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      After 14 Years, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Finally Reunite

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      The duo worked with T Bone Burnett on the million-selling triumph “Raising Sand,” in 2007. Its sequel is once again an alternative to nearly all of its pop contemporaries.“Raising Sand,” the 2007 duet album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, started as an experiment, a modest side project for two longtime bandleaders to revisit old and recent songs. It was a hushed, long-breathed album with a haunted twang, yet it turned into a blockbuster — selling more than a million copies and winning six Grammy Awards including album of the year.A follow-up would have seemed like an obvious next step. Yet it has taken 14 years for the arrival of that sequel: “Raise the Roof,” due Nov. 19.“Raise the Roof” almost magically reclaims the spectral tone of “Raising Sand,” then finds ways to expand on it, delving further into both quiet subtleties and wailing intensity. “It’s a little bit more smoky, a little bit more lustrous than the first record,” Plant, 73, said by phone from his home in western England.“It’s definitely different, even though it might be coming out of the same sort of crevasse, the same fork in the landscape of our musical lives. It has a mood to it, which is laced with time and with the actual age and maturity of the songs themselves.”But the musicians needed a decade of reflection between albums. “If we had thought we knew what we were doing in the first place, we could probably have repeated it,” T Bone Burnett, 73, the producer and linchpin of both albums, said by telephone from Nashville. “But we didn’t. At the time, we were just kind of goofing off, having fun. And that’s what we were up against. We’ve been waiting for it to get to that point where we could just have fun doing it again.”Plant and Krauss were an unlikely pairing from the start. “We were from two radically different worlds,” Plant said. He was the world-conquering, musically restless rock singer who had fronted Led Zeppelin. Krauss was already a luminary in the more close-knit world of bluegrass and Americana, leading the string band Union Station.They were also strikingly disparate singers, with contrasting musical instincts. Krauss, 50, grew up harmonizing in bluegrass groups, figuring out and delivering restrained, precise, locked-in ensemble parts. “I’m a regimented-type singer,” she said. “Bluegrass people sing things very consistently, because there’s three parts going on most times. And if someone pulls around and goes and does something different, now the other two want to run you over with their car.”Plant was used to a lead singer’s free rein; he would improvise with every take. “I try to sing across the beat quite a bit,” he said. “If it’s a straightforward groove, I like to bounce across the left and right of the groove. I did it in Zeppelin. I kind of scuttle it, accelerate it, slow it down.” He chuckled. “It drives them mad.”Krauss grew to appreciate their differences. “It makes you feel like you’re hanging off the edge of a cliff,” she said by telephone from her home in Nashville. “It is so exciting and so magnificent.” Plant and Krauss first sang together as part of a 2004 tribute to Lead Belly, and Plant proposed that they try recording together when their schedules aligned; that took more than a year. Plant initially suggested trying just three days in the studio to see if anything worked out.Krauss and Plant onstage in 2008. “We have a kind of languid, sometimes pensive sound, with the pathos of the original song taken into another place,” Plant said.Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage via GettyThey enlisted Burnett, who had recently reimagined old-timey Appalachian music for the soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” which featured Union Station. For “Raising Sand,” the three gathered songs — mostly about tragic lost loves — and transfigured them with close harmonies and an aura of suspended time. Burnett’s studio band let tempos hover and undulate; Plant and Krauss discovered how uncannily their voices could fit together.“A funny thing happens with them,” Burnett said. “When the two of them sing, it creates a third voice, a third part in their harmonies when there are only two parts. You know, one plus one equals two unless you’re counting, say, drops of rain. Then one plus one could equal one, or one plus one could equal a fine mist. Their voices are in that relative space where they sing together and it creates a fine mist.”“Raising Sand” was an otherworldly alternative to virtually all of its pop contemporaries (its competition at the Grammys included Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” and Ne-Yo’s “Year of the Gentleman”), and although it was released on the folky independent label Rounder, eager listeners sought it out. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart.Plant already had another project underway in 2007: the arena-sized last hurrah of Led Zeppelin that December. But the Led Zeppelin performance was an endpoint, while “Raising Sand” was a new beginning. Plant and Krauss toured for much of the next year, with concert sets that included some revamped Led Zeppelin songs. They plan to tour again in 2022.“We’ve got a kind of a personality which we could pursue as two singers, a neat place that we made for ourselves,” Plant said. “I just liked the idea of actually singing together throughout an entire show, more or less with somebody. Concentrating, listening, being free-form at times. Letting it rip, then being pretty controlled and organized and following instructions from her. And then, sometimes, letting go so she can’t catch me.”Yet having a hit album also brought self-consciousness and pressure. Plant and Krauss tried recording new duets with their touring band just after their Grammy sweep in 2009, but scrapped those sessions. “Nothing happened that was really horrible,” Krauss said. “We just felt like it was too much at once.”They then returned to their own bands and projects: Krauss with Union Station; Plant leading his Americana-rooted Band of Joy and then, for much of the 2010s, the psychedelia-, trip-hop- and world-music-infused Sensational Space Shifters. “We really enjoyed the fact that we have no idea about our corresponding alternative lives,” Plant said.Still, the “Raising Sand” collaborators stayed in touch. “We’ve been sending songs back and forth for almost 14 years, trying to figure out how to continue,” Burnett said.Finally, in 2019, they regrouped. A decade of other work had made the sequel less fraught although “there was a little bit of trepidation on my part,” Plant said. “I wasn’t sure whether we could reinvoke what we had. But it was very short-lived, that question of whether or not it was real. It was like, I bow to her, and she curtsies to me, and we see what we can do.”They went back to the venerable Nashville studio, Sound Emporium, where they had recorded “Raising Sand,” and where Burnett and Krauss have frequently recorded since. (Plant returned there this year, he said, for sessions with the 1950s guitar titans Duane Eddy and James Burton.)Plant and Krauss’s first album won five Grammys in 2009, including album of the year.Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesThe core rhythm section from “Raising Sand,” Jay Bellerose on drums and Dennis Crouch on bass, had continued to work with Burnett and returned for the new album. They were joined by an expanded assortment of guitarists including Marc Ribot; Bill Frisell; David Hidalgo from Los Lobos; and Buddy Miller, a Nashville stalwart who was in Plant’s Band of Joy. A few songs added collectors’ item string instruments like a Marxophone and a dolceola, both zithers played with keyboards: tinkling, evocative, echoey, unexpected timbres. Plant and Krauss finished recording in February 2020, just before the pandemic lockdowns.“Raise the Roof” opens with a song from the Arizona band Calexico, “Quattro (World Drifts In),” which is filled with images of desolation, escape and war, perhaps conjuring Afghanistan: “No choice but to run to the mountains where no poppies grow/You have to hit the ground running.”While most of the other songs on “Raise the Roof” ponder love, separation and longing, the album has a discreet through line. “As we were going through the material,” Burnett said, “it was clear that a story was being told concerning a man, a woman and war. And it became clear which songs fit and the sequence they went in.”The collaborators returned to some of the songwriters from “Raising Sand,” picking up the Everly Brothers’ “The Price of Love” and the Allen Toussaint song “Trouble With My Lover,” which was recorded by Betty Harris. And as on “Raising Sand,” they remade tracks that started as blues, old-timey, soul, country, gospel and rock.Their versions are far removed from the originals, often close to inside-out. Most often, Plant said, “We have a kind of languid, sometimes pensive sound, with the pathos of the original song taken into another place.”They stripped songs down to just lyrics and melodies, and rebuilt them intuitively in the studio, often around sparse, subtle beats from Bellerose. They shifted “Trouble With My Lover” from a major to a minor key, and Krauss trades Harris’s New Orleans soul resilience for a neo-Appalachian plaint, lingering over the song’s loneliness and hints of betrayal.Krauss chose “Going Where the Lonely Go,” a doleful ballad that Merle Haggard released in the 1980s. Plant seized the chance to record a soul song he had been singing since his teens: “Searching for My Love,” by Bobby Moore & the Rhythm Aces. He also brought material from Britain’s 1960s folk revival: Bert Jansch’s stoically intransigent “It Don’t Bother Me,” which brings out Krauss’s defiant streak; and Anne Briggs’s “Go Your Way,” a wife’s troubled farewell song to a soldier she may never see again.At one of the album’s extremes, Plant unleashes his Led Zeppelin wail and echoes of “Kashmir” in “High and Lonesome,” a song that grew out of a studio jam session. Burnett and the rhythm section were toying with a Bo Diddley beat. Plant happened to have his book of potential lyrics with him. The title is a tongue-in-cheek country cliché; the song is not. It is equally biblical and bluesy, wondering, “If I should lose my soul, would you still care for me?”At the other end of the dynamic scale is “The Price of Love.” The Everly Brothers’ own version is an exuberant two-minute, harmonica-topped stomp, though they’re singing about a cheater’s bitter regrets. Plant, Krauss and Burnett took the song down to half-speed and removed any distractions. The track opens with half a minute of near-ambience as instruments quietly drop in: a bowed bass drone, shakers, a distant fiddle, eventually a few guitar notes before the beat and chords solidify and Krauss arrives like an accusatory wraith: “You won’t forget her,” she warns. By taking their time, they concentrate the essence of the song. And as they did with “Raising Sand,” they calmly defy the impatience of 21st-century pop.The song “kind of forms before your ears,” Plant said. “When people stick stuff on the radio now, I think you’re allowed like 16 seconds or even less before you’re actually hitting a chorus. But then again, we’re fishing in a different pool. In fact, we’re not even fishing. We’re just trying to swim.” More

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      Marian Anderson: A Voice of Authenticity and Justice

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      A new box set explores the singer whose Lincoln Memorial concert was a 20th-century civil rights milestone.The night before Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she called Sol Hurok, her manager, to ask if she really had to go through with it.Earlier that year, Howard University had tried to book Anderson for a recital at Washington’s only large concert stage, Constitution Hall, which was run by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The organization, which maintained a whites-only policy for performing artists, refused. A public pressure campaign to get the group to reverse its decision came to nothing, but Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in protest, and through the efforts of Harold L. Ickes, the secretary of the interior, the Lincoln Memorial was approved as a new location.But the controversy surrounding the event swirled in newspapers around the country. No longer just a concert, it had become a civil rights battlefield. The pressure on Anderson was overwhelming.The Daughters’s discriminatory actions had stung Anderson deeply, taking her back to formative events in her life — especially when, at 17, she went to the Philadelphia Musical Academy seeking admission and a snippy secretary would not even hand her an application.But that was then. She had spent five rewarding years in Europe in the early 1930s, with more welcoming audiences and institutions. She found mentors, coaches and supporters; she began performing to acclaim. During one seven-month tour of Scandinavia, she gave more than 100 concerts.When the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow her to sing at Constitution Hall, Anderson received permission to give a concert on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesReturning to the United States in 1935, she began performing extensively, doing circuits of colleges and concert halls where she was welcomed, starting with a crucial recital at Town Hall in New York. The New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote, “Let it be said at the outset: Marian Anderson has returned to her native land one of the great singers of our time.” She made recordings, and she became wealthy: In 1938 her income was $238,000 (roughly $4.5 million today), though she was still a second-class citizen in her own country who on tour often ate dinner alone in her hotel room to avoid segregated restaurants.Anderson feared that her Lincoln Memorial concert would come to define her. And to a large extent, it did. But the full breadth of her artistry is newly evident with the release, from Sony Classical, of a new commemorative book, offering her complete RCA Victor recordings from 1924 to 1966 on 15 discs — timed to the 125th anniversary, coming in February, of Anderson’s birth in Philadelphia.The recordings are magnificent. There is her 1950 account of Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Pierre Monteux. Her splendid voice — a true (and rare) example of a contralto, the lowest-range female voice — is ideal for this music, Mahler’s settings of five piercing ruminations on the death of children.Deep, mellow tones provide the foundation of her voice. Even when she shapes midrange lyrical phrases and soars up to high passages with soprano-like radiance, the sound still somehow emanates from those awesome low tones. Her slightly tremulous vibrato can sometimes seem like shakiness. Yet the wavering more often exudes richness and warmth, and a touch of vulnerability. The feelings and emotions she draws from the words are overwhelming.Deep, mellow tones provided the foundation for Anderson, a true (and rare) example of a contralto, the lowest-range female voice.