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      Archie Roach, Who Lived and Sang the Aboriginal Blues, Dies at 66

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      His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More

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      Heilung Puts a Heavy Metal Twist on the Sound of the Vikings

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      The band Heilung performs on replica instruments to recreate the sound world of pre-Christian Europe and bring it into the modern age.BORRE, Norway — “We have vegan potato salad in the medium cauldron,” Maria Franz announced to the 17 members of Heilung, her folk metal band, as they gathered around a campfire here recently. The band was celebrating the release of its third album, “Drif,” at Midgardsblot, a festival that takes place on a Viking burial ground and also includes seminars on Viking culture for an audience of campers, many of whom were dressed up in tunics and cloaks. Earlier that day, festivalgoers joined the band to listen to the new album while sitting on the floor of a replica Viking feast hall rigged up with a speaker system.It was the perfect setting for Heilung, whose work over the past eight years has put a heavy metal twist on the music of pre-Christian Europe. Working with a team of researchers and performing on replica instruments from the period, Heilung produces music that its members describe as “amplified history.” Heilung takes its lyrics from historical texts, like runic inscriptions on archaeological finds, and uses sound sources that would have been available to early European civilizations, such as stones, bones and crude metal objects struck together.Clockwise from top left; Kati Liiri and Jussi Aspivaara at the Midgardsblot festival, in Borre, where Heilung played; Faust, a Heilung band member; a festival attendee; a homemade patch on a vest.David B. Torch for The New York Times“Drif,” for instance, combines throat singing, spoken word, chanting, battle sounds and field recordings from nature. One of Heilung’s songs, “Hakkerskaldyr,” was used in a trailer for a recent Robert Eggers film, “The Northman,” another artistic imagining of ancient Scandinavia.“We’re not claiming that we are doing the exact same thing as our ancestors did, because no one knows,” Franz said. “But it’s our interpretation of how it might have felt.”Heilung has three core members — Franz, Christopher Juul and Kai Uwe Faust — who are supported by a large cast of onstage performers, including actors dressed as Viking warriors, backing singers and drummers.Franz said the band’s project was about more than just focusing on the Viking era, though. Its members want to tap into what they see as a shared ancient history that goes beyond European borders and encompasses all of humanity. For instance, “Marduk,” the last track on the new album, is a recital of 50 names of the highest god of the Mesopotamians. Franz sometimes plays a primitive instrument she brought back from India: a stick, half a coconut, some goat skin and strings. If you look back far enough into history, Juul said, you find that most cultures share similar instruments, and similar myths.Fans of Heilung listening to its new album, “Drif,” inside a replica Viking hall.David B. Torch for The New York TimesThere are other bands in the subgenre of folk metal that draw on pre-Christian history, like the Norwegian group Wardruna. But Heilung stands out for the depth of its historical engagement and the scale of its live performances. The band’s self-released debut album, “Ofnir,” was well-received in folk metal circles, but it was not until the band’s first live shows, in 2017, that Heilung became popular in the broader metal scene.“It was a phenomenon,” said Jonathan Selzer, a music journalist at Metal Hammer magazine. He remembered seeing the band at Midgardsblot, in 2017, when it played the penultimate slot. The set incorporated elaborate costumes, including antlers and animal furs, battle cries and half-naked actors dressed as warriors charging around the stage. This performance set the blueprint for all of Heilung’s stage shows since. “You could just see this realization going through the crowd in real time, from incomprehension to wonder,” Selzer said. “The whole field turned into Viking rave.”Michael Berberian, who signed Heilung after that show to Season of Mist, a metal label he runs, said it was “a band that popped out of nowhere with a complete concept.” He added that “the visual aspects, the costume, the unique music, the production values were all there, fully ready.”Heilung onstage at a concert in Denver last year. The band stands out for the depth of its historical engagement and the scale of its live performances.Maurice NunezFranz, Faust and Juul first met through the Viking re-enactment scene, in which enthusiasts gather to dress up as Vikings, learn about their history and practice their traditions, such as sword fighting and cooking over an open fire. Runa Strindin, Midgardsblot’s founder, said the popularity of Viking re-enactments had exploded over the past five years in northern Europe, spurred by TV shows like “Vikings” and movies like “The Northman,” as well as the inclusion of Norse gods in the Marvel movies.