — had sung during her debut performance, at eighth-grade graduation. Cameras caught her over Mitchell’s right shoulder, often sobbing as she occasionally harmonized. Honest and unmitigated, the footage went viral. Everyone knew Wynonna was there.“It flipped me like a pancake, man, everything coming out. I was such a beautiful little mess,” she said on a recent Saturday afternoon in an enormous Nashville rehearsal hall, red hair cascading over a silver cross resting against her stomach. She paused to apply another stratum of lip gloss. “I was thinking about my mom, how much she loved my voice. And I was so freaking mad at her for leaving me. I realized I was an orphan.”Less than three months earlier, a mediator who has worked with the entire Judd family for more than a decade commanded Wynonna to race to her mother’s house across the 1,000-acre farm they shared outside Nashville. Her younger sister, the actress and activist Ashley Judd, was already there. Wynonna arrived nine minutes later to find paramedics ready to rush her mother and lifelong singing partner into an ambulance. Naomi had struggled for decades with severe depression and panic attacks. She died that morning, her death ruled a suicide, the day before the Judds were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.As the Judds, Naomi, left, and her daughter Wynonna became one Nashville’s most indelible duos.Ron Wolfson“We were still at the hospital,” Cactus Moser, Wynonna’s husband, manager and drummer, remembered later in the same dressing room. “Her exact words were, ‘I’m walking my mother into the Hall of Fame tomorrow. We’re not going to bail.’ She is an oak.”The tearful ceremony was Wynonna’s first step in moving toward her own future. Since the Judds disbanded three decades ago, her relationship with her mother had been fraught at best, an exercise in boundaries. A fence split their spread in half. Family dinners observed firm time limits. Meetings about music were led by managers. “I can compartmentalize real easy,” she said, curling her lips.Last week, Wynonna began what may prove the pivotal phase of putting the past to rest: the second leg of the Final Tour, a sweeping survey of the Judds’ bygone country supremacy, performed over 15 dates across the United States with a cast of guests that includes Tanya Tucker, Brandi Carlile and Kelsea Ballerini. When it is over, she believes the rest of her career can begin. Now a 58-year-old grandmother newly confronting an empty nest, one of country music’s most venerated singers is electrified by the idea of making records that turn away from what Naomi long called “Judd music.”“It’s made me even more determined to be myself,” Wynonna said of her mother’s death in a second interview on her tour bus, flanked by photos of herself with Mitchell. “It’s given me a louder voice. I want to do stuff that makes people say, ‘What are you doing?’”With a new record deal through the independent label Anti-, Wynonna hopes to mine the rock, folk and soul she wanted to sing before Naomi suggested a family band, when Wynonna was still a teenager. Already, she has released new music with an indie-rock descendant, Waxahatchee, and had even started a band a few years ago with the elliptical singer-songwriter Cass McCombs.“We’ve both lived our lives as people have expected us, but she’s just getting started,” said Bobby Weir of the Grateful Dead, speaking by phone from Mexico, where Wynonna had just joined Dead & Company for a surprise performance. “I can’t wait to see who she takes with her, who she leaves wondering.”Her mother’s death, Wynonna said, has “made me even more determined to be myself” musically.Thea Traff for The New York TimesFOR MUCH OF the ’80s, the Judds were country music’s sweethearts next door, the mother-daughter duo mistaken for sisters. The Judds’ preternatural Kentucky harmonies politely rebuffed the “Urban Cowboy” craze sparked by the 1980 film, and country’s increasing slickness. Wynonna and Naomi sang about grandpa and the good ol’ days, and then held each other in love or heartache. Naomi was the playful one, charming crowds as she sang backup; Wynonna, more stoic, was the generational singer out front.“I don’t think there’s anybody in the business — any business, whether it’s country or rock or pop, anything — that has a greater voice than Wynonna,” Dolly Parton, a longtime mentor who thinks of her as a daughter, said in an interview. “With all the passion she has, all the stuff she feels, she was able to get that voice out there.”The Judds’ life was “a wonderful duet,” Naomi wrote in her autobiography, “the two of us against a frightening and unknown world.” But for Wynonna, the songs were more idyllic than their circumstances. Naomi was a single mother, pinballing between California and Kentucky, Texas and Tennessee for opportunity or inspiration. By the time Wynonna was 8, she felt the burden of raising Ashley was, in part, hers. Her mother never told her that she and her sister had different fathers.“We didn’t have the sit-down, Norman Rockwell family,” she said. “I always wanted that. I was never really allowed to be a kid.”That applied to music, too. Wynonna loved Joni Mitchell and Bessie Smith but longed to be Linda Ronstadt or Bonnie Raitt. She wanted to build a sizzling rock band, not be in a country duo with her mother. Bouncing between short-term jobs and nursing school, Naomi had other ideas, not only to safeguard her firstborn but also to try a novel family business.“On some level, she knew that this kid could sing,” Wynonna said, winking. “She had dreams and plans, and I had dreams and plans. They were very different. But I was so codependent, and I wanted to sing.”Indeed, in only six years, Wynonna’s supple vocals led the Judds to country’s biggest stages. Their meteoric rise was interrupted in October 1990, when Naomi announced her sudden retirement as hepatitis C ravaged her health. Wynonna wanted to quit, too. “It’s like being in the middle of a divorce,” said Wynonna, who has endured two of them. “How can you possibly think about dating?”But as Wynonna built a solo career, Naomi found other ways to impose. Wynonna believes her mother once hired a private investigator to learn if Wynonna’s boyfriend was gay. Naomi resented that Wynonna toured while she stayed at home. It got worse after 2009, when Wynonna partnered with Moser. Comparing her voice to some garage-bound Ferrari that had “only ever gone to fourth gear,” he encouraged her to try new songs and fresh settings of Judds standbys.