Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      The Young Women Who Make TikTok Weep

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod recorded a verse of an unfinished song called “Complex” and posted it to TikTok in August, she was tapping into the app’s penchant for confessional storytelling, and demonstrating its ease of distribution and repurposing.Overnight, the snippet propelled her into viral success, leading to a recording contract and placing her in a lineage of young women who have found success on the app via emotional catharsis — sad, mad or both. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” first gained traction there, and also Lauren Spencer-Smith, Sadie Jean, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Gayle and many more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the evolution of TikTok’s musical ambitions and the expansion of its emotional range, how the music business has tried to capitalize on the app’s intimacy, and the speed with which a bedroom-recording confessional can become a universal story line.Guest:Rachel Brodsky, who writes about pop music for StereogumConnect 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

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Quinn Christopherson Finds Cause for Celebration

      by

      On his debut album, the Alaskan singer-songwriter moved into new emotional territory.Born in Anchorage to a wedding D.J. father and a karaoke-loving mother (whose own grandfather was a skilled luthier), Quinn Christopherson got his start in a music scene he describes as “closed in, so there’s nowhere to run.” For about six years, he played local shows and open mic nights while doing construction gigs and working with homeless and runaway teens at Covenant House. But that all changed in 2019, when he won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with his melancholy single “Erase Me,” which details his raw feelings relating to his gender transition. Last month, after wrapping a summer tour with Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen, he released his debut album. “Write Your Name in Pink” is the sort of dreamy record you want to listen to at night, maybe with some flickering candles.“I’m glad I gave music a full-time shot, because in the past my songs were really sad,” says the 30-year-old Alaska Native, who is of Ahtna and Iñupiat ancestry. “The sliver of time I spent on music was spent trying to heal myself. When I started coming into my studio every morning, I could cover all kinds of emotions instead of just using [my music] as therapy.”His new offerings are more joyful — a celebration, he says, of his youth. Not that the songs are any less deeply felt. “Neighborhood,” the first track he wrote for the album, concerns Christopherson’s complex relationship with his mother. “Retelling these stories, I learn along the way,” he says. “My mom and I had some really rough times, but she was hurt before she hurt me. Having empathy for her younger self is important in telling my story, too.”His family has never hid their struggles, Christopherson says, and their openness has inspired him to be vulnerable in his music. “We, as native people, have had a lot to overcome, and we’re still climbing our way out of it,” he says. “You can take a lot of things from people, but you can’t take our stories.” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Ralph Vaughan Williams Was Complicated, but Not Conservative

