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      Miley Cyrus and Brandi Carlile’s Raw Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, Nicki Nicole, Caroline Rose and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Miley Cyrus featuring Brandi Carlile, ‘Thousand Miles’From Miley Cyrus’s new album, “Endless Summer Vacation,” comes this rugged, low-to-the-ground duet with the polished roots-rock yowler Brandi Carlile. Both are capable of broad vocal theatrics, but it should be said, Carlile is holding back here, in order to allow Cyrus the space to ruminate in this song about failure: “I’m not always right/but still I ain’t got time for what went wrong.” In her post-Disney career, Cyrus has flirted with various forms of adulthood in terms of performance — sexual defiance, hippie experimentalism and so on. But she’s perhaps at her most appealing when applying restraint. JON CARAMANICANicki Nicole, ‘No Voy a Llorar’Latin R&B enjoys a whiff of hyperpop helium in “No Voy a Llorar” (“I’m Not Going to Cry”), a preemptively defensive breakup song. The 22-year-old Argentine songwriter Nicki Nicole insists she’s fully prepared if things go wrong. “When you leave, I’m not going to suffer,” she predicts. The song’s chord progression could have come from the 1950s, but its production is as contemporary as its brittle attitude. Her pop soprano gets pitched further upward as the track begins; elusive background vocals and synthesizers puff their syncopations around the beat. Even the exposed voice-and-piano coda, the sincere payoff, gets computer-tweaked. JON PARELESBaaba Maal featuring the Very Best, ‘Freak Out’The Senegalese songwriter Baaba Maal, with an extensive catalog behind him, has lately been heard worldwide with vocals on the soundtracks of the Black Panther films. He collaborated with the African-tinged English group the Very Best on “Freak Out,” from his coming album, “Being.” Ignore the song’s psychedelic title. The lyrics draw on an old proverb from Maal’s culture, the Fulani, instructing that someone who has deep knowledge should say neither too little nor too much. Its music merges programmed and hand percussion with a desert drone, an electric-guitar lick and the backup vocals of the Very Best’s Malawian singer, Esau Mwamwaya. It’s both up-to-the-minute and resolutely grounded in traditional wisdom. PARELESEladio Carrión featuring Future, ‘Mbappe’ (Remix)Last year, the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión had a hit with “Mbappe” a drowsy and delirious Migos-esque boast. Future appears on this remix with a pair of verses that are somehow both utterly rote and also grossly charming, rapping about the place where carnality and expensive jewelry intersect, and the elation of toxic love. CARAMANICANF, ‘Motto’NF has always rapped as if full of anxiety, and on a core level, that hasn’t changed on “Motto,” a clever narrative about unshackling oneself from the stressors of pop music success. But over classicist boom-bap production amplified with a whimsical swing and some of the howling dynamics of rock groups like Imagine Dragons, “Motto” feels somehow lighter. In his early career, NF sounded as if he was internalizing all the pressures of the world, but now he sounds free and calm, dismissing those same pressures with a shrug. CARAMANICABartees Strange, ‘Daily News’“Daily News” was tucked away on the vinyl version of the album Bartees Strange released in 2022, “Farm to Table.” Now it’s streaming, and it sums up and expands the album’s moods and dynamics. Strange sings about alienation, numbness and anxiety — “I can feel the weight/Crashing over me again” — as electric-guitar lines coil and intertwine around him. A bridge finds him even more alone — reduced to nervous, isolated vocals — but someone rescues him. Perhaps it’s a partner; perhaps it’s an audience. “I’ve found you,” he exults, in a full-band onrush of drums, saxophone and tremolo-strummed guitars, and the connection sounds rapturous. PARELESCaroline Rose, ‘Tell Me What You Want’A breakup could hardly be messier or more noisy than the one Caroline Rose depicts in “Tell Me What You Want.” “I am just pretending not to lose my mind,” she explains, in a track that swerves between acoustic-guitar strumming and full grunge blare. She blurts both “I can’t bear to lose you” and “Boy you’re going to hate this song!” She wonders if she should hold on; she wants to smash everything and move along. The video clip, a drunken trek through Austin, Texas, spells out all of her conflicting impulses. PARELESAngel Olsen, ‘Nothing’s Free’The steadfastness of vintage soul carries Angel Olsen through “Nothing’s Free,” as she sings about an unspecific but primal revelation. Slow gospel organ and piano chords, bluesy saxophone and patiently hand-played drumming sustain her amid — and in a long closing instrumental, beyond — something that sounds both life-changing and inevitable, as she sings, “Nothin’s free like breaking free/out of the past.” PARELESNoia, ‘Verano Adentro’Noia is Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, a songwriter from Barcelona who’s now based in Brooklyn. In “Verano Adentro” (“Summer Inside”), she wafts her voice over an amorphous, ever-shifting electronic backdrop. At first it’s tentative — chords and pauses, the clatter of a rainstick — but other, more ominous sounds crowd in: distorted guitar, insistent drums, rumbly low arpeggios. Nothing ruffles her as she basks in bliss: “All I need is an ocean, all I need is time,” she coos. PARELESSarah Pagé, ‘Premiers Pas Au Marécage’“Premiers Pas Au Marécage” translates as “First Steps in the Swamp,” and it’s a meditation on evolution — formlessness into forms — by Sarah Page, a harpist and composer from Montreal. She mingles electronics and plucked strings in this piece, which opens with yawning, amorphous sounds and recordings of Hungarian frogs, then deploys a quintet of Japanese kotos to join her in a measured, echoey waltz and march, a tentative climb toward order. PARELES More

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      Iris DeMent Is Worried About the World. So She Made Another Album.

