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      Alex Izenberg Was Almost a Teen Rock Star. His Second Chance Is Here.

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      On his 12th birthday, in April 2003, Alex Izenberg went to Guitar Center to jam.He was the prankster of his Los Angeles public school, a high-strung and mischievous kid who hated class but loved rock ’n’ roll. He dressed the part, too — a small, cherub-faced boy with a poofy brown mop tucked beneath a top hat, a black Stratocaster slung across a velvet vest. At Guitar Center, his friends marveled at his best Hendrix, and he attracted a famous listener, too.“I’m checking out, and I think, ‘Whoever’s playing has a really cool tone, a great feel,’” Linda Perry, the former 4 Non Blondes singer and pop songwriter, remembered in a phone interview. “I’m expecting to see some older dude, seasoned. But I see this dorky little kid in high-water pants and big glasses. I was in love.”Perry wanted to know everything: Were Izenberg’s parents musicians? Where’d he learn to play? Did he have that rig at home? When Izenberg chuckled and said no, Perry bought it for him, plunking down $5,000 for a “fiesta red” Fender Relic and a Marshall amp. She left her number, too, so he started calling, imploring her to see his preteen trio, Din Caliber. “It was a mini-Zeppelin or Beatles, all virtuoso-type geniuses,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to take you guys in.’”“Life doesn’t always make sense; oftentimes, it doesn’t,” Izenberg said.Peyton Fulford for The New York TimesIzenberg raced down a trail of teenage stardom. He shifted to home-school to focus on music. Perry introduced the band to a producer. The group changed its name to Paper Zoo, cut an EP for her label and toured with Roger Daltrey in 2009. But at 18, Izenberg left the band because its retro-rock no longer excited him like the indie-rock that had become an obsession — Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes.Bad news soon ballooned. His longtime girlfriend left. His parents split, and lost their house. He moved in with his grandmother. And there, in the speckles of the popcorn ceiling and in the reflection of the TV screen, he began seeing faces. In 2012, at 21, Izenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia.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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      Bernice Johnson Reagon, a Musical Voice for Civil Rights, Is Dead at 81

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      A singer, composer, curator and founder of the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, she provided a gospel soundtrack for the civil rights movement.Bernice Johnson Reagon, whose stirring gospel voice helped provide the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, then went on to become a cultural historian, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution and the founder of the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 81.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Toshi Reagon, who did not give a cause.Bernice Reagon, the daughter of a Baptist preacher in Albany, Ga., grew up in a church without a piano, and the first music she absorbed, rooted in spirituals and hymns, was performed by human voices to the accompaniment of clapping and foot stomping.She was an original member in 1962 of the Freedom Singers, a vocal quartet that provided anthems of defiance for civil rights protesters preparing to confront the police or as they were hauled away to jail. The Freedom Singers were associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sent them across the South as well as to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1963.Ms. Reagon once wrote, “I sang and heard the freedom songs and saw them pull together sections of the Black community at times when other means of communication were ineffective.”She went on to earn a doctorate in American history from Howard University in 1975 and to direct the Black American Culture Program at the Smithsonian. There, she amassed a collection of blues, gospel and spiritual music and presented that heritage to the public.During one gospel music presentation, in the 1980s, Ms. Reagon encouraged the audience to hum and sing along with the performers. “And if you can’t do that, grunt or sigh a little,” she instructed.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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      Happy Traum, Mainstay of the Folk Music World, Dies at 86

