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      A Summer of Live Music, From Stadiums to Clubs

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      Hear songs from Beyoncé, Alvvays, Mdou Moctar and more.Beyoncé, a master of ballads and addition.The New York TimesDear listeners,I sincerely hope I am not the first person to break this news to you, but it’s true: Summer is almost over.Let us not mourn what is lost, though. Let us celebrate the summer that was. And what it was, for me at least, was a time to go to a lot of concerts. Most of them outdoors!While the post-lockdown summer concert has made its gradual, necessary return over the past two years, this season it felt back in full bloom. The news was, of course, dominated by a few extremely high-profile ones (Taylor Swift’s cultural juggernaut Eras Tour; Beyoncé’s first solo outing in seven years, the Renaissance World Tour) but there were plenty of simpler (and cheaper) pleasures to be had, too. I caught some incredible free shows over the past few months in New York City parks, from the likes of Mdou Moctar and John Cale. And in a smaller club environment, I was introduced to the up-and-coming singer-songwriter Blondshell.Today’s playlist is a kind of sonic scrapbook of my summer of shows. I’d encourage you to make your own, too; even as this season fades out (sob), it’s a great way to hold onto its most tuneful memories.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Alvvays: “Easy on Your Own?”Let’s start with the most recent one: Last Wednesday, I caught an excellent double bill in Prospect Park, as a part of BRIC Arts Media’s annual Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. The Canadian dream-pop band Alvvays played first; its last album, “Blue Rev,” was one of my favorites of 2022, and I especially love this fuzzed out, gently melancholic second track. (Listen on YouTube)2. Alex G: “Gretel”And here’s the other half of that double bill, the Philadelphia indie musician Alex G, who also released one of my favorite albums of last year, the strange and poignant “God Save the Animals.” Alex’s live shows are always a bit louder and more raucous than his records would lead you to believe; I have actually seen mosh pits break out when he plays this seemingly subdued standout from his great 2019 album, “House of Sugar.” (Listen on YouTube)3. Taylor Swift: “The Archer”I have been known to refer to this one as “The Sagittarius National Anthem.” The more I think about Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour — and there are plenty of opportunities to do so; it’s still all anybody wants to talk about — the more I think my favorite stretch of the concert was the first one, when she finally got to play some songs from her 2019 album “Lover.” Here she is at her most minimalist, and her most antiheroic, as she punctures her own good-girl image on “The Archer”: “I see right through me, I see right through me.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Tanya Tucker: “Delta Dawn”When I traveled to the Gorge in Washington earlier this summer to catch Brandi Carlile’s Echoes Through the Canyon festival — and, you know, a certain very, very special headliner — I was lucky enough to catch an early evening set by the country icon Tanya Tucker. My second favorite part of the show was when she played “Delta Dawn,” which she recorded at age 13, and every single person there sang along at the top of their lungs. My first favorite part was when Tucker uncorked a bottle of her signature tequila and passed it around the front row. (Listen on YouTube)5. Amanda Shires & Bobbie Nelson: “Always on My Mind”The headliners that final night of Echoes Through the Canyon were the Highwomen, a country supergroup that features Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby and the fiery fiddle player and singer-songwriter Amanda Shires. Each Highwoman played a solo cover during the set, and Shires wowed me with a poignant rendition of “Always on My Mind,” which she dedicated to Bobbie Nelson. Luckily, you didn’t just have to be there: The studio recording of the song, on which Nelson played piano shortly before she died last year, is gorgeous, and quite close to the version Shires played live. (Listen on YouTube)6. John Cale: “Heartbreak Hotel”Another brilliant show in Prospect Park: Earlier this month, 81-year-old John Cale treated Brooklyn to a spellbinding concert on one of the most temperate evenings of the whole summer. His set pulled from decades of his own material, but one of the most memorable moments was when he played an eerily deconstructed reimagining of “Heartbreak Hotel,” similar to this version that appeared on his 1992 live album “Fragments of a Rainy Season.