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      The Endless Curiosity of Chris Thile

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      The 40-year-old mandolinist has found inspiration in groups, and as the host of “Live From Here.” “Laysongs” is his most directly personal work yet.At his first in-person performance before a New York audience in over a year, the mandolinist Chris Thile spent a lot of time with his instrument on his lap, listening.Half-encircled by a sizable but well-spaced-out crowd at the East River Park Amphitheater last month, Thile welcomed an assortment of New York-based artists to the stage. Some, like the members of the pop-soul band Lake Street Dive, were familiar collaborators; others, like the poet Carl Hancock Rux, he’d just met that day.He introduced them all with the kindly salesman flair of a consummate radio host — which in fact he was, until the pandemic put the kibosh on his syndicated variety show, “Live From Here,” the successor to “Prairie Home Companion,” which Thile had taken over from Garrison Keillor in 2016. Then, sitting by the side of the stage for much of the show, he took part as a listener as much as a performer.At 40, Thile has been the leading mandolin virtuoso of his generation since before its members could legally drink. After becoming a prodigy on the Southern California trad-music scene in the early 1990s, Thile has stayed endlessly busy. He’s found his way across most of the stylistic divides that might present themselves to a mandolin player from the bluegrass tradition.But during the pandemic, Thile took a rare cue to stop, slow down and dial back. Sitting outside a coffee shop blocks from his home in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, he said that throughout the past year — one of activism, upheaval and isolation — he had found himself longing for the chance to listen, just as much as to perform.Thile’s quietly powerful new album, “Laysongs,” out June 4, ends with a Hazel Dickens ballad, “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me,” for a reason. “I like that she’s saying ‘for,’ instead of ‘with,’” he said. “She’s implying that she wants to listen to those people,” he added — whoever they may be.As the host of “Live From Here,” he welcomed a smattering of guests each week, mostly musicians and other performers, and relished his role as a kind of participant-observer. “It was my job to be turned back into a listener, and then show people: ‘Hey, I heard this thing that I think you might like,’” he said. “I had to constantly be on the hunt for new sounds.”The show was abruptly canceled last year, amid pandemic-related financial constraints at American Public Media, but Thile hopes to carry that work with him going forward: “I would love to think that — fool us once — we’re not going to take being able to listen to one another for granted ever again.”Thile said his new album is an attempt “to push back” against the exclusion that comes with building community.Clement Pascal for The New York TimesTHILE WAS RAISED in an evangelical Christian household in Southern California, and grew up playing in the bluegrass-and-beyond band Nickel Creek; its songbook catalogs, among other things, the evolution of Thile’s relationship to God, and his bandmates’ too. Nickel Creek’s self-titled third album, released when Thile was just a teenager, went platinum, and put the trio near the commercial center of a rising alt-folk movement. A few years later, he started the Punch Brothers, with the goal of infusing bluegrass’s country craftsmanship with classical and jazz techniques. In 2012, he won a MacArthur “genius” grant mostly on the power of his musical strides alone.In more recent years, when not focused on the radio show or playing with one of the two bands, Thile collaborated regularly with the banjoist Béla Fleck, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and other laureates of what you might call contemporary American concert music. His big outlet for that these days is the Sony Masterworks-signed all-star group Goat Rodeo, which also includes Ma.He hadn’t seen — let alone played with — any of them for months when he and an engineer, Jody Elff, headed into a decommissioned church in upstate New York last summer to record “Laysongs.” It’s Thile’s first fully solo album, just his voice — still boyish after all these years — and his mandolin. Co-produced with his wife, the actress Claire Coffee, it’s his most directly personal work yet, and also his most potent reckoning with spirituality and Christianity.Specifically, Thile said, he was troubled by the question of what it means to build community in a world where our politics have grown so plainly defined by exclusion and parochialism. “I would say it’s centered around communion, and a yearning for it, and a mistrust of it,” he said, pausing his chipper cadence to search for the exact right words.“When we come together with people that we love, or with our fellow like-minded human beings, we also then immediately start demonizing non-like-minded human beings,” he said. The album is an attempt “to push back against that element of exclusion that comes with building community,” whether in church or in politics, and against how “we then isolate ourselves with those people that we love.”At its center sits a three-part suite, “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which he wrote after revisiting the Christian writer and theologian C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters,” a satire that imagines a conversation between a demon and his nephew. Thile’s suite begins with a single mandolin string, repeatedly plucked, then gives way to two, then three. Finally it blossoms out into a rustling chord, which Thile attacks in frustrated swipes. Then he starts to vocalize: “Ha, ha, ha.”In the suite’s windy, self-scolding lyrics, Thile sends up the folly of certainty — wagging his own fear of death in his face, daring himself to wonder how deeply it has influenced his beliefs. Throughout the disc, you can hear his big questions hanging in the stillness of the old church’s once-sacred air.Thile said that with both his instrumental playing and his lyrics, he wants to communicate, but not push a worldview. “I want the gestures to be clear,” he said. “I want to give people clear, defined building blocks. And now you get to put them together.”