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      Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ Was An Unlikely Hit

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      Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk ballad told the true story of a shipwreck on Lake Superior. One of his old friends called it “a documentarian’s song.”Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer who died on Monday at 84, had one hit in particular that famously defied Top 40 logic.“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” his 1976 folk ballad, was unusual partly because, at more than six minutes long, it was about twice as long as most pop hits. It also retold a real-life tragedy — the 1975 sinking on Lake Superior of a freighter with 29 crewmen aboard — with meticulous attention to detail.“It’s a documentarian’s song, when you think about it,” said Eric Greenberg, a longtime friend of the singer who interviewed Mr. Lightfoot as a student journalist in the late 1970s and later co-wrote a song with him.The plotline of a typical Top 40 hit usually consists of “boy meets girl, boy breaks up with girl, or come back, or you left me, or whatever,” Mr. Greenberg said, speaking by phone from New York City. “Not a five-, six-, seven-minute story — a factual story, in Gordon’s case, painstakingly checked to make sure that all the facts are right.”Here’s the true story that inspired “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and a look at the song that kept its memory alive.A disappearing shipThe Edmund Fitzgerald was a 729-foot ore carrier and one of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes when it left Superior, Wis., on Nov. 9, 1975, carrying iron pellets bound for Detroit.The next day, the ship was caught in a storm with winds that averaged 60 to 65 miles an hour. Its captain reported 20- to 25-foot waves washing over the decks and water pouring in below deck through two broken air vents.That night, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank near the coasts of Ontario and Michigan, in water that was only about 50 degrees. A nearby ship reported seeing its lights disappear in the driving snow.The Coast Guard later found lifeboats, life rings and other debris from the ship. But the lifeboats were self-inflatable, so their discovery did not necessarily indicate that they had been used. None of the 29 crew members survived.An unlikely successThe morning after the Fitzgerald went down, the rector of Mariners’ Church of Detroit tolled its bell 29 times, once for each man lost. An Associated Press reporter knocked on the church’s door, interviewed the rector and filed an account that was published in newspapers.Mr. Lightfoot read the article. Soon afterward, he started singing a song about the wreck during a previously scheduled recording session. His band joined in, and the first version of the song that they recorded was later released, according to “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,” a 2020 documentary.There was no expectation that the song would become a hit single, because its length made it too long for airplay on the radio. But it would spend 21 weeks on the Billboard charts and peak at No. 2, one notch behind Mr. Lightfoot’s only No. 1 hit, “Sundown.” It also turned the tale of the sinking into a modern legend.Yet unlike songs that use a real-life story as the basis for embellishment, Mr. Lightfoot’s ballad hewed precisely to the real-life details. The weight of the ore, for example — “26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty” — was accurate. So was the number of times that the church bell chimed in Detroit.Decades later, Mr. Lightfoot changed the lyrics slightly after investigations into the accident revealed that waves, not crew error, had led to the shipwreck. In the new lyrics, he sang that it got dark at 7 that November night on Lake Superior — not that a main hatchway caved in.“That’s the kind of meticulous, looking-for-the-truth kind of guy that he was,” Mr. Greenberg said.An enduring legacy“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” like its creator, endured as a Canadian classic long after slipping off the Top 40 charts. The bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice (who also released an entire album of Lightfoot cover songs) and the rock bands Rheostatics and the Dandy Warhols were among those who sang covers over the years.“The melodies are so powerful and he’s such a good storyteller and such a beautiful lyricist,” the Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan said in the 2020 documentary. “And the combination of those things just really makes for a great song.”Mr. Lightfoot remained proud of it for decades, and he kept newspaper clippings and items given to him by the crew members’ surviving families in his home, Mr. Greenberg said.The song’s success had one downside: It turned the wreck, which lies in Canadian territory at a depth of about 500 feet, into a trophy for divers, upsetting the lost sailors’ families. In 2006, the government of Ontario adopted a law protecting the site. More

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      Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist

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      In the 1950s, when segregation was still widespread, his ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. But his primary focus was civil rights.Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.Performing at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in 1956.Al Lambert/Associated PressMr. Belafonte was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like “Matilda,” work songs like “Lead Man Holler,” tender ballads like “Scarlet Ribbons.” By 1959 he was the most highly paid Black performer in history, with fat contracts for appearances in Las Vegas, at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and at the Palace in New York.Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Mr. Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though, and it was his friendly rival Sidney Poitier, not Mr. Belafonte, who became the first bona fide Black matinee idol.But making movies was never Mr. Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music. He continued to perform into the 21st century, and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights.Early in his career, Mr. Belafonte befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter. Dr. King and Mr. Belafonte at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1956.via Harry BelafonteEarly in his career, he befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter of Dr. King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organization and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.He provided money to bail Dr. King and other civil rights activists out of jail. He took part in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became Dr. King’s home away from home. And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on Dr. King’s life, with the King family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure that the family was taken care of after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.(Nonetheless, in 2013 he sued Dr. King’s three surviving children in a dispute over documents that Mr. Belafonte said were his property and that the children said belonged to the King estate. The suit was settled the next year, with Mr. Belafonte retaining possession.)In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after Dr. King’s death, Mr. Belafonte expressed ambivalence about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He would like to “be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people,” he said, adding, “I hate marching, and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail.” But, he said, he accepted his role.The Challenge of RacismIn the same interview, he noted ruefully that although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. As frustrating as that may have been, he was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.His role in the 1957 movie “Island in the Sun,” which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, generated outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would have fined any theater showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, Mr. Belafonte was twice refused service in the same restaurant. Television appearances with white female singers — Petula Clark in 1968, Julie Andrews in 1969 — angered many viewers and, in the case of Ms. Clark, threatened to cost him a sponsor.He sometimes drew criticism from Black people, including the suggestion early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin (his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were white). When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, who had been the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife.”Mr. Belafonte with Ed Sullivan in 1955. At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic.Associated PressWhen RCA Victor, his record company, promoted him as the “King of Calypso,” Mr. Belafonte was denounced as a pretender in Trinidad, the acknowledged birthplace of that highly rhythmic music, where an annual competition is held to choose a calypso king.He himself never claimed to be a purist when it came to calypso or any of the other traditional styles he embraced, let alone the king of calypso. He and his songwriting collaborators loved folk music, he said, but saw nothing wrong with shaping it to their own ends.“Purism is the best cover-up for mediocrity,” he told The New York Times in 1959. “If there is no change we might just as well go back to the first ‘ugh,’ which must have been the first song.”Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born on March 1, 1927, in Harlem. His father, who was born in Martinique (and later changed the family name), worked occasionally as a chef on merchant ships and was often away; his mother, Melvine (Love) Bellanfanti, born in Jamaica, was a domestic.In 1936, Harry, his mother and his younger brother, Dennis, moved to Jamaica. Unable to find work there, his mother soon returned to New York, leaving him and his brother to be looked after by relatives who, he later recalled, were either “unemployed or above the law.” They rejoined her in Harlem in 1940.Awakening to Black HistoryMr. Belafonte dropped out of George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy, where he was assigned to load munitions aboard ships. Black shipmates introduced him to the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and other African American authors and urged him to study Black history.He received further encouragement from Marguerite Byrd, the daughter of a middle-class Washington family, whom he met while he was stationed in Virginia and she was studying psychology at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). They married in 1948.He and Ms. Byrd had two children, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte, who survive him, as do his two children by Ms. Robinson, Gina Belafonte and David; and eight grandchildren. He and Ms. Robinson divorced in 2004, and he married Pamela Frank, a photographer, in 2008, and she survives him, too, along with a stepdaughter, Sarah Frank; a stepson, Lindsey Frank; and three step-grandchildren.Mr. Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, during a civil rights event — the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom — at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1957.George Tames/The New York TimesBack in New York after his discharge, Mr. Belafonte became interested in acting and enrolled under the G.I. Bill at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. He first took the stage at the American Negro Theater in Manhattan, where he worked as a stagehand and where he began his lifelong friendship with a fellow theatrical novice, Sidney Poitier.Finding anything other than what he called “Uncle Tom” roles proved difficult, and even though singing was little more than a hobby, it was as a singer and not an actor that Mr. Belafonte found an audience.Early in 1949, he was given the chance to perform during intermissions for two weeks at the Royal Roost, a popular Midtown jazz nightclub. He was an immediate hit, and the two weeks became five months.Finding Folk MusicAfter enjoying some success but little creative satisfaction as a jazz-oriented pop singer, Mr. Belafonte looked elsewhere for inspiration. With the guitarist Millard Thomas, who would become his accompanist, and the playwright and novelist William Attaway, who would collaborate on many of his songs, he immersed himself in the study of folk music. (The calypso singer and songwriter Irving Burgie later supplied much of his repertoire, including “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell.”)His manager, Jack Rollins, helped him develop an act that emphasized his acting ability and his striking good looks as much as a voice that was husky and expressive but, as Mr. Belafonte admitted, not very powerful.A triumphant 1951 engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village led to an even more successful one at the Blue Angel, the Vanguard’s upscale sister room on the Upper East Side. That in turn led to a recording contract with RCA and a role on Broadway in the 1953 revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.”Dorothy Dandridge and Mr. Belafonte in a scene from the 1954 film “Carmen Jones.”20th Century FoxPerforming a repertoire that included the calypso standard “Hold ’em Joe” and his arrangement of the folk song “Mark Twain,” Mr. Belafonte won enthusiastic reviews, television bookings and a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. He also caught the eye of the Hollywood producer and director Otto Preminger, who cast him in the 1954 movie version of “Carmen Jones,” an all-Black update of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, which had been a hit on Broadway a decade earlier.Mr. Belafonte’s co-star was Dorothy Dandridge, with whom he had also appeared the year before in his first movie, the little-seen low-budget drama “Bright Road.” Although they were both accomplished vocalists, their singing voices in “Carmen Jones” were dubbed by opera singers.Mr. Belafonte also made news for a movie he turned down, citing what he called its negative racial stereotypes: the 1959 screen version of “Porgy and Bess,” also a Preminger film. The role of Porgy was offered instead to his old friend Mr. Poitier, whom he criticized publicly for accepting it.Stepping Away From FilmIn the 1960s, as Mr. Poitier became a major box-office attraction, Mr. Belafonte made no movies at all: Hollywood, he said, was not interested in the socially conscious films he wanted to make, and he was not interested in the roles he was offered. He did, however, become a familiar presence — and an occasional source of controversy — on television.His special “Tonight With Belafonte” won an Emmy in 1960 (a first for a Black performer), but a deal to do five more specials for that show’s sponsor, the cosmetics company Revlon, fell apart after one more was broadcast; according to Mr. Belafonte, Revlon asked him not to feature Black and white performers together. The taping of a 1968 special with Petula Clark was interrupted when Ms. Clark touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm, and a representative of the sponsor, Chrysler-Plymouth, demanded a retake. (The producer refused, and the sponsor’s representative later apologized, although Mr. Belafonte said the apology came “one hundred years too late.”)Jacob Harris/Associated PressWhen Mr. Belafonte returned to film as both producer and co-star, with Zero Mostel, of “The Angel Levine” (1970), based on a story by Bernard Malamud, the project had a sociopolitical edge: His Harry Belafonte Enterprises, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to learn filmmaking by working on the crew. One of them, Drake Walker, wrote the story for Mr. Belafonte’s next movie, “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), a gritty western that also starred Mr. Poitier.But after appearing as a mob boss (a parody of Marlon Brando’s character in “The Godfather”) with Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby in the hit 1974 comedy “Uptown Saturday Night” — directed, as “Buck and the Preacher” had been, by Mr. Poitier — Mr. Belafonte was once again absent from the big screen, this time until 1992, when he played himself in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire “The Player.”He appeared onscreen only sporadically after that, most notably as a gangster in Mr. Altman’s “Kansas City” (1996), for which Mr. Belafonte won a New York Film Critics Circle Award. His final film role was in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” in 2018.Political ActivismMr. Belafonte continued to give concerts in the years when he was off the screen, but he concentrated on political activism and charitable work. In the 1980s, he helped organize a cultural boycott of South Africa as well as the Live Aid concert and the all-star recording “We Are the World,” both of which raised money to fight famine in Africa. In 1986, encouraged by some New York State Democratic Party leaders, he briefly considered running for the United States Senate. In 1987, he replaced Danny Kaye as UNICEF’s good-will ambassador.Never shy about expressing his opinion, he became increasingly outspoken during the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master.” Four years later he called Mr. Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”Harry Belafonte demonstrated against nuclear weapons in Bonn, Germany, in 1981.Klaus Rose/Picture-alliance, DPA, via Associated Press ImagesMr. Belafonte was equally outspoken in the 2013 New York mayoral election, in which he campaigned for the Democratic candidate and eventual winner, Bill de Blasio. During the campaign he referred to the Koch brothers, the wealthy industrialists known for their support of conservative causes, as “white supremacists” and compared them to the Ku Klux Klan. (Mr. de Blasio quickly distanced himself from that comment.)Such statements made Mr. Belafonte a frequent target of criticism, but no one disputed his artistry. Among the many honors he received in his later years were a Kennedy Center Honor in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2000.In 2011, he was the subject of a documentary film, “Sing Your Song,” and published his autobiography, “My Song.”In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in recognition of his lifelong fight for civil rights and other causes. The honor, he told The Times, gave him “a strong sense of reward.”He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, The Times published an opinion article by Mr. Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald J. Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature.”“Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose,” he wrote, referring to African American voters, “and we must answer: Only the dream, only everything.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFour years later, he returned to the opinion pages with a similar message: “We have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Richard Severo and Alex Traub contributed reporting. 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      Book Review: ‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,’ by Lucinda Williams