“People are searching for an identity to come closer to something that is missing in their modern lives,” Strindin said, “and they are attracted to the Norse mythologies because it’s so easily adaptable. Whatever suits you, you will find it there.”Norse mythology also resonates with some far-right groups that see it as an endorsement of their ideology, but Heilung’s members strongly reject that worldview. For at least a century in Scandinavia, extreme nationalists have adopted the visual language of ancient runes to suggest an imagined, pre-modern era of racial purity, and neo-Nazis have used the symbols to identify themselves to one another.The connection between Nordic runes and white supremacy is still strong. Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian extremist, marked the weapons he used in a 2011 massacre with runes, and the perpetrator of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque terrorist attack in 2019 emblazoned a sonnenrad — a rune symbol that was appropriated by the Nazis to embody their ideal vision of an Aryan identity — on his backpack.Selzer, the music journalist, said that, outside the metal scene, many people were wary about bands in the folk metal subgenre, whose merchandise and visual branding features runic symbols or who go to runic inscriptions for lyrics.A Viking battle demonstration at Midgardsblot. Heilung’s core members met through the Viking re-enactment scene.David B. Torch for The New York TimesBarbara Welento, 32, traveled from Poland to hear Heilung.David B. Torch for The New York TimesRunic windchimes at the Midgardsblot.David B. Torch for The New York TimesReclaiming Viking culture, particularly the runes, from neo-Nazis was a central part of Heilung’s mission, Strindin said. Each of the band’s live shows opens with a recited poem that emphasizes the audience’s shared humanity. “Remember that we all are brothers, all people, and beasts and trees and stone and wind,” reads one line.Strindin said that when she was growing up in Norway, in the 1990s, taking an interest in runes was discouraged by teachers and parents, because of their far-right associations. Heilung, she said, was “helping to take those symbols back, and put new meaning to them,” one that emphasized their original, spiritual intentions.“We see music as a cup,” Faust said. “You can have a beautiful cup, but a cup is supposed to transport something. So I was always more interested in the content: What am I doing with these frequencies? What is my intent, with these songs?”At the album listening session in the replica Viking hall, there was a quiet, respectful atmosphere, like a church. People closed their eyes to listen, or read through a booklet of explanatory notes the band had provided to accompany each track.The next day, Heilung played the festival’s headline slot to a crowd of fans who had come from all over the world. Lindsey Epperson, 32, from Tucson, Ariz., who had left the United States for the first time to be there, said the band’s music was “familiar, even though I wasn’t from that time,” adding, “It sounds like home to me.”A hush fell over the crowd as the show began. A performer wafted incense out over the audience, and the rest of the band gathered in a circle to recite the opening poem. They left a break after each line, so the crowd could chant it back with one voice.A couple on a Viking burial mound at dawn at Midgadsblot. “People are searching for an identity to come closer to something that is missing in their modern lives,” said the festival’s founder.David B. Torch for The New York Times More

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      The Art of Disappearance

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The problem — or at least a problem, I’ve been told — is that I am not very concerned about being missed upon any of my exits, not the ones that are voluntary nor the ones that swoop down without warning to cover me in a quilt of dark feathers. I think about this often, and if there is a remedy for it. I read the sometimes long, sprawling announcements people make when they leave or take breaks from social media platforms, or I watch someone announce that he or she is departing on the way out of a crowded party, and I sometimes find myself puzzled by the practice. I slip out of parties unannounced. I make up excuses for why I didn’t make the rounds, or say goodbye. I see the concerned texts, I tell myself I’ll reply later and sometimes I do. I am indifferent about being missed, which isn’t to say that I don’t believe that I have been missed, or will be missed again. It is very likely that there are people missing me right now, reading this admission and shaking their heads at what they’ve always known, even if I wasn’t bold enough to explicitly speak it out loud before walking out of a door that I’d never again be on the better side of.This feeling is acute during the long, endless-feeling Ohio winters, when leaving a physical space is scarcely an option. This is most challenging in late March, when temperatures can barely rise above the 30s and snow is still accumulating. During that season within a season, when hope tails off, spinning into the still-early darkness, I return to the music of the cult favorite singer-songwriter Connie Converse. When I am most seduced by the idea that sunlight might be a cure for an emotional descent I