Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      ‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ Review: In His Own Words

      by

      Personal tapes and letters bring fresh insights into the jazz great as a musician and a Black man.In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”By foregrounding the gravel, grace and salty frankness of Armstrong’s voice, and mining an archival mother lode of audio and video interviews and clips, Jenkins delivers a bountiful portrait of one of the 20th century’s superstars — on Armstrong’s own terms.As welcome as this is, the documentary’s most affecting attribute may be a reckoning by several Black male artists with what Armstrong means to them. After all, his broad smile, his cameo roles in Hollywood films, his seeming muteness on racial issues had some critics, many of them younger, discounting him for his complicity, his “Uncle Tomming,” as fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis put it early in the film, confessing to how he once felt about Armstrong. With the aid of Marsalis, Miles Davis, the poet Amiri Baraka (via audio clips) and the actor Ossie Davis, Jenkins recontextualizes the man.In a tribute from the “With Ossie & Ruby” television show, Davis shares an epiphany he had when he and Armstrong were on set for ‌the 1966 movie “A Man Called Adam.” During a break, he happened on Armstrong lost in a moment of somber repose, one that quickly gave way to his trademark grin. In that swing, Davis discovered a new kinship: “What I saw in that look shook me. It was my father, my uncle, myself down through the generations.”There is no paucity of expert witnesses who never had doubts about Armstrong’s depth, starting with Lucille Armstrong (whose story about their first house is a keeper). They also include the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the introduction to the centennial edition of Armstrong’s memoir “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” and the composer Leonard Bernstein, who describes the melodies Armstrong plied as “looking for a lost note.” The poetry in that phrase seems to underscore Armstrong’s lineage as a descendant of the African Diaspora.Among the film’s ample pleasures is the only known footage of Armstrong in the recording studio. His head tilted back while scatting, he holds a handkerchief to mop his forehead. The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.Louis Armstrong’s Black & BluesRated R for Satchmo’s salty language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available on Apple TV+. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Jody Miller, Singer of ‘Queen of the House’ and More, Dies at 80

      by

      Best known for a 1965 homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, the Oklahoma native had a hit the same year with the very different “Home of the Brave.”Jody Miller, a versatile singer with a rich, resonant voice who won a Grammy Award for “Queen of the House,” a homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, and had her biggest hit with a teenage anthem, “Home of the Brave,” died on Oct. 6 at her home in Blanchard, Okla. She was 80.Her daughter, Robin Brooks, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”The song was a crossover hit, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart and No. 12 on the Hot 100, and earned Ms. Miller the Grammy Award for best female country and western vocal performance in 1966. (Mr. Miller won five Grammys for “King of the Road” that year.)That accolade did not prevent some country radio stations from shunning another single she put out in 1965, “Home of the Brave,” an empathetic ode to a boy who is bullied and barred from school because he doesn’t wear his hair “like he wore it before,” has “funny clothes” and is “not like them and they can’t ignore it.”“Home of the brave, land of the free,” went the chorus of the song, written by the Brill Building stalwarts Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. “Why won’t you let him be what he wants to be?”Despite the opposition of some radio programmers to its anti-establishment theme, “Home of the Brave” became Ms. Miller’s best-selling U.S. single.“I loved that song,” she said in a 2020 interview for an Oklahoma State University oral history project. “Unfortunately, it got a bad rap.”Over time, Ms. Miller landed about 30 singles on the Billboard charts, 27 of them in the country category and several of those in the top five. In the 1970s she worked with the prominent Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who guided her to another crossover hit with a cover of the Chiffons’ 1963 song “He’s So Fine,” which reached No. 5 on the country chart and No. 53 on the pop chart in 1971.Ms. Miller made her last major-label album in 1979, then mostly stayed in Oklahoma to raise her daughter and to help her husband, Monty Brooks, with his quarter-horse business. She resurfaced later with an album of patriotic material and then, after becoming a born-again Christian, sang gospel music.“I like to sing all kinds of songs, so I didn’t fit into a mold,” she told The Tulsa World in 2018.Ms. Miller at the Grammy Awards in 1966 with her fellow winners Johnny Mandel, left, and Herb Alpert. Her “Queen of the House” was named the year’s best female country vocal performance.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMyrna Joy Miller, the youngest of five sisters, was born on Nov. 29, 1941, in Phoenix, a stop on her family’s move from Oklahoma to Oakland, Calif., where her father, Johnny Bell Miller, a mechanic, had a job lined up. Her mother, Fay (Harper) Miller, was a homemaker.The family often played music and sang together. Johnny Miller was a skilled fiddler, and Myrna’s sister Patricia, whom she idolized, taught her to harmonize.Aware of their daughter’s talent, Myrna’s parents entered her in singing contests, and her father sneaked her into bars, where she would climb atop tables and, she said, “sing my heart out.” She became known as “the little girl with the big voice,” according to Hugh Foley’s book “Oklahoma Music Guide III.”The Millers eventually divorced, and when Myrna was 8 she was put on a bus to Blanchard, a small town just outside Oklahoma City, to live with her paternal grandmother.Two songs Ms. Miller heard growing up made her want to become a professional singer. One was Mario Lanza’s version of “La Donna è Mobile” from “Rigoletto.” The other was a No. 1 hit for Debbie Reynolds in 1957.“The day I knew I would devote my life to singing was the day I first heard Debbie Reynolds sing ‘Tammy,’” Ms. Miller wrote on her website.After graduating from Blanchard High School in 1959, she got a job as a secretary in Oklahoma City and moved into the Y.W.C.A., where she would practice the folk songs she learned at a local library.Her hopes of a recording career got a jump-start one night at a coffeehouse where she was the opening act for the singer Mike Settle. The popular folk trio the Limeliters came in to see Mr. Settle, but also caught Ms. Miller’s performance. Impressed, the group’s Lou Gottlieb urged her to move to California if she was serious about a singing career.She married her high school sweetheart, Mr. Brooks, in January 1962, and together they headed to Los Angeles. After arriving, they contacted the actor Dale Robertson, a fellow Oklahoman and a friend of Mr. Brooks’s family. He helped arrange an audition at Capitol Records, which quickly signed Ms. Miller and suggested that she change her first name.Her first record, “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe,” was a collection of folk songs on which she was accompanied by session players like Glen Campbell and, she told the Oklahoma publication 405 magazine in 2012, an “unknown teenager” providing some of the backup vocals who later became known as Cher.The record’s timing was unfortunate.“By the time I cut my first LP with Capitol, folk music was on its way out,” she said. Thus began her pivot to pop and country and a career that took her to, among other places, Hawaii on a tour with the Beach Boys; television shows like “American Bandstand,” “Hullabaloo” and “Hee Haw”; and a 15-year run as a top draw in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.Her album of patriotic songs, recorded in 1987, found its way to Vice President George Bush, who invited her to sing at his campaign rallies when he ran for president the next year. When he was elected, she sang at an inaugural ball.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Miller is survived by two sisters, Carol Cooper and Vivian Cole, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 2014.Ms. Miller’s final recording, “Wayfaring Stranger,” is to be released next month on what would have been her 81st birthday. A mix of country and gospel songs, it includes a new version of “Queen of the House” and the title song, a 19th-century spiritual that was part of her repertoire when she started out as a folk singer 60 years ago.Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Ahmed Alshaiba, Yemeni Music Master, Is Dead at 32

