Music

The American Modern Opera Company, a collective of restless and enterprising young musicians and dancers, is preparing for the Ojai Music Festival.CATSKILL, N.Y. — At the Lumberyard center here on a recent evening, more than 15 artists gathered outdoors around a long banquet spread over several picnic tables that had been lined up and topped with tea lights, bottles of rosé and accouterments for a feast of roasted pork lettuce wraps.The group — mostly members of the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective founded five years ago by some of the most restless and enterprising young people in the performing arts — locked hands around their place settings. “Close the circle,” one said, nodding toward a remaining gap. Bobbi Jene Smith, the dancer and choreographer, arrived with her toddler, a multilingual mega fan of “Frozen,” to fill it.There was no prayer or any kind of speech. Just a pause, before they all smiled and said in near unison, “Thanks.” Then dinner began.As friends caught up and musicians mingled with dancers, Rebecca Sigel, the company’s manager for its Lumberyard residency, relayed pandemic safety measures, like daily testing, and asked for help cleaning up after dinner. Cooking, something of a competitive sport in AMOC, had been planned in advance; but dishwashing was handled just as easily. The night before, the honors fell to Julia Bullock, one of the world’s great sopranos, who had happily volunteered.That is how AMOC operates: with an all-in-it-together, egalitarian spirit. And that’s how its members insist on offering themselves to partnering institutions and presenters — the latest of which is the Ojai Music Festival in California, where the company will have its largest platform yet, programming and performing four days of events, beginning June 9. As at any AMOC show, anything goes; with disciplines colliding, a violinist may dance, or a concert may turn theatrical. Regardless, novelty and experimentation will reign.The company’s role as this year’s music director at Ojai — a festival overseen by a different guest each year, in collaboration with the artistic director, Ara Guzelimian — is a testament to the precious space it occupies. Endlessly adventurous, it is also a magnet for major support; its members have performed on high-profile stages, been commissioned by the likes of the Paris Opera and even won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. In March, it received a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant.From left, Smith, Zack Winokur, Bullock, Schraiber and Hanick debrief at Lumberyard after a rehearsal for “Harawi.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesDespite such prestige, AMOC is “an island of misfit toys,” said the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who like everyone in the company balances his work with it and a busy outside career. “I don’t know what the ‘misfit’ means, but I know that part of it is a yearning for a different sort of way.”That type of yearning is how the company was born, over a lunch between the composer Matthew Aucoin and the stage director Zack Winokur in 2014. The two had grown up in each other’s orbits, overlapping at camp and the Juilliard School, but never really had a substantial conversation until then. They talked about the frustrations of getting a project done quickly with a group of strangers, and wondered what would happen instead if a small network of artists were brought together for intentional, enduring relationships.Over the next couple of years the idea grew more earnest, and Aucoin and Winokur began to invite some of their favorite colleagues from the worlds of music and dance to join. They also sought recommendations; Aucoin asked the violinist Keir GoGwilt, a member, “Who is the violinist you respect the most?” Miranda Cuckson, GoGwilt responded. So she came on board, too.“There was a very particular profile that we were looking for in the artists, which is people who are virtuosos in their area and therefore are appreciated by institutions, but sometimes chafe at the limitations,” Aucoin said. “It was the people who had the chops to excel in the capital-C classical versions of these art forms but didn’t want to live there all the time.”One such artist was Paul Appleby, a tenor who appears regularly at the Metropolitan Opera. When he heard from Aucoin, he recalled, he had been looking for more new-music projects. “How many times,” he said, “can you do ‘Magic Flute’ before you start to glaze over a bit?” Tines felt similarly, describing repertoire like Schumann’s “Liederkreis,” for all its beauty, as “a straitjacket.”During the more nebulous days of AMOC, its artists found refuge in the rural town of Stamford, Vt., where they were regularly hosted by the dancer Marta Miller on an idyllic property with a vegetable garden, pool and rehearsal studio. (Aucoin and Winokur have also bought houses nearby.) It’s now a tradition to meet there in August.“Usually the Vermont time has not been about creating a project as much as working on stuff,” Winokur said. “Or workshopping ideas or totally experimenting. And there’s a level of social engagement: You’re living together, eating together, doing dishes together.”Vermont is where the ritual of giving thanks at dinner started. It’s also where, between the meal and dessert, AMOC members tend to give impromptu performances — a private entertainment that inspired “Family Dinner,” a modular set of miniature concertos by Aucoin that will premiere at Ojai.When they get together, artistic disciplines blur in an open-minded manner redolent of Black Mountain College, the short-lived liberal arts college where Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Anni Albers, for example, freely experimented alongside their students. With AMOC, Smith said, “One thing feeds another.” She continued: “Why would Keir pick up a violin to play, and why would I dance to it? It’s amazing to