can no longer trace, I return to the same song: Converse’s “We Lived Alone.” Clocking in at just over a minute, it’s both an ode to contentment with loneliness and an expression of intense longing. When the song begins, Converse is reveling in her own isolation: “We lived alone/my house and I/we had the earth/we had the sky/I had a lamp against the dark/and I was happy as a lark.” She describes her beloved stove and window, and the chair wearing a “pretty potato sack,” and the roses blooming around her doorstep. And then, right before the listener is evicted from the tune, there is the Volta: “I had a job/my wants were few/they were until I wanted you/and when I set my eyes on you/nothing else would do.” I first heard the songs of Converse in 2009, five years after Gene Deitch, who initially recorded Converse’s music in his kitchen with a Crestwood 404 tape recorder in the 1950s, played a cluster of recordings on WNYC. The songs were compiled and then released as the 2009 album “How Sad, How Lovely.” The release ignited a fascination around Converse, whom most people had never heard of. There are few things that seduce like scarcity — the reality that you can briefly traverse a single small world built by someone who left, and then built nothing else for the public to find or access. These were the only songs Converse ever recorded: She disappeared from Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1974, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.If Connie Converse were alive today, she would be 98. On the internet, she is mostly assumed dead. Written of and spoken of in the past tense. For some, it might be hard to separate the shock of how her story ended from the songs themselves, but there is an abundance of brilliance in the work. Converse mastered the art of sparseness, relying on her ability to create a tiny chamber in which all that could survive is a voice and the pin pricks of a guitar’s strings, moving along inch by inch. It is very possible that even if nothing about her disappearance were spectacular beyond the disappearance itself, even if she spent decades in the mountains or forest, or simply driving from place to place, the years might have accumulated, her body might have reached its limits. But I find myself uncomfortable with the assumption of finality.I realize that I am projecting. Converse was someone who, it seemed, made a path for her life, post-music, that was rooted in refusal. A refusal to be known, a refusal for access. Her musical legacy suggests that an exit — both the life it leaves behind, and the elsewhere that it hints at — can echo, be endless. An elsewhere can offer relief, or at least an idea of relief, whether that desire for an elsewhere leads one to consider death, or whether it leads one to simply exit her circumstances and seek new ones, seek a place where she is unreachable. I am drawn to Converse because she offers a model for these questions that I have weighed and carried in the past, questions that I will almost certainly be confronted with again. I live with multiple anxiety disorders and depression. I have, in the past, had to do hard math around the subject of staying: staying alive, staying present in the place that I am, the world I know best.I have found myself newly sensitive to the art of disappearance, and how it is not — or at least not always — aligned with death. Sometimes a desire to be gone is simply a desire to be gone. It may be foolish, but there’s something comforting about imagining Converse living, moving through the back end of her ninth decade, in defiance of the dissatisfying “here” that haunted her over 40 years ago.Connie Converse is a person with a life ripe for the writer’s gaze. There are incompletions, large holes that can be filled only through imagination, through wishing, through myriad projections, for better or worse. But there are, of course, some concrete facts.Converse was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse in Laconia, N.H., on Aug. 3, 1924. Her father was a minister, and her mother ran a strict Baptist household. She was the middle child, sandwiched between two brothers: Paul, nearly three years older, and Phillip, four years younger. Converse excelled academically and earned a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She was continuing a tradition — her mother and grandmother each graduated from Mount Holyoke — but dropped out abruptly after two years and moved to New York City. It was there, working at a printing house in the Flatiron district and living in Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village, that she shed the name Elizabeth and began going by Connie. She started writing songs and playing them for friends. She also took up drinking and smoking, which reportedly enraged her religious parents. Still, Converse gave in to the joys of reinvention. Photo illustration by Itchi. Source photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Elizabeth Eaton Converse.When we speak of artists as being “ahead of their time,” we often mean that they were operating in a time, place or space that was not prepared for them, and wouldn’t be prepared for years or decades to come. A very specific ache in the Connie Converse story is that she was ahead of her time, but by only minutes. Or, she was ahead of her time but