“Here are some things that I’m thinking about,” he said. “What do you think about it?”NICKEL CREEK BEGAN in 1989, as the Nickel Creek Band, when Thile was 8 and his friends, the fiddler Sara Watkins and her brother, the guitarist Sean, were about the same age. (Thile’s father, Scott, played bass and was an official member in its early years.) All three children were wunderkinds, but Thile stood out for his chutzpah and ostentatious talent.He was already winning bluegrass competitions, playing the instrument with a remarkable precision and speed usually matched only by banjo pluckers and bluegrass guitarists. Playing the instrument of the genre’s inventor, Bill Monroe, he took it well past the role that Monroe and acolytes like Marty Stuart had established.The group’s first album, “Little Cowpoke,” released in 1993 when Thile was 12, barrels through old country-western repertoire and bluegrass picking; a few tracks have been bootlegged onto YouTube, but it’s now a collector’s item. So is the follow-up, “Here to There,” released in 1997, which softened up on the traditionalism and leaned toward gentler songs about Christian faith and devotion.Like Thile, the Watkins siblings had grown up in a fundamentalist household, and in their telling, the security of their faith was part of their bond. But as they traveled the world, they encountered a wider range of humanity, and their thinking adjusted. Thile said he felt the effects in his music immediately.“The further away from fundamentalist Christianity I got, the further away from athleticizing the act of music-making I got,” he said. “For a long time there was a real desire to be ‘the best,’ whatever that means. And falling away from the idea that there was a hard-and-fast ‘right way’ just blew the doors off my concept of music-making.”Both the Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek remain active, and in recent months Thile took separate retreats with each to work on projects that should soon lead to new albums.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesThe group’s music began to reflect new lines of questioning, particularly the songs written by Thile. On “Doubting Thomas,” from Nickel Creek’s 2004 album, “Why Should the Fire Die?,” he reckons with religion through mortality. “What will be left when I’ve drawn my last breath/Besides the folks I’ve met and the folks who know me?” he sings. “Will I discover a soul-saving love/Or just the dirt above and below me?”In the mid-2000s, after more than a decade of often-constant touring, Nickel Creek went on a long hiatus. All three of the band’s members fanned out to work on independent projects and engage new collaborators, but Thile’s pace stood out, Sara Watkins said in an interview. She marveled at his “stamina for musical development, his stamina for the pursuit of what he’s going after.”“He has an insatiable appetite creatively,” she said.Thile buried himself in the Punch Brothers, a group that he’d pulled together with the goal of executing a complex, four-movement suite, “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” that he wrote in a daze as he processed the dissolution of his first marriage. It wound up setting a new standard in progressive bluegrass.The five-piece band — a wrecking crew of young talent in traditional formation: mandolin, banjo, fiddle, guitar and bass — could nimbly handle Thile’s jump cuts between sections and his layering of harmonic modes. “It was like all of a sudden getting the keys to a Lamborghini, or a spaceship,” the banjoist Noam Pikelny said in a phone interview. “You want to take the turns as fast as possible. You want to do what you could never do before, now that you have the brain power and the instrumental prowess.”If Nickel Creek’s sometimes-fatal flaw was its completely unconstrained willingness to give you what felt good, the Punch Brothers’ was its disregard for that, in favor of whatever had the most ideas packed into it.But as that band has grown more comfortable, its arrangements have grown airier, less abstruse, and Thile has learned to admit more of his bandmates’ contributions. Pikelny said that receptivity to others’ ideas had become one of Thile’s big strengths. “Even if the initial seed wasn’t something that he thought of, seemingly in just a moment, he internalizes this thing and a whole puzzle appears in his mind of how he could put this together,” Pikelny said.“I would love to think that — fool us once — we’re not going to take being able to listen to one another for granted ever again.”Leah Nash for The New York TimesBoth the Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek remain active, and in recent months Thile took separate retreats with each to work on projects that should soon lead to new LPs. The Punch Brothers rehearsed and ultimately recorded an album of material by the guitar luminary Tony Rice, who died just weeks later.With Nickel Creek, which has not released an album in seven years, the band members brought their families with them for a full retreat in Santa Barbara, Calif., and took their time. They got as far as writing a handful of songs, a process they have always closely shared, and will find time to record them sometime soon, as life allows.“Every time we go away from a Nickel Creek tour, we live lives, dig into our other projects that challenge us in different ways, and then when we come back these are things we can add,” Watkins said. “These songs can kind of be born out of that reconnection.” More

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      Taiwan Was a Covid Haven for Performers. Then Cases Flared.

