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    Jason Isbell’s Bare-Bones Breakup Tune, and 7 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by I’m With Her, Nathy Peluso, Car Seat Headrest and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Jason Isbell, ‘Eileen’Jason Isbell’s new album, “Foxes in the Snow,” is decisively unadorned: just Isbell singing over his acoustic guitar. It arrives following his divorce from Amanda Shires, who has her own songwriting career and was a member of his band. Over bare-bones fingerpicking in “Eileen,” Isbell sings about separation, regrets, self-deception and how “It ended like it always ends / Somebody crying on the phone.” He contends, “Eileen, you should’ve seen this coming sooner,” but adds, almost fondly, “You thought the truth was just a rumor, but that’s your way.” It’s not about blame — it’s about getting through.I’m With Her, ‘Ancient Light’The virtuoso string-band supergroup I’m With Her — Sarah Jarosz, Aiofe O’Donovan and Sara Watkins — has reconvened with the intimately ambitious “Ancient Light.” The verses are in a gently disorienting 7/4; the instruments mix acoustic and electric, juxtaposing fiddle tune and math-rock; the lyrics lean into the metaphysical. As the song begins, Jarosz sings, “Better get out of the way / Gonna figure out what I wanna say / I been a long time comin’,” and it only gets more cosmic from there.Car Seat Headrest, ‘Gethsemane’Will Toledo’s band Car Seat Headrest has announced its first album since 2020, “The Scholars,” and it’s a full-scale rock opera. The first single, “Gethsemane,” is an 11-minute suite that ponders faith, morality, creativity, free will and love as the music unfurls with stretches of kraut-rock keyboard minimalism and roaring power chords that echo the Who’s “Tommy.” Toledo sings, “A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song / I don’t know how it happened,” but the structure is ironclad.Illuminati Hotties, ‘777’Sarah Tudzin — the songwriter and producer behind Illuminati Hotties — cranks up distorted guitars and harnesses quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics in “777,” a song that nearly explodes with joyful anticipation. “I wanna figure you out,” she declares, but she’s already sure that she’s won any gamble: “You’re my spade / lucky 777.” All the noise doesn’t hide the pop song within.The Ophelias, ‘Salome’​​”I want your head on a stake / I want your head on a platter,” sing the Ophelias, an indie-rock band from Cincinnati, turning “I” into a peal of vocal harmony. “Salome” adapts an incident from the Bible into a seething, churning, implacable crescendo of guitars, drums and voices, calmly announcing, “The knife sways heavy in my hand.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block

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      The reel-to-reel tape is from a Gaslight Cafe show in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Dylan was playing to audiences you could count in a glance or two.On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign

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      Lobbying the public to attract the votes of the academy is an odd practice — but you can’t say Chalamet hasn’t excelled at it.Democracy is broken, they say. The wants of the electorate are contradictory and rooted in base emotions rather than rational thought. Viable alternatives are nonexistent, so we treat the ensuing insanity as a spectator sport, posting impotently as the world burns. I could be talking about electoral politics, but in this instance I am actually talking about Oscar campaigns.We as individuals do not cast the ballots that determine the year’s best actor or finest cinematographer or most evocative sound design. That privilege falls to a shadowy elite, who decide these things based on their personal aesthetic judgments — but also, it turns out, based on larger narratives that all of us get to judge, narratives about who has achieved true stardom or whose moment has come. It’s a strange arrangement: The public has no official say, and yet our collective gut-check vibes appear to influence the result just the same. Hence the Oscar campaign, which aims not just to persuade academy voters that a given contender deserves their support, but also to create a good story around it — and, ideally, a culture-wide consensus that the nominee’s victory is nearly inevitable.The 2025 race has been weirder than most. Three campaigns stand out — one weirdly funny, one weirdly disastrous and one weirdly endearing. The funny one involved the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” An endless promotional push surrounded the film’s November release, and a clear bid for Oscar recognition followed, but the highlight of the whole thing was its strangest moment: a journalist solemnly informing the two lead actresses, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that fans of the film were “holding space” for the lyrics of the breakout song “Defying Gravity.” Erivo was visibly moved by this news; Grande then reached out to hold Erivo’s pointer finger. Both women appeared to be on the verge of tears. The moment was so eerie and absurd that it was rehashed online for weeks. Maybe it helped: Each woman did ultimately secure an Oscar nomination.The disaster involved “Emilia Pérez,” the polarizing Spanish-language French musical crime film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. For a moment, this looked like the film to beat: It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actress. But it was quickly subsumed by a series of controversies. There was criticism, from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, that the film was “a step backward for trans representation”; there was negative coverage from the Mexican press about how the country was portrayed. Most devastating, there were unearthed social media posts by the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, disparaging George Floyd and Islam, among other hot-button topics — most likely torpedoing the chances of the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.Then there was the third offensive, the one credited with “making Oscar campaigning fun again.” Timothée Chalamet claimed a best-actor nomination, his second, for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — a film he’s quite good in, especially when he evokes Dylan’s unique blend of mumbly insouciance and magnetic star power. His status as a favorite slipped after he lost out on early awards. But his campaign has been something else: not just fun, but a genuine masterpiece of self-promotion.It has scored so many hits, across so many platforms, that it’s helpful to break them into categories. In October, when Chalamet showed up to a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (and later posed with the winner at the Golden Globes), it made for the kind of charming general-interest story that would be shared widely on Facebook. When he appeared in a video with the internet personality Nardwuar and talked about how “I rip Milk Duds” at the movies: That one serviced a slightly different segment, the “extremely online.” Elsewhere he would give special attention to the niche demographic of “Bob Dylan nerds,” to which I personally belong. On Instagram, he posted a video of himself listening to the 1980s outtake “Blind Willie McTell.” Even more specific was a reference to Dylan’s bizarre, bewigged appearance at the 2003 Sundance premiere of his own Dylan movie, “Masked and Anonymous” — Chalamet copied that wardrobe at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” a gesture that only the most committed Dylanologists would fully appreciate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jesse Welles, a Folk Musician Who Sings the News, Is Turning the Page