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      In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” the raw-voiced singer looks back on a contentious artistic life.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir, by Lucinda WilliamsLucinda Williams, the Grammy-winning 70-year-old songwriter, was born in Lake Charles, La. Her grandfathers were both preachers; one was a civil rights advocate. Her father, Miller Williams, was an award-winning poet. Her mother loved music and played the piano. Williams grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Utah, Chile and Mexico. On paper, it was an ideal upbringing for the artist she became: a nomadic touring musician whose songs draw on deep Southern roots, using matter-of-fact imagery to conjure tempestuous emotions.But her pedigree didn’t make her life fall neatly into place, as Williams recalls in her memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.” “I’ve held back from talking about my childhood over the decades of my life,” she notes. “I’ve written songs about it instead.” Williams’s mother was sexually abused as a child, she writes, and lived with schizophrenia and alcoholism. Her poet-professor father was a mentor and protector, but he also had a temper. Williams’s parents divorced after her father took up with one of his teenage students.In the title song of her best-selling album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” Williams sings about being a “Child in the back seat ’bout four or five years/Lookin’ out the window, little bit of dirt mixed with tears.” When her father first heard it, he told Williams that she was that crying little girl; until then, Williams hadn’t realized she was writing about herself. Williams’s memoir is as flinty, earthy and plain-spoken as her songs. She reveals the autobiographical underpinnings of some of her darkest lyrics, but she also tells a larger tale: of artistic determination battling personal insecurity; of misjudging and being misjudged by men and by the music business; and of steadfastly holding her own.She doesn’t give in: not on a trendy remix, not on her album cover photos, not on her instincts. She can handle being called difficult or “insane” even though, she admits, “There are times when I can bring an extra layer of unpredictable emotion to a situation that is already tough to begin with.” The lasting results are in her songs.Williams envisioned life as a musician soon after she picked up a guitar. She started performing folk songs in her teens. But even as she honed her own songwriting and built local reputations — in Texas and then in Los Angeles — she worked day jobs well into her 30s. Major labels rejected her, again and again, as being “too country for rock” but “too rock for country.”From the beginning — two low-budget Folkways albums she made in 1979 and 1980 — Williams sang about elemental subjects: desire, sorrow, love, traveling, survival, death. Some of her songs are kiss-offs; some offer regrets; some are elegies; some are takedowns. They’re always grounded in homely details. In “Hot Blood,” a bluesy outpouring of female lust, she sings about feeling “a cold chill” as she watches a guy just “fixin’ your flat with a tire iron.”It took an English punk label, Rough Trade, to release “Lucinda Williams,” her 1988 breakthrough album. A decade later, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” marked her commercial peak. But recording that album, she recalls in the memoir, was lengthy and fraught. Making records, she writes, “can test the limits and boundaries of everyone involved. I now understand that is normal.” Getting the sound Williams wanted on “Car Wheels” led to the breakup of her longtime band and clashes with two producers. Then contractual tangles delayed the release of the finished album for two years. Williams also nixed a video concept from the director Paul Schrader, deciding, “He was just another guy trying to impose his vision on a female artist. ‘Car Wheels’ did fine without a video.”Throughout her book, Williams recognizes her own appetites and mistakes. She writes about suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and bouts of depression, and she recognizes her weakness for the kind of boyfriend she calls “a poet on a motorcycle,” guys who often turned out to be cheaters, addicts or worse.She came through anyway. “That relationship was done, but I got a good song out of it,” she writes about one romantic debacle. Williams has been married since 2009 to her manager, producer and songwriting collaborator, Tom Overby.Although Williams finished her book in 2022, it doesn’t mention her 2020 stroke; she can no longer play guitar. But she returned to touring in 2021 and persists in writing songs; she’s releasing a new album in June. Her memoir shows how deep that grit runs.DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A Memoir | By Lucinda Williams | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Crown | $28 More

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      An Avett Brother Meets a Founding Son: John Quincy Adams

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      Bob Crawford is part of the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers. He’s also the host of a new podcast about the sixth president.Some professional musicians spend their days on the tour bus staring out the window, sleeping or pursuing various routes to oblivion. For Bob Crawford, the bassist for the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, history has been his distraction of choice.“On the van, and later the bus,” he said recently in a video interview from his home near Durham, N.C., “I would read history books.”One day, he picked up Sean Wilentz’s mammoth study “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.” From there, he moved on to “several books about Martin Van Buren,” as well as studies of Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system and the knockdown congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s.Now, he’s put it all together in “Founding Son: John Quincy’s America,” a six-episode podcast about John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a man, Crawford argues, for our own fractured times.“He knows democracy is on the line, he knows slavery is a moral evil,” Crawford said of Adams, who became a leading antislavery voice in the House of Representatives, where he served after leaving the White House. “He’s one of those transcendent characters. He deserves to be in the pantheon.”“Founding Son,” available through iHeartRadio starting April 13, is the latest entry in the crowded field of history podcasts. But it’s one where Crawford (who composed and played the show’s old-timey mandolin theme) hopes to use his musical celebrity and serious historical chops to illuminate a complex, formative period in the evolution of American democracy.The Early Republic, as scholars call it, may be a rich field of study. But it’s largely a blank for most Americans, who are a bit foggy on what exactly happened between the American Revolution and the Civil War.Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving office, is a vehicle for tracing the arc of the period, which saw the United States transform from a nation dominated by its founding elites (like the Adamses) into an expansionist, populist democracy where every white male had the vote, regardless of property or station.“Founding Son” focuses on John Quincy Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving the White House (and the earliest American president to be photographed).Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAs a seven-year-old, Adams, the son of John Adams, witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, when his mother, Abigail, took him to the top of the hill to watch the gunpowder rise in the distance. And he lived long enough to serve in the House alongside Abraham Lincoln.And in an impossibly dramatic ending, Adams (spoiler alert!) died in the Capitol, after having a cerebral hemorrhage as he stood up to cast a vote relating to the Mexican-American War, which he opposed.“It’s almost poetic,” Crawford said. (Oh, Adams also wrote poetry.)Crawford, 52, grew up in Cardiff, N.J., where he recalled himself as an unimpressive student, although one with a passion for history. He recalled how one of his high school teachers, Mr. Lawless, would ask the class, “Does anyone who isn’t Bob know the answer?”If there was one person he wished he could have interviewed for the podcast, Crawford said, it was William Lee Miller, the author of “Arguing About Slavery,” who died in 2012.Kate Medley for The New York TimesOver an hour-long conversation about the podcast, Crawford, his upright bass visible on a stand behind him, regularly pulled books from the shelf to underline a point. (William Lee Miller’s “Arguing About Slavery,” he said, was a particular inspiration.) He repeatedly apologized for diving into a rabbit hole before diving into another one.With his neatly trimmed hair and soulful eyes, he gives off the vibe of the intense, idealistic high school history teacher who is also “in a band.” Except that Crawford (who earned a master’s degree in history online in 2020) really is in a band.Crawford joined with Scott and Seth Avett in 2001, after a decade of jobs that included selling shoes, working in movie production and slinging grilled cheese sandwiches “in the parking lot of Grateful Dead shows,” as the band’s official bio puts it. (In an email, Crawford clarified it was actually Phish.)Scott Avett, the band’s banjo player and co-writer, said that the podcast reflected Crawford’s steadfast character.“He does hold a lot of facts, and it’s really impressive,” said Avett (who voices dialogue for Charles Francis Adams, one of John Quincy’s sons, and the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld). “But that’s not the point, which is how he carries those facts and who he is when expressing them.”Crawford, center, onstage with Scott and Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers.CrackerfarmAnd it’s not just Crawford’s friends who are impressed. Wilentz, who appears on the podcast, also praised his historical chops.