“Mom was not a big fan of me and Cactus, because she desperately wanted to be on the road,” Wynonna admitted. “There’s a piece of me that feels like I left her at the party.”In 2019, an unexpected invitation arrived. The Nashville promoter Leslie Cohea saw Wynonna perform at a Tennessee festival, as Naomi watched from backstage. Cohea began hatching a plan for a final Judds hurrah: a full tour, taking the hits to arenas one last time.At a preliminary meeting in a Nashville board room, mother and daughter sat at opposite ends of a conference table and offered redlines. At Naomi’s request, the songs would be true to original form, recalled Jason Owen, the founder of Sandbox Entertainment, who built the tour alongside Cohea; at Wynonna’s request, the outfits would not be fastidiously coordinated.When Naomi started in on wardrobe plans, Wynonna gagged. “She said, ‘I’m fine. That’s just the sound of my mother’s uterus strangling my throat,’” Owen remembered in an interview. “They were playing off each other, but it was real.”Sandbox shaped a comprehensive plan to relaunch the Judds, hinging on a taped outdoor performance of one of their final hits, “Love Can Build a Bridge,” for the CMT Music Awards in April 2022. They announced 10 tour dates that night, quickly selling most of the tickets.The performance, however, wobbled. For the first time in Judds history, the ever-punctual Naomi was late, flustered by the unseasonably cold weather and an edit made to shorten her anthem for television. “She went from being at home, putting on makeup, to being in a multimillion-dollar production,” Wynonna said. “She wasn’t prepared.”Wynonna is not big on regret. She doesn’t think she could have saved her mom. “Once you make that choice, you’re determined to carry it out,” she said flatly. “There’s only so much guilt to carry around.” Still, she wondered if they should have debriefed more, unpacking the anxiety of working together again.“I missed that, because I was gone,” she said, referring to a tour of her own. Two weeks later, so was Naomi.LATE IN THE afternoon on the first day of the Final Tour’s last leg (at least for now), Wynonna shuffled up the stage steps in a hockey arena in Hershey, Pa. “Oh, hi!” she said to a small crowd in the arena’s front two rows, stretching that last word like molasses.More than two dozen devotees had paid extra for deluxe treatment, arriving three hours before showtime to watch a snippet of soundcheck and pose for a snapshot. After the band raced through “Have Mercy,” an early Judds hit about a hopeless cad, Wynonna grabbed a stack of scrap paper. Each fan had scribbled a question, and she started with the easy ones.“She had dreams and plans, and I had dreams and plans,” Wynonna said of her mother. “They were very different. But I was so codependent, and I wanted to sing.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesHow many pets do you have? (Forty-eight, including 26 cats.) Who was your biggest influence? (Her Mamaw, or paternal grandmother.) And then, inevitably, came the queries about carrying on without Naomi. Her mother loved everybody, she said, and taught her gratitude for the life they’d built, even when it seemed impossible.“She was a good person — to everybody else,” Wynonna said. She paused, as if realizing how harsh that sounded. “I did her hair, so she was strict with me.”Perched above her behind the drums, Moser interceded with a mischievous grin, asking if she was ready to play. “What are you talking about?” she shot back. “I was born ready.”In the weeks after Naomi’s death, Wynonna wasn’t sure if she was ready for this tour, to say goodbye to the Judds without her mother. She canceled a run with her own band and wondered if continuing was crass. “There was no way I was going to sing these songs without her,” she explained. “I had to seek counsel, because I was in a shutdown. Even Jesus had disciples.”The feedback from a retinue that included Moser, her sister and even her farm manager was nearly unanimous: Play. Parton demanded as much in front of a crowd at a private memorial service, telling Wynonna she needed those shows. “I told her that Naomi had her journey, and she had hers. None of that was her fault,” Parton remembered. “I told her to get her ass out there on the road. It’s time for her to go on and do the great things she’s capable of doing, a new start.”Singers including Carlile and Ashley McBryde, both ’80s babies reared on “Judd music,” volunteered to join her and sing Naomi’s parts. The first 11 shows last fall were more celebration than elegy.“I would have been desperately sad if not,” Wynonna said, anxiously rubbing her hands together. “You can’t fake this. It’s not a time to put on your big-girl panties and just deal with it. This music is my foundational life journey.”These concerts without Naomi are the culmination of an extended and unsteady process of stepping from their famous duo’s shadows, personally and professionally. Though Wynonna’s solo career was full of left turns into slinky R&B, vaulting pop and collaborations with the likes of Jeff Beck, that work was heard within the context of what she had accomplished with her mother, or might still. That is finally over.Scenes from opening night of the Final Tour’s second leg, in Hershey, Pa.Thea Traff for The New York Times“Almost instantly, there was less weight, less pressure,” Moser said, chatting in a Hershey sports bar. “Naomi believed I was trying to tunnel under the Judds legacy and let her fall through the cracks.”An encyclopedic rock fan who scoffs at Nashville mores, Moser speculates about future collaborations with cerebral producers like Daniel Lanois or Blake Mills. He and Wynonna are eight songs into an album that will