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      Rivers Cuomo’s Very Complicated, Highly Organized Life

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      Preparing to release a new EP in Weezer’s “Sznz” series, the band’s leader explained how he keeps himself on track — and how he learned to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language.The Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo knows how people think about Weezer. The veteran rock band has dedicated much of 2022 to promoting “Sznz,” a four-part series of EPs that ostensibly correspond to the different seasons, but also stand in for eras in the band’s history. “‘Spring’ was the easy-breezy side of Weezer, nobody’s really going to object to that,” he said. “‘Summer’ was more like ’90s alt-rock Weezer, which lots of people will be relieved to hear.”The trick now was “Autumn,” due Sept. 22, which was still being written when we talked in mid-July. “‘Autumn’ is dance rock, which is not something we’ve traditionally been able to get away with,” he admitted. “It’s really hard to make it both dance and rock and Weezer. It’s very easy for that to turn into something that nobody likes.”Weezer certainly enjoys multitasking. Earlier this year, the band concluded the Hella Mega Tour, a joint bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy that wrapped in Europe, where Cuomo said he experienced “the big dream when you were 12 years old lying in bed at night — 50,000 fans in stadiums, feeling the power of rock.” The band released two full-length records in 2021 and planned a Broadway residency for this fall that was ultimately canceled because of production costs and lagging ticket sales. And Cuomo is heavily involved in running his own Discord, a private chat server where Weezer fans are invited to talk with him, weigh in on new music and even act as de facto creative assistants.At home in Los Angeles during a rare moment of downtime, Cuomo spoke via phone about 10 of his beloved cultural products. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Mr. Rivers’ Neighborhood” The core musical values of my Discord are probably quite similar to the people who were posting on Weezer message boards in 2001, and maybe similar to people who were writing fan letters to [the Weezer superfans] Mykel and Carli in 1996. There’s maybe six or seven thousand people who have joined the server, and often the results of what I’m working on turn out better if I have lots of smart people helping out.2. Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas The thing I’ve found most fulfilling in my life in the last year or two is that every night, I go on my Discord and I livestream myself playing Beethoven’s sonatas in order. I play anywhere from 45 to 75 minutes, and it’s just so deeply satisfying to me. It’s like going on this tour of the most sublime emotional landscape — from the most tender moments to the most head-banging moments, tragic moments, frightening moments. It doesn’t matter what happened that day or what kind of mood I’m in — by the end of that hour, I’m good.3. Mouth Taping Sleep has historically been a little challenging for me — I’ll often wake up in the middle of the night, wide-awake, and my body and mind have no interest in going back to sleep. But somebody told me if you tape your mouth shut with athletic tape, you’ll get much deeper sleep. I tried it, and it works great. At night, I say good night to my wife and then keep my mouth shut. The first night I was a little panicky, and gasping for breath through my nostrils, but then my body calmed down and I got a great night’s sleep.4. TikTok As a consumer, TikTok is obviously amazing; it’s freakishly good at knowing what I’m actually interested in. As a creator, it’s a real game changer because now songs that would otherwise have zero chance of reaching an audience can become gigantic without the help or approval of any gatekeepers. The song “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” was a B-side from “Pinkerton,” and now it’s getting 100,000 streams a day. Another example is “The Good Life” — that’s a song we tried to release as a radio single, but nobody would play it. I just made a TikTok of me doing a stupid dance, and within 24 hours it had a half a million views.5. Coding The process of building and writing the script that would solve the problem — I realized I enjoy that more than whatever work I was supposed to be doing with the results. It satisfies a very deep part of my brain to work on making the systems around it more efficient, more automated; I’d be happy to spend 10 hours working to make something that would save 10 seconds of mindless labor. For decades, I’ve had boxes of cassettes and Dropbox folders of MP3 of demos, thousands of them. It didn’t seem right to put out vinyl or CDs, or even iTunes or Spotify. Building Weezify seemed like a cool solution to that longstanding problem of what to do.6. Asana Work Management Platform My life is quite complex now, and I have all these complicated projects like building apps, or building the four-part “Sznz” tetralogy. There’s all these ideas, so it’s great to have them in Asana; it’s like my long-term memory storage. When you move a task from the to-do column to the in-progress column, and click it, this rainbow-colored unicorn flies across the screen. It’s all very rewarding.7. Audible Semi-famously, we have a song called “The Grapes of Wrath,” which is all about my love for Audible and listening to it in the middle of the night. I’m listening to “The Corrections” now, and I’m not sure why, but there’s moments that strike me as so funny I burst out laughing at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I wake up my wife. It’s definitely a corrective against any sense of romanticization you might have about life before the hyper-internet era — and for me, life back in Connecticut, because I grew up in Connecticut. It’s like, [shocked voice] Oh, yeah! That was super bleak. That’s why I moved to L.A., and that’s why I’m doing what I do, and that’s why we invented the internet.8. Farm Tourism At the end of the tour, we spent a few days in the Cotswolds, in the English countryside. We would do things like go to a farm and feed the cows, or do some falconry. My daughter’s 15, so she wanted something a little more thrilling. There’s this giant, ancient castle called Warwick, with a dungeon you can go through. It’s one of those horrifying experiences where you have to participate. I had to go up there in front of everyone and go through this torture routine where they humiliate me; they’re not actually touching me, but they make me bend over in front of the whole crowd and basically castrate me. It was just horrifying, but I guess that’s the kind of tourism we’re into these days.9. Vipassana Meditation In May of next year, it will mark my 20th year of meditating two hours every day. It’s kind of the foundation on which everything else I do is placed. In 2003, I was kind of stuck after our fourth album; I started working with Rick Rubin, and he suggested meditation. When I first started, it was specifically