      by

      He taught himself to play the oud, a lutelike stringed instrument, and made a splash on social media with his cover versions of pop songs.Ahmed Alshaiba, who as a teenager in Yemen taught himself the oud, a fretless lutelike Arabic instrument, and who after immigrating to the United States built an online following with his cover versions of pop songs that deftly blended Western and Middle Eastern influences, died on Sept. 28 in a car accident. He was 32.His brother Ali Shibah confirmed the death, in New York State, but provided no other details. Working from a studio in his apartment in Mamaroneck, N.Y., in Westchester County, Mr. Alshaiba recorded videos of himself playing instrumental versions of popular songs, movie themes and Arabic music — sometimes with other musicians, sometimes unaccompanied — and posted them on his YouTube channel. He also played guitar and percussion instruments like the congas and the daf, a large drum.His oud playing added a distinctly Middle Eastern sound to his versions of Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” which has had nearly 7.3 million YouTube views; Alan Walker’s “Faded” (6.9 million); Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” (6.8 million); and other songs. His oud seems to deepen the mood of alienation that Simon & Garfunkel brought to “The Sound of Silence” (nearly 1.8 million), and brings a different kind of energy to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” (1.4 million).In all, his YouTube videos have generated nearly 113 million views.A charismatic performer who interacted enthusiastically with his fans on YouTube and social media platforms, Mr. Alshaiba also produced his own takes on music from “Star Wars” (during which he wore disguises like a Darth Vader helmet and a Yoda mask) and “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”One of the last videos he posted before his death, on TikTok, was a snippet of his version of the music from HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the prequel to “Game of Thrones.”“He was one of a kind,” Ravid Kahalani, a founder of Yemen Blues, a band that is influenced by Yemenite, West African, Latin and jazz music, said in a phone interview. Mr. Alshaiba, he added, “had a different intelligence on the oud and a special, soulful touch that was softer than other oud players.”Mr. Alshaiba occasionally played with or opened for Yemen Blues at Joe’s Pub, Brooklyn Bowl and Symphony Space in New York City. He also performed in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait.But, his brother Ali said in an email, he also “did lots of charity shows; that’s why he remained broke.”Mr. Kahalani said that he once asked Mr. Alshaiba why he recorded so many covers.“He said to me something beautiful: ‘I want people to understand that the oud is not only Arabic, it’s everything.’ But the really special thing is how he played traditional Yemeni music, which really opened the gates of God.”Ahmed Alshaiba was born Ahmed Nasser Shibah on May 15, 1990, in Sana, Yemen. His father, Nasser, was a businessman, and his mother, Fanda Zeyad, was a homemaker.Ahmed had no musical ambitions until he was 14, when he watched his brother Hussein take lessons on an oud that their sister Malkah had bought him as a gift in Egypt.“When my other brother lost interest,” Ali Shibah said, “Ahmed picked up the oud and started his self-taught journey.”In an interview with The Times of Israel in 2018, Mr. Alshaiba said: “I would play for hours until my fingers hurt. I would listen to a song and could play it immediately after.” He skipped school to spend time in a music store where, he said, “I would help clean and tune every shipment of oud instruments, and in return the owner would let me stay in the store and practice.”Mr. Alshaiba moved to the United States in 2012 and worked for several years at his brother’s convenience store in Mamaroneck while starting to post cover songs online. In 2017, the Australian singer Sia posted his version of her song “The Greatest” which has more than 1.7 million views on Instagram“I was having doubts about succeeding in the U.S.,” Mr. Alshaiba told The Times of Israel, “but this gesture gave me the validation I needed.” Encouraged, he soon left his job to pursue music full time.A month before Mr. Alshaiba died, he released his first album, “Malahide,” which he produced himself and had been working on for several years. He wrote all the songs.In addition to his sister Malkah Shibah and his brothers Ali and Hussein Shibah, Mr. Alshaiba is survived by his mother; two other sisters, Fauziah and Thahaba Shibah; and two other brothers, Mohammed and Najib Shibah.In an interview and mini-concert at TED Studios in 2017, Mr. Alshaiba discussed his passion for the oud.“When you’re playing this instrument, you’re hugging it,” he said. “So you’re feeling the notes coming out in the body of this lovely instrument.” More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      How Fred Again.. Turns Digital Bricolage Into Dance-Floor Weepers

