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    Spring Forward: Songs for a New Season

    Hear a playlist tuned to rebirth, as well as the risk to bloom. Plus: a selection of tracks that explain our readers.The cover of Waxahatchee’s “Saint Cloud.”Merge RecordsDear listeners,A few days ago, I was buried up to my neck in volcanic sand.Literally, and by choice! My sister and I spent a very restorative weekend at a spa, to celebrate her upcoming wedding and to shake off a winter that had been a challenge for each of us. This particular spa has imported natural volcanic sand from Ibusuki, a city in southwest Japan, and for a cool $30 they will have someone rake a hot, heaping quantity of it atop your body until you cannot move. Then you lay there for 15 minutes, letting the mineral-rich sand work its supposedly detoxifying magic and, if you are like me, expelling such an ungodly amount of perspiration from your face that an attendant who sees maybe a hundred people through this process each day remarks with slightly concerned awe, “Wow, you’re really sweating.”For the first few minutes, I felt like a corpse. By the end, though, as I wriggled out of the earth and once again stood upright, I have never felt more like a freshly sprouting flower in springtime. (Albeit an exceptionally sweaty one who had to sit on the bench for five extra minutes of observation because she’d been deemed a fainting risk.)The earliest weeks of springtime have such a distinct feeling that I decided to make a playlist to soundtrack them. Late March/early April is a time of rebirth but also of the friction and occasional struggle of transition — the lime-green shoot emerging from the dirt; the chrysalis stage before the butterfly. It’s the April-is-the-cruelest-month part of “The Wasteland.” It’s the “little darling, it’s been a long, cold lonely winter” part of “Here Comes the Sun.” It’s this perfect little 24-word poem by Anaïs Nin that I always find myself thinking of this time of year:And then the day came,when the riskto remain tightin a budwas more painfulthan the riskit tookto Blossom.Flowers are a recurring motif on this playlist: Waxahatchee’s blooming and then withering lilacs “marking the slow, slow, slow passing of time”; Hurray for the Riff Raff’s bemused cataloging of poetic plant names (“Rhododendron, night blooming jasmine, deadly nightshade…”). So, too, is rebirth and that worthwhile risk to bloom. Perhaps selfishly, I sneaked in one song in about “smoke floating over the volcano,” but that’s from an album I find speaks to a lot of these themes anyway, Caroline Polachek’s excellent, recently released “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” My perennial favorites Nina Simone and the Mountain Goats make appearances, but don’t say I didn’t warn you in my introductory “11 Songs That Explain Me.”Speaking of which! Thank you so much for all your wonderful submissions when I asked last week for a song that describes you. I wish I could have included every one of them, but I wanted to share a few of my favorites below. So many of your responses were such vivid reminders of the humanizing power of music and the bone-deep connection we all have to certain songs. It was great to get to know more about who’s out there reading, too. I feel like we’re building something special together.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Waxahatchee: “Lilacs”“And the lilacs drink the water/And the lilacs die,” Katie Crutchfield sings on this bittersweet, gently twangy tune from her most recent album, “Saint Cloud”; that succinct image and the song’s stark arrangement lay bare her increasing confidence as a songwriter. (Listen on YouTube)2. Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Rhododendron”Alynda Segarra has a knack for writing songs that both celebrate the natural world and articulate the dangers of ignoring its glory. “Don’t turn your back on the mainland,” Segarra sings here, on a tuneful but defiantly prickly chorus. (Listen on YouTube)3. Troye Sivan: “Bloom”Here’s an underrated gem from a few years back: smeary, romantic, ’80s-inspired pop as vibrant as a bouquet of roses in every color. (Listen on YouTube)4. Beach House: “Lazuli”And from an album called “Bloom,” this is an atmospheric reverie from the indie-pop duo Beach House, a band that — despite the summertime humidity its name conjures — always sounds to me like the arrival of spring. (Listen on YouTube)5. Jamila Woods: “Sula (Paperback)”Inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel “Sula,” the ever-inquisitive Chicago R&B singer and poet Jamila Woods crafts an ode to self-discovery and personal growth with a refrain that stretches upward like a verdant stalk: “I’m better, I’m better, I’m better …” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Mountain Goats: “Onions”I love the way this simple, guitar-driven meditation on early spring entwines the personal with the more cosmic cycling of the seasons: “Springtime’s coming, that means you’ll be coming back around/New onions growing underground.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Caroline Polachek: “Smoke”“It’s just smoke floating over the volcano,” the avant-garde pop star Polachek sings, providing a potent reminder that all difficult periods — like, say, being buried up to your neck in a steaming pile of volcanic sand — do pass in time. (Listen on YouTube)8. Nina Simone: “Here Comes the Sun”This is such a deeply felt reading of a song so many of us know by rote: Simone’s particular phrasing cracks it open and makes you feel like you’re hearing George Harrison’s words anew. (Listen on YouTube)9. Dolly Parton: “Light of a Clear Blue Morning”Dolly Parton is, eternally, a human ray of sunshine, though perhaps never more explicitly than she is here, on this inspirational, soul-rattling classic from her first self-produced album from 1977, “New Harvest … First Gathering.” (Listen on YouTube)I feel that ice is slowly melting,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Spring Forward” track listTrack 1: Waxahatchee, “Lilacs” (2020)Track 2: Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Rhododendron” (2022)Track 3: Troye Sivan, “Bloom” (2018)Track 4: Beach House, “Lazuli” (2012)Track 5: Jamila Woods, “Sula (Paperback)” (2020)Track 6: The Mountain Goats, “Onions” (2000)Track 7: Caroline Polachek, “Smoke” (2023)Track 8: Nina Simone, “Here Comes the Sun” (1971)Track 9: Dolly Parton, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” (1977)The songs that explain youLast week, we asked readers about the songs that explain them. More than 500 of you wrote in. Thanks to everyone who shared their stories.Cameo: “She’s Strange”I’ve always thought of it as my personal theme song in a way … it’s a tribute to a woman committed to being her unique self in the world. When I think about the things I am most proud of in my life, it’s the fact that somehow I did not let the world, society, Groupthink or even my culture of origin diminish my quiet determination to live my truth as best as my circumstances would allow. — Idara E. Bassey, Atlanta (Listen on YouTube)Mitski: “Dan the Dancer”Or perhaps the whole album of “Puberty 2.” I’m 18 years old so I feel as though I am experiencing my own second puberty, not one of first periods and training bras but one of questioning my place in the world, having new experiences, first relationships etc. For me, Dan the Dancer encapsulates my fear and questioning of the future and my life through this metaphor of hanging onto a cliff, while connecting to this experience of new relationships and letting yourself be vulnerable with those around you. — Natalie, Singapore (Listen on YouTube)Sonic Youth: “Teen Age Riot”In high school, I boarded the bus every morning in my rural Louisiana hometown wearing thick black eyeliner and a scowl, always with some flavor of abrasive alternative music blasting in my cheap earbuds. This song carried me through many of those bus rides, away from my mostly conservative, evangelical Christian peers who I couldn’t identify less with to a place where my frustrations could be heard and understood. I’m now a student at a law school where I feel immense pressure to pursue a corporate career and give up the idealism that has served as my enduring motivation. This song inspires me to look to the teenage riot that still persists within me, and remember what’s really worth fighting for. — Amanda Watson, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube)Nina Simone: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”It encapsulates the world I want to see, coupled with the wistfulness that we’re not there yet. I love the way the song starts with barely any instrumental accompaniment, just Simone’s piano and a gentle drumbeat (or maybe finger snaps?) and then builds and builds until it’s speaking to the whole world. I’ve been some kind of activist most of my life (I’m now 55), and it’s easy to be deeply discouraged by the political and ecological present we’re in and lose hope for what the future might be. This song (re-)energizes me: Nina was singing at a moment when civil rights were a legal reality but mostly a aspiration for those living with the daily indignities and violence of racism, so if she can imagine a better world, so can I. — Sarah Chinn, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)Brian Eno: “The Big Ship”I discovered this in the mid-80s at a time when I was a closeted gay teenager, longing for some sort of freedom. This ethereal piece of almost-ambience defies easy categorization. It simply builds, like a cloudy nebula descending from space, more and more sounds playing off one another until it envelopes you and reascends, taking you with it. If felt like an escape into another reality — like a peaceful transition to an open world. I’d play it on repeat with headphones to keep spiraling darkness at bay. It worked. It helped me survive. — George B. Singer, Long Beach, Calif. (Listen on YouTube)And a very special bonus track (from the artist)The dB’s: “Amplifier”I wrote this 40 years ago, and it’s probably my best-known song. It’s partially about me and my own life, but it has spoken to other desperate, depressed people, helping defuse some of their emotional distress with a little misplaced humor. Sometimes. People still react to it — this past summer, at the request of the hostess, I played the song with my dB’s rhythm section bandmates at a soundcheck for a book release party in Chapel Hill. An early attendee had a visceral meltdown over the words to the song, begging us not to play it again. So we didn’t. — Peter Holsapple, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube) More

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    Best Songs of 2022

