Music

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

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

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

The 29-year-old musician has recorded with Frank Ocean, released a film score and made oodles of outré indie rock. One thing has guided his unusual career: gut decisions.Alex G in the studio earlier this year. The musician has become a Philadelphia hero, but his listenership is far from just local.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesPHILADELPHIA — On a blustery Thursday in June, the 29-year-old musician Alex Giannascoli sat on a bench in tranquil Penn Treaty Park, overlooking the Delaware River, the breeze occasionally shaking loose acorns from an overhead tree. Giannascoli, who is known professionally as Alex G, has dark, shaggy hair and a disheveled handsomeness that makes him look a bit like a softer, more approachable Andrew W.K. He clutched a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup and, whenever he felt like he’d gone on a tangent, blamed the caffeine.Before long, a hiply dressed 20-something walking an old dog came up and interrupted to politely ask if Alex G was indeed Alex G.Alex grinned sheepishly and laughed. “Yeah.”“I knew it!” the man said, shaking his head. “I just moved to Philly — and what do you know!”To a certain type of indie music fan, Alex G is a regional celebrity, the kind of artist who stands almost as a metonym for the place where he lives and works. Since 2010, he has released a string of albums that have showcased both his outré, D.I.Y. ethos and a melodic pop sensibility at the core of his music. Vocally and aesthetically, he is a restless shape shifter, altering the pitch of his voice, embodying uncanny characters (like, say, a cowboy who has survived the nuclear holocaust or an insecure teenage girl named Sandy), and plundering innumerable genres. All of these elements together make his albums feel like warped, scratchy transmissions from a sonic collective unconscious. Yet, somehow, they still sound unmistakably like Alex G.Over the past decade, his fandom has grown far beyond local love. It now includes Frank Ocean (who personally tapped Alex to play guitar on his 2016 opus, “Blonde”), a lively Subreddit whose members cheekily but reverently refer to him as “Mr. G,” and Michelle Zauner, the author of the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart” and the leader of the Grammy-nominated indie band Japanese Breakfast, which opened for Alex on a 2017 tour.“A lot of the music is still relying on my gut,” Alex G said. “Like, if I have a guitar part, and it gives me a gut feeling, I add that.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“Honestly, he is one of my favorite contemporary songwriters,” Zauner said in a phone interview. “Everything he does is so brilliant and singular and bizarre. Every time you think you know what he’s up to, he does something else, and then a bunch of people just try to copy what he does.” Trying to pin down his personality, she gave up: “He’s just a really unique, weird man.”Alex G’s signature eccentricity was in full force in May when he released “Blessing,” the introductory single from his ninth album, “God Save the Animals,” due Sept. 23. On first listen, it sounded like an entirely different artist: Perhaps one of those vaguely goth, subtextually Christian alternative rock bands that proliferated during the nu-metal boom. “Every day is a blessing,” he whispers with menacing intensity. “If I live like the fishes, I will rise from the flood.”“I guess it’s kind of left-field,” he said at the park, shrugging. “After a long time of not really putting stuff out, I thought it would be the most interesting choice.”The cult of Alex G, a group down for interesting choices, has grown with each album. His last release, the wildly eclectic “House of Sugar,” was his most acclaimed and successful yet. This year he released his first ever film score, for the indie horror flick “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” He also recently played on a major late-night show for the first time, performing a memorable rendition of his single “Runner” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”Yet at a time when so many musicians feel a professional obligation to share intimate details of their lives with fans on social media to grow their audience, Alex has carefully erected barriers protecting his privacy. (His longtime partner Molly Germer, a violinist who sometimes plays in his band, and his sister, Rachel, a painter who does the cover art for most of his records, both declined to comment for this article.)Still, there are moments on “God Save the Animals” that are so frank and plain-spokenly sincere — from inquiries about spirituality to anxiety about when to start a family — that some listeners will be inclined to wonder whether they are extensions of Alex’s inner dialogue.Alex remains reluctant to ascribe any meaning — least of all autobiography — to anything he writes. “It’s honesty like catching a ball or something,” he said of his songwriting process. “I just don’t allow myself to think, ‘Should I put my hand here or here?’”He laughed, looking at his now-empty coffee cup. “Maybe there’s someone who’s very good at this, buried deep down, who’s just not in touch with the dumb part of me that’s navigating the world.”“When I’m thinking of a song,” Alex G said, “it’s not like, ‘This would be a great ‘me’ song.’ I’m just like, ‘This would be a cool song.’”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIN JANUARY, ALEX and his longtime collaborator Jacob Portrait, a founder of the band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, were in the final stages of mixing “God Save the Animals” at a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Wearing a beanie and a black hoodie, Alex spoke enthusiastically about the Beatles documentary “Get Back,” which he’d just watched (“I just love how it felt like you were their friend”) and his recent obsession with the folk songwriter Gillian Welch. Talking about his new album, though, still felt difficult.