      by

      The Brian Eno-mentored musician Fred Gibson is amassing a following with tracks built from social feeds and his iPhone. The intricate and emotional results can sometimes even start a party.On a recent Friday night in Manhattan, pandemonium surrounded a waffle truck parked on the corner of 56th Street and 11th Avenue, as thumping beats and the aroma of fresh batter poured from within. An enthusiastic young woman thrust an inflatable giraffe head festooned with a red glow stick through one of the truck’s windows, bopping it to the music. A security guard ripped it away.Inside the vehicle, holding court, stood a grinning Fred Gibson, the 29-year-old British songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist better known as Fred again.., who was following up a show at the Hell’s Kitchen venue Terminal 5 with an ad hoc after-party.“Chaotic,” he later happily proclaimed the impromptu event, where he previewed tracks from his third album, “Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9, 2022),” out Friday. “Just great.”“Actual Life 3” is the culmination of music that Gibson — a pop hitmaker for Ed Sheeran, BTS and the British grime star Stormzy — started releasing at the end of 2019, after his mentor Brian Eno urged him to forgo writing for others and prioritize his own work. The result is lush electronica-rooted piano balladry, wistful nu-disco anthems and the occasional U.K. garage firestarter, all threaded with samples culled from the far reaches of YouTube, Instagram and his iPhone camera roll — a sonic bricolage of digitally documented lives.A few days after the concert, Gibson — a smiley, ebullient, occasionally sheepish presence — rolled a cigarette on a West Village bar patio and recalled Eno needling him when he was experiencing a peak of commercial success but had a brewing fear of artistic complacency. He had met Eno at one of the artist’s occasionally star-studded a cappella gatherings as a teenager, and wowed him with his production talents, which led to Eno (“a wizened cliff-pusher,” as Gibson described him) bringing him on as a producer on some of his projects.“I know that Fred has sometimes referred to me as a mentor, but actually, it works both ways,” Eno said by phone. “What he’s doing is quite unfamiliar — I’ve actually never heard anything quite like this before. He always seems to be doing it in relation to a community of people around him — the bits of vocal and ambient sounds.”Eno was referring to the basic construction of a Fred again.. song. Many tracks start with Gibson using one of thousands of ambient drones Eno once gave him. From there, he’ll go into his digital scrapbook of found footage. While some samples employ familiar voices — the moaning rap of the Atlanta superstar Future, an Instagram Live freestyle of the rapper Kodak Black, vocals from a call with the Chicago house D.J. the Blessed Madonna — the vast majority are relatively obscure. They include a stadium worker Gibson joked around with after a Sheeran show, audio from a nightclub he recorded with his iPhone, spoken word poets and burgeoning bedroom pop singers he caught glimpses of while scrolling his various social media feeds.Brian Eno, Gibson’s mentor, described his music as “romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesGibson then cuts, distorts, pitch-shifts, stretches or compresses the samples into shimmering cinematic soundscapes, and sings atop them in his soft, pleading croon. Some are cavernous, others dense, but they all retain the deep warmth of something homespun — the ideal foundation for lyrics about feeling too much and not nearly enough that map thin fault lines demarcating love and loss. The result are tracks that leave listeners both laughing and weeping on the dance floor.Gibson estimated that he’s experimented with thousands of different ways to turn the speech of complete strangers into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. “But at the beginning it was very labored, quite tortured, if I’m honest,” he added. “It felt like I was distorting their spirit.”One track was crafted from footage of a young Toronto-based performance artist named Sabrina Benaim performing her piece “Explaining My Depression to My Mother,” which would go on to become the thumping dirge “Sabrina (I Am a Party).”The source material is a full-tilt confessional characterizing the vicissitudes of anxiety and depression — not exactly the kind of thing obviously complemented by beats from a successful pop producer. “I was anxious with everything I was putting onto these people,” Gibson said. “I felt like I was projecting onto them.”Speaking by phone from Toronto, Benaim remembered hearing the finished track for the first time, after Gibson reached out over Instagram. “It was the wildest thing,” she said and laughed. “It was like I left my body. He handled the emotional center of it so well — he just cared so much about not ruining or soiling the poem in any way. It’s coming from such a careful place.”Romy Croft — a singer-songwriter in the xx who tapped Gibson to produce her own debut solo single, “Lifetime” — worked with Gibson and Haai on “Lights Out,” a song released earlier this year, in nearly the same way. Croft had given Gibson an xx demo that never came to fruition; a year later, Gibson mentioned having done something with it.As she explained in a recent phone call, she was gobsmacked by the result, a dance track that mixes laser squelches, piano chords, a skittering beat and Croft’s wistful vocals. “He had just given it a new lease of life,” Croft said. To her, the record reflects a thematic link in his work: “A thread of emotion and vulnerability within it that ties it together, as well as a lot of joy.”Gibson continues to experiment with turning strangers’ speech into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEno said he finds many of Gibson’s samples to be “tender and beautiful.” “To marry that with the kind of energetic chaos of the music he does is, I think, a beautiful combination,” he added. “It’s romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”The new album may be the apotheosis of this aesthetic. Gibson’s first two LPs, made during and immediately after the pandemic lockdown, concerned the illness of a close friend and its aftermath, and are often pensive affairs. “Actual Life 3” is an unfurling of sorts, a more cathartic, misty-eyed dance-floor moment. Its unlikely collaborators include Kieran Hebden, a.k.a. the electronic musician and producer Four Tet, known for the kind of dense, protean electronica compositions that rarely (if ever) abide anything close to a typical pop song’s structure.“He pulls me in a direction I wouldn’t normally be working in,” Hebden said on a recent FaceTime call. Gibson’s songs, he explained, are “great melodies and chord sequences, elegantly done. The work that has been done is considered. It doesn’t always sound ridiculously slick — there’s nothing very cynical about it. It’s quite direct, and honest; it just feels deeply refreshing, isn’t hidden away, and isn’t super mysterious.”“But,” Hebden paused, “the mystery of it is: How can anybody make it look so easy?” He laughed.At the waffle truck earlier this month, after playing the last in a series of then-unreleased songs to his increasingly hyped crowd, Gibson told Hebden — who was among his mischief-makers that night — to pick a final song. Hebden looked at him knowingly, and changed tracks. Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” blasted over the speakers. The crowd exploded into verse, and Gibson danced along, laughing. The musicians made their way out of the truck and back into the venue thronged by fans, another memory made in the night, soon to be posted for posterity — potentially, the start of another song. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘Carmen’ Returns to Its Comic Opera Roots