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesArturo Toscanini heard Anderson in 1935 in Salzburg, Austria — when, excluded from official Salzburg Festival performances because of her race, she performed in a hotel ballroom. Afterward the imposing maestro approached her and said, famously, that what he had just heard “one is privileged to hear once in a hundred years,” responding to the singular shadings and textures of her deep-set sound, and the extraordinarily nuances she could create through her wide range. (Naturally, Hurok seized Toscanini’s words and thereafter billed Anderson as the “voice of the century.”)Those qualities run through a recording of Schubert lieder, paired here with a sternly beautiful account of Schumann’s cycle “Frauenliebe und -leben,” mostly recorded in 1950 and ’51 and accompanied sensitively by the German pianist Franz Rupp, Anderson’s recital partner from the ’40s on. In Schubert’s “Ständchen” the long melodic arcs flow with wistful grace while never sacrificing tautness. In “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” Anderson truly becomes the young woman in the Goethe text, both terrified and thrilled at the desire a handsome stranger has aroused in her. There is a haunting, internal quality to Anderson’s performance, suggesting an innocent girl brooding over her confusions.There are many finely detailed lieder singers, though. What finally made Anderson so exceptional is a quality hard to define but impossible to miss: the authenticity that permeates her singing. In this regard, the most revealing recording in the new set may be a program featuring arias by Bach and Handel, mostly dating from the mid-1940s. (Robert Shaw and Charles O’Connell are the conductors).The pianist Franz Rupp, Anderson’s frequent collaborator, accompanying her in concert.Bettmann/Getty ImagesIn “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” a sublimely sad aria from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” Anderson’s singing is direct and honest, steady and true, at once calm and intense. Her performance of “He was despised” from Handel’s “Messiah” comes across as a fully lived-in experience. Indeed, when she sang this solo in a “Messiah” performance in Philadelphia in 1916, when she was still in her teens, a critic wrote that Anderson “felt with her soft, strong voice the sorrows of God.”Anderson grappled with hardships in her youth, especially the death of her father following a severe head injury while selling ice and coal at a train terminal, leaving a wife and three daughters. Just 12 at the time, Anderson, the eldest, was forced to delay high school for several years and take odd jobs. Her beloved grandfather — who was born enslaved in Virginia and, once freed, became a farm laborer and the first Anderson to settle in Philadelphia — died the following year.These events stayed with her as she learned to confront every challenge with affecting dignity. Was this the source of what I’m calling authenticity? It’s hard to say. But it surely accounts for her identification with spirituals — repertory she sang on every recital she gave, and works she invested with the same care she brought to German art songs. Several of the recordings in the new set offer her in affecting performances of spirituals. There are also collections of Christmas carols; an album titled “Songs of Eventide”; and more.Anderson’s way of confronting racism had been to offer herself as a model of Black excellence, rather than speaking out explicitly about politics. But by the 1950s, a new generation of activists began challenging segregation more directly. In 1951, the N.A.A.C.P. called for a boycott of a recital she was to give in Richmond, Va., because the audience was to be segregated.Anderson’s Met debut, as Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” was a success but came late in her career.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe action worked: Three-quarters of the seats in the hall were empty. And soon after, Anderson became more outspoken and vowed not to appear before segregated audiences. (The roiling social, racial and political currents that affected her life and career are presented in an insightful documentary, “Voice of Freedom,” broadcast earlier this year and part of PBS’s American Experience series.)There was one more milestone to come. In 1955 Anderson broke the color barrier for soloists at the Metropolitan Opera, singing the small but crucial role of the fortune teller Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” In earlier years, European houses had approached her about performing in opera, but she declined, having had no opportunity to learn the repertory or develop her acting skills.But as the civil rights movement gained headway in America, Rudolf Bing, the Met’s general manager, realized that the company had to respond. He wanted an artist without controversy to be the first. And by then, who didn’t admire Marian Anderson?She was very hesitant. But, after some encouraging work with opera coaches, she decided to proceed; received $1,000 per performance, the highest fee at the house at the time; and came to embrace her pioneering role.When the production opened, the starry cast included Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren and the young Roberta Peters, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting. Recalling the moment when the curtain went up, Anderson later wrote, “I trembled, and when the audience applauded and applauded before I could sing a note I felt myself tightening into a knot.”She was almost 58, past her vocal prime. But she did it, won solid reviews and a place in history. Sony’s set includes an album of excerpts from the opera recorded in a studio around the same time (though Jan Peerce replaced Tucker). Compelling moments in Anderson’s singing of the role suggest what her career in opera might have been.The American Experience documentary opens with poignant footage of Anderson on the morning of her Lincoln Memorial concert, going though sound checks on the platform, looking nervous and wary. For all her fears, the concert was a triumph. A mixed crowd of 75,000, more people than had ever gathered on the Mall, heard Anderson sing a 30-minute program that opened with “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” included Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and a Donizetti aria, and ended with a group of spirituals. Millions more heard it broadcast on the radio.In time, the Daughters of the American Revolution dropped its exclusionary policy at Constitution Hall. Anderson performed there in a war relief benefit in 1943. And it was sweet justice when, in 1964, she began an extended farewell tour with a recital there, too. More

