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      David Crosby’s 15 Essential Songs

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      The singer and songwriter, who died this week, created music that helped define an era and stretched across generations. Listen to six decades of tracks that tell the story of his career.A streak of otherworldliness ran all the way through David Crosby’s long, complicated life in music. It was in his voice, a reedy, quavering high tenor that could sound like he was pondering every line he sang. He was also happy to dissolve that voice, and the ego it implied, into shared vocal harmonies: with the Byrds, with Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young) and with his 21st-century group, the Lighthouse Band.There was otherworldliness, too, in the hovering harmonies he loved: the hypnotic modal patterns he picked on guitar and the ambiguous jazz chords that could lead in multiple directions. While Crosby, who died this week at 81, sometimes touched down in topical songwriting — a role he described as being a “town crier” — more often his lyrics were full of what-ifs and reflections on time, consciousness and eternity.In the 1960s, Crosby was a prime mover in the Los Angeles music scene that spun together folk, rock, country and psychedelia. He was a founding member and a secondary but innovative songwriter in the Byrds. He was an integral part of what became the Laurel Canyon coterie of songwriters in Los Angeles, and he also forged connections to psychedelic San Francisco.Crosby’s personal life was calamitous enough in the 1970s and 1980s — cocaine and heroin addiction, prison time, medical crises, financial ruin — for him to chronicle it in two older-but-wiser autobiographies: “Long Time Gone” and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It.” Throughout his career, close musical collaborations gave way to harsh acrimony.But his music told different stories. Shaped by the upheavals of the 1960s, his songs held crosscurrents of freedom and disorientation, of seeking and disillusionment, of yearning and alienation and, later, of seasoned reflection. In 2014, at 72, he restarted what turned out to be a prolific solo career with “Croz,” the first of five studio albums he released in the next seven years; there were live recordings, too. His voice, amazingly enough, held up for his final creative surge. It sounded gentle and selfless, humbled and purified by time.Here, in chronological order, are 15 songs spanning David Crosby’s six-decade career.The Byrds, ‘I See You’ (1966)Is it a love song or a rush of hallucinations? Written by Crosby and Jim McGuinn (who would later rename himself Roger), “I See You” shows their shared interest in Indian music and John Coltrane’s jazz. They sing about “Warm sliding sun through the cave of your hair” over a galloping backbeat, with early hallmarks of Crosby’s songwriting: a modal drone in the verses, a meter shift to change things up.The Byrds, ‘Everybody’s Been Burned’ (1967)Crosby sings with bittersweet patience about the pain of love gone wrong, as drums tick along and guitars entwine. But there’s a twist; he’s actually talking himself into taking another chance.The Byrds, ‘Mind Gardens’ (1967)An artifact of psychedelia’s experimental heyday, “Mind Gardens” is a parable about protection and openness, with an Indian-tinged vocal line rising above a multitracked, droney web of guitar picking: acoustic and electric, picked and sustained, running forward and backward and completely reveling in disorientation.The Byrds, ‘Triad’ (1968)In one of the disputes that led to Crosby leaving the Byrds, the band recorded his taboo-testing song about a ménage a trois — “Why can’t we go on as three?” it asked — but refused to include it on “The Notorious Byrd Brothers,” an album that marked the Byrds’ turn toward country-rock. The song would emerge anyway: first with the Jefferson Airplane, later on “4 Way Street” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Long Time Gone’ (1969)Written after the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, “Long Time Gone” seethes with bitter frustration, from its ominous organ chords to Stephen Stills’s gnarled guitar fills. There’s open desperation in Crosby’s voice as he exhorts, “Speak out against the madness/You’ve got to speak your mind if you dare.”Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Wooden Ships’ (1969)Crosby had a lifelong fondness for boats. Writing with Paul Kantner (of Jefferson Airplane) and Stills, in “Wooden Ships” he offered a grim but hopeful post-apocalyptic scenario. Survivors from opposite sides of a war, who don’t even know “who won,” share their meager supplies, deciding they can be “free and easy” on the water.Crosby, Stills & Nash, ‘Guinnevere’ (1969)“Guinnevere” was Crosby’s supreme enigma. The lyrics compare an unnamed “milady” to the adored but absent Guinnevere, who “drew pentagrams” on the wall and “had green eyes like yours.” Crosby, Stills and Graham Nash harmonize over two electric guitars picking modal chords, hinting at fleeting syncopations and suddenly declaring, “She shall be free.”Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ (1970)Boomers can remember when the length of a man’s hair signified a political allegiance. While Stills and Neil Young set up a lead-guitar duel behind him, Crosby sings with his most intense near-rasp, feeling paranoia — “like lookin’ at my mirror and seeing a police car” — but deciding he was “letting my freak flag fly” anyway.Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Déjà Vu’ (1970)“Don’t you wonder what’s going on down under you?” the members of this supergroup harmonized at a key moment in this wonderfully complex musical and verbal construction. Guitars, harpsichord, drums, scat-singing and vocal harmonies ebb and flow through the song, all delivered as if it were simple and homespun.David Crosby, ‘Laughing’ (1971)In 1971, Crosby released his perfectly atmospheric solo debut album, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” backed by members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane as well as Joni Mitchell, who joined the backup harmonies on this song. Crosby sings about a failed spiritual quest — finding “only reflections of a shadow that I saw” — and Jerry Garcia’s pedal steel guitar floats above him as he finds acceptance.David Crosby, ‘Orleans’ (1971)In this elaborate miniature, an eerie chorale of vocal harmonies carries the names of places in France; then guitar counterpoint takes over, sketching a melody just once before letting it fall away.David Crosby, ‘Holding On to Nothing’ (2014)There’s more than a hint of Crosby’s lifelong admiration for Mitchell in “Holding On to Nothing,” with its calmly strummed, eccentric chords and asymmetrical melody. From “Croz,” which was his return to making solo albums after 20 years, “Holding On to Nothing” meditates on time, longing, depression and persistence, feeling like “a stranger just passing through.”David Crosby, ‘The Us Below’ (2016)In a song from “Lighthouse,” the album that inaugurated Crosby’s years of collaboration with Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Crosby gazes at the vast distances between stars and wonders, “Why must we be eternally alone?” But gradually, layer by layer, guitar patterns and vocals waft in and interlock, suggesting that we’re not.David Crosby, ‘Curved Air’ (2017)Even in his last years, Crosby was trying new approaches. “Curved Air” — written with his son James Raymond — is briskly percussive and rhythmically unpredictable, with flamenco-like handclaps and a bass line that talks back to him. The lyrics wish for “a little traction here/A little solid ground,” yet as the melody hops around, Crosby is entirely sure-footed.David Crosby, Michael League, Becca Stevens and Michelle Willis ‘Balanced on a Pin’ (2018)Written with the members of the Lighthouse Band, “Balanced on a Pin” contemplates fragility and mortality: “Landing’s the hardest part/The connection comes apart,” Crosby sings. For much of the song, his only accompaniment is the picking of a lone guitar, suspending his voice above the inevitability of silence. More

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      David Crosby, a King of Twitter

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      The musician relished sharing opinions big and small, sparring with fans and dispelling myths, often in sharp, hilarious quips. The vibe on the platform changed, but he posted until the end.On Wednesday, one day before the world learned of his death at 81, the musician David Crosby posted to Twitter over a dozen times.He picked his favorite Beatles song for a rainy day (“Eleanor Rigby”). He expressed support for the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and disdain for the Republican representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a bit of poignant foreshadowing, he shared some thoughts about heaven: “I heard the place is overrated,” he wrote, “cloudy.”Among his musical peers, Crosby lived out a unique series of American lives. He was a defining voice of the folk-rock music of the 1960s and ’70s. He was a boldfaced name for his brief prison stay on drug charges, his liver transplant and the revelation that he was the sperm donor for Melissa Etheridge’s two children with Julie Cypher.And there was his surprising ascent as Twitter pundit, cemented in 2017 when he appeared in a commercial for the social media service. There are no formal metrics, but it’s fair to say that no other Woodstock performer or double inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tweeted as much as Crosby, or with such personable enthusiasm.Crosby was a true poster, a compliment handed out to those who seem to intuitively understand the unspoken rules for how to live an online life. He loved to interact with fans and haters; he never censored his thoughts or minced his words. He tweeted around 79,000 times in over a decade spent on the platform, a pace that dramatically eclipsed his contemporaries. Many musicians, and certainly those of his generation, exclusively use social media as a promotional service for tour announcements and new songs. Crosby, instead, treated Twitter as a walkie-talkie, a direct connection between himself and anyone who wanted to hear from him.This was one of Twitter’s initial appeals: The idea that you might actually interact with famous names like Ashton Kutcher or Shaquille O’Neal propelled thousands of newcomers to sign up in the platform’s early days. But numerous celebrities have quietly left in recent years, driven away by the increasingly combative dynamics that make sharing any opinion a risky proposition, or by Elon Musk’s messy takeover.Crosby did not care, and Crosby never quit. On any given day, he could be found opining on subjects like his distaste for Ted Nugent; his distaste for the Doors (which he eventually decided to tone down, though he never changed his mind about their lack of swing); his distaste for the songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’s attempted guitar-smashing on “Saturday Night Live”; his distaste for a not-so-bad painting of him drawn by a fan; his distaste for poorly rolled marijuana joints; his distaste for Donald Trump, always a subject on his mind.Possibly you notice a theme. But Crosby was no troll, complaining about every possible topic just to propel engagement. Many of his tweets were playful, and sweet. He loved to talk about his wife, and his appreciation for his family life. He never stopped praising his ex-girlfriend Joni Mitchell or his former bandmate Neil Young, even as his relationships with them were openly fraught.He advertised the sensual side of his discography. He solicited movie recommendations and promoted restaurants. He praised younger musicians like Jason Isbell and Jacob Collier. He really enjoyed the work of the director Alex Garland. He dispelled myths about his own life, regardless of whether the lie would have been more flattering.These posting tendencies evolved Crosby’s public persona for a new generation of music fans, in ways that felt both natural and genuine. As the music industry continues to change, its existing stars often attempt to latch onto emergent trends, through efforts that can easily seem forced or hatched by corporate fiat. (It’s hard to believe that Mick Jagger has anything to do with the Rolling Stones’ newly announced TikTok account.) But Crosby was right there, doing it himself. There was little doubt that he personally authored every tweet, because who else could post with such frequency, or idiosyncratic phrasing? His willingness to post so often and honestly did the work of several marketing budgets, and accompanied a late-career creative renaissance that saw the release of five solo albums in the last decade.This exposure didn’t suddenly transform Crosby into a commercial force. (His last album, “For Free” from 2021, did not chart in the United States.) Still, it was oddly reassuring to know that a public figure with such a varied and involved life, who had been present for some of the most consequential events in popular American music, could not resist the elemental pleasures of wasting time on Twitter like many of us, despite its myriad downsides.“I’m really trying to just have fun here,” he told Grammy.com in 2021. “I like people. I think they’re fascinating.” Celebrity is a fickle status, and surely there were moments in his career when Crosby wondered if people would ever care about him or his music. But here was evidence that they did. Even as Twitter frays and coarsens under Musk’s ownership, it’s still possible to have fun with others, one of the few things that keeps users from leaving. Crosby was right there until the very end.In his final weeks he was rating joints, once again advocating for the mood-setting capabilities of his own music and making plans to perform again. He was mad about George Santos and the environment, Spotify and Covid-19, as always, but the happy and the angry were intermingled for everyone to see.A few days ago, he posted his 1989 cover of the Noel Brazil song “Columbus,” with an opening verse espousing a philosophy he endorsed every day he spent on Twitter: “Better keep your distance from this whale/Better keep your boat from going astray/Find yourself a partner and treat them well/Try to give them shelter night and day.” More