like, “I’m doing this so that I can write better songs.” Now, it’s a little broader — I just want a better life, whatever that means. At the deepest level, it’s strengthening my equanimity so that whatever’s happening outside — good news, bad news — I can stay calm and be happy. And if I’m calm and happy, then I tend to treat other people better, and I tend to make decisions that are better for my own future and the people around me. Less shooting myself in the foot.10. Foreign Language Banter I’ve taken language classes before, but to do it systematically is new. This is me looking for ways to make touring fun, and it’s also helpful because it improves my stage banter, which is always the part of the show I’m most stressed about. I’m saying pretty basic stuff, but because it’s in their native tongue, it’s automatically amazing. I worked really hard at it, and then I was also able to write a script that accesses a Google spreadsheet. I have 100 common phrases in there, and then each column is a different language — all these different places we went, including Gaelic and Celtic and Basque. The script will look up the translation automatically and auto-populate any empty cell in the spreadsheet, so I can just look through that and know how to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language. More

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      How Music Loops Help Me Feel More Present

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      Loops open a dimension where, although time is ticking forward at its usual pace, I’m moving at my own speed, appreciating my body and the world around me.There once was a basement club in Minneapolis called Honey. I would go solo, taking the bus across the river and, descending the basement stairs, hear the music get louder with each step. I was mostly there on weeknights, when the club hosted touring D.J.s who were in between gigs in larger cities. I was nervous to go up to anyone, so instead I made myself comfortable by a column in the middle of the room. Being alone didn’t matter much once I closed my eyes. I would dance softly as techno or house tracks blared through the room. The music, much of it composed of looping, recurrent elements, went on for hours. Eventually, I opened my eyes and figured it was time to go home.Music made from loops — fragments of sound repeated over and over — has given me the freedom to explore who I am: a lanky Chilean who sweats too easily and thinks life shouldn’t be so serious. Though I often feel physically awkward at work or in social interactions — again, too sweaty and easily intimidated — on the dance floor everything moves as one. Loops open a dimension where, although time is ticking forward at its usual pace, I’m moving at my own speed, appreciating my body and the world around me. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, creators of the Oblique Strategies advice cards, put it simply: “Repetition is a form of change.”Growing up in the 2000s meant loops were omnipresent. Artists like Kanye West and Daft Punk created masterpieces by looping samples of older songs and even their own recordings. Take the latter’s seminal 2000 hit “One More Time.” The track still sounds alive to me more than 20 years later, its grainy synth sample, elastic bass line and titular refrain repeating throughout its run time. The looping creates an illusion that the record doesn’t have a beginning or an end, just the moment you happen upon it and the moment you exit the room. It’s inside this space where I discover my physicality and emotions — all it takes is some time.In miniature, loops help us become comfortable with endings, appreciative of the journey traveled.Not everyone is as patient. When I was young, my mom teased me about the repetitive music coming from my bedroom. “Que bonita,” she heckled. Other times she would beg me to change the song, irritated that, according to her, it was headed nowhere. The loops didn’t change, of course, but I would focus on everything else that did. I became more keenly attuned to my physical environment. I noticed new rhythms: conversations would start and end, people came and went, traffic picked up and died down. Becoming aware of these intricacies in everyday life is the closest I feel to being in the present, instead of picking over the past or constantly preparing for the future.In a conversation for his podcast, “Hanging Out With Audiophiles,” the musician Jamie Lidell compared the act of capturing a musical loop to catching the perfect wave. “When you have that loop and it gives you access, in a way, to something kind of sublime,” Lidell tells Four Tet, a fellow British musician, “you’re in the presence of something that to you, kind of does connect you to … maybe … some … unexplainable energy.” As you can probably gather by now, it’s hard to talk about loops without sounding like a shaman or a stoner. I reckon Lidell is neither and is getting at what makes loop-based music so transcendent. Loops condense all parts of the listening experience — sound, space, time and emotion — into one concise package.Few have captured the fleeting intensity of loops better than J Dilla, the Detroit producer whose raw, elliptical instrumentals paved a path forward for hip-hop. In his 2006 song “One Eleven,” he swirls a Smokey Robinson sample round and round, blending weeping strings and vocals together to create something entirely new. “Lord have mercy,” Robinson begs, before the strings take over again. The pain in his pitched-up voice brings me close to tears. Why is he pleading for mercy? For whom is he crying? There are no answers, only a drifting call for help. I can understand why Dilla kept many of his creations under two minutes. At some point, it’s time to let go, to literally and figuratively change your tune. If not, you can get stuck.No matter how many times a loop repeats, the song to which it belongs eventually stops, modeling a way to move on. In miniature, loops help us become comfortable with endings, appreciative of the journey traveled. This can be its own kind of buzz, too. It’s the D.J. fading out the last song of the night, the lights coming on in a movie theater, your partner tapping you on the knee and saying it’s time to go home. What happens after is anyone’s guess. At least you can feel proud knowing you went to the party.Honey closed its doors for good at the beginning of the pandemic. It was one of several endings that would follow. I quit my job, left Minneapolis, said goodbye to my parents as they moved out of the country, saw millions abruptly lose their loved ones. I miss dancing with my eyes closed inside that basement, guided by the music as it looped over and over. But I’m still here. Even now, I listen to loops to find a bit of bliss. Then I open my eyes, and the moment’s over.Miguel Otárola is a music writer and audio journalist based in Denver. Born in Chile and raised in Tucson, Ariz., he now covers climate and environment issues in Colorado. More

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      Morgan Wallen’s Career Seemed Over. Now He’s Broken a Billboard Record.