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      The singer and songwriter, 62, takes her time between releases, making sure she has something to say in her music. She has found inspiration once again.While writing songs for her seventh album, “Workin’ on a World,” Iris DeMent recalled a vivid memory from her childhood, when she was first struck by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.It was the late 1960s, not long before his assassination, and she was 5 or 6 years old. Her very large family — she has 15 siblings — had just moved from Paragould, Ark., out to California. “There were a gazillion people living in our house,” she said from her home in Iowa City, Iowa. “The TV was playing, and I heard this booming voice. This was back when TVs were on the floor, so when I turned, I was suddenly eye to eye with Dr. King.”Even as a child, she understood something important was happening. “I remember looking around our living room and thinking, ‘I hope the grown-ups are listening to this man.’”DeMent name-checks Dr. King on “How Long,” a gospel song from “Workin’ on a World” about the arc of the moral universe taking a long, long time to bend toward justice. On new tracks that sound like old hymns, she sings about the people she considers her heroes: Dr. King, of course, but also John Lewis, Mahalia Jackson and the Chicks. “It dawned on me that a lot of what I’ve done with my songs is, I’ve tried to get what I think needs to be heard out to the grown-ups,” she said. “It’s a blessing to be of use in that way.”DeMent, 62, has been making herself useful for 30 years now. Her philosophical 1992 debut, “Infamous Angel,” which opened with an inquiry into the afterlife and closed with her mother singing “Higher Ground,” showcased her high, keening voice, the kind you’d hear from a church pew rather than the radio. Her lyrics sounded like down-home poetry, plain-spoken in their wisdom, and her music drew from many different styles — country, bluegrass, old-time folk, older-time church music — without falling squarely into any one genre or market.“There’s love and there’s hate. There’s good and there’s evil. Which side are you on? Figure it all out now and go.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesVery quickly, she found herself celebrated by some of her heroes, including Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris and John Prine (who even wrote liner notes for “Infamous Angel”). Just as quickly she found herself overwhelmed by the demands of the music industry. After two follow-up albums — the melancholy “My Life” in 1994 and the scowling “The Way I Should” in 1996 — she very purposefully slowed her schedule down. “I realized that it wasn’t working for me,” she said. “I could succumb to making records that aren’t like who I am and what I was put here to do, or I could pull back and protect my calling.”DeMent learned to take her time, typically pausing for roughly eight years between releases. It makes for a small but weighty catalog: In this century she’s made four albums, only two of which included original songs. “Lifeline,” from 2004, was a collection of old Pentecostal hymns, and for “The Trackless Woods,” from 2015, she set to music poems by the writer Anna Akhmatova — a project inspired by her Russian-born adopted daughter. (That year, her 1992 track “Let the Mystery Be” was used as the Season 2 theme for “The Leftovers.”)During that downtime she occasionally tours, and she’s always writing, always singing around the house and playing music with her husband, the folk musician Greg Brown. And she often wonders if she’ll never release another album, if no more songs will demand to be set loose in the world.“I don’t think it’s because I have a high standard, but I do have a certain standard,” she explained matter-of-factly, as though that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. “It takes me a long time to get 10 or 12 songs that I have faith in. I don’t always know if I’ll make another record, because I don’t know if I’ll find those 10 or 12 songs.”For the new album, DeMent tried something that hadn’t clicked before: co-writing. “I’ve never really written with people,” she said. “John Prine and I tried to write a song together, and we have some great stories to tell but no songs. If I can’t write a song with John, then who can I write a song with? It just wasn’t my thing.” But she had better luck with her stepdaughter, Pieta Brown, a distinguished singer-songwriter in her own right. Together they penned the family remembrance “I Won’t Ask You Why” via text. “I sent her a melody and a title asking, ‘Hey, do you feel anything from this?‌’” DeMent said. “And about one in the morning, she sent me all the things she was feeling. Six verses in all.”Still, despite recording that and other songs in multiple Nashville sessions with the producers Jim Rooney (who worked on her debut) and Richard Bennett (Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris), DeMent didn’t think she had enough faithful songs for an album. Brown finally coaxed DeMent into taking the next steps. “I just asked her if I could listen to those first sessions,” she said in a phone interview. “It was winter, and I spent hours driving around the tundra of Iowa listening to these songs. It seemed like she was communicating something massive and important that everybody should hear. So I called her and texted her, ‘You have a record!’”“Workin’ on a World” is an album about DeMent’s ongoing quest to find her place, about passing the wisdom of the generation that came before her to the one that follows. On the title track she declares, “I get up in the mornin’ knowing I’m privileged to be workin’ on a world I may never see.”