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      Review: Carnegie Hall Makes an Intimate Space More Intimate

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      Zankel Hall has been temporarily reconfigured so that audiences can sit in the round, beginning with an enjoyable performance by the group yMusic.New York’s classical music powerhouses would like to get closer to you.Mere months after the New York Philharmonic’s stage at David Geffen Hall was shifted 25 feet out into the audience, with seating added behind the orchestra, as part of a gut renovation, Carnegie Hall has followed suit. If more economically: It has reconfigured its second stage, the subterranean Zankel Hall, and rearranged it so that audiences can sit in the round.To make that happen inside such a steeply raked space, Carnegie has raised the Zankel stage. This has reduced distances for everyone: the critics in prime seats, and the bargain-hunting customers in the balconies. It’s all part of initiative that Carnegie is calling “Center Stage,” with programming, from Thursday night through Jan. 27, designed to take advantage of the enhanced proximity.The Thursday concert, a richly enjoyable performance by the group yMusic, could be seen as a validation of Zankel’s temporary change. And yet what was best about the evening was more along the lines of business as usual for the hall. This vivacious and canny sextet — an idiosyncratic combination of cello, violin, viola, clarinet, a trumpeter who doubles on horn and a flutist-vocalist — debuted two Carnegie co-commissions: the world premiere of Allison Loggins-Hull’s nine-minute “Supply,” and the American unveiling of Andrew Norman’s 24-minute “Difference.”Helping to fund new work from younger American composers is part of what Carnegie’s Zankel wing does well. And that part of the machine is humming along just fine.In “Supply” — inspired by a tale of extramarital office romance — Loggins-Hull makes stirring use of the multiple talents of the flutist-vocalist Alex Sopp (who was lightly but effectively amplified). There was seductiveness in her singing of lines like “Tell me your dreams and I’ll show you the way.” More fragmentary bits of text (“Can I get a pass?” and “I want what I can’t have”) were more aggressive. The work moves between these emotional poles with smart instrumental writing, including some ferocious yet melodically supple passages in rhythmic unison.Norman’s “Difference” was likewise a showcase for yMusic’s abilities in both precision and abandon within the same piece. As in some of his recent orchestral works, Norman here alternates between hushed stasis and manic volleys of virtuosic eruption. In those extremes, CJ Camerieri’s muted trumpet brought a quizzical, mellow edge to some moments, while Nadia Sirota’s sinewy viola (and headbanging stage presence) took the lead in nervier ensemble episodes.The performance by yMusic validated the idea of a concert in the round, but was perhaps more notable for its premieres.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesNorman’s score, as is often the case, was exquisitely paced. Ideas don’t overstay their welcome, but even when that threatens to become the case, he tends to pile on fresh material just in time (and long past the point where another composer might stop). As the patterns deepen and the lengths of phrases extend, to the point of beggaring belief, Norman’s music makes you want to cheer for him — as well as for the artists who bring it to life.Both of those pieces would probably have come across just fine in Zankel’s regular configuration. The real barrier to intimacy with audiences might not be the space’s design, but the fact that music like this most often comes to town for a single night, then disappears.What if audiences were allowed to find this music over the course of a week, or even a full month, like they can with orchestral and operatic programming? What if yMusic had a residency that featured the newly commissioned works multiple times? They certainly wouldn’t have trouble filling out additional programs; the rest of Thursday’s concert featured yet more novelty in a half-hour of miniatures composed by the group’s members. (That happened thanks to some encouragement from Paul Simon, one of the pop musicians who have collaborated with yMusic in the past.)As yMusic wrote in program notes for the concert, original group composition is expected in pop but unusual in classical music. Some of the results in the nine-section suite were tentative — not quite songs, even with Sopp’s vocalizations. But there was also promise, such as the dense chords and almost-bluesy trumpet writing of “Sober Miles” and the occasionally Minimalist-influenced miniatures like “Zebras” and “Three Elephants.”A recording of all this music is unlikely to be released within the year. I know I’d like to revisit the Loggins-Hull and Norman pieces much earlier. And the same goes for seeing yMusic’s creativity and ensemble spirit again — no matter how the Zankel stage is situated.yMusicPerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Ice Spice, Hip-Hop’s New Princess, Is Just Warming Up

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      Last year, the Bronx rapper emerged from the drill scene with a pop-friendly sound, and attracted the attention of Drake. Now she’s releasing her first EP.On a cold, damp afternoon earlier this month, Ice Spice didn’t want to be recognized, so she covered her signature bounty of red curls with a wig of long blonde tresses, and wrapped that wig in a pink scarf. After a quick stop at her dentist in Bushwick to get her veneers adjusted, the rising hip-hop star hopped in a black SUV to head up to the area around Fordham Road in the Bronx where she grew up.At first, she was muted on the ride, pulling a makeup case out of a pink Von Dutch bag and applying foundation, mascara and lip liner while playing a string of sentimental songs by the Atlanta R&B singer Mariah the Scientist from her phone through the car’s stereo.But by the time the SUV crossed over into the Bronx, Ice Spice — wearing a black Prada fleece, black Balenciaga tights and black Uggs, her long nails painted in an exaggerated French manicure — had livened up, playing her latest single, “In Ha Mood,” on repeat, and rapping along with quiet force:“Oh, they mad ’cause I keep making bops/Oh, she mad ’cause I’m taking her spot/If I was bitches, I’d hate me a lot.”These are the sort of coolly but directly confident verses that have made Ice Spice, 23, one of the most signature voices in New York drill music, as well as an emerging pop culture touchstone, beloved both for what she says and how she comes off while saying it.