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      Nelson Freire, Piano Virtuoso of Warmth and Finesse, Dies at 77

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      Hailing from Brazil as one of the great pianists of the last half of the 20th century, he recalled masters of the first half in his virtuosity. But he shunned the limelight.Nelson Freire, a reclusive pianist whose fabled technique and sensitive, subtle musicianship made him a legend among pianophiles, died on Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.His manager, Jacques Thelen, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Freire had been suffering from trauma after a fall in 2019, which led to surgery on his upper right arm and left him unable to play.Mr. Freire was one of the greatest pianists of the past half century, possessing a gift that, in its grace of touch and its ease of virtuosity, recalled playing from the great masters of the half-century before that.“You will be hard pressed to find a recital of comparable warmth, affection and finesse,” the critic Bryce Morrison wrote of a Debussy album from Mr. Freire in 2009, in words that might also have spoken for his artistry as a whole. “Here, there is no need for spurious gestures and inflections; everything is given with a supreme naturalness and a perfectly accommodated virtuosity that declare Freire a master pianist throughout.”That Mr. Freire was indeed a master pianist had never been in doubt. A child prodigy, he gave his first performance at 4 and was attracting attention at international competitions before his teens. His playing had a wisdom that critics rarely failed to describe as innate.“There was hardly a single forced or teasing effect, not a sigh of sentimentality, not a line of hectoring rhetoric,” Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe wrote of a recital of Franck, Ravel, Chopin, Villa-Lobos and Liszt in 1977. Mr. Freire, the critic continued, possessed “one of the biggest natural talents for the keyboard that I have ever heard.”Even so, his profile remained relatively limited. Comparisons to Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz abounded, but Mr. Freire was an uncommonly reticent artist, giving fewer concerts than many of his peers, recording only rarely early in his career and remaining indifferent to publicity.“There is a big difference between music and the music business,” he was quoted as saying in a 1992 profile in The Baltimore Sun. “It’s a completely different language, and when I get too involved in talking it, I get a little bit sick. As for talking about myself, it actually bores me.”For much of his career, such reticence reduced aficionados, as The Sun put it, to treat “pirate Freire tapes with the veneration an art historian might accord to a recently rediscovered Rembrandt.”But that began to change in Mr. Freire’s last two decades, when a series of recordings brought him wider attention.“Whether Mr. Freire is shy or merely introspective, it is impossible to say,” Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote of the pianist’s New York recital debut in 1971. He noted that Mr. Freire had “projected little of his own personality to the audience.”“He was there, he played splendidly and that was it.”Mr. Freire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Critics often noted his self-effacing quality. “He was there, he played splendidly and that was it,” one wrote of a 1971 recital.Rachel Papo for The New York TimesNelson José Pinto Freire was born in Boa Esperança, in southeastern Brazil, on Oct. 18, 1944. His father was a pharmacist, and his mother was a teacher who bought a piano for Nelson’s sister, Nelma, one of four older siblings. Nelson began to play from memory what he had heard Nelma practice. After 12 lessons of his own, each of which involved a four-hour bus ride down dirt tracks, his first teacher said that he had nothing left to teach the boy.The family moved to Rio de Janeiro to find a new mentor; his father gave up his career to work in a bank there. But Nelson, then 6, was an unruly child, unwilling to be taught. With his parents about to give up, they found Lucia Branco, who had trained under Arthur de Greef, a pupil of Franz Liszt’s. Branco placed the boy with her student Nise Obino. “My relationship with her was very strong,” Mr. Freire said of Ms. Obino in 1995, “the strongest in my life.”His break came in 1957, when he entered Rio’s first international piano competition and emerged a finalist. Brazil’s president, Juscelino Kubitschek, offered him a scholarship to study wherever he wanted to. He chose Vienna, and moved there at 14 to work with Bruno Seidlhofer, joining a class that included Rudolf Buchbinder and Martha Argerich, both of whom would go on to major international careers.Ms. Argerich and Mr. Freire became frequent duo partners (and lifelong friends), both in concert and on record, her impulsive, electrifying style blending well with his tonal palette and impeccable timing.“I didn’t do much work,” Mr. Freire nonetheless recalled of his two years in Vienna. He initially spoke no German and remained, after all, a teenager far from home.Little success followed his return to Brazil, until he won first prize at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon and the Dinu Lipatti Medal, presented in London, in 1964, accelerating his career in Europe.Mr. Freire began recording for Columbia in the late 1960s, taping solo works by Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, as well as a double album of concertos by Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Grieg and Schumann, with Rudolf Kempe conducting the Munich Philharmonic. That album, Time magazine reported in 1970, “caught the critics by surprise and sent them scurrying for superlatives.”Mr. Freire would scarcely return to the recording studio until 2001, after which he embarked on a golden period with Decca that produced nuanced, masterly releases of everything from Bach to Villa-Lobos, one of several Brazilian composers whom he played with pride.Perhaps most valuable were standard-setting discs of the Chopin études, sonatas and nocturnes, as well as Brahms concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.“This is the Brahms piano concerto set we’ve been waiting for,” the critic Jed Distler wrote in Gramophone in 2006, praising it for fusing “immediacy and insight, power and lyricism, and incandescent virtuosity that leaves few details unturned, yet always with the big picture in clear sight.”Mr. Freire is survived by a brother, Nirval. His parents were killed in 1967 when a bus they were using to travel to hear Mr. Freire perform in Belo Horizonte, in their home state of Minas Gerais, plunged into a ravine.Whatever repertoire Mr. Freire turned to, he had a depth of tonal variety, a poetry of phrasing and a natural, almost joyous refinement.In “Nelson Freire,” a 2003 documentary film, he is shown watching a video of a joyous Errol Garner playing jazz piano. “I’ve never seen anyone play with such pleasure,” he said.“That’s how I found the piano,” Mr. Freire continued. “The piano was the moment, when I was little, when I felt pleasure. I’m not happy after a concert if I haven’t felt that kind of pleasure for at least a moment. Classical pianists used to have this joy. Rubinstein had it. Horowitz had it, too. Guiomar Novaes had it, and Martha Argerich has it.”What about you, the interviewer asked?Mr. Freire lit a cigarette, looked up shyly, and smiled. More