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      One of the few places where performances continued steadily for much of the pandemic has had to shut down theaters just as they are reopening elsewhere.TAIPEI, Taiwan — For much of the past year, Taiwan has been a sanctuary for performing artists, the rare almost-Covid-free place where audiences could cram into concert halls to hear live music and sip coffee together at intermission.The island played host to modern dance festivals, full-fledged productions of “La Traviata” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and a recital of Bach’s cello suites by Yo-Yo Ma, which was attended by more than 4,000 people.But a recent surge in cases — Taiwan’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic — has brought a halt to cultural life on the island, forcing performing arts centers, concert halls and museums to shutter just as they are coming back to life in the rest of the world.Performers from Taiwan and abroad have been caught in the middle, grappling with lost income and an avalanche of canceled engagements.“Everything blew up,” said the American clarinetist Charles Neidich, who recently made the 7,781-mile trip from New York to Taipei only to have his first live performance in more than 400 days canceled.Neidich, who had been engaged to play a clarinet concerto by the American composer John Corigliano with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, endured two weeks of hotel quarantine, one of the strict measures that had helped Taiwan tame the virus. Then Taipei went into a state of semi-lockdown last week, so he packed up and went home.“This is my non-adventure,” he said.The outbreak, coming as the government’s vaccination program has gotten off to a slow start, is forcing Taipei to shut down just as other cities around the world are finally reopening. In London, the theaters of the West End brought up their curtains last week. Officials in New York announced that Radio City Music Hall would soon allow full capacity, maskless crowds back inside, as long as they have been vaccinated.The American clarinetist Charles Neidich flew from New York to Taipei to give his first live performance in more than a year, but the concert was canceled.I-Hwa Cheng for The New York TimesTaiwan’s experience is a reminder of the ongoing uncertainty of life in the pandemic, the threat posed by the virus and its power to upset even the most carefully crafted of plans. Semi-staged performances of Verdi’s “Falstaff” have been called off. The French musical “Notre Dame de Paris” has been postponed.Even though the number of cases in Taiwan is low compared with many parts of the world — 283 cases were reported on Tuesday, fewer than in New York City — the authorities are doubling down on restrictions, hoping that lockdowns can bring the virus under control within weeks or months as Taiwan tries to speed its lumbering vaccine rollout.Artists are optimistic that concerts, dances, plays and museum exhibitions will soon return.“This is a place used to earthquakes and typhoons,” said Lin Hwai-min, the founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theater, a contemporary dance troupe, which has delayed performances until later in the summer. “The crisis comes, you deal with it and you come back to restore everything.”Over the past year Cloud Gate has suffered financially from the cancellations of its planned tours to the United States and Europe. But with infections near zero in Taiwan and residents hungry for entertainment, the company has offset those losses with strong demand at home, premiering new works before sold-out crowds.“It used to be so surreal that we could perform,” Lin said. “Now for the first time we are confronting the reality of the virus, like our peers in Western countries.”Taiwan’s closing of its borders early in the pandemic and its strict public health measures, including mask mandates and extensive contact tracing, turned the island of 23.5 million into a coronavirus success story. But the emergence of more contagious variants in recent months, a relaxation of quarantine rules and a vaccine shortage gave the virus an opening.Before that, the lack of widespread transmission in Taiwan made it easier for performance venues to operate near full capacity. And theaters and concert halls enforced tough public health measures that have been adjusted depending on the number of confirmed cases.At many venues, attendees were required to provide their names and phone numbers to be used for tracing in case of an outbreak. Masks and temperature checks were required. Some concert halls barred the selling of food and drinks. Seats at some spaces were staggered to resemble flowers, in an arrangement that came to be known in Taiwan as “plum blossom seating.”Despite the vigilance, there were occasional scares. More than a hundred people were forced to quarantine in March of last year after coming into contact with the Australian composer Brett Dean, who tested positive for the virus after performing in Taiwan. The incident was front-page news in Taiwan, with some people fuming that Dean — whose “Hamlet” is scheduled at the Metropolitan Opera in New York next season — had been allowed to perform even though he had a cough.Lydia Kuo, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, which collaborated with Dean, said the scare taught the orchestra the importance of maintaining strict health measures even when infections were near zero.