“He’s really quite versed,” Wilentz said. “He had a lot of really specific questions to ask, some of which I didn’t know the answer to.”Crawford’s side gig as a history podcaster started in 2016 with “The Road to Now,” which he created with the historian Benjamin Sawyer. (Recent episodes have covered Benghazi, Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and the history of March Madness.)Last year, Crawford hosted “Concerts of Change,” a SiriusXM docuseries about human rights benefit concerts from the 1970s to the 1990s. While working on that, he got an invitation from a friend to pitch a show to iHeart, and suggested Adams.The initial response was lukewarm. “They asked, was he involved in any true crime?” Crawford recalled.But eight months later, they bit. Will Pearson, the president of iHeartPodcasts, said what ultimately sold him on the project was the combination of Crawford’s enthusiasm and knowledge and the unfamiliarity of the John Quincy Adams story.“In my opinion one of the strongest elements of a good history podcast is the element of surprise,” he said.Crawford wrote the show (a coproduction of iHeartPodcasts, Curiosity Inc., and School of Humans) himself, with help from James Morrison, a producer who also works on the Smithsonian podcast “Side Door.” (Adams is voiced by Patrick Warburton, familiar to some as Elaine’s boyfriend on “Seinfeld.” Andrew Jackson is voiced by Nick Offerman, of “Parks & Recreation.”)Crawford with notes for the podcast. “He’s really quite versed,” said the historian Sean Wilentz, who appears on the podcast.Kate Medley for The New York Times“Founding Son,” which takes a largely chronological approach, has a certain whiskery dad-history vibe. There are dramatic set pieces (some with Ken Burns-style voice-overs and sound effects) about events like the battle of the Alamo and the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meetinghouse in Philadelphia that was destroyed by a racist mob. (Burns himself pops up as the voice of Roger Baldwin, the lawyer who represented the enslaved people who revolted aboard the Amistad.)But even as Crawford focuses on elite politics and Congressional maneuvering, he makes clear that politics was far from just a white man’s game.He acknowledges the crucial role of Black abolitionists like David Walker, whom he likens to the Black musicians who inspired rock ‘n’ roll — the creative sparks who are rarely given enough credit.And he notes that the antislavery petition drives of the 1830s, which led to the notorious “gag rule” forbidding any mention of slavery in Congress, were largely the work of women, who played a growing role in national politics despite being denied the right to vote.“Founding Son” underlines the story’s resonance to contemporary politics, with terms like “one-term president,” “alternative facts” and “deep-state cabal.” There are even accusations of a “stolen election,” after Adams — despite losing the popular and electoral votes — was elevated to the presidency in 1825, following a back room deal in Congress.)But Crawford, who calls himself an “unaffiliated” voter, also allows plenty of room for those aspects of history that don’t satisfy a contemporary thirst for a simplistic morality play.Crawford said he wanted to avoid turning the past into an oversimplified morality play. In history, he said, “everyone’s a hero, everyone’s a villain.”Kate Medley for The New York TimesConsider the treatment of Adams’s archrival, Andrew Jackson. Today, Jackson — a slaveholder who pursued a brutal policy of Native American removal, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is anathema to Democrats who not so long ago celebrated him as a founder of the party. And Crawford seconds the opinion of Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian featured on the podcast: There’s a word for him, and it’s “not a nice one.”But he also notes that it was Jackson who blocked John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of “nullification,” which held that the Constitution allowed states to reject federal legislation.As for Adams, for all his noble fight against slavery, some of his rhetoric — like his lament that American leaders, unlike Europe’s, were “palsied by the will of our constituents” — does not sound great today.In history, Crawford said, “everyone’s a hero, and everyone’s a villain.”As for today’s politics, he laments the intensity of the polarization, and the loss of any connection with a “shared reality.” But the dysfunction, as he sees it, is not equally shared.“Today the parties are clearly out of balance,” he said. “And yes, it seems to be that the Republican Party of 2023 bears no resemblance to its former self.”What comes next, he said, “is a story for someone else to tell many years from now.” In the meantime, he’s outlining another history podcast he hopes to record.“It’s juicy and reflects this moment,” he said, launching into an enthusiastic elevator pitch. “I’m not dallying in presentism — not doing that! But man.”He paused: “And I’ve already got a whole shelf of books.” More

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      8 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      A dive into tracks by Tyler, the Creator, Feist, Bully and more recent highlights.Tyler, the Creator released a new track as part of an expanded edition of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”Luis “Panch” PerezDear listeners,I have a constantly replenishing playlist on my phone called “Thursday Nights and Friday Mornings.” It’s named for the time I do some of my most focused new-music listening, in preparation for the publication of the Playlist, a weekly feature that I compile with my colleagues Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica.* Each Friday, we recommend a handful of songs released in the past week, a task that helps me stay on top of all (well, most) of the new music that comes out in a given week, and often the Jons’ picks point me toward what I missed.Every few weeks, I’ll be sending out an Amplifier digest of recent Playlist highlights. Today, we’ve got a mix of some possibly familiar names (Lucinda Williams; Feist; Tyler, the Creator) and hopefully some new ones, too.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Jess Williamson: “Hunter”This is one of my favorite new songs right now. It’s from the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, whose music I’ve been following since her haunting 2014 debut, “Native State.” Last year, she teamed up with a fellow musician from the South, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and formed a country duo called Plains. Williamson’s contributions to Plains’ excellent record “I Walked With You a Ways” felt like a step forward for her as a songwriter, and I hear that growth on “Hunter,” the first single from her next solo album, “Time Ain’t Accidental,” out in June. It’s a bittersweet song about the spiritually exhausting process of looking for love, but on the chorus Williamson sounds hopeful and replenished, reminding herself, “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Bully: “Days Move Slow”My former colleague at Vulture Jesse David Fox once compared an early song from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy power-pop band Bully to “Sugarhigh,” the fictional alt-rock hit that Renée Zellweger’s character sings at the end of “Empire Records” — and now I will never un-hear that similarity as long as I live. (It’s definitely a compliment.) I interviewed Bognanno over video chat in August 2020, and I remember a very sweet dog named Mezzi dozing behind her. (A dog lover myself, I always ask my interview subjects about their pups. Always.) Sadly, Mezzi has since passed on, but “Days Move Slow,” from the forthcoming Bully album “Lucky for You,” is both an ode to her memory and a chronicle of Bognanno trying to propel herself out of the muck of grief. That probably makes it sound like a downer, but the song has a resilient, upbeat energy about it — sort of like an excitable canine. Rest in power, Mezzi! (Listen on YouTube)3. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro: “Beso”Some couples announce their engagement with a ring pic on Instagram. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, two of the brightest Spanish-language stars in the current pop firmament, hinted at theirs in a music video. Their sweet and sultry duet “Beso” is a highlight from their recently released collaborative EP, “RR” — and proof of their musical chemistry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Tyler, the Creator: “Sorry Not Sorry”Fun fact: In 2021, only two albums made appearances on all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists — Olivia Rodrigo’s head-turning debut “Sour” and Tyler, the Creator’s sprawling rap odyssey “Call Me if You Get Lost.” Last week, Tyler released an expanded edition featuring a few new tracks, including this one, the gregarious “Sorry Not Sorry.” I really like this song’s Jekyll-and-Hyde energy, as a repentant Tyler apologizes for a number of personal and professional slights and then, occasionally, a brasher version of himself takes it right back: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Mahalia: “Terms and Conditions”I’m a total mark for any song that mines and cleverly updates the sounds of Y2K pop or “TRL”-era R&B. (See also: The entire output of the young British girl group Flo.) “Terms and Conditions,” from the 24-year-old singer Mahalia, does just that. It’s giving me hints of Mya, Destiny’s Child and a whole lot of J. Lo’s glimmering millennial time capsule “If You Had My Love.” But it’s also got a contemporary twist, as Mahalia tells a potential suitor what she won’t tolerate (“If you look at her, consider bridges burned”), flipping the dry language of contractual agreements into something confident, fun and flirty. (Listen on YouTube)6. Lucinda Chua featuring yeule: “Something Other Than Years”Like the Mahalia song, I have my colleague Jon Pareles to thank for this next Playlist pick, from the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua. “Something Other Than Years” is a sparse, hypnotic duet with the Singaporean musician yeule, which finds Chua pleading in a glassy voice, “Show me how to live this life,” a request that seems to be answered by yeule’s celestial melody. Jon describes the rest of Chua’s new album “Yian” as a collection of “meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Feist: “Borrow Trouble”I love it when Feist — an artist often associated with calm and quietude — lets loose and makes a ruckus, as she does on this stomping tune from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Wait for her primal screams at the very end! (Listen on YouTube)Two Lucindas in a single playlist? Better believe it. The country-rock legend Lucinda Williams’s voice has sounded defiant since at least the 1980s, but since recovering from a 2020 stroke, her survivor’s rasp has taken on a whole new gravitas. “New York Comeback” — from the upcoming album “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” — has Williams’s characteristic grit and lack of sentiment (“No one’s brought the curtain down,” she sings wrly, “maybe you should stick around”) but there’s something poignant about hearing Amplifier fave Bruce Springsteen (along with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa) singing backing vocals to support her as if he’s just one more rock ’n’ roll lifer nodding to another. (Listen on YouTube)These are my terms and conditions,Lindsay*If the grammatically correct plural of “attorney general” is indeed “attorneys general,” maybe I should say “Jons Pareles and Caramanica.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Jess Williamson, “Hunter”Track 2: Bully, “Days Move Slow”Track 3: Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, “Beso”Track 4: Tyler, the Creator, “Sorry Not Sorry”Track 5: Mahalia, “Terms and Conditions”Track 6: Lucinda Chua featuring yeule, “Something Other Than Years”Track 7: Feist, “Borrow Trouble”Track 8: Lucinda Williams, “New York Comeback”Bonus TracksA few of you have written in to ask if we archive previous Amplifier playlists on Spotify. We do! The easiest way to find them is through our account page, where we also archive all the weekly Friday Playlists, too.And speaking of reader emails: Special thanks to Sharon Smith for — after I mentioned that Bob Dylan won his first Grammy nearly two decades into his career, for his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — directing me to this blistering performance of Dylan playing the song live at the 1980 Grammys. (Kris Kristofferson, as you’ll see, was loving it.) Apparently the producers asked him to cut the song down to three or four minutes; he played for six and a half. Classic Bob! More

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      4 New Artists You Need to Hear

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      Listen to Jana Horn, Water From Your Eyes, Debby Friday and Anna B Savage.Debby Friday is on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Katrin BragaDear listeners,Each year when I watch the Grammys, I am reminded of the absurdity of the best new artist category. New to whom, I always wonder. The qualifications are notoriously fuzzy and historically unstable — just ask the country musician Shelby Lynne, who released her debut record in 1989 and was amused to find herself winning best new artist in 2001. (“Thirteen years and six albums to get here,” she remarked wryly from the stage.) In 2007, Justin Vernon’s folk-pop project Bon Iver put out the lauded “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but it took five years and two more acclaimed releases to pull off one of the category’s most dramatic upsets, when he took home the 2012 trophy by beating the fan favorite, Nicki Minaj — who, as it happened, put out her first mixtape all the way back in 2007, too.And yet I did feel sympathy for the Grammy nominating body while putting together today’s playlist, which is full of up-and-coming artists who have recently caught my ear. No, they’re not exactly “new” — all have previously released music, and in some cases a few albums. But they’re new to me, and I hope that means at least a few of them will be new to you, too. They’re an eclectic bunch, making confessional acoustic folk, brash electro-pop and off-kilter art-rock. All have fresh albums that have either just been released or will be very soon. I would happily break Milli Vanilli’s (rescinded) best new artist Grammy from 1990 into four pieces and redistribute it to the following acts.Listen along here on Spotify as you read, or hit the YouTube links as you go.Jana HornJana Horn is a native Texan with a poised, glassy voice that reminds me a bit of the great ’60s folk singer Vashti Bunyan, except Bunyan’s voice evoked pastoral realism instead of Horn’s subtly mischievous mirror-world. The sparse, spine-tingling “After All This Time” — from a new album coming out next week, “The Window Is the Dream” — was what first caught my ear, but it’s since led me back to her great 2020 album, “Optimism,” and the absolutely haunting song “Jordan,” a poetic meditation on a Bible verse that Horn unfurls with the fixed gaze and confident pacing of an expert storyteller.Water From Your EyesSonic Youth never made a guest appearance on “Sesame Street,” but what the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes presupposes with its latest single, “Barley,” is, well … what if the band did? “1, 2, 3, counter,” the vocalist Rachel Brown intones in a bone-dry deadpan. “You’re a cool thing, count mountains.” Nate Amos provides the perfect complement by kicking up dust storms of distorted, deconstructed guitar riffs. “Barley” stacks familiar words and musical elements in unpredictable shapes, creating an internal logic as alluring as it is mysterious. It all bodes very well for the group’s album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26.Debby FridayThe Nigerian-born, Toronto-based singer and rapper Debby Friday’s ambitious, charismatic album “Good Luck” is one of my favorite debuts of the year so far. The strobe-lit club banger “I Got It,” which features Uñas, has been a mainstay of my running playlist for the past few months — it’s bona fide sprint fuel! But Friday shows off her range on the more introspective “So Hard to Tell,” which she frames as a tender but direct address to her younger self: “Lady Friday,” she sighs in a voice weighted down with the wisdom of hindsight, “all you do is rebel.” No matter her mood, though, Friday has what the kids call main character energy: She’s a shape-shifting, swashbuckling dynamo journeying through different tempos and genres, always on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Anna B SavageWhere does love go — like, energetically speaking — after the relationship that contained it ends? That’s the question that the British singer-songwriter Anna B Savage stares down in “The Ghost,” a quivering, emotionally raw incantation that begins her gripping new album, “In/Flux.” “I thought you were gone, but six years on, you’re back again,” Savage sings through gritted teeth before unlatching her jaw to let out a keening plea: “Stop haunting me, please.” There’s a rattling immediacy to Savage’s music; she writes like someone with a direct, unimpeded channel to her innermost feelings. “The Orange,” the album’s cautiously optimistic closer, provides a satisfying counterpoint to “The Ghost” and, I’d venture, a pretty good ending to this little playlist. “My new love is wind in the poplar trees,” Savage sings, finally free of the ghost’s interruptions and able to take stock of the simple pleasures all around her: “Round pebbles, poetry/Orange peel hacked on my knee.”If that’s not enough new music, Jon Pareles and I have 9 more song recommendations for you in this week’s Playlist.Yours in imagining Kim Gordon meeting Cookie Monster,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Best New (to Me) Artists, 2023” track listTrack 1: Jana Horn, “After All This Time”Track 2: Water From Your Eyes, “Barley”Track 3: Debby Friday, “I Got It”Track 4: Anna B Savage, “The Ghost”Track 5: Jana Horn, “Jordan”Track 6: Debby Friday, “So Hard to Tell”Track 7: Anna B Savage, “The Orange”Bonus tracksI cannot mention Vashti Bunyan without stopping everything and listening to “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind,” and if you have two minutes and 15 seconds to spare, I suggest you do the same.Another absurd Grammy fact I learned this week and must share with you: Guess which song earned Bob Dylan his first ever solo Grammy? Actually, don’t guess, you’re never going to get it so I’m just going to tell you: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won best rock performance in 1980. Think about that: Bob Dylan didn’t win a single solo Grammy until 1980. (In 1973, when Ringo Starr accepted a podium full of album of the year awards for the many artists featured on “The Concert for Bangladesh,” Dylan got one of those. But still.) As it happens, I do love “Gotta Serve Somebody” — even more after seeing him play it at the Beacon Theater in November 2021 — so here’s to Bob Dylan’s first Grammy. Maybe that is what Soy Bomb was trying to protest. More

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      What’s Driving a Fresh Wave of Irish Music? Tradition.