“A lot of the music is still relying on my gut,” he said. “Like, if I have a guitar part, and it gives me a gut feeling, I add that.”Portrait spun around in his chair in front of the mixing console to assist. “Some people, the way that they analyze it feels almost scholarly,” he told Alex. “But you’re always like, ‘It doesn’t feel right.’ And then you go in and change something and it’s like, ‘Oh wow. That’s incredible.’”Alex said his instincts are a part of a creative process that can skew obsessive. “I am beyond a control freak — I’m a monster,” he told me. “I say it straight up to my band sometimes, because I’ll have them play on some of the songs, and sometimes I’m like, ‘Honestly you could play something so amazing and I might not like it just because I didn’t do it.’”After self-recording a prolific run of early albums, Alex was reluctant to invite anyone new into his process, but Portrait, who arrived to work on the 2015 album “Beach Music,” slowly became a trusted partner.Portrait recalled a turning point in their relationship, when Alex was writing his next album, the tuneful, quasi-folk “Rocket.” Alex was so excited about a new song he’d just written that he drove from Philadelphia to Brooklyn just to tape a USB stick containing the demo to Portrait’s computer screen. (“Which is hilarious,” Portrait said, “because the internet’s definitely around.”) When he plugged it in and listened, Portrait was blown away by one of the best songs Alex had ever written, a fractured country lament called “Bobby,” which has since become a fan favorite.Around this time, an email from Ocean’s manager arrived out of the blue. Alex ended up credited as a guitarist and arranger on two tracks from Ocean’s “Blonde”: the plangent, pitch-shifted “Self Control” and the diffuse “White Ferrari.” He also played guitar throughout the amorphous visual album “Endless” and joined Ocean’s live band for a six-gig stint.The scope of their fame is certainly different, but, in an aesthetic sense, Alex and Ocean are kindred spirits. Both value privacy and continue to work with a trusted circle of collaborators, incubated from outside timelines and trends, which allows their music to retain a power of intimacy no matter how many people listen to it.“As a producer, Frank really was thinking of Alex when he got some of his music onto that record,” Portrait said, “because you can get the feeling of some of those moments. You’re like, ‘Damn, that really is Alex.’”ALEX GREW UP in Havertown, a quiet suburb nine miles outside of Philadelphia. He has two artistic siblings who are roughly a decade older than him, so it took him a while to figure out his place. His brother played jazz and had formal training in music, but 7-year-old Alex quickly grew bored with the piano lessons he’d begged his parents for.His sister, Rachel, though, was an avid music fan who introduced him to his first “cool bands”: Nirvana, Radiohead. In his early teens, influenced by another one of his sister’s favorite artists, Aphex Twin, Alex started fiddling around on the computer, making what he laughingly dismissed as “beep-boop [expletive].” His older sister heard something in it, though, and that meant the world to him.“You could show her any outlandish thing and she’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, OK,’” he said, of sending her his songs. “It basically pushed me into the world of DIY music, the fact that I had this confidence to be like, ‘She thinks I’m good at it.’” They’re still close today, and live down the street from each other.In high school, Alex was into “typical pot-smoking teenager” stuff, he said: drawing, reading, writing, and, of course, honing his musical sensibility. His school hosted coffeehouses where local bands could play. He went to his first one when he was in middle school and felt a world of possibility open up: “It clued me in as a kid that, ‘OK, you can make a band. You can just do it.’”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn recent years, as would-be creatives continue to be priced out of New York, Philadelphia has become a kind of beacon for young artistic types, especially independent musicians. As soon as he started playing music, Alex felt the support of a strong local scene. Early in high school, he and his friend Sam Acchione, who still plays in his band, formed a group called the Skin Cells and performed their first show in the basement of a local library, opening for the New Jersey punk stalwarts Screaming Females. “I remember afterwards they were like, ‘Hey, great job,’” Alex said. “And then we went home, like, ‘They said great job!’”Still, for all his DIY bona fides, Alex’s influences often skew surprisingly mainstream. At the park, Alex said the production on “Blessing” was inspired by a song he became obsessed with while working on “God Save the Animals,” which he’d listen to endlessly on loop. I leaned in, expecting him to name-drop some obscure, crate-dug rarity.“It was this song ‘Like a Stone’ by Audioslave,” Alex said. “It came on the radio one night and I was like, ‘What the …? This is the best thing I’ve ever heard!’”