“I’m just naturally super chill and nonchalant about a lot of things,” she said. “I’ve always been that way, since I was a baby.”On Friday, she’ll release her first EP, “Like..?,” which gathers her previous singles with some new songs, all of which feel of a piece. While the sound of the Bronx drill scene she emerged from is often unrelenting and harsh, the style of her EP, she said, is “pop drill” — spacious, up-tempo and a little skittish, with careful use of melody and just the right amount of punch.“I was getting a lot of hate when I first put out my anything — content, music, whatever,” Ice Spice said, but added, “hate could take you a long way.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesUnlike many New York drill rappers, who tend toward the antic, Ice Spice raps with equanimity: calm, controlled and almost reticent, letting each line linger ever so slightly, almost as if to draw you to her before she again pushes you away.“She makes this thing we call sexy drill,” said Nicole Racine, founder of Talk of the Town, a media company that documents New York drill music. “Her being sexy, being feminine, not the rah-rah drill that we expect.”Just a few months ago, Ice Spice didn’t need to hide behind decoy wigs, but that changed during one hectic week in August. First, Drake expressed admiration for her music — she posted a screenshot of his message — and then flew her along with her manager and producer, RIOTUSA (who goes by Riot), on a private jet to his annual festival in Toronto, OVO Fest.“I probably had like $200 to my name on that trip,” Riot said, chiming in from the back seat of the SUV. “It kind of felt like the flight was like me flying into a new life.”Ice Spice said she was “mad broke” at the time, laughing as she remembered the “fake-ass purse” she was carrying.A few days after the event, she released “Munch (Feelin’ U),” the song that would become her true breakout, inaugurate a delicious new piece of slang and establish her signature visual identity: golden curls, bold outfits, intense eye contact.“We slept on that record because that was the only song we had that didn’t have a sample,” said Riot, whose father is DJ Enuff, an influential New York radio figure. At the time, the dominant sound of New York drill relied on familiar samples; earlier, they’d released “No Clarity,” based heavily on Zedd’s decade-old trance-pop hit “Clarity.”But the originality of “Munch” turned out to be a blessing — a hit reliant upon an older hit can feel contingent, saying less about the new artist than about the durability of the older one. “I’m happy the first song that ever really blew up for me like that was an original song, with an original word,” Ice Spice said. “I’m just so proud of that.”The response, fueled by social media, was instant. “I remember the week ‘Munch’ came out, I had went to the mall, right?” Ice Spice said, characteristically unperturbed. “And a bunch of kids started running up to me like, ‘Yo, are you the “Munch” girl?’ And like, taking pictures of me and recording me.”Before stopping at New Capitol diner for an M&M cookie, she popped by St. James Park, where the “Munch” video was filmed, hoping to use the bathroom — it was locked — and quipped, “They should name it Munch Park.”Ice Spice’s 2022 track “Munch (Feelin’ U)” became her breakout and established her signature visual identity.In the wake of the success of “Munch,” Ice Spice signed to 10K Projects/Capitol Records, and had her first taste of financial success — “I got 2 milli for using a mic,” she posted online at one point. But riding down the blocks where she grew up, making the trip back for the first time since handing out Thanksgiving turkeys alongside fellow Bronx rapper Lil Tjay, she expressed a little exhaustion. “People won’t ask you directly, like, ‘Hey, can you buy me a house?’ I mean, they will actually,” she said. But she was even more frustrated about the things she couldn’t yet do: “It’s just weird now being at a certain place and not being able to just help everybody that you want to help.”Born Isis Gaston to a Black father and a Dominican mother who divorced when she was still a toddler, Ice Spice has five younger half siblings. She’d written poetry and raps since childhood, and her father routinely encouraged her to freestyle with him. (“We would be walking to school and he would be trying to get me to rap about my day,” she recalled.) She didn’t begin writing full songs until 2019, inspired by the breakout wave of Brooklyn drill rappers that included Sheff G and Pop Smoke, and didn’t record any of them until 2021, after a video of her doing the #BussItChallenge gained traction and she had a brief flirtation with extreme virality.“Once that happened I was like, Oh, if I could do it one time, I’m pretty sure I could do it again,” she said. “That’s when I knew I could be an artist.” Sensing an opportunity, she rushed to complete her first song: the squelchy, tough-talking, Brooklyn drill-esque “Bully Freestyle.” She began recording more tracks, and documenting the process, eventually releasing promo trailers for each to gin up attention and enthusiasm.All of her released songs so far have been produced by Riot (born Ephrem Lopez Jr.). The two met when they were both studying communications at SUNY Purchase, where Ice Spice also played volleyball, as she did at the Catholic high school she attended in the Bronx.They found a common language in drill songs that didn’t shy away from the personal, and that were lyrically emphatic, line by line. “I like to hear catchy stuff and I always be thinking like, Damn, what should I caption this? So I just started coming up with mad captions,” she said. She also found that writing personal stories came naturally. “There’s like this type of therapy to it,” she said. “It’s just like a relief whenever I complete a song.”Before “Munch,” attention came in fits and starts, not all of it positive. “I was getting a lot of hate when I first put out my anything — content, music, whatever,” she said, but added, like a sophisticated child of the internet, “hate could take you a long way.”Even now, she’s still something of a lightning rod. Because social media spins tizzys from even the barest scraps of information, there was prurient interest after Drake unfollowed her on Instagram after the Toronto trip. “We’re cool,” she said. “We spoke after that a couple times and we’re good. There’s no beef.” When she was being roasted for her lackluster performance at Rolling Loud in September, her first festival appearance, she “was just happy they were talking about me, really.”But she has benefited greatly from the online attention, too. Her fandom is still settling on a name: Spice Cabinet? Spice Rack? Spice Cadets? Munchkins? And she has seamlessly been absorbed into the meme universe — split portraits of her alongside Tupac, XXXTentacion, Martin Luther King Jr. and Princess Diana float around the internet, and her lyrics (“How can I lose if I’m already chose?”) pop up in tweets and captions. She decided to record “Princess Diana,” from her new EP, after seeing memes flying around the internet late last year calling her this generation’s Princess Diana.