“It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that song saved my life,” DeMent said. “Seeing my country embrace what it embraced in 2016 made me wonder truly and utterly how I was going to live. I don’t say that lightly. I just couldn’t comprehend it. But that song steadied me. I was singing it at home at the piano long before I recorded it. I would get up in the morning and sing it to get myself going, to get clarity. It was comforting in the way that even painful truths can carry comfort.”The album is full of what might be called marching songs, which are meant to inspire listeners, to show them the hard road ahead and to spur them along — or, as she put it, “to fortify you in your fight against evil.” That idea is rooted deep in DeMent’s experience growing up in church, and it has inspired all of her albums to some extent, but especially the politically agitated “The Way I Should” and “Lifeline,” a collection of old hymns.“That’s what I like about my Pentecostal upbringing,” DeMent said. “I’ve left most of it behind, but our songs were painting that picture of hell, the fiery furnace that awaited us, all the bad stuff coming down the line. So picture it. Get a really good vivid image. Then figure out what you’re going to do.“Some things aren’t that complicated,” she continued. “There’s love and there’s hate. There’s good and there’s evil. Which side are you on? Figure it all out now and go.” More

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      Grammys 2023: How to Watch and What to Expect

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      A guide to everything you need to know for the 65th annual awards on Sunday night.After two years of pandemic-related disruptions, the 65th annual Grammy Awards are returning on Sunday to their longtime home at the Crypto.com Arena (formerly the Staples Center) in Los Angeles.The night’s big story is Beyoncé. With 28 Grammy wins to her name, the star could become the most decorated Grammy artist ever. She needs three wins to tie, and four to beat the conductor Georg Solti, who holds the record for most overall wins.Her field-leading nine nominations this year include the three top categories — album, song and record of the year — where she has previously struggled to win. The Recording Academy, the institution behind the awards, has faced longstanding criticism that the show often fails to recognize Black talent with its biggest awards. Over the past few years, it has been trying to address that by eliminating nearly all of the nominating committees that determined the ballot and pushing to attract a younger and more diverse pool of voters.A bad night for Beyoncé, who enters the ceremony with an adored album in “Renaissance,” a famously vocal fan base known as the BeyHive and only one career win in an all-genre category, could mean more hard conversations for the Grammys.The awards on Sunday will recognize recordings released between Oct. 1, 2021 and Sept. 30, 2022. There were 16,741 eligible entries considered, and superstars including Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift will contend for top honors.The Grammy Awards 2023The 65th annual ceremony will be held on Feb. 5 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, after two years of delays and complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.Beyoncé: With a dominant new album and the chance to become the most awarded artist in Grammy history, all eyes are on the pop superstar ahead of the ceremony. What could go wrong?Bonnie Raitt: Long renowned as an interpreter of songs, the musician has quietly built a catalog of her own. Up for song of the year, she talked about her lifetime onstage in an interview with The Times.The-Dream and Muni Long: Ahead of the first-ever Grammy Award for songwriter of the year, the two musicians, who are both up for awards, trace their unique journeys to recognition.Here’s how to watch — and what to expect at — Sunday’s ceremony.What time does it all start?The ceremony will air live on Sunday, at 8 p.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. Pacific time) on CBS and stream live on Paramount+.Before the prime-time event, the premiere ceremony, where about 80 of the 91 prizes will be awarded, takes place at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. It begins at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time (12:30 p.m. Pacific time), and is available to watch in real time on live.Grammy.com and the Recording Academy’s YouTube page.The comedian Randy Rainbow will help host that event, and performers include Arooj Aftab, Blind Boys of Alabama, Madison Cunningham, Samara Joy, La Marisoul from La Santa Cecilia, Anoushka Shankar and Carlos Vives.How do I watch the red carpet?The parade of fashion and awkward interviews commences at 4 p.m. Eastern time on E!, and “Live From E!: Grammys” starts at 6 p.m. Celebrity arrivals will be streamed at grammy.com beginning at 6:30 p.m.Who is hosting?Trevor Noah, formerly of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, will do the honors for a third year.Who are the top contenders?Beyoncé, who this week announced a world tour supporting her latest album, “Renaissance,” has the most nominations, with nine, followed by Kendrick Lamar with eight and Adele and Brandi Carlie with seven each. Harry Styles, Mary J. Blige, Future, DJ Khaled and the producer and songwriter The-Dream all landed six apiece.What’s the breakdown of Beyoncé’s nominations?Beyoncé will go head-to-head with Adele once again in multiple categories, most notably album of the year, an award Beyoncé has yet to win. Adele cleaned up in all of the major contests in 2017, when “25” squared off against “Lemonade,” which led to Adele at first tearfully saying that she could not accept her album prize. Beyoncé’s losses in the show’s premier categories have also fueled wider complaints about how the Grammys have often failed to recognize Black artists in its all-genre categories. Only three Black women have ever taken home album of the year — the most recent was Lauryn Hill in 1999.In addition to album of the year (“Renaissance”), Beyoncé has nominations for record and song of the year (“Break My Soul”), best dance/electronic