      by

      The English composer deserves a fresh assessment as the world does (and doesn’t) observe the 150th anniversary of his birth.Ralph Vaughan Williams understood what his fate was likely to be.“Every composer cannot expect to have a worldwide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people,” Vaughan Williams, an Englishman, said in a series of lectures on folk music and nationalism at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. “Many young composers,” he went on, “make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local.”There was a time when it seemed plausible that Vaughan Williams might become, if not exactly a universal composer, then at least something more than the countrymen he had described as “unappreciated at home and unknown abroad” in the 1912 essay “Who Wants the English Composer?”Several of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies were staples in the United States in his lifetime, and from the depths of the Blitz around 1940 to the front-page news of his death in 1958, he was among the 20th-century composers that American orchestras played most. The New York Times critic Olin Downes even placed him near the summit of contemporary composition in 1954, though he feared that his “kinship to modern society” meant that “the music of the Englishman will age sooner than that of Sibelius with the passing of the period that bore it.”So it seemed. When Harold Schonberg, Downes’s successor, argued in The Times in 1964 that “Vaughan Williams may turn out to be the most important symphonist of the century,” he did so while complaining that his scores were no longer performed, and alongside a report about how busy Benjamin Britten had become.If Vaughan Williams’s music has since recovered in Britain after a period when it was the butt of modernist jokes — “The Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” are routinely elected the favorite works of radio listeners there — the same has hardly been true elsewhere, even in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth.Perhaps Aaron Copland’s judgment in 1931, that Vaughan Williams was “the kind of local composer who stands for something great in the musical development of his own country but whose actual musical contribution cannot bear exportation,” was in the end right.On this page of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, he referred to “Pilgrim’s Progress” with the inscription “Upon this place stood a cross, and a little below a sepulchre.”via Royal College of MusicIT IS AT THIS POINT in an essay on an arguably overlooked composer that a critic will often suggest that the judgment of history is wrong, explaining that new research shows that the subject, if renowned as a conservative, was in fact a progressive, deserving of a fresh assessment.It’s an easy enough argument to make in Vaughan Williams’s case, and he does repay another listen. An excellent new biography by the musicologist Eric Saylor makes clear that the composer — who was born in Gloucestershire on Oct. 12, 1872, wrote his first piece at 6, the year of the Brahms Violin Concerto, and his last at 85, in that of Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” — was not, or at least not entirely, the parochial reactionary that he has sometime appeared to be, the comforting nostalgist and purveyor of rustic folksiness who dressed like a gentleman farmer, as Copland called him, and composed like one, too.Especially in the 1920s and ’30s, Vaughan Williams was amply capable of wielding ferocious, dissonant violence, most sardonically in his Fourth Symphony; Bartok admired his percussive Piano Concerto. His modal vocabulary, flecked with pentatonic and other outré accents, could be profoundly ambiguous — sometimes stark, as in “Job,” a ballet in all but name, and sometimes discomforting, as in the otherworldly Sixth. Even the “Lark,” for all its pastoral popularity, has an indeterminate form and a sense of “sonic freedom,” Saylor writes.Nor did Vaughan Williams, a student socialist who remained left-leaning, always flee the present into an Arcadian past, despite the wistfulness of works like his Oboe Concerto. He confronted a broken world in “A Pastoral Symphony,” which despite its title reflects on World War I, in which he witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman, and in “Dona Nobis Pacem,” a pleading antiwar testament from 1936 that anticipates Britten’s “War Requiem.”In truth, though, it is hard to tell any sort of simple story about Vaughan Williams. He cared not at all for trends, making sure he knew what was going on elsewhere in contemporary music — he did, after all, study with Ravel — but remaining indifferent to much of it. “Schoenberg meant nothing to me,” he wrote after the serialist’s death in 1951, “but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I dare say it is all my fault.” Michael Kennedy, a biographer and friend, recalled that he liked to pronounce “tone row,” impishly, as if it rhymed with “cow.”“Why should music be ‘original’?” Vaughan Williams grumbled in 1950. “The object of art is to stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment.”He was therefore a pragmatist, with an independent streak as strong as his patriotism. He was not beholden to English music as he found it — neither Elgar’s imperial grandeur nor the examples of his tutors, Parry and Stanford — but sought through folk songs and hymnals to refine a national style that he could preserve, and through which he could prosper. Oxymorons work better for him than simplistic categories; he was a conservative iconoclast, an unconventional traditionalist.“There is a unity of style, it’s just that he was able to stretch it in so many different directions,” the conductor Andrew Davis, who is president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, said in an interview. “Elgar’s style was quite consistent, and Britten changed over the years, but there was not the radical breadth of emotional range that you find in Vaughan Williams.”During World War I, Vaughan Williams witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman.via RVW TrustOn account of that breadth of emotional and compositional range, there are any number of entry points into Vaughan Williams’s work; for me, the moment of discovery came hearing the Fifth Symphony.ON ITS FACE, the Fifth is one of Vaughan Williams’s most straightforward works, and more than debatably his most purely beautiful. Dedicated to Sibelius, it premiered at the Royal Albert Hall, with the composer conducting on June 24, 1943, and it was immediately hailed for its lustrous consolation amid total war. After a New York Philharmonic performance the following year, Downes called it “the symphony of a poet, regardless of the throng, who communes with the ideal.”That poetry, especially the yearning of its Romanza, was hard-earned. Vaughan Williams started the symphony after he met Ursula Wood in 1938, his eventual second wife, who offered him musical as well as personal rejuvenation. He found inspiration piecing together scraps from other works, including from an opera he feared he would not finish, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and short contributions to a pageant that he had directed, “England’s Pleasant Land.” They were called “Exit for the Ghosts of the Past” and “A Funeral March for the Old Order.”The result is not the exercise in dishonest nostalgia that some critics have heard. The scholar Julian Horton has argued that, from its uneasy opening harmonies to its concluding passacaglia, seraphic at the last, its rarefied blend of archaic modes and modern tonalities created “a new musical order,” a way out of a musical and civilization collapse.Put another way, the Fifth, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will play next month, is a symphony about hope. And whether Vaughan Williams intended it or not, it was initially heard by some as a political work, though not necessarily in the way one might expect from an avowed English nationalist.Far too old to fight in World War II, Vaughan Williams still made himself useful, writing scores for propaganda films, aiding European refugees, even collecting scrap metal to do what he could for the war effort. No composer, he told Michael Tippett in 1941, could “sit apart from the world & create music until he is sure he has done all he can to preserve the world from destruction.”But the Fifth struck some listeners as a different sort of contribution to the conflict. From Vaughan Williams’s nationalism, intriguingly, flowed a genuine internationalism; around the start of the war, he founded a branch of Federal Union, an activist group that, among other political arrangements, sought a United States of Europe. For his friend and fellow traveler Adrian Boult, the Fifth’s “serene loveliness” indeed showed, “as only music can, what we must work for when this madness is over.”If the Fifth offers an idealist corollary to the defiance of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, its finest interpreters make that idealism sound plausible. Boult’s readings have too stiff an upper lip for me, though their authority is unmistakable; others, from Serge Koussevitzky’s muscular account to the soaring grandeur of John Barbirolli’s, the radiant patience of André Previn’s to the touching honesty of the composer’s own, give more of a sense of the stakes involved.But the 20th century was harsh on “loveliness” like this. Who could believe in such an uncomplicated optimism now? Vaughan Williams’s grim Sixth, which was such a sensation after its debut in 1948 that the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra all played it at Carnegie Hall in 1949, stands as the answer, with its desolate epilogue. Vaughan Williams half-joked that he called it “The Big Three,” a reference to the great-power leaders who crushed dreams of a new world order after the war; critics, to his annoyance, heard it as portraying a nuclear apocalypse.Yet there the Fifth remains, an expression in sound of what once was thought possible. “To imagine beauty under such conditions,” Saylor suggests of its writing, “and to express that beauty so that others too might find hope within the wreckage — that is the mark of the true artist.” Perhaps, dare I say it, a universal one. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Anita Kerr, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 94