      by

      MasterVoices sheds the typical grand-opera treatment of Bizet’s classic to reveal a sleeker, funnier show.Do we truly know Bizet’s “Carmen”?To be fair, the opera could single-handedly fill out a playlist of classical music’s greatest hits, with its Overture, Habanera and “Toreador Song,” among other gems. It has played at the Metropolitan Opera over a thousand times since it debuted there in 1884.But that grand-opera version, with its recitative — and some ballet music adapted from the Bizet catalog — was finalized after the composer’s death. When the work premiered at the Opéra Comique in Paris, in 1875, audiences instead heard spoken dialogue in between the score’s rip-roaring numbers.When you remove the subsequent meddling, and dial things back to Bizet’s original idea for “Carmen,” you get a sleeker, funnier show: one in which the tawdry violence and blithe indifference to pat morality comes off with a devil-may-care kick.Most companies stick to the grand-opera confection. Yet MasterVoices — New York’s scrappy, pop-up music drama specialists — brought the original idea to town on Tuesday for a one-night-only performance at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. (It was sung and spoken in English, using a fluid, ingenious translation by Sheldon Harnick, the Broadway veteran and lyricist of “Fiddler on the Roof.”)As sung by the mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson, this Carmen was suitably entrancing, but also a savvy operator. Her mix of laser-sharp intonation and a dark timbre has been heard in smaller roles at the Met, where she is a member of the young artist program, but the intimacy of the Rose Theater allowed her greater freedom for subtle dramatic effects.When rebuffing ceaseless male attention in Act I, Costa-Jackson used cabaret theatrics, including flicks of the finger and generous servings of side eye, to emphasize how much of Carmen’s story — even her vaunted independence — amounts to a show observed by the citizenry of Seville.There were slight signs of pushing too hard during the Habanera, but Costa-Jackson’s aggressive, overall take on the role was a success, especially by the third act: As Carmen came face to face with a grim recognition of her unalterable fate, she had full command of a glowering power, easily slicing through some of Bizet’s most dramatic scoring.Just as strong was the soprano Mikaela Bennett as Micaëla. Her top notes sparked as clearly on Tuesday as they did in Michael Gordon’s doom-metal chamber opera “Acquanetta” in 2018. John Brancy’s suavely warm baritone made for a dashing Escamillo. And although the tenor Terrence Chin-Loy’s honeyed sound as Don José could overindulge in the character’s naïveté, he produced a climactic characterization of authentic, thrilling malevolence.Ted Sperling, MasterVoices’ artistic director, conducted an Orchestra of St. Luke’s performance of polished, singing ease. During the first act’s expositional recounting of Carmen’s knife fight, Sperling rushed the tempo a bit, making it difficult for the skilled singers of the MasterVoices chorus to be heard as cleanly as elsewhere. Yet his reading was in service of an evening that strutted.MasterVoices tends to underpromise then overdeliver, and Tuesday’s performance was carefully not billed as a staging. But with this cast — and some choreography by Gustavo Zajac — it was much more than a mere concert.Previously, I have admired the way Sperling and his players can figure out a problem piece like Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark” or the largely forgotten “Let ’Em Eat Cake,” by the Gershwins. Their only real problem is budgetary. Short runs or one-night performances are great for audiences in the know. But imagine a stable home, and enduring engagements, for these musicians. They could go from being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it novelty to something that New York desperately lacks: a standing, smashing comic opera company.CarmenPerformed on Tuesday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      On ‘Midnights’, Taylor Swift Is Revising Her Own Love Stories