    Seventy-two tracks that identify, grapple with or simply dance away from the anxieties of yet another uncertain year.Jon Pareles’s Top 25Full disclosure: There can’t be a definitive list of best songs — only a sampling of what any one listener, no matter how determined, can find the time to hear in the course of a year. For discovery’s sake, my list rules out the (excellent) songs on my favorite albums of the year, and it’s designed more like a playlist than a countdown or a ranking. Feel free to switch to shuffle.1. Residente featuring Ibeyi, ‘This Is Not America’Backed by implacable Afro-Caribbean drumming and Ibeyi’s vocal harmonies, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente defines America as the entire hemisphere, while he furiously denounces historical and ongoing abuses.2. The Smile, ‘The Opposite’Thom Yorke of Radiohead — in a side project, the Smile — wonders, “What will become of us?” Prodded by a funky beat and pelted by staggered, syncopated guitar and bass notes, he can’t expect good news.3. Wilco, ‘Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull’With Wilco picking and strumming like a string band, Jeff Tweedy spins a free-associative fable about elemental forces of life and death, leading into a brief but probing jam that reunites country and psychedelia.4. Rema featuring Selena Gomez, ‘Calm Down’The crisply flirtatious “Calm Down,” by the Nigerian singer Rema, was already a major African hit when Selena Gomez added her voice for a remix. He’s confident, she’s inviting — at least for the moment — and the Afrobeats syncopation promises a good time.5. Emiliana Torrini and the Colorist Orchestra, ‘Right Here’A plinking Minimalist pulse and a deft chamber-pop arrangement carry the Icelandic songwriter Emiliana Torrini through fond thoughts of hard-won but durable domestic stability.Thom Yorke, left, and Jonny Greenwood of the Smile performing at Usher Hall in Edinburgh in June. The band also includes the drummer Tom Skinner.Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns, via Getty Images6. Lucrecia Dalt, ‘Atemporal’“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” Lucrecia Dalt’s heady concept album about time, physicality and love. It’s a lurching bolero that dovetails lo-fi nostalgia with vaudeville horns and an electronically skewed sense of space.7. Burna Boy, ‘Last Last’The Nigerian superstar Burna Boy juggles regrets, justifications and resentments as he sings about a romance wrecked by career pressures, drawing nervous momentum out of a strumming, fluttering sample from Toni Braxton.8. Aldous Harding, ‘Lawn’The tone is airy: unassuming piano chords; a high, naïve voice; a singsong melody. But in one of Aldous Harding’s least cryptic lyrics, she is trying to put the best face on a confusing breakup.9. Madison Cunningham, ‘Our Rebellion’Madison Cunningham sings, wryly and fondly, about an opposites-attract relationship in a tricky, virtuosic tangle of guitar lines.10. Big Thief, ‘Simulation Swarm’Adrianne Lenker’s wispy voice belies the visionary ambition — and ambiguity — of her lyrics. So does the way the band, not always in tune, cycles through four understated folk-rock chords, swerving occasionally into a bridge. It’s a love song with a backdrop of war and transformation, delivered like a momentary glimpse into something much vaster.11. Margo Price, ‘Lydia’Somewhere between folk-rock plaint and short story, Margo Price sings about a pregnant woman at a clinic, with a hard-luck past and a tough decision to make.12. Ice Spice, ‘Munch (Feelin’ U)’Cool, fast, precise and merciless, the Bronx rapper Ice Spice dispatches a hapless suitor by designating him as a new slang word: “munch.”13. Jamila Woods, ‘Boundaries’Mixing a suave bossa nova with a tapping, stubbornly resistant cross-rhythm, Jamila Woods neatly underlines the ambivalence she sings about, as she ponders just how close she wants someone to get.14. Stromae featuring Camila Cabello, ‘Mon Amour’The cheerful lilt of Stromae’s “Mon Amour” is camouflage for the increasingly threadbare rationalizations of a compulsive cheater; he gets his comeuppance when Camila Cabello asserts her own freedom to fool around.15. Giveon, ‘Lie Again’Giveon floats in a jealous limbo, hoping not to be exposed to hard truths. His voice is a baritone croon with an electronic penumbra, in a track that hints at old soul translated into ghostly electronics.16. Tyler ICU featuring Nkosazana Daughter, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, ‘Inhliziyo’No fewer than three leading producers of amapiano, the patient, midtempo South African club style, collaborated on “Inhliziyo” (“Heart”), creating haunted open spaces for the South African singer and songwriter Nkosazana Daughter to quietly lament a heartbreak.The Nigerian star Burna Boy addresses the challenges of balancing a relationship with his growing career on “Last Last.”Ferdy Damman/EPA, via Shutterstock17. Tinashe, ‘Something Like a Heartbreak’Nothing feels entirely solid in this song: not Tinashe’s breathy vocals, not the beat that flickers in and out of the mix, not the hovering tones that only sketch the chords. But in the haze, she realizes, “You don’t deserve my love,” and she moves on.18. Jessie Reyez, ‘Mutual Friend’Revenge arrives with cool fury over elegant, vintage-soul strings as Jessie Reyez makes clear that someone is definitely not getting a second chance.19. 070 Shake, ‘Web’Danielle Balbuena — the songwriter and producer who records as 070 Shake — overdubbed herself as a full-scale choir in “Web,” a pandemic-era reaction to the gap between onscreen and physical interaction. She wants carnality in real time, insisting, “Let’s be here in person.”20. Holly Humberstone, ‘Can You Afford to Lose Me?’In an ultimatum carried by a stately crescendo of keyboards, Holly Humberstone reminds a partner who’s threatening to leave just how much she has already put up with.21. Brian Eno, ‘There Were Bells’“There Were Bells” contemplates the slow-motion cataclysm of global warming as an elegy and a warning, with edgeless, tolling sounds and a mournful melody as Brian Eno sings about the destruction no one will escape.22. Caroline Polachek, ‘Billions’Is it love or capitalism? Caroline Polachek sings with awe-struck sweetness — and touches of hyperpop processing — against an otherworldly backdrop that incorporates electronics, tabla drumming and string sections, at once intimate and abstract.23. Stormzy, ‘Firebabe’In a wedding-ready, hymnlike ballad, Stormzy sings modestly and adoringly about a love at first sight that he intends to last forever.24. Hagop Tchaparian, ‘Right to Riot’A blunt four-on-the-floor thump might just be the least aggressive part of “Right to Riot” from the British Armenian musician Hagop Tchaparian, which also brandishes traditional sounds — six-beat drumming and the snarl of the double-reed zurna — and zapping, woofer-rattling electronics as it builds.25. Oren Ambarchi, ‘I’The first section of an album-length piece, “Shebang,” by the composer Oren Ambarchi, is a consonant hailstorm of staccato guitar notes, picked and looped, manipulated and layered, emerging as melodies and rejoining the ever-more-convoluted mesh.Jon Caramanica’s Top 22There are plenty of ways to try out something new — fooling around with your friends, tossing off a casual but not careless experiment, disappearing so deeply into a feeling that you forget form altogether.1. GloRilla featuring Cardi B, ‘Tomorrow 2’Kay Flock featuring Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory300, ‘Shake It’It was a great year for the Cardi B booster plan. Like Drake before her, she is an attentive listener and a seven-figure trend forecaster, as captured in these two cousin-like feature appearances. “Shake It” is as credible a drill song as a non-drill performer has yet made — Cardi’s verse is pugnacious and tart. And “Tomorrow 2,” with its big BFF energy, helps continue construction of a new pathway for female allyship in hip-hop.2. Ice Spice, ‘Munch (Feelin’ U)’Ice Spice is a gleefully patient rapper. On “Munch,” she pulls off a perfectly balanced tug of war between neg-heavy seduction and the affect of being utterly unbothered.3. Bailey Zimmerman, ‘Rock and a Hard Place’The trick of this catalog of a couple’s catastrophic collapse is that the arrangement never lets on that the circumstances are dire, but atop it, Bailey Zimmerman sings like he’s narrating a boxing match.4. Lil Yachty, ‘Poland’A non-song. A koan. A cry from beneath the ravenous eddies. A memory bubbling up from repression. A tractor beam. A stunt. A hopeful warble. A promise of infinite tomorrows.5. The Dare, ‘Girls’Epically silly and epically debauched, “Girls” marks a return(?) of quasi(?)-electroclash(?), but, more pointedly, is a reminder of the perennial power of lust, sweat and arch eroticism.Cardi B didn’t put out a lot of her own music in 2022, but she showed up in a savvy selection of features.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters6. Sadie Jean, ‘WYD Now? (10 Minute Version) [Open Verse Mashup]’The logical endpoint of the TikTok duet trend: one extended posse-cut version aggregating everyone’s labor into a lofi-beats-to-study-to forever loop. The wooden spoon provides.7. Lil Kee, ‘Catch a Murder’From his arresting debut mixtape “Letter 2 My Brother,” a caustic and bleak pledge of revenge from the Lil Baby affiliate Lil Kee, who sing-raps as if in a trance of menace.8. Cam’ron, Funk Flex #Freestyle171Another year, another casual calisthenics lesson from Cam’ron, the last avatar of the intricately economical style that dominated Harlem rap in the ’90s and remains staggering to observe.9. Yahritza y Su Esencia, ‘Soy El Unico’The first song Yahritza Martinez wrote — at age 13 — was “Soy El Unico,” a defiantly sad retort from a discarded partner to the discarder that pairs the groundedness of Mexican folk music with a vocal delivery inflected with hip-hop and R&B.10. Kate Gregson-MacLeod, ‘Complex (Demo)’This song began life as viral melancholy on TikTok, a brief portrait of someone stuck in the gravitational pull of a person who doesn’t deserve their care. The finished song is desolate but resilient, a hell of a plaint.11. NewJeans, ‘Cookie’Most striking about “Cookie,” the best song from the debut EP by the impressive young K-pop girl group NewJeans, is its ease — no maximalism, no theater. Simply a cheerful extended metaphor over an updated take on the club-oriented R&B of a couple of decades ago, finished off with a tasteful Jersey club breakdown.12. Jack Harlow featuring Drake, ‘Churchill Downs’The student befriends the teacher. Both drop out for a life of partying, followed by self-reflection, followed by more partying.13. Ethel Cain, ‘American Teenager’Midwest emo as refracted through Southeastern parchedness under a filter of radio pop-rock, delivering devastating sentiment about the emptiness of the American dream and the hopelessness of those subject to its whims.Ethel Cain turns a critical eye on the American dream with her debut album, “Preacher’s Daughter.”Irina Rozovsky for The New York Times14. Joji, ‘Glimpse of Us’You OK, bro?15. Delaney Bailey, ‘J’s Lullaby (Darlin’ I’d Wait for You)’One long ache about the one who’s slipping away: “Darlin’, I wish that you could give me some more time/To herd the whole sky in my arms/And release it when you’re mine.”16. Muni Long, ‘Another’Luscious, indignant, scolding.17. Romeo Santos featuring Rosalía, ‘El Pañuelo’Two traditionalists at heart, each feeling out the outer boundaries of their appetite for risk while still honoring what the other can’t quite do.18. Hitkidd featuring Aleza, Gloss Up, Slimeroni and K Carbon, ‘Shabooya’Roll-call rap that bridges the early ’80s to the early ’20s, with a cadre of Memphis women reveling in filth and sass.19. Kidd G featuring YNW BSlime, ‘Left Me’Lil Durk featuring Morgan Wallen, ‘Broadway Girls’What is hip-hop to country music these days? A source of vocal inspiration? A place for experimentation? Close kin? Safe harbor?20. Fireboy DML and Ed Sheeran, ‘Peru’The globe-dominating update of the Fireboy DML solo hit features bright seduction delivered with jaunty rhythm from Ed Sheeran.Lindsay Zoladz’s Top 25Anxiety abounds in this modern world, and music is one surefire way to process it — or maybe, for a few minutes at a time, to escape from it. The songs on this list consider both options.1. Hurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Life on Earth’Conventional wisdom tells us that life is short, time flies and there are never enough hours in the day. But Alynda Segarra takes the long view on this elegiac, piano-driven hymn: “Rivers and lakes/And floods and earthquakes/Life on Earth is long.” As it progresses at its own unhurried