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      What You Remember About ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’

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      Listening to the album. Singing along at the show. And wearing a loincloth to play the title role. All fresh in our readers’ minds in the 50 years since.Fifty year ago, “Jesus Christ Superstar” landed on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theater, and the careers of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice and Ben Vereen would never be the same. Responding to a recent article celebrating the anniversary, nearly 400 readers shared their own memories of hearing, seeing or acting in the show, then and since. Here is an edited selection.Setting: A dinner party at our house in Toledo, Ohio. Time: Fall 1970. Dramatis Personae: My parents (Mom, probably in a Halston Ultrasuede dress, Dad with au courant sideburns) and 10 of their groovy friends. Music: The “Jesus Christ Superstar” cast album is on the stereo. What is that incredible music? Everyone thought it was the most modern, creative and innovative thing they’d ever heard. I was 8 years old. I went on to memorize the whole album and can still, to this day, pretty much sing any song. LISA W. ALPERT, New YorkI played Jesus in my Connecticut boarding school production in November 1982. Me, a Pakistani Zoroastrian with a decent baritone — yes, “Gethsemane” was near impossible. Women played Simon and Judas; a mix of the school’s nerd and jock squads Caiaphas and his cabal; and the son of a French expat aristocrat sang Pilate. As I dragged the cross to Calvary, from stage through audience to exit, my loincloth snagged on I still don’t know what, and unbeknown to me unraveled slowly as I performed trudging up that imaginary hill. I’m certain Christ flashing a healthy mop bordered on blasphemy. FRAMJI MINWALLA, Karachi, PakistanI was asked to play Herod in the 2003 tour with Carl Anderson, Sebastian Bach and Natalie Toro. Carl blew me away every night as Judas. At 58 years old — still singing, wrapping each note with deep, rich, emotional life. He was a marvel! He is missed! Natalie Toro brought an exotic beauty to her performance and should be remembered as one of the best Marys ever. And then we come to Sebastian Bach of the ’80s rock band Skid Row [as Jesus.] It was an interpretation like no other. That’s the best way to remember it! PETER KEVOIAN, Dingmans Ferry, Pa.I appeared as Pilate in a dance recital production where my first wife went to see her sister perform and saw me as well. A week later she seduced me and then her ex-husband insisted we marry. He didn’t want his kids exposed to a “sinful” relationship. So I owe that part of my life and the rest as well to “Jesus Christ Superstar”! PAUL JANES-BROWN, Pukalani, Hawaii“Jesus Christ Superstar” was my first Broadway show. I had been listening to the double album for months when the time finally came for us to go: Me, my best friend, Stacy, and her magical Aunt Joanne. Stacy’s aunt took us — two 10-year-old kids — from Long Island to Times Square. I was breathless watching the cast sing all the songs I knew by heart, and had to keep myself from singing with them. And when King Herod appeared in heels higher than any platform shoes I’d yet seen in the early 1970s, I laughed with the best of them and felt oddly at home. RUSSELL KALTSCHMIDTMy husband Stephen Altman was the assistant electrician at the Mark Hellinger. Toward the beginning of the run, he remembers that one of the Apostles was supposed to put a safety clip on Judas’s harness, when they “hang” him at the end of the show. He missed the clip, and Nicky Knox, one of the flymen, grabbed Ben Vereen and saved him! Fortunately, Ben’s neck was very strong! Stephen is a proud 53-year retired member of IATSE Local #1. DOREEN ALTMAN, Morrisville, N.C.Age 21, and I took the girl of my dreams, who to this day remains one of my favorite people, to the final preview. When Yvonne Elliman sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and reached the extremely high note, I felt, for the first time in my life, an actual physical electrical stimulation going up and down my spine. JOSEPH R. REM Jr., Hackensack, N.J.I played King Herod in a production in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late ’80s. Of course every director was trying to find a new “take” on Herod’s song. I just happened to be cast by someone who thought it would be a brilliant idea to have me pop out of a giant Easter egg which then became an ornate bath, covered in pink balloons (and only balloons), with a pink shower cap and brandishing a golden loofah. My dancing troupe were dressed like Playboy Bunnies. Well, it was the ’80s, I suppose. CHRIS BALDOCK, Canberra, Australia More

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      Popcast Mailbag! Halsey, Nicki, TikTok and, of Course, Taylor

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherYou ask, we answer. Or prevaricate. It depends!On this week’s Popcast, part of our semiregular mailbag series, the team takes questions on a range of topics:the year in Taylor Swiftthe quality of Halsey’s new musicthe state of the music videothe ways TikTok can be a lifeline for a legacy actthe direction Drake’s career should head inthe increasingly idiosyncratic vocal styles of young female pop starswhether we still buy physical mediaAnd much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      From BTS to ‘Squid Game’: How South Korea Became a Cultural Juggernaut