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      As Ireland reimagines itself, musicians including the singer Lisa O’Neill and the band Lankum are reimagining the island’s music with an ever-growing sense of pride.DUBLIN — The 40-year-old Irish singer Lisa O’Neill’s north Dublin flat is filled with books, records, instruments and talismanic chachkas. A Sinead O’Connor photo flanks a Johnny Cash portrait on a shelf next to a ceramic teapot; a Patrick Kavanagh poetry collection tops a pile of paperbacks; a Margaret Barry LP jacket gets pride of place on her upright piano’s rack.Barry was a street singer “discovered” by the folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1950s; she busked with a banjo and a beautiful bray of a voice, brazenly Irish, singing songs of the day alongside traditional ballads. Her work has become a touchstone for O’Neill. “I kind of really learned to sing from these recordings,” she said in an interview in her high-ceilinged kitchen last month. “She was like the Edith Piaf of Ireland.”O’Neill is a cultural hero in her own right. She has released five albums since 2009, building a reputation as a modern artist tapped into the ancient. In song, her voice becomes a wild thing, cutting the air like the cry of Dublin’s omnipresent sea gulls; it can silence a noisy pub crowd when it lays into a ballad, swooping boldly into high notes or creaking fiercely. She spent Ireland’s strict lockdown largely by herself here in one of the city’s weathered Georgian townhouses, writing the incantatory songs that inform her recent album, “All of This Is Chance,” which was released in February.“Folk” might not be the best word to describe O’Neill’s striking mix of originals and interpretations, which echo singer-songwriter, alt-country and indie-rock traditions. In this, she is not alone. Over the past decade she has found community and common cause with a Dublin tribe leaning into Ireland’s older traditions.There’s the sublimely harmonizing brother duo Ye Vagabonds, who opened shows for Phoebe Bridgers last summer; the mighty bass-baritone singer-songwriter John Francis Flynn; Eoghan O Ceannabhain, a master of Irish-language song in the sean nos tradition; and Lankum, a gang of drone-loving experimentalists who have become a lodestar for the scene, and released their fourth album on March 24.This creative bounty has been echoed in other Irish arts resonating abroad despite — and arguably because of — their rich, resolute Irishness: the TV series “Derry Girls” and “Bad Sisters,” the films “The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin)” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” both part of the so-called Green Wave at this year’s Oscars.All this has coincided with significant sociopolitical change in Ireland. The legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage — alongside the exposure of the horrors inside the religious institutions known as “mother and baby homes” that proliferated until the 1990s — have marked the diminished power of the Roman Catholic Church alongside the greater empowerment of women. Brexit, while further complicating Ireland’s ever-fraught relationship with England, has perhaps sharpened the Irish sense of self.Lankum’s singer and multi-instrumentalist Radie Peat, 36, sees this cultural churn accompanying a resurgence of interest in Irish folklore and language “with absolutely zero sense of embarrassment,” describing an atmosphere where artists are “confident about their identities as Irish people, and not trying to recreate things they’ve seen done somewhere else.” She credits the abortion and marriage referendums, driven by decisive popular vote, as giving people “a sense of pride.”Her bandmate Ian Lynch, 42, a singer who plays contributes both uilleann pipes and tape loops, added a clarification. “Not a jingoistic, blinkered sense of pride,” he said. “Not like some right-wing, ‘oh, we’re the best,’ but actually a sense of pride for good reasons.”The Lankum crew, who often finish each other’s sentences, mulled this notion on a blustery February afternoon at Guerrilla Sound, the workshop of the group’s producer/low-key fifth band member John Murphy, 39, who’s known as Spud. The catacomb studio is stocked with esoteric electronic instruments, some of which shaped the band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album, “False Lankum.”The band’s “folk song” approach, which can equally suggest the vast dronescapes of the composer Sarah Davachi and the experimental metal band Sunn O))), appears in microcosm on their nearly nine-minute single “Go Dig My Grave.” Peat’s piercing delivery of the centuries-old “forsaken girl” ballad, which has many variants (“The Butcher Boy,” “Died for Love”), charts a bottomless grief as the track layers instruments alongside other sounds: minor-key hurdy-gurdy notes, steely fiddle harmonics, witch-coven murmurs, potato-chip crunching and the subliminal flicker of Murphy digging holes for tomato plants in his garden.Spider Stacy, 64, the English musician and actor who exploded the possibilities of Irish traditional music with the Pogues in 1980s and has performed with Lankum, admired the group’s “profound understanding of the possibilities of sound” and “intimate knowledge of their art” in an email exchange. “For me anyway, they surpass pretty much anyone,” he added. “They’re the best band in the world.”“Go Dig My Grave” is a song Peat had plumbed for years at casual pub sessions, social hubs that remain central to Irish music tradition. The tradition got a boost in the late ’00s, when the financial crisis left young people with more time on their hands than cash. Lankum’s members met at a Dublin session. Diarmuid and Brian Mac Gloinn, of Ye Vagabonds, found a home in them, as did O’Neill. For a time, she and the Mac Gloinns anchored separate nights at Walsh’s, in the north side Stoneybatter neighborhood.O’Neill sat in on a recent session there, a lively assembly that ran until 1 a.m. and nearly veered into a brawl when a bystander picked up a concertina without asking. A labor-themed sequence included O’Neill’s “Rock the Machine,” about a Dublin dockworker losing his job to automation. Kilian O’Flanagan, a rising talent, sang Ewan MacColl’s “Tunnel Tigers,” about the digging of the London Underground, and Paddy Cummins, taking a night off from his band Skipper’s Alley, delivered “McAlpine’s Fusiliers,” another rueful worker’s tale popularized by 1960s folk revivalists the Dubliners.The mother ship of Dublin session pubs, however, remains the Cobblestone in nearby Smithfield. In a scenario echoing the 1970s New York punk crucible CBGBs, a dive bar in a rough neighborhood was transformed by a music lover — here, in the late 1980s by Tom Mulligan, who now runs the Cobblestone with his children. Roughly 10 years ago, the bar began hosting “The Night Larry Got Stretched,” a monthly session in the back room aimed at involving younger people in traditional singing. It’s been going strong ever since.But Dublin has changed. Smithfield became a desirable district, and the Cobblestone was the locus of a civic controversy in 2021, as developers planned to build a hotel on top of it, eliminating the pub’s back room and courtyard. Community protest was swift; petitions circulated, and a media savvy march included musician pallbearers parading a coffin inscribed “RIP Dublin.” The hotel project stalled, and developers withdrew an appeal last year.The Cobblestone’s cause, like that of the Dublin scene writ large, has been furthered by a dedicated network of culture workers. Filmmakers have been key. Luke McManus is a local who shot a moving clip for Lankum’s 2016 breakthrough single, “Cold Old