tempo, the song, remarkably, seems to slow down time, or at least zoom out until it becomes something geological rather than selfishly human-centric. The thick haze of climate grief certainly hangs over the track (“And though I might not meet you there, leaving it beyond repair”) but its lingering effect is one of generosity and spaciousness, inspiring a fresh appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things.2. The 1975, ‘Happiness’Matty Healy, the gregarious leader of the British pop group the 1975, is rarely at a loss for words, but on the supremely catchy “Happiness,” infatuation leaves him tongue-tied: “My, my, my, oh/My, my, my, you.” Ultimately, though, the song becomes an ode to giving oneself over to forces beyond control: like love, the unknown or maybe just the groove — particularly the loose, sparkling atmosphere the band taps into here.3. Beyoncé, ‘Alien Superstar’The moon is a disco ball and it orbits around Beyoncé on this commanding dance-floor banger, a studied but lived-in ode to ball culture and Afrofuturism. Like the rest of the remarkable “Renaissance,” the song’s focus flickers constantly from the individual to the collective, as Beyoncé’s braggadocious boasts of being No. 1, the only one, share space with her exhortations to find that unicorn energy within: “Unique, that’s what you are,” she intones regally, before a transcendent finale in which the song takes flight on a Funkadelic spaceship of its own making.4. Amanda Shires, ‘Take It Like a Man’The melody keeps ascending to nervy, dangerous heights, like a high-wire walk without a net: “I know the cost of flight is landing,” Amanda Shires sings on this imagistic torch song, trilling like some newly discovered species of bird. The title is playfully provocative, but it takes a twist in the song’s final lyric, when Shires proclaims, “I know I can take it like … Amanda” — a fitting finale for such a singular song of self.Amanda Shires makes a strong statement on “Take It Like a Man,” also the name of her latest album.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York Times5. Taylor Swift, ‘Anti-Hero’Rejoice, you who have suffered through “Look What You Made Me Do,”“Me!” and even “Cardigan”: For the first time in nearly a decade, Taylor Swift has picked the correct lead single. “Anti-Hero” is one of the high points of Swift’s ongoing collaboration with the producer Jack Antonoff: The phrasing is chatty but not overstuffed, the synthesizers underline Swift’s emotions rather than obscuring them and the insecurities feel like genuine transmissions from Swift’s somnambulant psyche. Prospective daughters-in-law, you’ve been warned.6. Rosalía, ‘Despechá’Rosalía, smacking her gum, eyebrows raised, one hand on an exaggeratedly cocked hip: That’s the attitude, and this is its soundtrack. “Despechá” — abbreviated slang for spiteful — is a lighter-than-air, mambo-nodding dance-floor anthem, and an invitation to join the ranks of the Motomamis. As always, she makes pop perfection sound as easy as A-B-C.7. Pusha T, ‘Diet Coke’Pusha T, is, as ever, part rap-poet and part insult comic on the razor-sharp “Diet Coke,” bending language to his will and laughing his enemies right out of the V.I.P. room: “You ordered Diet Coke — that’s a joke, right?”8. Chloe Moriondo, ‘Fruity’“Fruity,” like the best hyperpop, is an anarchic affront to refinement and restraint, an ever-escalating blast of melodic delirium and warped excess. It’s a sugar rush, it’s brain-freeze-inducing, it’s recommended by zero out of 10 dentists. Turn it up loud.9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs featuring Perfume Genius, ‘Spitting off the Edge of the World’Yeah Yeah Yeahs grow elegantly into their role as art-rock elders here, not just by slowing to a tempo as confidently glacial as the Cure’s “Plainsong,” but by placing a spotlight on the existential dread of the next generation. “Mama, what have you done?” Karen O sings, channeling the voice of a frightened child. “I trace your steps in the darkness of one/Am I what’s left?”10. Grace Ives, ‘Lullaby’Grace Ives makes music of interiority, chronicling the liminal moments of her day when she’s by herself, daydreaming: “I hear the neighbors sing ‘Love Galore,’ I do a split on the kitchen floor,” goes the charming “Lullaby,” a passionately sung, welcoming invitation into her world.11. Weyes Blood, ‘It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’The pandemic left many people isolated in their own heads, questioning their perceptions, feeling disconnected from a larger whole. The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering has written a soothing anthem for all those lost souls in the emotionally generous “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”; its title alone is an offering of solace and sanity.12. Florence + the Machine, ‘Free’A bass line buzzes like a live wire, snaking continuously through this exorcism of anxiety. “The feeling comes so fast, and I cannot control it,” Florence Welch wails as if possessed, but she eventually finds her catharsis in the music itself: “For a moment, when I’m dancing, I am free.”13. Ice Spice, ‘Munch (Feelin’ U)’“I’m walking past him, he sniffing my breeze,” the rising star Ice Spice spits expeditiously on this unbothered anthem; before he can even process the insult, she’s gone.14. Drake, ‘Down Hill’A sparse palette from 40 — finger snaps, moody synth washes, light Afrobeats vibes — gives Drake plenty of room to explore his melancholy on this standout from the welcome left turn “Honestly, Nevermind.”15. Alex G, ‘Miracles’An aching, bittersweet meditation on the holiness of the everyday, and an expression of intimacy from one of indie rock’s most mysterious, and best, songwriters.16. Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Western Wind’The one-time “Call Me Maybe” ingénue shows off a breezier and more mature side, as impressionistic production from Rostam Batmanglij helps her conjure California sunshine.17. Mitski, ‘Stay Soft’“You stay soft, get eaten — only natural to harden up,” Mitski sings on this sleek but deceptively vulnerable pop song, as her voice, fittingly, oscillates between icy cool and wrenching ardor.Drake takes a refreshing swerve into dance music with the songs on “Honestly, Nevermind.”Prince Williams/Wireimage, via Getty Images18. Miranda Lambert, ‘Strange’Down is up and wrong is right in this topsy-turvy, tumbleweed-blown country rocker, on which a wizened Miranda Lambert sings like a woman who’s seen it all: “Pick a string, sing the blues, dance a hole in your shoes, do anything to keep you sane.”19. Plains, ‘Problem With It’Katie Crutchfield, better known as Waxahatchee, embraces her twang and her Alabama upbringing on this collaboration with the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson; the result is a feisty, ’90s-nodding country-pop gem.20. Charli XCX, ‘Constant Repeat’“I’m cute and I’m rude with kinda rare attitude,” she boasts on the best song from her aerodynamic “Crash” — a top-tier lyric befitting some next-level Charli.21. Alvvays, ‘Belinda Says’As in Belinda Carlisle, whom the Alvvays frontwoman Molly Rankin addresses at the climactic moment of this blissfully moody song: “Heaven is a place on Earth, well so is hell.” Towering waves of shoegaze-y guitars accentuate her melancholy and give the song an emotional pull as elemental as a tide.22. Jessie Ware, ‘Free Yourself’A thumping, glittery one-off single from the British musician finds her continuing in the vein of her 2020 disco reinvention “What’s Your Pleasure?” and proving that she’s still finding fresh inspiration from that sound.23. Koffee, ‘Pull Up’The Jamaican upstart Koffee has a contagious positivity about her, and this reggae-pop earworm is an effortless encapsulation of her spirit.24. Anaïs Mitchell, ‘Little Big Girl’“No one ever told you it would be like this: You keep on getting older, but you feel just like a little kid,” the folk musician Anaïs Mitchell sings on this moving standout from her first solo album in a decade, which poignantly chronicles the emotions of a demographic drastically underexplored in popular music: women at midlife.25. The Weather Station, ‘Endless Time’“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in a mirror-fogging exhale, eulogizing a whole host of things taken for granted — love, happiness, the inhabitability of Earth — expressing a fragile, and very human, disbelief that they won’t last forever. More

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    On ‘ForeverAndEverNoMore,’ Brian Eno Sings for the End of the World

    The musician and producer’s new songs meditate on folly and annihilation, playing like a far more fatalistic sequel to “Another Day on Earth” from 2005.When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance. That’s what Brian Eno has done on “ForeverAndEverNoMore”: a mournful, contemplative album that stares down humanity’s self-immolation in what he calls “the climate emergency.”“These billion years will end/They end in me,” he intones in “Garden of Stars,” as electronic tones go whizzing by and distortion flickers and crests around him like a cosmic radiation storm. It’s a song that marvels at the mathematical improbability of human life — “How then could it be that we appear at all?/In all this rock and fire, in all this gas and dust,” he sings — while envisioning its cessation.Although much of Eno’s solo catalog is instrumental — soundtracks, ambient albums, video and multimedia projects — he is no stranger to songs. He embraced pop structures, and riddled them with noise, on his early solo albums after he left Roxy Music in 1973, tossing off flippantly highbrow lyrics like “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics/You will find that their minds rarely move in a line” (“Backwater,” on the 1977 “Before and After Science”). Eno also produced hits, and sometimes sang, with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and others, and he has extolled the individual and collective benefits of group harmony singing.“ForeverAndEverNoMore” is decades and decisions removed from Eno’s 1970s song albums. At 74, Eno has taken on the stoic reserve of a sage. The new album plays like a far more fatalistic sequel to Eno’s most recent song-centered album, “Another Day on Earth” back in 2005, when he was already concerned with the state of the planet.On “ForeverAndEverNoMore,” Eno has traded percussiveness for sustain. Long drones underlie most of the tracks, echoing ancient traditions of mystical music; most of the instrumental sounds seem to arrive from great echoey distances. Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.The songs deliver indictments of human folly with measured calm. Slow, deep breathing sets the rhythm of “We Let It In,” as Eno sings, “We open to the blinding sky” to the soothing notes of a major chord; his daughter Darla Eno quietly repeats the words “deep sun.” In its reverberating solidity, the song makes global warming sound encompassing and inevitable.“There Were Bells” has bleaker lyrics, with birdsong and blue skies giving way to war and annihilation: “In the end they all went the same way,” it concludes. Singing a doleful melody over a tolling, inexorably descending bass line, Eno’s voice takes on a deepening melancholy as the music darkens, thickens and eventually thunders around him; all he can do is bear witness before going silent.There’s little comfort on “ForeverAndEverNoMore.” In “These Small Noises,” set to operatic keyboard arpeggios from Jon Hopkins, Eno imagines a useful afterlife by becoming compost — “Make us into land/Land of soil we owe our fathers” — but ends with a curse: “Go to hell/in hell to burn.” The album’s two instrumentals, “Making Gardens Out of Silence” (based on music from his sound installation at the Serpentine Galleries’ exhibition “Back to Earth”) and “Inclusion” return to Eno’s ambient side, placing elongated, breath-defying melodies in an electronic ether. On this album, they sound like they’re anticipating a post-human eternity.Perhaps the planet’s surviving species will appreciate the music.Brian Eno“ForeverAndEverNoMore”(Verve/UMC) More