unrecognized as an innovator perhaps because of immutable factors: her gender, her personality. In New York, before the enormous success of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Converse got in good with the right crowd, rolling with a crew of budding young folk musicians like Pete Seeger. In 1954, she played songs on the CBS “Morning Show.” In photos from this moment, she is sitting next to Walter Cronkite, who leans in while Converse answers a question, her arm slung over her guitar, a half-grin on her face. But then there was nothing. The TV appearance came and went with little interest from the public. The work to get her music in front of producers and managers yielded no results. She was considered too hard to sell, according to Deitch. She would mail her brother Phillip some of her recordings monthly. When her listener base didn’t expand as she’d hoped, she moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1961, in part to be closer to Phillip. She worked as a secretary for two years before taking a job as the managing editor for The Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963. She stopped writing songs altogether, seemingly content with her newfound life of relative certainty. By that time, the folk scene in New York had taken off, bursting with singer-songwriters who were aligned with the work Connie had already done.By the end of 1972, The Journal, which she had helmed for nearly a decade, left the University of Michigan, where it was housed, and was acquired by Yale. This was an inciting event for Converse, whose loved ones saw her growing increasingly depressed, bored and burned out on the routine of work, though it seemed to be the routine that sustained her. Friends pooled money to send her on a sabbatical to London, where she lived for around half a year, though it didn’t appear to have an impact on her demeanor upon her return. When she did return, her mother coaxed her into taking a trip to Alaska. Converse, who was by now drinking with noticeably more frequency, was not interested. But that trip, too, just furthered her dissatisfaction. In a quote attributed to Converse from 1974, she reportedly told her brother Phillip, “Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.” Shortly after that, she placed her meager belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle, left behind a batch of goodbye letters and vanished, entirely. In the interview, Phillip says that he didn’t know where his sister was. That he wouldn’t know what to say to her even if he knew where to find her. In the 2014 documentary “We Lived Alone,” Phillip reads a letter his sister left behind. The language in the letter is much like the language in her songs, poetic and direct. Speaking of things as they are, not as she dreamed they could be: “I’ve watched the elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor, those I know and those I don’t, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and I felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance. If I ever was a member of this species perhaps it was a social accident that has now been canceled.” In another letter, she wrote: “Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.”Beautiful and jarring and haunting as it may be, what has most remained for me, in the back of my mind at a low hum, is its opening: Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t. About a decade after her disappearance, Converse’s family hired a private investigator to find her, or to at least confirm whether she’d taken her own life. In the documentary, Phillip says that the investigator declined, telling the family that even if he did find Connie, it was her right to disappear. He couldn’t bring someone back who didn’t want to return to the place from which they fled.To drill down on the definition of “being alive,” I have always come to a core definition that I can understand and make peace with: being someone who participates in the ever-shifting world. But I have no control over the world, and I don’t mean only the world in the sense of a blue rock twirling along endless dark. I also mean the smaller worlds. The worlds of the country I live in, the worlds of my city, the worlds of my neighborhood. There are edges of these worlds simultaneously sharpening and softening, even now, and I do not know which edges they are, or when they’ll come for me or comfort me, depending on their intent. And so I decide that living, then, is also a contract. I’ll stay for as long as I can, and I hope it is a good, long time. I’ll stay as long as staying gives more than it takes. In the times I’ve not wanted to stay, I have been showered with familiar platitudes. I’ve been told I have “a lot of life left,” or I’ve been told to think about all the people who will miss me when I’ve gone. Once, a doctor who was tasked with keeping me alive for longer than I wanted to be at the time told me to envision my funeral. It didn’t work, because I’d buried enough people I’d loved by that point. I had begun to believe in the funeral — at least as it serves the still-living — as a portal. Something you enter with one understanding of grief, and exit with a newer, sharper understanding of grief. I began to believe the funeral as a simple moment of transience, not of any grand enough consequence to keep