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Blondshell: “Dangerous”I already knew, from listening to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, that Sabrina Teitelbaum was a sharp songwriter with a distinct take on the dark side of young adulthood and an easy way with minor-key melodies. What I didn’t realize until I saw her live this summer, though, is that she can really sing. She belted out “Blondshell” highlights like “Salad” and “Sepsis” (two great titles for songs), but the finely calibrated pathos she brought to the haunting “Dangerous” lingered with me long after the show. (Listen on YouTube)8. Mdou Moctar: “Tarhatazed”Mdou Moctar, the Tuareg guitar wizard whose last few albums have gained him much-deserved recognition in the West, leads what I believe to be one of the best rock bands in the world right now. I’ve seen them live a few times, and they’ve never sounded tighter than they did at the free — what a bargain! — show they played in July at Central Park’s SummerStage Festival. The new material was amazing and has me very excited for whatever the group decides to release next, but in the meantime, here’s an epic jam from the band’s 2019 album “Ilana the Creator.” (Listen on YouTube)9. Beyoncé: “1+1”As I pointed out in my review of the North American opening of her dazzling Renaissance World Tour, Beyoncé began a show that honors the vast history of dance music with, unexpectedly, a mini-set of slow, piano-driven torch songs. I confess I was getting a little impatient with the Queen — didn’t we come to dance?! — until she played a transcendent “1+1,” one of her greatest ballads. Then I had no choice but to bow down. (Listen on YouTube)I’ve got a hundred thrown-out speeches I almost said to you,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“A Summer of Live Music” track listTrack 1: Alvvays, “Easy on Your Own?”Track 2: Alex G, “Gretel”Track 3: Taylor Swift, “The Archer”Track 4: Tanya Tucker, “Delta Dawn”Track 5: Amanda Shires & Bobbie Nelson, “Always on My Mind”Track 6: John Cale, “Heartbreak Hotel”Track 7: Blondshell, “Dangerous”Track 8: Mdou Moctar, “Tarhatazed”Track 9: Beyoncé, “1+1”Bonus tracksI purposely left off the summer concerts to which I’d already devoted entire playlists, but in case you missed those, the Cure and the Pretenders were both amazing.Also, my beleaguered New York Mets are still giving me little to cheer about, but I continue to be amused by the special walk-up songs they choose for “Women’s Day” (which was March 8 everywhere else in the world but, for some reason, was Aug. 26 at Citi Field). Each player changed his walk-up song to one by a female artist, and for the second year in a row, Daniel Vogelbach’s pick was the one to beat. This year he chose Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” and last year, he went with Kelis’s “Milkshake.” Daniel Vogelbach, I salute you. More

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      Oliver Anthony Music’s ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Stays No. 1

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      The song by Oliver Anthony Music played a role at the Republican primary debate, though the musician clarified he doesn’t identify with “people on conservative news.”“Rich Men North of Richmond,” the out-of-nowhere viral protest song by Oliver Anthony Music, is the country’s No. 1 single for a second time, after playing a key role in last week’s Republican primary debate.“Rich Men,” a spare acoustic track uploaded to YouTube just weeks ago by the largely unknown Anthony, quickly caught fire as an angry cry against corporate and political elites, though it also took shots at welfare recipients. Embraced by conservative commentators, the song shot to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, with big download and streaming numbers.Last week, the first question at the Republican debate was about the significance of “Rich Men,” and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spun it as a sign of policy failures by the Biden administration.In a video response posted to YouTube, Anthony — real name Christopher Anthony Lunsford — said he was bothered by how his song has become a political talking point. “It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them,” he said. “I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own. And I see the left trying to discredit me.” The song, he added on Facebook, “is about corporate owned D.C. politicians on both sides.”“Rich Men” repeats at No. 1 on the all-genre Hot 100 with 23 million streams and 117,000 downloads, according to the tracking service Luminate. It is also No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart.On the Billboard 200 album chart, Travis Scott’s “Utopia” marks a month at No. 1 with the equivalent of 161,000 sales, including 92 million streams and 92,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to Luminate, driven by discounted vinyl sales on the rapper’s website. According to Billboard, “Utopia” is the first rap album to spend its first four weeks at the top since 2018, when Drake’s “Scorpion” had five. (In 2021, Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” spent its first three weeks at No. 1, then returned to the top for another two weeks later on.)Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 2, while the singer-songwriter Hozier opens at No. 3 with his new “Unreal Unearth.” The “Barbie” soundtrack remains in fourth place, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 5. More