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    Beyoncé’s Anthem for the Unique, and 10 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Rosalía, Brian Eno, Robert Glasper and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Beyoncé, ‘Alien Superstar’Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, “Renaissance,” is a dazzling nightclub fantasia, a nimble, freewheeling journey through decades of dance music that feels almost Prince-like in its ambition. Sequenced seamlessly between the humid beats of “Cozy” and the immaculately produced disco throwback “Cuff It,” the Afrofuturistic “Alien Superstar” is a bold pop homage to ballroom culture and an embodiment of the escapist, self-celebratory ethos that courses throughout “Renaissance.” “Unique, that’s what you are,” Beyoncé intones from on high, “Stilettos kicking vintage crystal off the bar.” Grace Jones, who appears later in the album on the charismatic “Move,” certainly feels like a touchstone here, but in the album’s liner notes Beyoncé also shouts out the familial influence of her late Uncle Jonny, a queer Black man who, she writes, was “the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and the culture that serve as inspiration for this album.” The word unique becomes a motif throughout “Alien Superstar,” and in the song’s outro, a sampled speech from Barbara Ann Teer, the founder of Harlem’s National Black Theater, drives the point home, resonantly: “We dress a certain way, we walk a certain way, we talk a certain way, we paint a certain way, we make love a certain way. All of these things we do in a different, unique, specific way that is personally ours.” By the end of this song, it goes without saying: Same for Beyoncé. LINDSAY ZOLADZRosalía, ‘Despechá’Rosalía sounds aggressively unbothered on the studio version of “Despechá,” a fan favorite she’s been playing live on her Motomami World Tour. Influenced by Dominican merengue, “Despechá” is a quintessential summer jam, built around a buoyant piano riff and an insistent beat. There’s a current of defiance driving Rosalía’s vocals, though, as she attempts to shake off the memory of a disappointing lover on the dance floor: “Baby, no me llames,” she begins (“Baby, don’t call me). “Que yo estoy ocupá olvidando tus males” (“I’m busy forgetting your ills”). ZOLADZU.S. Girls, ‘So Typically Now’The music of Meg Remy’s ever-evolving project U.S. Girls has rarely sounded as sleek as it does on the synth-pop “So Typically Now,” which makes the satirical bite of its lyrics that much more surprising. “Brooklyn’s dead, and Kingston is booming,” Remy vamps on this cheeky critique of pandemic-era exodus, gentrification and rising housing costs. A thumping beat and a glossy sheen that’s somewhere between Robyn and Kylie Minogue provides the foundation for Remy’s social commentary, while sky-high backing vocals from Kyle Kidd take the track to the next level. “Gotta sell all my best,” Remy sings archly, “to buy more, not less.” ZOLADZRina Sawayama, ‘Hold the Girl’Orchestral anthem? Dance-floor thumper? Fingerpicked folk-pop ditty? Hyperpop twitcher? Choral affirmation? Rina Sawayama chooses all of the above on “Hold the Girl,” a vow to reconnect with her younger self — “Reach inside and hold her close/I won’t leave you on your own” — that flits from style to style, cheerfully claiming every one. JON PARELESRobert Glasper featuring Masego, ‘All Masks’Pandemic malaise and endurance are the foundation of “All Masks,” which looks back on years of “all masks, no smiles.” Over a murky, oozy track with synthesizer chords that climb patiently only to fall back to where they started, Masego sings about “Looking like you’re in disguise every day/Breathing my own breath.” “All Masks” comes from an expanded version of “Black Radio III” due this fall, continuing the keyboardist Robert Glasper’s decade-long series of “Black Radio” albums that merge R&B, hip-hop and jazz. A pensive, darting piano improvisation near the end of the song is a whiff of possibility amid the constraints. PARELESBrian Eno, ‘There Were Bells’“There Were Bells” is a threnody for planetary extinction from Brian Eno’s coming album, “Foreverandevernomore.” The LP, he has said, is about “our narrowing, precarious future,” and it returns to songs with lyrics and vocals after more than a decade of primarily instrumental and ambient works. “There Were Bells” begins with birdsong and floating, glimmering sustained tones. Eno croons, in what could be a lullaby or a dirge, about natural beauty, but then human destruction ensues; as the track deepens, darkens and thunders, he observes “storms and floods of blood,” until no one can escape: “In the end they all went the same way,” he sings, leaving an echoey void. PARELESRat Tally, ‘Prettier’Addy Harris, who records as Rat Tally, faces chronic depression in the elegantly heartsick “Prettier”: “Sorry, I’ve just been down for the past decade,” she sings, over fingerpicked guitar. “I always did think I’m prettier when I’m unhappy/So do you,” she adds, as synthesizers bubble up behind her. “When I drop, I plummet,” she sings — examining herself with cool compassion, wondering what could change. PARELESPlains, ‘Problem With It’Plains is a new group formed by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and the underrated singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — two Southern-born musicians who began their careers in the indie-rock world but whose more recent albums have reconnected with their country roots. Crutchfield and Williamson’s voices blend gorgeously on Plains’ hard-driving debut single “Problem With It,” which will appear on the forthcoming album “I Walked With You a Ways.” Crutchfield’s smoky twang takes center stage on the verses, but Williamson’s harmonies flesh out the chorus so that the lines land like bold, self-assured mantras: “If you can’t do better than that, babe, I got a problem with it.” ZOLADZAmaarae, ‘A Body, a Coffin’Amaarae, from Ghana, has an airborne, Auto-Tuned soprano in “A Body, a Coffin,” from an EP called “Wakanda Forever Prologue” that starts the rollout for the movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” A crisp, staccato Afrobeats rhythm track, a little flute lick and a swarm of now-you-hear-them, now-you-don’t computer-manipulated voices back her as she sings about facing deadly odds: “You was in danger/I needed a savior.” The track ends, in Marvel Cinematic Universe fashion, as a cliffhanger. PARELESPalm, ‘Feathers’Palm — formerly an indie-rock band that brandished jittery, asymmetrical, tangled guitars — has used its four years between albums to learn electronic instruments. “Feathers,” from an album due in October, reveals the band’s new mastery with a clanging, lurching, meter-shifting song that enjoys programmed, multitracked precision even as Eve Alpert sings about spontaneity. “Imma make it up as I go,” she lilts, and for all its premeditation, the song swings. PARELESBobby Krlic, ‘KJ’s Discovery’Bobby Krlic, who usually records as the Haxan Cloak, has composed the score for a new Amazon series, “Paper Girls,” and “KJ’s Discovery” is from its soundtrack album. It’s one-and-a-half minutes of aggressive six-beat and four-beat propulsion: drums and gongs interwoven with electronic blips and throbs, like an ominous, time-warped gamelan. PARELES More

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    Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans

    When the Hirshhorn Museum told Laurie Anderson that it wanted to put on a big, lavish retrospective of her work, she said no. For one thing, she was busy. She has been busy now for roughly 50 years, hauling her keyboards and experimental violins all over the world to put on huge bonanzas of lasers and noise loops and incantatory monologues that she delivers in a voice somewhere between slam poetry, an evening newscast, a final confession and a bedtime story. Although Anderson plays multiple instruments, her signature tool has always been her voice. Words emerge from her mouth deliberate and hyperenunciated, surrounded by unpredictable pauses. She piles up phrases the way van Gogh piled up brush strokes.Over the course of her incessant career, Anderson has done just about everything a creative person can do. She has helped design an Olympics opening ceremony, served as the official artist in residence for NASA, made an opera out of “Moby-Dick” and played a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House. She has danced the tango with William S. Burroughs and flown to a tropical island with John Cage. And she is still going. As Anderson once put it to me, during a brief pause between trips to Paris and New Zealand, just before a Carnegie Hall performance with Iggy Pop: “Lately, I’m doing a stupid amount of things.”On top of all this, Anderson had philosophical qualms about a retrospective. She is 74, which seems like a very normal age to stop and look back, and yet she seems determined, at all times, to keep moving forward. She is a perpetually cresting wave, a little green shoot constantly emerging from its seed. The last thing she wanted was to stop and stand still and be institutionalized in a big museum. This is the paradox of Laurie Anderson: What makes her worthy of a retrospective also makes her basically retrospective-proof.Anderson’s response to the Hirshhorn was a counterproposal: How about a show of entirely new work?“In some ways, I wasn’t surprised,” Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director, told me. “She’s so interested in the here and now. We had to make peace with that. We made a decision, early on, to say: OK, Laurie’s got this.”The Hirshhorn gave Anderson the whole second floor and then followed her lead. (There were a few exceptions. When Anderson proposed filling part of a room with stinky wet mud, the museum, citing policy, said no.) The result is a show called “The Weather,” a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of one of America’s major, and majorly confounding, modern artists. Chiu says the show is less a traditional exhibition than a giant artist’s project that happens to be set in our national museum of modern art.The Hirshhorn sits right on the National Mall, midway between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. This makes it the perfect site to showcase Anderson’s work. She has always been obsessed with America; her whole career, as she describes it, has been an attempt “to tell and retell the national story.” This is, of course, a fraught, impossible project. But then Anderson is a fraught, impossible storyteller.