me grounded in an unsatisfying life. I have still not gotten good at explaining this to anyone who has always wanted to be alive, or at least people who have rarely questioned their commitment to living, but there is a border between wanting to be alive and wanting to stay here, wherever here is to you, or whatever it means. It’s a border that I have found to be flimsy, a thin sheet overrun with holes. But it is a border, nonetheless. Similar to the border between, say, sadness and suffering. All these feelings can intersect, of course. But I have found it slightly more confusing when they don’t. When I maybe want to be alive, but don’t want to be in the world as it is. When I haven’t wanted to be alive, but want to cling to the varied bits of brightness that tumble into my sadness, or my suffering, which isn’t the same as a temporary haze of sadness, or a rush of anxiety. I mean suffering that requires a constant measuring of the scales between staying and leaving. Suffering that requires a consideration of how long the scale can tilt toward leaving before it becomes the only viable option. There are a lot of things in any life that aren’t left up to the people doing the living. If there is anything for a suffering person (or any person) to self-determine, it should be how they live, or if they choose to live at all.There are few thoughtful bits of advice for those who drift between those borders, or those who have a foot on each side simultaneously. And so, in a bad week, I turn my phone off, and then on again. I play piano in a quiet room. I look at maps. I admit, of course, that there are many intersections of Converse’s story that allow for me to map myself onto both her apparent frustrations and dissatisfactions. This is, I’m sure, why I’m here again. Why I have been here before, picking apart her old tunes and searching tirelessly for more and hoping that she is somewhere, alive, and away from anywhere that reminds her of any ache she has carried. I feel some compulsion to defend against the dominant idea that is attached to her songs: that they are terribly, poignantly sad. I bristle at this, not only because I know sadness to be a shorthand description for deep, vibrantly aware feeling. What Converse seemed to aspire to was a removal from the world on her own terms. From what is known about the time leading up to her disappearance, Converse was seeking newness. Her close friends pooled money to send her on a six-month trip to England in 1973, and she returned home, her mood unchanged. Not long before her disappearance, her mother pushed her into the Alaska trip, which worsened her discomfort and depression. These are the gestures people make when they love us, when they see us suffering. The idea is about what can be done to fix a person gripped by a sometimes unexplainable condition. Someone who is folding further into herself, and becoming seemingly unreachable. There is something I understand about the letter Converse left behind. She wanted to be let go, perhaps not only for the sake of not feeling like a burden on loved ones, but also to figure out, on her own, if the world was worth living in.I am sure that no small part of me takes some offense to Converse being referred to in the past tense is because it rushes to a conclusion about her motivations and fate — neither of which we have access to — and assumes that what seemed to be her relentless dissatisfaction was a form of selfishness. In the words she left behind, it seems as if she was most eager to be gone, away from a world that dissatisfied her, that had failed her after a half century of living. But to live in a world that often can’t make sense of someone self-determining their own exits, death is the easiest presumption to make. Photo illustration by Itchi. Source photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Elizabeth Eaton Converse.What I hear fighting its way to the surface in Converse’s songs is a type of questioning discontent, opening up to a sky of insatiable desire. In her songs, her voice doesn’t sound weighed down by grief, or weariness. It doesn’t sound as if it is nested in some web of dilemmas from which it can’t untangle itself. It tends to leap at the end of each line she sings. It’s a playful voice, a curious and constantly seeking voice. It splashes in the gaps of silence left by the space in her sparse guitar playing. It is almost a child’s voice — which, yes, can sometimes be sad — but is often trying to make sense of the otherwise unexplainable world that is newly coming into focus. I hear longing, and something that seems like hope.What stands out most is a sort of eager dreaming. Exuberant wishes that aren’t as sad as they appear on the tracks themselves, but maybe became sad for her as the years accumulated and she continued to seek them. What Converse seemed to know in her songs was that there was somewhere better, or a little more satisfying. And then, when she was done recording, she spilled back into a world where all of that satisfaction became increasingly out of reach. I am aware, more often now than I used to be, that I am up against time, same as anyone else. I can work to be happy where I am, and I do. I can work for my satisfaction with what I have at my disposal, which, to be clear, is a life full of privileges and sometimes pleasures, even