Music

“Happier Than Ever” beat out Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” on the Billboard album chart by a margin of 1,000 equivalent album sales.After a tight weekly race, Billie Eilish holds at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart for a third time, just ahead of releases from earlier this year by Doja Cat and Olivia Rodrigo.Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” a moderate streaming success that has been a huge hit on vinyl, had 50 million streams and sold 23,000 copies as a complete package in its most recent week, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Altogether, “Happier Than Ever” was credited with the equivalent of 60,000 sales in the United States, the lowest weekly total for a No. 1 album since Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” notched 56,000 in the winter doldrums at the start of the year.Right behind Eilish, at 59,000 equivalent units — Billboard’s publicly reported numbers are rounded to the nearest thousand — is Doja Cat’s “Planet Her,” a steady seller for the last two months, which jumps three spots to No. 2. It had 78 million streams, the best of any album this week, but was overtaken by Eilish’s album sales, which are weighted more heavily in the formula that determines chart positions. (It takes 1,250 song streams on paid accounts or 3,750 on free, ad-supported ones to count the same as a single album sale.)Rodrigo’s “Sour,” which came out in May and has had a total of four weeks at No. 1, fell one spot to No. 3 in its 13th week out. The Kid Laroi’s “____ Love” held at No. 4, while Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is in fifth place. Also this week, the country-pop duo Dan + Shay opened at No. 6 with their latest, “Good Things.” More

Kanye West may or may not be imminently releasing “Donda,” his 10th solo album, but over the course of the past few weeks, this era in his career has already established its own signature aesthetic: all black, military, asceticism on an epic scale.It’s a now familiar part of West’s album rollout strategy: clothes to match, or make, the mood. Given that nowadays he spends as much time focused on his fashion enterprises as his music (likely more), it’s unsurprising that shifts in those two creative areas move in parallel.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about West’s use of fashion as a signifier for musical evolution, the ways he has been alternately embraced and rejected by the fashion industry, and how musicians like Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator are walking in the path he carved.Guests:Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic at GQSteff Yotka, senior fashion news editor at Vogue More

As a 4-year-old, our critic couldn’t get enough of this manic 1989 hit, a crash course in U.S. history. Now the song lives on in parodies and memes.Mark PerniceAs a music critic, I’ve long been fascinated by people’s first favorite songs. Not songs made for children, or the kinds of songs we self-consciously broadcast our allegiance to after we’ve developed the filters of taste, personal identity and critical perspective. I’m talking about those early formative encounters with the vast world of popular culture — the initial, primeval jolt that this song is somehow more special than the rest.Where does that feeling come from? Does something about our first favorite song’s chord progression or production style predict what sort of music we grow up to like best? Are we all eternally doomed to be haunted by our original favorite song, forever chasing the unrepeatable rush of hearing it for the first time?I have perhaps felt a need to intellectualize all of this to avoid coming to terms with an embarrassing truth, which is that my first favorite song — yes, me, a person who grew up to be a professional music critic — is a song hated so vehemently by some people that its own Apple Music catalog description admits that it regularly shows up on “worst song” lists. It certainly seems to be one of the most parodied songs in pop music history. Even its own composer has an ambivalent-at-best relationship to its existence and has repeatedly compared its monotonous melody to a “dentist’s drill” and “a droning mosquito.”I am talking about Billy Joel and his notorious, wildly mystifying 1989 U.S.-history-lesson-on-Adderall “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which as a 4-year-old I believed to be the greatest song ever recorded.Billy Joel released “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in 1989 and the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Over the decades, it has spawned many parodies and memes.Mike Slaughter/Toronto Star, via Getty ImagesWhat kind of 4-year-old loves this song? My vocabulary was still a work in progress, so I couldn’t have understood most, if any, of its hundred-plus cultural references: Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev/Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc. And yet I lived for the thrill of the song’s rousing introduction coming on the car radio — as it did often; “Fire” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 around the time I turned 3. I loved its weird intensity: I didn’t know what Joel was saying but it all sounded so important! So deep was my love of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that there is a camcorder video of me singing it into a Playskool karaoke machine, ad-libbing lyrics about my own personal cultural luminaries of the time, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.But that was then. How long has it been since you’ve sat down and really listened to that song? (I had to do it to write this article, so you have to do it to read it — I’m sorry, but those are the rules.) More than three decades later, it provokes several different variations on the philosophical question, “How did this get made?” Also: Is Billy Joel … rapping? Did he just rhyme “Malcolm X” with “British politician sex”? Does he always pronounce “Berlin” with an accent on the first syllable, or is he just stretching it to fit the syntax of the song? What’s up with the urgent, unbridled passion he summons to growl “Trouble in the Sueezzzz”?I can at least offer an answer for the “how did this get made?” part. Joel wrote it during a transitional moment in his life: It was around the time of his 40th birthday and he was feeling a little ruminative. One day, when he was working on what would become his 1989 album “Storm Front,” a young Sean Lennon stopped by the studio with another friend his age. They were bemoaning what a strange and overwhelming time they were growing up in: foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz. Joel suggested that he’d also come of age during an exhausting moment in history: birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again. But, in Joel’s telling, Lennon’s friend countered, “You were a kid in the ’50s. And everybody knows that nothing happened in the ’50s.”“Didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel protested. (Again with the Suez.) As soon as these youngsters left, he began writing down bite-sized headlines from his youth, if only to prove his point. Eventually he realized he was writing a song.“The chain of news events and personalities came easily — mostly they just spilled out of my memory as fast as I could scribble them down,” Joel told his biographer Fred Schruers. (He also told Billboard magazine in 2009 that he was pretty sure it was the first and last time in his career that he wrote a song’s lyrics before its melody: “I think it shows, because it’s terrible musically.”)And yet, for a song so indelibly time-stamped and frozen in the year of its completion, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” has had a remarkably long afterlife. In the almost 32 years since its release, it has spawned countless parodies, from the niche (a friend recently told me that her former colleagues once performed a company-specific rendition they’d written for an office party) to the mainstream (a 2019 “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” bit in which the stars of “Avengers: Endgame” attempted to summarize the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe). “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” both featured “Fire” riffs. And this year, a history-based podcast named after the song debuted; hosts Katie Puckrik and Tom Fordyce devote an entire episode to each of the topics Joel mentions in the song. (Suffice to say, they’re going to be at it for a while.)There have also been the pandemic-era memes. “Today was like if ‘we didn’t start the fire’ was a day,” the TV writer Matt Warburton tweeted on March 12, 2020, and shortly after a therapist named Brittany Barkholtz went viral when she took him up on this challenge: “Schools close, Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks, no vaccine, quarantine, no more toilet paper seen.” Plenty of sequels followed, tailored to the most surreal headlines of the day.When I listen to the song now, I can’t say I believe it to be objectively good — but there is something enjoyable about the over-the-top absurdity of it. (It is certainly one of my go-to karaoke standards.) More than anything, though, I am amazed that all the way back in 1989 Joel somehow managed to predict the precise, decontextualized mania that I feel when I’ve spent too long on the internet. At any given moment, I can log onto Twitter and experience a sequence of flat, oddly juxtaposed phrases being shouted at me with the intensity of a man growling “Trouble in the Sueezzzz.”But I also find the prescience of this three-decades-old song a little comforting. It can be easy to feel that we are currently living through the nadir of human history — and hey, maybe we are! But Joel also wrote this song to capture a certain kind of generational déjà vu that has existed since the dawn of civilization. As he reflected to his biographer: “Oh man, we all thought that too, when we were young: My God, what kind of world have we inherited?”Maybe “Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, space monkey, mafia” is not the most poetic line that the Piano Man has ever penned. But it’s often hard for songwriters to predict just which of their creations will strike an enduring chord, let alone understand why. In a similar sense, you don’t necessarily get to choose which songs you fall in love with, especially when you’re young and impressionable, which is why pop music is one of the great cultural equalizers. I now spend most of my days trying to put into words exactly why I like certain songs, so “We Didn’t Start the Fire” makes me nostalgic for a simpler time when I enjoyed things in a way that defied further explanation. I heard the song and was blown away. What else do I have to say? More

The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, were the most successful rock act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, rivaling Elvis Presley for radio airplay. NASHVILLE — Don Everly, the elder of the two Everly Brothers, the groundbreaking duo whose fusion of Appalachian harmonies and a tighter, cleaner version of big-beat rock ’n’ roll made them harbingers of both folk-rock and country-rock, died on Saturday at his home here. He was 84. His death was confirmed by his family, which did not provide the cause. The most successful rock ’n’ roll act to emerge from Nashville in the 1950s, Mr. Everly and his brother, Phil, who died in 2014, once rivaled Elvis Presley and Pat Boone for airplay, placing an average of one single in the pop Top 10 every four months from 1957 to 1961.On the strength of ardent two-minute teenage dramas like “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Cathy’s Clown,” the duo all but single-handedly redefined what, stylistically and thematically, qualified as commercially viable music for the Nashville of their day. In the process they influenced generations of hitmakers, from British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Hollies to the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel and the Southern California country-rock band the Eagles.In 1975 Linda Ronstadt had a Top 10 pop single with a declamatory version of the Everlys’ 1960 hit “When Will I Be Loved.” Alternative-country forebears like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were likewise among the scores of popular musicians inspired by the duo’s enthralling mix of country and rhythm and blues.Paul Simon, in an email interview with The Times the morning after Phil Everly’s death, wrote: “Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.”“Bye Bye Love,” with its tight harmonies, bluesy overtones and twanging rockabilly guitar, epitomized the brothers’ crossover approach, spending four weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart in 1957. It also reached the top spot on the country chart and the fifth spot on the R&B chart.Art Garfunkel and Don Everly performed in Hyde Park, London, in 2004. Mr. Everly recorded several solo albums.Jo Hale/Getty ImagesAs with many of their early recordings, including the No. 1 pop hits “Bird Dog” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bye Bye Love” was written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant and featured backing from Nashville’s finest session musicians.Both brothers played acoustic guitar, with Don being regarded as a rhythmic innovator, but it was their intimate vocal blend that gave their records a distinctive and enduring quality. Don, who had the lower of the two voices, typically sang lead, with Phil singing a slightly higher but uncommonly close harmony part.