      by

      On “Midnights,” the singer-songwriter probes the realizations and reckonings of many millennial women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.On the plucky, bucolic “Love Story” — the first single from her 2008 sophomore album “Fearless,” and one of the mainstream smashes that initiated her crossover from country to pop — a then 19-year-old Taylor Swift felt emboldened to rewrite Shakespeare, imagining a happy ending for literature’s most famously doomed couple.“Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” Swift’s Romeo proposes in the final chorus, as an accelerating tempo and sudden key change kick the song into an ecstatic gear. The answer to the couple’s woes, “Love Story” earnestly suggests, and the only sacrament that could prevent their story from becoming a tragedy, is that trusted deus ex machina of Shakespeare’s comedies: holy matrimony.Fourteen years later, on her moody 10th studio album, “Midnights,” Swift doesn’t sound quite so sure that Juliet should have accepted the offer. “Midnights” oozes with ambivalence, not just about the sorts of starry-eyed, fairy-tale endings Swift’s earlier songs used to dream of, but also about the expectations and traditional timelines of adulthood writ large.“All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride,” Swift sings on “Lavender Haze,” the album’s sleek introductory airing of grievances, adding, “The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.” Later, on the smeary, pulsating “Midnight Rain,” Swift revisits an old relationship seemingly thwarted by her professional ambition and ambivalence about settling down: “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name,” she sings, Jack Antonoff’s production pitching her voice down to a notably masculine register.At 32, Swift is still as much an object of tabloid scrutiny as when she was that 19-year-old ingénue. But the excessive energy that the gossip pages used to spend on who she was dating has now transformed into a fixation on whether she and her longtime partner, the actor Joe Alwyn, are ready to get engaged, or have already gotten engaged, or have been secretly married for who knows how long. Swift’s relationship with Alwyn has been her most resolutely private and also her longest, having now reached a duration that can invite unwanted speculation even for people who are not megawatt superstars but mere mortals trying to make it through a Thanksgiving dinner. Frustration with this line of questioning bubbles over throughout “Midnights.”In both its self-referential, backward-glancing sound and its lyrical preoccupations, “Midnights” is a record about stasis, arrested development, and that liminal time between yesterday and tomorrow. “I’ve got this thing where I get older but just never wiser,” Swift sings on the album’s infectious, playfully self-flagellating lead single, “Anti-Hero.” (In a sense, it’s a sequel to her affecting 2019 song “The Archer,” on which she plays pop star as Peter Pan and admits, “I never grew up, it’s getting so old.”)As inwardly focused as these songs are, they also reflect something about the way Swift is perceived in pop culture. On a recent episode of Vulture’s podcast “Into It,” the host Sam Sanders asked his guest, the NPR music critic Ann Powers, why Swift — more than fellow stars who entered the spotlight young, like Adele and Beyoncé — has stayed fixed in the public imagination as a kind of eternal, “crimp-haired” teenager. “Taylor doesn’t have a child,” Powers answered, in an exchange that has since sparked a lively discussion on social media. “And in our patriarchal society, when does a woman change? When she becomes a mother.”“We don’t know how to accept childless women as adults,” Powers added. “I’m going to thank you, Taylor, for not having kids yet because we really need more childless women out there showing their path.”While Swift has almost never explicitly imagined motherhood in her songs (save for a brief, hypothetical lyric on the “Folklore” track “Peace”), there are a few lines on “Midnights” that feel striking in that context. Take that spiky third verse of “Anti-Hero” — which Swift expands and dramatizes in the music video she directed — when she sings, “I have this dream my daughter-in-law kills me for the money/she thinks I left them in the will.” Even in this darkly comic rendering, motherhood is presented as a potential dilution of the legacy over which Swift has always exerted meticulous control. (Swift, with the last laugh and the tightest rein, has left her fictional heirs nothing.)Then, of course, there’s the song’s instantly memed, irresistibly quotable bon mot, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I’m a monster on the hill.” The lyric is enigmatic enough to invite plenty of speculation — Is it about distorted body image? Is it a “30 Rock” reference? — but it certainly suggests some kind of anxiety about aging in an industry that fetishizes feminine youth. The Gen Z star Olivia Rodrigo has lovingly referred to Swift as “mom,” and when Rodrigo’s debut single, “Drivers License,” became a hit, Swift winkingly quoted something her own mother once said about her: “I say that’s my baby and I’m really proud.”Since Swift is one of the most famous people on the planet, it’s hard to consider much of anything about her life “relatable” — which poses an artistic challenge for a singer-songwriter who prizes connection with her audience. The divide between Swift and Swiftie felt most vast on 2010s blockbuster albums like “1989” and “Reputation,” on which Swift fixated on feuds with other celebrities and the minutiae of her public persona. “Midnights” is still largely about Being Taylor Swift, but the attention she brings to her own sense of inertia and discomfort allow her to tap into something larger than herself.Like Swift, much of her cohort is also putting off or forgoing supposedly transformative life events like marriage and parenthood, or at least attempting to reimagine what partnership and adulthood looks like in such a strange time to come of age. If “Folklore” was characterized as her pandemic album, “Midnights” feels like her are-we-ever-going-to-be-able-to-say-“post-pandemic” album, a work of exasperation and spiritual exhaustion. Here, Swift sounds more authentically like an ambassador of millennial unease than she has in some time.For all its evocations of stasis, though, “Midnights” does represent a maturation in Swift’s perspective, particularly when it comes to depictions of other women. Unlike, say, the regrettable “Better Than Revenge” or even the campily catty “Bad Blood,” the Swift of “Midnights” is no longer chastising other women from a suspiciously lofty position of moral superiority; she’s pointing a finger at a culture that has enforced a different set of rules for her female peers or — occasionally to uncomfortably self-deprecating excess — she’s blaming herself. “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid,” she sings on the intricately composed finale, “Mastermind.” “So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since.”Crucially, though, she’s also revising herself, revisiting those streamlined fairy tales she used to propagate and adding in all the doubts and complications she once left out — or wasn’t yet aware of. Most effective is “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” which plays out like a letter to her younger self, or maybe one of those side-by-side Instagram posts that points out what parts of a too-perfect picture had been Photoshopped. “I hosted parties and starved my body like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss,” Swift sings, presenting the supposedly innocent era of her early stardom with a new overlay of world-weariness and pain.As she suggests on a warm, contented ballad like “Sweet Nothings,” co-written with Alwyn under the pseudonym William Bowery, Swift now seems to have the love she so desperately believed would usher in her happy ending on her early classics like “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “Love Story.” But the brooding “Midnights” is also proof that love hasn’t solved all her problems. The only thing that can help with that, she realizes, at the exhilarating end of “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” is chasing the next song — even if it’s just a more accurate rendering of a scene she’s already set. That, though, is something of a flex. She used to rewrite Shakespeare. Now she rewrites Taylor Swift. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Kanye West, Dropped by CAA, Makes Adidas and Corporate Partners Squirm