“We were facing an unknown enemy,” she said. “We were lucky to face this reality very early.”Taiwan’s still-active cultural scene attracted talent from around the world over the past year when many artists were without stable work and confined at home. There were visits by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the German organist Felix Hell, and Ma, the renowned cellist, who chartered a flight to the island for a tour in November.Many musicians with roots in Taiwan have also returned, some for an extended visit. Ray Chen, a violinist, came back in August at the urging of his family and has taken part in about 20 live concerts, master classes and music education outreach events since then. He said he was struck by the care people showed toward one another and the widespread adherence to public health rules, even when Taiwan went months without any reported infections.“Everyone is willing to play a part,” Chen said. “Everyone values life.”Taiwan’s strict approach has not been popular in all corners of the artistic world. After the outbreak this month, some artists questioned the government’s decision to close performance venues, concerned that it would hurt performers’ income.Lang Tsu-yun, a Taiwanese actress who leads a theater troupe, provoked controversy when she suggested, in a sharply worded Facebook post, that the restrictions would be devastating to arts groups.“Do you know how long we rehearse?” Lang wrote. “Do you know how many of us are working hard?” (After coming under criticism for her comments, Lang deleted the post and apologized.)A masked crowd at a performance at the National Concert Hall in Taipei in November, when low numbers of coronavirus cases allowed for a virtually normal cultural life.Ann Wang/ReutersThe government has provided tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to arts groups during the pandemic, but some performers say the grants have not been enough to offset losses. Officials say restrictions on large gatherings are necessary to curb the rising rate of infections.But for visiting performers caught in the middle of the latest surge, the experience has been frustrating.The violinist Cho-Liang Lin was excited to arrive in Taiwan last month, his third trip to the island since the start of the pandemic. After livestreaming for months and playing in empty halls in the United States, where he lives, he had come to relish the energy of live performances in Taiwan, where he was born, despite the mandatory quarantine.Then this month, Lin’s concert with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, with which he was going to perform Korngold’s Violin Concerto, was canceled two hours after his first rehearsal. He was also forced to cancel a summer festival for young musicians that he leads in Taipei. He was devastated, going out with friends to drink Scotch.“All that work and waiting around went for nothing,” said Lin, who returned home to Houston last week. “I can’t help but notice the irony here. The model citizen of the world now has become a bit of a problem child.”Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting. More

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      ‘The Off-Season’ Is J. Cole’s Sixth Straight No. 1 Album

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      The rapper’s latest LP opens with the year’s biggest streaming total, and Olivia Rodrigo, projected to top the album chart next week, has the No. 1 song.Two big new hits top the Billboard charts this week: J. Cole’s “The Off-Season” is the No. 1 album, with the year’s most robust streaming number so far, while Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” is the top single.“The Off-Season” had the equivalent of 282,000 sales in the United States last week, according to MRC Data. That is the second-best opening of the year, after Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” which had 291,000 a month ago. But “The Off-Season” — a nod to Cole’s second career as a basketball player with the Rwanda-based Patriots, part of the new Basketball Africa League —  had by far the biggest streaming number of the year, with 325 million clicks. That beat the 240 million opening for Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” in January, and was the highest for any album since Juice WRLD’s posthumous “Legends Never Die,” which had 423 million in July 2020.In addition to its streams, “The Off-Season” sold 37,000 copies as a complete package. It is J. Cole’s sixth studio album, each of which has gone to No. 1.Also this week, a reissue of Nicki Minaj’s 12-year-old mixtape “Beam Me Up Scotty” — she has not released a new album in three years — opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 80,000 sales, including 86 million streams.Moneybagg Yo’s “A Gangsta’s Pain,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 3, and Wallen’s “Dangerous” is No. 4. Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” is No. 5. The Black Keys’ new “Delta Kream” opens at No. 6.Rodrigo’s song “Good 4 U” reaches the top of the singles chart just as her debut album, “Sour,” looks like a safe bet for the peak position on next week’s chart. Her debut single, “Drivers License,” held No. 1 for eight weeks earlier this year. More

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      Roger Hawkins, Drummer Heard on Numerous Hits, Is Dead at 75