if it is difficult to make that clear to myself some days. But in my wishing, my satisfaction is endless. In my dreams, I want to live forever. To come back to earth, swept into the many jagged realities of the present, is small damage. It accumulates, though in my case, that accumulation is met with other moments that make survival worthwhile: A pink flower that didn’t grow in my front yard last year pokes out of a brown patch. My dog, somehow, still excited to see me when I walk through the door. It didn’t rain when I wanted to go shoot ball and I made a few shots in a row. But even those pleasures work against a clock. Everything is a balance. When I think back to “We Lived Alone” and what I love about that song, I am grateful for its celebration of building the world you want amid life’s wreckage. It’s a song about understanding that what some people might see merely as absence is not only that. Like most of Converse’s songs, it is an ode to the delights of small pleasures, the things worth staying for.It might be hard for some listeners to hear this aspect of her music. I find myself uncomfortable with how people — not just in the case of Connie Converse, but broadly — tend to flatten the idea of what sadness is, or looks like, without considering its varied face. The music of Connie Converse teems with longing, desire and relentless dreaming. We are to believe that the outcome of her life is sad; therefore, she and her music have retroactively been branded as sad. But Converse reminds us that sadness is a complex color, a result of other, primary colors intersecting over time. I’m thankful for Converse’s vanishing act, even if I’ll never know its destination. She wrote and sang of all the places she hoped to go, and I listen to her songs now and hope that she got to where she wanted, even if it wasn’t where the people who loved her wished that she would be. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to Speaking of Suicide for a list of additional resources.Hanif Abdurraqib is a contributing writer for the magazine as well as a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. More

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      Judith Durham, Singer of ‘Georgy Girl’ and Other Hits, Dies at 79

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      A classically trained soprano, she became a chart-topping pop star in the 1960s with the folk-based Australian quartet the Seekers.Judith Durham, the lead vocalist of the 1960s Australian folk-pop band the Seekers, whose shimmering soprano voice and wholesome image propelled singles like “Georgy Girl” and “I’ll Never Find Another You” to the top of the pop charts, died on Friday in Melbourne. She was 79.Her death, in a hospital, was caused by bronchiectasis, a lung disease that she had battled since childhood, according to a post from Universal Music Australia and the Musicoast record label on the Seekers’ Facebook page.A sunny folk-influenced quartet whose fresh-faced image and effervescent pop songs stood in marked contrast to the libidinal frenzy of 1960s rock, the Seekers sold an estimated 50 million singles and albums worldwide. They became the first Australian pop group to achieve global success, paving the way for other acts based in Australia, like the Bee Gees and Olivia Newton-John.“Judith Durham gave voice to a new strand of our identity and helped blaze a trail for a new generation of Aussie artists,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote on Twitter.Ms. Durham was a classically trained vocalist whose work was admired by other singers. Elton John, whose song “Skyline Pigeon” Ms. Durham recorded in 1971, once said that she possessed “the purest voice in popular music.”Lynn Redgrave and Alan Bates in a scene from the hit 1966 movie “Georgy Girl,” for which Ms. Durham sang the theme song.Columbia Pictures, via PhotofestJudith Mavis Cock was born on July 3, 1943, in Essendon, Australia, to William Cock, an aviator in World War II, and Hazel (Durham) Cock. “My mother apparently said I could sing nursery rhymes in perfect tune when I was 2,” Ms. Durham once said in a television interview.She was working as a secretary at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Melbourne when an account executive, Athol Guy, invited her to sit in with his folk group, which also included Keith Potger and Bruce Woodley, and which had just lost its singer.The group released its first album, “Introducing the Seekers,” in 1963, but did not strike it big until the next year, when it took a gig on an ocean liner and ended up staying in England indefinitely.It was a portentous time to arrive on the British music scene: Bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks were performing to screaming teenage fans as they rolled toward global stardom.The Seekers were a far cry from the rock ‘n’ roll sweeping London. Ms. Durham belted out toe-tapping ditties wearing ankle-length evening gowns and a perky smile, backed by three clean-cut male bandmates in suits.