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      Untitled (The Playlist)

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      Hear songs with no firm names from the Cure, D’Angelo, Kate Bollinger and more.Robert Smith of the Cure.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,Today, Jack White released a new solo album named “No Name,” joining the ranks of the many artists throughout history who have finished a piece of music and, confronted with the challenge of giving it an all-encompassing title, simply shrugged and said, “I’d rather not.” Elliott Smith, for example, had a whole numbered series of “No Name” songs, while the Breeders called their 2002 album “Title TK,” publishing shorthand for “to come later.” The rapper Noname has confused things further, cheekily titling a recent song “Namesake.” The mind boggles.But when it comes to music without a name, one particular title has been used more often than any other: “Untitled.” And so we have arrived at the theme of today’s playlist, filled entirely with untitled tracks.“Untitled,” that neutrally toned cop-out of a name, has been used by all kinds of artists past and present, Interpol, R.E.M. and Mk.gee among them. To call a song “Untitled” can be either pretentious or practical, depending on the ear of the beholder. Sometimes, as on Kendrick Lamar’s demo collection “Untitled Unmastered,” it’s used to suggest that there is a certain rough, unpolished quality to the material. Other times, as illustrated here in songs by Kate Bollinger and the Cure, a lack of a title echoes a narrator’s struggle to communicate the right sentiment. Every so often, it’s all a bit of a lark. Consider the playful wink that D’Angelo gave this whole phenomenon when he titled what is perhaps his most famous song, “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”What’s in a name? These nine songs just might make you wonder. For all their differences, though, they share an understanding that an untitled song lets the music speak for itself.Never quite said what I wanted to say to you,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hear Billie Eilish and Charli XCX’s ‘Guess’ Remix

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      Hear tracks by MJ Lenderman, Miranda Lambert, ASAP Rocky featuring Jessica Pratt and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish, ‘Guess’In the slightly less than two months since its release, Charli XCX’s sixth album, “Brat,” has transformed from a clubby cult classic into a mainstream phenomenon, fueled by a sense of cool so elusive yet galactically powerful that a CNN panel recently convened to discuss, with magnificent awkwardness, its potential impact on the presidential election. Strange times indeed. Luckily, Charli is still keeping it light, not allowing the new patina of Importance to cloud the fact that “Brat Summer” is, above all things, about messy, hedonistic fun. So let’s just say that the latest “Brat”-era remix, the deliriously suggestive “Guess,” is unlikely to appear in an upcoming Kamala Harris campaign ad.“You wanna guess the color of my underwear,” Charli winks atop an electroclash beat produced by the indie-sleaze revivalist the Dare, who interpolates Daft Punk’s 2005 single “Technologic”; Dylan Brady of 100 gecs also has a writing credit. It’s an underground loft party crashed by a bona fide A-lister: Billie Eilish, making her first guest appearance on another artist’s song, purring a playfully flirtatious verse that ends, “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it.” It’s refreshing to once again hear Eilish on a beat as dark and abrasive as those on her debut album, but she and her brother and collaborator Finneas know they are ultimately on Charli’s turf, reverently endorsing the trashy aesthetic and if-you-know-you-know humor of “Brat.” “You wanna guess if we’re serious about this song,” Charli intones at the end, as Eilish lets out a conspiratorial giggle. Against all odds, reports of Brat Summer’s death seem to have been slightly exaggerated. LINDSAY ZOLADZOkaidja Afroso, ‘Kasoa’Okaidja Afroso, from Ghana, sings about cycles of nature and human life in his childhood language, Gãdangmé, on his new album, “Àbòr Édiń.” But his music exults in modern technology and cultural fusions. The six-beat handclaps and bass riffs of “Kasoa” look toward Moroccan gnawa music, while the vocal harmonies exult in computerized multitracking. “There will be meetings and partings, and joys and sorrows,” he sings. “May we journey with ease, and hope to cross paths again in another lifetime.” JON PARELESWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 97, This Conductor Is Modest and Extraordinary