recording (“Break My Soul”), best dance/electronic album (“Renaissance”), best R&B performance (“Virgo’s Groove”), best traditional R&B performance (“Plastic Off the Sofa”), best R&B song (“Cuff It”) and best song written for visual media (“Be Alive” from the movie “King Richard”).Who will hit the stage?Bad Bunny (the most nominated artist at the Latin Grammys in November), Lizzo and Harry Styles will perform during the prime-time ceremony. The live lineup also includes Mary J. Blige, Brandi Carlile, Luke Combs, Sam Smith and Kim Petras, DJ Khaled, and Steve Lacy. Stevie Wonder will also perform with Smokey Robinson and Chris Stapleton.In celebration of 50 years of hip-hop, a special performance bringing together genre legends and contemporary stars will feature Busta Rhymes with Spliff Star, Missy Elliott, Future, GloRilla, Ice-T, Lil Baby, Lil Wayne, Queen Latifah, Run-DMC, Salt-N-Pepa and others. LL Cool J will introduce the segment, perform and share a few words.And as the show honors the artists we lost last year, Kacey Musgraves will perform for Loretta Lynn; Sheryl Crow, Mick Fleetwood and Bonnie Raitt will pay tribute to Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie; and the Migos rapper Quavo will be joined by Maverick City Music to celebrate Takeoff, who died at 28 in a shooting in November.Who will be handing out the awards?Jill Biden will take the stage on Sunday as a presenter, but she’s not the first-ever first lady to grace the Grammys. (Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance in a 2019 opening segment and won a Grammy the following year for best spoken word album.) Other presenters include Cardi B, James Corden, Billy Crystal, Viola Davis, Dwayne Johnson, Olivia Rodrigo and Shania Twain.What else is new this year?The Recording Academy introduced a new award for songwriter of the year, which will go to a single songwriter or a team of writers for a given body of work. Four other categories are arriving, too, for alternative music performance, Americana music performance, spoken word poetry album and score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media. In addition, a prize for best song for social change will be handed out the day before the ceremony.Who might make history?Beyoncé, of course, who could become the Grammys’ most awarded artist. The superstar, already recognized as the “winningest woman in Grammy history,” and her husband, Jay-Z, both have 88 total nominations each — a tie for most Grammy nods collected by any artist.Bad Bunny also has a chance to join the Grammy record book: An album of the year win for “Un Verano Sin Ti” would make it the first exclusively Spanish-language release to earn the honor. His nomination was historic, too, as “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the first album released entirely in Spanish to earn an album of the year nod. More

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      Karol G and Romeo Santos’s Sensual Goodbye, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Morgan Wallen, Yves Tumor, Lankum and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Karol G and Romeo Santos, ‘X Si Volvemos’Two Latin pop songwriters who thrive on breakup drama — Karol G, from Colombia, and Romeo Santos, a stadium-scale headliner from the Bronx with Dominican and Puerto Rican roots — arrange a last tryst in “X Si Volvemos.” Karol G points out “No funcionamos” — “We don’t work” — and “We’re a disaster in love,” but she admits, “In bed we understand each other.” He tells her their relationship is toxic, but wonders if he’s addicted to their intimacy. The musical turf, a reggaeton beat, is hers, but the temptation is mutual. JON PARELESMorgan Wallen, ‘Last Night’The distance between acoustic-guitar sincerity and electronic artifice is nearing zero. Morgan Wallen, the canny country superstar, has what sounds like a loop of acoustic guitar — three chords — backing him as he sings about a whiskey-fueled reconciliation: “Baby, baby something’s telling this ain’t over yet,” he sings, sounding very smug. PARELESSunny War, ‘No Reason’Sunny War, a songwriter from Nashville born Sydney Lyndella Ward, sings about a flawed but striving character — maybe herself — in “No Reason,” from her new album, “Anarchist Gospel.” She observes, “You’re an angel, you’re a demon/Ain’t got no rhyme, ain’t go no reason,” as folk-rock fingerpicking, a jaunty backbeat and hoedown handclaps carry her through the contradictions. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘Echolalia’There’s a dreamlike quality about “Echolalia,” the breathy, percussive new single from Yves Tumor’s wildly titled upcoming record “Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds).” Basically a three-minute swoon, “Echolalia” finds the 21st-century glam rocker dazed with infatuation and, however briefly, cosplaying conventionality: “Just put me in a house with a dog and a shiny car,” Tumor sings breathlessly. “We can play the part.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJames Brandon Lewis, ‘Someday We’ll All Be Free’When Donny Hathaway sang his “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” it was determinedly encouraging. On his new album, “Eye of I,” the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis makes it both militant and questioning. Chris Hoffman’s electric cello snarls distorted drones and Max Jaffe’s drumming moves between marching-band crispness and rumbling eruptions, while Lewis and Kirk Knuffke, on cornet, share the melody, go very separate ways simultaneously and then reunite, contentious but comradely. PARELESUnknown Mortal Orchestra, ‘Layla’The New Zealander Ruban Nielson, leader of the tuneful lo-fi psych-rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, is known for being a prolific songwriter, so it makes sense that the band’s forthcoming “V,” its first release in five years, will be a double album. “Layla” is full of warmth, with a soulful vocal melody, Nielson’s