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      Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Selena Gomez, Al Green, L’Rain and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Miley Cyrus, ‘Used to Be Young’“You say I used to be wild, I say I used to be young,” Miley Cyrus sings on the muted, introspective new ballad “Used to Be Young.” The timing of the single’s release is canny: Cyrus gave her infamous, twerk-seen-’round-the-world MTV Video Music Awards performance 10 years ago on Friday. Cyrus, now 30, isn’t chiding her younger self or expressing regrets here, though — “I know I used to be crazy, messed up, but God was it fun,” she sings with an audible grin — so much as she is asserting her right to grow and change. Though “Used to Be Young” starts out quiet, it gradually builds in intensity, culminating in a finale that allows Cyrus to showcase the full power of her grainy drawl. LINDSAY ZOLADZAl Green, ‘Perfect Day’The magnificently idiosyncratic soul singer Al Green has re-emerged singing “Perfect Day,” a song from 1972 by — of all people — Lou Reed. Reed’s original had a disquieting undertone, warning “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” But Green’s remake — backed by musicians from his 1970s Hi Rhythm Section — trades any misgivings for romance, and the same line becomes a promise of mutual bliss. JON PARELESZach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves, ‘I Remember Everything’This wrenching highlight from Zach Bryan’s new self-titled album is a he-said/she-said account of a failed, whiskey-soaked romance, set to a forlorn chord progression. “A cold shoulder at closing time, you were begging me to stay ’til the sun rose,” Bryan sings in his aching croak, before Kacey Musgraves enters with a pointed question: “You’re drinking everything to ease your mind, but when the hell are you gonna ease mine?” ZOLADZL’Rain, ‘Pet Rock’“Why would you go without me?” L’Rain — the songwriter and musician Taja Cheek — wonders in “Pet Rock,” a turbulent song about unwanted solitude. Cascading guitars and shifty-meter drumbeats give the music an unpredictable, almost tidal motion that ebbs and flows with all the lyrics’ unanswered questions. PARELESSelena Gomez, ‘Single Soon’“I know he’ll be a mess when I break the news/but I’ll be single soon,” Selena Gomez exults in the ultra-smiley “Single Soon.” It’s a triumphal march about all the prerogatives of moving on — “I’m gonna do what I wanna do” — with giggles in the backup track as she decides it’s “Time to try another one.” Like Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” it celebrates the choices ahead. PARELESPrince, ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’The teaser for the next much-expanded Prince reissue — “Diamonds and Pearls,” due Oct. 27 — is a falsetto funk tune about a woman with a mysterious but alluring occupation. “Some call it a curse, some call it sweet salvation/No one can deny the stimulation,” Prince sings over a skulking synth-bass line. The lyrics stay ambiguous, but the groove tells its own sensual story. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Strays’Margo Price released her album “Strays” in January, but its title track arrives this week in the rollout of “Strays II,” a sequel she’s releasing a few songs at a time. In “Strays,” she sings about being young, broke and ferally in love back in January 2003, with a galloping beat and pounding piano chords that suggests the E Street Band visiting Nashville. The memories sound victorious. PARELESMon Laferte, ‘Tenochtitlán’The Chilean songwriter Mon Laferte sings about a woman shamed for her pregnancy in “Tenochtitlán,” comparing her to the Virgin Mary. In a track that melds the retro and futuristic, she overlays a trip-hop bass undertow with lushly dramatic strings, a flamenco-tinged guitar solo and a passage of pitch-shifted vocals, while she urges, “Beautiful one, cry no more.” PARELESLuciana Souza & Trio Corrente, ‘Bem Que Te Avisei’The new album from Luciana Souza and Trio Corrente, “Cometa” is a celebration of Brazil’s classic songbook, with covers of songs by Dorival Caymmi and Antonio Carlos Jobim alongside lively originals written in the spirit of tradition. Souza contributes a composition, “Bem Que Te Avisei” (“Well, I Warned You”), an up-tempo samba in which she admonishes a suitor not to chase someone unless he’s interested in committing. The piece comes fully alive midway through, when she sings a verse accompanied by just Paulo Paulelli’s bass and Edu Ribeiro’s light percussion, and achieves elevation at the end, as Souza’s wordless vocals double with the piano of Fabio Torres, briefly bringing to mind Flora Purim’s synergy with Chick Corea in Return to Forever. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTitanic, ‘Anónima’The Guatemalan songwriter Mabe Fratti and the Venezuelan composer Hector Tosta, who bills himself as I la Católica, have collaborated as Titanic, with an album due in October. In “Anónima” (“Anonymous”), Fratti’s cello grunts rhythmic double-stops as she sings about persistent, troubling thoughts, surrounded by clusters of piano notes and increasingly brutal percussion. Her voice maintains its equanimity, but her distorted cello finally lashes out. PARELESAbiodun Oyewole, ‘Somebody Else’s Idea’In 1968, the poet-activists Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka released “Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing,” a collection that would help to define the Black Arts Movement. The poet with the most works featured in its pages was Sun Ra: Although mostly known as the bandleader of the Arkestra, Ra was a philosopher and poet as much as he was a musician. That same year, a group of young poets came together in Harlem, dubbing themselves the Last Poets and helping to lay the groundwork for what would soon become hip-hop; Abiodun Oyewole was one of them. Those histories collide on “My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun Ra’s Poetry,” a new album on which various artists read Ra’s poems between spacey synthesizer interludes from Marshall Allen, the Arkestra’s current leader. On “Somebody Else’s Idea,” Oyewole delivers verses that Ra first recorded in the early 1970s, when the Last Poets were in their prime: “Somebody else’s idea of things to come/need not be the only way to vision the future,” he declares. RUSSONELLO More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): A Shocking No. 1 Hit and Addison Rae’s New EP

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:“Rich Men North of Richmond,” the sudden No. 1 hit by Oliver Anthony Music, the recording alias of the roots-country singer Christopher Anthony Lunsford, which has become a culture war flashpoint and right-wing media cause célèbreThe release of “AR,” the first EP from the one-time TikTok star Addison Rae, and the way in which copycat pop might be the purest pop of all“In the Night,” the new song from DJ Sliink featuring SAFE and Bandmanrill“Namesake,” a new song from the Chicago rapper NonameSnacks of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      How ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Topped the Charts

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      A song by the previously unknown Oliver Anthony Music struck a chord with conservative pundits. Its quick trip to No. 1 relied on tactics that help pop stars go viral.The unadorned video suddenly appeared on social media earlier this month: a young man with a bushy red beard and a guitar in a backwoods locale, dogs at his feet and bugs buzzing in the background. In an impassioned drawl, he sings a country-folk anthem about selling his soul “working all day,” and being kept in his place by inflation, high taxes and the elites he holds responsible: “Rich Men North of Richmond.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Viral Hit ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Debuts at No. 1

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      Oliver Anthony Music’s song expressing frustration over working-class struggles shot to the top of the Billboard chart after a wave of support from conservative commentators.“Rich Men North of Richmond,” an independently released track by the little-known performer billed as Oliver Anthony Music, became the surprise No. 1 song in the United States this week, topping hits by superstars like Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen and Olivia Rodrigo.The song, which was uploaded to YouTube just two weeks ago, caught fire with conservative commentators including Matt Walsh and Laura Ingraham, who described it as an authentic expression of working-class struggle, though some critics winced at anti-welfare sentiments that seemed to hark back to the Reagan era: “If you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds/Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds,” sings Anthony, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford.“Rich Men” shoots to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with 17.5 million streams and 147,000 downloads, according to the tracking service Luminate. After Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” it is the second country song in less than a month to reach No. 1 after stirring political controversy and sparking download sales — a very small part of the contemporary music business, but one that can have an outsize impact on the charts, thanks to the weighting formulas that Billboard and Luminate use to reconcile streams and sales.According to Billboard, it is the first time that an artist has made a debut at No. 1 on the Hot 100 without any prior chart history “in any form.”Whether “Rich Man” can hold the top spot for long is yet to be seen. When Aldean, a Nashville hitmaker for years, rode a wave of culture-war controversy for “Try That in a Small Town” after its music video was criticized as a coded call to vigilantism, the song spent a single week at No. 1; it dropped 20 spots after streams and downloads plunged.On the album chart, Travis Scott’s “Utopia” holds No. 1 for a third week, thanks in part to a flash sale on the rapper’s website that priced the double vinyl version at $5. Scott sold 99,000 copies of his album, 93,000 of which were on vinyl; he also had 124 million streams. Altogether, “Utopia” was credited with the equivalent of 185,000 sales in the United States, according to Luminate.The neon-haired Colombian pop star Karol G debuts at No. 3 with her latest release, “Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season),” which had the equivalent of 67,000 sales, including 68 million streams. The mixtape is a companion collection to Karol G’s last studio album, the similarly titled “Mañana Será Bonito,” which opened at No. 1 in March.Also this week, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 2, the “Barbie” soundtrack is No. 4 and Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” is in fifth place. More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): Is There Such a Thing as the Song of the Summer?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on the songs that have shaped this summer, or at least attempted to, including:Big-tent chart successes like Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” and Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer”Hip-hop (and adjacent) hits like Gunna’s “___umean,” Toosii’s “Favorite Song” and “Creepin’” by Metro Boomin’ featuring the Weeknd and 21 SavageRecordings that live somewhere between song and meme, like Drake and Central Cee’s “On the Radar Freestyle,” Sexxy Red’s “Pound Town,” Kaliii’s “Area Codes” and Flyana Boss’s “You Wish”Songs that blend the fictional and real, like “World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak” by Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), from “The Idol,” and “I’m Just Ken,” by Ken (Ryan Gosling), from “Barbie”Rural-issues country music red meat like Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car,” Jelly Roll’s “Need A Favor” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond”Breakout hits in K-pop, dancehall, regional Mexican music and Afrobeats: Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma’s “Ella Baila Sola,” Byron Messia’s “Talibans,” NewJeans’s “Super Shy” and “Calm Down” by Rema featuring Selena Gomez.New songs from That Mexican OT featuring Paul Wall and Drodi and people featuring AyooLii and Lil SinnConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Morgan Wade Was Looking for the Spotlight. It Found Her.

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      The day before Morgan Wade was set to perform at Lollapalooza for the first time, the country singer-songwriter was in a Chicago hotel gym at around 10:30 a.m. It was arm day: regular curls, hammer curls, triceps pushdowns, lateral raises, dumbbell presses, face pulls and shoulder presses. She stopped after around 45 minutes, but only because it was actually her second session of the morning — she’d been up for hours, and had already done another 90-minute workout, and also ran three miles.“It’s just been something healthy for me to be addicted to,” Wade, 28 and slathered in tattoos, said of her fitness routine, sipping a chocolate Muscle Milk she’d grabbed from a vending machine for a quick boost of protein.For the last couple of years, Wade’s music career has been ascendant. Her 2021 album, “Reckless,” was a critical favorite in progressive country music circles, and “Wilder Days,” its stoutly aching breakout single, became an unlikely mainstream country crossover success. “Psychopath,” Wade’s second album and first on a major label, will be released on Aug. 25.In almost every other way, though, the last couple of years have been destabilizing: the erratic schedule, the increasing obligations to the music business, a slate of health struggles, the full-scale immersion into the public spotlight. And Wade, who has been sober for six years, has been finding ways to cope: therapy, fitness, clean eating, reading, journaling.In recent weeks, those tools have been stress-tested at a profound level, as Wade has found herself the subject of prurient tabloid interest regarding her seemingly unlikely connection with Kyle Richards, one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Online chatter that the women might share a romance has taken Wade from CMT to TMZ in record time.