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      When Herbert Blomstedt, the oldest major conductor active today, led the Vienna Philharmonic, age was only one factor in his remarkable artistry.If you’ve been reading news about the U.S. presidential election, you might be forgiven for thinking that age has something to do with ability.But it doesn’t work that way in classical music, a field in which artists often go on as long as they can. Conductors tend to retire only when they decide it’s time. And Herbert Blomstedt, who recently turned 97, clearly doesn’t want to just yet.The oldest major conductor still keeping a regular performance schedule, he was forced to take a break after a fall in December, but was back onstage by the spring and, this week, conducted the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Hardly pushed aside because of his age, he was at the podium of one of the world’s greatest orchestras, at one of classical music’s most prestigious events.Blomstedt has garnered a lot of attention for his longevity and vitality, but that is just one aspect of what makes him a remarkable conductor. As the critic Alex Ross wrote when Blomstedt was 94, equating age with wisdom is a dubious belief, and what he enjoys now is “a belated reward for a resolutely unshowy musician who has gone about his business decade after decade.”Even Blomstedt doesn’t spend too much time making sense of his age in interviews. He values routine, and cooks for himself when he’s not on the road. And he has mentioned that, as a Seventh-day Adventist, he doesn’t eat meat or drink alcohol or coffee; without missing a beat, though, he often adds that Winston Churchill made it to 90 liberally drinking and smoking cigars.Wisdom may not be a given with Blomstedt’s age, but it’s undeniable in his artistry. Perhaps because of physical limitations or personal preferences, or both, his conducting in recent years has had the kind of economy that comes with experience. (You can hear it, too, on the recordings he continues to release, with ensembles including the Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.) He is also a maestro with roots in musicology, who thrills at returning to scores; he has mentioned that it took 66 years to notice a detail in Schubert’s “Great” Symphony for the first time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Algumas Últimas Notas da ‘Voz de Deus’

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      Milton Nascimento, uma divindade musical no Brasil, colabora com a baixista, vocalista e produtora Esperanza Spalding em um álbum que contempla o efeito da idade sobre a arte.Em 1955, Milton Nascimento tinha 13 anos, estava aprendendo a cantar e, para sua tristeza, chegando à puberdade.“Quando eu comecei a ver que a minha voz estava engrossando, eu falei, ‘eu não quero cantar mais, não’”, lembrou Nascimento, uma das figuras musicais mais importantes do Brasil, em entrevista na semana passada. “Porque os homens não têm coração”.Ele disse que chorava quando um canto suave e expressivo entoou na rádio. Era Ray Charles, cantando “Stella by Starlight”. “Depois que eu ouvi isso, eu falei, agora dá para cantar’”.Nas seis décadas seguintes, floresceu uma das grandes vozes da música, uma força etérea que percorria oitavas com emoção e energia, deslizando perfeitamente entre um barítono aveludado e um falsete celestial.A voz singular de Nascimento e sua ascensão às notas mais altas ajudaram a influenciar uma geração de artistas. Em entrevista, Paul Simon descreveu sua voz como uma “mágica sedosa”. Philip Bailey, cantor da Earth, Wind & Fire, comparou-a com “uma bela praia brasileira”. Sting disse que havia “verdade na beleza” dela.No Brasil, onde a voz de Nascimento conduziu desde músicas introspectivas àquelas icônicas, a nação cunhou uma metáfora ainda mais grandiosa: “a voz de Deus”.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Dreamlike Collaboration From Milton Nascimento and Esperanza Spalding

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      Milton Nascimento, a musical deity in Brazil, collaborates with the bassist, vocalist and producer Esperanza Spalding on an album that contemplates age’s effect on art.In 1955, Milton Nascimento was 13, learning to sing and, devastatingly to him, hitting puberty.“When I began to see my voice deepening, I said, ‘I don’t want to sing anymore,’” Nascimento, one of Brazil’s most important musical figures, recalled last week in an interview. “Because men don’t have heart.”He was crying, he said, when a smooth, soulful croon came from the radio. It was Ray Charles singing “Stella by Starlight.” “After I heard that, I said, ‘Now I can sing.’”Over the next six decades blossomed one of music’s great voices, an ethereal force that spanned octaves with emotion and verve, gliding seamlessly between a velvety baritone and a celestial falsetto.Nascimento’s unique sound and ascent to the highest notes helped influence a generation of artists. In an interview, Paul Simon called his voice “silky magic.” Philip Bailey, a singer in Earth, Wind & Fire, compared it to “a beautiful Brazilian beach.” Sting described it as “truth in beauty.”In Brazil, where Nascimento’s voice led singalong anthems and emotional ballads, the nation settled upon an even grander metaphor: “the voice of God.”Nascimento has long been one of the biggest acts in Brazil, while also influencing musicians around the world.Larissa Zaidan for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Gets the Museum Treatment