understand the why, and so much gets answered from there.”Less formal cross-pollination has been productive, too. One night, Bullock danced with the former Batsheva company member Or Schraiber after dinner, and the casual fun led to Schraiber joining a staged production of Messiaen’s song cycle “Harawi” at Ojai, directed by Winokur and choreographed by Smith.When the company formally announced itself, in 2017, it had a mix of instrumentalists (including the JACK Quartet cellist Jay Campbell, the exhilaratingly versatile pianist Conor Hanick, the genre-blending flutist Emi Ferguson, the bassist and composer Doug Balliett, and Jonny Allen, of Sandbox Percussion); vocalists (among them the ubiquitous countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo); and dancers (in addition to Schraiber and Smith, Julia Eichten — though the cellist Coleman Itzkoff has convincingly pulled off this role as well).From left, Miranda Cuckson, Anthony Cheung and Paul Appleby preparing for the premiere of Cheung’s “The Echoing of Tenses.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAt first, the company really had only one project on the calendar: a small festival at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where it had an early champion in Diane Borger, the theater’s executive producer. She already knew Tines and Aucoin — their talent, she said was obvious and extraordinary — and committed to three years of hosting them for an event that, she recalled, had to be called Run AMOC!, because “how could it not?”It was essential to the company that its members receive equal pay for their work. “All of these people are at the same caliber, yet their pay is so different based on their disciplines,” Winokur said. “Musicians make more, and dancers make less.” So they set a precedent of a high minimum pay for performance and rehearsal weeks. “It’s less, obviously, than what Anthony or Julia can make in a night,” he added, referring to Costanzo and Bullock’s star status in opera, “but it’s not chump change, either.”The policy is built into the company’s contracts. Sometimes, it’s too expensive — most often at dance institutions, which tend to be chronically underfunded. So when it can, AMOC makes up the difference with subsidies. (That Mellon grant will help.) In the end, Winokur said, “everyone enters the room feeling the same way.”Usually, Winokur said, partners are fine with AMOC’s pay standards. One reason could be that most institutions would be willing to support the company’s artists anyway. Many of them have been regulars at Lincoln Center; during the 2018-19 season, Bullock was in residence at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Costanzo was instrumental in bringing the New York Philharmonic back from its pandemic hiatus. “We have,” Tines said, “earned our stripes.”That puts the company in a position not enjoyed by many avant-gardists, or young artists generally. They have freedom, and means.“The way AMOC engages with institutions is, we are happy to utilize the resources of the hardware,” Tines said. “We need the spaces, we need the financial support. We do not need the artistic ideals or ideas even. Just allow people to be their full selves and artists to create, and hopefully you will allow an ecosystem for beautiful things to be made. The provider of resources cannot also be the arbiter of them.”When AMOC is left to its own devices, it operates in a disciplined, democratic way. It has a “small but busy staff,” Winokur said, consisting of him, the managing director Jennifer Chen, the producer Cath Brittan and the company manager Mary McGowan. The company is also made up of committees, such as the one overseeing Ojai.Anthony Cheung, who composed one of the festival premieres, “The Echoing of Tenses,” said: “I’ve never seen an organization like this, where even in the planning stages people involved or not in the project are so invested.” Guzelimian laughed while recalling the sight of a shared Google Docs file for Ojai, where changes from all members were happening in real time. “Even editing documents,” he said, “is a collective effort.”During the pandemic lockdown, the company met regularly on video calls in which members had long, seminar-like discussions about AMOC’s mission and future. Group decisions, they learned, don’t come easily. Cuckson said, “There’s a lot of work you have to put in,” while Appleby put it more bluntly: “Democracy can be a pain in the ass.”But at their best, the artists achieve what Guzelimian described as “Brownian motion,” adding: “They exert creative pulls on each other that just make more energy. I’m still scratching my head, because conventional wisdom would say that the larger the committee, the more it becomes leveled. In their case, the interaction seems to push them.”Winokur directing a rehearsal of “Harawi” with, from left, Schraiber, Bullock and Hanick.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesWhen they do push one another, it’s often friendly. At Lumberyard, they were preparing a dense slate of Ojai programming, including new works, a tribute to the long-overlooked composer Julius Eastman and dances including the premiere of Smith’s “Open Rehearsal,” based on her film “Broken Theater.” Days are long, and sometimes hot, with one of the spaces cooled only by open doors and fans. Winokur had the most aerial view, moving from room to room with his dog, a young mutt named Henry (one of three on site, joining Sigel’s senior beagle-terrier mix, Ollie, and new puppy, Otis).Even amid struggle — repetition of a single passage, say, for an hour at a time — the mood stayed light. With Costanzo in New York singing in “Akhnaten” at the Met Opera, Tines playfully sang his part in falsetto during rehearsals for Aucoin’s setting of the poet Jorie Graham’s “Deep Water Trawling,” newly arranged for AMOC. And the artists were quick to compliment. Appleby told Cheung that he felt like “The Echoing of Tenses” made him “see the Matrix.” In a break from the thorniness of “Deep Water,” Bullock told Aucoin, “I like this music, Matt,” to which he said, “Thanks, Jules; it’s nice to hear every once in a while.”As she spoke, Bullock rubbed her baby bump. Her coming parenthood is a reminder of the life events that loom over AMOC. They all have independent careers, and some already have families. Winokur said that the company’s structure — more of a relationship network than an organization with regular programming — could protect it from committing to a future it can’t maintain. AMOC’s sustainability, Tines said, is a “big philosophical question.”