      by

      The antisemitic outbursts and provocations by the artist now known as Ye have raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Update: Adidas said on Tuesday that it is cutting ties with Kanye West.Kanye West had already been burning bridges in the music industry. He was disinvited from performing at the Grammy Awards last spring after erratic behavior. He withdrew from headlining this year’s Coachella festival just over a week before it began. His last album was released not on streaming services, but exclusively on a proprietary $200 speaker device.This month Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, came under fire for making a series of antisemitic remarks and wearing a shirt with a slogan associated with white supremacists, putting some of his fashion-related businesses — which appear to be more lucrative these days than his musical ventures — in jeopardy.It has become a make-or-break moment for his career, and raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Adidas, the German sneaker giant whose collaboration with Ye’s company, Yeezy, has been estimated to be worth billions, has said that their partnership was “under review” — prompting the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “what more do you need to review?” It appeared that Adidas continued to sell his products, though. (On Tuesday, after this article was published, Adidas announced it would cut ties with Ye.) Ye ended his Yeezy Gap partnership last month, before the latest controversies erupted, but in recent days Gap sent out promotional emails for the Yeezy Gap hoodie.There have been some signs that the fashion industry is distancing itself from Ye, as the former halo effect of his celebrity turned into an Achilles’ heel after he appeared at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month in a shirt that read “White Lives Matter,” and then went on to make antisemitic remarks on social media and in a series of interviews, posting on Twitter that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”Balenciaga, whose fashion show Ye opened in Paris this month with a surprise modeling appearance, deleted him from its pictures and videos of the show. Similar images disappeared from Vogue Runway, the platform of record for fashion shows. And Skims, the shapewear brand started by Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, that he reportedly helped shape in design and aesthetic, described him as a “small minority shareholder” and said that he had “no active role at Skims.”And Ms. Kardashian condemned “hate speech” in a post on Twitter on Monday, which named no one but said: “I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”The designer Willy Chavarria, who last worked with Ye in 2020 on Yeezy Gap, said in an email, “I think it’s important for brands that use Ye for their gain like Balenciaga and Adidas to be forthcoming on their position on hate speech.”Ye has weathered crises before, especially since 2016, when he was hospitalized; he later said he had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In recent years he has been condemned for saying that Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves” and that centuries of slavery had been “a choice”; polarized fans with his embrace of right-wing politics and former President Donald J. Trump; launched a quixotic campaign for president in 2020; and split with Ms. Kardashian. He has continued to work amid it all.Much of the music industry, where an artist’s notoriety is often a key selling point, has appeared to take more of a wait-and-see attitude about his latest controversies.But there is uncertainty about his musical future, too. Ye is no longer represented by the Creative Artists Agency, one of the world’s major booking agencies, a representative of the company said. On Monday, the film and television studio MRC announced that it was shelving a completed documentary about Ye following his antisemitic outbursts. He is no longer signed to Def Jam, his longtime record company; his contract expired with his 2021 album, “Donda.” And Ye’s own label, G.O.O.D. Music, which has released music by other artists like the rapper Pusha T, is also no longer affiliated with Def Jam, according to a person briefed on the deals. A representative of Def Jam declined to comment, and Ye did not respond to questions sent to a representative.“Will Kanye bounce back from this?” asked Randy Phillips, who was the promoter for a benefit concert Ye performed with Drake last December at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum that drew more than 60,000 fans and was streamed live by Amazon. “He could. He’s a musical genius. But it’s going to take time. It’s not going to be immediate.”Reaching a High Note, Then FallingYe, floating above it all during his 2016 Saint Pablo Tour. After a series of onstage monologues, the tour was cut short.A J Mast for The New York TimesIn 2016, as he performed on a spaceshiplike platform that hovered over sold-out arena crowds during his Saint Pablo Tour, Ye appeared to be at the peak of his creative powers.More on Kanye WestKanye West, the rapper and fashion designer who now goes by Ye, has been at the center of several controversies.Runway Scandal: Ye wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt during a Paris fashion show. The use of the phrase, which the Anti-Defamation League has attributed to white supremacists, was widely condemned.Corporate Partners: A series of antisemitic outbursts by the artist have raised questions about how much offensive behavior companies are willing to tolerate from a proven moneymaker.Adidas Cuts Ties: The German sportswear giant, the most important partner in Ye’s fashion empire, ended its lucrative relationship with the rapper after his antisemitic remarks.Parler Deal: Parler, the social media service known for its right-wing audience, said that Ye would purchase its site, days after Instagram and Twitter restricted his accounts.His seventh studio album, “The Life of Pablo,” was his latest No. 1 hit and his show was received as an event. He was moving full-steam into the fashion world. His marriage to Ms. Kardashian, a reality-TV princess, had made him even more famous.But Ye never finished the tour.Shortly after he delivered a long, grievance-filled monologue at a concert in Sacramento that November, and abruptly ended the show after just a few songs, Ye was hospitalized, and the remainder of the tour was canceled.In some ways Ye’s music career has never quite recovered. In the six years since, his only performances have been scattered dates, with no proper tour befitting a major star. Once a frequent presence at the top of the Billboard charts, Ye has not had a huge hit in years. While his recent albums have usually opened at No. 1, they have then slid down the charts and been overshadowed by other releases.His career since has toggled between increasingly outrageous public controversies and sometimes remarkable creative achievements.On his 2021 album, “Donda,” he included industry pariahs like Marilyn Manson, who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, and DaBaby, who had made homophobic remarks and waffled about apologies. He made attacks on the comedian Pete Davidson, who was dating Ms. Kardashian, including in a music video in which an animated figure closely resembling Mr. Davidson is kidnapped and buried.Yet Ye’s “Sunday Service” performances — intimate, spiritual events including one at the Coachella festival in 2019 — mesmerized audiences. And his earlier period remains so popular that his catalog has held strong on streaming services, with more than 90 million streams a week in the United States over the last month, and a total of nearly four billion streams so far this year, according to the tracking service Luminate. His audience on the radio, on the other hand, has fallen by about 22 percent over the last month, as some stations have cut back on playing his songs.A Lucrative Fashion Partnership JeopardizedAt New York Fashion Week in 2015. The following year, he drew a crowd to Madison Square Garden for a fashion show and album premiere.Lucas Jackson/ReutersAs his music career has stumbled, Ye’s work in fashion has taken on new importance. The most lucrative corner of his empire appeared to be Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas, which began in 2013 after he left a collaboration with Nike. The Adidas deal, which involved both shoes and clothing, became hugely successful.Even before his recent controversies, Ye had been sparring publicly with Adidas executives, but so far the company has not elaborated on its statement more than