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      The country singer was rebuked by the music industry after using a racial slur. Still, “Dangerous: The Double Album” has logged 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s 200 chart.Nineteen months ago, it seemed that the music career of Morgan Wallen — primed as Nashville’s next crossover star — might be dead. Instead, he is now playing to sold-out arenas and has broken chart records set by the likes of Adele and Bruce Springsteen, in a success story that highlights the power of fan loyalty and the challenges of cancel culture.“Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s second LP, came out at the beginning of 2021 and shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, with big streaming numbers that demonstrated his power among a new generation of country performers. The album was in its third week at the top when TMZ published a video of Wallen using a racial slur. The rebuke was immediate and strong, with Wallen’s songs removed from radio and streaming playlists, and Wallen’s label, Big Loud, saying it would “suspend” his recording contract “indefinitely.”Yet “Dangerous” would hold at No. 1 for a further seven weeks, and since then it has become an unusually enduring hit. The album has now spent 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s chart — dipping to No. 12 only once, when it was pushed out by holiday albums last December — and has been in the Top 5 for 65 of those times.“Dangerous” stands at No. 2 on the latest chart, beaten only by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” another streaming blockbuster that came out in May and has just matched Wallen’s 10-week run at No. 1.Wallen has now beaten the 1964 record set by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary for the longest Top 10 run for an album by a single artist. (In the 66 years of the Billboard 200 album chart, seven other titles have had longer stretches in the Top 10, but those are all movie soundtracks or Broadway cast albums; the longest run of all albums is 173 weeks for the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” which came out in 1956.)In the wake of the controversy last year, Wallen issued multiple apologies, but was otherwise largely unseen in the mainstream media — a rare test of the commercial appeal of an artist without the benefit of supportive TV interviews or magazine covers. But for many in Nashville, he remains a symbol of a pervasive racism that exists just below the surface of the country music business.To hear it from executives at Big Loud, which functions as Wallen’s label, management company and music publisher, the success of “Dangerous” is proof of Wallen’s broad cultural appeal and the quality of his music, which blends beer-soaked bro-countryisms with mellow melodies that at times recall classic rock like Eagles.“We’re having our Garth Brooks moment, our Taylor Swift emergent moment,” Seth England, the chief executive of Big Loud, said in an interview, “of just an artist so big, everyone is getting used to it. Pop is short for popular culture, and he just is popular culture.”When asked how “Dangerous” has managed such extraordinary success, Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, added simply: “There’s only one explanation. The music is that good.” (Wallen’s suspension from Big Loud, which continued to sell his music, was temporary. Through a representative, Wallen declined to answer questions for this article.)Yet from the beginning, Big Loud — and Republic Records, the division of the giant Universal Music Group that has a deal with Big Loud to promote its artists — has pursued smart strategies to make “Dangerous” a success in the streaming era. Most obvious is the album’s length; taking a page from hip-hop albums that have been exploiting this aspect of the streaming economy for years, “Dangerous” has 30 songs on its standard edition, each of which contributes to the album’s overall numbers each week.Second, Wallen stoked his fans by releasing batches of new songs ahead of the album’s release, sometimes a few at a time, which helped foster the fan loyalty that sustained him in his fallow months of promotion.With Republic’s help, Wallen has also had some success as a pop crossover act, though that process has been slow. Two of his songs, “7 Summers” and “You Proof,” his latest single, have gone as high as No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. According to data from the tracking service Luminate, a little more than half of Wallen’s radio airplay has been on country stations, with pop stations a distant second.In the wake of Wallen’s use of the slur, musicians and journalists debated the role of racism in country music. Wallen gave an interview to “Good Morning America” in which he characterized the incident as a mistake among close friends who “say dumb stuff together.” He added: “In our minds it’s playful. That sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from.”Gradually, the Nashville world, and beyond, has largely welcomed him back. In an interview with The New York Times published this month, the country singer Kane Brown, who is Black, said: “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” Late last year, Wallen appeared on Lil Durk’s track “Broadway Girls,” a hit on the rapper’s No. 1 album “7220.”Despite the intensity of the criticism levied against Wallen, fans remained loyal. According to Chartmetric, a company that tracks data from streaming and social media, Wallen’s followers on Facebook and Spotify increased at the height of his controversy.Within months, his songs were back in force on the official playlists of major streaming platforms. And according to Luminate, radio stations are now playing Wallen more than at any point since “Dangerous” was released, with his songs being played about 19,000 times a week this summer.Also on this week’s Billboard album chart, the veteran metal band Megadeth opens at No. 3 with its first studio release in six years, “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!” DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4, and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      My Chemical Romance, Reunited and It Feels So Bruised

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      Back on the road after more than a decade, emo’s most theatrical outfit let its songs and fans provide the drama as it revisited its anthems about fearlessness and individuality.In 2006, My Chemical Romance — by then, an edgy screamo band turned ostentatious pop-punk dramatists — released “The Black Parade,” a flashy and theatrical opus that established the group as art-house emo sophisticates. It maintained some of the scabrousness of its earlier albums, and smeared big-tent pop ambition atop it: “The Wall” for the “TRL” era.On Saturday night at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, while performing “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a caffeinated march that’s one of that album’s signature songs, the band’s frontman Gerard Way saw the crowd pumping fists in the air, and encouraged it to go even harder.“C’mon, I’m 45 doing this,” he said — a little tart, a little bemused, maybe a little fatigued.The passage of time is an inevitable subtext of all reunion tours. This show, the first of four arena shows in the New York area, was part of the group’s first proper tour in a decade. (Its last studio album, “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” came out in 2010.) In that time, emo has gone through its second or third revival, Way’s comic book The Umbrella Academy has become a Netflix hit and something about the My Chemical Romance mythos has deepened and hardened — it is now a misfit beacon.Mikey Way, left, the frontman’s brother and the band’s bassist, celebrated his 42nd birthday onstage.