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      An innately soulful musician, he recorded with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and many others and was an architect of what became known as the Muscle Shoals sound.Roger Hawkins in performance in 1973. He was member of the band Traffic at the time, but he was best known as a studio musician.Brian Cooke/RedfernsRoger Hawkins, who played drums on numerous pop and soul hits of the 1960s and ’70s and was among the architects of the funky sound that became identified with Muscle Shoals, Ala., died on Thursday at his home in Sheffield, Ala. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his friend and frequent musical collaborator David Hood, who said Mr. Hawkins had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other conditions.An innately soulful musician, Mr. Hawkins initially distinguished himself in the mid-’60s as a member of the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. (The initials stand for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises.) His colleagues were the keyboardist Barry Beckett, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and Mr. Hood, who played bass. Mr. Hood is the last surviving member of that rhythm section.Mr. Hawkins’s less-is-more approach to drumming at FAME — often little more than a cymbal and a snare — can be heard on Percy Sledge’s gospel-steeped “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop single in 1966. He was also a driving force behind Aretha Franklin’s imperious “Respect,” a No. 1 pop hit the next year, as well as her Top 10 singles “Chain of Fools” (1967) and “Think” (1968).Mr. Hawkins was a driving force behind some of Aretha Franklin’s biggest hits. Seen here with Ms. Franklin in a New York studio in 1968 are, from left, the producer Arif Mardin, the guitarist Tommy Cogbill, Mr. Hawkins, the bassist Jerry Jemmott, the keyboardist Spooner Oldham, the guitarist Jimmy Johnson and the producer and arranger Tom Dowd.The Estate of David Gahr/Getty ImagesRemarkably, none of the four members of the FAME rhythm section could read music. They extemporized their parts in response to what was happening in the studio.“Nobody really suggested anything to play; we would interpret it,” Mr. Hawkins said in a 2017 interview with Modern Drummer magazine. “Now that I look back at what we did, in addition to being musicians, we were really arrangers as well. It was up to us to come up with the part.”In his 2015 memoir, “The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey From Shame to FAME,” Mr. Hall attributed the transformation of the middle section of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances,” a Top 10 hit recorded at FAME in 1966, to the genius of Mr. Hawkins.“All the musicians stopped playing except Roger Hawkins, who continued to play with every ounce of strength he had in his body,” Mr. Hall recalled. “I poured the echo into the drums and Pickett started screaming, ‘Nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah.’”From left, Mr. Johnson, Wilson Pickett, Mr. Oldham, Mr. Hawkins and Junior Lowe at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., in 1966.FAME StudiosMr. Hawkins said that a principal influence on his playing was Al Jackson Jr., the drummer with Booker T. & the MGs, the rhythm section at Stax Records. “Through listening to Al Jackson is how I learned to build a drum part in a soul ballad,” he said in a 2019 interview with Alabama magazine.In 1969 Mr. Hawkins and the other members of the FAME rhythm section parted ways with Mr. Hall over a financial dispute. They soon opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield.Renaming themselves the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men appeared on many other hits over the next decade, including the Staple Singers’ chart-topping pop-gospel single “I’ll Take You There,” a 1972 recording galvanized by Mr. Hawkins’s skittering Caribbean-style drum figure. They also appeared, along with the gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, on Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock,” a Top 10 single in 1973.Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Hood worked briefly with the British rock band Traffic as well; they are on the band’s 1973 album, “Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.”Mr. Hawkins and his colleagues became known as the Swampers after the producer Denny Cordell heard the pianist Leon Russell commend them for their “funky, soulful Southern swamp sound.” The Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned them, by that name, in their 1974 pop hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”Mr. Hawkins also worked as a producer, often in tandem with Mr. Beckett, on records like “Starting All Over Again,” a Top 20 pop hit for the R&B duo Mel and Tim in 1972. The entire rhythm section produced (with Mr. Seger) and played on Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” a Top 40 hit perennially cited as among the most played jukebox records of all time.Roger Gail Hawkins was born on Oct. 16, 1945, in Mishawaka, Ind., but was raised in Greenhill, Ala. He was the only child of John Hawkins, who managed a shoe store there, and Merta Rose Haddock Hawkins, who worked in a nearby knitting mill.Roger became enamored of rhythm while attending services at a local Pentecostal church as a youth. His father bought him his first drum kit when he was 13.As an adolescent, he began spending time at FAME, then located above a drugstore in Muscle Shoals, before he joined the Del Rays, a local band, led by Mr. Johnson, that played fraternity parties and other dances. By 1966 he was doing session work at FAME.Early in his career Mr. Hawkins (top right with Mr. Oldham) played in the band Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, along with, from left, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Penn and Donnie Fritts.FAME StudiosHe and the other owners of Muscle Shoals Sound sold the studio in the 1990s. Mr. Hawkins stayed on as the studio’s manager under its new owners.Mr. Hawkins was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1995, along with the other members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Thirteen years later they were enshrined in the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville.He is survived by his wife of 19 years, Brenda Gay Hawkins; a son, Dale; and two grandchildren.Mr. Hawkins’s approach to session work often focused on those moments in a recording when he remained silent, waiting for just the right time and place to strike the next note.“Every musician strives to be the best they can,” he told Modern Drummer. “Not every musician gets the chances I had. Some new studio players have an attitude of ‘Man, I’ve got to play something great here — got to play the fast stuff to be hired again.’“That’s not the way to go,” he continued. “I’ve always said this: I was always a better listener than I was a drummer. I would advise any drummer to become a listener.” More