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      The country was once largely known for cars and smartphones, but a global audience has become mesmerized by its entertainment, and creators say success didn’t happen overnight.PAJU, South Korea — In a new Korean drama being filmed inside a cavernous studio building outside of Seoul, a detective chases down a man cursed to live for 600 years. Pistol shots crack. A hush follows. Then, a woman pierces the silence, screaming: “I told you not to shoot him in ​the heart!”The scene was filmed several times for more than an hour as part of “Bulgasal: Immortal Souls,” a new show scheduled to be released on Netflix in December. Jang Young-woo, the director, hopes it will be the latest South Korean phenomenon to captivate an international audience.South Korea has long chafed at its lack of groundbreaking cultural exports. For decades the country’s reputation was defined by its cars and cellphones from companies like Hyundai and LG, while its movies, TV shows and music were mostly consumed by a regional audience. Now K-pop stars like Blackpink, the dystopian drama “Squid Game” and award-winning films such as “Parasite” appear as ubiquitous as any Samsung smartphone.Jang Young-woo, the director of “Bulgasal: Immortal Souls.” He hopes it will be the latest South Korean phenomenon to captivate an international audience.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn the same way South Korea borrowed from Japan and the United States to develop its manufacturing prowess, the country’s directors and producers say they have been studying Hollywood and other entertainment hubs for years, adopting and refining formulas by adding distinctly Korean touches. Once streaming services like Netflix tore down geographical barriers, the creators say, the country transformed from a consumer of Western culture into an entertainment juggernaut and major cultural exporter in its own right.In the last few years alone, South Korea shocked the world with “Parasite,” the first foreign language film to win best picture at the Academy Awards. It has one of the biggest, if not the biggest, band in the world with BTS. Netflix has introduced 80 Korean movies and TV shows in the last few years, far more than it had imagined when it started its service in South Korea in 2016, according to the company. Three of the 10 most popular TV shows on Netflix as of Monday were South Korean.“When we made ‘Mr. Sunshine,’ ‘Crash Landing on You’ and ‘Sweet Home,’ we didn’t have a global reaction in mind,” said Mr. Jang, who worked as co-producer or co-director on all three hit Korean Netflix shows. “We just tried to make them as interesting and meaningful as possible. It’s the world that has started understanding and identifying with the emotional experiences we have been creating all along.”The South Korean dystopian drama “Squid Game” became the most watched show on Netflix.NetflixThe growing demand for Korean entertainment has inspired independent creators like Seo Jea-won, who wrote the script for “Bulgasal” with his wife. Mr. Seo said his generation devoured American TV hits like “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Miami Vice,” learning “the basics” and experimenting with the form by adding Korean colors. “When over-the-top streaming services like Netflix arrived with a revolution in distributing TV shows, we were ready to compete,” he said.South Korea’s cultural output is still tiny compared with key exports like semiconductors, but it has given the country the sort of influence that can be hard to measure. In September, the Oxford English Dictionary added 26 new words of Korean origin, including “hallyu,” or Korean wave. North Korea has called the K-pop invasion a “vicious cancer.” China has suspended dozens of K-pop fan accounts on social media for their “unhealthy” behavior.The country’s ability to punch above its weight as a cultural powerhouse contrasts with Beijing’s ineffective state-led campaigns to achieve the same kind of sway. South Korean officials who have attempted to censor the country’s artists have not been very successful. Instead, politicians have begun promoting South Korean pop culture, enacting a law to allow some male pop artists to postpone conscription. This month, officials allowed Netflix to install a giant “Squid Game” statue in Seoul’s Olympic Park.Seo Jea-won, the writer behind “Bulgasal.” The show’s supernatural plot recalls American TV favorites like “X-Files” and “Stranger Things.”Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe explosive success didn’t happen overnight. Long before “Squid Game” became the most watched TV show on Netflix or BTS performed at the United Nations, Korean TV shows like “Winter Sonata” and bands like Bigbang and Girls’ Generation had conquered markets in Asia and beyond. But they were unable to achieve the global reach associated with the current wave. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” was a one-hit wonder.“We love to tell stories and have good stories to tell,” said Kim Young-kyu, CEO of Studio Dragon, South Korea’s largest studio, which makes dozens of TV shows a year. “But our domestic market is too small, too crowded. We needed to go global.”It wasn’t until last year when “Parasite,” a film highlighting the yawning gap between rich and poor, won the Oscar that international audiences truly began to pay attention, even though South Korea had been producing similar work for years.“The world just didn’t know about them until streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube helped it discover them at a time when people watch more entertainment online,” said Kang Yu-jung, a professor at Kangnam University, in Seoul.A scene from “Parasite,” the first foreign language film to win best picture at the Academy Awards.EPA, via ShutterstockBefore Netflix, a select number of national broadcasters controlled South Korea’s television industry. Those broadcasters have since been eclipsed by streaming platforms and independent studios like Studio Dragon, which provide the financing and artistic freedom needed to target international markets.South Korean censors screen media for content deemed violent or sexually explicit, but Netflix shows are subject to less stringent restrictions than those broadcast on local TV networks. Creators also say that domestic censorship laws have forced ​them to dig deeper into their imagination, crafting characters and plots that are much more compelling than most..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Scenes often overflow with emotionally rich interactions, or “sinpa.” Heroes are usually deeply flawed, ordinary people trapped in impossible situations, clinging to shared values such as love, family and caring for others. Directors and producers say they deliberately want all of their characters to “smell like humans.”Kim Young-kyu, CEO of Studio Dragon, which makes dozens of South Korean TV shows a year. Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesAs South Korea emerged from the vortex of war, dictatorship, democratization and rapid economic growth, its creators developed a keen nose for what people wanted to watch and hear, and it often had to do with social change. Most national blockbusters have story lines based on issues that speak to common people, such as income inequality and the despair and class conflict it has spawned.“Squid Game” director Hwang Dong-hyuk first made a name for himself with “Dogani,” a 2011 movie based on a real-life sexual abuse scandal in a school for the hearing-impaired. The widespread anger the film incited forced the government to ferret out teachers who had records of sexual abuse​ from schools for disabled minors​.Although K-pop artists rarely speak about politics, their music has loomed large in South Korea’s lively protest culture. When students in Ewha Womans University in Seoul started campus rallies that led to a nationwide anti-government uprising in 2016, they sang Girls’ Generation’s “Into the New World.” The boy band g.o.d.’s “One Candle” became an unofficial anthem for the “Candlelight Revolution” that toppled President Park Geun-hye.The K-Pop band Blackpink, which has conquered markets in Asia and beyond.Netflix, via Associated Press“One dominating feature of Korean content is its combativeness,” said Lim Myeong-mook, author of a book about Korean youth culture. “It channels the people’s frustrated desire for upward mobility, their anger and their motivation for mass activism.” And with many people now stuck at home trying to manage the enormous angst caused by the pandemic, global audiences may be more receptive to those themes than ever before.