“It’s almost like we could read each other’s minds when we sang,” Mr. Everly told The Los Angeles Times shortly after his brother’s death.The warmth of their vocals notwithstanding, the brothers’ relationship grew increasingly fraught as their career progressed. Their radio hits became scarcer as the ’60s wore on, and both men struggled with addiction. Don was hospitalized after taking an overdose of sleeping pills while the pair were on tour in Europe in 1962.A decade later, after nearly 20 years on the road together, their longstanding tensions came to a head. Phil smashed his guitar and stormed offstage during a performance at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, Calif., in 1973, leaving Don to finish the set and announce the duo’s breakup.“The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago,” he told the audience, marking the end of an era.Isaac Donald Everly was born on Feb. 1, 1937, in Brownie, Ky., not quite two years before his brother. Their mother, Margaret, and their father, Ike, a former coal miner, performed country music throughout the South and the Midwest before moving the family to Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1944. Shortly after their arrival there, “Little Donnie” and “Baby Boy Phil,” then ages 8 and 6, made their professional debut on a local radio station, KMA.The family went on to perform on radio in Indiana and Tennessee before settling in Nashville in 1955, when the Everly brothers, now in their teens, were hired as songwriters by the publishing company Acuff-Rose. Two years later Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose would help them secure a recording contract with Cadence Records, an independent label in New York, with which they had their initial success as artists.Phil and Don Everly at the 10th annual Everly Brothers Homecoming concert in Central City, Ky., in 1997. The brothers had a fraught relationship and the act broke up in 1973, but they later reunited.Suzanne Feliciano/Messenger-Inquirer, via Associated PressDon’s first break as a writer came with “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” a Top 20 country hit for Kitty Wells in 1954, as well as with songs recorded by Anita Carter and Justin Tubb. He also wrote, among other Everly Brothers hits, “(’Til) I Kissed You,” which reached the pop Top 10 in 1959, and “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad),” which did the same the next year. “Cathy’s Clown,” which he wrote with Phil, spent five weeks at the top of the pop chart in 1960.That record was the pair’s first hit for Warner Bros., which signed them after they left Cadence over a dispute about royalty payments in 1960. They moved from Nashville to Southern California the next year.Their subsequent lack of success in the United States — they continued to do well in England — could be attributed to any of a number of factors: the brothers’ simultaneous enlistment in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1961; their lack of access to material from the Bryants after their split with Cadence and Acuff-Rose; the meteoric rise of the Beatles, even though their harmonies on breakthrough hits like “Please Please Me” were modeled directly on those of the Everlys.They nevertheless continued to tour and record, releasing a series of influential albums for Warner Bros., notably “Roots,” a concept album that reckoned with the duo’s legacy and caught them up with the country-rock movement to which they gave shape.Don also released a self-titled album on the Ode label in 1970 and made two more solo albums, “Sunset Towers” on Ode and “Brother Juke Box” on Hickory, after the Everlys split up.In 1983 he and his brother reunited for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, a show that was filmed for a documentary. The next year they recorded “EB84,” a studio album produced by the Welsh singer-guitarist Dave Edmunds. That project included the minor hit “On the Wings of a Nightingale,” written for the Everlys by Paul McCartney.The duo released two more studio albums before the end of the decade. They were inducted as members of the inaugural class of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.They also received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1997 and were enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.In 2003 they toured with Simon and Garfunkel, and in 2010 they appeared on an album by Don’s son, Edan Everly.In addition to his son, survivors include his wife, Adela Garza; three daughters, Venetia, Stacy and Erin; his mother, Margaret Everly, and six grandchildren.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2014, Mr. Everly acknowledged his decades of conflict with his brother but recalled their intimate musical communion with pride.“When Phil and I hit that one spot where I call it ‘The Everly Brothers,’” he said, “I don’t know where it is, ’cause it’s not me and it’s not him; it’s the two of us together.” More

An all-star show to celebrate the city’s emergence after the hardships of the pandemic, even as the spread of the Delta variant has driven up cases again, was stopped halfway through.It was supposed to be a glorious celebration of the re-emergence of New York City after more than a year of pandemic hardship — a concert bringing thousands of vaccinated fans on Saturday evening to the Great Lawn of Central Park to hear an all-star lineup.And for the first couple of hours it was, with messages of New York’s resilience sandwiched between performances by the New York Philharmonic, Jennifer Hudson, Carlos Santana, LL Cool J, and Earth, Wind and Fire, among others.But shortly after 7:30 p.m., as Barry Manilow was performing “Can’t Smile Without You,” lightning brought the concert to a halt. “Please seek shelter for your safety,” an announcer intoned, stopping the music, as people began filing out of the park.The concert had begun with a ray of sunshine, breaking through the clouds just before it got underway at 5 p.m. Gayle King, a co-host of “CBS This Morning,” began the evening by thanking the essential workers who had pulled the city through the darkest days of the pandemic.“We were once the epicenter of this virus, and now we’ve moved to being the epicenter of the recovery,” she said. “We gather for a common purpose: to say, ‘Welcome back, New York City!’”She then introduced the New York Philharmonic, which kicked off the concert with the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” conducted by Marin Alsop, a Bernstein protégée. The orchestra then played a medley of New York-themed music, including bits of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and “Theme from ‘New York, New York,’” the anthem made famous by Frank Sinatra, among others.The concert, “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert,” which was broadcast live on CNN, was part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to celebrate the city’s comeback after the pain and suffering of the pandemic.When the concert was announced by Mr. de Blasio in June, plunging coronavirus case numbers and rising vaccination figures had filled the city with hope.But circumstances have shifted considerably over the past two months. The spread of the highly contagious Delta variant has led some city businesses to postpone the return to their offices, prompted the city to institute vaccine mandates for indoor dining and entertainment and threatened to destabilize the wider concert business.On June 7, the day the concert was announced, the city was averaging 242 cases a day; the daily average is now more than 2,000 cases a day.With the Philharmonic still onstage, the concert continued with Andrea Bocelli, the star Italian tenor, singing “O Sole Mio,” and Jennifer Hudson, the star of the new Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect,” singing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” — a beloved aria that became associated with Franklin after she sang it at the Grammy Awards in 1998.As the crowd streamed in, the idea of New York’s return — whether a two-fisted vanquishing of a viral enemy or a premature declaration of victory — was on seemingly everyone’s mind.