“Blessing” is an outlier sonically, though not thematically, on the new album. Its title included, “God Save the Animals” riffs on religious imagery and sometimes even evokes a kind of funhouse-mirror Christianity (“God is my designer,” a surreal, helium-voiced Alex sings on one song, “Jesus is my lawyer”). Though Alex wasn’t raised in a religious household, he admits that spirituality has been on his mind these past few years, and that some of the songs likely sprang from that part of his subconscious. “I don’t really have a set of beliefs,” he said, “but it seems like a place everyone has to go at some point.”Even if Alex’s music has never felt especially spiritual, there has long been a recurring sense of morality in it. Terrible things happen in and around the margins of his songs — nuclear bombs; fentanyl overdoses; bottomless longing — but never without the possibility of renewal and carrying on.Similarly, one of the most stirring moments on the new album comes in the middle of “Runner,” which until then has been a mild-mannered lite-rocker in the vein of Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train.” “I have done a couple bad things,” Alex sings in a pleasant voice, and then repeats the line several times, his voice becoming increasingly anguished until it turns into a bloodcurdling scream. It’s a gaping rupture in the song, but just as casually, it continues on.That it sounds nothing quite like anything he’s released before goes without saying — as does the fact that it’s still somehow so Alex G. “When I’m thinking of a song,” he said, “it’s not like, ‘This would be a great ‘me’ song. I’m just like, ‘This would be a cool song.’”“And so it sounds like me because I don’t know what I’m doing,” he added, his laughter rising against the wind. “But I’m pursuing it as far as I can go.” More

Piano technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity.Lars Vogt, a sensitive, communicative pianist whose warmth as a collaborator made him an outstanding chamber musician and a conductor of growing stature, died on Monday at a clinic in Erlangen, Germany. He was 51.His manager, Celia Willis, said the cause was esophageal cancer, which Mr. Vogt had learned he had in March 2021. He had spoken frankly about his prospects while continuing to perform, up until a few weeks before his death.“Music is just such an amazing thing. I find that even more in these times, when I spend a lot of time in hospitals and with doctors, and of course wondering how things are going to go,” Mr. Vogt said in an online interview with the pianist Zsolt Bognar in July, “and yet in music you get transported into this world where you forget everything.”Mr. Vogt created and shared those worlds in sublimely free, quite personal detail, and he had little interest in show for the sake of show. His was a “loving” approach to the piano, he told Pianist magazine in 2016, one that tried “to get the sound out of the keyboard, rather than into it.”If the results could sometimes seem idiosyncratic, at his best he played with “a sense of perfect equilibrium, a balance of lines that sounded simple and natural, but could only have been the result of thoughtful calibration,” as Allan Kozinn of The New York Times wrote in a review of a recital in 2006.Technique for Mr. Vogt was a means to expression, not an end in itself. He avoided repertoire that called for mere virtuosity — he once recorded an album of pieces written for children — and he eventually unburdened himself of the pressure placed on pianists to memorize the works they learn, so he could perform without the nervousness he had long felt onstage.He took the time to involve himself deeply in the works he played solo, which came mostly from the high Germanic tradition — ranging from Bach, whose “Goldberg” Variations he recorded to acclaim, to contemporary composers like Thomas Larcher. It was the music of Brahms, however, that was always closest to Mr. Vogt, for the solace of its melancholy.Mr. Vogt’s last public appearances, in which he played Brahms, were in June at Spannungen, a chamber music festival that he founded in 1998 that takes place in an Art Nouveau hydroelectric power plant in Heimbach, Germany. (Its name translates to “Voltages” as well as “Tensions.”) And it was in chamber music that he excelled, especially with the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister, the cellist Tanya Tetzlaff.Mr. Vogt recorded Brahms and Dvorak with the Tetzlaffs as a trio and, with Mr. Tetzlaff, set down fervently expressive accounts of violin sonatas by Mozart, Schumann and Brahms. Those exquisite recordings, made for the Ondine label, were widely judged worthy of reference status not because they aimed to be a final word on the works involved, or even appeared to be, but because the audible generosity of their partnership made for a unique focus and intensity.“This is chamber-playing at its most humane,” the critic Richard Bratby wrote of their recording of Beethoven’s Opus 30 sonatas in Gramophone last year, “impossible to hear without feeling a renewed love and admiration for music and performers alike.”It was also as an avowed collaborator, rather than as a more forceful leader, that Mr. Vogt took on conducting, which he decided to explore after stepping in at short notice to lead Beethoven from the keyboard with the Camerata Salzburg early in the 2010s.“There was no conductor, just a very good concertmaster, and it was so much fun, so easy,” he recalled of that concert in an interview with Gramophone magazine in 2017. “I rang my agent afterwards from the taxi to the airport and said, ‘I need to know how far I can go with this. It doesn’t matter which orchestra it’s with, I just love it so much.’”Hired after a single concert, Mr. Vogt became the music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, based in Newcastle, England, in 2015; together, they recorded the Beethoven concertos with a sparkling pliancy and the Brahms with an unusual tenderness of touch. He took the same post with the Chamber Orchestra of Paris in 2020 and remained there until his death.Conducting is “like chamber music,” Mr. Vogt told Gramophone. “I want to encourage the character of the music, encourage people to go to their limits of expression, and ideally get them to the state that they want to do