most likely include work with Weir, Carlile and Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. It feels so real and vulnerable, Wynonna said, it makes her uncomfortable. “It’s the most intimate I’ve ever been,” she noted of a song called “Broken and Blessed.” “And that’s because of my mother.”And two years ago, after her biological father died, she finally met her brother, Michael, when she called him without warning on his birthday. They talked for five hours the first time they met. “We couldn’t get over how much we looked alike,” she gushed. “They’re all so normal.”She never told Naomi about her new family. She beamed, though, when she mentioned someday introducing him to Ashley, whom she repeatedly called “honey bunny.” Their relationship has become closer, Wynonna explained, the result of having and respecting boundaries. “We’re in such good places now,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.”MORE THAN 20 minutes before Wynonna was due onstage in Hershey for the opening night’s 24-song set, she stood still in a backstage hallway, bare feet on the concrete floor. She talked to her son, Elijah, and asked for more hair spray. Her black velvet outfit was covered in a constellation of gold glitter, and her wavy hair was a ripple of burnished reds. She clutched an enormous white guitar, so new it gleamed even beneath wan fluorescent lights.For the better part of a year, Moser schemed with Gibson to make a replica of the big, white guitar Wynonna bought soon after the Judds broke up. After a quarter-century of concerts, the original was as yellow as fresh butter, the wood beneath its strings ground down from countless strums. That guitar had signaled a new phase of her life, just like this one. She kept both hands around it, as if protecting a puppy. “It feels good,” she said slowly, closing her eyes to reveal more glitter.Just then, she stopped her tour manager, Tanner Brandell, and asked how much time she had left. “I was coming to tell you that you have the trigger,” he said. “Tell me when.” Without hesitation, she said “Now” and began sauntering toward the stage, moving deliberately, as if the world could always wait for Wynonna.She climbed the stairs and strummed a chord as the white guitar caught the spotlight for the first time. She belted out one line from an old Judds favorite, her voice every bit as mighty as it was when they cut the song in 1983: “Had a dream about you, baby.” She let the line echo back, and grinned.Thea Traff for The New York Times More

Bonnie Raitt is no stranger to the Grammys, which will be awarded Sunday in Los Angeles. She has won 10 of them since 1979, and she has also been a frequent presenter and performer on the show, befitting a musician who has long been the model of a sustainable, self-guided rock career.Raitt has never depended on hit singles or spectacle; instead, she relies on the quiet power of a voice that draws on blues, country, soul and rock to speak plainly about complicated emotions. Modestly but tenaciously, Raitt has cycled through decades of recording albums and touring, selling out 3,000-seat theaters and playing regularly at festivals. Musicians like Adele and Bon Iver have drawn on her repertoire, and younger musicians, particularly women, have cited her example as a bandleader and producer.Raitt, 73, has long been renowned as a finder and interpreter of songs, but most of her albums have also included a few of her own. Her four Grammy nominations this year include her first ones for her songwriting. The title track of her 2022 album, “Just Like That…,” has been nominated as song of the year and best American roots song. It’s a quiet, folky track about a heart transplant; a mother whose son was killed in an accident meets the recipient, and she gets to hear her child’s heart beating again.“Just Like That” and “Down the Hall,” a song narrated by a prisoner serving a life sentence and working in the prison hospice, show the influence of John Prine, a master of folky, laconic character studies, who died of Covid in 2020. He wrote “Angel From Montgomery,” a song Raitt always sings in concert.In a video interview from her living room in Marin County, Calif., Raitt wore a rainbow-hued outfit and spoke about songwriting, autonomy and awards-show serendipity. The following are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I don’t write all the time,” Raitt said. “So it’s almost like having a whole body, spiritual, emotional, physical feeling when you get shaken like that.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesYou have a lot of Grammy Awards already, but “Just Like That” is your first nomination as a songwriter. It seems a little belated for someone who has written dozens of songs.I was never expecting this song of the year nomination. But I was very proud of the song, especially since it was so inspired by John Prine, and we lost him. I put my heart and soul into every record, and I never know which ones are going to resonate. But I can tell people are really moved, looking out there in the audience.Tell me about writing the song. You’ve said that it began with fingerpicking guitar.I usually write my ballads on the keyboard. Probably because I took lessons, it just seems to be freer, more flexible. The guitar style that I have is really homegrown, primitive folk guitar chords and those old blues licks.This particular time, I wanted to write, but not about my personal life, because I really had covered that. I didn’t have anything else to say. So I was looking for a story.And completely out of the blue, I saw this news program. They followed this woman with a film crew to the guy’s house who received her son’s heart. There was a lump in my throat — it was very emotional. And then when he asked her to sit down next to him and asked if she’d like to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart — I can’t even tell the story to this day without choking up, because it was so moving to me.I wrote it for awhile without the music. I worked on the lyrics for both “Down the Hall” and this one. It was like there was a higher purpose for both of those