“This is our reopening — this is our invitation to get back to real life,” said Dean Dunagan, 52, of the Lower East Side, who had come to see Mr. Springsteen and had been waiting outside the park for four and a half hours before the gates were opened.“New York has been punched in the face every other decade, or whatever,” Mr. Dunagan said, “and we get right back up.”Just a few feet from him was Alexandra Gudaitis, a 24-year-old Paul Simon fan from the Upper West Side. “I’m scared this is going to be a mass spreader event, with the Delta,” she said.Still, she was one of the first fans through the door and rushed to the very front of the general-admission section with a few friends. They wore masks, and Ms. Gudaitis said they had chosen their spot because it seemed to have better access to fresh air.Some of the acts had only tenuous connections to New York. But the rap pioneer LL Cool J led a New York-centric ode to old-school hip-hop with Busta Rhymes, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, French Montana, Melle Mel and Rev. Run of Run-DMC.Amid concerns about the spread of the Delta variant, the show required everyone 12 years old and older to show proof that they had had at least one dose of a vaccine. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThe homecoming show required everyone 12 years old and up to show proof that they had had at least one dose of a vaccine; children younger than that, who are still ineligible for the vaccines, were required to wear masks.“When it comes to the concerts, they are outdoors — they are for vaccinated folks only,” the mayor had said on Wednesday. “We are definitely encouraging mask use. But I really want to emphasize the whole key here is vaccination.”The Central Park show came after the city had hosted a week of free hip-hop shows, with local heroes including Raekwon and Ghostface Killah in Staten Island, and KRS-One, Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick in the Bronx. Tickets were required to attend the concert on the Great Lawn — most were free, but V.I.P. packages cost up to $5,000 — and the show was broadcast on television by CNN and on satellite radio by SiriusXM.The concert was programmed by Clive Davis, the 89-year-old music eminence, who, in an interview this week, stressed the role that music could play in shaping society.“It’s vital and important that New York be back,” he said.From the stage on Saturday night, Mr. Davis, a Brooklyn native, made a plea to the audience: “Tonight, I only ask one thing: When you’re having a great time, cheer loud — loud enough so they can hear you all the way in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.”The concert ended before many of the headliners, including Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, got to perform. Mr. Davis said in the interview that after Mr. de Blasio asked him in May to put together the show, his first call had been to Mr. Springsteen.“I picked up the phone and told him we were going to celebrate New York City,” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said he would show up and wanted to do a duet.” That duet was to have been with Patti Smith, on “Because the Night,” a 1978 song they wrote together.The abbreviated concert came at an uncertain moment for the music industry. While some high-profile artists, including Garth Brooks, BTS and Nine Inch Nails, have canceled tour dates recently, the show is largely going on in the live-music business — but it hasn’t been easy. Concert protocols, in New York and elsewhere, have been in flux for months, as the federal authorities, local governments and businesses have adjusted to the changing realities of the virus.Broadway is requiring masks and proof of vaccinations as its theaters reopen, and Los Angeles County recently announced that it would require masks at large outdoor events such as baseball games at Dodger Stadium and concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.Mr. de Blasio has defended going ahead with the concert, noting that it was being held outdoors and for vaccinated people, even as some other events have been canceled. This year’s West Indian American Day parade in Brooklyn, for example, planned for Labor Day Weekend, has been canceled.The eyes of the concert industry have been on Chicago, where the Lollapalooza festival drew 400,000 over four days in late July and early August, amid concerns that it could turn into a “superspreader” event. The festival, which was held outdoors, required that attendees show proof of vaccination or a negative test. Last week, the city said that 203 people attending the show had tested positive afterward and that no hospitalizations or deaths had been reported. More

Mr. Hall, who wrote hits like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” helped to imbue country lyrics with newfound depth and insight in the 1960s and ’70s.Tom T. Hall, a country singer and songwriter known for wry, socially conscious hit songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” died on Friday at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 85.His death was confirmed by a director at the Williamson Memorial Funeral Home in Franklin.Known to his fans and fellow musicians as “the Storyteller,” Mr. Hall was among a small circle of Nashville songwriters, including Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and others, who imbued country lyrics with newfound depth and insight in the 1960s and ’70s. As his nickname suggests, he was a skilled narrator, although he told his stories less through the unfurling of linear plots than through the presentation of one-sided conversations or interior monologues that invited listeners into the lives of his often conflicted protagonists.“Homecoming,” his 1969 Top 10 country hit, portrays a singer who has been away from home so long — and is so wrapped up in his own celebrity — that he hardly knows his own people anymore.“I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there with you all when Mama passed away/I was on the road and when they came and told me it was just too late,” Mr. Hall sings in an unadorned baritone, assuming the role of the young entertainer during an overdue visit to his widowed father. Permitting his listeners to hear only the son’s portion of the dialogue, Mr. Hall refrains from passing judgment on the man, only to have him betray his self-absorption with one halfhearted apology after another.