that, enjoy searching to the depths.”Mr. Vogt performing a program of Mozart, Schubert and Brahms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLars Vogt was born on Sept. 8, 1970, in Düren, near Cologne, the third child of Marie-Luise Vogt, a secretary, and Paul Vogt, an engineer who also played soccer to a high standard. He and his siblings learned music as just one of many youthful activities, soccer included.But Mr. Vogt’s first piano teacher saw promise soon after he had started at age 6. He won a national competition for young musicians at 14, and at the same time began studying with the renowned pedagogue Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Hanover University of Music and Drama (now the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media). Their lessons continued informally until Mr. Kämmerling died in 2012, when Mr. Vogt succeeded his teacher as professor of piano at that university.Suitably firmed up technically under Mr. Kämmerling’s demanding tutelage, Mr. Vogt took second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1990. That experience proved as important for the personal relationships it brought as for the international tours that followed.On the podium during the Leeds final for Mr. Vogt’s intelligent if introverted reading of the Schumann Piano Concerto was the English maestro Simon Rattle; their partnership became one of the many friendships through which the pianist thrived musically, not least during a stint in the 2003-4 season as the pianist in residence at the Berlin Philharmonic, which Mr. Rattle then led.Mr. Rattle also planted the seeds that bloomed into Mr. Vogt’s podium career. He told him after a joint appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991 — an American debut in which the pianist “exercised his command with personality and poise” in Beethoven, John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times — that he would be a conductor within a decade.That comment “hit me like a lightning bolt, because I’d never thought of it,” Mr. Vogt told The Scotsman in 2015. “I guess he noticed how curiously I observed what he was doing. I was fascinated at what miracles can be achieved by something that doesn’t — ideally — produce any sound.”Mr. Vogt’s first marriage, to the composer Tatjana Komarova, ended in divorce. He married the violinist Anna Reszniak, the concertmaster of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, in 2017. She survives him, as do his parents; his siblings, Karsten Vogt and Ilka Fischboeck; and his daughters, Emma Vogt, Charlotte Kuehn and Isabelle Vogt, an actress with whom he recorded melodramas by Schumann and Strauss.“He was at once the wildest and most sensitive musician I know,” Mr. Tetzlaff, who performed with Mr. Vogt for 26 years and considered him his “closest comrade,” said of the pianist in an interview with Van magazine shortly after Mr. Vogt’s death.“I’ve met a lot of musicians who have become very successful by talking about themselves, presenting themselves well, and who seem to have no experience with doubt,” Mr. Tetzlaff went on. “But I learned that music can only speak fully in freedom and love. It’s a thing you only experience with very few musicians, artists like Lars.” More

The unmasking of a fake Galileo manuscript this summer brought renewed attention to a colorful, prolific early-20th-century forger named Tobia Nicotra.When the University of Michigan Library announced last month that one of its most prized possessions, a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610, was in fact a 20th-century fake, it brought renewed attention to the checkered, colorful career of the man named as the likely culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious forger from Milan.Nicotra hoodwinked the U.S. Library of Congress into buying a fake Mozart manuscript in 1928. He wrote an early biography of the conductor Arturo Toscanini that became better known for its fictions than its facts. He traveled under the name of another famous conductor who had recently died. And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him.His explanation of what had motivated his many forgeries, which were said to number in the hundreds, was somewhat unusual, at least according to an account of his trial that appeared in The American Weekly, a Hearst publication, in early 1935.“I did it,” the article quoted him as saying, “to support my seven loves.”When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, several news outlets reported, they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding and other famous figures.Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses, at least according to The American Weekly. The article described a room with black velvet-covered walls, with seven panels featuring paintings, sketches and photographs of the women — one of whom was said to be a “novelty dancer,” and another an “expert swimmer” — with fresh flowers in front of each. “The pictures in some cases displayed their physical attractions with startling frankness, but they were in general highly artistic,” the article noted.“Incidentally,” the publication added, “he had a wife.”Over the years Nicotra’s counterfeits have fooled collectors and institutions, sown confusion, and been denounced by the esteemed Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who collected musical manuscripts and who wrote an article in 1931 naming Nicotra as a forger. Now Nicotra is back in the news, thanks to the Galileo forgery in Michigan, which was unmasked by Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University who showed that the paper it had been written on had a watermark dating from the late 18th century, more than 150 years after Galileo supposedly wrote it. He also linked it to several other Nicotra forgeries.