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      In a small home recording studio on a Monday afternoon in January, Jesse Welles sat with a guitar on his lap, dressed head-to-toe in black.Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs. He’s managed to turn subjects like the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms. But the song he was recording in that basement in East Nashville, “Simple Gifts,” is a different beast.As he delicately plucked his acoustic guitar, he sang its earnest opening lines — “Slouching towards the sky’s extent from the edges of a waste / Was something darker than a hope, something brighter still than fate” — sketching out an imagistic tableau untouched by current events. Welles’s new album, “Middle,” due Feb. 21, is similarly minded.“The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” he said. “These are ones that are self-indulgent, or at least I feel like they are at times. I like to do both. They’re two different mediums.”Jesse Welles’s protest songs deftly blend the whimsical with the serious, turning topics like Walmart and the war in Gaza into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesThe producer, Eddie Spear, rose from behind a mixing board and adjusted the microphone in front of Welles. Most of the songs on “Middle” are recorded with a full band, but for “Simple Gifts” and the album’s title track, the setup was pared down to a solitary microphone. “I’m trying to honor what people are enjoying about Jesse,” said Spear, who has also worked with Zach Bryan and Sierra Ferrell. “We thought getting a really simple capture in this way might tie in where he’s come from and honor this particular period of his career.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tribute to Marianne Faithfull

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      Hear 10 tracks from a long, winding career.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesDear listeners,We lost one of the true greats last week when Marianne Faithfull died at age 78. A pop star turned punk rocker turned cabaret chanteuse, Faithfull was also a style icon, an actress with remarkable screen presence and a wonderfully unfiltered memoirist, among many other things. She will be greatly missed — but what a life she lived!Today’s playlist is a celebration of Faithfull’s long and varied musical career, which began at 17 — when she was signed on sight by the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham — and stretched until her late 70s. I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Faithfull in 2021, around the release of what is now the final album she released in her lifetime, “She Walks in Beauty,” which found her reciting Romantic poetry atop compositions produced by her friend and collaborator Warren Ellis. She was then recovering from a nasty bout of Covid-19 that had put her in a coma, but her resilience was something to behold.That toughness and durability was a through line of her career, as she sprung back from multiple near-death experiences and returned with music that seemed supercharged by those struggles. She was a bold, intuitive and one-of-a-kind artist, as you’ll hear on the following 10 tracks.Also, apologies for this newsletter going out a day late. My personal advice: Steer clear of that norovirus! Thankfully I’m now on the mend and The Amplifier will return to its regular schedule on Friday. Til then!It is the evening of the day,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83

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      Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple “Alice’s Restaurant” was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts.Alice Brock, whose eatery in western Massachusetts was immortalized as the place where “you can get anything you want” in Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 antiwar song “Alice’s Restaurant,” died on Thursday in Wellfleet, Mass. — just a week before Thanksgiving, the holiday during which the rambling story at the center of the song takes place. She was 83.Viki Merrick, her caregiver, said she died in a hospice from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ever since Mr. Guthrie released the song, officially called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” in 1967, it has been a staple of classic-rock stations every late November, not to mention car trip singalongs on the way to visit family for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself. Over the course of a little more than 18 minutes, Mr. Guthrie — doing more talking than singing — recounts a visit that he and a friend, Rick Robbins, paid to Ms. Brock and her husband, Ray Brock, for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock with Mr. Guthrie in 1977. They met when she was a school librarian and he was a student.Peter Simon Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst LibrariesA shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead. The next morning the police arrest them for littering, and Ms. Brock has to bail them out.That night she cooks them all a big meal, and the following day they appear in court, where the judge fines them $50. Later, Mr. Guthrie is ordered to an Army induction center, where he is able to avoid the draft because of his criminal record.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sophie Straat Fights Gentrification With Folk Music