“I didn’t make judgments,” Mr. Hall once said in an interview. “I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.”Mr. Hall and his band arriving from Nashville for a sold-out tour of Australia in 1971.Antonin Cermak/Fairfax Media via Getty Images“Harper Valley P.T.A.,” which reached No. 1 in 1968 on both the country and the pop singles charts for the singer Jeannie C. Riley, was part allegory and part small-town morality play. Written amid mounting tensions over civil rights, women’s liberation and the war in Vietnam, the song pits an indomitable young widow against the two-faced authorities at her daughter’s school, unmasking petty hypocrisy and prejudice while at the same time giving voice to the nation’s larger social unrest. (The song gained sufficient traction within the pop mainstream to inspire a movie and a TV series of the same name.)Several of Mr. Hall’s other compositions also became major hits for his fellow artists, including “(Margie’s at) The Lincoln Park Inn,” a Top 10 country single for Bobby Bare in 1969, and “Hello Vietnam,” a No. 1 country hit for Johnnie Wright in 1965. “Hello Vietnam,” which featured backing vocals from Mr. Wright’s wife, Kitty Wells, was later used as the opening theme for the movie “Full Metal Jacket.”Mk/Associated PressAs a performer, Mr. Hall placed 21 singles in the country Top 10, most of them on Mercury Records. The most successful were “I Love,” “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” and “A Week in a Country Jail.” Each spent two weeks at No. 1 on the country chart; the sentimental “I Love,” Mr. Hall’s only crossover hit as a recording artist, also reached the pop Top 20 in 1973.Backed by lean, uncluttered arrangements typically played by first-call Nashville session musicians, Mr. Hall’s songs were both straightforward and closely observed, forcing listeners to look at the world, and their preconceived notions about it, in a new light. Concerned with everyday lives and struggles, Mr. Hall’s concise, understated tales had the impact of well-wrought short stories. (He also wrote two volumes of short fiction and two novels.)Thomas Hall — he added the middle initial T to his name when he embarked on his career as a performer — was born on May 25, 1936, near Olive Hill, Ky. His father, Virgil, worked in a brick manufacturing plant and was also a preacher. His mother, Della, died when he was an adolescent. When he was 15, Mr. Hall dropped out of school to work in a garment factory to help support the family after his father was injured in a hunting accident.One of eight children, he began playing guitar and writing songs and poetry as a young boy. Floyd Carter, a local musician and raconteur, was an early influence, as well as the man Mr. Hall later memorialized in song as the colorful Clayton Delaney.Mr. Hall, center, performing with Ralph Stanley, left and Don Rigsby in Ashland, Ky., in 2003. Mr. Hall and his wife and songwriting partner, Iris Lawrence Hall, were given a Distinguished Achievement Award by the International Bluegrass Music Association the next year.John Flavell/The Independent, via Associated PressMr. Hall formed the Kentucky Travelers, a bluegrass band that played at local gatherings and on the radio, while doing factory work as a teenager. He joined the Army in 1957; while stationed in Germany, he performed humorous material on the Armed Forces Radio Network, before returning to the United States three years later and enrolling in Roanoke College in Virginia to study literature on the G.I. Bill.He moved to Nashville in 1964 and signed a recording contract with Mercury shortly after the Cajun singer Jimmy C. Newman had a Top 10 country hit with his song “D.J. for a Day.”In Mr. Hall’s career as a recording artist, which spanned more than two decades, he placed a total of 54 singles on the country charts. He also released more than three dozen albums, including two bluegrass projects: “The Magnificent Music Machine,” a 1976 collaboration with Bill Monroe, and “The Storyteller and the Banjoman” (1982), with Earl Scruggs.Mr. Hall joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 1971 and won a Grammy Award for best album notes for the 1972 compilation “Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits.” He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008. In the early 1980s, he hosted the syndicated television series “Pop! Goes the Country.”His songs continued to be recorded by mainstream country artists well into the 1990s, most notably “Little Bitty,” which reached the top of the country chart for Alan Jackson in 1996.Mr. Hall is survived by his son, Dean; a sister, Betty Kiser; and a brother, Larry. His wife of 46 years, Iris Lawrence Hall, known to most as Miss Dixie, died in 2015.The Halls did not have children of their own (Mr. Hall’s son is from a previous marriage), but Fox Hollow, their 67-acre farm and recording studio south of Nashville, was a haven for aspiring young singers and songwriters.Bluegrass was the couple’s passion during their final years together; for their many contributions to the idiom, including the numerous songs they wrote in that style, they were honored with a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2004.“He didn’t like taking 35 dogs to a show, and he wouldn’t play golf with me because I was good,” Ms. Hall, a dog lover and animal rights activist, told The New York Times in 2008, explaining why the couple spent much of their retirement writing songs. “But songwriting was something we could do together.” More

Fue un fenómeno adolescente por el gran éxito de ‘Royals’ y un álbum que fue aclamado por la crítica. Pero ahora, con 24 años, la música neozelandesa no persigue la fama masiva. Sigue la ruta del sol.Lorde grabó ‘Solar Power’, su tercer álbum, después de tomarse una pausa en la que simplemente se enfocó en vivir.Justin J Wee para The New York TimesPuede ser tentador, tras pasar mucho tiempo con Lorde, preguntarse qué le pasa.Es decir, ¿dónde esconde exactamente los puntos negativos, los defectos, las partes poco favorecedoras de cualquier personalidad que se asoman de manera incómoda, especialmente después de vivir una trayectoria tan extraña como la suya? Nadie que haya sido famosa y agasajada desde los 16 años, podría estar tan bien adaptada. ¿O sí?Ni siquiera se trata de que la cantante y compositora cuyo nombre de pila es Ella Yelich-O’Connor, ahora de 24 años, se presente como alguien especialmente perfecta, segura de sí misma o inmune a las críticas. No es que no tenga dudas, inseguridades, ataques de vanidad, impaciencia o que vea cosas en su celular sin pensar demasiado.Pero Lorde —la humana y la artista— suele ir un paso adelante, de forma intuitiva y emocional, tras haber pensado en su realidad desde la mayoría de los ángulos: cómo le pareció algo, cómo podría expresarlo, cómo será recibido y cómo podría procesar la forma en que fue interpretada. Ese es un conjunto de habilidades que muchas personas que llegan al estrellato como ella —una adolescente brillante de un pueblo pequeño con un éxito arrollador— pueden fingir bastante bien. Pero pocos lo hacen de forma tan convincente.