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEveryone is older now, and reality sometimes weighs down memory. At this show, that played out as a tug of war between been-there-done-that fatigue and we-survived-this-together triumph, with triumph ultimately triumphing.The band started tentatively, lading the show’s first half with late career singles that felt much like conventional rock songs — “The Only Hope for Me Is You,” “Boy Division.” It was almost as if this rigorously flamboyant band was somehow shy about its own hits.“Let me put on my sunglasses so I can look like an authority figure,” Way said, after a dry half-hour of bits and bobs. What followed was exuberant, rowdy, winningly messy: the chipper swing of the wry “Teenagers” giving way to the frenzy of “Welcome to the Black Parade.” “Mama” brought the Nutcracker to the mosh pit. “Helena,” perhaps the band’s most memorable song, was part victory march, part plea.These epic anthems about fearlessness, rebellion and individuality were bracing. But the tension between the show’s two halves exposed a light quirk about this band, which is that often what set it apart from its peers was its sense of performance and its willingness to be ambitious while its actual music remained more conventional.That accessibility is what allowed My Chemical Romance — Way; his brother, Mikey, who plays bass; the guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero — to survive long enough to thrive once more. They play with confidence, if not always warmth. (It was Mikey’s 42nd birthday, and some speakers onstage were adorned with drawings made by his children; most of the band wore T-shirts celebrating him.)In front of trompe l’oeil installations of demolished buildings, the group was musically robust — Toro delivered taut chaos, and the touring drummer Jarrod Alexander was blistering, closing out the heart-rending anthem “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” with sensitive aggression and then shifting right into the punchier intro of “House of Wolves.” There were occasional flickers of rockabilly, ska, even death metal. Way is a lauded wailer, but his growl is just as potent.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAt times throughout the show, Way appeared lightly cautious, never quite oversinging, even on the songs that demand abandon. He wore a camouflage jacket and a T-shirt featuring a smiley face with a bullet hole in its head, blood dripping down the cheerful yellow visage, and toward the end of the night, he put on a tight clear mask that had echoes of Patrick Bateman.It was a manque version of the hypertheatricality that elevated the band out of scene notoriety to pop ubiquity. Late in the show, Way described a conversation he’d had about how to navigate a comeback tour after so many years, and the tension between performing for oneself and performing for the crowd.“Maybe for a time it was for me,” he conceded.But not now. “It’s not about the ego,” he said.And yet. “Sometimes it’s about that,” he continued. “That’s a really delicate way of telling you I’m going to control you right now.” Everyone pumped their fists in unison.My Chemical Romance performs at Barclays Center in Brooklyn Sunday night, and at Prudential Center in Newark on Sept. 20 and 21. The tour continues in North America through Oct. 29. More

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      Review: In ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ John Adams Goes Conventional

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      This composer’s latest stage work, at San Francisco Opera, is his most straightforward, but also his least inspired.SAN FRANCISCO — John Adams’s operas have never been ordinary.His first two, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” broke ground by treating events from recent history with enigmatic new poetry. The stage works that followed over the next 30 years included a reflection on the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, an adaptation of an Indian folk tale, and, since 2000, four pieces with patchwork librettos drawn from a broad assortment of sources: ancient and modern, poetic and prose.Adams infused the eclecticism — and the sometimes anti-dramatic artificiality — of these texts with music of fast-shifting colors and energy, of tenderness and unexpected, haunting effects. If the works varied in impact, none were like any other composer’s.But with “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premiered on Saturday at the start of San Francisco Opera’s centennial season, Adams, 75, has finally become conventional.He has done the same thing as many composers before him for his first opera created without the collaboration of the director and writer Peter Sellars, who for better and worse pressed him toward that quiltlike method of libretto-writing. Adams has chosen a great, eminently sturdy play from the past — in this case, Shakespeare’s tragedy of love and war — and trimmed it to a more manageable size, adding just a scattering of interpolations from other sources.The result is the clearest, most dramatically straightforward opera of his career — and the dullest. “Antony and Cleopatra” has the least idiosyncrasy of his nine stage works so far, and the least inspiration.With almost three hours of music, it slumps to a subdued finish. It could be described in a line from the play that was cut for the opera: “She shows a body rather than a life, a statue than a breather.”That sense of not quite coming to life, of not fully inhabiting the play through music, begins at the start. With the two lovers and their attendants crowded into Cleopatra’s bedroom, we are unceremoniously shoved into frenetic activity both onstage and in the orchestra — as if to prove that the work is, as Adams writes wishfully in a program essay, his “most actively dramatic.”But with the pace so breathless from the opening bars, and with the focus seemingly on getting as much text out of the singers’s mouths as possible, we are never able to really sit with the two main characters and feel the depth of their bond.Paul Appleby, center left, as Caesar, shaking hands with Finley. From left: Hadleigh Adams (Agrippa), Elizabeth DeShong (Octavia) and Philip Skinner (Lepidus) look on.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAnd without the strength of their relationship being convincingly depicted, the precipitous ups and downs of that relationship lose their stakes, despite the baritone Gerald Finley’s weathered authority and the soprano Amina Edris’s focused vigor. (Edris deserves special credit for stepping in when Julia Bullock, for whom the role of Cleopatra was written, withdrew because of her pregnancy.)Largely eschewing arias, duets and other ensembles — its source is a play with notably few soul-baring soliloquies — “Antony and Cleopatra” skates along the emotional surface as it tries to keep up with the fast-moving story, lacking the expansive dives into thoughts and feelings that are the glory of Adams’s best work.So we never really feel we know these characters, though we see a lot of them: Despite the condensed form, this is a sprawling plot. Antony’s passion for Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, has upset the fragile balance of power in the Mediterranean world, with Caesar — his younger partner in ruling Rome — using it as a pretext to make war against him. Shakespeare’s genius was to make the lovers’ pairing, a union of two seen-it-all cynics, bracingly yet realistically volatile, with jealousy, betrayal and reconciliation from both sides.It is an unwieldy piece to wrangle into musical shape. An “Antony and Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Burdened