songs. It was a really different process for me to have those lines that are crucial in each song just appear in my head.I don’t write all the time. So it’s almost like having a whole body, spiritual, emotional, physical feeling when you get shaken like that. And the music — after the vaccines were available, I decided to make the record six months early, in the summer, and tour again. That put the pressure on to actually finish the song. So I just sat and played my acoustic guitar. And at that point, we had just lost John, and I just had him in my heart. I just started fingerpicking, and I had the lyrics in front of me, and the song poured through me without any thinking about it.You’ve been an example for a lot of younger performers as a woman who is indisputably the bandleader.Maria Muldaur told me that years ago. She decided that she could actually be a solo act after watching me with my band in the studio in Woodstock, making “Give It Up.” And in the last 10 years of Americana events, I meet all these other women like Brandi Carlile, and they’ll tell me that they were growing up on my music and what an influence I’ve been.But it’s hard for me to think about that because I know my foibles and my failings. I still hold myself up to a standard I probably can’t live up to. But I’m really grateful when people say those kind things about me.It’s a very challenging position to be in when you’re very young. But I’ve been my own boss since I was 20. I walked into Warner Bros. and said, “You can’t tell me what to wear, when to put my work out, who to work with and what to record. But I’ll work my ass off if you put out my records.” And they went for it. Now, I can’t even imagine somebody telling me what to do.And I could not live with somebody overriding my musical taste. I always picked someone that was not going to produce me and decide the arrangements, but work with me as a partner in the studio. So sometimes, when I needed to tell somebody that they just weren’t cutting it, I would use my producer partner to go in and say something instead of me. As a live bandleader, I have sometimes been on thin ice, when I’ve tried to find the words to explain something that I wanted when I couldn’t play it myself.The tricky part is that I know what I want. I know what doesn’t work. I know what direction I like. I can say, “Play something more like this.” But it’s how to say that in a way that doesn’t deflate someone’s joy or their ability to feel.At your concerts, it seems that you’re totally relaxed and casual, but you’re onstage in front of thousands of people. Do you think about pacing, timing, theatricality?Somehow I just learned to put a show together. There’s nothing like performing live. It’s just something I was born to do. And when I put together a show, I leave room for some wild cards. It’s a joy every night — to know that you have the aces on each of those instruments, and that we’ve rehearsed enough where we can have some fun with it. And I think the audiences are not there to see a jukebox show. They’re going with me wherever I want to go. I’m more comfortable onstage than any other place in my life. I wish I was as comfortable offstage as I am onstage.“I’ve been my own boss since I was 20,” Raitt said.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIt seems awards shows and festivals are rare chances for a lot of performers to meet.I think all of us are like a kid in a candy store backstage. My favorite story about the Grammys was going through the metal detector at the Staples Center, at the afternoon ceremony. I was in the line between two guys in Slipknot, and the guy behind me is like in a Hannibal Lecter kind of a mask, and he goes, “I really dig your music!” I wouldn’t have expected Slipknot guys to know me. You know, maybe a “My mom loves you” kind of thing, but he was clearly a fan.And I just never expected the number of people that come up and tell each other that. I got to tell Dave Grohl what a fan I am of the Foo Fighters, and he was so surprised on the red carpet. Pharrell Williams, when he was in N.E.R.D., he grabbed me as I was walking back to my seat at the Grammys, and he said, “Any time you want to do something together …”“Nick of Time,” which was your title song for the 1989 LP that won album of the year, was about the fact of mortality, and now so are “Down the Hall” and “Just Like That.”Yeah, and I dedicated this record to friends that I lost in just two years. It’s just been an unbearable amount of loss. Suicides, drug overdoses, cancer, Covid. It’s unbelievable, what’s going on with the climate and with Ukraine and the Somali famine, which isn’t even getting any coverage, and the migrant situation on the border, and Syrian refugees. I mean, I’ve never been as discouraged and heartbroken as I have been. I soldier on.People say, “Well, how come you don’t do political music?” Most of it is just so insufferable. And I try to be really careful about not preaching my politics onstage because I know there’s a lot of people out there that may not agree with me, and they’re there to hear the music. So we have a table out there in the hall, and we tithe a dollar of every ticket.I do have a couple of songs that are political, like “Hell to Pay” and “The Comin’ Round Is Going Through” — I couldn’t wait anymore. But the politics between people, and love relationships, are just as thorny and important to lift up and write from interesting points of view. More