“Americans have traditionally demanded coherent and simple national stories,” she has written. “Now many of these stories no longer make any sense. But so far nothing has replaced them. We are in story limbo, and for a storyteller this is an intensely interesting place to be.”Anderson’s stories tend to be broken and fragmented, unfinished, nonlinear, elusive, pointless — stories about the impossibility of stories. They are often gender-fluid. (She appears, sometimes, as a character called Fenway Bergamot, a male alter ego with thick eyebrows and a mustache.) In place of coherence, in place of the machine logic of propaganda, Anderson inserts dream logic, joke logic, the self-swallowing logic of Buddhism. She likes to hollow out triumphant national stories and fill them with doubt. She once summarized “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for instance, as “just a lot of questions asked during a fire.” (“Say, isn’t that a flag?” she asked, pointing into the distance. “Couldn’t say,” she answered, “it’s pretty early in the morning.”)Chiu told me, with what sounded like a mixture of awe and anxiety, that she could imagine Anderson wanting to change the Hirshhorn show even after it was installed.I asked Anderson if she could see herself doing this. Absolutely, she said. In fact, she was planning on it. She wanted to hang her new paintings in the museum and then paint over them, right there on the walls. She even fantasized, aloud, about painting over them again after the show opened.When I mentioned this to Marina Abramovic, one of Anderson’s longtime friends, she laughed admiringly.“Laurie is a total nightmare for every gallerist,” she said.At various times, the Hirshhorn show was touch and go. There were issues with paperwork, logistics. There was a whole pandemic. At one point, Chiu told me that Anderson basically disappeared.“She’s offline,” Chiu said.“She’s offline?” I asked.“Yes.”“Did she send out a declaration or something?”“No, she just told us that she was going offline.”“OK,” I said.“Until it subsides,” she said.“Until it subsides?”“Yes,” Chiu said, and paused. “She’s very mysterious.”“I learn about things by talking about them.”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesOne winter day, Anderson invited me to her studio at the end of Canal Street, right where it meets the Hudson River. She has been working here since the 1970s — since the downtown glory days of Warhol, Basquiat, CBGB, Patti Smith, the Ramones, David Bowie, etc. etc. etc. I sat there petting her scruffy terrier, Little Will, while Anderson talked to me about basically everything in the universe. She told me about ponies (“If ponies were people they’d all be in jail”) and donkeys (“They have the best memory in the animal kingdom”) and about how the Hudson River is full of seahorses — not the elegant tropical wiggly jewels that you tend to see in aquariums, but New York City seahorses. Survivors. “Funky, brown, crusty,” she said.I had come prepared with a notebook full of nervous sweaty questions, because Anderson is an icon of the avant-garde, a titan and a pioneer, and her career is so staggeringly full and deep and weird that my brain kept breaking whenever I tried to think about it. But my questions turned out to be unnecessary. Anderson is maybe the easiest person to talk to I have ever met. A conversation with her is self-propelling and unpredictable, an instant flood of ideas and funny stories and book recommendations and factoids. Did you know that a mosquito, in really bad storms, can hang onto a raindrop and ride safely toward the ground? Anderson will pause to show you viral videos on her phone and websites on her laptop. She will ask questions — “Have you noticed that?” or “How do you handle that?” or “Do you think so?” — and then she will actually listen to the answers. Because of the circles she moves in, even the most basic stories about her life can sound like outrageous name dropping. She had just been to Yoko Ono’s 87th birthday party. She told me a funny story about Donna Karan and quoted something Brian Eno once told her. (“You don’t tell other people what’s in your bank account — it’s the last taboo.”) At one point, she was reminiscing about Alice Waters, an old friend, when suddenly her phone rang, and the caller ID actually said, right out loud, “Julian Schnabel.” That’s what it’s like to be around Anderson.“I’m a really blabby person,” she told me. “I learn about things by talking about them.”After a few minutes, however, the conversation paused. Anderson asked if I would mind helping her carry some stuff down the stairs. She had to rehearse, later, with a cellist she’d been improvising with. Of course not, I said. Anderson is small and slim and slight, a sort of national heritage site of a human being, and I told her I would be happy to haul whatever needed hauling.“How about one of these?” she said. She handed me a small electrical cord, neatly coiled. “And one of these?” She handed me a second cord.Anderson, meanwhile, walked over to a huge black box, roughly the size of a filing cabinet, the kind of mysterious case a magician might drag onstage for the final trick of the night. She heaved it off the ground, then proceeded to lug it, all by herself, down a narrow spiral staircase. I followed her with my two cords. It became clear to me that she hadn’t needed my help at all. She just had something to do, and she wanted to keep moving while we talked.One floor down, in her music studio, Anderson clunked the black box down. She knelt and opened it, revealing a whole nest of sci-fi-ish equipment: keyboards, screens, metal frames, a shipyard’s worth of cords and wires. This, broken into pieces, was her performance rig — a big block of gear that she has assembled and disassembled and hauled across the world infinite times.She is the American heartland affectionately alienated from itself.For the next 30 minutes or so, I watched Anderson unpack and construct this rig. She worked with deep absorption, with quick expert movements, clonking pieces together, kneeling and then popping upright, tightening knobs, unfolding frames, zipping zippers, testing the connections of cords. It was strangely mesmerizing. Every time I thought the case was empty, she would pull out something else: a microphone, an iPad, a synthesizer, a chunk of wood. Before long, Anderson had assembled a multilevel architecture of screens and keyboards. One entire keyboard was just for her feet. From somewhere, I didn’t even see where, she pulled out a futuristic-looking violin, and she hooked it over her shoulder, and then suddenly the whole rig started to vibrate with noise: thumping bass, organ chords, tinkling piano, wild gusts of piercing sustained notes. She seemed to be marshaling whole armies of instruments, lining them up in different formations, setting them against one another. Anderson has been perfecting her command center for decades now, streamlining it and juicing up its weird powers. Watching her bring it to life felt less like watching a musician prepare for a rehearsal than like some kind of religious ceremony: a ritual, a discipline. The equipment and the noises it made seemed to reach down into her bones and spirit.Anderson, her assistant told me, insists on setting this whole rig up herself, every single time, whether she is alone in the studio or about to play Carnegie Hall. Sometimes, when Anderson is setting up out in public, on a stage, she will avoid interruptions by wearing a disguise: a roadie T-shirt and a long black wig. It is minimalist but, apparently, extremely convincing. One time, Anderson told me, a close friend came up to her before a show, while she was absorbed in constructing her rig — and she asked Laurie Anderson, from just inches away, if Laurie Anderson was in the building yet.Laurie Anderson in her studio in 1980.Allan Tannenbaum/Getty ImagesIggy Pop, who grew up in a trailer park in Michigan, helped me understand something essential about Anderson.“Is she from Ohio?” he asked me, in a voice so deep and rough and weather-beaten I worried it was going to blow out the speakers in my phone.“Illinois,” I said.“Close enough,” he said.Then he explained. “She has this really nice, steady, clear energy,” he said. “She looks straight at you and doesn’t bring any problems with it. That’s something special about her. There’s some clear-cut, no-nonsense, Midwest stuff in there.”This is the elemental force that Iggy Pop was picking up on: Midwesternness. Although Anderson has come to be associated with New York, with Europe, with cosmopolitan intellectualism, her baseline vibe is extremely Midwestern — normal, practical, unpretentious, conspicuously kind. This is a good way to read her work — all those avant-garde stories spooling out around familiar things (weather, sweaters, pet dogs, J.F.K.). She is the American heartland affectionately alienated from itself. Anderson is the middle of our nation asking out loud, in a spirit of loving curiosity, what on Earth it thinks it is doing.Anderson was born in 1947, into a large, eccentric family outside Chicago. She was one of eight children. Growing up in that household meant marinating, constantly, in language and stories. One of her brothers was named Thor; a sister was named India. At dinner, each child was expected to tell the story of their day — a recitation that could go on indefinitely and include a baffling variety of incidents and styles. On Sundays, their grandmother took the kids to church, and Laurie became fascinated by the dreamlike surrealism of the Bible: “talking snakes, an ocean that suddenly parted to form a road, stones that turned into bread and dead people brought back to life.” These stories, Anderson would later write, “were the first clues that we live in an irrational and complicated world.” Two of Anderson’s younger brothers were twins, and as kids they invented a private language so elaborate that it drew the attention of a linguistic researcher. It was, in other words, a perfect childhood for producing Laurie Anderson: deep normalcy inflected by sharp stabs of strangeness.With so many people around, Anderson found it easy to slip away and do her own thing. She relished her freedom. She took long bike rides and went ice skating on ponds. In elementary school, she joined an all-girl gang that threatened to poke boys’ eyes out with sharp sticks. In sixth grade, Anderson founded a painting club whose members posed for each other nude. Every day, for many hours, she practiced her violin. On Saturdays, she took the train to Chicago, where she would study painting at the Art Institute and play in the Chicago Youth Symphony.Anderson’s parents were a study in contrasts. Her father was personable, funny, affectionate. Her mother was formal, distant, intimidating, hard to read. Anderson describes her mother as a kind of bottled-up genius: She went to college at 16, married young and immediately started having children. In her rare spare time, she read voraciously. She designed the family’s house herself. One of Anderson’s earliest memories is of waking up in the middle of the night, around 4 a.m., and seeing her mother still awake, alone, reading. “She was very smart, very focused,” Anderson told me. “She really should have been, like, the head of a big corporation. But she got caught in a generation of women who didn’t get to do that. ” Every morning, when Laurie left the house, her mother would offer a single word of advice: “Win!” Anderson remembers thinking: What does that mean?Later, the voice that Anderson would use in her art performances — that distinctive blend of casual and formal, fluid and halting, warm and cold — was a combination of her parents’ voices. Her father’s sly deadpan; her mother’s precise, ironic detachment.In college, Anderson studied biology for one year. But this only confirmed her desire to make art. In 1966, she moved to New York and dove headfirst into that world. She studied at Barnard and wrote reviews for Artforum. At the School of Visual Arts, she studied sculpture with Sol Lewitt and Carl Andre. The trend, back then, was to make huge, heavy steel monoliths, but Anderson decided to work mostly with newspaper. She would pulp The New York Times and shape it into bricks, or cut multiple newspapers into long, thin strips and weave them together. Already, she was manipulating stories, slicing and crushing and blending them.The art world, Anderson realized, was not set up to showcase storytelling, this