      by

      She and her background vocalists were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of country and pop hits recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.Anita Kerr, the prolific session singer and arranger who was an architect of the sumptuous Nashville Sound and later had a multifaceted career in pop music, died on Monday in Geneva. She was 94. Her death, at a nursing home in the city’s Carouge district, was confirmed by her daughter Kelley Kerr.Working with producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, Ms. Kerr and her quartet of background vocalists, the Anita Kerr Singers, were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of recordings made in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, they contributed to the birth of the lush orchestral Nashville Sound, refining the rough-hewed provincial music for which the city was known into something that appealed to a wider audience.Just as important, Ms. Kerr and her ensemble helped preserve country music’s viability in the face of the commercial threat presented by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll.Ms. Kerr sang soprano and wrote and conducted arrangements for the group, which included the alto Dottie Dillard, the tenor Gil Wright and the bass Louis Nunley. Together they performed on hits by future members of the Country Music Hall of Fame like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, as well as on major pop singles, including Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” (1960) and Burl Ives’s “A Little Bitty Tear” (1961).Ms. Kerr and her singers also crooned the indelible “dum-dum-dum, dooby-doo-wah” on “Only the Lonely,” a No. 2 pop hit for Roy Orbison in 1960.With the possible exception of the Jordanaires, the Southern gospel quartet featured on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, no vocal ensemble was in greater demand for session work in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s than the Anita Kerr Singers.“At the beginning we recorded two sessions per week,” Ms. Kerr wrote on her website, describing the postwar boom in Nashville’s music industry. “Then, by 1955, we were recording eight sessions per week, plus a five-day-a-week national program at WSM with Jim Reeves.”“Gradually,” she went on, “we grew to 12 to 18 sessions per week, and I was writing as many arrangements for these sessions as was physically possible. Loving every minute of it, mind you. Tired at times, but happy.”Beginning in 1956, the group began working in New York City as well, winning a contest on the popular CBS television and radio variety show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” They soon began making regular trips to appear on the program.In 1960, another quartet led by Ms. Kerr, the short-lived Little Dippers, had a Top 10 pop hit with the dreamy ballad “Forever.”Ms. Kerr, center, with the 1970 version of the Anita Kerr Singers in Amsterdam. She, her husband and her daughters moved to Switzerland that year.Fotocollectie AnefoThe Anita Kerr Singers signed a contract with RCA Victor Records in 1961 and went on to release a series of albums of easy-listening music, some of them credited to the Anita Kerr Quartet. One, “We Dig Mancini,” which featured renditions of TV and movie themes written by Henry Mancini, won a Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group in 1966, besting the Beatles’ “Help!” for the honor.The Kerr group won the same award the next year for their cover of “A Man and a Woman,” the theme song from the 1966 French film of the same name.During the early ’60s, the group, augmented by four additional vocalists, released several albums of contemporary pop material as part of RCA’s Living Voices series.Ms. Kerr and her ensemble also lent their voices to a number of significant R&B hits of the day, including Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (1960), Esther Phillips’s “Release Me” (1962) and Bobby Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” (1963).In addition, Ms. Kerr wrote and recorded jingles for some of the era’s popular AM radio stations, including WMCA in New York City and WLS in Chicago.Anita Jean Grilli was born on Oct. 13, 1927, in Memphis to William and Sofia (Polonara) Grilli, Italian immigrants who settled in Mississippi with their families as teenagers and became farm workers. Moving with his wife to Memphis, her father opened a grocery store there. Her mother, a contralto, had the opportunity to study classical music in New York but instead became a homemaker.Anita and her two older brothers studied piano at their mother’s insistence, but only Anita, who began taking lessons at the age of 4, stayed with it. By the time she was in the fourth grade at St. Thomas Catholic School, she was playing organ for the school’s Masses.At 15, she was hired as a staff musician for an after-school radio program in Memphis. She also played with local dance bands, for which she composed arrangements.She married Al Kerr in 1947 and moved to Nashville after he accepted a job as a disc jockey at the local radio station WKDA. Ms. Kerr again worked with dance bands, and she also assembled a vocal quintet that was eventually hired by WSM, the station that broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry,” to perform on its show “Sunday Down South.”A year later, Ms. Kerr and members of her group were hired as background singers for Decca Records. They changed their name, at the label’s urging, from the Sunday Down South Choir to the Anita Kerr Singers.In 1965, after almost two decades in Nashville — and after she had divorced Mr. Kerr and married Alex Grob, a Swiss businessman who became her manager — Ms. Kerr moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote orchestral scores and worked in pop, jazz, Latin and other idioms besides country music.She assembled a new edition of the Anita Kerr Singers and released a series of musically omnivorous records, including three mariachi albums credited to the Mexicali Singers. She made several records devoted to the catalogs of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David and composed, arranged and conducted the music for “The Sea,” an album featuring the poetry of Rod McKuen. And she served as the choral director for the first season of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967.In 1970, Ms. Kerr and her husband, along with her two daughters from her first marriage, moved to Switzerland. Ms. Kerr formed yet another edition of her singing group there and continued to write, record and conduct. Two of the gospel albums she made during this period were nominated for Grammys.In 1975, she and her husband established Mountain Studios in Montreux. They later sold it to the English rock band Queen, which eventually turned it into “Queen: The Studio Experience,” a museum and exhibition benefiting the Mercury Phoenix Trust.Ms. Kerr remained active into the 1980s and beyond, writing scores for films including the 1972 drama “Limbo” and conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other ensembles.Ms. Kerr, who wasn’t always credited for her work as an arranger and group leader in Nashville — and is still is not a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — received a special award from the music licensing organization ASCAP in 1975, recognizing her “contributions to the birth and development of the Nashville Sound.” In 1992 she was honored by the Recording Academy with a Governors Award for her “outstanding contribution to American Music.”“Anita Kerr: America’s First Lady of Music,” a biography written by Barry Pugh with a foreword by Mr. Bacharach, was published this year.In addition to her daughter Kelley, Ms. Kerr is survived by her husband; another daughter, Suzanne Trebert; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.From early childhood on, Ms. Kerr said, she knew she would spend her life making music.“I did everything regarding music, I couldn’t get enough,” she wrote on her website. “I never had the problem of wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I always knew that it would be music.” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Melissa Etheridge and Jill Sobule Bring Their Whole Lives to the Stage