“Korean creators are adept at quickly copying what’s interesting from abroad and making it their own by making it more interesting and better,” said Lee Hark-joon, a professor of Kyungil University who co-authored “K-pop Idols.”On the set of “Bulgasal,” dozens of staffers scurried around to get every detail of the scene just right — the smog filling the air, the water drops falling on the damp floor and the “sad and pitiable​”​ look of the gunned-down man. The show’s supernatural plot recalls American TV favorites like “X-Files” and “Stranger Things,” yet Mr. Jang has created a uniquely Korean tragedy centered on “eopbo,” a belief among Koreans that both good and bad deeds affect a person in the afterlife.Based on the recent success of Korean shows abroad, Mr. Jang said he hopes viewers will flock to the new series. “The takeaway is: what sells in South Korea sells globally.”Construction of new studios at the complex where “Bulgasal” was filmed. “Our domestic market is too small, too crowded. We needed to go global,” Mr. Kim said.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times More

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      Pat Martino, Jazz Guitarist Who Overcame Amnesia, Dies at 77

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      He was one of the genre’s most acclaimed players when brain surgery left him with no memory. But he recovered and made music for another three decades.Pat Martino, whose trailblazing career as a jazz guitarist seemed to end prematurely in 1980 when brain surgery left him with no memory, but who then painstakingly relearned the instrument, and his own past, and went on to three more decades of innovative musicianship, died on Monday at his home in South Philadelphia. He was 77.Joseph Donofrio, his longtime manager, said the cause was chronic respiratory disorder, which had forced Mr. Martino to stop performing after a tour of Italy in November 2018.Mr. Martino’s playing began drawing attention when he was still a teenager. Having been expelled from a Roman Catholic high school in 10th grade (“Something took place between me and one of the priests there,” he wrote years later. “If I remember correctly, it had something to do with bubble gum.”), he became a professional musician, joining the singer Lloyd Price’s big band and then, in 1962, the saxophonist Willis Jackson’s combo.In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”Mr. Martino at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2006, accompanied by Albert Heath on drums.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn the book, he described going through a series of misdiagnoses and ill-advised treatment, including electroshock. He retired from performing and turned to teaching at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, but his problems worsened; at one point, he wrote, a doctor told him he had two hours to live.A condition called arteriovenous malformation, a tangling of arteries and veins, was diagnosed. An aneurysm resulted in emergency surgery to remove a large tumor; when he awoke, he had no memory.“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.“He can play chorus after chorus of bebop lines, zigzagging through the chromatic harmonies of his own tunes,” Mr. Pareles wrote. “But more often than not, he turns bebop conventions sideways. He starts a line on an unexpected beat, breaks his runs up to insist on a single note or riff, inserts odd-length leaps into standard licks and shifts accents around the beat. His playing is articulately wayward, approaching tunes from odd angles and taking rewarding tangents; he makes song forms seem slippery and mysterious.”In 1987, Mr. Martino released a new album. It was called “The Return.”Mr. Martino at a nightclub in Asbury Park, N.J., in 1967, the year he released his first album, “El Hombre.”Pat Martino CollectionPatrick Azzara (he took Martino, which his father had also used, as a stage name) was born on Aug. 25, 1944, in Philadelphia to Carmen and Jean (Orlando) Azzara. His father, known as Mickey, was a tailor who also worked as a guitarist and singer. He would hide his guitar from young Pat, though in the autobiography Mr. Martino suggests that this “was a bit of reverse psychology on his part” — once the boy took up the instrument, his father encouraged his career and introduced him to various musicians.Mr. Martino was in bands as a boy, including one with the future pop star Bobby Rydell, who lived nearby. One of the guitar greats Mr. Martino’s father took him to meet, backstage after a concert in Atlantic City, was Les Paul, who asked young Pat to play a little something.“What came out of that guitar was unbelievable,” Mr. Paul wrote in the liner notes to Mr. Martino’s 1970 album, “Desperado.” “His dexterity and his picking style were absolutely unique. He held his pick as one would hold a demitasse … pinkie extended, very polite. The politeness disappeared when pick met string.”As Mr. Martino grew more experienced, his view of jazz evolved, largely shaped by Eastern philosophies; he did not, he told The Examiner in 1975, consider himself a jazz musician.“Jazz is a way of life,” he said. “It’s not an idiom of music. Jazz is spontaneous improvisation. If you ever leave your house with nowhere to go, and just walk for pleasure, observing and looking around, you’ll find that you improvise.”And he did not consider himself a “guitar player,” he said, though he once did.“I no longer view myself that way because I don’t want to be depersonalized by my instrument,” he said. “I’m an observer of my environment, including the guitar; I see the guitar in everything.”In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”Mr. Martino is survived by his wife of 26 years, Ayako Asahi.Mr. Martino had other health issues over the years, but Mr. Donofrio, his longtime manager, said his resilience was remarkable.“Every time I thought he was going to be down and out,” he said, “he came back stronger than before.”Jeff Roth contributed research. More

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      To Go Big, Sloppy Jane Went Underground