“The pop charts was probably the furthest thing from any of our minds,” she said in a 2001 television interview. “You just didn’t try to do that with a folk-based quartet. Everybody was more poppy, and had the long hair and the electric instruments.”Fueled by Ms. Durham’s vocals, however, the group caught the eye of Tom Springfield — Dusty Springfield’s songwriting brother — who offered them one of his songs, “I’ll Never Find Another You,” to record.Released in 1964, it went on to hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 4 in the United States. The hits kept coming in 1965, with “A World of Our Own” (No. 3 in Britain) and “The Carnival Is Over” (No. 1).On her 70th birthday in 2013, Ms. Durham received kisses from her Seekers bandmates Mr. Potger, left, and Mr. Guy. David Crosling/EPA, via Shutterstock“Georgy Girl,” the title song from the hit 1966 feature film starring Lynn Redgrave in the title role, was an even bigger smash. Written by Mr. Springfield and Jim Dale, it was nominated for an Academy Award and hit No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart in the United States.But Ms. Durham felt the pressure of fame and was increasingly insecure about her weight, which she tried to disguise by making her own dresses. She began to shrink from the spotlight.“It was this never feeling good enough to be given the amazing opportunities we were given,” she said in a 2018 Australian television interview. “The boys were amazing, they all looked gorgeous, and so musically talented and everything. And so for me, I thought, ‘Well, they don’t really need me.’”Fans were crestfallen when she left the group in 1968. (A later version of the group, the New Seekers, would have a hit in 1973 with “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”) But Ms. Durham remained in the public eye, particularly in Australia, where she recorded solo albums, starred in television specials and performed with her husband, the pianist Ron Edgeworth, whom she married in 1969. He died in 1994 of motor neuron disease, a rare neurological disorder.Survivors include a sister, the singer Beverley Sheehan.Ms. Durham reunited with the Seekers off and on in the ’90s and again in 2013, for the group’s 50th anniversary. That tour was interrupted when Ms. Durham suffered a brain hemorrhage.In honor of her 75th birthday in 2018, Ms. Durham released her first album in six years, a compilation of previously unreleased tracks called “So Much More.”In a 2016 interview on Australian television, she admitted that fame had come to seem a burden at times when she was younger.“At one stage I really thought that I probably wasn’t going to keep singing,” she said. But, she added: “I’m glad that I’ve lived a long time. That’s helped me therefore lose the sense of burden, and see it as an honor and a privilege that people have kept me in their lives.” More

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      Mick Moloney, Musician and Champion of Irish Culture, Dies at 77

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      An Irish immigrant to the U.S., he was a recording artist, scholar and concert presenter who also encouraged women to join a male-dominated folk tradition.Mick Moloney, a recording artist, folklorist, concert presenter and professor who championed traditional Irish culture and encouraged female instrumentalists in a male-dominated field, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan, in Greenwich Village. He was 77.Glucksman Ireland House N.Y.U., New York University’s center for Irish studies, announced his death. No cause was given. Less than a week earlier, Mr. Moloney had performed at the Maine Celtic Festival in Belfast, Maine.An immigrant from Ireland, Mr. Moloney was a pioneering scholar in the field of Irish-American studies at N.Y.U., where he was named a global distinguished professor. The university houses his extensive collection of materials in its Archives of Irish America. He reissued a wealth of music by 19th- and 20th-century Irish bands and brought the music to a wide audience whose familiarity with Irish culture often did not extend much beyond commercialized Saint Patrick’s Day events.A superb musician, Mr. Moloney sang and played the guitar, the mandolin and the banjo, with the tenor banjo his primary instrument. He was a founder in 1978 of Green Fields of America, an interdisciplinary Irish touring ensemble whose members include Michael Flatley, the founder of Riverdance, the theatrical show featuring Irish music and dance.Mr. Moloney was passionate about exploring the connections between Irish, African, Galician and American roots music and organized many concerts and lectures highlighting those synergies. On one program in the “Celtic Appalachia” series that he led, presented in 2012 at Symphony Space in Manhattan by the Irish Arts Center, the Malian musician Cheick Hamala Diabaté performed on Indigenous African instruments that predated the banjo. Mr. Moloney also collaborated with the Filipino vocalist Grace Nono, among other musicians.Mr. Moloney’s research extended to the often troubled relationship between Irish Americans and African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries; at his death he was working on a film called “Two Roads Diverged,” about how those communities found common ground through music and dance despite their antagonisms.His scholarship also embraced Irish-Jewish relations. On an entertaining recording called “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews,” Mr. Moloney highlighted vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley collaborations between those two groups of immigrants in America. (One verse asked, “What would this great Yankee nation really really ever do/ If it wasn’t for a Levy, a Monahan or Donohue?”)Mr. Moloney was involved as a musician or a producer, or both, on some 125 albums, according to the ethnomusicologist and musician Daniel T. Neely. Other notable Moloney recordings include “Slow Airs and Set Dances,” “Strings Attached,” “Green Fields of America,” “McNally’s Row of Flats” and “The Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra,” with an N.Y.U.