      by

      They both first made a splash in the ’90s. They’re now in New York to present new theatrical memoirs that mix storytelling and songs.When musicians as popular and as varied as Brandi Carlile, King Princess, Syd, Hayley Kiyoko and Girl in Red can be so openly, so matter-of-factly gay, it’s easy to forget that the vibe was not quite as welcoming 30 years ago.In the 1990s, singing paeans about making out with other women was a bold move. So when the Kansas-born lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge released the album “Yes I Am” in 1993, featuring the hits “Come to My Window” and “I’m the Only One,” she made a splash. A couple of years later, Jill Sobule, a sly, funny bisexual pop singer-songwriter, released “I Kissed a Girl” — with a video starring the actor and model known as Fabio.Coincidentally, both women are currently settling in New York to present new stage memoirs that mix storytelling and songs. On Thursday, Etheridge starts previews for “My Window — A Journey Through Life,” with a book by her wife, Linda Wallem, at New World Stages. The next day, Sobule follows suit with “F*ck7thGrade” at the Wild Project.Born a few months apart in 1961, the two women have been on parallel trajectories over the years but did not really meet until Sobule joined the musical lineup on the 2019 Melissa Etheridge cruise. “We were getting done in our room, and we were all singing, ‘Come to my porthole,’” said Sobule, whose recent land-bound experiences have included starring in Matt Schatz’s musical “A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill” at the Geffen Playhouse.On Friday morning, Etheridge and Sobule gathered again over a breakfast of oatmeal, fruit and herbal tea. It was the day after the Denver Broncos had lost an excruciating game to the Indianapolis Colts, and Sobule, a Colorado native and football fan, was still reeling. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The two women did not really meet until Sobule joined the musical lineup on the 2019 Melissa Etheridge cruise.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesWhy did you both decide to look back on your life and music in a theatrical format?JILL SOBULE I have a theater agent, and he said, “You should come up with a concept and maybe something with your songs.” So many of them directly deal with the worst year of my life: seventh grade.MELISSA ETHERIDGE That’s everyone’s worst year.SOBULE I was this badass little girl. I was the best guitar player, but there were no role models for us. And as a little strange girl with queer feelings in the ’70s, the only role models I had for that was Miss Hathaway from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Or my gym teacher, who looked like Pete Rose.ETHERIDGE My wife’s gym teacher was named Miss Lesby. It’s like something out of “S.N.L.”! One of my major influences was the Archies [they both start singing “Sugar, Sugar”]. I thought, “Why can’t I grow up and be Reggie? I’m going to have Veronica and live a happy life.”SOBULE We wanted to make sure that the show wasn’t just for people interested in my career because most people could give a [expletive]. I’m not that famous. It’s kind of this universal story of a weirdo growing up.What was it like coming of age at a time when it must have been difficult to put words onto some feelings?SOBULE I have a brother who’s six years older than me. I happened to stumble upon one of his softcore magazines, and there was a series of soft-focus photos of girls in a French boarding school. I thought, “Oh my god, how do I transfer to that school?”ETHERIDGE I think the first media I saw was “The Children’s Hour.” All of a sudden I’m feeling stuff. And then she [Shirley MacLaine’s character] hangs herself, because anything gay you saw, they were criminals or killed themselves. I remember Time magazine had something about gay liberation on the front. My father was a high school psychology teacher, and he had a book that said, “Homosexuality — we don’t think it’s a mental illness anymore.” It was kind of nice: Maybe I’m not crazy.Etheridge and K.D. Lang. “It was the drama geeks getting together and having fun,” Etheridge said about Hollywood in the ’90s.Steve Eichner/WireImage, via Getty ImagesHow did you get into music?ETHERIDGE In high school, I was in professional bands. I made money every weekend; I was very independent. I was a security guard in college. I made $7 an hour, and that was hard work, in a hospital. So I went down to the subway — it was in Boston, I went to the Berklee College of Music — I opened up my case, and I played for an hour. And I made seven bucks. So I went, “Well, I can make as much here as I do doing that job.” I never looked back after that.SOBULE When I was in eighth grade, I was the guitar player in our jazz stage band, and we won State because I brought my brother’s Marshall amp and wah-wah pedal, and I did a solo of “2001.” That’s the only thing I’ve ever won in my whole life. Later I was in Spain, and a friend said, “Let’s go busk on the street.” A guy walked by and went, “Would you guys like to play in my nightclub?” I ended up dropping out of school.ETHERIDGE I dropped out of school, too.Is it difficult to tell your stories in a new medium?SOBULE I think it’s a natural progression because we’re storytellers, and now we get to grow it out, we get to be more cinematic, in a way. I was telling my theater friends, “I’m moving on from music to Off Broadway because it’s so lucrative.” [They both roar with laughter.]ETHERIDGE I always hate to say “at our age,” but in this phase of our life to be able to have a different creative expression is fantastic. I came from rehearsal last night, and I could not get to sleep. My brain was so tickled and delighted by what I can do.Melissa, what was it like playing St. Jimmy in “American Idiot” in 2011?ETHERIDGE It was amazing. This was a full Broadway show, and there were so many things that I didn’t really realize I was getting into. Especially when they said, “Now we’re going to rehearse the death drop.” I said, “Excuse me, the what?” I climb up two flights of these stairs that move around, and I fall backwards into two people’s arms. And I’m not a dancer! To me it represented my own fear of stepping into the theatrical world. So I said, “You got it!”SOBULE Theater was a learning curve. I remember the first time a director said, “OK, move stage left.” And I was, “What the [expletive] is stage left?” We have so much dialogue, and I don’t even memorize my own lyrics. I was like, “Can I have a monitor? Did Springsteen have a monitor?” They were like, “You are not Springsteen.” OK, fair enough.Jill, you’re working with the playwright Liza Birkenmeier on your show’s book. And Melissa, your wife, Linda, is helping out. How do you collaborate with them?SOBULE Basically we have conversations, and we figure out how to best put the jigsaw puzzle together. Every day, I’m like, “Let me add this little one-liner.”ETHERIDGE My Covid experience really focused this show because I did a thing called Etheridge TV. I turned my garage into a streaming studio, and every week I would stream five shows. On Wednesdays my wife and I would do a chat show, and on Fridays I would do what I called the Friday Night Time Machine. I started digitizing my old pictures and old videos, and I would show them and tell my life story. I got used to telling it, and my wife started writing it down. But I’m going to still be speaking extemporaneously in the show — I’ll hit the beats so that everything matches right, but I’m not reciting lines.How much excavating did you do in terms of music?ETHERIDGE I’m playing a couple tracks that I hardly ever play live because they were so theatrical, so dramatic that there was never a place for them in my concerts. There’s one from “Your Little Secret” called “This War Is Over” — I think I did it in concert in ’96 and that was the last time. There’s one from “The Awakening” called “Open Your Mind.” You’re going to hear a song I wrote when I was 11 years old, and four or five songs that were never recorded.SOBULE We took out the first song I ever wrote, which was called “Nixon Is a Bad Man, Spiro Agnew Is Too.” I don’t remember the music, but I’m sure it was hot.ETHERIDGE Unfortunately, I did remember the music of mine.Sobule performing in 2000. “When I had ‘Kissed a Girl’ coming out, it was dicey because it was like, ‘Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?,’” Sobule said.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesJill, reassure us: Does your show include “I Kissed a Girl”?SOBULE Yeah. People call me a one-hit wonder, and I say, “Wait a second, I’m a two-hit wonder!” When I had “Kissed a Girl” coming out, it was dicey because it was like, “Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?”ETHERIDGE It was revolutionary. I remember seeing that, my jaw dropped, and I went, “Wow, here we go.” It was punk, it was edgy, it was that MTV cool. Someone called me once, like management, and said, “Your songs are too sexual.” It was the “Lucky” album. I was having a lot of sex, what can I say?I read that you were involved in some fun parties back in the day.ETHERIDGE It was Hollywood in the early ’90s. I happened to know K.D. Lang; Ellen DeGeneres was this stand-up comic, so was Rosie O’Donnell. I met Brad Pitt after he did a little independent film with Catherine Keener, who’s a real good friend of mine. None of us had kids, and we were all young and crazy. There was a lot of smoking and drinking. It was the drama geeks getting together and having fun.What do you do for fun now?ETHERIDGE Fun is getting in bed before midnight. I watch football. [To Sobule] You’re not a Broncos fan, are you? Last night was brutal. I have to hug you.SOBULE My whole family was at the game and they FaceTimed me. I almost didn’t make today, it was so awful.ETHERIDGE I’m with the Kansas City Chiefs: We’re set. In high school we had powder-puff football. We showed up for the first practice — I was the quarterback, thank you very much — and then they came and said, “We’ve got to shut this down, we don’t have insurance,” or something. Because of Title IX, we were supposed to be able to do it, but we didn’t, and it broke my heart.SOBULE The last couple years I’ve been totally into basketball. I like it because there’s so many games and it doesn’t matter.ETHERIDGE Oh no, I like something to be on the line. Every. Play. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Bad Bunny and Steve Lacy Spend Another Week Atop the Charts

