Folk Music

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares50 Views

    An Unearthed Joni Mitchell Jazz Demo, and 11 More New Songs

    by

    Hear tracks by Sarah McLachlan, Camilo, Us3 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.Joni Mitchell, ‘Be Cool’The first preview of “Joni’s Jazz,” an archival collection of Joni Mitchell’s collaborations with jazz musicians, is this 1980 demo of “Be Cool,” a song that featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone when it was released in 1982 on “Wild Things Run Fast.” This version — two guitars, drums and a click track — doesn’t have all its lyrics yet. It doesn’t need them. Instead, Mitchell flaunts some bold, sure-footed scat-singing. The groove and the attitude — “50-50 fire and ice” — were already fully formed.Sarah McLachlan, ‘Better Broken’Sarah McLachlan ponders giving a second chance to a fraught, long-ago relationship in “Better Broken,” her first new song since 2016 and the title track of a coming album. It’s in vintage McLachlan style: a stately piano ballad with a melody that climbs gradually and holds some aching notes. She knows the possible rationalizations, envisioning “a jagged edge worn smooth by time”; she also, it seems, knows better.Caroline Polachek, ‘On the Beach’It was probably inevitable that Caroline Polachek — whose pop pushes toward the posthuman without losing physical connection — would fulfill a videogame commission. With the hyperpop producer Danny L Harle, she created “On the Beach” for Hideo Kojima’s game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. She sings about Sanzu — the Japanese analog of the river Styx, dividing life and death — in a slow march with a melody that leaps to superhuman, computer-tuned peaks and valleys. She still sounds awe-struck.Us3, ‘Resist the Rat Race’In the 1990s and early 2000s, the British group Us3, led by Geoff Wilkinson, backed rappers with jazz grooves, mixing samples — primarily vintage Blue Note jazz tracks — with performances. Now Us3 has returned as Wilkinson’s instrumental band, still merging loops, beats and live musicians — now with arrangements for 18 brasses and reeds. A low-slung piano vamp and programmed trap drums run throughout “Resist the Rat Race,” topped by tootling synthesizer melodies and dense horn-section outbursts worthy of Gil Evans and Henry Mancini. It’s a swaggering alliance of human and machine.Camilo, ‘Maldito ChatGPT’Artificial intelligence matchmaking fails completely in Camilo’s “Maldito ChatGPT” (“Damned ChatGPT”). When he tells ChatGPT the attributes of his ideal partner, the system insists he’s chosen the wrong person, sabotaging his confidence. “I make a list of everything I’ve always dreamed of / And it looks nothing like the person next to me,” he sings. The track feels transparent, with a steady, subdued beat and skeletal piano chords. But as with an A.I. interface, there’s a lot going on under the surface: percussion, vocals, pizzicato strings, echoes. True to chatbot conventions, the A.I. ends its response with a question; Camilo can barely sputter an incredulous reply.

    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

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      15 Surprising Show-Tune Covers for Broadway’s Big Night

      by

      Get ready for the Tony Awards with songs from Sylvester, Diana Ross & the Supremes, Queensrÿche and more.“One Night Only” originated in “Dreamgirls” and was later covered by Sylvester.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,This is Scott Heller, the former theater editor (now I’m on The New York Times Book Review). With the Tony Awards this Sunday, I’m serving up show tunes to Amplifier readers — but not the usual fare.There are no deathless standards here, like Judy Collins singing “Send in the Clowns” or anything from Barbra Streisand’s “Broadway Album.” And if you’re the kind of person who saves your Playbills, you’ve already listened to the Pet Shop Boys version of “Losing My Mind” — a lot.Rather, I’m hoping this edition of The Amplifier is full of surprising covers, and covers of show tunes you may not know as theater songs in the first place. I’ve mostly stayed away from pop albums designed to market the shows themselves, though I couldn’t resist opening with one, from well before “Hamilton” got into that game. And, alas, one of my favorites — Jill Sobule’s “Sunrise, Sunset,” recorded for the “Fiddler” tribute compilation “Knitting on the Roof” — doesn’t seem to be streamable. But you can find it on her website.Laden with happiness and tears,ScottListen along while you read.1. Diana Ross & the Supremes: “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty”Who knew? This delightful curiosity comes from a 1968 Motown album on which the trio performed 11 songs from “Funny Girl,” a tie-in released just as the movie version reached theaters. Take away the ugly duckling story line and the Brooklynese and it doesn’t exactly add up. But who cares when greeted with brash horns, sunny vocals and a group cheer after the unforgettable rhyme, “When a girl’s incidentals / are no bigger than two lentils.”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