“Sé lo suficiente como para saber que las personas en mi posición son símbolos y arquetipos y que el lugar donde nos encontramos con la gente, en el contexto de la cultura y la actualidad, está fuera de nuestro control, así que intento no preocuparme demasiado”, comentó Lorde recientemente, con la consideración y el zen que la caracterizan, antes del lanzamiento de su tercer álbum.“Es una posición muy divertida”, reconoció. “Es absurdo”.Pero es ese sentido de la perspectiva y la autoconciencia lo que ha hecho que Lorde siga adelante en una industria a menudo implacable. De hecho, grabó un álbum entero sobre la búsqueda del equilibrio.Solar Power, que saldrá a la venta el 20 de agosto, es lo que ocurre cuando una estrella del pop burla al sistema, se desvía de sus extrañas exigencias, deja de intentar hacer éxitos y decide susurrar a sus seguidores más devotos cómo lo logró. Para Lorde, el truco fue tener una vida —una vida real— lejos de todo lo demás. Y también tirar su celular al mar. (Un terapeuta tampoco le vino mal).Tras el reinado de “Royals”, su primer sencillo —que estuvo nueve semanas en el puesto número uno y ganó dos premios Grammy— y su debut con el álbum Pure Heroine de 2013, que fue disco de platino en tres oportunidades debido a sus ventas, Lorde tardó cuatro años en lanzar otro material. En comparación, Melodrama, su segundo disco que fue lanzado en 2017, palideció a nivel comercial pero reajustó las expectativas desmesuradas. Además, la estableció como un fenómeno convertido en autora, lo que le valió buenas críticas y otra nominación a los premios Grammy, esta vez en la categoría de álbum del año. Después, reservó cuatro años para dedicarse a ella.En el camino, Lorde se convirtió en un modelo para la industria, una suerte de cantautora diferente y precoz que construye mundos y abrió caminos para una generación que incluye a Halsey, Billie Eilish y Olivia Rodrigo. Pero Lorde no se quedó a mirar lo que pasaba.“Volví a vivir mi vida”, dijo sobre su pausa reciente, identificándose como “una flor de invernadero, una persona delicada y una introvertida empedernida”, agotada tras más de un año de promoción y gira del álbum Melodrama. “Es difícil que la gente lo entienda”.“Últimamente lo que más me preguntan es: ‘¿Qué has estado haciendo?’”, añadió. “Yo digo: ‘Oh, no, no, no: esto es un descanso de mi vida’. Vuelvo y hago estas cosas porque creo en el álbum”.Lorde juró que no volvería a alcanzar las alturas de su gran éxito, “Royals”. “¿Te imaginas?”, dijo. “No me hago ilusiones. Aquello fue un momento excepcional en la vida”.Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesIncluso ahora, con las obligaciones generadas por Solar Power, Lorde programó unas vacaciones de una semana en la playa con amigos, y aprovechó una entrevista programada como una ocasión para realizar varias tareas, caminando para comprar una bolsa llena de buen queso para el viaje.Sin embargo, durante la mayor parte de los últimos cuatro años Lorde ha vivido como Ella entre la vegetación y el esplendor de los muelles donde creció, en Auckland, Nueva Zelanda, y sus alrededores, trabajando para descubrir sus límites.Una amiga de las amigas que conoció en ese lugar, Francesca Hopkins, dijo: “Todo ese asunto de Lorde no se menciona ni se ha comentado realmente. Probablemente pueda contar con una mano la cantidad de veces que se ha pronunciado la palabra ‘Lorde’”.La cantante también comenzó el proceso de abordar su adicción a internet, inspirada en libros como Pilgrim at Tinker Creek de Annie Dillard y Cómo no hacer nada de Jenny Odell.“Veía que mi tiempo de pantalla llegaba como a 11 horas y sabía que era solo por mirar el Daily Mail”, dijo Lorde. “Recuerdo que me senté en la cama y me di cuenta de que podía llegar al final de mi vida y haber hecho esto todos los días. Y depende de mí elegir, ahora mismo. Así que simplemente elegí”.Al final hizo falta más que eso: el teléfono de Lorde, configurado en escala de grises, ahora no tiene navegador de Internet; no puede entrar en sus aplicaciones de redes sociales (otros manejan las contraseñas); y un amigo codificador incluso hizo que YouTube fuera inaccesible en su computadora portátil. “No he hecho un disco de Jack Antonoff”, dijo la cantante. “He hecho un disco de Lorde y él me ha ayudado a hacerlo y me ha delegado muchas tareas de producción y los arreglos”.Justin J Wee for para New York TimesEn cambio cocinó, horneó, paseó al perro, nadó, cultivó el jardín —en otras palabras, se relajó— mientras esperaba a ver “si ocurría algo más sobre lo que valiera la pena escribir”. Pero resultó que ya lo había hecho, especialmente cuando se entretejía con su existencia actual.En “The Path”, la deslumbrante canción con que inicia Solar Power y que escribió como una especie de declaración de tesis para el álbum, Lorde se describe como “criada en la hierba alta”, pero también como una “adolescente millonaria que tiene pesadillas en las que aparecen las luces de las cámaras”. “Si buscas una salvadora, esa no soy yo”, advierte. No obstante ofrece una alternativa embriagadora: el sol.“Estoy consciente de cómo me mira la gente”, dice Lorde. “Puedo sentir la enorme cantidad de amor y devoción que las personas sienten por mí —y por la gente que está en mi posición— y enseguida quise decir: ‘Yo no soy la que merece tu devoción. Básicamente, soy como tú’”.Y agregó: “Mis chicos —mi comunidad— esperan trascendencia espiritual de mi parte, de estas obras. ‘¡Necesito que Lorde vuelva y me diga cómo sentirme, que me diga cómo procesar este periodo de mi vida!’. Y yo, lo que pienso es: ‘No sé si puedo ayudarte con eso. Pero lo que sí sé es que, si todos miramos hacia arriba, ¡eso nos ayudará mucho!’”.Jugando con el papel de estrella del pop como mesías, abrazó el personaje de líder de la secta en la canción, haciendo proselitismo sobre el mundo natural.Pero Lorde también sabe que estos consejos proceden de un lugar privilegiado, ya que coinciden con algunos de los principios más obvios de la cultura moderna del bienestar (que también critica en el álbum): salir a la calle. Pasar tiempo con la familia. Apagar el teléfono. Salir con los amigos.Lo que evita que Solar Power resulte didáctico o excesivamente simplificado son las letras en las que satiriza sus propias experiencias, basándose en detalles chismosos y rebajando las ideas demasiado elevadas con humor, como cuando interrumpe un frágil tratado sobre el envejecimiento con la frase: “Tal vez solo estoy… drogada en el salón de uñas”.