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      Four years ago, Haley Dahl dreamed of taking her band and an orchestra into a cave to record an album. The result, “Madison,” is out Friday.LEWISBURG, W. Va. — On a Friday afternoon in October 2019, Haley Dahl, the leader of the bicoastal punk rock orchestra Sloppy Jane, sat at a small upright piano in the belly of Lost World Caverns here, recording tracks for the band’s second full-length album, “Madison,” out Friday.Her head bent forward in concentration, Dahl struck the keys, loosing a mesmerizing cascade of notes. The piano tuner, Maria Caputo, sat on a rock nearby to tweak the instrument when needed, which was often because of the cold and damp. After a round of takes, Jack Wetmore, a producer and musician on the album, reached into the piano’s innards to mute the strings.“It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole,” he said.“I don’t think the idea was for this to be easy,” Caputo said. “The idea was for this to be awesome.”This awesome thing started the way most do — in the wake of heartbreak. In 2017, Dahl attempted to distract herself from unrequited love by spelunking the internet. Her searches led her to discover Leland Sprinkle, who built the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia’s Luray Caverns in the 1950s. She wanted to play it, but when the powers that be said no, she chose the next best thing: dragging her own piano, along with her band and a backing orchestra, into another cave and making an album there.From left, Dahl, Bailey Wollowitz and Al Nardo at Lost World Caverns in West Virginia during a recording session.Walter Wlodarczyk“The decision early on that no matter what, this is a project that is happening fueled everything else,” Dahl said a few months after recording “Madison.” She was at one of her favorite spots in Brooklyn, Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg, and surrounded by a handful of people who contributed to this moonshot of hers: a few of Sloppy Jane’s core collaborators — the filmmaker Mika Lungulov-Klotz and the multi-instrumentalists Al Nardo, Bailey Wollowitz and Lily Rothman — and the album’s engineer, Ryan Howe.Besides involving a cave and a piano, the project needed to be “giant” and “beautiful,” Lungulov-Klotz said. “Everything else was becoming a bigger person and learning how to compromise or learning how to record in a place that is super humid and doesn’t want you to touch it at all.”Subterraneous settings can lend music a beautiful, ethereal resonance. But recordings are rare, for good reason. At Lost World, the cave dripped, echoed and randomly hummed. Because of the humidity, the recording equipment was relocated to a car parked at a nearby grate aboveground. Five band members needed a day to get the piano into position and another one to get it out. Each workday started at around 3 p.m. and ended anywhere from 6 or 8 a.m. Over two weeks, Dahl, 21 musicians and a film crew endured a constant temperature of 53 degrees Fahrenheit and numerous round trips through a long, sloped tunnel.Having done her homework on caves, which included trips to more than 30 scattered across the country over a year and a half, Dahl was aware that the conditions would be grueling. Additionally, the project was funded not by a record label, but by credit cards, a GoFundMe campaign and the kindness of others, including the owner of Lost World, Steve Silverberg, who allowed the band to use the cave free as long as they recorded outside of business hours.Accordingly, Dahl tapped the group’s cellist, Sean Brennan, to recruit additional orchestra members, most of whom were students from his alma mater, the Berklee College of Music. But utmost, Dahl knew she would need to enlist people who would fully commit. “Everybody needed to be really, really gung-ho, and that was going to be the only thing that was going to carry it,” she said.Realizing big ambitions and singular visions in a D.I.Y. fashion seems to be a criterion for Dahl, 26, who started Sloppy Jane 11 years ago as a high school student in Los Angeles. A boyfriend back then gave her a Roy Orbison CD that was so well loved it became scratched to the point where a peak in “Only the Lonely” fell into distortion. It was anguishing yet inspiring: “I was like, ‘That’s what I want to make musically,’ something that has the highest high and the lowest low, that goes in and out of lucidity, where it’s like this beautiful thing that just unravels,” she said a few weeks ago during another interview in Williamsburg, this time at Bar Blondeau.Rather than seeking formal training, Dahl opted for self-direction. “Ideas are the things that are important,” she said. “You just need to walk around and trust yourself.” So she did her time on the Los Angeles punk scene, and in 2015 released Sloppy Jane’s first EP, “Sure-Tuff,” six songs of rock ’n’ roll high jinks that feature Phoebe Bridgers, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who has been Dahl’s friend since high school, on bass.Following the EP’s release, Dahl started work on the band’s first full-length album, “Willow.” She wanted to not only base it around a narrative theme but also expand beyond the bass-drum-guitar sound when performing the songs live. Dahl recalled that Bridgers told her, “Go get your orchestra.” So after recording “Willow” in Los Angeles with Sara Cath, Dahl headed to New York in 2017 and found Nardo, Wollowitz, Rothman, Brennan and others. Once she had the band she desired in place, she released “Willow” in March 2018.The opening musical passage of “Madison” references the final piano outro of “Willow,” beginning where the other ends, but the two albums differ. Musically, where “Willow” is more of an alt-rock opera, “Madison” is a wall of sound with poppier leanings that key in a spectrum of emotions — the uplift of “Party Anthem,” the delightful weirdness of the wordless “Bianca Castafiore,” the wistfulness of “Wilt.” And thematically, where “Willow” is about “numbness” and “touching but not being able to feel,” “Madison” is about “loneliness” and wanting someone who is just out of reach, Dahl said. “It’s like you figured out how to have these feelings, but you have nowhere to put them.”The desire to make “Madison” happen was intense enough that nothing could stop it. Not even a mugging a month before the cave sessions, during which Dahl was slashed in the face, hand and back. After the incident, the band talked of delaying the recording to spring 2020 but decided to push ahead. Even after it was done, Dahl was concerned she had irrevocably harmed herself mentally. “But then the pandemic happened,” she said. “And I was like, ‘No, good call, because now I have a lot of time to recover.’”At the start of last year’s lockdown, Dahl left the closetlike space she had called home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, first spending a few months in Wisconsin and then returning to Los Angeles. She spent the pandemic working on other people’s projects, both visual and musical; doing more cave recordings; putting the final touches on “Madison”; and finding it a label, Bridgers’s Saddest Factory Records.Dahl hopes someday to do a third album that picks up where “Madison” leaves off and uses the piano she played in the cave, then she wants to perform all three as one piece in concert. For now, more traditional shows are on the horizon, including an appearance at Pitchfork’s festival in Paris this month. But perhaps the cherry on the cake is that she is verging on the sound she has wanted to achieve since she was a teenager.“I think that I got close with this record,” she said. “I think that it sounds like a scratched Roy Orbison CD.” More