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      Review: Olivia Rodrigo's 'Sour' Album Is a Critic's Pick

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      On her excellent debut album, “Sour,” the 18-year-old singer and actress expresses just how challenging it is to arrive at who you are.For the last few months, Olivia Rodrigo has been chiseling out a story about young love turned sour. Between the undulating ballad “Drivers License” — her huge debut single, which opened at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for eight weeks — and the wistfully aggrieved (and perhaps even better) “Deja Vu,” she’s nailed the agony of collapse, and the anxiety of watching your old partner rebuild. It’s a phenomenon as awful as it is familiar.Like those songs, “Enough for You” — from her nuanced and often exceptional debut album, “Sour” — seems like it’s about the contest between the narrator and the woman who replaced her in her ex’s eyes and arms. But really it’s about a different sort of competition: the one between the versions of the self we cycle through, depending on who’s around.Rodrigo starts off with a rearview confession: “I wore makeup when we dated ’cause I thought you’d like me more/if I looked like the other prom queens I know that you loved before.” From there, the song plays like an elegy for a persona that no longer fits, Rodrigo singing with a quaver over a steady but reluctant acoustic guitar. “I don’t want your sympathy,” she concludes. “I just want myself back.”On “Sour,” which deploys sweet pop and tart punk equally well, Rodrigo’s real study is of the unsteady self, the way in which people — young people, especially, but by no means exclusively — contort themselves into the shapes laid out before them. It is about the wages of being clay, not the mold.For Rodrigo, 18, who’s been playing alternate versions of herself in public at least as far back as the first season of the Disney Channel’s “Bizaardvark,” in 2016, it is a natural subject. She is an optimal pop star for the era of personalities, subpersonalities and metapersonalities; of finstas and spams; of trying on new identities and discarding as you go. “Sour” is an album about accepting alternate endings, and embracing who you become when you have to hot swap one idea about yourself for another all while keeping up a smile, or a career, or several.Rodrigo has had to do all of this under an unusually sudden and intense spotlight. Even though she’s been a Disney mainstay for years, most recently as Nini Salazar-Roberts, the coming-into-herself female lead on “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” the success of “Drivers License” has occasioned exponential growth, and a juggling of Rodrigo’s many selves. In addition to the true and immutable inner personality, there is Rodrigo the musical performer, and Rodrigo the public spectacle, a subject of increasing tabloid interest. Then there is Rodrigo as Nini, and Rodrigo as Nini as Gabriella (the “High School Musical” character she plays in the musical within the show). Each of these has a distinct narrative. Each comprises a part of how Rodrigo navigates — and is seen by — the world.This is now the stuff of everyone, though — on social media, teenagers often have multiple accounts, playing different versions of themselves for different sets of people. To constantly modulate one’s identity is the norm; the idea of the fully-centered and fixed self might be done for good.On “Sour,” Rodrigo is working through this evolution in real time. On “Drivers License,” she’s still unsteady about who she might become. “Today I drove through the suburbs/and pictured I was driving home to you,” she sings, not quite able to let go. On “Deja Vu” — and especially in its video, which features Rodrigo spying on her doppelgänger replacement — Rodrigo is frantic with stress about how her ex’s new relationship parallels their own: “When you gonna tell her that we did that too?” And by the end of the song, she begins to succumb to the idea that perhaps her experience wasn’t so original to begin with: “I hate to think that I was just your type.”Her paramours are playing these sorts of games, too. “Which lover will I get today?/Will you walk me to the door or send me home crying?” she sighs over the dampened piano of “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back.” And it’s on “Drivers License” where that realization fully crystallizes: “Guess you didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me,” she gasps. There are few colder jolts than learning someone you loved was simply playing a role.Rodrigo’s juggle is also embedded in her musical choices on “Sour,” which is written almost wholly by Rodrigo and produced almost wholly by Dan Nigro, formerly of the band As Tall as Lions (who also contributed songwriting). She plants a flag for the divided self right at the top of the album, on the spectacular “Brutal,” which begins with a few seconds of sober strings before she declares, “I want it to be, like, messy,” which it then becomes. That tug of war persists throughout the album: more polished songs like the singles and the rousing, Paramore-esque “Good 4 U” jostling with rawer ones like “Enough for You” and “Jealousy, Jealousy.”