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      Costumes and memorabilia from the pop star’s personal archive are now on display at the V&A museum in London.“Disappointed Love,” painted in 1821 by the Irish artist Francis Danby, is a scene of eternal teenage wistfulness, its visual codes as readable now as they were back then. A young girl sits by a river, tearful and heartbroken, her head in her hands, her white dress pooling around her legs. In the water, pages of a torn letter float among the waterlilies. By her side are props of femininity: a straw bonnet, a bright red shawl and a miniature portrait of the man who wronged her.The work hangs in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in a red-walled gallery tightly packed with Georgian and Victorian paintings. As of recently, Danby’s weeping beauty has a new neighbor: a ruffled cream Zimmerman dress worn by Taylor Swift in the music video for “Willow,” from her 2020 album “Evermore.”The gown is one of more than a dozen items from Ms. Swift’s personal archive featured in installations across the V&A galleries. Danby’s painting is “so her vibe,” the curator Kate Bailey said of Ms. Swift, gesturing to the lovesick girl and her assortment of trinkets — “the dress, the scarf.”It was not yet noon on a muggy July day in London, and yet Ms. Bailey, a senior curator in the V&A theater and performance department, had already clocked more than 8,000 steps on her iPhone pedometer as she rushed about the museum overseeing the Taylor Swift installation. The V&A galleries, spread across multiple floors, stretch seven miles. (The exhibition, “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” will be open to the public through Sept. 8.)“Whose idea was it to put a trail around the whole museum?” Ms. Bailey asked as she arrived, cheerful and panting, in the gilded Norfolk House Music Room. The V&A acquired the room in 1938, when Norfolk House was demolished, and reassembled it in its entirety, panel by panel, in 2000.Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” blasted from speakers, and her iridescent tulle ball gown, worn on the back cover of the album, was encased on a mannequin in a vitrine in the center of the room, like a ballerina in a giant music box.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead

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      A good musician’s relationship with the past is tricky. You want to move forward without entirely forsaking what you’ve already done. You don’t want it defining you when so much future defining lies ahead. It’s a dilemma Meshell Ndegeocello was thinking through at her dining room table in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, on a recent afternoon.Ndegeocello happens to be much more than merely a good musician. She’s been playing professionally since the early 1990s and, at 55, is about to release her 14th album, a collection of songs that excites her. The past — the repertoire, the old stuff, the hits — can start to feel like “karaoke of myself,” she said, even if that’s never what it’s been like for us folks in the audience. Take her performances earlier this year at the Blue Note, the essential Greenwich Village jazz club.Over the course of a month, she and the six assiduous, deliriously skilled musicians in her band turned a rush-hour subway car of a venue into their hearth. To fuel these shows, Ndegeocello could have reached into three decades of her own music, an eclectic body of work whose spine is funk — she’s all but synonymous with the bass — and guided by her insinuating baritone. Yet on one January night, her ensemble’s layered mantras and lacquered grooves were the fruit of a long-gestating project built around the existential straits of being Black in America that now comprise this new album, “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.”“No one does anything alone,” she said. “There are artists like Prince and Stevie Wonder who can do that all themselves. I just like band experience.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesThe room swayed and rhythmically nodded as rapt, reverent congregants. More than halfway through: a change-up. A jewel from the Ndegeocello trove, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” off her 31-year-old debut album, “Plantation Lullabies.” The song had essentially been reconsidered, infused with the solemnity and rumination befitting the rest of the set. But the women at the table inches behind mine flipped out with the gratitude of recognition. They were at a party and had run into an old friend who kicked things up a notch. (“It’s her birthday!” one of the women exclaimed to me, about her pal.)That moment at the Blue Note came back to me watching Ndegeocello and her band rehearse one afternoon last month at her studio in Long Island City, in Queens. They were getting ready for an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Ndegeocello had planned to stock it with selections from “No More Water,” which arrives on Friday. (Its release coincides with Baldwin’s centennial.) Running through the set list, she mentioned “Outside Your Door,” a quiet-storm slow burn from “Plantation Lullabies” that a casual Ndegeocellist might be expecting. Then she reconsidered, wary of NPR’s request that she perform a hit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More