The musician is already facing decades in prison after being convicted of federal charges, prompting the Cook County state’s attorney to halt her case.Noting that the R&B singer R. Kelly is facing decades in prison after two federal convictions, the top prosecutor in Chicago said on Monday that her office planned to drop its sexual abuse charges against him.The Cook County state’s attorney’s office had been waiting for its turn to bring Mr. Kelly, 56, to trial, which it could not do before the federal court cases in New York and Chicago were brought to a jury.In 2021, Mr. Kelly was convicted on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, for which he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Last year, he was convicted on sex crimes charges, including coercing minors into sexual activity and producing sex tapes involving a minor. He is scheduled to be sentenced for that conviction next month, which could add decades to the total.“Mr. Kelly is potentially looking at never walking out of prison again for the crimes he’s committed,” Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, said at a news conference in which she announced plans to drop the charges. “We believe that justice has been served.”A lawyer for Mr. Kelly, who is mounting appeals in both federal jurisdictions, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Kelly is being held in federal prison in Chicago.The charges in Cook County, brought nearly four years ago, were a turning point in Mr. Kelly’s lengthy downfall.After a Chicago Sun-Times report alleging that he abused minors, and a failed prosecution in Chicago in 2008, Mr. Kelly became the focus of renewed scrutiny in the wake of the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which was broadcast in January 2019 and included testimony from several women who accused the singer of abuse dating back to the 1990s.After the documentary aired, Ms. Foxx made a remarkable public request, asking anyone with sexual abuse allegations against Mr. Kelly to come forward.A month later, Mr. Kelly was charged with aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four victims, three of whom were underage. Mr. Kelly pleaded not guilty to the charges, and he sat down for an infamous television interview with Gayle King of CBS News, in which he screamed, cursed and claimed that he did not do what he was accused of.Ms. Foxx spoke about the case against Mr. Kelly in unusually personal terms: She had been attending a Chicago high school when he was a rising R&B artist in the city, and a sex crimes prosecutor there when Mr. Kelly was tried on child pornography charges in 2008 and ultimately acquitted. Ms. Foxx has also divulged her own accounts of sexual abuse when she was a child.“I know firsthand how difficult it is for you to tell your stories,” Ms. Foxx said on Monday, noting that one of the accusers was disappointed by the decision because she had not yet had her day in court.Others involved in the case had also been involved in Mr. Kelly’s federal trial, in which a jury convicted him on six of 13 charges. The jury found the singer guilty of producing three videos of himself abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter, who took the stand last year after her direct testimony was not part of the 2008 case.Mr. Kelly was acquitted of a charge that he had attempted to obstruct an earlier investigation about his treatment of his goddaughter, among others.Part of the thinking in dropping the charges, Ms. Foxx said, was a desire to focus resources on alleged perpetrators who still walk free. She said the decision was not related to financial calculations or questions about whether the prosecution would be successful.“There are survivors — hundreds of survivors — whose files remain on our desks,” she said. “That was the calculation we made.”Robert Chiarito More

A diverse group of composers presented nine new and recent works at Carnegie Hall on Friday, ranging from exuberant joyfulness to existential questioning.No one is ever going to say that Kronos Quartet is satisfied with the string quartet status quo. This group, founded nearly 50 years ago by violinist David Harrington, has, in its malleable virtuosity, become a wellspring for hundreds of new music commissions. Some of those have become iconic pieces of repertoire; others have provided real-time snapshots of creative collaborations. True to form, this Kronos program at Zankel Hall featured nine new and recent works, nearly all written during the past three years. It offered a wide palette of sonic ideas and creative visions, though some were more fully formed than others.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. The Benin-born composer and singer Angélique Kidjo’s “YanYanKliYan Senamido #2,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, provided an easefully exuberant start to the evening, with interlocked melodies and rhythms playing call-and-response. The Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi’s “Daughters of Sol” was a profoundly meditative study on shade and color, with each layer unfolding slowly into another. The Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “I Haven’t the Words” was a restless, questioning susurration precipitated by the tumults of 2020, including the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. Jennifer TaylorThe movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake entered Zankel for the world premiere of her “eyes closed” with the regality of a one-woman procession, carrying a clutch of large plastic sheets. She distributed them to Harrington, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt. They became her fellow dancers, twisting and fluttering the sheets into three-dimensional shapes. The conceit was spectacularly imaginative: the sheets had enough form to become both dynamic sculptures and, in their murmured crinkling, significant percussive accompaniment for occasional wails from Sunny Yang’s cello. (The elegiac visual effect was not unlike the plastic bag scene from the film “American Beauty.”)Some works didn’t cohere quite as completely. Mazz Swift’s “She Is a Story, Herself” included several exciting moments, such as flitting small melodic ideas that subsided into a graceful chorale, but the piece overall did not feel fully conceptualized. Canadian composer Nicole Lizée’s “Zonelyhearts,” a lengthy homage to “The Twilight Zone,” tacked wildly between willful wackiness — including using Pop Rocks (yes, the classic 1970s candy) as a form of percussion, amplified with the performers’ open mouths nestled up to microphones — and existential musings on censorship and surveillance.While the stage setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it was also, at times, hard to see what was going on.Jennifer