“Either he thought he was just invincible, or he was maybe just incredibly desperate,” Wilding, who is working on a biography of Galileo, said of Nicotra. While other forgers have been more prolific, Wilding said, few have been as daring — or as talented.“Everything Nicotra does is plausible; there are no jarring anachronisms,” he said. “He knows enough to try and get it right.”This manuscript was one of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions when it was thought to be by Galileo. It was unmasked this summer as a 20th-century forgery, most likely by Nicotra.via University of Michigan LibraryThere is relatively little concrete information about Nicotra, and, given that he was a professional forger, the existing documentary evidence must be taken with a grain of salt. “The facts just seem to slip away from him,” Wilding said. While some accounts say he was 53 at the time of his trial, a birth certificate suggests he may have been 44. Contemporary news accounts, and interviews with several scholars who have studied him, however, begin to give some sense of the man and his prolific career.A courtroom sketch of Nicotra that appeared in The American Weekly portrays him as a balding, thin-faced man with glasses perched on a pointy nose, sporting a mustache and goatee, and wearing either a thick scarf or some kind of furry, Astrakhan-like collar on his coat.Nicotra cast a wide net in the types of documents he counterfeited, and seems to have possessed real talent and learning. He forged a poem he claimed was by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso, musical manuscripts by leading composers, and was even said to have started a minor international incident by creating a fake Columbus letter identifying his birthplace as Spain, not Italy, prompting the mayor of Genoa to write a lengthy rebuttal reaffirming Columbus’ Italian ancestry.An account of his 1934 conviction by The Associated Press, which ran in The New York Times under the headline “Autograph Faker Gets Prison Term,” described how Nicotra operated: “His method was to visit the Milan Library and tear out the fly leaves of old books or steal pages of manuscript and write on them the ‘autographs’ of famed musicians. The librarians of Milan testified that he had ruined scores of their books.”In 1928, he sold what appeared to be a signed Mozart aria called “Baci amorosi e cari,” supposedly written by the composer at age 14, to the Library of Congress.“It was so special because first of all it was unknown, so it wasn’t reported in any of the thematic catalogs of Mozart at that time,” Paul Allen Sommerfeld, a music reference specialist at the Library of Congress, said in an interview. “He claimed that he found this manuscript and then published the song.”The library paid $60 for the document, which was later believed to have been composed by Nicotra himself.Nicotra said he was the son of a botany professor, and he wrote in one letter that he had graduated with a music degree from a conservatory in Naples in 1909. “We don’t know whether that’s a true fact or not,” Wilding said.When he published his biography of Toscanini in 1929, early critics noted that it contained a number of errors. It is seen as even more unreliable today.“It’s mostly invented conversations and so on,” said Harvey Sachs, the author of a definitive 2017 biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience.” “Just made-up stuff.”His conviction in 1934 made headlines around the world, including in The New York Times.In 1932, Nicotra toured the United States while masquerading as Riccardo Drigo, an Italian conductor and composer who had been the conductor of the Imperial Ballet in Russia and who may be best remembered for the arrangement of “Swan Lake” he created after Tchaikovsky’s death. (The Associated Press reported that Nicotra had been “feted widely in the United States as the former orchestra conductor of the Czar of Russia.”) Apparently no one realized that Drigo had died two years earlier, in 1930.“My main way of characterizing him would be ‘bold,’” said Erin Smith, who wrote her master’s thesis on Nicotra at the University of Maryland in 2014. “He was able to carry on with this for a good number of years.”Nicotra was also known for forging works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, an early-18th-century composer who died at the age of 26 and whose posthumous fame attracted forgers. One Pergolesi forgery wound up in the collection of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. When Christie’s auctioned it in 2017, it described it as an “intriguing forgery, once thought to belong to the hotly debated Pergolesi canon” and cited authorities who list it as “created by the prolific forger Tobia Nicotra.” It fetched $375.The discovery of the Galileo leaves open the question of what happened to the many other forgeries Nicotra created, which he was quoted as saying could number as many as 600.“I don’t know if he did 600, but I’m sure he did more than the little we’ve found so far,” said Richard G. King, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Music, who has been researching Nicotra. “I don’t think people are willfully hiding these things, but it’s just hard to find them.”Unless an institution has a record of buying documents from Nicotra, Wilding said, it may be hard to identify other forgeries. He suggested that documents by figures Nicotra habitually forged that lack clear provenance before the 20th century “are probably really worth looking at very, very closely.”Nicotra eventually ran afoul of the law after selling the fake Mozart manuscript to Walter Toscanini, who persuaded detectives in Milan to investigate the case. Nicotra was convicted, fined 2,400 lire and sentenced to two years in prison.Some accounts suggest that Nicotra was let out of prison early, because the Fascist government wanted his help forging signatures. That story, notes Wilding, “is just too good to be ignored, and maybe too good to be true.” More