‘Melodrama’ consagró a Lorde como un fenómeno musical que logró la transición para convertirse en cantautora.Chad Batka para The New York TimesLa artista, que antes cantaba con desprecio y desde la distancia sobre la cultura de las celebridades, ahora señala su “baúl lleno de ropa de Simone y Céline” y el tiempo que ha pasado en hoteles, en la Gala del Met, en los Grammy y en aviones. “Tengo cientos de vestidos, tengo cuadros enmarcados”, canta en “The Man With the Axe”. “Y una garganta que se llena de pánico cada día de festival/ que se deshace en honor a la princesa de Noruega”.Sin embargo, alejarse de todo eso, aclara Lorde, simplemente se siente mejor. “Adiós a todas las botellas, a todos los modelos, adiós a los niños que hacen fila para comprar los nuevos productos de Supreme”, añade en “California”, cerrando el ciclo de vuelta a su ethos de Pure Heroine.Lorde sabía que necesitaba un sonido soberbiamente fuera de lo común que se ajustara a su tema y a su sentido de la desconexión. Encontró la estética “twinkly” para Solar Power combinando influencias de los años 60 y 70, como los Mamas and the Papas y los Bee Gees, con artistas de su juventud, a menudo denostados, que representaban lo que ella llamaba “optimismo playero de fin de siglo”: All Saints, S Club 7, Natalie Imbruglia, Nelly Furtado.Alguna vez fiel a la electrónica y alérgica a las guitarras, Lorde solo emplea una caja de ritmos 808 en todo el álbum, en una sección que pretende ser un retroceso autorreferencial. “Definitivamente no hay un exitazo”, declaró sobre sus perspectivas comerciales con una carcajada. “Es lógico que no sea un exitazo, porque ni siquiera sé realmente qué son los exitazos ahora”.Juró no volver a alcanzar las alturas de “Royals”. “Es una causa perdida”, comentó. “¿Te imaginas? No me hago ilusiones. Aquello fue un momento excepcional en la vida”.Sin embargo, ha encontrado un aliado en la experimentación y el agnosticismo sobre Billboard en el productor y compositor Jack Antonoff, con quien también escribió y produjo Melodrama.“Grabas tu primer álbum con una alegría increíble porque no existe nada”, explicó Antonoff. Pero recordó la inminente presión que precedió a la segunda grabación de Lorde, por lo que tuvieron que aislarse para evitar el bullicio, lo que dio lugar a la intimidad que se percibe en Melodrama.Solar Power, dijo, surgió de una renovada sensación de libertad. “El tercer álbum es un gran lugar para hacerlo, para despertar y decir: ‘Realmente amo este trabajo y tengo mucha suerte de estar aquí’. Simplemente vuelves a conectarte con lo que haces. Hubo mucho de eso”.Lorde estuvo de acuerdo. “Sentí que podía relajarme y presumir un poco”, concluyó.“Últimamente la pregunta que más me hacen es: ‘¿Qué has estado haciendo?’”, dijo Lorde. “Yo digo: ‘Oh, no, no, no: esto es un descanso de mi vida’. Vuelvo y hago estas cosas porque creo en el álbum”.Justin J Wee para The New York TimesSin embargo, es en el contexto de Antonoff donde Lorde expresó lo más parecido a la angustia que pudo experimentar. En concreto, se mostró en desacuerdo con un creciente contingente de fans y críticos que meten en el mismo saco el extenso trabajo del productor con otras artistas pop femeninas —Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey y Clairo, entre ellas—, reduciendo a Lorde a una yegua más en lo que ella denomina, con algo de filo y más humor, “el establo de Jack”.“No he hecho un disco de Jack Antonoff”, dijo la cantante. “He hecho un disco de Lorde y él me ha ayudado a hacerlo y me ha delegado muchas tareas de producción y los arreglos. Jack estaría de acuerdo con esto. Darle esa cantidad de crédito es francamente insultante”. Ella calificó la narración —que también ha incluido especulaciones sobre la vida romántica y sexual de la pareja— de “retro” y “sexista”.“Sé que hay ciertas señas de identidad de lo que hace Jack y algunas de esas cosas me encantan y otras no me gustan. Y las saco a golpes del trabajo que hacemos juntos”, añadió. “Lo digo con mucho amor y cariño, pero me siento como si estuviéramos arreglando una casa juntos y él dijera: ‘¡Mira esta servilleta que he diseñado en forma de dos cisnes! ¡Mira este conjunto de cestas tejidas!’. Y yo le digo: ‘Genial, una por habitación’”.En un ensayo reciente para una actuación en un programa de televisión nocturno, Lorde estaba claramente al mando y atenta a los detalles. Al llegar, Antonoff advirtió que su forma de tocar la guitarra sería “bastante floja”.“¿Qué tan floja?”, respondió Lorde. Más tarde, hizo una pausa al cantar para escuchar con más atención el arreglo. “Lo único que haría sería clavarte un poco más en la grabación”, ofreció Lorde, con la franqueza que otorga una sociedad experimentada.“¡Pero bonito!”, añadió.“Nadie que esté en un trabajo como este tiene una relación como la que tengo con Jack”, dijo Lorde después. “Él es como un compañero para mí. Tenemos una relación. No es una relación romántica, pero llevamos siete años en ella, y es algo realmente único, así que no recrimino que la gente no pueda entenderlo”.Trató de mantener la misma mentalidad para el lanzamiento de Solar Power, dijo, volviendo a la idea de que estaba “muy, muy reconciliada y a gusto con cosas como la percepción del público. Simplemente, hoy en día no me perturba”.“Casi valoro que la gente no lo entienda al principio”, dijo sobre el álbum. “Me deprime un poco cuando sale un álbum y lo reviso muy rápido y miro Genius y leo todas las letras en tres minutos y me doy cuenta de que sé exactamente lo que es y no va a crecer”.“Creo que todavía estoy dando algo que es realmente digerible”, añadió Lorde con una sonrisa de satisfacción, “pero me gusta confundir. Me gusta ser eso para la gente”.Joe Coscarelli es reportero cultural especializado en música pop. Su trabajo busca revelar las maneras en las que se descubren, crean y comercializan las canciones de éxito y los nuevos artistas. Antes trabajó en la revista New York y The Village Voice. @joecoscarelli More

Hear tracks by Circuit des Yeux, Cimafunk and George Clinton, Alice Longyu Gao 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.Shawn Mendes and Tainy, ‘Summer of Love’It’s amazing that more English-speaking pop songwriters haven’t latched on to Tainy, the Puerto Rican producer behind globe-spanning hits by Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, J Balvin and many others. Tainy puts a reggaeton beat, bachata-tinged guitar syncopations and deep sustained bass lines behind Shawn Mendes as he croons short, breathy, calculated phrases about a remembered season of sensual delights. The title has completely freed itself from the 1960s. JON PARELESThe Rolling Stones, ‘Living in the Heart of Love’Sure, it’s a leftover, and it’s obvious why it was shelved. “Living in the Heart of Love” is a vault track to be released on an expanded 40th-anniversary reissue of “Tattoo You,” something to promote when the Stones tour this fall (with Steve Jordan substituting for Charlie Watts on drums). The song is an obvious “Brown Sugar” knockoff, with Mick Jagger striking an uncommonly conciliatory pose as he woos someone: “I’ll play dirty, I’ll play clean/But I’ll be damned if I’ll be mean,” he contends. (Really?) It’s