“I’m interested in understanding what we look like in our next phases of scale,” he added. “Does it mean inviting new people? Does it mean modeling what we’re doing for other groups?”For now, the company’s institutional support continues apace. Winokur said the coming year, after the wave of work created for Ojai, will entail a lot of touring. “Harawi” is going to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July. “Comet/Poppea” — which blends Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” with a new opera adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s story “The Comet” by George Lewis — will premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA next spring.And that future, as open-ended as it is micromanaged, is currently taking shape at picnic tables in the Hudson Valley, alongside expressions of thanks, songs from “Frozen” and dinner recipes explained in great detail.“I only refer to AMOC as a group of my closest friends and colleagues,” Tines said. “When I’m doing any other project, this is home.” More

The American premiere of the brutal play “A Little Life,” a drag-infused Hamlet and an immersive celestial installation highlight the festival’s latest iteration.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s artistic director, David Binder, who is programming the 13 shows for the Next Wave Festival, is mixing “incredible light” and darkness, he said.It is the first in-person edition of the festival since 2019 and it will run from Sept. 28 to Dec. 22. The highlight will be the U.S. premiere of the stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” (Oct. 20-29) — a coming-of-age tale about four young men that includes depictions of self-harm, domestic violence, child abuse and suicide.“There’s optimism and there’s things that speak to the challenging world we all live in,” Binder said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “So I think it relates to one piece of all of that mosaic.”Ivo van Hove’s production of Yanagihara’s Kirkus Prize-winning novel, which is set to be presented in Dutch with English supertitles at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, runs just over four hours and features a live video screen to show close-ups of agonizing moments, like a character burning his own arm — and pouring salt in the wound. (Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)“It’s an extraordinary production that challenges the audience,” said Binder, who saw the world premiere production in Amsterdam in 2018. “Much like the whole season.”Even though it’s long, he said, “I guarantee you it holds you every moment.”This is just the second Next Wave Festival that Binder, who started as BAM’s artistic director in 2018, has programmed, after the 2020 and 2021 events were canceled because of the pandemic. He told The New York Times in 2019 that his focus for the first event would “move it forward by adding in a whole new slew of artists,” and that emphasis continues this year, with 13 programs created in eight countries featuring dance, music and theater. Nine of the 13 artists and companies are performing at BAM for the first time.“That was our guiding principle,” he said this week, “to cover a lot of ground with lots of international new artists.”One of the returning artists is the German director Thomas Ostermeier, whose riotous production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will come to BAM’s Harvey Theater stage this fall (Oct. 27-Nov. 5). In Ostermeier’s staging, Ophelia and Gertrude are played by the same actor — as are many of the other characters; the play features just six performers. (The Guardian called the production of it in Berlin, which mixed pop music and drag shows with duels, “kookily funny and coolly self-aware.”)Next up at the Harvey will be the U.S. premiere of the Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues’s carnivalesque dance piece “Encantado,” whose title refers to spirits of healing — the encantados — and which features 100 colored blankets that transform the stage (Nov. 8-9). Meanwhile, at the Howard Gilman Opera House, another dance piece, the Greek director-choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou’s dreamlike concoction “Transverse Orientation,” pairing experimental, painterly choreography with music by Vivaldi, will have its New York premiere, Nov. 7-11.Then the main stage shifts to opera with the U.S. premiere of Ong Keng Sen’s “Trojan Woman,” a queer Korean operatic take on the Greek tragedy (Nov. 18-19). The production, performed in Korean with English subtitles, fuses the traditional Korean musical storytelling form of pansori with K-pop music. (The “Parasite” composer Jung Jae-il composed the music in collaboration with the renowned Korean pansori master Ahn Sook-sun.)Binder also programmed work from within the United States, including an orchestral hip-hop performance by the Los Angeles producer and rapper Flying Lotus, the composer and D.J. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Wordless Music Orchestra that is being billed as a rendition of their Hollywood Bowl performance in Los Angeles this summer (Oct. 6-7).The festival is set to wrap up with an immersive installation by the Brooklyn-based interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider, whose world premiere of “N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars)” at BAM Fisher may be the closest a New Yorker will come to clear-sky stargazing (Nov. 29- Dec. 22). Visitors will enter a completely dark space and be guided by an unseen voice as 5,000 programmed points of light, which the artist has said are inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity” mirror room, respond to everyone individually.The season also features the American premiere of the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman’s wordless production of “300 el x 50 el x 30 el” (Sept. 28-Oct. 1), which follows the inhabitants of a small village fearful of an impending disaster. (The title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark.) The Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras will showcase “Open for Everything,” which sheds light on contemporary Romany people, at the Harvey (Oct. 5-8). The Grammy-winning violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s staged musical work “Everything Rises,” which seeks to “replace abstract slogans and inert diversity statements with lived experience and direct engagement,” will be at BAM Fisher (Oct. 12-15). More

Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt’s an indelible 1990s relic, a tune that gets you into a groove right when the six opening words hit. Wesley has heard “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan countless times since he was a teenager, but it wasn’t until a recent listen at the gym that he had an epiphany: It’s a country song. It fits into a long tradition of country music that expresses love and respect for an artist’s hometown — which, in Jordan’s case, is South Central Los Angeles.Wesley explores other songs that have personally changed in meaning for him over the years (like “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M.), and he considers music that has changed in tone for our collective culture — such as Britney Spears’s catalog, in the aftermath of her yearslong struggle to end her court-sanctioned conservatorship.While the context and meaning of these songs may evolve, “the art itself is not going to change,” Wesley realizes. “‘This Is How We Do It’ is the same song in 1995 as it is in 2022,” he continues. “But what’s different is me, I have changed, and there’s something about just hearing Montell Jordan talk about what it’s like to live in South Los Angeles that my life was finally ready to absorb in some different way.”Hosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Hans Buetow and Elyssa DudleyEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More

He had just concluded a performance when he was stricken. Nicknamed “the Mesmerizer,” he recorded hundreds of songs for some of India’s biggest movie stars.NEW DELHI — Krishna Kumar Kunnath, popularly known as KK, whose mellifluous voice gave India some of Bollywood’s biggest hit songs of the 1990s and 2000s, died on Tuesday after a performance in Kolkata. He was 53.The death was confirmed by his publicist.KK had been performing in an auditorium packed with college students when, after singing his last song of the evening, cameras caught him wiping his brow as he was led offstage in a hurry.He was declared dead at a hospital soon after. The cause was not yet known, his publicist said.Krishna Kumar Kunnath was born in 1968 in Delhi into a Malayali family — a people of mixed ethnic heritage from southern India. His parents were C.S. Nair and Kunnath Kanakavalli.In college he took to rock and was a fan of Kishore Kumar, a well known Bollywood playback singer — a vocalist who dubs the songs for a movie’s lead character.After a brief stint as a marketing executive, KK, as he was called, decided to follow his passion for music. With no mentor in the competitive recording industry, he initially struggled to make a name for himself, resorting to singing at hotels to make ends meet. He broke into Bollywood in 1996 with the movie “Maachis” (“Matchstick”), about the rise of the Sikh insurgency in Punjab.As a playback singer, KK became the voice of Bollywood stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor and Salman Khan. He recorded about 3,500 jingles in 11 languages, mostly in Hindi, and released popular albums like “Pal” (“Moment”) in 1999 and “Humsafar” (“Co-Traveler”) in 2008.With his shock of black hair and a boyish charm, KK earned the nickname “The Mesmerizer” for the way he could hold an audience under his sway with his smooth voice and easy demeanor.“When I go to a concert, I am an underdog,” he told Indian news media in 2015, “but when I walk out, I am a prince.”He sang of everything from heartbreak and sadness to love and friendship in songs like “Tadap Tadap Ke Is Dil Se Aah” (“Pining, This Heart Kept Crying Out for You”) “Bas Ek Pal” (“Just This Moment”) and “Aankhon Mein Teri” (“In Your Eyes”).Millions of young Indians took to social media after his death in an outpouring of grief.“There are some people who we have never met personally but somehow they have become an inseparable part of our lives,” one fan wrote. “KK was one such.”Cricket players, politicians, Bollywood actors, playback singers and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, all paid tribute on social media, and the state government of West Bengal honored KK with a gun salute.He had been singing fewer Bollywood numbers in recent years because, he said, he wanted to “rediscover” himself, telling The Times of India in 2018 that he missed “the freedom to create your own songs and music.”He is survived by his wife, Jyothi, whom he married in 1991; and two children, Nakul and Tamara.Before his performance on Tuesday, KK posted a photo on his Facebook page showing him with arms outstretched toward the audience. “Pulsating gig tonight at Nazrul Mancha. Vivekananda College!!” he wrote. “Love you all.”Dressed in jeans and a collared T-shirt and appearing much younger than his years, he shouted to the audience, “Sing along!” Waving their cellphones with the flashlights on, the audience swayed to the music.His final song was “Pyaar ke Pal” (“Moments of Love”), a favorite from the album “Pal.” The lyrics seemed prophetic:We may or may not be around, these moments will be remembered.Moments, these are moments of love, come, come along with me.Come, what are you thinking, it’s a short life.If you get tomorrow, that would be good fortune. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherHarry Styles’s third album, “Harry’s House,” just debuted at the top of the Billboard chart with the year’s biggest opening-week sales: 521,500 equivalent album units. His upcoming tour will feature 15 performances at Madison Square Garden in New York, and 15 performances at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif. By most conventional metrics, Styles is one of pop’s biggest stars.And yet his music has not always been as successful as his celebrity might suggest — he has had just six Top 10 hits. He makes 1970s-style pop that is largely out of step with the current landscape, and he often draws more attention for his intense charisma and his gender-fluid sartorial flair than for his songs.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Styles’s sometimes circular musical journey, the ways his time in One Direction helped shaped his public image and how internet fandom has bolstered his career.Guests:Kaitlyn Tiffany, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It”Lindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The Kentucky musician’s second album, “Teeth Marks,” is steeped in Southern songwriting, but not tethered to anything beyond its creator’s own truths.MURRAY, Ky. — S.G. Goodman was looking for the perfect sentence. Sitting in her midcentury-modern living room in this small college town and steadfastly ignoring the whines of her balding terrier, Howard, the singer-songwriter flipped through a copy of “My People’s Waltz,” the Pulitzer-nominated 1999 short-story collection by her mentor and friend Dale Ray Phillips.“All of his sentences are so beautiful and economical,” she said, failing to locate the one she had in mind. “He taught me that a really good way to understand what feelings you’re trying to capture is by reading something like a short story or a novel and really paying attention to the moments or images that make your stomach turn a little.”Goodman has put those lessons to good use, especially on her second album, “Teeth Marks,” out Friday. She approaches her songs as though they were stories, emphasizing character and scene. Over a clutch of tender, twangy guitar notes on the LP’s title track, she sings, “When you left the bed, after you bit my arm. A little souvenir, where your teeth left marks.” Her voice is an intimate whisper, her phrasing defined by her West Kentucky accent, and the image itself is both playful and painful. Love — especially unrequited love — leaves a physical impact, an idea she explores throughout the album.With her sharp eye for character and scene and her arresting voice — which sounds like it could be emanating from a century-old 78 — Goodman, 33, is the latest in a wave of Kentucky artists who divine inspiration from their home state. Like Kelsey Waldon from Monkey’s Eyebrow, Joan Shelley from Louisville and Tyler Childers from Lawrence County, she embraces the freedom of making music far from Nashville and New York. Her songs don’t stray too far from home, although they do speak to issues and ideas much larger than her hometown.“It’s important to represent the South and rural places with a beauty and complexity,” Goodman said, adjusting her glasses and running her hand through the thick brown hair that has become her signature. “I don’t think that can be done by someone who just decided that they like the style of music that typically portrays those places. You write out of a region. You don’t write into it.”Western Kentucky has left its marks on Goodman and her songs. She was raised in Hickman, right on the Mississippi River, and she’s quick to point that “Mark Twain actually called it ‘a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill.’” It’s “mostly dilapidated now,” she noted, “but it’s still charming and beautiful.” Her family were sharecroppers, responsible for thousands of acres of wheat, corn and soybeans. Each summer, Goodman’s father would plant sweet corn for each of his children, and they would be responsible for harvesting and selling the crop. After tithing at the local Baptist church, profits would go toward buying school clothes.“When I signed my record contract, I knew that I wasn’t going to keep my sexuality a secret,” Goodman said.Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesGoodman left Hickman in 2007 to attend Murray State University, in this small town in the western corner of the state. After studying philosophy and creative writing, she has become a local historian with a deep knowledge of the region and its eccentric characters. She’ll drive you down Route 641 to Puryear, Tenn., a well-worn route to buy beer in the nearest wet county. And on the way she’ll point out where the Big Apple Café once stood, welcoming Black and white clientele even when other area establishments were still segregated.“When the town wasn’t ready to progress, these were places where change could happen,” she explained. “They hosted different types of people and outlooks, and they’ve been a life force for people in rural communities.”She’ll also take you by Terrapin Station, a strip mall record store that serves as the hub of the lively scene in Murray, stocking merch from local bands and occasionally hosting shows. This is where Goodman got her start as a musician, buying records and playing bills with local punk bands.