“Traitor,” one of the album’s highlights, is a stark song masquerading as a bombastic one. “I kept quiet so I could keep you,” Rodrigo confesses, before arriving at an elegant way of understanding, if not quite accepting, how someone who loved you has moved on: “Guess you didn’t cheat/but you’re still a traitor.”That songwriting flourish is emblematic of what Rodrigo has learned from Taylor Swift on this album (which, in shorthand, is Swift’s debut refracted through “Red”): nailing the precise language for an imprecise, complex emotional situation; and working through private stories in public fashion. There is residue of Swift throughout “Sour” — whether the way that “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” interpolates “New Year’s Day,” or the “Cruel Summer”-esque chants on “Deja Vu.”But really, Swift persists in the lens, which is relentlessly internal — Rodrigo only breaks out of it in a couple of places on the album, like on “Jealousy, Jealousy,” where she pulls back to assess the self-image damage that social media inflicts (“I wanna be you so bad, and I don’t even know you/All I see is what I should be”) and on the final track, “Hope Ur OK,” a melancholy turn that’s thoughtfully compassionate, but thematically out of step with the rest of the album.On the first season of “HSMTMTS,” Rodrigo had a safe platform to play out her creative development as Nini. (Nini’s lament “All I Want” could have been a trial balloon for a solo Rodrigo career.) At the end of those episodes, which aired in late 2019 and early 2020, Nini aced the role in the school musical and finally settled into a relationship with her longtime friend Ricky (Joshua Bassett). (Rodrigo’s early singles were dissected for signs pointing to her rumored real-life relationship with Bassett, another conflation of selves.)“HSMTMTS,” which is partly framed as a mockumentary, is a charmingly winking exploration of teenage metamorphosis. Like “Hannah Montana” before it, it is knowing about the ways in which teenagers are constantly improvising, both for better and worse. But during the prime Disney Channel era, the “Hannah Montana” star Miley Cyrus had far less direct access to her fan base, and therefore far less of a public self than Rodrigo, who has been able to commune directly on TikTok and Instagram.That’s meant that Rodrigo’s public and performing life are beginning to outpace her old television life. (Also, Rodrigo curses on her songs, speeding up the Disney molting process.) Last season, when Nini was struggling with confidence, her best friend Kourtney (Dara Renee) told her, “Ever since you discovered boys, you’ve spent way too much time trying to see yourself through their eyes.” But Rodrigo herself is balancing several lives at once now — new celebrity, new pop superstar, holdover child actress, and more. And “Sour” is the first step toward insisting that the gaze that matters most is the one in the mirror, no matter who else is looking.Olivia Rodrigo“Sour”(Geffen) More

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      Beethoven Is More Intimate Than Ever in New Poems

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      Ruth Padel tells the great composer’s life story, more profoundly than most biographies, in “Beethoven Variations.”Though much is known about Beethoven, whole swaths of his life remain elusive. His deafness, for one thing. He started experiencing hearing loss before he was 30. But how extensive was the initial problem? How quickly did it worsen? It’s not clear.His most revealing words on the subject come in a letter he wrote (though never sent) to his brothers in 1802, while seeking isolation and resting his ears in Heiligenstadt, on the outskirts of Vienna. In the Heiligenstadt Testament, as it became known, his fear comes through poignantly. But what did it feel like to go deaf? What sensations did he experience? What did music sound like to him?The British poet Ruth Padel tries to fathom this mystery, and other long-mythologized strands of the composer’s life story, in “Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life,” recently published in the United States. Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.Padel’s imagery and imagination took our critic deeper into Beethoven than many biographies he had read.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesIn one of the first poems, “On Not Needing Other People,” Padel describes the 13-year-old Beethoven visiting the Breunings, a rich, cultured family that befriended him. Most books on the composer present this episode as an opportunity for the young Beethoven to enjoy some familial companionship — one of the sons became a lifelong friend — and develop career skills by teaching piano to some of the children.But Padel dwells on how different, how apart, Beethoven must have felt, even while savoring the family’s attention. The mother told her children to let their young visitor alone when he slipped into, as Padel puts it, “the solitude she calls raptus” and displayed his “surly way of shouldering people off,” his “fits of reverie, lost/in a re-tuning of the spheres.” As Padel perceives it, Beethoven early on drifted into states that prefigured how deafness would increasingly isolate him:This boy has no idea that before he’s thirtysome inflamed wet muddle of labyrinth and cochlea,thin as a cicada wing, will clog his earswith a whistling buzz, then glue them into silence.In “Moonlight Sonata,” Padel, in an imaginative leap, describes that famous piano work as music of loss — not