nimble guitar playing and the band’s signature fuzzy tones all contributing to an enveloping atmosphere. “Layla, let’s get out of this broken place,” Nielson sings, conjuring an alluring elsewhere. ZOLADZTemps featuring Joana Gomila, Nnamdï, Shamir and Quelle Chris, ‘Bleedthemtoxins’“Do not fear mistakes,” floating voices advise for the first minute of “Bleedthemtoxins,” a bemused miscellany overseen by James Acaster, an English comedian, actor and podcaster turned musical auteur. His debut album as Temps, “Party Gator Purgatory,” is due in May. The studio-built track is loosely held together by a loping beat, but it rambles at will through Beach Boys-like harmonies, free-form raps and small-group jazz, all thoroughly and cleverly whimsical. PARELESDebby Friday featuring Uñas, ‘I Got It’“I Got It,” from the Toronto musician Debby Friday, is an explosive, pounding, relentlessly calisthenic dance-floor banger with attitude to spare. A pulsating beat flickers like a strobe light as Friday and Chris Vargas of the duo Pelada, appearing here as Uñas, trade braggadocious bilingual verses. “Let mama give you what you need,” Friday shrieks before calmly assuring, “I got it.” ZOLADZCaroline Polachek, ‘Blood and Butter’Sheer, euphoric infatuation courses through “Blood and Butter,” the latest single previewing the album Caroline Polachek is releasing on Valentine’s Day: “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” Polachek and her co-producer, Danny L Harle, constructed a song that starts out in wonderment — “Where did you come from, you?” — on its way to declarations like “What I want is to walk beside you, needing nothing.” Springy hand percussion, a bagpipe solo and multilayered la-las sustain the bliss. PARELESRaye, ‘Environmental Anxiety.’Most of the songs on “My 21st Century Blues,” the impressive new album by the English songwriter Raye, are about personal struggles: with romance, with the music business, with drugs, with exploitation. But “Environmental Activity” views the generational big picture: a poisoned planet, a toxic online culture, a rigged economy. The song is elegant in its bitterness, opening with a sweetly sung indictment — “How did you ever think it wasn’t bound to happen?” — leading to a snappy dance beat, a matter-of-fact, half-rapped list of dire situations and a poised chorale sung over church bells and sirens: “We’re all gonna die/What do we do before it happens?” PARELESYuniverse, ‘L8 Nite Txts’Yuniverse, an Indonesian-Australian songwriter, collaborated with the producer Corin Roddick, of Purity Ring, to make a familiar situation shimmery and surreal: “You’re smiling through your lies again/You’re telling me she’s just a friend,” she sings. Her voice is high and breathy, with hyperpop computer tweaks; it floats amid harplike plinks and fragments of deep, twitchy, drill-like beats. Even in the synthetic soundscape, heartache comes through. PARELESJana Horn, ‘After All This Time’The Texas folk singer Jana Horn makes music of arresting delicacy; her songs take shape like intricately woven spider webs. “After All This Time,” from a new album due in April, is a hushed, gently off-kilter meditation full of Horn’s peculiar koans: “Looking out the window,” she sings in a wispy voice, “is not the same as opening the door.” ZOLADZLankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’The Irish band Lankum amplifies the bleakest tidings of Celtic traditional songs, leaning into minor modes and unswerving drones, harnessing traditional instruments and studio technology. “Go Dig My Grave,” an old song that traveled from the British Isles to Appalachia, is death-haunted and implacable. It begins with Radie Peat singing a cappella, insisting “tell this world that I died for love.” The band joins her with somber vocal harmonies, tolling drone tones, clanking percussion and baleful fiddle slides, a crescendo of dread. PARELES More

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      Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott and Sheryl Crow Nominated

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      Cyndi Lauper, Joy Division, George Michael and the White Stripes are also among the first-time nominees up for induction this year.Willie Nelson, Missy Elliott, Sheryl Crow, the White Stripes and Cyndi Lauper are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, the organization behind the museum and annual ceremony announced on Wednesday.Artists become qualified for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording; both Elliott, the trailblazing rapper, and the White Stripes, the defunct garage-rock duo, made the ballot in their first year of eligibility. (Because of changes in when the nominating committee meets, the Rock Hall said releases from 1997 and 1998 were eligible this year for the first time.)Nelson, who turns 90 in April, became eligible in 1987, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. Last year, Dolly Parton at first protested her nomination, saying that she didn’t “feel that I have earned that right” as a country musician. (Voters disagreed, and she joined the Hall in November.) Crow, whose career began in the 1990s, has been eligible for several years, while Lauper, the singer behind hits like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” could have been nominated more than a decade ago.Among the 14 nominees this year, other first-time picks include: George Michael, the English singer-songwriter who died in 2016; Joy Division, the English rock band that became New Order in 1980 after the death of the group’s frontman, Ian Curtis; and Warren Zevon, the singer-songwriter whose work was beloved by performers like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and who died in 2003.More than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals will now vote on the nominees to choose the final class of inductees, which typically include between five and seven musicians or groups that have