Hear tracks by Blood Orange, Madison Cunningham, Yeat and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Björk, ‘Atopos’Multiple Björks converge in “Atopos,” the first single from her album due Sept. 30, “Fossora”; “atopos” is Greek for “out of place” or “amiss.” There’s the brash, declarative Björk, calling for unity and belting, “Thank you for staying while we learn/To find our resonance where we do connect.” There’s the beat-heavy Björk, who collaborated with Kasimyn — an Indonesian disc jockey who is in the duo Gabber Modus Operandi — on a stark, elemental kick-drum syncopation that turns to fierce battering at the end. There’s the nature-loving Björk, who surrounds herself in the video with close-ups of fungi. And there’s the modern chamber-music Björk, who chooses a family of instruments — on this track, six clarinets from bass on up — and writes gnarled, harmonically ambiguous arrangements for them. The song is equally cerebral and visceral — and, in its own way, jolly. JON PARELESBlood Orange, ‘Jesus Freak Lighter’A skittish electronic beat collides with a low, morose guitar riff on Blood Orange’s “Jesus Freak Lighter” — which is to say it’s a little bit New Order, a little bit Joy Division. Though Dev Hynes remains Blood Orange’s creative nucleus, as usual he’s brought on some new collaborators to orbit him on “Four Songs,” a new EP coming out next week; Ian Isaiah, Eva Tolkin and Erika de Casier will all be featured. “Jesus Freak Lighter,” though, is all Hynes, fitting since it conjures a mood of digital-era solitude: “Got carried away,” he sings with a kind of muffled melancholy, “Living in my head, photo fantasy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPhoenix featuring Ezra Koenig, ‘Tonight’Phoenix harkens back to 2009 on the sleek “Tonight,” not just in the way the group recaptures the sound of the excellent record it released that year, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” but in the cameo appearance from another late-aughts indie-pop luminary, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. “I talk to myself and it’s quite surprising,” Thomas Mars quips on the chorus; by the second iteration, Koenig adds some backing vocals to keep him company. ZOLADZDeerhoof, ‘My Lovely Cat’What if the spiky San Francisco art-rock band Deerhoof decided to write a Rolling Stones song? “My Lovely Cat” might be as close as they get, with a rowdy, distorted 4/4 guitar riff, a more-or-less march beat and a slide guitar that veers between teasing the rhythm guitar and shadowing the vocal. Satomi Matsuzaki sings, in Japanese, about bonding with her cat in the internet era: “Let’s monitor on pet-cam!/Shall I start Instagram or TikTok?” Of course Deerhoof skews things, with sudden silences, sneaky shifts of key and meter and a final minute of obsessive repetition. But there’s a Stones swagger lurking underneath. PARELESMadison Cunningham, ‘Our Rebellion’Opposites attract, and perplex, in “Our Rebellion” from “Revealer,” the new album by Madison Cunningham. As she tries to defuse a lovers’ quarrel by recognizing differences — “You speak in numbers/I sing in metaphor” — she insists “I’m not trying to simplify you.” That certainly applies to the music: a perpetual-motion weave of deftly picked guitar lines in a brisk 7/4 meter, stacking up and realigning, jabbing and easing off, sometimes running backward, as the crafty wrangling goes on. PARELESJordana, ‘Is It Worth It Now?’Perky synthesizer arpeggios, a confident guitar line and a broad-shouldered drumbeat promise something cheerful. But “Is It Worth It Now?” is actually a snap-out-of-it pep talk for someone deeply depressed: “Disinterest in the things that made you wanna live is sad enough itself, isn’t it?” She has advice — “Swim right into the center of all your doubt” — but the song ends with a question, not a cure. PARELESThe Waeve, ‘Can I Call You’Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall are former members of two very different, if quintessentially British, bands: Blur and the Pipettes. They recently joined forces to form a new duo, the Waeve, and announced that a debut album will be coming next year. The first single, “Can I Call You,” is full of unexpected and sonically adventurous twists and turns: Just when it seems that the song has settled into its groove as a plaintive, folky piano ballad sung by Dougall, a screaming guitar solo from Coxon propels it into a different, and much antsier, register. “I’m tired of being in love, I’m sick of being in pain,” they chant together in a punky cadence, shouting to be heard over a cacophony that now includes Coxon’s blaring saxophone. “Can’t you just kiss me, then kiss me again?” ZOLADZYeat, ‘Krank’One of several space jams from the new Yeat EP, “Lyfë,” “Krank” is woozy, circular, lewd, lightly dystopian, and 10 percent less inscrutable than the average Yeat song to date. It’s something like growth. JON CARAMANICABryson Tiller, ‘Outside’Bryson Tiller sings with gymnastic verve, never letting the potential power of a lingering note get in the way of a slickly assembled cluster of syllables. Here, he prances and slides atop a beat that borrows heavily from the Ying Yang Twins’ signature salacious hit, “Wait (The Whisper Song).” CARAMANICA​​Lewis Capaldi, ‘Forget Me’The yowling prince Lewis Capaldi has made hay from singing himself hoarse, his hits filled with raw eruptions of schlock so potent they transcend past corn into something far more cooked. Unlike his biggest hits, “Forget Me,” his first new song in about three years, has a slight tempo to it — you aren’t bathing in his pathos quite the same as you once were. The verses amble by amiably, and there’s just the faintest echo of “Man in the Mirror” as the song