“Trust me, I’ve Googled it, man,” Wade said the prior night, backstage before a midnight gig at Reggie’s Rock Club. “I’ve Googled how to deal with the beginning stages of fame. The Wikipedia articles on that aren’t very helpful.”“I’m just a private person,” Wade said. “I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesWhen Wade was performing acoustic gigs at FloydFest, the roots music festival in her Floyd, Va., hometown, in the late 2010s, that she might someday be simultaneously navigating the rollout of her major label debut and the public dissection of her personal life might have seemed unfathomable.But even then, Wade was deeply disciplined. She took music seriously, writing and performing her own songs long before meeting Sadler Vaden, who plays guitar for Jason Isbell and has become her go-to producer.“She already had taken on the challenge of addiction when I met her. And she was in sobriety,” said Mary Sparr, Wade’s manager. “I saw in her that she had already had this huge challenge and chose to go ham, you know?”Vaden, who first saw Wade in a video performing her track “Mend” on a flatbed truck, described her as something akin to “a country Melissa Etheridge,” noting how the specificity of her gritty and reedy voice locates her in a country lineage, which frees her to make music that’s more eclectic and less hidebound.“Reckless,” which contained songs that Wade had written over several years, had the lightly bumpy texture of a scar that’s never quite healed. Wade’s voice is rich and sinewy, and it can sound like a scold and a plaint all at once. “Wilder Days,” which made it into the Top 40 on the Billboard country chart and was certified gold, got her signed to a Nashville major label, but she is in no way a country centrist. She has opened for Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton and Ashley McBryde, all on the genre’s more stylistically earthy side.Wade onstage at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif., in April. In August, she made her Lollapalooza debut.Monica Schipper/Getty Images for StagecoachWhen it came to beginning work on “Psychopath,” Wade was feeling pressure, self-imposed, to follow the success of “Wilder Days.” The first batch of songs was recorded last summer, but Vaden sensed she needed some more breathing space. “We have to just make an album that we are proud of,” he said he told her.Her manager was concerned, too. “She was burning herself out really bad,” Sparr said. “She’s the type that will say yes till the end of the world and work herself to the death until she hits that boiling point. We’ve had to mitigate her drive in those cases to give herself some more balance.”The songs from a second batch, recorded in January, are both heftier and more assured, playing with emotion, or genre, or both. The chirpy “Fall in Love With Me” is in this set, as is “Alanis,” which directly takes on the difficulties of a female performer enacting her whole self in public. “Losers Like Me” is an agitation about small-town life that recalls Kacey Musgraves’s debut single, “Merry Go ’Round.” And “27 Club” is a cutting song about dodging the worst fate, and still being unsure of what comes next.During that stretch of time, Wade and Richards were forming a friendship. Richards discovered Wade on the radio and followed her on Instagram. Wade, ever the skeptic (and who had never previously watched “Housewives”), messaged her to ask why. They got close quickly. Soon, they had a Wordle group chat, including fellow Housewife Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave and Richards’s friend Jenn Leipart. Richards began filming content for a documentary about Wade’s life, both onstage and off. The two posted photos together working out in the gym, and one of Wade sitting in Richards’s lap. Wade performed at a charity concert Richards had organized to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Wade will also appear in the upcoming season of “Real Housewives.”)Wade, left, and Kyle Richards on a red carpet in late April. The two struck up a friendship after Richards followed the musician on Instagram.Ella Hovsepian/Getty ImagesThe public adjustments have not all come smoothly. “She told me at the NAMI event she almost wanted to leave at one point — she was like, This is so stressful,” Richards said in an interview. “I realized and appreciated later her hanging in there for me.”In the first week of July, news of Richards’s separation from her husband, Mauricio Umansky, hit the internet. Suddenly, Wade was being floated as a possible factor in the split. Strangers began dissecting her music, her lyrics, her past struggles with addiction and depression.Wade was at her family’s home in Virginia at the