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      A noted guitarist and banjo player, he emerged from the same Greenwich Village folk-revival scene as his friend and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan.Happy Traum, a celebrated folk singer, guitarist and banjo player who was a mainstay of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene of the early 1960s, recorded with Bob Dylan and had an influential career as a music instructor, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 86.His wife, Jane Traum, said he died of pancreatic cancer in a physical rehabilitation facility after undergoing surgery for the disease. He lived in Woodstock, N.Y.Known for his easy vocal approach and his prowess as a finger-style guitarist and five-string banjo player, the Bronx-bred Mr. Traum was an enduring presence in the folk world for more than six decades.“Revered by most in the musical know, he is easily one of the most significant acoustic-roots musicians and guitar pickers of his — and many other — generations,” Blues magazine observed in the introduction to a 2016 interview with Mr. Traum.Will Hermes of Rolling Stone described him as a “folk revivalist straight out of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” a reference to the Coen brothers’ 2013 folk-world odyssey, in a four-star review of Mr. Traum’s album “Just for the Love of It.” It was the seventh of eight albums he released as a leader, starting with “Relax Your Mind” in 1975.In the late 1960s, Mr. Traum performed in a highly regarded duo with his younger brother, Artie Traum. The brothers performed at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1969, toured the world and released five albums, starting with “Happy and Artie Traum” in 1970. Artie Traum died of liver cancer in 2008.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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      10 Outstanding Brian Eno Productions

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      Inspired by an ever-changing new documentary about the musician and producer, listen to songs he helped construct by David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and more.Just four versions of Brian Eno.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesDear listeners,This week, I saw Gary Hustwit’s lively documentary “Eno,” about the musician, artist and producer Brian Eno. I’d recommend it to you — but it’s highly unlikely that you will see the same version of the film that I did.Formally inspired by Eno’s longtime fascination with generative art, “Eno” is essentially created anew each time it’s screened. A computer program called Brain One (a playful anagram of “Brian Eno”) selects from 30 hours of interviews with Eno that Hustwit conducted and 500 hours of archival footage, fitting it into a structure that lasts about 90 minutes. According to the Brain One programmer Brendan Dawes, 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie exist. I did not even know, before seeing this film, that “52 quintillion” was a real number.Some of my favorite parts of the version of “Eno” that I saw concerned his work as a producer. He’s certainly been a prolific one, working with traditional rock bands (Coldplay, U2), avant-garde composers (Harold Budd) and a whole lot of legends in between (David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads). Eno is neither a classically trained musician nor a conventional technician, and his role in the studio can be hard to define — maddeningly so, to certain record-label executives over the years. Admitted Bowie, in a clip from the film I saw, “I don’t really know what he does.” He meant that as a compliment.The most interesting parts of “Eno,” for me, shed a little more light on that elusive “what.” As a producer, he is equal parts agitator and sage. When he and Bowie were hitting a wall during the making of Bowie’s 1977 landmark “‘Heroes,’” they each pulled cards from Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies cards, which provide creative jumping-off points; the result was the hypnotic ambient composition “Moss Garden.” When Bono was struggling to complete a soon-to-be classic U2 track, Eno showed patience. When Talking Heads were looking for a new musical direction before making “Remain in Light,” Eno played them one of his all-time favorite musicians, Fela Kuti. The rest — in so many clips of Eno in the studio — is history.Inspired by “Eno,” today’s playlist is a collection of songs produced by the man himself. Eno the Producer is merely one side of this multifaceted artist, but I appreciated that the sense of multiplicity baked into the structure of “Eno” speaks to how difficult it is to define him with a single identity. There are probably nearly 52 quintillion possible Brian Eno playlists I could have made — Jon Pareles made another in 2020, selecting 15 of Eno’s best ambient compositions — but here is the one I chose. It flows well from start to finish, but if you’re feeling inspired by Hustwit’s generative approach, you’re certainly welcome to put it on shuffle.Line my eyes and call me pretty,LindsayWe 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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      Kim Deal Goes Solo, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Alan Sparhawk, Joy Oladokun, Ivan Cornejo 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.Kim Deal, ‘Coast’“Coast,” a delightfully woozy solo single from the eternally cool Breeders frontwoman Kim Deal, begins with a kind of self-deprecating punchline: “I’ve had a hard, hard landing/I really should duck and roll out,” she sings in her inimitable voice, pausing to add with great comic timing, “Out of my life.” Deal has said that the song was inspired by a wedding band she saw cover “Margaritaville,” but part of the track’s charm is that despite its surf-rock lilt and buoyant horn section, she is never quite able to tap into those blissful vacation vibes. Instead, it is a song about shrugging and carrying on in spite of what bums you out; the fact that it was produced by Steve Albini, who died in May, adds an extra note of elegiac bittersweetness. LINDSAY ZOLADZJoy Oladokun, ‘Drugs’What seems like an idle complaint — “The drugs don’t work/Oh I can’t get high”— expands into a cry from the heart, as Joy Oladokun sings about no longer being able to numb herself from rage, loneliness and “running on empty and calling it strength.” Luckily, she has a bluesy backbeat and gospel-choir harmonies to lift her spirits. 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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      Why Do Pop’s Biggest Stars Adore Michael Uzowuru?