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      In the Age of the Algorithm, Roots Music Is Rising

      by

      Billy Strings and Chris Thile were singing an old song called “Rabbit in a Log” at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Clouds of weedy smoke rolled up to the stage from below, and thunder echoed from the surrounding mountain peaks as the crowd of 7,000 nodded blissfully and trance-bopped in Dead-show fashion.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinThe song, also known as “Feast Here Tonight,” is about extracting a rabbit from a hollow log when you don’t have a dog (you’ll need to fashion a brier snare), cooking it over an open fire and finding a place to lay your weary bones for the night. So it’s about the techniques and outlook of the hobo, redolent of atavistic physical competence and the unforgiving facts of life. Like a lot of old-timey music heard in our disorienting present, it sounds like equipment for living, shaped and road-tested by hard times. Bill Monroe, the main force behind the merger of Scottish fiddle tunes with blues and gospel that came to be called bluegrass, recorded the song in the 1930s, but its roots extend back to earlier folk traditions in the South.It carries a considerable payload of history, and it also offers an occasion to shred. Billy Strings, who is already regarded at age 32 as an all-time great flat picker, grimaced in concentration as he laid down dense, twisting skeins of guitar notes. Thile, who is known as a wizard of the mandolin able to play anything with anybody, was all smiles and seemed to do everything without effort: impossibly swift runs, chordal washes, daring harmonic touches. Billy Strings told me later that his immediate reaction to hearing Thile warm up on mandolin backstage was “I better get some coffee.”But Billy Strings was the main attraction. Born William Lee Apostol, he is one of the biggest names in the world of roots music and still getting bigger. He consistently sells out arenas, and it seems just a matter of time before he moves up to stadiums. He has been wildly successful in attracting fans of all ages, including devotees of jam bands, heavy metal and other genres beyond the roots-music scene. He told me, “I’ll throw in some diminished runs for metalheads; you know, put some horns on it,” referring to the devil-horns finger gesture favored by fans of heavy metal, who lap up the ominous minor sound of diminished chords.Billy Strings, whose marquee turn with Thile opened the Telluride festival last June, was one of a cohort of youngish, proven-yet-still-rising stars who converged there that also included Molly Tuttle, Charley Crockett and Sierra Ferrell. They are all big fish in the expanding pond of the roots-music scene who have been testing the vaster waters of the mainstream — showing up all over late-night TV, movie soundtracks and music awards shows. Endlessly in demand as guest stars on other artists’ songs, they are both generating and riding the cultural momentum as American popular music makes one of its regular cyclical swings back toward acoustic instruments and natural voices, the values of community and craft and a heightened sense of connection to the soulful experience and hard-won wisdom of those who lived in the past. Like crafting and sewing and other embodied competences also making a comeback, music handmade by flesh-and-blood humans on instruments made of wood and metal has acquired special added meaning. It offers a strong contrast to the disembodied digital reality that more and more of us inhabit more and more of the time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Christy Moore, Ireland’s Folk Music Legend, Is Still Writing History