TaylorThe quartet played in Zankel Hall’s temporarily reconfigured, in-the-round seating arrangement. While this setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it also meant that it was hard for a large portion of the audience, myself included, to see three composer/guest musicians who performed their own works alongside Kronos. Instead, we saw only their backs. I overheard nearby concertgoers lamenting that they couldn’t really view such instruments as Soo Yeon Lyuh’s haegeum, a hoarsely voiced, two-stringed and bowed Korean instrument used in her sweetly nostalgic piece “Yessori (Sound from the Past),” or the one-stringed dan bau, the Vietnamese zither played by the virtuoso Van-Anh Vo in her pandemic-era piece “Adrift,” in which the musicians circle around each other melodically, grounded by a walking bass line plucked out by the cello. Nor could we fully appreciate the facial expressions and hand gestures of Peni Candra Rini, the composer and singer from the East Java province of Indonesia who appeared with the quartet in her wistful piece “Maduswara,” also arranged by Garchik.With zero fanfare, this Kronos program included music by eight female composers and one who is nonbinary; many are people of color. (In 2023, such a program would still be lamentably rare at many venues. Carnegie Hall had pledged to give a particular limelight to female performers and composers this season.) What Harrington did note proudly from the stage is that Kidjo, Candra Rini, Darvishi and Lyuh’s pieces were works created for Kronos’s engaging and inspired 50 for the Future commissioning project, which has put 50 recent compositions in the hands of young and emerging ensembles without cost online.This concert also marked the final New York City Kronos Quartet appearance for the cellist Sunny Yang, who has been part of the ensemble for the past decade. (Next month, the group will welcome Paul Wiancko in that chair.) As an encore, the group played Laurie Anderson’s “Flow”; in this context, her short, tender work felt like a benediction.Kronos QuartetPerformed on Friday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

The R&B star’s “SOS” has racked up more than 1.4 billion streams and had the equivalent of 1.1 million sales since its December release.When SZA released her latest album, in early December, it was sure to be a hit. “SOS” was the R&B singer-songwriter’s first LP in five years, and arrived with oodles of fan anticipation following a string of Grammy nominations and featured spots with Doja Cat, Kendrick Lamar and Summer Walker.But “SOS” has ended up a steady streaming hit and a chart blockbuster, spending its first seven weeks of release at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It is the first album by a woman to have at least seven weeks at the top since Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” which racked up a total of eight over a 13-week period in 2020. It is also the first album by any artist to spend its first seven weeks at No. 1 since Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which sat atop the list for its initial 10 weeks out at the start of 2021.In its seventh week out, “SOS” had the equivalent of 111,000 sales in the United States, including 149 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since the album was released, it has generated more than 1.4 billion streams, and had the equivalent of 1.1 million sales.Also this week, Swift’s latest LP, “Midnights,” holds strong at No. 2. Since that album came out in October, it has notched a total of five weeks at No. 1 and never fallen lower than second place.The Ohio-born rapper Trippie Redd opens at No. 3 with his latest album, “Mansion Musik,” which had the equivalent of 56,000 sales, including 68 million streams. Hardy, a buzzy country-rock singer and songwriter, opens at No. 4 with a double LP, “The Mockingbird & the Crow,” which had the equivalent of 55,000 sales, including about 45 million streams.“Heroes & Villains,” by the producer Metro Boomin, is No. 5. More

The vivid characters and the infectious melodies of the 1983 musical prove remarkably durable in Barrie Kosky’s madcap production at Komische Oper Berlin.BERLIN — In Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s “La Cage aux Folles,” the habitués of the show’s titular nightclub are enumerated as a “girl who needs a shave,” “both the riffraff and the royalty,” “eccentric couples” and “a nun with a Marine.” That description seemed to fit the fashionable and eclectic opening night audience of the Komische Oper Berlin’s new production of the Tony Award-winning 1983 musical.Barrie Kosky’s decade-long reign running the Komische, one of this city’s three world-class opera companies, was a near breathless succession of musical and theatrical high jinks. When Kosky stepped down from his role as the Komische’s artistic director over the summer, his parting gift to the house was a glitzy and unexpectedly moving Yiddish revue. “La Cage,” Kosky’s first production as guest director, premiered on Saturday night and remains in repertory through June 9.Although Kosky has already directed several musicals at the house, this production did mark something of a departure for the company. The “La Cage” score is on the weaker end of the house’s musical theater repertory, which includes “Kiss Me, Kate,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Even so, it was a thrill to hear Herman’s old-fashioned Broadway songs, tunes that swing between razzle-dazzle and sentimentality, performed by a full orchestra. (The most recent Broadway revival of “La Cage,” from 2010, was rescored for eight musicians.) The chameleon-like Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin (the same week as the “La Cage” premiere they also performed works by Mozart, Dvorak and Prokofiev) played with polish and panache for the conductor Koen Schoots.Stefan Kurt, right, as Zaza. Kurt’s mix of elegant wit, dramatic flair and emotional vulnerability was never less than captivating.Monika RittershausHerman and Fierstein’s musical is based on Jean Poiret’s 1973 farce about a gay owner of a nightclub and his