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      Sophie Straat is reviving a style of music once popular in the working-class bars of Amsterdam to protest an increasingly expensive and homogenized city.On a recent Saturday night, the Dutch singer Sophie Straat took the stage before a raucous crowd at Garage Noord, a sweaty Amsterdam club. “Tonight is about a lot of things, but it’s especially about gentrification,” she said as she launched into “Groen Amsterdam” (“Green Amsterdam”) her ironic song about being priced out of the city.The crowd — largely female, young and Dutch-speaking — danced as the singer, dressed in a leather skirt bearing the words “no fun,” sang about the expensive cargo bikes that have become a fixture of Amsterdam’s increasingly wealthy central neighborhoods. “You watch how I took over the city,” Straat sang in Dutch, adopting the persona of a gentrifying newcomer. “It’s not my fault the bakery is closing.”Straat, 30, has gained a following in the Netherlands in recent years for modernizing a genre of folk music known as smartlap, with punk and pop sounds and lyrics about inequality and gentrification. It has made her a voice for a generation of young Amsterdammers fed up with a city they see as increasingly expensive and homogenized.“I was attracted to her music because it was in Dutch, then I realized it was about not being able to find a place to live — which is exactly what’s happening to me,” said Zoë Schaap, 35, a bartender attending the concert. “The music sounds old-fashioned, but it has a real vibe about what is going on right now.”Straat performing at Garage Noord in Amsterdam.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ella Jenkins, Musician Who Found an Audience in Children, Dies at 100

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      Performing and recording, she transformed what was seen as a marginal genre in the music industry into a celebration of shared humanity. Ella Jenkins, a self-taught musician who defied her industry’s norms by recording and performing solely for children, and in doing so transformed a marginal and moralistic genre into a celebration of a diverse yet common humanity with songs like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 100. Her death was confirmed by John Smith, associate director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.Ms. Jenkins had no formal musical training, but she had an innate sense of rhythm. “I was always humming or singing and la-la, lu-lu or something,” she once said.She absorbed the everyday melodies of her childhood — the playground clapping games, the high school sports chants, the calls of a sidewalk watermelon vendor hawking his produce. As an adult, she paired such singsong rhythms with original compositions and sought not simply to amuse or distract children but to teach them to respect themselves and others.Against the sound of a kazoo, a harmonica, a variety of hand drums or, later, a baritone ukulele, Ms. Jenkins sang subtly instructive lyrics, as in “A Neighborhood Is a Friendly Place,” a song she wrote in 1976:You can say hiTo friends passing byA neighborhood is a friendly place.You can say helloTo people that you knowA neighborhood is a friendly place.Neighbors to learn to shareNeighbors learn to careA neighborhood is a friendly place.Over children’s steady clapping, she recorded the age-old “A Sailor Went to Sea”:A sailor went to sea, sea, seaTo see what he could see, see, seeAnd all that he could see, see, seeWas down in the bottom of the sea, sea, sea.For many parents and classroom teachers, Ms. Jenkins’s renditions of traditional nursery rhymes like “Miss Mary Mack” and “The Muffin Man” are authoritative.Still, from the beginning of her career in the 1950s, Ms. Jenkins pronounced her signature to be call-and-response, in which she asked her charges to participate directly in the music-making, granting them an equal responsibility in a song’s success. She had seen Cab Calloway employ the technique in “Hi-De-Ho,” and for her, the animating idea, veiled in a playful to-and-fro, was that everything good in the world was born of collaboration.In one of her most popular recordings, Ms. Jenkins sings out, “Did you feed my cow?” “Yes, ma’am!” a group of children trumpet back. The song continues:Could you tell me how?Yes, ma’am!What did you feed her?Corn and hay!What did you feed her?Corn and hay!As Ms. Jenkins repopularized time-honored children’s songs, she also gave the genre global scope. Before Ms. Jenkins, children’s music in the United States consisted primarily of simplified, often cartoonish renditions of classical music.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ Gets a Folk-Musical Makeover

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      The decade-spanning story of a man aging in reverse comes to the West End, transformed into a thoughtful fable opening on the English coast.Benjamin Button is born onto the West End stage with a hunch, a walking stick and venerable observations more suitable to a wizened man than a newborn.“You’re only as old as you feel,” Button quips to his parents, who are aghast that their long-awaited baby seems to be a 70-year-old man. “Do you mind if I smoke?”Age aside, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a folk-rock musical adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story opening Wednesday at the Ambassadors Theater in London, explores earnest and existential questions of how and where to live. The broad strokes of the story might be most familiar from David Fincher’s 2008 film of the same name, which starred a backward-aging Brad Pitt and opened in New Orleans.But this onstage Button lives a different life altogether. He’s born in 1918 in a blustering, harbor village in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England, as something of a shut-away, before breaking free in search of romance and adventure. A 13-person cast of actor-musicians is onstage nearly the entire time, giving the show the feel of a fable merged with a Mumford & Sons concert.In the show, time moves in quick jumps, but for the creators behind this fairy tale retelling, Jethro Compton and Darren Clark, the project has been a long endeavor. The show, their first to open in the West End, started life about eight years ago as a project that Compton called “Untitled Cornish Musical.”Jethro Compton and Darren Clark, the creators of the musical.Sam Bush for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More