“I like to hear catchy stuff and I always be thinking like, Damn, what should I caption this? So I just started coming up with mad captions,” Ice Spice said of her writing style.Luisa Opalesky for The New York Times“Who don’t wanna be a princess?” she said quietly, as if acknowledging something that she’d already known for a while, and assumed everyone else did, too.In perhaps the ultimate indication of pop culture absorption, Lil Nas X, the effortless channeler of virality, dressed as her in the “Munch” video for Halloween, sporting a neon tank top and a wild wig.“The hair is definitely iconic,” she conceded. “When I was in high school, I was straightening my hair, trying to be something that I’m not. Now it’s flattering seeing a wave of Afros. I enjoy that. I feel like that’s great for Black women especially, making Afros more like just a normal staple look, you know?”Racine, of Talk of the Town, said, “She’ll make the sexy drill mainstream, she’s just gonna open more doors.” But drill, the aesthetic that has delivered Ice Spice’s first dose of fame, may only be a convenient way station.“She’s a pop star,” Riot said. “People say drill just to box people in.”Ice Spice agreed that her aspirations stretch beyond that sound. “For me personally, I think I have passed that,” she said. “I do want to be a mainstream artist. I want diamond records and plaques and Grammys. So I think in order to get that, you do have to surpass just one subgenre.”Back in the car, she scrolled through new music, both from the EP, and a verse she recorded for a remix of PinkPantheress’s “Boy’s a Liar,” which has a similar tempo to her own songs but a completely different texture. It’s her first adventure out into the world beyond drill but unlikely to be her last.“I’ve tried Detroit beats. I’ve tried trap. I’ve tried hyperpop,” she said. She speaks Spanish, and has been chatting with the Dominican rapper Tokischa about possibly working together.On her way home from the Bronx, she stopped at a mall in Elizabeth, N.J., so she and Riot could buy True Religion jeans for an upcoming video shoot, which would take its visual cues from the early 2010s, perhaps the last era, pre-drill, in which New York rap truly spurred national conversation. On the way, they dove into a conversation about whether New York, the birthplace of hip-hop, could ever truly fall off.“I just feel like there’s never been a moment where it was dead,” she said. “You can name a year and I can say an artist from New York that was popping, lit, that year. We was singing them songs in the parties.”For maybe the first time all day, she betrayed just the slightest bit of agitation: “Like, I would be mad if one day somebody refers to 2022 as when New York fell off when it’s like, ‘Hello, I’m here.’” More

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      Indie-Rock Supergroup boygenius Returns, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kim Petras, Yaeji, Arlo Parks and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.boygenius, ‘$20’The indie-rock supergroup boygenius — featuring Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — never promised to be anything more than a one-off side project when it released an excellent six-song EP in 2018. But this week, the group returned with the promise of a full album and three new songs that prove that EP wasn’t a fluke. The poignant, Bridgers-led “Emily I’m Sorry” is a compassionate folk-rock portrait of a relationship on the brink of collapse, while Dacus steers the ship on the heartening “True Blue,” a vivid snapshot of a love that’s going stronger than ever. (“It feels good to be known so well,” Dacus sings. “I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself.”) The revelation, though, is “$20,” a chugging rocker that finds the band kicking into a whole new gear, and allows Baker to inhabit a swaggering persona. “It’s a bad idea and I’m all about it,” she sings, sketching a scene full of indelible images (“It’s an all night drive from your house to Reno, to the T-Bird graveyard where we play with fire”). Halfway through, “$20” takes a thrilling turn when all three members of the band start singing different refrains in a round: Their voices converge and collide before the song erupts in a conflagration of primal screams — playing with fire, indeed.Fenne Lily, ‘Lights Light Up’On “Lights Light Up,” from the forthcoming album “Big Picture,” the English singer-songwriter Fenne Lily’s smooth, arpeggiated guitar playing has the fluidity of a babbling brook, and her murmured vocals flow with a similar kind of serenity. An undercurrent of melancholy and loss emerges from her lyrics, though, which chronicle a gradual acceptance of loss: “You didn’t listen when I told you I’m no dancer,” she sings, “now I dance alone all the time.”Yaeji, ‘For Granted’The New York-based musician and producer Yaeji has released two acclaimed house-inspired EPs and an impressionistic 2020 mixtape, but on April 7 she’ll finally put out her first full-length album, “With a Hammer.” The debut single, the shape-shifting “For Granted,” is certainly promising — a playful, sing-songy synth-pop track that, halfway through, explodes into skittish euphoria. “When I think about it, I don’t even know,” she croons dreamily, before letting her concerns go: “So I stop the thinking, let it rest and I’ll flow.”Arlo Parks, ‘Weightless’Arlo Parks works through indecision on the driving “Weightless,” the first single from her second album “My Soft Machine.” “I don’t wanna wait for you,” the young British artist sings on the chorus, “but I need you so I won’t go.” With its persistent beat and whooshes of melodrama, “Weightless” is a departure from the more muted sound she explored on her debut, “Collapsed in Sunbeams,” but the vivid lyrics still showcase her signature poeticism: “Cardamom and jade as your eyes screamed,” she sings, “on the night you showed your volcanic side.”Kim Petras, ‘Brrr’Kim Petras plays ice queen on the bold, commanding “Brrr,” a synth-pop track as industrial and echoey as a walk-in freezer. “Why don’t you take it out on me, if you think you’re so cold?” she asks a prospective paramour, delivering the line like a seductive dare.Ice Spice and Lil Tjay, ‘Gangsta Boo’Ice Spice cuts right to the chase on “Gangsta Boo” — “A baddie got’ get what she like/So what’s your sign, ’cause I like you?” — one of three new songs released today on her debut EP “Like..?” Her trusted producer RIOTUSA speeds up and adds some percussive crunch to a sample of P. Diddy’s “I Need a Girl Part 2,” while fellow Bronx rapper Lil Tjay drops in for an exuberant guest verse. “Gangsta Boo” doesn’t have the venomous attitude that made Ice Spice’s breakout single “Munch (Feelin’ U)” pop, but her effortless charisma sells the track just the same. More

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      She Brought New Sounds to Colombia. The World’s Catching Up.