increasingly over recent years spanned a wider mix of genres: rap, country, folk, pop and more.Will 2023 be the year for musicians who have been nominated repeatedly, to no avail? The politically minded group Rage Against the Machine is on the ballot for the fifth time. Kate Bush, whose song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was resurgent on the charts last year after an appearance in the TV show “Stranger Things,” has been nominated three times before, as have the Spinners, one of the leading soul groups of the 1970s.The hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, the heavy metal band Iron Maiden and Soundgarden, a rock band that was ascendant in the ’90s and lost its singer Chris Cornell in 2017, have all been nominated once before.While an unnamed nominating committee within the Hall of Fame is in charge of choosing the slate of possible inductees, power now flips to the voters, and fans are also asked to weigh in online. (A single “fan ballot” is submitted as a result of those votes.)The inductees will be announced in May, and the ceremony is slated to take place in the fall. More

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      David Crosby, a King of Twitter

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      The musician relished sharing opinions big and small, sparring with fans and dispelling myths, often in sharp, hilarious quips. The vibe on the platform changed, but he posted until the end.On Wednesday, one day before the world learned of his death at 81, the musician David Crosby posted to Twitter over a dozen times.He picked his favorite Beatles song for a rainy day (“Eleanor Rigby”). He expressed support for the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and disdain for the Republican representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a bit of poignant foreshadowing, he shared some thoughts about heaven: “I heard the place is overrated,” he wrote, “cloudy.”Among his musical peers, Crosby lived out a unique series of American lives. He was a defining voice of the folk-rock music of the 1960s and ’70s. He was a boldfaced name for his brief prison stay on drug charges, his liver transplant and the revelation that he was the sperm donor for Melissa Etheridge’s two children with Julie Cypher.And there was his surprising ascent as Twitter pundit, cemented in 2017 when he appeared in a commercial for the social media service. There are no formal metrics, but it’s fair to say that no other Woodstock performer or double inductee in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tweeted as much as Crosby, or with such personable enthusiasm.Crosby was a true poster, a compliment handed out to those who seem to intuitively understand the unspoken rules for how to live an online life. He loved to interact with fans and haters; he never censored his thoughts or minced his words. He tweeted around 79,000 times in over a decade spent on the platform, a pace that dramatically eclipsed his contemporaries. Many musicians, and certainly those of his generation, exclusively use social media as a promotional service for tour announcements and new songs. Crosby, instead, treated Twitter as a walkie-talkie, a direct connection between himself and anyone who wanted to hear from him.This was one of Twitter’s initial appeals: The idea that you might actually interact with famous names like Ashton Kutcher or Shaquille O’Neal propelled thousands of newcomers to sign up in the platform’s early days. But numerous celebrities have quietly left in recent years, driven away by the increasingly combative dynamics that make sharing any opinion a risky proposition, or by Elon Musk’s messy takeover.Crosby did not care, and Crosby never quit. On any given day, he could be found opining on subjects like his distaste for Ted Nugent; his distaste for the Doors (which he eventually decided to tone down, though he never changed his mind about their lack of swing); his distaste for the songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’s attempted guitar-smashing on “Saturday Night Live”; his distaste for a not-so-bad painting of him drawn by a fan; his distaste for poorly rolled marijuana joints; his distaste for Donald Trump, always a subject on his mind.Possibly you notice a theme. But Crosby was no troll, complaining about every possible topic just to propel engagement. Many of his tweets were playful, and sweet. He loved to talk about his wife, and his appreciation for his family life. He never stopped praising his ex-girlfriend Joni Mitchell or his former bandmate Neil Young, even as his relationships with them were openly fraught.He advertised the sensual side of his discography. He solicited movie recommendations and promoted restaurants. He praised younger musicians like Jason Isbell and Jacob Collier. He really enjoyed the work of the director Alex Garland. He dispelled myths about his own life, regardless of whether the lie would have been more flattering.These posting tendencies evolved Crosby’s public persona for a new generation of music fans, in ways that felt both natural and genuine. As the music industry continues to change, its existing stars often attempt to latch onto emergent trends, through efforts that can easily seem forced or hatched by corporate fiat. (It’s hard to believe that Mick Jagger has anything to do with the Rolling Stones’ newly announced TikTok account.) But Crosby was right there, doing it himself. There was little doubt that he personally authored every tweet, because who else could post with such frequency, or idiosyncratic phrasing? His willingness to post so often and honestly did the work of several marketing budgets, and accompanied a late-career creative renaissance that saw the release of five solo albums in the last decade.This exposure didn’t suddenly transform Crosby into a commercial force. (His last album, “For Free” from 2021, did not chart in the United States.) Still, it was oddly reassuring to know that a public figure with such a varied and involved life, who had been present for some of the most consequential events in popular American music, could not resist the elemental pleasures of wasting time on Twitter like many of us, despite its myriad downsides.