two weeks ago that the partnership is “under review.” (The company announced Tuesday, after this article was published, that it was over.) There had been increasing pressure on the company to take action. On Sunday, after a group hung a banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews” over a Los Angeles freeway, Jeffrey I. Abrams, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director there, released a statement that concluded, “Decisive action against antisemitism by Adidas is long overdue.”It put Adidas in a difficult position. Its founder, Adi Dassler, belonged to the Nazi Party, and in Germany, where antisemitic statements made online can lead to prosecution, companies that played a role in the country’s dark history are often expected to uphold their responsibility to prevent the return of such sentiment.Ye has long been interested in fashion. In 2009, he interned at Fendi with Virgil Abloh, who went on to work with Ye’s Donda creative agency before starting his own brand. That year Ye also brought a group of collaborators and friends to “crash” Paris Fashion Week.A luxury debut (DW by Kanye West) at Paris Fashion Week in 2011 was critically savaged and lasted only two seasons, but his partnership with Adidas proved transformative. The company underwrote his clothing brand, Yeezy, which unveiled its first collection at New York Fashion Week in 2015, with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna and Diddy sitting in the front row.Within a few seasons Ye packed Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for a fashion show and album premiere. While his Season 4 show on Roosevelt Island in September 2016 proved a debacle, his potent combination of reality-TV celebrity, music stardom, sneaker success and establishment disruption was impossible to resist for an industry that often felt stuck in the last century.It is also why partnering with Yeezy was so appealing to Gap, the mall brand whose sales and cultural relevance were floundering. Gap hoped the partnership, announced in 2020, would last 10 years and generate $1 billion in annual sales.Instead it lasted about two years, and produced only two products until a third party — Balenciaga — was brought in to accelerate the line. Lawyers for Ye argued that Gap broke “contractual obligations.” Gap said it was “deciding to wind down the partnership.” Ye has suggested that he may open his own line of retail shops.Then, last month, Ye went to Paris. He modeled for Balenciaga, and held his own show, where he proved he could still draw top industry names — including the Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful and the designer John Galliano, who attended, and the model Naomi Campbell, who walked in the show.Before the event began, Ye offered what turned out to be a preview of what was to come: “You can’t manage me,” he told the crowd. “This is an unmanageable situation.”He made good on his promise.Courting Controversy, and the RightYe meeting with Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office in 2018.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesWith Ye in Paris, photographed in her own “White Lives Matter” shirt, was Candace Owens, a conservative activist and media personality who shares his love for the spotlight and taste for provocation.Ye has embraced conservative politics since 2016, when he announced his support for Mr. Trump, meeting him at Trump Tower while he was president-elect and later in the Oval Office when he was president.For several years he has associated with Ms. Owens, a fellow Trump supporter who has become one of the country’s most prominent Black critics of the Black Lives Matter movement. In April 2018, Ye tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” Ms. Owens accompanied him to an interview with TMZ Live the following month in which he called American slavery a “choice,” spurring outrage.“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years?” he said. “That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? We’re mentally in prison.”This month Ms. Owens posted on Twitter that Ye had been “officially kicked out of JP Morgan Chase bank,” which she described as “frightening.” In fact, Ye had decided to leave the bank, and he announced his intention to do in September on CNBC.Ye attended the Oct. 12 Nashville premiere of Ms. Owens’s documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM.” Ye then went on the podcast Drink Champs and questioned the official account of Mr. Floyd’s death, for which a police officer was convicted of murder. His remarks prompted outrage from the Floyd family and an apology from the show’s host, N.O.R.E.After Twitter and Instagram restricted Ye’s accounts this month in response to antisemitic posts, the social media platform Parler, which bills itself as a platform for uncancelable free speech, announced that it would be sold to Ye. Its chief executive, George Farmer, is Ms. Owens’s husband.Struggles With Mental HealthYe’s recent antisemitic outbursts and other provocations have prompted some in the music industry to wonder whether his behavior was related to his mental health struggles.Ye has long alluded to mental health issues in lyrics — as early as 2005, in “Gossip Files,” he raps, “They told my mama I was bipolar, had A.D.D.” — but his psychiatric treatment did not become part of the public record until 2016, when he was hospitalized.He has acknowledged a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but at times, including during his 2018 meeting with Mr. Trump, questioned it and said that his problem might have been sleep deprivation. He told David Letterman the following year that he had been “hyper-paranoid” when he was hospitalized, convinced that people wanted to kill him.He continued to address mental illness over the years in interviews, on social media and in his work, often expressing reluctance to take psychiatric medications. In 2018 he tweeted, “6 months off meds I can feel me again.”During the summer of 2020, when he was often disjointed, emotional and meandering on social media and in public appearances, Ms. Kardashian, who was still married to him, issued a statement on Instagram asking for “compassion and empathy” as he managed his symptoms, suggesting his family had tried and failed to get him into treatment.For a person with bipolar disorder, a manic episode is “a very sped-up state,” said David Miklowitz, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide.” “They’re full of ideas, sometimes ideas that get grandiose and delusionally unrealistic.”It can be difficult for friends and family to disentangle whether a person in a manic episode is delusional, or expressing their true beliefs.Rwenshaun Miller, 35, a psychotherapist who has bipolar disorder, said he regretted that Ye “doesn’t have someone around to take his phone” and ensure that he receives treatment. But he said the rapper should be forced to reckon with the consequences of his behavior. “I know it can make you do certain things, but it is also up to me to take accountability for things that happen when I am in a manic episode,” he said.The Industry Watches, and WaitsYe brought a Sunday Service performance to Coachella in 2019.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesWhile people in the entertainment industry, including many who have worked with Ye in the past, privately express shock about his recent comments, few have spoken publicly.But the heads of two major talent agencies that do not represent Ye have called for people to stop working with him. Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of Endeavor, the parent company of the agency WME, wrote an opinion article for The Financial Times calling on entertainment companies — including Spotify, Apple and “whoever organizes West’s tours” — to cease working with Ye.Jeremy Zimmer, the chief executive of United Talent Agency, wrote in an internal email that “we’re seeing a surge in antisemitism in our communities, fueled by Kanye’s comments” and urged a boycott.Representatives of Spotify and Apple did not respond to requests for comment. Universal Music Group, the parent of Def Jam, and AEG Presents, the global concert company that puts on Coachella, declined to comment.Some of the industry’s silence may be strategic, as key players wait to see if Ye — still widely considered an immensely talented musician with a gift for seizing attention — will express contrition and begin a comeback cycle. A successful one could be lucrative for any partner.Melissa Eddy More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Rupert Holmes, on Creating a Victorian-Flavored Escape in Upstate NY