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      Back in the 1960s, when female musicians were mostly confined to the roles of teacher, interpreter or muse, the Colombian composer Jacqueline Nova was charting new pathways in Latin America. Using tools like amplifiers, cables, pulleys, transformers and oscillators to create novel sounds, her sonic experiments anticipated the music software programs and apps that are commonplace today. Nova also helped to lay the foundations for the development of sound art and interdisciplinary feminist art worldwide.Yet Nova’s work is only now beginning to resurface and her influence to be reckoned with. Scattered recordings began appearing online a decade or so ago, followed by presentations in museums. It culminated this fall with the release of a double album, “Creation of the Earth: Throbbing Echoes of Jacqueline Nova: Electroacoustic and Instrumental Music (1964-1974),” from Buh Records in Lima, Peru.Perhaps the delayed recognition is not surprising. Nova — who died at 40, in 1975, from bone cancer — was a consummate rule breaker. An independent woman and a self-identified lesbian in a field dominated by men, she created forward-thinking, often transgressive music. Though classically trained, she played with variations in form and blurred the boundaries of acoustic instruments, electronic sounds and human speech. She also challenged the conservatism of Colombia’s musical establishment by keeping the structure of her scores open to interpretation, inviting performers to collaborate rather than defer to her authority.“Today we can say she’s a sound artist or interdisciplinary artist, but she was an autonomous person driven by curiosity,” said Ana María Romano G., a professor at El Bosque University in Bogotá and a musical innovator in her own right. “She had questions about sound, about the here and now. Hers was not the kind of music we could hear in the streets, but she was interested in the freedom to engage in the world of sound — acoustics, physics, timbre, orchestration.”The work was often political, sometimes overtly so. Nova brought the chants of the Indigenous U’wa into her 1967 piece “Uerjayas. Invocación a los dioses” (“Invitation to the Gods”) and again in “Creación de la Tierra” (“Creation of the Earth”), her 1972 masterwork. By sonically altering recordings of those chants, she raised questions about what it was like to be perceived as an “other.”Nova’s work with visual artists was no less provocative. Rather than positioning audiences passively, Nova and Julia Acuña’s “Luz-Sonido-Movimiento” (1969) invited viewers to physically activate the installation’s various components. Nova contributed a soundtrack to the sculptor Feliza Bursztyn’s series “Las Camas” (1974), in which metal bed frames, outfitted with electric motors and colorful satin sheets like those used to cover images of the Crucifixion during Holy Week, moved suggestively to a throbbing beat. ‌Nova rejected the idea that music was meant only to be performed for the elite in hushed concert halls. She gave lectures, hosted a program on Colombia’s national radio station, composed for theater and films, wrote for magazines and newspapers, and worked tirelessly to support like-minded contemporaries by cultivating receptive audiences. For Nova, experimentalism was more than a new method of making music. It was a method of making change. And why wouldn’t it be for a composer whose outsider status led her to forge her own way?Born in 1935 in Ghent, Belgium, to a Belgian mother and a Colombian father, Nova spent her early childhood in Bucaramanga, the capital of the Santander region in northeastern Colombia. She came of age during La Violencia, the Colombian civil war that stretched from 1948 to 1958, the year she was admitted to the National Conservatory as a piano student. At the conservatory, she worked with the contemporary composer Fabio González Zuleta and became the first woman to graduate with a degree in composition. In 1967 she won a scholarship to study at the Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies in Buenos Aires, where she found the infrastructure and community to support experimental music made with machines.For all the intensity and breadth of her work, however, Nova didn’t achieve the renown she deserved during her lifetime. The musicologist Daniel Castro Pantoja points out that the contributions of Latin American composers were often regarded as secondary to those of European and North American vanguard figures like Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage and Milton Babbitt. There was also the issue of gender bias, leading Pauline Oliveros to write an essay for The New York Times in 1970 asking “Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers?”Another obstacle to gaining widespread recognition was Nova’s unapologetic denunciation of traditionalists. She dismissed those who clung to the classical conventions as fearful of the present and the possibility of progress. In 1966, she argued for bursting that protective bubble: “The world of the composer, of the artist,” she wrote, “is situated concretely in the current moment.” Beyond that are “the fainthearted,” she continued, “those who can’t make up their mind about joining our fight.”That fight was cut short by Nova’s early death from cancer. The movement she had started building was still in its infancy, and since she didn’t teach, there were no students to carry on the work. Colombia’s experimental music scene fell into a long period of dormancy, Romano G. said.Nova at work. She used tools like amplifiers, cables, pulleys, transformers and oscillators to create novel sounds.Archive Ana Maria Romano G.Recovering Nova’s music and establishing its place in the electroacoustic canon has been an obsession ever since Romano G. first encountered it as an undergraduate in the early 1990s. Attending a concert of “Creación de la Tierra,” Romano G. said she was shocked by its beauty as well as its rarity. “Works by women were not generally presented, nor studied,” Romano G. said, “Maybe Clara Schumann or Hildegard of Bingen, but certainly not contemporary women from Latin America.”Romano G. became something of a Nova detective. While working at the Colombian Ministry of Culture she discovered a trove of material, including scores and press clippings, in its Center for Musical Documentation. That led her to Nova’s brother, who gave her access to Nova’s personal archives. Interviews with contemporaries helped her further situate Nova’s life and work in a multilayered context. Though Romano G. admired Nova’s technical proficiency as a composer, she said she was also eager to learn how she managed to flourish creatively despite living in a