second- or third-tier Stones, and it nearly falls apart halfway through, but the way the band keeps charging ahead is more than enough fun. PARELESParquet Courts, ‘Walking at a Downtown Pace’Parquet Courts are back with a vibrant ode to New York City — and a chronicle of a busy mind traversing its streets. “Treasure the crowds that once made me act so annoyed,” Andrew Savage sings on the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, “Sympathy for Life,” “Sometimes I wonder how long till I’m a face in one.” As ever, his observations are peppered with the robotic banalities of modern existence (“pick out a movie, a sandwich from a screen”), but the song’s snaking groove, persistent beat and shout-along chorus are all teeming with life. LINDSAY ZOLADZLily Konigsberg, ‘That’s The Way I Like It’Lily Konigsberg is a member of the freewheeling art-rock trio Palberta, but over the past few years she’s also been releasing a steady stream of eclectic-yet-infectious solo material on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. (A compilation of that work, titled “The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now,” arrived earlier this year.) “That’s the Way I Like It,” from her forthcoming solo debut “Lily We Need to Talk Now,” is smoother around the edges than Palberta’s spiky grooves, but it’s still got ample personality to spare. “That’s the way I like it, you can’t do anything about it,” Konigsberg intones with a sugary defiance, addressing someone who’s been disrespecting her boundaries. As far as assertions of selfhood go, this one’s particularly catchy. ZOLADZCircuit des Yeux, ‘Dogma’Haley Fohr’s voice has an entrancing power. As Circuit des Yeux, she composes haunting atmospheres that augment its force. “Dogma,” the first offering from her sixth album, “-io” pulls the listener along with a steady, hypnotic beat, overtop of which her shape-shifting vocals move from a low drone to a keening croon with remarkable ease. “Tell me how to see the light,” she sings, as if yearning for salvation, but at other moments in the song she sounds like an eerily commanding cult leader. ZOLADZCimafunk and George Clinton, ‘Funk Aspirin’Cimafunk puts a heavy dash of classic Afro-Cuban rhythm into his throbbing dance music, but he’s also been a longtime fan of American funk, and he recently sought out George Clinton, an idol of his since childhood, for a hang and a recording session. The result is “Funk Aspirin,” a bilingual paean to the healing powers of rhythm, taken at a coolly grooving medium tempo and recorded at Clinton’s Tallahassee, Fla., home studio, where the music video was also shot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONaujawanan Baidar, ‘Shola-e Jawed’Thinking about Afghanistan this week? Here’s a traditional Afghan melody in modern guise: distorted, multitracked and surrounded in effects, yet still speaking from its home. PARELESPieri, ‘Quien Paga’Born in Mexico and now based in New York City, Pieri chant-rap-sings over a cranked-up, swooping synthesizer bass line with ratcheting drum machines at its peaks in “Quien Paga” (“Who Pays”). It’s a brash, assaultive kiss-off with electronic muscle as she multitracks her voice to announce, rightly, “They tell me that I’m pretty, and I also have a flow that kills.” PARELESAlice Longyu Gao, ‘Kanpai’For the uninitiated: Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Alice Longyu Gao, a glitchy hyperpop paradise full of killer hooks and knowing, oddball humor. A D.J. and producer who was born in China and later moved to New York, then Los Angeles, Gao has recently worked with such similarly brash kindred spirits as Alice Glass and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady (who produced her deliriously fun 2020 single “Rich Bitch Juice”). “Kanpai” — “cheers” in Chinese, Japanese and Korean — is a total sugar rush, blending the pop excess of Rina Sawayama with the electro-freneticism of Sophie. “My name on your lips like liquor lipstick, everybody’s talking about me,” Gao intones, a semi-absurd but self-evident declaration from someone who’s clearly already a global superstar in her own mind. ZOLADZTopdown Dialectic, ‘B1’The taciturn electronic musician who records as Topdown Dialectic previews “Vol. 3,” an album due in October, with “B1,” a rhythm-forward track that surrounds a roboticized samba beat with sporadic cross-rhythms and chords that bubble up from below, then vanish before leading anywhere. It’s simultaneously propulsive and evasive. PARELESMaggie Rose, ‘For Your Consideration’On her third album, “Have a Seat,” the Nashville-based songwriter Maggie Rose seeks reconciliation and balance: between friends, between lovers, between ideologies. She recorded, like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with session musicians rooted in soul. The slow-rolling “For Your Consideration” chides a judgmental companion — “Doesn’t mean it’s all my fault ’cause you say it’s so,” she observes — but also, in a swelling chorus, announces, “I wish that I could borrow your eyes/Maybe that would open my mind.” She’s only calling for fairness, not domination. PARELESOrla Gartland, ‘Things That I’ve Learned’The meter, mostly, is a syncopated and eccentric 5/4, though it shifts at whim; the attitude is terse and businesslike, but sisterly. The Irish-born, England-based songwriter Orla Gartland, 26, an online presence for more than a decade, dispenses advice in “Things That I’ve Learned” on her long-burgeoning debut album, “Woman on the Internet.” She warns against consumerism, comparisons and artificial peer pressure; she gradually stacks up electric guitar riffs and then breaks them down to a little percussion and a lone, undaunted voice. PARELESLee Morgan, ‘Absolutions (July 10, 1970; Set 2)’Starting on the night of his 32nd birthday, not long before his flare-like career would come to an abrupt end, the trumpeter Lee Morgan played a three-day engagement at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, Calif. A live album drawn from these performances became the last LP released during Morgan’s life; its four lengthy tracks are part of the jazz canon. But there was plenty more where those came from, and on Friday Blue Note Records released a mammoth box containing the full recordings: a dozen separate live sets, performed over the course of three nights. It’s dizzying to hear how little the quintet flags, knowing it was playing four sets a night; the unrepentant tension and synced-up control that made “Live at the Lighthouse” a classic is maintained basically throughout the boxed set. A nearly 20-minute version of “Absolutions,” a perilously seesawing, skittering tune written by the group’s bassist, Jymie Merritt, opened the original album. This newly released take, from Set 2 of Night 1, lasts even longer. As Morgan, the tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin and the pianist Harold Mabern each take lengthy solos, Mickey Roker’s cross-stitched drumming keeps the friction high. RUSSONELLO More