by an extravagant Franco Zeffirelli staging, it was a notorious fiasco, but a revision — recorded, if infrequently performed — revealed a lushly perfumed, viably dramatic score.In that revised form, Barber’s “Antony” is nearly an hour shorter than Adams’s. Perhaps the main trouble with this new opera is simply the amount of text still in it — especially given the problems inherent in setting Shakespeare’s verse, which is so virtuosic that it’s barely legible when sung. If you catch it in the supertitles, a line like “Gentle Octavia, let your best love draw to that which seeks best to preserve it” is a challenge to grasp at a glance.Adams has long rightly been regarded as a master of intriguing orchestration, but his work here is surprisingly bland. Wisps of cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer with a tinny yet silky sound, would have more interest if that instrument hadn’t become something of his go-to evocation of the ancient Mediterranean: It is also a central feature of the passion oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” (2012) and the violin concerto “Scheherazade.2” (2015). Interludes bridge many of the scene changes, but even if these are generally bustling, they tend to feel like vamping, oddly characterless.There are some effective touches, particularly in more shadowy passages that the conductor, Eun Sun Kim, revels in without losing the pulse. Octavia — Caesar’s sister, who has been married to Antony in a last-ditch effort to cool the hostilities — replies to Antony after their wedding in vocal lines surrounded by an instrumental halo of hovering prayer, mysterious and alluring. The opening of the second act aptly depicts the stunned aftermath of Antony’s military disaster, with the mellow music for Cleopatra’s entrance having a dreamlike, distant suggestion of a foxtrot.Appleby’s Caesar rallies the crowd in a hectoring empire-building monologue.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaBut the tenor Paul Appleby’s bright stamina can’t keep his big speech late in the work — an empire-building monologue whose text is taken from John Dryden’s translation of “The Aeneid” — from being hectoring. And while Alfred Walker and Hadleigh Adams are both firm as aides to the Roman rulers, the bass-baritone Philip Skinner, as Lepidus, is alone in the cast in his ability to sing both richly and with perfectly intelligible diction.The inoffensive staging, by Elkhanah Pulitzer (who also consulted with Adams on the libretto alongside Lucia Scheckner), sets the opera not in ancient times but in the 1930s or so, with Art Deco elements and slinky gowns (by Constance Hoffman) winking at the glamorous Hollywood adaptations of the Cleopatra story.Mimi Lien’s spare set, starkly lit by David Finn, hides and reveals playing spaces as it opens and closes like an aperture, with some large structures looming in the back that recall the pyramids. Bill Morrison has contributed lyrically grainy black-and-white film projections of scenes including a sail on the Nile and a crowd ready to be whipped into frenzy by a dictator.This loose association of Caesar with later authoritarian leaders is pretty much the opera’s only contemporary resonance. After decades of pointedly political work with Sellars, in which those resonances could sometimes feel suffocating, Adams seems more than happy to make an opera that’s not “about” anything other than its plot.The outcome of that experiment is thin. But hopefully this is a transitional work for Adams, away from those patchwork pieces with Sellars and toward other styles of libretto, adapted or original, more compelling than this.“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said in a recent interview. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”Unfortunately, compared with those earlier works — among them true glories of opera history — “Antony and Cleopatra” is a dreary disappointment.Antony and CleopatraThrough Oct. 5 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco; sfopera.com. More

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      For Jann Wenner, the Music Never Stopped

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      In his memoir, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine is serenaded by Springsteen, nursed by Midler and breaks bread with Bono. There’s journalism, too.LIKE A ROLLING STONEA MemoirBy Jann S. Wenner592 pages. Little, Brown. $35.Jann Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is the literary equivalent of a diss track: a retort to Joe Hagan’s biography, “Sticky Fingers,” which was published five years ago, after Wenner’s initial cooperation curdled into public repudiation. This it accomplishes with that ultimate diss, the silent treatment — acting like Hagan’s book never existed.Also, perhaps, by being a little longer, if not more searching. Hagan interviewed scores of intimates, plenty disgruntled; Wenner is fond of quoting laudatory letters and speeches, supplemented with color candids and a cover portrait by his longtime colleague Annie Leibovitz.Not counting Robert Draper’s 1990 “uncensored history” of Rolling Stone magazine, which Wenner co-founded and headed for five decades, the reading public now has over 1,100 heavily annotated pages on the guy, a print publisher who calls the internet “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles” and curses the iPhone from his hospital bed. Generation Spotify might be baffled.One thing Wenner didn’t like about Hagan’s book was the title, a homage to the Rolling Stones album, of course, but perhaps too redolent of thievery and salaciousness for his taste. Choosing “Like a Rolling Stone” instead implies “I’m just as good friends with Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning poet, as that naughty, bum-wiggling sensualist Mick Jagger.” One of the revelations in this overwhelmingly male tale is that each singer has a limp handshake, though Dylan wins this particular contest, his paw tending to “stay motionless in your palm as if you were holding a dead fish.”But the new title also strikes a note of melancholy. Wenner sold the majority stake in his flagship publication in 2017, a couple of months after the disdained biography came out. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be without a home (luxury real estate in Sun Valley, Montauk, etc. notwithstanding)?This devoted and daring sportsman — he also founded Outside magazine — had a triple coronary bypass, valve replacement and hip surgery that year. Candidly, he notes that fluid retained during the procedures made his scrotum swell “to the size of a head of cauliflower — not a grapefruit, not two papayas.” He “dramatically undraped” it for the amusement of Bette Midler.This isn’t the only time Wenner gets clinical. He describes his ex-wife Jane’s cesarean section for their second of three sons, Theo, and being “spellbound by how they pulled out various organs and laid them on her stomach.” (The third son, Gus, is currently C.E.O. of Rolling Stone.)Years later, as an unnamed gestational carrier is delivering twins to Wenner and his new partner, Matt Nye — the man who ushered him out of the closet in the ’90s — her organs are placed on cheesecloth. “It didn’t bother me,” the author writes coolly, as if playing the old battery-powered game Operation. Well, my buzzer went off.“Like a Rolling Stone” is about birth, the origin of a scrappy San Francisco music rag and its development into a slick, bicoastal boomer bible. But that story has always been intertwined with untimely death, starting with Otis Redding’s a month after its founding in 1967. The magazine’s coverage of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where an 18-year-old Black student, Meredith Hunter, was killed by one of the Hells Angels paid in beer to do security, helped put it on the map. Curiously for someone so associated with the epochal events of his generation, Wenner decided at the last minute not to attend; nor was he at Woodstock. When he did show up, the experience was often blurred or oversharpened by recreational drugs: pot, LSD, cocaine.Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass. More