begins to build. But Capaldi unleashes the full catharsis at the chorus: “I’m not ready/to find out you know how to forget me/I’d rather hear how much you regret me.” The only catch is that the song feels as if it’s rushing him along, urging him not to wallow. And wallowing is where Capaldi thrives. CARAMANICAMarisa Anderson, ‘The Fire This Time’When the 21st-century folk-primitive guitarist Marisa Anderson — no stranger to electric instruments, home recording or multitracking — learned about George Floyd’s death in May 2020, she spent the day recording ‘The Fire This Time’ and quickly put it on Bandcamp for a month as a benefit single. She has re-edited it for her coming album, “Still, Here.” Anderson places steady, mournful fingerpicking behind searching, keening slide-guitar lines and, at the 30-second mark, a police siren that passed by her window as she was recording. It’s a musician working out emotions physically, instinctively, with her fingers on the strings. PARELESMakaya McCraven, ‘The Fours’Jazz, minimalism and a rich sense of unfolding mystery suffuse “The Fours” by Makaya McCraven, the drummer, composer and producer whose next album, “In These Times,” arrives Sept. 23. The track begins with muffled drums and a patient bass vamp, but other instruments keep arriving, slipping into the mix almost surreptitiously and then adding their own layers of counterpoint: cello, viola, piano, harp, saxophone, trumpet, flute, even some flamenco-like handclaps from McCraven. The players collude as sections — strings, horns — or peek out with their own bits of melody; loops mingle with live instruments. The track undulates and thickens, then dissolves before revealing too many secrets. PARELES More

The painter and budding electronic-pop musician has a new show of figurative paintings in New York, and quietly released the LP “My Body Your Choice” last month.For the last three years, through art fairs, auctions, a global pandemic and an album release, the British painter and musician Issy Wood has been perfecting the craft of being pursued professionally.Singled out by collectors, curators and titans of culture from two disparate worlds as a next big thing, Wood, 29, took a strange ride on her own hype cycle, luxuriating momentarily in the fuss and then — for the most part — rejecting it, leaving some fancy bridges smoldering behind her.As an in-demand visual artist and a D.I.Y. singer uncomfortable with the very different demands of potential pop renown, Wood is now resurfacing with new boundaries after extended sagas — in business, creativity and friendship — with two would-be patrons: the mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, in art, and the music super-producer Mark Ronson, best known for his work with Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga.Instead of Gagosian, the blue-chip gallery empire that might have been Wood’s champion, her new show of unsettling figurative paintings, “Time Sensitive,” opened Friday at Michael Werner, the more traditional Upper East Side gallery. And rather than releasing her debut album with Ronson’s Zelig label, an imprint of Sony Music where she briefly had a record deal, the wobbly and acerbic “My Body Your Choice” was put out completely independently last month, following the dissolution of her contract.“If I wanted an older man to hold money over my head, I would’ve gotten back in touch with my dad,” Wood said dryly over seltzer and Capri cigarettes last week at the cavernous Soho apartment where the new gallery had put her up for the show.One part self-professed naïf and one part openly savvy maneuverer, she identified as both “tough” and “very sensitive,” displaying both modes as she recounted her recent ups and downs across industries.Of Gagosian, 77, Wood noted that “to a point, he would say, I love how spunky you are,” only for the switch to flip when she decided not to work with him. “Then there’s a line where it becomes, Why are you being so difficult?” (Through a representative, Gagosian declined to comment.)On “Parts,” an almost playful kiss-off from her new album, Wood touches on a similar dynamic with Ronson, though it applies to others, too: “You only want the part of me/that smiles and says, ‘Yeah, I agree,’” she sings, adding: “I’m more than just a fresh face/I’ve got problems that you can’t pronounce.”It is this rare combination of emotional vulnerability and strategic, biting intelligence that allows Wood to connect across multiple mediums, said Vanessa Carlos, a founder of the London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa, where Wood has shown work since art school.“Issy really, really resists being commodified and objectified,” Carlos said. “Sometimes she might be seduced by something shiny, but very quickly she can see through things. Her main compass has been integrity to herself and to her own work.”On “My Body Your Choice,” made entirely alone at her kitchen table, Wood said she blends “heartbreak songs about actual boyfriends, heartbreak songs about my dad no longer being in my life and heartbreak songs about working with a music label.”Like her figurative paintings, which have been described as “a dysmorphic take on objects we think we know the shape of,” her electronic pop sounds nearly familiar, but can crunch or undulate in unexpected ways.Wood’s “Sore awards 1.”Issy Wood, via Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Carlos/Ishikawa, LondonThe artist’s “Stock, live.”Issy Wood, via Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Carlos/Ishikawa, London“Embarrassingly, I’m making what I think is pop music, but people describe it as wonky,” Wood said. “But I was trying my best! Why is it wonky? That’s everything — it’s me trying to be normal and failing miserably.”Tying the two bodies of work together are the semipublic blogs that Wood has kept since she was 14. Evolving from the abstract Tumblr musings of a disaffected teenager to raw and searing diary entries in which she dissects her life and career, the writing has regularly been compiled and released in book form by Carlos/Ishikawa. (Sample quip: “Having an angry 76-year-old man tell you how you feel is the new ASMR.” Or, after a failed romance: “Men continue to be a waste of moisturiser.”)