lover, a drag queen and the revue’s star, whose (heterosexual) son brings his fiancée’s ultraconservative parents for dinner. The production has incredible staying power. Even if the musical no longer feels as revolutionary as it did when it was first performed nearly 40 years ago — the original production is widely considered a milestone in gay theater history — the show’s premise, the vivid characters and the infectious melodies are remarkably durable, or, at least, proved so in Kosky’s madcap production.This energetically choreographed, outrageously costumed and boldly designed staging gave full evidence of Kosky’s shrewd theatrical instincts. One of the first things we see onstage, during the overture, are a number of large silver cages occupied with extras decked-out in colorful plumes and wearing bird masks. The 13-strong “Cagelles,” as the nightclub dancers are called, spend most of the evening energetically twirling, tapping, can-canning and step-dancing clad in pink feathers, fake gold brocade, lace stockings or sparkly underwear. (I’d like to petition the Tonys to consider the choreographer Otto Pichler, assisted here by Mariana Souza, and the costume designer Klaus Bruns as overseas awards candidates.)In contrast to the plumage on display, Rufus Didwiszus’ sets are comparatively simple, even minimal at times, with one notable exception: the gay couple’s apartment. The flamboyant room boasts a sexually explicit illustration by Tom of Finland, large white porcelain vases and couches that are shaped like male genitalia. In addition, there’s an outdoor bistro under a starry set and a series of eclectic curtains with large, neon images of hummingbirds, flamingos and cockatoos that provide trippy backdrops to the kinetic dance numbers.Images of birds and plants provide colorful backdrops to the kinetic dance numbers.Monika RittershausBut “La Cage” requires more than theatrical pizazz. For the piece to work, the camp needs to be counterbalanced by heart, and the cast Kosky has assembled bring both to the stage. The Swiss actor Stefan Kurt, best-known here for his work with Robert Wilson, was captivating as Albin, the drag queen who performs as Zaza. Kurt played him with a touch of Quentin Crisp and a dash of Norma Desmond, but made the role his own by refusing to copy what other actors have done with it. Kurt is not a classical trained singer, and his vocal performance was not as polished as many of the others. But his mix of elegant wit, dramatic flair and emotional vulnerability was never less than captivating.Peter Renz, a former tenor engaged at the Komische, returned to play the dilemma-stricken Georges, the nightclub owner whose loyalty is divided between his lover and his son. He sang with warmth and beauty and acted with the brittle sang-froid of someone trying to maintain sanity in a madhouse. As the couple’s assistant, Jacob, Daniel Daniela Yrureta Ojeda, a Venezuelan dancer who has appeared here in several other Kosky productions, brought impressive physical antics and impeccable comic timing to a wonderfully scene-chewing role. Nicky Wuchinger was comparatively stiff as Georges’ son Jean-Michel, a fairly colorless role, although he crooned and harmonized well with Maria-Danaé Bansen, another young Berliner who lithely danced her way through the production as his fiancée Anne.Helmut Baumann, a local musical theater legend who originated the role of Zaza in “La Cage’s” German premiere in 1985, was cast here as the restaurateur Jacqueline. His entrance won applause from the opening night crowd, which was one of many times throughout the evening that the performance was punctuated by the audience’s vocal enthusiasm. One couldn’t really blame them. With this production, Kosky has turned his former opera house into an inviting place to perch for an evening. It’s the giddiest, most thrilling, most fabulous show in town.La Cage aux FollesThrough June 9. Komische Oper Berlin; komische-oper-berlin.de. More

He first attracted attention with the band Television, a fixture of the New York punk rock scene. But his music wasn’t so easily categorized.Tom Verlaine, whose band Television was one of the most influential to emerge from the New York punk rock scene centered on the nightclub CBGB — but whose exploratory guitar improvisations and poetic songwriting were never easily categorizable as punk, or for that matter as any other genre — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 73.His death was announced by Jesse Paris Smith, the daughter of Mr. Verlaine’s former love interest (and occasional musical collaborator) Patti Smith, who said that he died “after a brief illness.”Although Television achieved only minor commercial success and broke up after recording two albums, Mr. Verlaine had an enduring influence, especially on his fellow guitarists. (He was also Television’s singer, primary songwriter and co-producer.)“Verlaine persisted in playing the guitar while those around him were brandishing it as a weapon,” Kristine McKenna wrote in Rolling Stone in 1981.Lenny Kaye, the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, said in an interview that “Tom was capable of anything,” adding: “He could move from chaotic soundscapes of free jazz to delicate filigree. It wasn’t covered up with distortion. He had a real sense of the instrument and its expressive powers.”Mr. Verlaine and the other members of the group Television in 1973. From left: Richard Lloyd, Mr. Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca.Collection of Richard MeyersReviewing Television for the magazine Rock Scene in 1974, Ms. Smith wrote that Mr. Verlaine “plays guitar with angular inverted passion like a thousand bluebirds screaming.” She also declared that he had “the most beautiful neck in rock & roll.”Tom Verlaine was born Thomas Joseph Miller on Dec. 13, 1949, in Denville, N.J., the son of Victor and Lillian Miller. The family relocated to Wilmington, Del., when Tom was a child.He attended a boarding school in Delaware, where he studied classical music and played saxophone. He was equally influenced by rock bands like the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones and free-jazz musicians like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane.He ran away from school with a classmate, Richard Meyers (later known as Richard Hell). “Our plan was to become poets in Florida where the living was easy,” Mr. Hell said in an email. Camping in Alabama, they set a field on fire and were arrested and sent back home.Mr. Hell soon went to New York and after graduating from high school, Mr. Verlaine joined him. They wrote and published poetry together; Mr. Miller renamed himself Tom Verlaine, in tribute to the 19th-century French poet Paul Verlaine.GodlisMr. Hell recalled the two friends being exuberant teenagers on Second Avenue near St. Mark’s Church in the early days of spring: “As we walked down the street, we’d start rapidly weaving between the parking meters making buzzing sounds with our mouths and flapping our bent arms, fertilizing the parking meters. Tom was often lightheaded and whimsical back then.”In 1972, inspired by the New York Dolls, they started a band called the Neon Boys. Mr. Verlaine bought an electric Fender Jazzmaster guitar for himself and picked out a $50 bass for Mr. Hell; their friend Billy Ficca joined them on drums.In 1973 they added Richard Lloyd, a guitarist, and renamed themselves Television. They chose the name because they had a distaste for the medium and hoped to provide an alternative. Mr. Verlaine also enjoyed the resonance with his initials, T.V.After seeing a performance by Television in 1974, David Bowie called the group “the most original band I’ve seen in New York.” However, Mr. Hell’s emotive, chaotic outlook on music clashed with Mr. Verlaine’s more controlled approach. Mr. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith in 1975 and later went on to form the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.Television signed with Elektra Records and in 1977 released its first album, “Marquee Moon,” which featured hypnotic guitar work that ranged from mournful to ecstatic.Television, Tom Verlaine, Fred Smith, Richard Lloyd, Filly Ficca on First Avenue in New York City in 1977.GodlisThe album contained eight songs, mostly written by Mr. Verlaine, and showcased two lead guitarists who did not just trade solos but also built sonic cathedrals out of countermelodies and interlocking parts. Although Mr. Verlaine was renowned as a lead guitarist, Mr. Lloyd said that his work as rhythm guitarist was underrated. “He used to drag me kicking and screaming through five minutes of solos,” he said in an interview.Mr. Verlaine’s lyrics (which he sang in a pinched but expressive tenor) were sometimes poetically abstract, sometimes slyly funny. The song “Venus” featured the line “I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo.”In 1991, Mr. Verlaine told Details magazine: “As peculiar as it sounds, I’ve always thought that we were a pop band. You know, I always thought ‘Marquee Moon’ was a bunch of cool singles. And then I’d realize, Christ, this song is 10 minutes long, with two guitar solos.”The New York punk scene inspired sonic experimentation in multiple directions, from the aggression of the Ramones to the tightly wound funk of Talking Heads to the calloused poetry of Ms. Smith. But no act seemed to push further than Television.Mr. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television in performance in 1978. The band recorded two well-received albums before breaking up but later reunited periodically.Stephanie Chernikowski“Once we all got past tuning problems, we could explore at will,” Mr. Kaye said. “Those couple of years where nobody knew where CBGB was, it was a gloriously experimental time.”While “Marquee Moon” received rapturous reviews and now regularly appears on lists of the greatest rock albums ever made, that did not translate into significant sales or airplay. “Shooting himself in the foot was a particular talent of his,” Mr. Lloyd said of Mr. Verlaine. “He had a will of iron and he would say no to big tours and big shows.”Asked by The New York Times in 2006 to summarize his life, Mr. Verlaine replied, “Struggling not to have a professional career.”Television released a second album, “Adventure,” in 1978 and then broke up. The band reunited in 1992 for an album simply called “Television,” followed by periodic tours.The group’s members continued to employ “an experimental approach,” Mr. Verlaine told Details. “It’s like when we started, all falling together from different angles.”Mr. Verlaine released nine albums under his own name over the decades, some emphasizing songs and others emphasizing guitar heroics. Reviewing a performance by his band at the Bowery Ballroom in 2006, the Times critic Jon Pareles wrote: “Mr. Verlaine’s guitar leads didn’t flaunt virtuosity by streaking above the beat. They tugged against it instead: lagging deliberately behind, clawing chords on offbeats, trickling around it or rising in craggy, determined lines.”Mr. Verlaine performing at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan in 2006.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesHe also wrote film scores, including for silent movies by Man Ray and Fernand Léger, and made occasional guest appearances with the Patti Smith Group. In 2006 he told The Times, “I liked recording, but I wasn’t much in the mood to do it until a couple years ago.”He was, Mr. Kaye said, “very much not into the persona of being a rock star. His legacy is that he was always looking for a new expression of who he could be.”Mr. Verlaine leaves no immediate survivors. However, he does leave an outsize influence on other musicians. The 2022 album “Blue Rev” by the Canadian group Alvvays, for example, includes a song titled “Tom Verlaine.”In 1981, Mr. Verlaine told Rolling Stone: “I recently realized that Television has influenced a lot of English bands. Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, Teardrop Explodes — it’s obvious what they’ve listened to and what they’re going for. When I was 16 I listened to Yardbirds records and thought ‘God, this is great.’ It’s gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.” More