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      Mable John, Soul Singer With a Star-Studded Résumé, Dies at 91

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      She was one of the first female acts signed to Motown, and her career later intersected with Isaac Hayes and Ray Charles. But she eventually heeded a higher calling.Beyond her many other accomplishments — collaborating on a hit single with Isaac Hayes, singing backup for Ray Charles — Mable John earned a place in the music pantheon as one of the first female artists signed to the Motown Records empire, which altered the face of pop music in the 1960s.But none of it might have happened if Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, had not needed a ride.Ms. John was an aspiring blues singer working for a Detroit insurance company owned by Mr. Gordy’s mother, Bertha, in the 1950s when she found herself serving as the de facto chauffeur for the future music mogul, a former Lincoln-Mercury assembly line worker who had sky-high ambitions as a songwriter and music impresario and was hustling around town looking to conjure hits.It did not take long for him to recognize the vocal power of the woman behind the wheel. Before long, with Mr. Gordy serving as her pianist and mentor, Ms. John joined the Detroit nightclub circuit.“I was groomed for a full year before I did anything anywhere,” she later said, “because that was Berry’s motto — he wanted to make you an act, not a gimmick.”As a pioneering Motown act, Ms. John never churned out hits like those of Stevie Wonder, the Supremes or other stars of the Motown roster. But her influence on music was soon felt.With a voice that could reach breathy depths and then soar to the upper registers, Ms. John moved on to Stax Records in Memphis, known for an earthier kind of R&B, where she scored a hit single in 1966 with “Your Good Thing (Is About to End),” a wistful ballad of heartache that was later covered by Lou Rawls, Bonnie Raitt and others. She eventually spent more than a decade as a member of the Raelettes, Ray Charles’s backing vocal group.Ms. John signed with Stax Records in 1966. A publicity photo from the label misspelled her first name.Stax Museum of American Soul MusicMs. John died on Aug. 25 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91. Her death was confirmed by her nephew Keith John, a longtime backup singer with Stevie Wonder.“She was definitely R&B royalty,” said the author David Ritz, who has written biographies of Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and others, and who collaborated with Ms. John on a series of semi-autobiographical novels centered on an R&B singer turned minister.In broad terms, Ms. John’s musical odyssey might be seen as a metaphor for the Great Migration of Black Americans who fled the South in the middle decades of the 20th century, looking for opportunity in the North. She was born in Bastrop, La., on Nov. 3, 1930, the eldest of 10 children of Mertis and Lillie (Robinson) John, who moved the family to Cullendale, Ark., shortly after her birth. When she was 12, her father left a grueling job at a paper mill and moved the family to Detroit in search of a better life. He found work in an automobile factory.With its swelling Black population, Detroit was a hotbed of African American music, and it became an ideal place for people to pursue their musical ambitions. Lillie John led a family gospel group, and by the mid-’50s Mable’s younger brother William had found fame as a singer under the name Little Willie John, scoring multiple R&B hits with songs like “All Around the World,” “Need Your Love So Bad” and “Fever,” which hit No. 1 on the R&B charts in 1956 and later became an enduring anthem of desire for Peggy Lee.With her sights on a music career of her own, Ms. John was soon singing, in a voice both sassy and vulnerable, at hallowed Detroit clubs like the Flame Show Bar, where she opened for Billie Holiday shortly before her death in 1959.Her career ambitions, and her decision to tour with her famous brother, got her booted from a statewide Pentecostal choir. “They disapproved of the music,” she said in a 2008 interview with The Guardian. “I had gone over to the Devil.”But she was on her way. In 1959, Mr. Gordy formed his landscape-altering sister labels, Tamla and Motown, and he soon signed Ms. John, who recorded “Who Wouldn’t Love a Man Like That,” written by Mr. Gordy and others, in 1960.A handful of singles over the next few years failed to make a splash. By 1966, Ms. John was living in Chicago and married to a preacher, and she told Mr. Gordy that she wanted to be released from the label. In a 1999 interview with the magazine, “Living Blues,” she recalled telling him: “The direction the company is going into, I don’t think I can measure up, because I’m not a pop singer. I’m a blues singer.”Her career, however, was far from over. She moved on to Stax, Motown’s bluesier rival, which proved more amenable to her musical vision.“At Motown, they gave you your songs and told you how to dress and how to dance,” Tim Sampson, the communications director of the Soulsville Foundation, which operates the Stax Museum in Memphis, said in an interview. “At Stax, they just brought you in and said: ‘Tell us your story. What makes you happy? What makes you sad? That’s what your music is going to be.’”Before long, Ms. John found herself meeting with two of the label’s top songwriters, David Porter and a not-yet-famous Isaac Hayes. In search of a song to record, she told them about an early marriage to an unfaithful man. As she spoke, Mr. Hayes began to play the piano, and Mr. Porter began to scribble lyrics.Ms. John in 2019 at the premiere of the Showtime documentary “Hitsville: The Making Of Motown.” She was one of the Motown Records empire’s first female artists.Leon Bennett/Getty Images“I had no idea how the music or the melody should go,” she told The Guardian. “I just knew it was a story that was inside of me. It was a pain, and it needed to get out. And when we got finished that night, we had ‘Your Good Thing (Is About to End).’”The song reached No. 6 on the Billboard R&B chart, but her tenure with Stax was brief. In 1969, she joined Ray Charles as a backing vocalist.Living up to Mr. Charles’s exacting musical standards was an accomplishment in its own right, Mr. Ritz said: “He was an uncompromising taskmaster in terms of musical excellence. You played the wrong stuff and you were out.” Ms. John, who had a strong moral sense and whose nickname was Able Mable, he added, also did her best to steer the band away from the temptations of the road.For Ms. John, her years with Mr. Charles were an opportunity to expand her musical horizons.“At the beginning, I thought I could only sing gospel,” she said in a 2007 interview with NPR. “With Berry Gordy, I found out I could sing the blues. I went to Stax, and I find out I could sing love songs. I got with Ray Charles, and we sang country — everything. And we could play to any audience. I wanted to sing what was in my heart to everybody that loves music, and Ray Charles was the place for me to be, to do that.”Ms. John’s survivors include a son, Limuel Taylor; a brother, Mertis John Jr.; and several grandchildren.She continued to perform off and on over the years. She also wrote three novels with Mr. Ritz: “Sanctified Blues” (2006), “Stay Out of the Kitchen” (2007) and“Love Tornado” (2008). And she dabbled in acting, portraying a seasoned blues singer in John Sayles’s 2007 film, “Honeydripper.”But Ms. John also felt a higher calling. She followed the stage-to-the-pulpit path taken by the likes of Little Richard and Al Green, and founded a small Baptist ministry in Los Angeles that organized food and clothing drives for the homeless.In a sense, she might have been heeding the wisdom that she recalled Billie Holiday imparting to her long ago: “Baby, if you intend to make it in this business, there is one thing you’re going to have to remember. You’re going to have to know when you’ve given enough, and then you have to stop.” More