time. For three days, she didn’t get out of bed, she said. Sparr checked in like clockwork. “She was calling me like once an hour or every two hours and being like, What am I going to do? What are we going to do?” Sparr said. “She’s programmed to want to take an action. She wants to fix things. And, you know, sometimes there’s not anything to do but let time do the work.”Wade even skipped going to the gym. “For her to not go to the gym, I was like, OK, this is not good,” Richards said. “I’ve never seen her in two years not do that.”She continued, “I carried some guilt for having her be a victim of this because of me. I felt like it was collateral damage and I felt guilt about that, you know?”The gossip even traveled to Wade’s family; her grandfather suggested that land prices in their small town might go up. (“He has a damn flip phone!” Wade cackled.) Her 5-year-old half sister asked her why she was crying so much.“I seriously thought I was going to have to go to a rehab just preventively, to keep me from doing something stupid,” Wade said.Slowly, she got back on her feet. She returned to the gym, and set up twice-weekly therapy sessions. Getting a taste of public scrutiny, she said, made her regretful of the judgment she used to hold about celebrities. She tried to encourage her family and friends to see that she had now become the object of the kind of dismissiveness with which they had once regarded the famous. “You have to give people a little bit of grace,” Wade said.Wade said she’s going to go “Back to basics,” to articulate her post-fame version of herself on her next album.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I’m just a private person. I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me,” Wade said anxiously, but with a touch of resentment. “And then too, your orientation, your sexuality, all that is just being discussed online by random people that don’t even know. It’s heartbreaking.”Sparr encouraged Wade to get offline, and to treat her relationship with social media “with a similar urgency and with a similar seriousness that she did with sobriety.”But Wade also had, depending on your perspective, either an ace up her sleeve, or a liter of gasoline about to spill onto the fire. In June, she had filmed a video for “Fall in Love With Me,” the cheeriest and poppiest song on “Psychopath.” The video features a slowly unfolding romantic rapport in a shiny “Desperate Housewives”-ish exurb between Wade, depicted in tight workout gear, and an infatuated neighbor, who watches longingly from a window in the house next door.The neighbor is played by Richards.It was inspired, in part, by avid Housewives fans who had already been speculating about their friendship online. “There was already a little bit of Reddit fodder — I call it fan fiction — about Kyle and Morgan,” before any of the “TMZ stuff happened,” Sparr said.The clip is playful, cheeky, a welcome blast of good mischief. “I’ve actually, my entire life, weaseled my way out of kissing someone on camera,” Richards said. Even though there’s a strategic millimeter between their mouths in the video’s most steamy moments, “This is the closest I’ve ever gotten, and it’s, spicy enough, I guess, that I would consider that breaking that streak.”The power of the video, far beyond the tabloid tease, is the conventional frankness with which it depicts same-sex attraction. Coming from an artist signed to a Nashville major label, it is deeply striking.“There was never any pushback from the label,” Sparr said. “But the greater feeling of everyone I talked to was like, I can’t believe you guys are going to pull this off.”There, again, is Wade’s discipline at work, steadily walking a path few before her have tried, emphasizing the representational value of the video while also toying with the story, real or imaginary, of her and Richards’s bond. And having been on the receiving end of scrutiny for the last several weeks, Wade has finally emerged on the other side, emboldened.“I don’t know why we’re in this day and time where we have to speculate about people’s sexuality,” she said, emphatically. “That is not appropriate at all. Like, let anybody be what they want to be — it’s none of your damn business.”She has more pressing things in front of her — an ultramarathon in November, just a couple of weeks before she is scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy (following a positive test for a BRCA mutation, a genetic risk for breast cancer). And she has already written a dozen songs for her next album.“Back to basics,” she said of the challenge of articulating the new, post-spotlight version of herself. “Taking elements of who I used to be and those core fundamental things and finding out like, Hmm. What I believed then and thought then, that part of me doesn’t exist anymore.” But, she added, there are some things “that I’m going to keep that didn’t die.” More