art form she had learned to love as a child. Museums were designed for objects, not the human voice as it moved words through time. Early on, Anderson became obsessed with the challenge of smuggling stories into art galleries. She began experimenting with audio, video, performance. Her work became increasingly about voice: looking for the line between voice and nonvoice, speech and nonspeech, story and nonstory. She built a talking “robot” out of plywood and organized a concert for car horns. She made little clay figures, onto which she projected Super 8 films so that the statues seemed to move, to speak, to live. “Fake holograms,” she called them. Little by little, she managed to bring her Midwestern origins into New York. She found a way to invite the whole art world to sit down at her childhood dining-room table.Marina Abramovic first heard about Laurie Anderson in 1975. Abramovic was living in Europe at the time, hand-to-mouth, sleeping in her car, traveling from one country to the next to do the performance pieces that would eventually make her reputation. She and her partner, Ulay, would braid their hair together and sit back to back in a gallery for 17 hours, or they would get naked and run across the room and repeatedly slam into each other and fall over. In the midst of all this, Abramovic heard about something wild happening down in Italy: A young American woman was doing street performances in Genoa. Every day she would pick a different spot in the city and stand there playing some kind of cyborg violin — it had tape loops and speakers inside of it, so the violin would play prerecorded violin music, and the American would stand there and play the violin along with itself. A “self-playing violin,” she called it. But that wasn’t even the best part. The best part was that this young American was playing her experimental violin while standing on ice skates, and the blades of the skates were frozen into two huge blocks of ice — so as she played her cyborg violin, as crowds of baffled Italians gathered to watch, the ice blocks she was standing on would slowly melt, and eventually the skates would clunk down onto the pavement, and that would be the end of the performance. Anderson would stop playing and walk off. She called the piece “Duets on Ice.”Marina Abramovic thought that this was basically the most wonderful thing she had ever heard of. Soon the two artists met. The first thing they talked about, Abramovic says, was money. Like most young artists, they were hustlers, eking out a living from stingy gallery owners. Anderson approached it all as a kind of game. She had inserted herself into the European art circuit through a fabulous deception: She wrote to roughly 500 venues and told them, falsely, that she had booked a European tour. Would they like to be added to it? As she tells it, 498 venues said no. But the two that said yes were enough to get her going. From there, she improvised. She dragged her huge black box — the keyboards, cords, lights, amps — back and forth across the continent. To Abramovic, Anderson seemed small and vulnerable. But she quickly learned not to underestimate her new friend.Anderson performing “Duets on Ice” in Genoa, Italy, in 1975.Photograph by Paolo Rocci, via Laurie Anderson“I always have this feeling to protect her,” Abramovic told me. “I feel bigger, you know. I come from Montenegro, which is like a world of strong warriors in the mountains. But I don’t think she needs protection. Really, she’s a very stable little strong baby. Not weak at all.”Today, Abramovic looks back fondly at those old European struggles.“It was so incredibly pure,” she told me. “The art was no commodity. You were doing it because you believed in it. There was so much purity and innocence.”Anderson, despite all her success, still works in this spirit. The anti-careerism of her career is part of what has made her illegible, and often invisible, to mainstream audiences. Although she is a legend in some circles, she is totally unknown in others. She remains uncategorizable in a way that strikes me as both naïve and deliberate, pure and perverse, simple and profound. She moves in the tradition of John Cage, Fluxus, Schoenberg, Warhol. I mentioned to Julian Schnabel that I was having trouble summarizing Anderson’s career. “Well, it’s not really a career,” he said. “She’s really unemployable.”If people outside the art world have heard of Anderson, it is probably because of her song “O Superman (For Massenet),” one of the least likely pop hits in music history. Anderson recorded the song in a studio she set up in her hallway. It is eight minutes long, with a background beat that is entirely a loop of Anderson’s voice, heavily processed, saying the word “Ha.” On top of this — ha ha ha ha ha ha ha — she layers cryptic and haunting electro-poetry: “So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. In your automatic arms. … Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.” (The song was inspired by the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, although you wouldn’t really know it, going in cold.) Anderson had 1,000 copies of “O Superman” pressed; she kept them in her apartment and sold them, personally, via mail order.Then, in 1981, the ridiculous happened. Anderson’s experimental art song caught the attention of an influential English D.J., and “O Superman” shot up the British charts all the way to No. 2. It was voted best single in The Village Voice’s influential Pazz & Jop critics poll — tied for the top spot with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” a song that is its opposite in basically every way. The music critic Robert Christgau called it “the pop event of the year.” Iggy Pop told me the “O Superman” video was the only thing on MTV that year that he could relate to. A British distribution company ordered 80,000 copies. Warner Brothers signed Anderson to an eight-album deal. Pitchfork would later rank her ensuing album, “Big Science,” the No. 22 album of the 1980s, adding accurately: “Listening to Laurie Anderson’s first album is like sitting down with a strange form of life that has been studying us for a long time.”Anderson was suddenly a paradox: mainstream avant-garde. Her scrappy little art career morphed, almost overnight, into touring, songwriting, recording. She poured her creativity into increasingly elaborate stage shows. She got tired, for instance, of projecting films onto screens — she hated trapping all those moving images inside of flat rectangles. So she made screens that were cylinders, cubes, spheres. She started projecting things onto couches, into corners, onto huge pieces of crumpled paper. She wore a big white canvas dress and projected images onto herself. She put cameras on violin bows and microphone stands.When Iggy Pop finally saw Anderson in concert — this multimedia assault of loops and text and voice and images — he was duly impressed.“She was up there alone with her fiddle,” he said. “I don’t remember what was said, but what I took away was just that she had big balls. Those stages are huge, you know? And there she was, all by herself. Boy, I thought. That’s a heavy chick.”He laughed apologetically. “Hey, you can take the boy out of the country, you know?” Anderson met Lou Reed in 1992, in Munich, at a music festival. They were each, in different ways, underground royalty. Reed was a legendary rock-’n’-roll badass: former frontman of the Velvet Underground, critically acclaimed solo artist, author of the 1970s hit “Walk on the Wild Side.” Anderson didn’t really know who he was. Again, she was very busy. After the festival, Reed suggested that they meet up in New York. Sure, she said. How about in four months?Their first date was at an audio-equipment convention; they met in the tube microphone section and spent all afternoon discussing gear. Anderson didn’t realize it was a date until Reed invited her to coffee, then a movie, then dinner, then on a walk. “From then on,” she writes, “we were never really apart.”Well, they were and they weren’t. They met later in life, when both were established in their careers. Anderson remained, as always, busy and free. They never fully moved in together; she kept her own space and continued to disappear, for long stretches, to drag her black box around Europe. In New York, she worked at her studio on Canal Street. Reed stayed at his apartment on 11th Street. They each had a view of the Hudson River, and Reed would call her sometimes during the day to point out an interesting cloud. Then they would stay on the phone together, looking at it for a while.Reed was notorious, in music circles, for his fiery temper. But everyone was struck by how in love he was with Anderson. It was one of the great wonders of the world. Anderson mellowed Lou Reed. As Reed’s biographer Anthony DeCurtis puts it: “People who met them together and expected the fearsome Lou Reed were struck by how puppyish he could be around her.”Anderson and Reed in 2002.Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive, via Getty Images“She was always running all over the world performing and doing all these things,” Schnabel told me, “and he missed her quite a bit. But at the same time, he was so impressed by her. He kept saying to me: ‘You know, she’s a genius. Laurie is a genius. You know that?’ They really loved each other a lot. And they got so much from each other, in the most buoyant and loving way.”Reed wrote lyrics about Anderson: “I’ve met a woman with a thousand faces, and I want to make her my wife.” But they didn’t marry until 16 years after they met. It was a grand romantic gesture. In 2008, the two of them were talking on a cross-continental phone call — he was in New York, she in California — and Anderson said that she regretted never marrying. Reed insisted that they marry the next day. So they did. They met each other halfway, in Colorado. Immediately after the ceremony, they went off together to perform in a show.Just a few years later, Reed got sick: hepatitis C, diabetes, liver cancer. He worked, stoically, to keep up his regular life. He dressed every morning. He did tai chi. But soon he started to decline. A liver transplant seemed to be working for a while, until suddenly it wasn’t. One particularly bad day, Reed and Anderson went to visit Julian Schnabel’s studio in Montauk. Everyone was horribly depressed. Schnabel set up a huge canvas and told Anderson to paint. She didn’t want to. She had given up painting decades before. But Schnabel insisted. So Anderson picked up a brush and made some black marks. Suddenly she could not stop. She slathered the canvas in black. When she was done, Schnabel looked at her work. “You know,” he said, “red can be black. So can pink.” For some reason, in that moment, Anderson found the idea of pink being black terrifying. But eventually she took his advice. She started to experiment with colors, started to love painting again. At her Hirshhorn show, Anderson’s favorite room features only new paintings: no multimedia wizardry, no noise, just big canvases covered with splashes of color.In 2013, Lou Reed died. It was late October. The last thing he asked for was to be taken outside, into the light. Anderson, of course, was by his side.