“I remember her coming into the store years ago with a goody bag of homemade CDs,” said Tim Peyton, one of Terrapin’s owners, who plays in the local post-punk band Quailbones. “She didn’t want to sell them. She wanted us to give them away to people. Just sneak it in somebody’s bag. That’s how she introduced herself. Now she’s making a name for herself, but it’s amazing that she’s doing it while staying here in Murray.”To record “Teeth Marks,” however, Goodman had to leave town. She and her backing band of Murray musicians drove the eight hours down to Athens, Ga., to record with the co-producer Drew Vandenberg at Chase Park Transduction Studios. “One of the things that she and I really connected on was just being into so many different kinds of music,” Vandenberg said. “She didn’t want to just make a country record.”The 11-track album encompasses country music, spartan post-punk and high-lonesome Appalachian balladry, everything tied together by Goodman’s indelible vocals. For the stark “You Were Someone I Loved,” which features Goodman singing with no accompaniment, Vandenberg let her have the run of the studio. “It was like one of those experiments where the act of observing something changes what it’s going to do,” he explained. “So I left the tape rolling and left her alone, just so she didn’t have to worry about this person staring at her through the glass.”“It’s important to represent the South and rural places with a beauty and complexity,” Goodman said.Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesEspecially on “Teeth Marks,” Goodman selects her details precisely, the better to make you squirm when she says a prayer for a dead squirrel, or counts the 32 voice mail messages she received one day, asking if she’s OK. Or when she discloses the object of her unrequited love on the spare “Patron Saint of the Dollar Store”: “Know I found heaven lying in a woman’s arms.” It’s the most explicit description of the subject of her love songs, and it further complicates the stories she’s telling: She knows that small towns and rural communities, even her beloved Murray, are often perceived as being hostile to those who identify as queer.“When I signed my record contract, I knew that I wasn’t going to keep my sexuality a secret,” she said, pausing to choose her words carefully. “Me being queer had been known to most everyone in my life.” When journalists covering her 2020 album, “Old Time Feeling,” described her as a queer singer-songwriter, it outed her to even more people, yanking her own story out of her control. “It was a disappointment,” she said, “because I felt like people might be happy for me releasing an album, but I realized that there will always be people who won’t get behind me, no matter what I’m doing. Because I’m going to be doing it while I’m gay.”As dedicated as she is to creating art in Murray and mapping the region in her music, Goodman is spending less time in her hometown and more on the road. As she pulled Howard into her lap, she said, “I have a stronger idea of where I’m from and my situation here, no matter where I’m at in the world. I’m really not sure if I’ll ever be able to remove myself from this place.” More

Anson Boon went through a grueling process to play the punk star in “Pistol,” even though the original wanted nothing to do with the project.LONDON — Anson Boon gave playing Johnny Rotten everything he had, including a front tooth.Boon embodies the punk frontman in “Pistol,” a new limited series charting the meteoric rise and fall of Rotten’s band the Sex Pistols, and the tooth was lost recreating one of Rotten’s “most animated performances,” the 22-year-old actor said in a recent interview. “I slammed my face into the microphone by accident.”Sitting in a north London park, a mile from where Rotten grew up, Boon reeled off a list of other injuries sustained over six months of filming: He fractured his coccyx when he fell over a drum kit; zealous singing dislocated his jaw; he spent several hours a day hunched over to emulate the musician’s posture, and still has back pain from it today.This roll call is, in some ways, appropriate. Rotten — who now goes by his real name, John Lydon — was one of the pioneers of London’s 1970s punk movement, known for his “divine insanity,” as John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times in 1977, and for overseeing concerts where chairs were thrown and noses bloodied.“Pistol” — which begins streaming Tuesday on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in other territories — is Boon’s most significant screen role to date, following parts onstage in London and in films like Sam Mendes’s “1917.”Despite the injuries, he “loved the intensity” of playing the Pistols frontman, Boon said. Besides, “It’s not Rotten to give up. I just had to power through,” he added.Each day on set, Boon would go through an hour and a half of hair and makeup preparation.Miya Mizuno/FXThis determination was already clear to Danny Boyle, who directs the series, when he saw Boon’s audition tape. One of the scenes Boon presented was Rotten auditioning for the Pistols by singing Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” into a broken shower head. Boon sang into a toilet brush.His parents watched the tape, and asked him: “‘Are you sure you can send that? You’ve really gone for it,’” he remembered. Boon thought he would either get the part, or the casting team would never let Boyle see it.As it turned out, the director loved it. The tape was “repulsive and magnetic at the same time,” Boyle said in a recent phone interview.Boon realized he needed to “transform into Rotten.” But he only knew the Sex Pistol’s most famous songs — “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” — and meeting Lydon wasn’t an option.The show is based on “Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol,” the autobiography of the guitarist Steve Jones, who hasn’t spoken to Lydon since 2008. While all the other living members of the band are consultants for “Pistol,” Lydon has disavowed the project from the start. In 2021, the frontman was sued by his former bandmates for refusing