“I’m really trying to just have fun here,” he told Grammy.com in 2021. “I like people. I think they’re fascinating.” Celebrity is a fickle status, and surely there were moments in his career when Crosby wondered if people would ever care about him or his music. But here was evidence that they did. Even as Twitter frays and coarsens under Musk’s ownership, it’s still possible to have fun with others, one of the few things that keeps users from leaving. Crosby was right there until the very end.In his final weeks he was rating joints, once again advocating for the mood-setting capabilities of his own music and making plans to perform again. He was mad about George Santos and the environment, Spotify and Covid-19, as always, but the happy and the angry were intermingled for everyone to see.A few days ago, he posted his 1989 cover of the Noel Brazil song “Columbus,” with an opening verse espousing a philosophy he endorsed every day he spent on Twitter: “Better keep your distance from this whale/Better keep your boat from going astray/Find yourself a partner and treat them well/Try to give them shelter night and day.” More

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      Joni Mitchell to Be Honored With Gershwin Prize and Tribute Concert

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      The award from the Library of Congress comes amid a wave of recognition for the singer-songwriter, who performed in public last year for the first time since a 2015 health scare.Joni Mitchell, the revered singer-songwriter who has recently begun tiptoeing back into the public eye, has been named this year’s recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, an award delivered by the Library of Congress, the institution announced Thursday.Mitchell, 79, has received a wave of accolades over the past few years, including recognition at the Kennedy Center Honors; a tribute from MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity; and an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. The commendations have made once-rare public appearances by Mitchell not so rare. In July, she performed in public for the first time since she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015, stunning attendees at the Newport Folk Festival — and viewers of the viral videos filmed there.As part of the Gershwin Prize, Mitchell will be honored with a tribute concert on March 1 in Washington, D.C., that will air on PBS on March 31. Typically, honorees perform at least one song at the event.Mitchell, who was one of the defining singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s, was already expected to return to performing later this year. The musician Brandi Carlile, whom Mitchell has referred to as her “ambassador,” announced last year that Mitchell would headline a concert at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State in June, a day after Carlile anchors her own show there.Recognition for Mitchell’s creative achievements has surged in recent years, as her 1971 album “Blue” was widely celebrated for its 50th anniversary and the musician started an ongoing project called the Joni Mitchell Archives, which unearths rich collections of previously unheard music.Performing alongside Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Mitchell sang some of her most beloved songs, including “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Both Sides Now” and “A Case of You.” Writing in The New York Times, the critic Lindsay Zoladz called Mitchell’s resurgence “heartening,” noting that “it allows a beloved if somewhat underappreciated artist to receive her laurels while she’s still living.”“Younger artists got the chance to pay earnest homage to their elder; a mature woman who was not yet finished reinterpreting her life’s work reclaimed the stage,” Zoladz wrote.The Gershwin Prize was established in 2007 to honor living musical artists whose contributions to popular music “exemplify the standard of excellence associated with George and Ira Gershwin.” The recipient is chosen by the librarian of Congress — currently Carla Hayden — who receives advice from scholars, producers, songwriters and other music specialists. Previous recipients include Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Carole King, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. More

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      Ian Tyson, Revered Canadian Folk Singer, Dies at 89

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      A rancher for most of his life, he began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and was also celebrated for his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country.Before Canadian musicians like Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, there was Ian Tyson.Mr. Tyson, who began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and went on to become a revered figure in his home country, celebrated both for his music and his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country, died on Thursday at age 89 at his ranch in southern Alberta.His family said in a statement that he died from “ongoing health complications,” but did not specify further.Mr. Tyson, whose song “Four Strong Winds” in 2005 was voted the most essential Canadian piece of music by the listeners of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation public radio network, lived most of his life as both a rancher and a musician.Performances of his songs like “Four Strong Winds” by Mr. Young, Johnny Cash and others, and “Someday Soon,” particularly by Judy Collins, made his music, if not always his name, well-known in the United States.But his persona as a weathered