      by

      “Un Verano Sin Ti” and “Bad Habit” remain Billboard’s No. 1 album and song in the United States.The champions on Billboard magazine’s two most important music charts remain unchanged this week, with Bad Bunny holding the No. 1 album position and Steve Lacy the No. 1 single.“Un Verano Sin Ti,” the streaming juggernaut by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny — a.k.a. Benito Martínez — logs its 13th time as the top album, with the equivalent of 84,000 sales in the United States, including 116 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since it came out 22 weeks ago, Bad Bunny’s album, an international blockbuster, has racked up 3.6 billion streams in the United States alone and bounced in and out of Billboard’s top spot, never dipping lower than No. 2.“Un Verano” now ties Drake’s “Views” (2016) and Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack (2013) for the longest stays in the chart’s penthouse in a decade, since Adele’s “21” (remember “Someone Like You”?) notched 24 weeks at No. 1 back in 2011 and 2012.Lacy’s song “Bad Habit,” which since midsummer has been inescapable on streaming services — and in TikTok memes — is No. 1 on the Hot 100 singles chart for a second week, with 20.6 million streams and 41.5 million “audience impressions” from radio play, according to Luminate.Back on the album chart, Slipknot, the Iowa metal band that has been dressing up in Halloween-like masks — and selling millions of records — for more than two decades, reaches No. 2 with “The End, So Far,” the group’s seventh studio LP. It had the equivalent of 59,000 sales, including 11 million streams and 50,500 copies sold as a complete package.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” holds at No. 3, the Weeknd’s hits compilation “The Highlights” is No. 4 and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 5.“Dangerous,” released at the beginning of 2021, has now spent 90 weeks in the Top 10, matching “South Pacific” — the soundtrack to a 1958 film whose songs go back to a 1949 Broadway production. In the 66-year history of the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship album chart, only five other releases have logged more weeks in the Top 10, all soundtracks and cast albums from the 1950s and ’60s. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: Berlin Takes Wagner’s Approach to Staging the ‘Ring’