conservative milieu that was hostile to change.At first Romano G. presented her findings in academic journals and within Colombia’s experimental music scene. And then, in 2017, she organized a sound installation based on “Creación de la Tierra” for the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín, and another in 2019 at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, in collaboration with Castro Pantoja and Tyler Blackwell. This past fall, she put together the double album for Buh Records.Nova’s legacy can now be heard in the current generation of Colombian artists like Alba Triana, whose work includes sound and light sculptures, vibrational objects and resonant spaces; and Lucrecia Dalt, who fuses the traditional music of her childhood with electronic, and sometimes otherworldly, sounds.But Ela Minus, a Bogotá-born musician, said the impact of Nova’s approach to making and understanding music has yet to be fully realized. “There is still not a lot of structure for electroacoustic music in Colombia. The idea is that musicians should reach back to the past to ‘folkloric’ instruments, and avoid ‘European’ ones” — that is, electronic instruments and music technology.Ela Minus stumbled onto Nova’s music around 2012, as a Berklee College student in jazz drumming, while perusing music videos on YouTube. “She was working with tape machines!” Ela Minus said, adding that she was blown away by the sophisticated spatiality of Nova’s 1968 electroacoustic composition “Oposición-Fusión” and how huge it sounded. Ela Minus, 32, said the revelation helped her to imagine a new approach, inspiring her to switch to a double major in drumming and music synthesis.Today Ela Minus creates music in a homemade lab where she patches self-built hardware synthesizers together with samplers, drum machines and effects pedals to create interwoven beats and pulses. Romano G. says she’s not surprised to learn that Nova’s experiments continue to spark the imagination and traverse borders, whether geopolitical or generational. “She was more contemporary than many people today.” More

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      Ticketmaster Under the Magnifying Glass

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicLast year, Ticketmaster was the object of a significant amount of consumer discontent. There was the confusing rollout of tickets for the upcoming Taylor Swift stadium tour. In Mexico City, countless people with valid tickets were denied entry to a Bad Bunny concert. And the rising roots-rock singer-songwriter Zach Bryan made Ticketmaster a focus of his public ire.If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Ticketmaster has long been the target of — or perhaps the cause of — widespread unhappiness. High prices and fees? Blame Ticketmaster. A resale/scalping market that’s even more financially taxing? Blame Ticketmaster. And so on, and so on. Artists as big as Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have taken on the giant, and mostly been forced to stand down, owing to the company’s reach and power.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the recent spate of kerfuffles that have increased scrutiny of Ticketmaster, the artists who have pushed back against the ticketing giant and the seeming intractability of the issues plaguing the ticket marketplace.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music industry reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      How Do You Measure a Season on Broadway? In Cast Albums.

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      From “A Strange Loop” to “Funny Girl,” most Broadway musicals of 2022 were recorded, offering listeners a chance to love or hate them again.Last year was a pretty good one for Broadway musicals, if by “pretty good” you mean “not as dreadful as usual.” Of the 15 that opened, just a handful were outright disasters both critically and financially. And though only six are still running, that’s not a bad number these days.Even better, most of last year’s shows made cast albums, so you can judge for yourself. True, you will not find “1776” or “The Little Prince” among them; they were not recorded. Nor was the original Broadway revival cast of “Funny Girl,” which instead opted to preserve its replacement cast, led by Lea Michele. (Following its November digital release, the CD goes on sale Friday.)Another absentee is “Paradise Square,” which, because of litigation between the show’s producer and its unions, is available only piecemeal — and only on its composer’s Instagram page. What I’ve heard of it there is better than what I saw of it onstage.That is often the case with the 2022 cast albums. Among the 10 I’ve played in their entirety (the remaining two — “KPOP” and “Almost Famous” — are scheduled to be released in the coming months), some improve on the shows they preserve merely by jettisoning most or mercifully all of the book. In other cases, you can actually hear what the authors had in mind, which you can’t always do amid overexcitable stagings.Even so, it remains generally true that the best and freshest musical theater recordings — omitting standout solo albums like Christine Ebersole’s “After the Ball” and Victoria Clark’s “December Songs” — arise from the best and freshest underlying material. That means that in my breakdown below, the quality tends to improve as you move from jukeboxes to revivals to originals.But not always. Another reason 2022 was a pretty good year for Broadway musicals is that, often enough, they were pretty surprising.Clockwise from top left: Myles Frost in “MJ the Musical”; Lorna Courtney in “& Juliet”; Billy Crystal in “Mr. Saturday Night”; and Joshua Henry, left, and Gavin Creel in “Into the Woods.”Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJukeboxesWhatever you think of jukebox musicals as a theatrical genre — and I generally don’t think much of them — they make exceedingly strange cast albums. The worst offenders are biographical jukeboxes, which purport to tell the story of the singer or songwriter (or record company) that owns the songs or made them famous. When those songs are stripped from their jimmied narratives and returned to their native format as recordings, they devolve into something peculiar: greatest hits tribute albums.That’s especially problematic with “MJ the Musical,” based on Michael Jackson’s life and catalog. Because the songs — and Jackson’s idiosyncratic original performances of them — are (like “Billie Jean”) so unforgettable, there’s little Myles Frost, in the title role, can do with just his voice to suggest something new. Instead we are stuck with a slick impersonation, accurate but wan. Why not just get the original?That problem is somewhat attenuated in “A Beautiful Noise,” the Neil Diamond bio-jukebox. For one thing, Will Swenson, as Diamond, does not aim for a carbon copy. Exaggerating some of the singer’s vocal qualities — the basso burr and steel-wool growls — he instead adds value while suggesting character. And when he is backed up by the show’s terrific ensemble in a joyful number like “Holly Holy,” you hear it in a new way, as an unexpected cover. Yes, some of these “covers” are a little too unexpected: When Diamond’s intensely interior musings are turned into duets and awkwardly refitted as plot numbers, it’s hard not to roll your ears.That problem is triply avoided in “& Juliet.” (1) It’s not a rumination but a romp. (2) It has no biography to be true (or false) to. (3) It’s built on hit songs, by Max Martin, that, having been written for many different singers, are generic enough to suit many situations. So when Lorna Courtney, as Juliet, wakes up by her tomb to sing Britney Spears’s “ … Baby One More Time,” or a song like Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is” is repurposed as a feminist anthem, it’s additive, not subtractive. And it’s hard to be very critical when the Katy Perry hit “I Kissed a Girl” becomes a flirty wink to nonbinary attraction.RevivalsMusicals that have previously produced a superb recording pose a different problem. Other than bonus tracks and extended dance music sequences — the result of technology that offers almost limitless capacity — what new can a cast album offer?I’m afraid I didn’t find much of an answer in the revival cast recording of “The Music Man,” even though, or rather because, it’s an accurate rendering of the hit stage production. Is that because Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, avoiding comparison to Robert Preston and Barbara Cook, offered very different readings (and singings) of the roles? Both went darker — and Foster lower, dodging Cook’s high notes — resulting in a somewhat grim take on songs that once were joyous. (Passages of Jackman’s “Ya Got Trouble” are almost terrifying.) At least there’s joy to be had around the edges, especially in the funky chromaticism of the barbershop quartet, whose rendering of “Sincere” is like a roller coaster that keeps going up and up.If rethinking did not serve “The Music Man,” it certainly did “Into the Woods.” After several revivals and the 2014 movie, this Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical could almost seem too familiar, yet the stripped-down version directed by Lear deBessonet restored its warmth, humor and strangeness. Not all of that survives in the cast recording, especially in complicated ensemble numbers that mix dialogue and song at top speed. Yet in solos and duets — like the alternately hilarious and gorgeous “Agony,” sung by Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry, the score shines anew.As a record of raw Broadway talent, there may never be a greater cast album than the one on which Barbra Streisand, at 21, was captured in a state of wild, almost feral daredevilry. At 36, Lea Michele is past the feral stage, but she’s still a thrill on the revival cast album of “Funny Girl.” In some ways, it’s even more of a feat, as she gets thin support from the watered-down orchestrations, even juiced with three additional strings. And if her renditions of barnburners like “Don’t Rain on My Parade” owe more than a little to their originator, Michele brings her own banked fires to the ballads, especially “The Music That Makes Me Dance” and a triple crème “People.”OriginalsBy comparison, new musicals are too often skim milk. Whether it’s the overwhelming costs or the coolness of so many stories, they do not lend themselves to Golden Age butterfat. That’s fine, but the grooves on their cast albums can feel like ruts as a result, both emotionally and aurally. How nice to hear four that are so rich in varied craft and feeling!Even “Mr. Saturday Night,” a middling entertainment onstage, shines in its recording. Not that it isn’t cynical; the story of a washed-up borscht belt comic naturally evokes an acrid Rat Pack score (and matching orchestration) from the composer Jason Robert Brown. But Billy Crystal, in excellent voice, provides a nice balance in the title role, especially when highlighting the pathos behind the aggressive humor of Amanda Green’s lyrics, as in “A Little Joy.” “I’m gonna bring a little mirth/To celebrate our time on earth,” he hectors an unresponsive old age home audience. “Of course it helps to have a pulse.” This recording does.Oddly, it’s the cast album of “A Strange Loop,” a terrific musical — and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama — that has the pulse problem. Michael R. Jackson’s brilliant concept, in which unhelpful “thoughts” persecute a gay Black musical theater writer trying to write a gay Black musical, is so innately theatrical that, without Stephen Brackett’s staging, it’s hard to track its ups and downs through music alone. Still, with Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell and Liz Phair as his “Inner White Girl” inspirations, Jackson writes songs that sting, his lyrics merging poetry and perseveration.Kimberly Levaco doesn’t have time to perseverate; she’s aging at four times the normal speed and already looks 60-ish at 15. Her upbeat attitude in the face of early mortality gives “Kimberly Akimbo” (due out Feb. 14, though two songs are now available for streaming) its tragic undertow but also its uncanny, uncloying delight. The songs by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire, especially as sung by Victoria Clark and Bonnie Milligan, rarely waste time stating the obvious, thus allowing us to experience both dawning rapture (“Anagram”) and hilarious sociopathy (“Better”) without condescension. As the cast album moves from high to high with no explanations, you may wonder where that lump in your throat came from.How much story a cast album needs to tell has from the start of the format been a defining question. The first recordings of Broadway shows were essentially glorified singles, with no context at all. (There was no room.) But even with dialogue and liner notes, new musicals today, in which songs are narrowly tailored to narratives, can leave you perplexed if you haven’t seen them live. That will not be a problem for the cast album of “Some Like It Hot” (due out on March 24); it’s designed, like so many Golden Age musicals, to give pleasure both within and without the story. As they did in “Hairspray,” Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman write numbers — including the ear-wormy title song — that find the sweet spot between generic pop and overspecificity: songs that can sound like just one character’s blues, or anyone’s. More