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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

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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