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      Billy McFarland Is Out of Jail and Ready for His Next Move

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      Five years after the Fyre Festival, the convicted fraudster is planning a comeback.“Is this technically Dumbo?” Billy McFarland asked, walking toward the East River shoreline. “It’s super cool. Are the rents here crazy too?“I never spent much time in Brooklyn, until the Brooklyn detention center,” he continued. “I was always like, ‘I’m never going to live in Brooklyn.’ Now, I think it’s kind of nice.”Mr. McFarland, who in 2018 entered guilty pleas for fraud stemming from his role in organizing the Fyre Festival — a Coachella-for-the-Bahamas affair that went spectacularly awry and established him as the Elizabeth Holmes of party promoters— had been a free man for all of 15 minutes. And he didn’t seem inclined to lay low after spending close to four years in prison, plus another six months of additional confinement.Moments after removing an electronic ankle monitor at the Gold Street halfway house where he had stayed earlier this year, he was posing for a New York Times photographer and talking to a reporter whom he’d approached toward the end of his confinement with the help of a publicist.“I thought it was going to be a big process, but it turns out they just hand you scissors and you cut it off,” said Mr. McFarland, 30, who is 6-foot-3 and post-prison lean. He was wearing a dark T-shirt and navy pants that he said were from Uniqlo. On his feet were Gianvito Rossi sneakers that looked like Converse All Stars, but retail for around $700.Mr. McFarland — who has little money in the bank, around $26 million in financial amends to make and no immediate job prospects — said he had purchased the shoes before his legal problems.“Friends joke that my entire wardrobe is from 2016,” he said.Back then, Mr. McFarland — who grew up in Short Hills, N.J., and dropped out of Bucknell University after less than a year — was known as the founder of a company called Magnises, whose flagship charge card was pitched as a kind of American Express Black card for millennials.Mostly, those who joined were given access to an open bar at a Greenwich Village townhouse where he held parties. Another membership perk: Bahamian excursions, including to Norman’s Cay, a small island that once served as a hub for the Medellín Cartel’s cocaine-smuggling operation.That was the site Mr. McFarland had selected to hold an epic coming-out festival for his next invention, Fyre, an Uber-like app through which people could book their favorite celebrities for special events. He enlisted Ja Rule, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski to help promote the 2017 party, which featured more than 30 musical guests, including Blink-182 and Tyga. Tickets cost up to $12,000.But the Fyre Festival — which would go on to achieve cultural notoriety, if not for the reasons Mr. McFarland had intended — was poorly planned, and its finances were a mess.The night before the first attendees arrived on the island, an intense rainstorm hit.The site of the Fyre Festival in Exuma, Bahamas, in 2017.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesPeople showed up to find that the “luxury villas” that came with their ticket packages were, in fact, disaster relief tents located on a makeshift camping ground.And the “uniquely authentic island cuisine” guests were promised in promotional materials turned out to be cheese sandwiches served in plastic foam containers, though Mr. McFarland countered in our interview last week that reports of the meals had been vastly overblown.“There’s a reason there’s only one photograph of that,” he said, referring to a viral shot of a sad pile of lettuce topped by two tomato slices, above two slices of prepackaged cheese serving as a sort of garnish for two slices of untoasted wheat bread.Ultimately, the event — which stranded thousands of attendees in the Bahamas and left them scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach — was scrapped without a single performance taking place. Less than two months later, Mr. McFarland was arrested and charged with fraud.“They took me to the Brooklyn detention center for one night,” he said. “My head was swirling with all these things, and I panicked like, ‘I need to pay everybody back tomorrow or else this is real.’”Class-action lawsuits followed.While on probation, Mr. McFarland launched a V.I.P. ticket service that promised users tickets he didn’t have to events including the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and the Met Gala.There was another round of fraud charges.“I probably added years on to my sentence by doing that,” he said. “I just was making bad decision after bad decision.”By the water in Dumbo, Mr. McFarland struck a few plaintive poses. “I can’t wait to go swimming,” he said.Mr. McFarland was weighing a return to the tech world.Ben Sklar for The New York TimesHe then took an Uber to his small second-floor apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.On the curb outside his new building, he continued to speak of the borough with tourist-like wonder. “Was this street terrible years ago?” he asked. “Because there are all these nice new buildings.” (Before the Fyre Festival, Mr. McFarland had lived in the meatpacking district. “I was 21 when I moved there — cut me some slack,” he said.)With characteristic vagueness, Mr. McFarland said the rent for his new place was being paid by “family and friends.” He did not say whether that included his parents, Steven and Irene McFarland, who are real estate developers based in New Jersey.It had taken a lot, Mr. McFarland said, for his parents to understand that “someone they were so close to was capable of lying like I did.” He continued, “I hurt them, and it sucks.”Had he personally apologized to his victims? “No,” he said, then posed a question of his own:“What would you say to them if you were me?”The terms of Mr. McFarland’s six-month house arrest allowed him to go outside only to go to the grocery store or the gym. He chose a membership at Blink Fitness, which he paid for with a debit card. “I don’t think I can get a credit card,” he said.His new apartment was Airbnb-neutral. The only decorations were a few plants he’d picked up at Trader Joe’s — a bird of paradise, two money trees — along with a white board that was blank as the decor. The bed was perfectly made, the floor immaculate.The work of a cleaning service? “You’re never going to believe it,” he said. “I learned how to do it!”As Mr. McFarland recalled it, his housekeeping education began at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was first held, then continued at the Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he was transferred in early 2019. “It was like Danbury,” he said, referring to the less hard-line cushy-by-prison standards facility where Martha Stewart did her time. “But I messed it up.”How?“I brought in a USB drive.”He was storing notes for a possible book on his saga, he said, which had already been memorialized in dueling documentaries for Hulu and Netflix.Mr. McFarland pleaded guilty in 2018 to two counts of wire fraud.