      by

      All four parts of Wagner’s epic were presented within a week, in a new production by Dmitri Tcherniakov inspired by the work’s experimental roots.BERLIN — Lately, the German capital has been looking more like a city to the south: Bayreuth.At least in one respect. The Berlin State Opera, in mounting Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” has taken Bayreuth’s approach — begun by the composer himself — of presenting it all within a week. Most houses build to that marathon slowly, sometimes over the course of several years, but Berlin has unveiled an entire production at once, with the first cycle ending Sunday night.It’s an enormous undertaking — 15 hours of music to be staged and rehearsed by a couple of hundred performers — especially for a busy repertory house like the State Opera. But this new production, a myth-busting and subtly provocative take by Dmitri Tcherniakov, was designed for a special occasion: the 80th birthday of Daniel Barenboim, the company’s long-reigning music director and a titan of Berlin culture.Barenboim’s health, though, has deteriorated in recent months, and he withdrew from the premiere. In his stead came Christian Thielemann, one of very few conductors to have led all 10 of Wagner’s mature operas at Bayreuth. He hasn’t much experience with the State Opera’s orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, but after his first “Ring” with them, he suddenly seems like a worthy contender for its podium when Barenboim eventually steps down.The Staatskapelle executed Thielemann’s vision for the “Ring” — a long crescendo built over the four operas — with sensitivity and skill. His tempos, slower than usual, tested the stamina of singers, but he also had a keen sense of balance, scaling his sound to match theirs onstage. This was an often quiet ring, a near opposite of Georg Solti’s famous (and ever-elevated) studio recording from the mid-20th century with the Vienna Philharmonic. It did, though, reward patient listeners, with Thielemann simultaneously shaping the score on the level of scenes and the immense entirety.Robert Watson as Siegmund and Vida Mikneviciute as Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.”Monika RittershausHe also had a gift for illustrating the representative moments in Wagner’s score: sheets of rain in the opening of “Die Walküre,” or the idyllic forest murmurs at the heart of “Siegfried.” Those, as it happened, were about the only glimpses of nature in Tcherniakov’s “Ring,” which not only demythologizes the work — like the contemporary-dress family drama presented at Bayreuth last summer — but also isolates its characters in a world so human, it’s constructed by their hands and cut off from the outside world.Talk to anyone who saw this “Ring,” and you’re unlikely to hear the same response twice. It’s telling, and satisfying, that the State Opera auditorium was divided in boos and cheers for Tcherniakov during the curtain call for “Götterdämmerung” on Sunday. There didn’t seem to be a passive listener in the house.Wagner’s sprawling, dramaturgically imperfect work — a multigenerational power struggle among gods, creatures and men — has been interpretive fodder for nearly 150 years. In his book “The Perfect Wagnerite,” George Bernard Shaw argued that the “Ring” was a Marxist epic; so did the director Patrice Chéreau in his benchmark centennial staging at Bayreuth.Tcherniakov offers an original reading on the “Ring,” one that departs severely from Wagner but with a story just as rich — unfurling in a challenging, at times obtuse production that defies quick judgment and demands curiosity. The plot doesn’t map onto the libretto, yet like the text, it is many things at once: commentaries on the dangers of playing god; the limits of knowledge and science; the evolution of sexual politics; generational conflict; even the ways in which a renovation can ruin historical architecture. Funny and aching, ironic and horrifying, it is, however irreverent, loyal to the “Ring” as a work of novelistic complexity.Michael Volle as Wotan with Anja Kampe as Brünnhilde in the final scene of “Die Walküre.”Monika RittershausHere, the four operas unfold within the walls of a Cold War-era research center called E.S.C.H.E. (Esche is the German word for ash tree, which in Wagner’s text is mutilated in the name of power, and withers in parallel to the fall of the gods.) It’s a vast facility; the curtain is a blueprint of the third floor, which alone contains 185 rooms. The production’s program refers to Wagner’s lifetime as a golden age of experimentation — sometimes world changing, sometimes perverse. So were the post-World War II years of arms races and scientific pipe dreams, when the story of this “Das Rheingold” begins.The kind of experimentation that takes place at E.S.C.H.E. becomes clear within the opening minutes, in which people gather in a lecture hall to watch a video (by Alexey Poluboyarinov) of a liquid being injected into a brain, stunting neural pathways as they’re being formed. That’s the least of the unnatural acts to come.Wotan, the ruler of the gods — Michael Volle, the production’s high point as a commanding baritone and actor of remarkable range — oversees a kingdom of inquiry into the human mind. Subjects undergo stress tests or are manipulated into love and violence for the sake of observation. In a world where everything is an experiment, nothing emerges as reliably real.The characters visibly age over the four operas. By “Siegfried,” Stephan Rügamer, left, as Mime, and Volle appear decades older than in “Das Rheingold.”Monika RittershausThe ring is not a physical object so much as the idea of knowledge as power. Scenes that would typically be highlights of stage magic — the crossing of the Rainbow Bridge, the blaze that