just of love, but of hearing: “Bass clef/High treble only once/and in despair.” For Beethoven, she continues, this is the new “shocked calm of Is it true.” Is this “what it sounds like, going deaf?”In a poem about Beethoven’s five-month stay in Heiligenstadt, Padel recounts her own visit there — with views of the Danube canal and vineyards in bud — as she follows his steps into a cobbled yard: “God invents curious/torture for his favourites. He’s thirty-one./Fate has swung a wrecking ball.” Beethoven has walked into a place “of zero sum,” she writes, where “he must cast himself as victim or as hero.”Though he “cannot hear the driving rain,” he is sketching a funeral march — a symphony — taking him down a new path. In “Eroica” Padel arrestingly describes that path:You are havoc on the brink, a jackhammershattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow.Against everything that can happento you or anyone, you pitch experimentand the next new key, ever more remote.Most traditional biographers are reticent about guessing how Beethoven’s deafness affected his composing. Padel, though, suggests — daringly but compellingly — that Beethoven’s isolating deafness contributed to his greatness. “What we forget,” she writes, “makes us who we are” — perhaps for Beethoven that eventually included the actual sound of music. Describing what she felt as she examined the manuscript of the late Op. 131 String Quartet, Padel asks, “Does being deaf break the chains?”“Could he,” she writes, “have written this otherwise?”Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly, as in her acute phrases on the sublime slow movement of the Op. 132 String Quartet: “Cloud iridescence”; “Wave-shadow like mourning ribbon”; “Quiet as a wreath of sleep/for anyone in sorrow.”A writer and teacher, Padel has also explored ancient Greek culture, the contemporary issues of refugees and homelessness, and science. (Darwin was her great-great-grandfather, and her book “Darwin: A Life in Poems” was published in 2009.) The Beethoven poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble; she played the viola.This Beethoven book is not her first poetic biography. “Darwin: A Life in Poems,” about her great-great-grandfather, was published in 2009.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesThe book originated through her work over the past decade with the Endellion String Quartet, to whom it is dedicated. Padel first worked with the Endellion on performances of pieces by Haydn and Schubert, in which she wrote poems and read them between the movements. Asked to collaborate on a Beethoven program that included the Op. 131 Quartet, she wrote seven poems to be interspersed between that visionary work’s seven movements. As the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, in 2020, approached, she went further and wrote what is, in effect, a poetic biography.Naturally, some of the poems will speak more immediately to those with knowledge of the events and characters of Beethoven’s life. So Padel helpfully includes “Life-Notes: A Coda,” some 30 pages of short biographical bits linked to the four sections of poems (49 in all). Even these entries have poetic elegance. Explaining that Beethoven’s alcoholic, abusive father put his young son to work playing viola, she explains why the instrument appealed to her, and may have suited Beethoven: “It does not have the brilliance of the violin or power of the cello, but when playing it you hear everything going on around you, all the relationships and harmonies, from inside. It is a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Padel’s viola. Beethoven also played that instrument, which Padel describes as “a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesVisiting the house in Bonn, Germany, in which Beethoven was born, Padel imagines “your mother/carrying the shopping,” “your father staggering home drunk/up these stairs” to “wake you in the middle of the night.” In “Meeting Mozart,” she describes the 16-year-old Beethoven after a three-week winter journey to Vienna, “burning” to be taught by the master.Many biographers struggle to deal with this meeting between two of the titans of music history. Padel puts herself in the mind of the young Beethoven, to whom Mozart “looks like a fat little bird./Bug eyes, fidgety,/tapping his toes.” Beethoven’s performance of a Mozart sonata fails to impress its composer, who suddenly urges Beethoven to improvise.“And at last he’s caught,” Padel writes. It’s a thrilling moment in her telling.Then the news comes that his adored mother is gravely ill and Beethoven is “snatched away”:She waits till you returnto drown in the coughed-up dregsof her own lungs.There are poems about Beethoven’s hapless infatuations for unattainable women from the upper ranks of Viennese society; about his sexual activities (“Brothels? Probably. Everyone did.”); and, especially, about his long, contorted legal battle to gain custody of his young nephew Karl from his widowed sister-in-law. His obsession with being a substitute father causes a long dry spell in his composing:You’re not working. You’re a mountain kingwaylaid in your own black corridors.The final poem, “Musica Humana,” begins with a description of a postmortem examination of Beethoven’s inner ears, the auditory canal “covered in glutinous scales/shining throughout the autopsy.” Other biographies report on this, but not with such gruesomely poetic imagery. And “how he died,” Padel marvels, “lifting his fist/as if it held a bird he would release into the storm.”I thought back to an early poem about Beethoven’s bullying father:your response to challenge ever after will be attack.You will need no one. Only the relationshipof sound and key. You improvise. More