      by

      Even though he just turned 80 and doesn’t leave the country, Moore finds himself at a surprising career peak, performing for generations of fans with an intense connection to his music.A sudden buzz crackled through the 2011 Oxegen Music Festival as one of pop’s starriest power couples — Beyoncé, who was performing on the final night, and Jay-Z — made their way backstage at the summer fete in the rolling countryside of County Kildare, Ireland. An older gentleman (bald, barrel-chested, in a black T-shirt) held open a door to the V.I.P. entrance for them. Sweeping past, Jay-Z pressed a $50 bill into the man’s hands, assuming he was a staff member or security — unaware he’d just tipped Ireland’s most beloved living musician, Christy Moore.Moore closed the festival that night, as the surprise guest of the headliners, Coldplay. Performing his soaring 1984 anthem “Ride On,” he heard 60,000 fans roar at his introduction (“One of our heroes since we were kids,” Chris Martin announced), sing along at full volume and chant his name.Born in nearby Newbridge, Moore had returned home after a long, celebrated career as a singer, songwriter, solo artist and leader of the groundbreaking folk band Planxty and the Celtic rock collective Moving Hearts. He’d become an icon, a national treasure — but a man still easily mistaken for the help.“Once, at Carnegie Hall,” Moore recalled gleefully during a recent interview, “a critic wrote, ‘When Moore came out, I presumed he was a stagehand coming to move the piano.’ I think that review was OK.”Moore, who turned 80 earlier this month, finds himself at a surprising professional peak. Last year, his 25th studio LP, “A Terrible Beauty,” debuted at No. 1 in Ireland, besting Sabrina Carpenter and Tyler, the Creator. Once a globe-trotting touring artist, these days Moore only plays his native island, performing solo — accompanying himself on guitar, bodhran drum or sometimes singing a cappella — while exploring a repertoire of songs that cut across several hundred years of history.Whether singing about the Blanket Protests (“Ninety Miles to Dublin Town”), detailing the Stardust nightclub tragedy (“They Never Came Home”) or pondering post-Troubles reconciliation (“North and South of the River,” his collaboration with U2), Moore has made a career charting his nation’s tragedies, triumphs and often difficult progress.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Fiona Apple’s Statement About Jailed Mothers, and 8 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis, Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, I’m With Her 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.Fiona Apple, ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’Fiona Apple’s first solo single in five years is topical, focused on poor women who are imprisoned before trial and drawing on Apple’s time spent as a court watcher. Over a percussive track built on hand drumming, Apple sings about a single mother who can’t afford to post bail; by the time her case is dropped, she has lost her home and her family. Her voice is bitterly sympathetic; the video adds stark statistics.Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, ‘I Like It I Like It’Hayley Williams of Paramore joins Mosey Sumney for a song he wrote with a co-producer, Graham Jonson (a.k.a. quickly, quickly) about desire thwarted by its own intensity. “I turn cactus when we touch,” Sumney moans; “My lips clutch when you open up,” Williams admits. Deep, loping, stop-start synthesizer lines and a lumpy beat underline both their hesitancy and their obsession; all they can agree on is, “I like it too much.”Billy Woods and Preservation, ‘Waterproof Mascara’The most harrowing track on “Golliwog,” the new album by the rapper Billy Woods, is “Waterproof Mascara.” A sobbing woman and an elegiac melody share the foreground of the production, by Preservation, as Woods recalls domestic abuse and suicidal thoughts and tries to numb himself with weed. Like the rest of the album, it’s bleak and uncompromising.Kali Uchis, ‘Lose My Cool,’“Sincerely,” the new album by Kali Uchis, is one long, languorous sigh of relief at finding true love, then basking in it. The production luxuriates in relaxed tempos and reverbed guitars in songs like “Lose My Cool,” a two-part song — slow and slower — that shows off her jazzy side with melodic leaps and airborne crooning. She revels in clinginess: “Whenever I’m without you babe, it don’t feel right,” she coos.Hxppier, ‘Aller’Hxppier — the 20-year-old Nigerian songwriter Ukpabi Favor Oru — lets smoldering irritation boil over in “Aller,” singing, “I can’t right now with your wishes / You try but you lie.” The bass-loving production, by ValNtino, is grounded in an earthy low drumbeat and keeps expanding — with call-and-response voices, ululations, shouts, horns, strings, organ, even a crying baby — as if Hxppier is mustering allies from all sides.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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Barbra Streisand’s Silky Duet With Hozier, and 9 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Summer Walker, Nilüfer Yanya, Ed Sheeran 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.Barbra Streisand with Hozier, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’At 83, Barbra Streisand still commands a voice of dewy-eyed purity, long-breathed grace and tremulous anticipation. She has announced “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2” — an album of duets with Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Sting, Laufey and more — with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” A deferential, un-gritty Hozier joins her in a slow, string-laden arrangement that changes key to accommodate him. This duet definitely won’t eclipse Robert Flack’s eternally radiant version, but it has an earnest charm.Ed Sheeran, ‘Old Phone’Fireside folk-rock contends with digital technology in “Old Phone.” It’s a guitar-strumming, foot-tapping ditty about realizing, too late, that cellphone storage can hold a Pandora’s box of regrets: lost friends, misjudgments, arguments, “messages from all my exes.” Better to wipe it next time.Summer Walker, ‘Spend It’The sound is plush and sensual, a silky, spacious R&B ballad with glimmering vocal harmonies sharing the chorus. But the message is coldly mercenary: “Give me the last four of your credit card / Buy back my love, you can keep your heart.” Instead of refuting the hip-hop cliché of women as gold-diggers, Summer Walker leans into it.Nilüfer Yanya, ‘Cold Heart’With her new single, “Cold Heart,” Nilüfer Yanya sets aside her trusty fuzz-toned guitar. Amid undulating keyboard chords and programmed beats, she sings about desire, separation, resentment and heartache: “I don’t wanna bear this burden ’cause it hurts like hell,” she sings. Many of her previous songs have built toward grungy catharsis, but in “Cold Heart,” the chords keep cycling around her; she’s still enmeshed.Bambii featuring Jessy Lanza and Yaeji, ‘Mirror’Bambii, a Jamaican-Canadian D.J. turned producer and songwriter who’s based in Toronto, keeps reconfiguring a sparse, syncopated bass riff and twitchy, flickering breakbeats in “Mirror.” Jessy Lanza sings in English and Yaeji sings and raps in English and Korean, pondering connection and identity — “I look in the mirror / I see your eyes” — as the rhythms ricochet.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