Fire,” gratis; his new documentary, “North Circular Road,” is a musical love letter to hardscrabble North Dublin. “Song of Granite,” Pat Collins’ haunted 2017 biopic of the sean nos legend Joe Heaney, featured vivid performances by O’Neill and Damien Dempsey, the north side singer-songwriter who just completed a run of his “Springsteen on Broadway”-style “Tales From Holywell” at the venerable Abbey Theater. The filmmaker and musician Myles O’Reilly, possibly the hardest-working man in Irish trad, maintains a YouTube Channel that’s a master course in how to present, preserve and promote a nascent music scene.From left: Ian Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada, Radie Peat, Daragh Lynch of Lankum. The band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album is titled “False Lankum.”Ellius Grace for The New York TimesImaginative boutique festivals (Quiet Lights in Cork, Roise Rua on the island of Arranmore) have helped, too, as well as the Irish Arts Council’s traditional arts arm, who have lent support in spite of grumbling from some folk music old-schoolers skeptical of the current scene.Perhaps the biggest boost to international outreach has been the attention of Rough Trade Records, founded by Geoff Travis; the label was known for signing post-punk acts like the Smiths and the Raincoats in the 1980s. The label’s co-owner Jeannette Lee sharpened her appreciation of traditional music touring with Public Image Limited, whose frontman, John Lydon, liked blasting Irish folk alongside dub reggae in its van. She started the folk-adjacent River Lea label with Geoff Travis as, in his words, “a labor of love, to a degree,” but also as a proving ground for young artists. Flynn, Ye Vagabonds and O’Neill debuted on River Lea; with a growing audience, her latest album was issued on Rough Trade proper.While the tide of interest is lifting many boats, no one’s getting especially rich. Ian Lynch felt so priced out of Dublin’s ballooning housing market, he moved back in with his parents. (“I get to see them, which is good,” he said. “But, I mean, I’m 42.”) Side hustles help. Along with lecturing on Irish folklore, Lynch produces “Fire Draw Near,” a fascinating and often very funny Patreon-funded podcast devoted to modern and historic Irish traditional music. O’Reilly supports his video work in part via Patreon, too, with enough success that he can often film emerging musicians without charge, helping grow the scene.O’Neill, one of the first musicians O’Reilly ever filmed, back in 2010, is an object lesson in how the collective work bears fruit. She quit her barista job at Bewley’s, the famous Grafton Street tearoom, and after years of shares, was finally able to get a flat of her own. Her February album release concert at the town hall in Cavan — her hometown, roughly a 90-minute drive from Dublin — felt like the homecoming it was. On a stage made homey with vintage table lamps, guest artists came and went as old songs flanked new, and the show ended on a spectacular, dissonance-spiked version of “All the Tired Horses,” her remarkable Bob Dylan cover that recently capped the popular period crime drama “Peaky Blinders.”Afterward, naturally, a session bubbled up, in the lobby of a small hotel down the road. O’Neill’s father ferried in rounds of Guinness from the pub next door. A young man spoke of health struggles, and beautifully sang “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.” The Corkonian legend John Spillane, a national treasure who is something of Ireland’s John Prine, reprised an earlier onstage duet with O’Neill on his aching “Passage West,” then laid into the raucous WWI lament “Salonika,” with hearty accompaniment from the novelist Patrick McCabe, a friend and fan of O’Neill’s who came in for the show.And on it went until sometime after 3 a.m., when the holdouts finally called it a night. More

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      10 (or, Actually, 11) Songs That Explain Me

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      Introducing a new newsletter dedicated to music discovery, and your host, Lindsay Zoladz.Illustration by The New York Times; Bob Berg/Getty Images (Fiona Apple)Dear listeners,Welcome to the first installment of The Amplifier — a twice-weekly note about songs (new and old) worth hearing. I want The Amplifier to bring that mixtape-from-your-friend feeling back to musical discovery. Too often, in the streaming era, our choices are at the mercy of a shadowy, impersonal algorithm. The Amplifier will be a return to something more intimate and human.Of course, that requires you knowing at least a little bit about me and my particular musical perspective.But the easiest way to fill a music critic with crippling panic is to pose that seemingly simple question: “What’s your favorite song?” Most of us are likely to get defensive and philosophical, asking whether you mean “favorite” or “best,” and how you personally would define those terms — all as a stalling tactic while we spin through the bulging Rolodex of all the songs we’ve ever loved, trying and probably failing to arrive at a sufficiently revealing choice.So rather than make a monolithic list of My Favorite Songs of All Time — one that I’d immediately be adding tracks to in my head as soon as I hit send — I thought I’d opt for the more inviting language of a popular social media prompt: “10 Songs That Explain Me.”Except that I just. Could. Not. Do it. No matter how many times I tried, I always ended up with an extra song. So consider this to be a 10-song playlist with a bonus track — or perhaps an early indication that the knobs on this Amplifier go to 11.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Nina Simone: “Ain’t Got No — I Got Life”Only Nina Simone could transform two relatively kitschy numbers from the musical “Hair” into a song of self that rivals Walt Whitman. Simone is a lodestar to me: The excellence that she demanded from herself, the attention she demanded from her audiences and the classical virtuosity she brought to popular music all make her one of the greats. This rousing song can lift me out of just about any funk, and with such efficiency! Simone only needs less than three minutes to remind you exactly what it means to be alive. (Listen on YouTube)2. Fiona Apple: “Shameika”I grew up in suburban New Jersey and came of age in the late ’90s: a place and a time when conformity was currency. I wasn’t very good at fitting in, and like many an angsty youth, I found a kindred spirit in Fiona Apple. I first heard (and became obsessed with) her poetic and moody debut album, “Tidal,” when I was on the precipice of middle school, which is about the age Apple imagines herself to be in this elegantly unruly song from her 2020 album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” I see a lot of myself in it — both in the young, dissatisfied girl Apple remembers herself to be, and in the adult writer who made it out of that environment intact enough to tell the story. In my headphones, at least, Fiona said I had potential. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Dismemberment Plan: “Superpowers”When I was 18, I moved to Washington, D.C., for college and lived there until I was 25. My friend Drew put this song on a mix for me a few years into that stretch, and for a time it became my anthem: The Dismemberment Plan — an arty, verbose four-piece from D.C. that had broken up shortly before I got there — was a perfect bridge between the introspective emo I liked in high school and the more experimental strains of indie-rock I got into in college. Nothing brings me back to the ennui of early adulthood like the band’s 1999 classic “Emergency & I,” but my favorite of its records is the one that has “Superpowers” on it, “Change.” Luckily I got to catch a couple of amazing D-Plan reunion shows before I left town. (Listen on YouTube)4. Grimes: “Genesis”I have this theory that moving to New York knocks at least five years off your behavioral age. I made it here at 25, but for the first few years it felt like a second adolescence: catching shows every night at a bunch of now-defunct Williamsburg venues, making new friends, vying for the car stereo’s aux cord. Very often, the iPod was playing Grimes’s light and blissful album “Visions,” or sometimes just “Genesis” on repeat. It’s a song that can still make me feel, for a fleeting four minutes, like I’m the main character in my own video game and I’ve figured out the cheat code that makes me invincible. (Listen on YouTube)5. Frank Ocean: “Self Control”And here is the B-side of my roaring 20s: Frank Ocean’s tender voice was and remains a balm for whatever failure, loneliness and disappointment life decided to throw my way. (Consider “Self Control” a way to sneak another one of my favorite artists, and homes-away-from-home, onto this list, too, since the eclectic Philadelphia indie-rocker Alex G plays guitar on the track.) (Listen on YouTube)6. The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Wild Horses”Let’s continue wallowing while turning back the clock a bit to hear from another one of my all-time favorite singers, Gram Parsons. (I recently went on a Nashville vacation that was at least partially a spiritual pilgrimage to see his infamously sinful Nudie suit in the Country Music Hall of Fame.) A lot of the older music I love most has a kind of “near miss” quality about it — history’s beautiful losers, the artists who didn’t break through but deserved to, the ones who gesture toward all sorts of alternative presents and what-ifs. Maybe that’s why I prefer Parsons’s vocal take of “Wild Horses” to Mick Jagger’s more familiar one. (The Sundays’ version is great, too.) There’s a wobbly brokenness to it that I find incredibly moving, especially the way he emphasizes “a dull aching pain.” The origins of the song are notoriously disputed, but some insist that its titular line was inspired by something that Marianne Faithfull croaked when she came out of a six-day coma in 1969 — “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” — and that is one of those rock ’n’ roll stories that, even if it’s apocryphal, I have chosen to believe. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Star: “Daisy Glaze”Speaking of music history’s beautiful losers: Big Star, one of my favorite rock bands ever. Like many a teenage millennial, I first came to the band through one of the numerous covers of the acoustic ballad “Thirteen” (“one of my almost-good songs,” the ever-humble Alex Chilton once said). Once I’d immersed myself in the band’s back catalog, I became belatedly furious that it had never been as famous as Led Zeppelin. I will always be exhilarated by the moment in the middle of “Daisy Glaze” when Jody Stephens’s three kick-drum thumps initiate a sudden tempo change — a perfect encapsulation of the band’s thrilling brilliance. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Mountain Goats: “Up the Wolves”I got into the Mountain Goats toward the end of high school — my friend Matt and I would drive from Jersey diner to diner, listening to their seemingly limitless discography — and John Darnielle is probably my favorite contemporary lyricist. The album “The Sunset Tree,” and this song in particular, have gotten me through many a dark night of the soul. I have now seen the Mountain Goats live more times than I can count — I lost track in the low 20s — and I am not yet numb to the emotional power of these songs. They played “Up the Wolves” a few months ago at Webster Hall, and after all these years, it still made me cry like a big teenage baby. (Listen on YouTube)9. Buffy Sainte-Marie: “The Circle Game”This one’s a total cheat: a sneaky way to mention two artists I adore — Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell, who of course wrote “The Circle Game” — on a single track. Joni is probably my favorite living songwriter, and there are about 100 other songs of hers I could have chosen. But I like the story behind this cover, recorded when Joni was still a fledgling songwriter to whom the then-better-known Buffy was trying to bring some attention. Suffice to say, it worked. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Raincoats: “No Side to Fall In”I’ve identified as a feminist throughout many different cultural and personal phases: in seventh grade when the boys told me girls couldn’t skateboard; in college, when it was a somewhat unfashionable concern that meant I read a lot of literary theory; these days, when a more watered-down version of the word has been co-opted to sell things on Instagram. All throughout, music has given me the strength to keep fighting, dreaming and resisting psychic death. To me, the great post-punk group the Raincoats are emblematic of a kind of utopian feminist freedom: a sonic universe where women can sound like and do anything they want — yes, even skateboarding. (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison: “Ballerina”Oh, Van the (Facebook-hating) Man, my problematic fave. “Astral Weeks” is an album I love deeply, but I’ve always thought “Ballerina” should be the closing track. Since this is my playlist, with my rules, let’s try it out. I love this clip of a very young Leonard Cohen explaining to a confused interviewer on Canadian television what it feels like to be in “a state of grace.” It’s that “kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you.” I have found no better description of how I feel when I listen to this song. (Listen on YouTube)Thanks for listening,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“10 (or, Actually, 11) Songs That Explain Me” track listTrack 1: Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No — I Got Life”Track 2: Fiona Apple, “Shameika”Track 3: The Dismemberment Plan, “Superpowers”Track 4: Grimes, “Genesis”Track 5: Frank Ocean, “Self Control”Track 6: The Flying Burrito Brothers, “Wild Horses”Track 7: Big Star, “Daisy Glaze”Track 8: The Mountain Goats, “Up the Wolves”Track 9: Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Circle Game”Track 10: The Raincoats, “No Side to Fall In”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Ballerina”The song that explains youI’m really excited to go on this musical journey with you. I also want to make this newsletter a place for conversations about the songs and artists that mean something to you, so I’ll occasionally be asking for your thoughts on the topics we cover in this newsletter — and I’d love to hear from all of you.Today, I want to know: What’s a song that explains you? Tell me about it.If you’d like to participate you can fill out this form here. We may use your response in an upcoming edition of The Amplifier.Bonus tracksIf you want to read me going even deeper on my love of Fiona Apple, here’s an essay I wrote a few years back, as part of NPR’s “Turning the Tables” series on female artists. (My dear friend Jenn Pelly also tracked down the real-life Shameika and wrote a wonderful article about her.)And, if you’re a Van Fan, here’s me going incredibly long on “Astral Weeks,” for The Ringer, on the occasion of the album’s 50th anniversary.Finally, if you’re inclined to read my recent profile of the great Buffy Sainte-Marie (I was pinching myself just outside the Zoom frame!), might I suggest following it with this delightful clip of her showing Pete Seeger, on his short-lived TV show “Rainbow Quest,” how to play a mouth bow. More