“I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died,” she wrote afterward. “His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life — so beautiful, painful and dazzling — does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.”I spoke with Anderson for this article, off and on, for nearly two years. Which means that our relationship spanned multiple apocalyptic spasms. Pandemic. Public murders. Protests. Insurrection. Storms and fires. I asked her, multiple times, what it all meant. What story could we tell ourselves about this moment? But she always seemed to defer. It’s too early to tell that story, she said. We have to wait and see.The last time I saw Anderson, my family and I had just come back from Oregon, the place of my birth, a place I tend to see, still, through the idealized glow of early childhood. After two years stranded on the East Coast, I missed it terribly. But out in the real world, Oregon had changed. Downtown Portland, after months of clashes between protesters and the police, was largely boarded up. People were living in tents on the sidewalks and streets. Early on our first morning, we woke up to the sound of a woman screaming outside, over and over. We walked past human feces on the sidewalk. It was the middle of a deadly heat wave, the hottest temperatures ever recorded, and to the east wildfires were raging out of control — in every direction, the horizon was blurred by smoke. The ragged trees of my youth, up on the hills, looked like ghosts. Finally we drove south, away from the big cities, and the smoke only thickened. Some of the most beautiful places I have ever been, my favorite places on Earth, were nearly unrecognizable. You couldn’t see the scenic mountains right on the edge of town. The air was like barbecue smoke. It felt like an apocalypse, like a failed society.In her studio in New York, Anderson told me that she, too, has been thinking about the end. The collapse of civilization. The possibility of human extinction. What stories will be possible, she asked, when everything is gone? Can we tell a story if no one is listening?“She has this really nice, steady, clear energy,” says Iggy Pop.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesAnderson said she has become obsessed, lately, with artificial intelligence. An Australian university she has collaborated with has created a text engine designed to write in three styles: Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and a combination Anderson/Reed. You just have to feed it a little information — six words, or a photo — and it will produce, almost instantly, a whole virtual text.The program isn’t perfect yet, Anderson said. Roughly a third of what the computer spits out is total nonsense — “monkeys with typewriters” — and another third is just boring. But the final third is surprising, even authentic, some kind of new fresh magic. That final third is what keeps her coming back. Sometimes she sits there with the hunger of an addict, feeding words and pictures into the engine, seeing what comes out. For a long time, she would save the texts. They felt so precious. After a while, though, she realized that the texts were infinite. She could have one whenever she needed it. So she read them and then let them go.Anderson got out her laptop, turned it toward me and opened the A.I. text box.“Ask it a question,” she said.I thought for a second. “What is the story of America?” I asked.Anderson typed it in. After a few seconds, the A.I. answered with a long paragraph in Anderson’s voice. It was actually a good impression — it talked about America elliptically, as Anderson would, using a metaphor of a theater production. “Theaters who really know what they’re doing don’t just copy other people’s lines but rework them, amplify them, make them their own,” the fake Anderson said, and the real Anderson read it aloud. “And people tell each other their story which is called the story and there are lots of stories about betrayal and redemption and love and hate and heroism and sacrifice and the end. And then of course there are the countless movies that are made every day by some kind of action hero or action hero with a lot of running and talking and bravery and some sort of democracy.”Not bad, we agreed.Then Anderson ran that same question through the A.I. — “What is the story of America?” — but asked it to answer in the voice of Lou Reed.The computer answered with a poem:The storyOf the dirtIt hurtTo be so goodAnd then to be so badYou shouldNot have comeAll the wayFrom Europe and back againJust to seeWhat would happenTo these peopleIf they found outWhat you had doneBut what could they doWith all the evidenceThat they had gatheredBoth from youAnd from othersNamely, from your faceThe albino friendWho came disguisedAs a bird from the airTo ask for moneyBecause he or she was worthMore than you or your parentsWere worth moreBecause of whatThey did in the nameOf whom you were madeThe bondsman walks slowlyIn front of meHolding his audienceUntil I walkSlowly in front of himToward the light at theAt the end of the streetlightsAnderson read this out loud to me: this poem about America, her lost country, in the voice of her dead husband, ending with the discussion of him moving toward one final light. She did a few more Lou poems, including one in which he spoke in the most intimate terms: “my eyes are thin and dry, my heart is beating very fast.” Anderson’s whole career has been about voice, voice as presence, and here — in the room with us, coming out of a computer — was her husband’s voice. I asked her how that felt, to hear this simulacrum, this computer-Lou, referring to himself like that.“Wonderful,” she said. “Just great. He’s talking to me from somewhere else. I definitely do feel that. The line is pretty thin for me.”Finally we fed the A.I. a photo of one of Anderson’s recent paintings, a huge whirl of color that she hung in the Hirshhorn a few weeks earlier, then painted over and renamed “Autumn.” We fed it to the A.I. and waited. We waited longer. We kept waiting. The A.I. had nothing to say. More

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    It’s Time to Give Enya Another Listen

    Even at her peak, she was hugely famous but never especially cool. But maybe we’re finally ready to heed her whispered call to awaken.On the long drives through Ireland that peppered my childhood like bouts of flu, my father played songs from a small a pool of classic albums. Many of these would be familiar to any Irishman from that time. The cheerful ribaldry of the Dubliners, Christy Moore’s “Live at the Point” and the earnest, heart-tugging confessionals of Eleanor McEvoy and Mary Black all soundtracked our winding trips through the unending swatches of green that formed the Irish countryside. But none of those artists struck me like my father’s personal favorite, Enya.My father’s fascination with Enya was mysterious. Her music wasn’t like anything else he listened to, but then, it’s not much like the music anyone else makes either. Enya’s music is suffused with an aura of mysticism so nebulous it borders on the occult; nevertheless it enraptured a man so Catholic he would interrupt family holidays with cheerful visits to Marian shrines. The global success of this mélange of Irish traditional music and new-age electronica was unlikely given that the bulwark of her fandom, in Ireland at least, appeared to be people like my father: rank traditionalists entering middle age, few of whom would have countenanced synthesizers, arpeggiated strings or heavy reverb in any other aural context.I, a youthful devotee of ambient music, loved Enya for her place in that genre’s canon. I was mesmerized by the folding synthscapes of “Caribbean Blue” or “Sumiregusa (Wild Violet),” which hit my childhood ears like probes from a far-flung planet. Her melodies recursed and interwound; her vocals shimmered and shone, at once new and old, alien and familiar. It just confused me to see my father similarly moved. After all, even Aphex Twin’s most soothing ambient works often made him unplug my CD player, as if their nontraditional musical forms might damage our wiring. How, then, could Enya reduce this same man to tears?It helped that she was local. As a child, Eithne Brennan grew up not far from Mullennan, my home, in one of the most prestigious families in the history of Irish traditional music. She departed from the Brennans’ band, Clannad, at a young age, boned up on Japanese synths and crafted a strange musical form that was all her own. By the time I was an adolescent, the shy little sister of Clannad had become one of the biggest-selling recording artists on Earth. Within the spiraling melody of ‘Aldebaran’ there is euphoria and gravitas, as well as something approaching dread.When I was a teenager, Enya was hugely famous but never especially cool, at least not among people my age. I adored Enya for the sonic worlds she charted for her listeners: filled with pomp and grandiosity, yes, but also rivers of deep and intense wonder. I found in her music that same pinch of the infinite I felt listening to “An Ending (Ascent),” by Brian Eno, or “Polynomial-C,” by Aphex Twin. Yet when I tried to posit her as a peer of those artists, the stares I received were blank and pitying. The images blaring out from Enya’s album covers and videos were unerringly earnest, simultaneously too camp to be serious and too serious to be camp. For all her peculiar complexity, my classmates wrote Enya off as easy listening, on par with panpipe Muzak.This skepticism was probably because of the mythological visual style that Enya built around herself: She lived in a castle, rarely gave interviews or performed live. Her videos present her as an ethereal being, surrounded at all times by 400 lit candles, wearing a wardrobe bequeathed to her by a faerie queen who had too many velvet capes lying around and hated to see them go to waste. This imagery made Enya a world unto herself. Nothing typifies this more than my favorite Enya track, the beguiling “Aldebaran.” It first found fame as part of the soundtrack she composed for the BBC documentary “The Celts,” a 10-episode series that told the story of the Celtic people from prehistory to 1987. Featuring Irish-language vocals delivered at Enya’s most breathy, “Aldebaran” marries the Irish past to the future through a bonkers tale of intergalactic travel. The production is beatless and ever-winding, girded by a coruscating, arpeggiated riff that tumbles through major and minor chords in a cycle of atmospheric tumult. Within its spiraling melody there is euphoria and gravitas, as well as something approaching dread (she dedicated the song to Ridley Scott). Beneath the song’s soaring chords and breathy vocals, an alien undercurrent has smuggled itself aboard — a reminder that, in space, no one can hear you sing. Enya’s music has other unique attractions. If you visit her Twitter page, you might be recommended not just Phil Collins and Tina Turner but also Bob Ross: Even the algorithm seems to know her work is contemplative and therapeutic. Enya’s hallmarks — the angelic wash of reverb, ASMR-ready vocals; her deeply textured and layered synths — were soothing for me on long journeys as a child. They still provide a portal to long-dead worlds and distant stars, but also a town a few parishes over from my own.Nowadays, when I recommend Enya, and “Aldebaran” in particular, ears aren’t quite as deaf as they once were. The cosmos may now be heeding her whispered call to awaken, whether she knows it or not. I hope she does, and that somewhere, dressed in velvet, Enya sometimes plays “Aldebaran” still. Bringing another candle to another window, might she look out from the stone walls of her castle, and once more point her face toward the stars? More

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    Jon Hassell, Trumpeter and ‘Fourth World’ Composer, Dies at 84