surrounds a sleeping Brünnhilde, the flooding of the Rhine — don’t exist as such in Tcherniakov’s staging, except with unnecessarily winking substitutes. And there isn’t such a high body count; most characters make it to the end of this “Ring” alive.Tcherniakov, as usual, manages details on a level rarely seen in opera. Most impressively, his characters perform to each other rather than at the audience; with no sound, the action could still communicate its essentials. The soprano Vida Mikneviciute, mighty yet fragile as Freia in “Das Rheingold” then Sieglinde in “Die Walküre,” wears years of emotional and physical abuse in her facial expressions and wincing reflexes; Lauri Vasar’s Günther, a boss made into a cuckold in front of his colleagues in “Götterdämmerung,” looks back at one of them with an uncomfortable, sympathetic smile; Claudia Mahnke’s Fricka is a desperate wife who, resigned to a bitter relationship with Wotan, gestures cruelly for him to keep the pen she lends him to sign away Siegmund’s fate.Elsewhere, the cast performs with laugh-out-loud physical comedy, especially Rolando Villazón, however effortful in the unlikely role of Loge. This “Ring” would be an office sitcom if its subtext weren’t so appalling. Tcherniakov traces E.S.C.H.E.’s existence over a half-century or so, beginning in the 1970s and reflected in Elena Zaytseva’s grounding costumes. The place is rotten from the start, seemingly built with dirty money by Fasolt (Mika Kares, who returns in “Götterdämmerung” as a wickedly resonant Hagen) and Fafner (Peter Rose, who comes back in “Siegfried” not as a dragon, but as a psych patient in a straight jacket).Andreas Schager as Siegfried, the ultimate test subject, with Victoria Randem as the forest bird.Monika RittershausThat original sin serves the plot less than it normally would; more important is Alberich’s theft of “gold.” Later scenes suggest that he is an employee at the center, but one who submits to a stress test and breaks under pressure, violently removing the sensors from his head and running out of the lab with as much data as he can carry. He — Johannes Martin Kränzle, a characterful foil to Volle’s Wotan — forms his own dominion of research in the subbasement.Wotan turns out to be the supreme schemer, though, rather than on an equal level with his rival as written: his “Light-Alberich” to the dwarf’s “Black-Alberich.” By “Götterdämmerung,” Alberich — aging throughout the cycle like everyone else — seems to have died, existing only in the mind of Hagen, whereas Wotan appears in all four operas, instead of the usual first three. His cameo at the end, during Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, is where Tcherniakov’s production snaps into focus; much of her monologue, delivered by the soprano Anja Kampe with equal parts anguish and revelation, is an indictment of Wotan sung directly at him, in a reversal of the final scene of “Die Walküre.”It’s almost as though, like Wagner, Tcherniakov started there, with Siegfried’s death, and worked backward. If you follow that thread, you see his “Ring” as a series of missteps and misplaced priorities. The first two operas exist to set up Wotan’s ultimate test subject: Siegfried, born in the center and raised under constant surveillance. And throughout, Erda (Anna Kissjudit, as assertive as Volle) appears at pivotal moments, along with her three Norns, dispassionate witnesses to Wotan’s folly.Not everything adds up. As is often the case with Tcherniakov, you get the feeling that he ran out of time. He introduces an actual ring in “Götterdämmerung,” but because it serves a traditional purpose as a symbol of fidelity, it doesn’t make sense as an object of everyone’s obsession; also made literal are the sword Nothung and Wotan’s spear, their powers mysterious and irrelevant in a world without magic.Kampe with Schager and Volle. During Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene, she delivers the monologue to Wotan as an indictment.Monika RittershausBut where successful, Tcherniakov’s approach is thoughtful, if rending. He shows how, from the 1970s to the present, women have risen from casual workplace cruelty to precarious power; but also how abusive relationships will always take form in ways like Brünnhilde’s neglect by Siegfried (a tireless, crowd-pleasing Andreas Schager), which drives her to depressive behavior and possibly alcoholism. And Tcherniakov demonstrates, through his own scenic design and lighting by Gleb Filshtinsky, how easily history can be taken for granted or erased, whether Wotan’s legacy or the architecture of E.S.C.H.E.Because so few characters die, they are left to live with their mistakes, and perhaps to perpetuate them for as long as the center remains open. But all “Ring” productions should have an element of renewal, and here that is granted to Brünnhilde, sung by Kampe with a heroic but smaller sound than other sopranos in the role. Instead of greeting the flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre, she walks out of the facility with a bag in hand. On the empty stage’s back wall, Tcherniakov projects Wagner’s Schopenhauer-influenced version of the Immolation Scene that he never set, in which Brünnhilde describes fleeing from the world of delusion, enlightened and having seen “the world end.”She’s tempted by Erda, who flaps the wings of a toy bird in her hand. But Brünnhilde won’t be fooled. She leaves it all behind, pulling the curtain down behind her — without the knowledge her colleagues so carelessly pursue, perhaps, but with wisdom.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Nov. 6, then again in April, at the Berlin State Opera; staatsoper-berlin.de. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Music Festivals Try to Go Green and Carbon Neutral