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressGuards confiscated the drive and Mr. McFarland spent three months in solitary confinement, where he said he fell asleep to the sounds of a screaming gang member known as the White Tiger, so named because of tattoos of the animal that covered his face and other areas of his body.After that, he was resettled at FCI Elkton, a low-security federal correctional institution located in Ohio.Then, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Mr. McFarland appealed for compassionate release, claiming that allergies and asthma placed him in a high risk category for health complications. His efforts were unsuccessful. “Hope clouds your judgment,” he said. “There was no way I was going to get out.”In the fall of that year, he wound up in solitary confinement again, this time for participating by pay phone in a podcast (“Dumpster Fyre”) about the Fyre Festival.Ultimately, prison records show, Mr. McFarland spent six months there, though the records do not specify why. His lawyer, Jason Russo, said in a phone interview that he had written letters to prison officials attempting to get Mr. McFarland out of solitary confinement, only to be stonewalled at every turn. Mr. Russo said he could not even get a specific answer as to why Mr. McFarland was there for such an extended period of time. Emails and phone calls to the prison by The New York Times were not returned.Mr. McFarland read a lot during those months. “There was nothing else to do,” he said.One of the books he finished was Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” Another was Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantarum.”“It’s about an Australian who breaks out of jail and joins the Indian mafia,” said Mr. McFarland. “Really cool.”In Mr. McFarland’s Bedford-Stuyvesant living room, on a small shelf by the gray couch from Wayfair — “A friend bought it for me,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it” — were copies of Don Winslow’s “City on Fire” and Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future.”But Mr. McFarland said hadn’t been doing as much reading since he began home confinement and acquired a Mac desktop computer with a Westinghouse screen. “I just missed the computer so much,” said Mr. McFarland. “I missed that more than anything.”Mr. McFarland owes tens of millions of dollars to his victims.Ben Sklar for The New York TimesAs part of his plea, Mr. McFarland is barred for life from serving as a director of a public company. His earnings will be garnished until he pays back the full amount he owes his victims, more than $25 million.“Obviously, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him,” Mr. Russo said.At least for now, Mr. McFarland has abandoned the idea of writing his memoir.“The book’s not going to pay the restitution, let me put it that way,” he said.So what will?“I’d like to do something tech-based,” he said a few minutes later, walking to BKLYN Blend, where he ordered an egg sandwich and a coffee. “The good thing with tech is that people are so forward-thinking, and they’re more apt at taking risk.“If I worked in finance, I think it would be harder to get back,” he continued. “Tech is more open. And the way I failed is totally wrong, but in a certain sense, failure is OK in entrepreneurship.”Seated at a quiet table in the corner — no one at the coffee shop appeared to recognize him — Mr. McFarland mulled whether he’d prefer to work for himself or someone else. “At the end of the day, I think I could probably create the most value by building some sort of tech product,” he said. “Whether that’s within a company or by starting my own company, I’m open to both. I’ll probably decide in the next couple of weeks which path to go do.”He said he was “not particularly interested in crypto,” though he would make an exception for the latest frontier in blockchain technology, decentralized autonomous organizations, which he said were “allowing people to come together online to effect real world change in a way they previously couldn’t, taking people to places they couldn’t get to — and, once they’re there, enabling them to effect real-world change.”In April 2020, while in prison, Mr. McFarland made his first foray into philanthropy. He led a drive called Project 315, which raised money to cover the costs of calls between underprivileged inmates and their families. Four days after the project’s Instagram launch, fees were waived nationwide. “We did it,” the Instagram account associated with Mr. McFarland’s “non profit organization” said, claiming credit. (In fact, the suspension of fees came after campaigning by Senator Amy Klobuchar and a group of other Democratic senators that had begun well before Mr. McFarland got the idea.)But it whetted his appetite for good works, he said. Now, Mr. McFarland is talking about forming a charity that would pay travel costs for the families of prisoners.“I met some really amazing people in prison,” he said. “Half the people are just naturally bad and the other half are great.” (Mr. McFarland hedged, when asked which group he belonged to. “But I think I’m a better person than I was four years ago,” he said.)Mr. McFarland said he wanted people to know that he was sorry for what went wrong with the festival and for his actions. “I deserved my sentence,” he said. “I let a lot of people down.”He attributed his choices in part to “immaturity” and hubris.“I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he said.Partly, he blamed the tech world — the very same world he was musing about re-entering — which he said sometimes operates by an “ends justify the means” ethos.Still, he took some issue with news articles that compared him to Bernie Madoff; he wasn’t running a decades-long scheme to defraud people of their life savings, after all. Plus, he said, he hadn’t planned for things to end up the way they did.Much was made in both the Hulu and Netflix documentaries about the local workers in the Bahamas who were stiffed when the festival was canceled and debts piled up.Mr. McFarland argued that this characterization was somewhat misleading because, he said, most of them were working on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, and therefore suffered limited losses. (One restaurant owner said in the Netflix documentary that she spent $50,000 of her savings preparing for the festival and received no compensation from organizers. In May 2017, she told The New York Times that she was owed $134,000.)Two of his former Bahamian employees traveled to New York for a post-house-arrest party Mr. McFarland hosted on the evening of his release at Marylou, a French bistro in the East Village.Ozzy Rolle, Mr. McFarland’s principal consigliere in the Exumas, an island district in the Bahamas, said the following afternoon that he’d been paid almost everything he was owed for the festival, before it imploded. “I was treated good. Probably a week I wasn’t paid for.” He even went as far as to say the Fyre Festival had been good for tourism in the Bahamas. “So many people came after reading about what happened,” he said.But Scooter Rolle, his cousin and travel companion, said he had yet to get a dime of what he was owed for his work, in the days before Fyre. “I came to clarify things,” he said.That didn’t exactly happen, but Mr. McFarland did buy him a post-party lobster roll at Sarabeth’s Kitchen. “Billy tried his best,” he said.Back at the Bed-Stuy cafe, Mr. McFarland said the biggest sin he had committed was digging himself in deeper with dishonesty.“I lied,” he said. “I think I was scared. And the fear was letting down people who believed in me — showing them they weren’t right.” More