    Blending modern technology with traditional instruments, Mr. Hassell created a genre he described as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”Jon Hassell, a composer and trumpeter who blended modern technology with ancient instruments and traditions to create what he called Fourth World music, died on Saturday. He was 84.His death was announced in a statement from his family released by his record label, Ndeya. It did not specify where he died or the immediate cause.Mr. Hassell’s music floated outside the genre boundaries of classical music, electronica, ambient music or jazz. He described Fourth World as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” and, elsewhere, as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”His music could be contemplative and atmospheric, darkly suspenseful or abstractly funky. On the 20 albums Mr. Hassell made as a leader, his trumpet usually had an eerily disembodied sound, one that was processed through electronics and enfolded in shadowy reverberations, sometimes using harmonizers to multiply each note in parallel lines.He played vocalistic phrases that invoked the bluesy intimacy of Miles Davis along with the Indian classical music that Mr. Hassell studied with the raga singer Pandit Pran Nath. Around his trumpet, as foreground and background coalesced, there might be drone tones, global percussion, wind or string ensembles, washes of synthesizer, samples, distorted guitar, voices and more.He delved into calm and aggression, reflection and propulsion, serenity and suspense. His polymorphous, layered, ambiguous yet sensual music helped shape decades of electronic experimentation from acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca and Matmos.In a tribute in The Guardian in 2007, the musician and producer Brian Eno wrote, “He looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music. He sees dignity and beauty in all forms of the dance of life.”Through the years, Mr. Hassell collaborated repeatedly with Mr. Eno and the American musician Ry Cooder. He also recorded with musicians from Africa, Brazil, India and Europe; composed a piece (“Pano da Costa”) for the Kronos Quartet; and played recording sessions with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal, David Sylvian, Tears for Fears, Bono and others.In a 1997 interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever, Mr. Hassell said he wanted to create “music for above and below the waist simultaneously.” He added that Fourth World music was “about heart and head as the same thing. It’s about being transported to some place which is made up of both real and virtual geography.”Mr. Hassell was born on March 22, 1937, in Memphis. He picked up the instrument his father had played in college, a cornet, and studied music and played in big bands as a teenager. He attended the Eastman School of Music, exploring modern classical composition and earning a master’s degree. To avoid being drafted, he joined the Army band in Washington, D.C.Fascinated by the emerging field of electronic music, he made tape collages and won a grant to study with the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years in Cologne, Germany. His classmates included musicians who would go on to start the German band Can; he took LSD with them.He received a fellowship at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo. There, he composed music on one of the early Moog synthesizers. He also met the composer Terry Riley, who first recorded his Minimalist landmark “In C” in 1968 with musicians at SUNY Buffalo, including Mr. Hassell.Mr. Hassell performed in concerts with Mr. Riley and in the drone group Theatre of Eternal Music, which was led by another pioneering Minimalist, La Monte Young. Like them, Mr. Hassell became a student of Mr. Nath, the Indian singer whose subtleties of pitch and inflection would profoundly influence Mr. Hassell’s music; he applied raga singing to his trumpet playing.“It’s about making a beautiful shape in air. I call it calligraphy in sound,” he said in a 2009 interview with All About Jazz.Mr. Hassell’s musical direction was already clear on his 1977 debut album, “Vernal Equinox.” His electronically altered trumpet is joined by African mbira (thumb piano), Indian tabla drums, maracas, tropical bird calls, electronic drones, ocean waves and crickets.“This record fascinated me,” Mr. Eno wrote in 2007. “It was a dreamy, strange, meditative music that was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also seemed located in the lineage of tonal Minimalism. It was a music I felt I’d been waiting for.”In New York City, where in the late 1970s art-rock, punk, pop and jazz shared a creative flux, Mr. Eno sought out Mr. Hassell, and they collaborated on “Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics” (1980). As the marketing category “world music” arose, its sounds and ideas strongly influenced musicians like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. Mr. Eno was also producing Talking Heads, and Mr. Hassell’s ghostly trumpet is prominent in “Houses in Motion” on Talking Heads’ 1980 album, “Remain in Light.”Mr. Hassell helped conceptualize the 1981 Byrne-Eno album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” which merged found recordings with studio rhythm tracks and introduced a broad audience to ideas of sonic and cultural collage. But Mr. Hassell later said that he could not afford the airfare to join the recording sessions, and he told Billboard magazine that he considered the results “too poppy.”Writing in 1982 for the science-fiction magazine Heavy Metal, Mr. Hassell championed both preserving and extending local traditions, in order “to understand which music made sorrows bearable and expressed the mystery of creation before the entry date of the first transistor radio into the village.”Through the decades, Mr. Hassell continued to record, experiment and recombine far-flung musical elements.He collaborated with the African percussionists and singers of Farafina, from Burkina Faso, for “Flash of the Spirit” in 1988. He wrote theater music for “Sulla Strada,” an Italian stage adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” He recorded with Mr. Cooder and Indian musicians — Ronu Majumdar on bansuri, a wooden flute, and Abhijit Banerjee on tabla drums — on the 2000 album “Hollow Bamboo.” In 2005 he began touring internationally with a group called Maarifa Street, which he named after a street in Iran; “maarifa” means knowledge or wisdom.Mr. Hassell learned evolving technology and made it speak for him, incorporating samples and complex signal processing. He also held on to the physicality of breath and lips on the trumpet.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Hassell conceived his two final albums, “Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)” (2018) and “Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)” (2020), as “pentimento,” a visual-arts term for the reappearance of images an artist had painted over.He described his approach to the music as “seeing it in terms of a painting with layers and touch-ups and start-overs with new layers that get erased in places that let the underlying pattern come to the top and be seen (or heard).”He had also been working on a book titled “The North and South of You,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard.“It’s the analysis of our current situation in terms of our overemphasis on the north of us, the rational and technological, instead of the south of us,” he said. “North is logic, south is the samba — and how much more of each would you rather have when the time comes to depart the planet?” More

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    Harold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Calm, Dies at 84

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationU.S. Deaths Surpass 300,000F.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostHarold Budd, Composer of Spaciousness and Calm, Dies at 84Known for his collaborations with art-pop artists like Brian Eno and Cocteau Twins, he created a signature sound suspended in reverberation and drone.The composer and pianist Harold Budd in Birmingham, England, in 2011. His music was known for its unhurried, organic spontaneity.Credit…Steve Thorne/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDec. 17, 2020Updated 5:45 p.m. ETHarold Budd, a composer and pianist known for the preternatural spaciousness and melancholy calm of his music, and for his collaborations with art-pop artists like Brian Eno and Cocteau Twins, died on Dec. 8 in a hospital in Arcadia, Calif. He was 84.The cause was complications of Covid-19, which he contracted at a short-term rehabilitation facility while undergoing therapy after suffering a stroke on Nov. 11, his manager, Steve Takaki, said in an email.Born in Los Angeles, Mr. Budd grew up close to the Mojave Desert, a likely inspiration for the sparsity and vastness his music could evoke. Engaged initially by free jazz, John Cage’s avant-garde innovations and early minimalism, he broke with all of those styles to create a signature sound that centered on the piano, soft-pedaled, sustained and suspended in a corona of reverberation and drone.That sound, which Mr. Budd began to develop in 1972, found its initial fruition on “The Pavilion of Dreams,” a 1978 album produced and released by Mr. Eno. In 1980, Mr. Budd and Mr. Eno jointly created “Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror,” a watershed work for both artists, not least for its feeling of unhurried, organic spontaneity. For their next collaboration, “The Pearl,” released in 1984, they brought in a second credited producer, Daniel Lanois.“I just want to say one thing again clearly right now: I owe Eno everything,” Mr. Budd proclaimed in a 2016 interview with L.A. Record, a music publication. Recording with Mr. Eno in London had “opened up another world for me that I didn’t know existed,” he said, “and suddenly I was a part of it.”Mr. Budd would go on to work with other artists active in popular music, including Andy Partridge of XTC and John Foxx, a founder of Ultravox. A collaboration with the Scottish trio Cocteau Twins, whose music shared with Mr. Budd’s a quality of esoteric reverie, produced the 1986 album “The Moon and the Melodies.” An enduring bond with Robin Guthrie, the Cocteau Twins guitarist and songwriter, resulted in several film scores and duo albums. The latest, “Another Flower,” was recorded in 2013 but released this month.Mr. Budd announced his retirement from music in 2004, but within a few years he was working again, with fresh vitality and variety. “Bandits of Stature,” issued in 2012, comprised 14 succinct pieces for string quartet. By 2018, Mr. Budd was collaborating with chamber groups in concerts that amounted to career retrospectives, including a high-profile appearance at the 2019 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn.When Mr. Budd died, Mr. Takaki wrote in an email, he had recently completed 19 new string quartets. Some had been recorded this year. Others have yet to be performed. Preparations to transcribe and edit Mr. Budd’s solo piano music and chamber works for publication began during the summer, and will continue.Mr. Budd in performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., in 2019.Credit…Jake Giles Netter for The New York TimesHarold Montgomery Budd was born on May 24, 1936, to Harold Budd, who worked in the textile industry, and Dorothy (McNeill) Budd, a homemaker. His father died when he was 13, resulting in financial hardship that prompted the family to move to Victorville, on the edge of the Mojave Desert.An early interest in jazz led Mr. Budd to take up the drums. He played nightclub dates in Los Angeles while working days at Northrop Corporation, the aircraft manufacturer, to support his family, and later attended Los Angeles Community College. Drafted into the Army, Mr. Budd performed in a band with the saxophonist Albert Ayler, who would later achieve renown as a free-jazz firebrand.The Coronavirus Outbreak More