rancher-musician, who performed and ran the Tyson ranch south of Calgary well into his 80s, stubbornly keeping on despite the ravages of time, changing tastes, economic hardship and, for a time, the loss of his voice, made him emblematic in Canada, much as Mr. Cash was on the other side of the border.Mr. Young, in the 2006 Jonathan Demme concert film “Heart of Gold,” recalled being 16 or 17 and spending all his money playing the Ian and Sylvia version of “Four Strong Winds” over and over on the jukebox at a restaurant near Winnipeg. “It was the most beautiful record that I’ve heard in my life, and I just could not get enough of it,” he said.Ian Dawson Tyson was born Sept. 25, 1933, in Victoria, British Columbia, the second child of George and Margaret Tyson. Mr. Tyson learned to ride horses on a small farm owned by his father, an insurance salesman and polo enthusiast who had emigrated from England in 1906. Mr. Tyson grew up entranced by horses, and beginning in his teens, he competed on the rodeo circuit. He learned to play guitar while in a Calgary hospital recovering from a broken ankle sustained in a fall.He began performing folk and rock in the late 1950s, but then graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958 and moved to Toronto to work as a commercial artist.There, he performed in local clubs, and in 1959 began singing with a dark-haired young woman named Sylvia Fricker. They became a full-time folk act in 1961, performing as Ian and Sylvia, and were married four years later.In 1962, they moved to New York and became mainstays in the emergent American folk scene, and friends with Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who described Mr. Tyson as “movie-star handsome” and “the best looking of all the cowboy dudes in Greenwich Village” in her 2008 memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time.” The high-powered manager Albert Grossman, who managed Mr. Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and others, signed them to Vanguard Records. Their first record, “Ian & Sylvia,” consisted of mostly traditional British and Canadian folk songs.Ian and Sylvia in 1970. They became a full-time folk act in 1961 and were married four years later.Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
      Their second, “Four Strong Winds,” was more eclectic. It included Mr. Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” and the title track, Mr. Tyson’s first song, which he said he wrote in about a half-hour, spurred on by Mr. Dylan’s emergence as a songwriter.It was, he said, about “a lovely Greek girl, I was always leaving and regretting it,” in Vernon, British Columbia. (Her name was Evinia Pulos and, as it turned out they carried on an on-again-off-again love affair over six decades). A tale of lost love and itinerant farm and ranch work set against the Canadian West and the implacable forces of nature (“Four strong winds that blow lonely/Seven seas that run high/All those things that don’t change come what may”), it set the tone for how his work would evolve over time.In 1968, before the Byrds’ seminal country-rock album, “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” the two relocated to Nashville where they recorded two country-influenced albums and formed the country rock group Great Speckled Bird. The couple recorded 13 albums before they stopped performing and then divorced in 1975.Mr. Tyson returned to western Canada, where he resumed ranching, and focused on his solo career. And after hosting a show on Canada’s national television network, between 1970 and 1975, he had almost dropped out of music when he reinvented himself less as a folk act than as a cowboy and Western one.First came his well-received 1983 album, “Old Corrals and Sagebrush,” which combined traditional cowboy music and songs of the West he wrote himself. In 1986, his “Cowboyography” earned platinum status in Canada. Over time, he became a familiar Canadian presence in his trademark cowboy hat and stiff-legged gait, ranching, recording and performing at concerts and events like the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev.And he recorded a series of evocative, stubbornly unfashionable albums like “Songs from the Gravel Road,” about the allure and frustrations of the lonely ranching life. His own life remained complicated, too, including both an endless array of honors and awards and a 1986 marriage to a teenager, Twylla Biblow, less than half his age, that ended in divorce in 2008.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Tyson badly strained his voice in 2006 at the Havelock Country Jamboree in Ontario, and a virus a year later caused further and irreversible damage.He returned two years later, his smooth baritone reduced to a hoarse whisper, but his popularity remained intact with the album “From Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories.”Throughout, his music reflected the solitary ranching life, the lure of the outdoors, the pains of heartbreak and lost love.A 2008 profile in The Globe and Mail when he was nearing 75 captured some of the details of it at his T-Bar-Y ranch: The 6 a.m.-to-6 p.m. work schedule. The Monday washing (five pairs of Wranglers to get him through the week). The “mean, garlicky” buffalo he cooked. The place filled with cowboy hats and books — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a Georgia O’Keeffe biography, a dictionary, “The Western Buckle: History, Art, Culture, Function,” Michael Ondaatje’s “Divisadero.” The magnet on his refrigerator reading: “Life is tough. Life is tougher if you’re stupid. — John Wayne.”“I became a historian, a chronicler of this way of life,” he told the reporter Marsha Lederman, “and this way of life is just about over. The cowboys are all gone.”It was a theme he often came back to. “People tell me, ‘Tyson, you’re always longing for the old days,’” he once said. “And they’re right, that’s true — I live in the past. And it was way better.”Eduardo Medina More