      by

      The artist you know from ‘The Piña Colada Song’ has a new play about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a new novel coming out next year — but still no plans to live in the city.Over the decades, the playwright, novelist and singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes has collected quite the haul of trophies and treasures. They include — deep breath, now — two Tony Awards (for the book and score of his 1985 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”), two Edgar Awards, 16 gold records, and 15 platinum records, including for his 1979 earworm “Escape.” (You undoubtedly know it as “The Piña Colada Song”).In his home studio, Mr. Holmes has a framed thank-you note from Barbra Streisand, for his contributions to her 1975 album “Lazy Afternoon,” as a composer and co-producer, and a signed Rosebud matchbook from Orson Welles, whom he met on a talk show. He also has a piano bench that belonged to Marvin Hamlisch, a gift from Mr. Hamlisch’s widow.But there is one thing that Mr. Holmes does not have — has never had and never wanted to have — despite all of his Times Square-centric pursuits: a permanent address in New York City.“When I’m working on a show, I get some sort of accommodations in Manhattan for a couple of months,” said Mr. Holmes, 75, whose new play, “All Things Equal: The Life & Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” will be at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y., from Nov. 3 to Nov. 27, and whose thriller “Murder Your Employer,” the first book in a new series, is due out in February. “But for me, New York has always been a place that’s like a thermonuclear reactor, where everything interesting and exciting happens. And then you want to leave at the end of the day and calm down.”Rupert Holmes, the Tony Award winning writer and composer of the 1985 musical “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and “The Piña Colada Song,” lives with his wife, Liza, in a colonial-style house in Cold Spring, N.Y.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesRupert Holmes, 75Occupation: Playwright, novelist, singer-songwriterLost in translation: “When I was three and a half, my parents told me we were moving from England to a place called Long Island. I thought, ‘Oh, pirates and lagoons.’ And it turned out to be Levittown, Long Island.”In 1980, Mr. Holmes and his wife, Liza, a lawyer, settled in Tenafly, N.J. They had a snug house they loved in a nice community that was within quick reach of the city. But when the couple’s 10-year-old daughter, Wendy, died suddenly from an undiagnosed brain tumor in 1986, “we couldn’t stay there,” he said. “Her friends would walk by the house; her bedroom was empty. We just couldn’t do it. So we moved to Scarsdale.”Again, nice house, quiet street, easy commute. There they stayed for 22 years. “Then, once again, a child issue,” Mr. Holmes said.Timothy, the younger of the couple’s two sons, is “severely autistic,” he said. “He doesn’t have language, really,” and he was aging out of a local care facility. There was an excellent adult-treatment program farther afield, but it was open only to residents of Putnam and Dutchess Counties. Relocating was less than ideal, “but we tried to make the most of it,” he said. “We wanted this to feel like a good thing.”Thirteen years ago, the Holmeses moved to a hillside colonial-style house in Cold Spring, N.Y., where, depending on the room and the window, they could see woods, gardens, the Hudson River, Storm King Mountain, Crows Nest Mountain, West Point or some fine combination.The piano bench in the basement studio once belonged to Marvin Hamlisch, with whom Mr. Holmes collaborated on a stage adaptation of the 1963 movie “The Nutty Professor.”Andy Ryan for The New York TimesThe couple chose Cold Spring in part because of a key resemblance to Nyack, where they both grew up and were high school sweethearts: The main stem in both villages slopes down to the Hudson. The house was also appealing for its proximity to the train station — a 12-minute walk, critical for Mr. Holmes, who has never learned to drive. “One of my eccentricities,” he said.But the move was not without drama. The couple stayed in Scarsdale for several months after closing on the property so that Mr. Holmes could finish a project in Manhattan. It was winter, and the pipes in the new house froze and burst, flooding the place. To focus on the good news, the house was insured. And because they hadn’t yet shuttled their possessions upstate, nothing was lost. Plus, they now had an opportunity to make some design adjustments.Borrowing square footage from a porch, they built a sunroom adjacent to the dining room. On the second floor, a wall between two small bedrooms came down to make a more expansive office for Mr. Holmes. Soil was excavated so that he could have a window — let there be light — in his basement studio. And the powder room was redone in a symphony of black-and-gold lacquer to serve as a color-appropriate backdrop for his many framed gold records. When a plumber comes to do repair work, Mr. Holmes said ruefully, “his quote changes after he’s been in the bathroom.”The British-born Mr. Holmes began life as David Goldstein; he changed his name when he got into the music business in the late 1960s. “Rupert” was a nod to the poet Rupert Brooke. “Holmes” was a tip of the deerstalker to …. well, it’s pretty elementary.A kidney-shaped platform is a favorite spot where Mr. Holmes likes to read al fresco.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesWith its show posters, Hirschfeld caricatures, framed sheet music and shelves of scripts, awards and branded mugs, the house could be viewed as celebration of Mr. Holmes’s life in the entertainment business. But really, it’s a valentine to Victoriana and to Baker Street’s most famous resident.The Victorian hat stand in the foyer sets the tone. Three rare Sherlock Holmes movie posters and an Inverness cape hang in the dining room, along with a painting of the legendary detective and Dr. Watson that Mr. Holmes commissioned. The Victorian cabinet that he and Ms. Holmes bought early in their marriage sits in the living room. A rose-colored globe lamp on a marble-topped Victorian-style table keeps the theme going in the sunroom. A Victorian student lamp helps light the office.Just before the pandemic, Mr. Holmes’s next-door neighbor decided to sell his house and an adjoining parcel of land. “I realized this was the last piece of property in Cold Spring with a view of the Hudson that did not have a house on it,” Mr. Holmes said. “And I was probably the only person in the world who wouldn’t want to develop that land and build a house on it to sell or live in.”The view from the bay window in the living room takes in the Hudson River and Storm King Mountain.Andy Ryan for The New York TimesHe knew that if he didn’t buy the land, someone else would. Hello bulldozers, goodbye expansive water views. “Without a moment’s thought, I offered him well above what he was asking,” he said. “So now I’ve gone from having a house with a small footprint to having around three acres.”Cleared of scrub and weeds, the terrain has become a sloping pocket park complete with a gazebo. A small platform beneath towering oaks is a favored destination for Mr. Holmes when he wants a break. Or, as he once so lucratively put it, an escape.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More