to agree to license the band’s music for the show; Lydon lost the case. He declined to be interviewed for this article.So Boon’s research process was rigorous. He read “Lonely Boy,” as well as “Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story,” a memoir from Jordan Mooney, a friend of the band who is played in the show by Maisie Williams. Boon also created what he called a “Rotten museum” on his laptop, collecting photos, videos and charts of Rotten’s life to keep track of how he changed, Boon said, from a “shy kid” to a famous punk artist.From left, Johnny Rotten (Boon), Sid Vicious (Louis Partridge), Steve Jones (Toby Wallace) and Paul Cook (Jacob Slater) in “Pistol.”Rebecca Brenneman/FX“You usually have to tell young actors to be diligent and do their research,” Boyle said. “We had to tell Anson when to stop. He became obsessed with him. He knows more about him than I do.”For three months, Boon and his co-stars also went through a band camp, led by the British electronic group Underworld, who scored “Pistol.” The hard work seemed to be paying off by February 2021, when Mooney came to see the actors during rehearsals. At her request they sang the Pistols track “Holiday in the Sun.” After they’d finished, Mooney approached Boon: “‘Thank you,’” he remembered her saying. “‘I feel like I’ve just watched the Sex Pistols again.’”It took a team to get the actors to that point. A dialect coach helped Boon pin down Rotten’s accent and his lisp. A movement instructor helped him emulate Rotten’s posture.His vocal coach, Anne-Marie Speed, helped raise Boon’s singing voice two octaves to match Rotten’s register, “in the same way you might teach a dancer to do the splits,” Boon said. The process was arduous. Afterward, “I had to have acupuncture in my head because there would be so much pressure buildup,” he said.Each day on set, Boon would go through an hour and a half of hair and makeup preparation, wearing wigs and brown false teeth, while listening to interviews of Rotten “to get into his voice and his contrarian mentality,” he said.Boon said he wanted to make sure the world created by Boyle and the show’s screenwriter, Craig Pearce, didn’t feel “like a caricature,” he said. “I had to be surrounded by everything, completely enveloped in it, to make it feel real.”“I have never met a young actor who is as unafraid of throwing themselves in at the deep end like Anson does,” Kate Winslet said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesToby Wallace, who plays Jones in the series, saw Boon “shifting through these wild and risky choices, and committing to all of them,” he said in a phone interview.When Kate Winslet played Boon’s mother in the 2019 film “Blackbird,” she recognized a similar dedication. “I have never met a young actor who is as unafraid of throwing themselves in at the deep end like Anson does,” Winslet said in an email interview.The sense of responsibility Boon felt playing Rotten was only “amplified” by the fact Lydon didn’t want to be involved, the actor said. Recently, Lydon has criticized the show on Twitter and in British tabloids, which only “endears him to me even more,” Boon said.Boyle believes Boon has done Rotten justice. “He’s done his due diligence,” Boyle said. “He believed in himself,” in the same way “John would have.”For months after filming, Boon would automatically sit pigeon-toed with his friends at the pub, he said. And the show has rubbed off on him in other ways. Through Rotten, “I learned about that punk spirit,” said Boon, who still lives in Peterborough, a medieval city in the east of England.Does that spirit live on in him still? “I’d certainly like to think so,” Boon said. And just in case, he has that false tooth to remind him. More

Hear tracks by Wynonna & Waxahatchee, Superorganism, Rico Nasty 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.Sky Ferreira, ‘Don’t Forget’The nine long years since Sky Ferreira’s 2013 cult-classic album “Night Time, My Time” vanish in the opening moments of “Don’t Forget,” a dazzling return to form that is slated to appear on Ferreira’s much-delayed second album, “Masochism.” In her near decade (mostly) away from music — due, in part, to disagreements with her record label — Ferreira’s grungy synth-pop sound has hardly changed at all. But “Night Time, My Time” still sounds singular enough that “Don’t Forget” (which she co-produced with Jorge Elbrecht and co-wrote with Tamaryn) comes as a comfort rather than a disappointment. It’s refreshing to hear the 29-year-old pick up exactly where she left off, inhabiting a song’s echoing, tarnished atmosphere with her signature breathy intensity and smeared glamour. “Keep it in mind, nobody here’s a friend of mine,” Ferreira sneers, proving her melodramatically defiant edge is still intact. LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex G, ‘Blessing’The Philadelphia-based indie artist Alex G has both an easily recognizable aesthetic sensibility and a playfully elastic sense of self. On his excellent 2019 album “House of Sugar,” Alex (last name: Giannascoli) sometimes pitch-shifted and distorted his vocals as though he were embodying different characters — and then on the very next track he’d sing a twangy and seemingly earnest acoustic-guitar ditty that could break your heart in half. His predictable unpredictability strikes again on “Blessing,” which contrasts quasi-spiritual lyrics (“Every day/Is a blessing”) with a sound that borrows from the moody, alt-rock/nu-metal sound of the late ’90s. Alex sings in a menacing whisper, and an explosion of apocalyptic synths completely transforms the song midway through. Inscrutable as it may be, the whole thing is eerie, hypnotic and, somehow, strangely moving. ZOLADZSuperorganism, ‘On & On’The London-based group Superorganism turns boredom and monotony into something almost perky in “On & On.” “No more space, hit replay/It goes on and on,” Orono sings with sullen nonchalance, then repeats “and on” another 16 times. The track is bubble gummy pop with a hint of reggae, and it’s packed with little hooks and ever-changing effects, but nothing breaks through the ennui. JON PARELESWynonna & Waxahatchee, ‘Other Side’As she’s gotten older, Wynonna Judd has been singing with an assured husk in her voice, cutting the crisp country she’s performed for decades with just a hint of the blues. Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, over the course of a career that began in DIY warehouse spaces, has found her bridge to American roots music. The two singers meet on “Other Side,” a gentle rumination on impermanence. For Judd — whose mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi, died last month — it’s a sturdy breeze, understated but invested. For Crutchfield, it’s a soft landing in a new home. JON CARAMANICASaya Gray, ‘Empathy for Bethany’“Empathy for Bethany” keeps wriggling free of expectations. Saya Gray, a Canadian songwriter who played bass in Daniel Caesar’s band, starts the song like a folky, picking triplets on an acoustic guitar. But almost immediately, the chord progression starts to wander; then her vocals warp by multitracking and shifting pitch, and soon a breathy trumpet drifts in from the jazz realm; by the time the track ends, it has become a loop of electronic aftereffects. “Honestly, if I get too close I’ll go ghost,” Gray sings, and the track bears her out. PARELESBruce Hornsby, ‘Tag’Bruce Hornsby has stayed productive and exploratory through the pandemic, doubling down on musical craftiness and structural ambition. His new album, “’Flicted,” pulls together spiky dissonances and folky warmth, chamber orchestrations and electronic illusions, puckishness and benevolence. “Fun and games in pestilence/We could use, use some kindly kindliness,” he sings in “Tag,” adding, “Still shake your fist/A kind of gritted bliss.” The music seesaws between rumbling, dissonant piano over a funky backbeat and richly chiming folk-rock, neatly juggling skepticism and hope. PARELESMaria BC, ‘April’The songs on Maria BC’s debut album, “Hyaline,” are reveries built around patiently picked guitar patterns and tranquil melodies, though they might sprout electronics, percussion or chamber-music orchestrations at any moment. In “April,” vocals overlap and multiply into cascading chords while unexpected sounds wink into earshot behind the guitar. “Listen to me/Anything you want,” the lyrics promise. PARELESKaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri, ‘Amber’The experimental artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the Academy Award-nominated film composer Emile Mosseri have struck gold with their collaborative album, “I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon.” It’s only two minutes long, but “Amber,” from the second half of the project, runs like a spaced-out symphony. Over bubbling synth tones, Smith’s airy vocalizations loop into circuitous entanglements, shapeshifting into oceans of cosmic flotsam. The effect is appropriately cinematic, like a long-lost immersive Pipilotti Rist video. ISABELIA HERRERANduduzo Makhathini featuring Omagugu, ‘Mama’The first release on the new Blue Note Africa label, “In the Spirit of Ntu” is the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini’s homage to the universal energetic force known in Bantu cultures as “ntu.” It includes this wistful but swiftly rolling tune, “Mama,” written by Makhathini’s wife, Omagugu, in memory of her mother, who recently died. Omagugu sings in a sweeping, brushy tone, holding her syllables open, as Makhathini surrounds her in a pattern of chords that ascend and ascend. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORico Nasty, ‘Intrusive’Falling somewhere between gritty hardcore and distorted jungle, Rico Nasty’s “Intrusive” scrapes like metal through a meat grinder. With her latest single, the Maryland rapper continues her return to music after her 2020 album “Nightmare Vacation.” On “Intrusive,” she harnesses punk verve and raps over a warped breakbeat, letting her intrusive impulses and most violent desires flow out in a stream-of-consciousness torrent. It’s bratty, turbulent and deliciously cathartic, like a childhood temper tantrum. “Mom, if you hear this I’m sorry,” she raps. Hey, at least she warned you. HERRERASleazyWorld Go featuring Lil Baby, ‘Sleazy Flow’ (remix)There’s not much to “Sleazy Flow,” by the Kansas City rapper SleazyWorld Go: a few piano tinkles, some groaning bass throbs, a sleepy, sinister tempo and crucially, some select lyrics blending street beef and sexual conquest: “How you mad she choosing me?/I like what she do to me/She say she feel safer over here, this where the shooters be.” That snippet became a TikTok breakout earlier this year, and Lil Baby picks up that taunting theme on the song’s official remix. His verse is almost chipper: “Acting like I’m chasing her or something, she be pursuing me/Can’t hold her, she be telling me all the time she wish that you was me.” CARAMANICADavid Virelles, ‘Al Compas de Mi Viejo Tres’David Virelles has no beef with the piano. A virtuoso improviser and classically trained pianist from Santiago de Cuba, he doesn’t seem intent on turning the instrument inside-out, like Thelonious Monk did; or jettisoning it entirely, like a John Cage; or turning it into an android, like some of his contemporaries. Virelles is a subtler expander. He plays the grand piano with sensitivity and deference, working with it, not against. He tucks dense harmonies inside other harmonies, shading his music with deep browns and grays — like an island sky turning dark before a storm. And on “Al Compás De Mi Viejo Tres” (“By the Compass of my Old Guitar”), from his masterly new album, “Nuna,” he celebrates the lilt of classic Cuban danzón by playing with utter elegance and clarity — stopping every so often to get in his own way with a few irruptive slashes or low, corrosive chords. RUSSONELLO More