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      U.K. Folk Bands Use Centuries-Old Ditties to Discuss Prison Abolition, Trans Rights and the Gig Economy

      by

      Several rising British bands are using centuries-old ditties to discuss hot-button issues like prison abolition, trans rights and the gig economy.Think of English folk music and maybe thoughts come to mind of villagers lamenting lost loves or sailors bellowing tales of adventure at sea.But when the rising British folk band Shovel Dance Collective performs, its members want their listeners to think of more contemporary concerns.At the band’s shows, the singer Mataio Austin Dean sometimes introduces “The Merry Golden Tree,” a song about a badly treated cabin boy, as a tale of “being shafted by your boss” — a scenario many office workers might relate to.The group also performs “I Wish There Was No Prisons” and “A Hundred Stretches Hence”: probable 19th-century ditties that Alex McKenzie, who plays accordion and flute in the group, said could be thought of as pleas for prison abolition.Many folk songs “ring very true” today, McKenzie said: “There’s a very easy thread you can draw between what ordinary people were concerned about 100, 200 years ago, or whatever, and what we’re concerned with now.”Goblin Band performing at the Ivy House, a South London pub that regularly hosts folk nights.Andrew Testa 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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Michael Hurley, a Singer Both Eccentric and Inspirational, Dies at 83

      by

      A folk troubadour with an eclectic style, he built a devoted following for his songs about love, death, drinking and a particularly sad werewolf.Michael Hurley, a singer and songwriter whose music — an idiosyncratic kind of folk mixed with a variety of other styles — made him a revered elder to younger artists like Cat Power, Devendra Banhart and the band Yo La Tengo, died on April 1 in Portland, Ore. He was 83.Mr. Hurley’s family announced the death but did not specify the cause.Mr. Hurley was visibly ill during his final shows — two on March 28 and 29 in Knoxville, Tenn., as part of the Big Ears Festival, and the third on March 31 in Asheville, N.C. — before flying back to Portland, said Regina Greene, the booking agent for his Southeast shows.Mr. Hurley stopped breathing on the ride to his home in rural Brownsmead, Ore., and after his driver tried to revive him, he died in the ambulance taking him to a hospital, said Eric Isaacson, the owner of Mississippi Records, one of several labels Mr. Hurley recorded for over the years.For more than 60 years, Mr. Hurley performed (somewhat under the radar and usually in intimate spots) and recorded (often at home on his reel-to-reel tape recorder) in a gentle, twangy and worldly voice, accompanied by his guitar and sometimes nothing else. He wrote and sang about subjects as diverse as love, drinking (tea and wine), the human digestive system and a weeping werewolf.“I never thought of a career in music,” he told The New York Times in 2021. “What I do is goof off — and try to get away with it.”At some point he adopted a nickname, Snock, which he used on album covers and elsewhere.“His songs are timeless; you can’t tell if they were written in the 1400s or now,” said Mr. Isaacson, whose label reissued some of Mr. Hurley’s old albums as well as releasing some newer ones. He added: “He’d perform a song that I hadn’t heard, and I’d ask, ‘What’s that, an old English air?’ and he’d say, ‘No, I wrote it last night.’”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

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Tracy Schwarz, Mainstay of the New Lost City Ramblers, Dies at 86

      by

      He was the last surviving member of a retro-minded string trio whose celebration of prewar songs of the rural South put them at the heart of the folk revival.Tracy Schwarz, the last surviving member of the New Lost City Ramblers, an influential folk trio whose reverential approach to the lost music of the rural South stood in contrast to more commercial acts like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, died on March 29 in Elkins, W.Va. He was 86.His death, in a hospice facility, was announced by his wife, Virginia Hawker.The New Lost City Ramblers were formed in New York in 1958, riding the crest of the folk revival. They performed at the first Newport Folk Festival the next year and counted Bob Dylan — whom they jammed with at Gerdes Folk City, the storied Greenwich Village folk club, in the early 1960s — as a fan.“Everything about them appealed to me — their style, their singing, their sound,” Mr. Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.” “Their songs ran the gamut in style, everything from mountain ballads to fiddle tunes and railway blues.” He added, “I didn’t know they were replicating everything they did off old 78 records, but what would it have mattered anyway?”Mr. Schwarz, who was skilled on the fiddle, accordion, guitar and banjo, joined Mike Seeger, a half brother of the folk luminary Pete Seeger, and the guitarist John Cohen in the Ramblers after another original member, Tom Paley, left in 1962.Even though Mr. Schwarz was New York born and the son of an investment banker, “there was just something that was down-to-earth country about Tracy,” Mike Seeger was quoted as saying in the 2010 book “Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival,” by Ray Allen. “He just kind of has a feeling for the music, it was in his bones.”Mr. Schwarz, right, and Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The Ramblers first performed at the festival in 1959, three years before Mr. Schwarz joined.John Byrne Cooke Estate/Getty ImagesWe 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