      by

      A handful of festivals are striving to become carbon neutral by reducing waste, using high-tech dance floors and offsetting emissions.In Nashville this past August, about 5,000 revelers in neon chaps, gothic chains and kaleidoscopic crop tops descended on Bicentennial Park for an electronic music festival. They gyrated to pulsating sets by the British D.J. Chris Lake and the electronic duo Snakehips. They watched choreographed light shows and got massages in a healers’ village.And when they raised their arms in the air, many of them flashed a green wristband, signifying a commitment to partying in a way that was carbon neutral.Billed as the “greenest festival” in the country, Deep Tropics had no trash cans (though there were plenty of recycling and compost bins), and single-use plastics were banned. Festival organizers said that all the carbon consumed for the two-day event (including the fuel used by all the festivalgoers) will be offset by the planting of some 23,000 trees.“We’re the next generation of festivals,” said Blake Atchinson, 39, who founded Deep Tropics in 2017 with his twin brother, Joel Atchinson. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art.”The festival was founded by Blake and Joel Atchison. “We are trying to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture and sustainability and art,” Blake said. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesTraditional music festivals consume a lot of resources. The sound systems and lights alone guzzle tons of power. Bigger festivals like Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland draw hundreds of thousands of revelers, who use energy to get there and leave behind mountains of waste. What isn’t carried in by hand needs to be trucked in.And that’s not counting the D.J.s. A 2021 report by Clean Scene, a climate collective in Berlin, found that 1,000 of the top D.J.s together took more than 51,000 flights in a single year, emitting 35 million tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the amount of power consumed by 20,000 households.But there is a novel push by eco-minded organizers to make festivals greener, sometimes through smaller, feel-good initiatives like compost toilets and vegan food trucks. Others are striving for bigger impact by offsetting their carbon emissions, or tapping dancers’ body heat to power their heating and cooling systems.“There’s pressure on festivals, especially because they’re such large events,” said Fallon MacWilliams, 37, a D.J. and promoter in Berlin who is one of the three founders of Clean Scene. “This year while touring I saw a lot of festivals changing the way they’re doing things when it comes to plastic and encouraging artists to take trains to the festival.”Vision: 2025, a nonprofit in Bristol, England, has gotten more than 40 festivals in Britain to pledge to cut their emissions in half and double their recycling rates by 2025. Daybreaker, which organizes sober dance parties worldwide, hosts a series of morning raves where single-use plastics are prohibited and public transportation is encouraged.Some festival organizers say the changes need to be more systemic. Music festivals are “completely dependent on cheap flights and therefore the consumption of fossil fuels,” said Eilidh McLaughlin, 35, a founder of Clean Scene. “Any effort to advance sustainability is essentially greenwashing unless you are working to actively break the cycle and reduce your carbon footprint by touring more sustainably.”The festival took place in Nashville in August.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThe lights and sounds will be offset by the planting of trees.Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesIn 2020, DGTL, an organization in Amsterdam that produces electronic music festivals, pledged to be climate neutral. “We are trying to create a new festival landscape where sustainability will be the norm,” said Mitchell van Dooijeweerd, 31, the sustainability manager for DGTL. “It’s become a business model, because we are experts in this and everybody wants to change.”For this year’s Deep Tropics, the organizers teamed with Green Disco, a company in New York that helps events become environmentally friendlier. During the festival, its founders Jonah Geschwind, 22, and Jacob Chandler, 21, stood at the entrance and sold $20 “eco-bands”: green wristbands that funded the planting of trees and other environmental causes.“If you make sustainability easy and as cool as possible, people are going to naturally adopt it,” said Mr. Chandler, who said they sold about 500 bracelets, which he estimates will offset 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide.A group called Green Disco sold “eco-bands” that will offset carbon emissions. Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesBigger festivals are also making efforts: Coachella has increased vegan food options, urged its attendees to car pool and pledged to slash emissions; Burning Man announced a 10-year sustainability road map in 2019.And some music acts are trying, too. Coldplay has pledged that its current tour will create half as much greenhouse gas emissions as its previous one. The band is also touring with a kinetic dance floor that uses human movement to create electricity. The floor was a previous attraction at Club Watt, a dance club in Rotterdam that’s now closed.Still, real-world practicalities sometimes get in the way. At this year’s Burning Man there were 12-hour traffic jams, leaving ravers stuck in hot, idling cars while Nevada temperatures crept above 100 degrees. And at Deep Tropics, some vendors used plastic packaging despite signing pledges.There were no trash cans at the festival (though plenty of recycling and compost bins).Taylor Baucom for The New York TimesThat doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made, said Heather White, 49, an environmental scientist in Bozeman, Mont., and founder of the nonprofit One Green Thing.“From a 30,000-foot level, does all this matter?” she said. “It absolutely matters. These electronic music festivals are drivers of culture change. We have to have these living laboratories, where people can see zero waste at a concert, because without culture change, big policy solutions are not going to work.” More