“It’s all one thing,” said the dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, an owner at Michael Werner Gallery, of Wood’s various projects, all of which touch on “power, sex, class, femininity, masculinity.” He added, “She has enough energy to make everything the primary parts of her work.”Born in Durham, N.C., to doctor parents and raised in South London, Wood spent most of her adolescence “in hospitals and psychiatric units for my eating disorder,” she said. “Art school was the only path available to me.”At the Royal Academy in 2016, Wood was plucked by Carlos, who was drawn as much to the artist’s Tumblr as to her paintings. But by Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018, Wood’s large scale oil renderings of car interiors, painted on velvet, had become sought after, ushering her into a class of young artists whose sales market and attention share would explode in tandem. This year, one of her paintings topped half a million dollars at auction, a windfall not for Wood or her galleries, but for those flipping the work on the secondary market.Wood has done her best to ignore the noise, but there has been plenty of it. Most days, after meditation and two morning smokes, she paints during regular office hours at her London studio, taking breaks to chat with Carlos at the gallery next door.“We’ll talk about the insanity around how desperate people seem to be for my work right now and some of the deranged and frankly abusive emails from collectors, from advisers who want their cut, from people who put my work in auction,” Wood said. “Rich people don’t like being told no — most of them are men and they especially don’t like being told no by women. It offends everything they’ve worked to attain.”Music, which was supposed to be a haven, happens at night. While Wood had messed around in a band as a teenager, she returned to songwriting in 2019 following a breakup. “Art had very much become my job,” she said. “Music became my hobby, and it was like a secret.” Then a friend offered at a party to send Ronson some of Wood’s early demos.“I knew him as the guy that put loads of horns on things,” Wood said.The producer soon visited her in London — “He said, this could really be big,” she recalled — and began loaning her equipment, which Wood took as a creative challenge. She didn’t know Ronson had a record label until he offered to sign her, and even then, failed to realize it meant a deal with Sony as a corporate partner, she said.“I thought it was going to be like joining a gallery: It’s just a handshake and then you’re on the thing,” Wood said. She retained a lawyer on his advice.Used to the 50-50 splits of the art world, Wood was aghast at the lopsided terms of a typical major-label recording contract. “I feel like I arrived to that record deal in the strongest way possible — a bit older, a bit wiser. I was 27 rather than the 17-year-old version of me, desperately mentally ill and confused in every way,” she said. “And I had a very lucrative career, which meant I didn’t need much from them.”Still, across the rocky release of two pandemic EPs with Zelig (which she took to calling Zony), Wood found the requirements of her new job to be both mentally taxing and borderline absurd. The label fretted about being sued over her videos and album artwork, she said, and set her up with a social media manager who tried to teach her about hashtags. (“I was born in 1993, I know exactly what a hashtag is.”)“Embarrassingly, I’m making what I think is pop music, but people describe it as wonky,” Wood said. Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesAlthough Ronson could be generous with his feedback on her music, she found him difficult to pin down when she had questions; because of Covid, she had never met anyone else involved in her music career, including the manager Ronson had helped her hire.Emotional and physical distance turned to hostility, and then the unceremonious end of the pairing. “He made sure that I always knew that he was doing me a favor,” Wood said. “That he’d won an Oscar for his songwriting and I very much hadn’t.” (Ronson, in a brief statement, said, “I have a different recollection of our professional history but I wish her the best and the continued use of my HBO Max login.”)The rupture with Gagosian after a prolonged cat-and-mouse game was of a “similar flavor,” she said. “After all I’ve done for you …” Wood parodied, beating her fist on the table.She recalled upsetting the dealer at their final business meeting when she questioned who would shepherd her career when he died. After Wood retreated to the bathroom to escape Gagosian’s frustrated disappointment, she said, he texted her that “the other galleries you are considering will go out of business long before my demise,” accidentally sending it three times, which cut the tension. Later, she wrote about the episode in detail.This week, at Michael Werner, things were more tranquil. As Wood and her new gallerist, VeneKlasen, attempted to arrange the paintings, Wood compared the sweetly awkward negotiation to having sex with someone for the first time: “What do you even like?”The art being considered included a textbook-size depiction of a birth control container and a zoomed crop from “Mad Men” the size of a small swimming pool. Wood’s main instinct was to subtract. But even as the party, the sales, the reviews and maybe even more music loomed, the focus, once again, was on the work. More