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      The producer has helped A-listers including Donald Glover, SZA, Halsey and Frank Ocean to elevate their craft. How much longer can he avoid the spotlight?Shortly into a Monday morning piano lesson, Michael Uzowuru came alive. Seated at a black grand piano in a long, sunlit room, he warmed up with finger exercises and scales before his instructor, Riko Weimer, asked him to improvise a composition using diminished chords as a foundation. Closing his eyes, he kneaded his way into a languid, contemplative melody, his head bent gently over the keys.“I generally have a lesson plan,” Weimer said when Uzowuru stopped, “but then he digests it in one try.”Uzowuru, 32, sipped from a porcelain cup of espresso, rolled the sleeves of his bright pink sweater to his elbows and resumed playing. Four mornings a week, he drives 20 minutes from the Los Angeles home he shares with his girlfriend and son to Weimer’s Atwater Village studio. When he isn’t intensely working on his craft — “It almost hurts, the distance I feel between where I am and where I want to be,” he later lamented — he is helping some of the most influential figures in pop music spark their own imaginations.Uzowuru may not have the name recognition of Jack Antonoff or Rick Rubin, but his work with artists including Beyoncé, FKA twigs, Frank Ocean, Halsey, Rosalía and SZA has solidified him as a collaborator that A-list artists seek out to sharpen and elevate their craft. His reputation for concocting elegant, distinctive pop songs — like Ocean’s “Nights,” or twigs’s “Cellophane” — has made him one of contemporary music’s most respected producers even as he remains absent from the public eye.On Friday, his latest high-profile collaboration — “Bando Stone & the New World,” the sixth album from Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino — arrives, 17 songs filled with dramatic rock, clever rap and silky R&B that were driven by a concept for a film: an artist recording his masterwork on a remote island as civilization collapses around him.“For a while I thought he was some sort of shady character,” Glover said in a phone interview, with a laugh. “He works with Frank and that whole camp, and they’re very mysterious. I was intimidated.”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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      Dave Loggins, Who Wrote Hits for Himself and Others, Dies at 76

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      After tasting fame with “Please Come to Boston” in 1974, he became a major Nashville songwriter. He also wrote the theme to the Masters golf tournament.Dave Loggins, a chart-topping Nashville songwriter for the likes of Kenny Rogers and the Oak Ridge Boys who also notched his own Top 10 pop hit with the wistful “Please Come to Boston” and wrote the enduring theme for the Masters golf tournament, died on July 10 in Nashville. He was 76.His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his son Kyle, who did not specify the cause.Mr. Loggins, a second cousin of the pop star Kenny Loggins, released five albums as a solo artist in the 1970s, but he scored only one hit single himself.“Please Come to Boston,” a soft-rock weeper about a rambling man trying to woo a lover to follow him as he chases his dreams in one city after another, climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s easy listening chart and No. 5 on the magazine’s Hot 100 in 1974. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for best pop vocal performance by a male artist — the first of Mr. Loggins’s four Grammy nominations.For Mr. Loggins, the song almost seemed to have divine origins. In a 2021 interview with the singer-songwriter and vocal coach Judy Rodman on the podcast “All Things Vocal,” he said he wrote the song early in his career “with chords I had never even played before.”“There was this beautiful, glowing feeling that came over me,” he added, “a godlike feeling, that said, ‘Here, go ahead and play, I’ll move your fingers.’”While “Please Come to Boston” was his only mainstream hit, Mr. Loggins was considered anything but a one-hit wonder in country music circles: He wrote hits for Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, Wynonna Judd and Toby Keith, among others.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