-based ensemble he founded in 2000.Until the 1980s, instrumentalists in traditional Irish music were mostly male, but Mr. Moloney encouraged women to perform as well, organizing a festival in Manhattan in 1985 called “Cherish the Ladies” (the name of an Irish jig) and a concert the next year called “Fathers and Daughters.” He produced an album by the all-female group Cherish the Ladies called “Irish Women Musicians in America.”Mr. Moloney, who hosted shows about folk music on American public television, was honored by the Irish government in 2013 as a recipient of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad. In 1999, Hillary Clinton, the first lady at the time, presented him with the National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts, given by National Endowment for the Arts.Mr. Moloney was a mentor to many subsequent N.E.A. fellows, including the flutist Joanie Madden, of Cherish the Ladies.He wrote a 2002 book called “Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song” accompanied by a CD of songs. And he led regular tours of Ireland, highlighting Irish culture through concerts, studio visits, castle tours and pub visits.“At the heart of the Irish American experience is a sense of displacement, from one country to another, from a rural to a more complicated way of life,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times in 1996. “There’s that sense of a tug from across the ocean. There’s a profound sense of loss.”Mr. Moloney performing at Symphony Space in Manhattan in 2015. He “has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment,” a reviewer wrote in 1971.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesMichael Moloney was born in Limerick, in southwestern Ireland, on Nov. 15, 1944, one of seven children of Michael and Maura Moloney. His father was the chief air traffic control officer at Shannon Airport, west of Limerick, and his mother was the principal of a primary school in Limerick.Mick, as he was called, studied the tenor banjo, the mandolin and the guitar in his youth, becoming particularly attracted to the “wild sound” of the banjo after first hearing it in the 1950s, he said. Lacking opportunities to hear traditional instrumental music in Limerick, he recalled, he would travel to nearby County Clare to listen to tunes in pubs and record them so that he could learn them.In his youth he played with the Emmet Folk Group and with a trio called the Johnstons, with whom he recorded and toured Europe and America. “Much of their personality stems from Mr. Moloney,” the critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times in 1971, “who has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment, punctuated by a marvelously Mephistophelian eyebrow.”Mr. Moloney received a bachelor’s degree in economics from University College Dublin and lived briefly in London as a social worker helping immigrant communities. He moved to the United States in 1973 and received a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In addition to N.Y.U., he taught ethnomusicology, folklore and Irish studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at Georgetown and Villanova.In 1982, Mr. Moloney founded the Irish/Celtic Week at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va., modeled after the Willie Clancy Summer School, an annual event in County Clare that teaches traditional Irish arts.In his last two decades, he lived in both Manhattan and Thailand, where he volunteered as a music therapist and teacher for abandoned children with H.I.V. at the Mercy Center in Bangkok. He performed online from Thailand for Irish for Biden presidential campaign events in 2020.His marriages to Philomena Murray and Judy Sherman ended in divorce. His survivors include his partner, Sangjan Chailungka with whom he lived in Bangkok; a son, Fintan, from his marriage to Ms. Murray; and four siblings, Violet Morrissey and Dermot, Kathleen and Nanette Moloney.While he dedicated much of his career to academia, Mr. Moloney never lost his energy for making music, describing himself as an artist first and foremost.“There are thousands of tunes in the tradition, so when we sit down for rehearsal, our job really isn’t to find material, it’s to exclude material, because we’d play them all if we could,” he said in a video interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “On my tombstone,” he added, “I want the inscription banjo driver.” More

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      The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear new tracks from Alvvays, Tyshawn Sorey, Killer Mike 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.The 1975, ‘Part of the Band’Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was Rimbaud and he was Paul Verlaine.” He also queries, “Am I ironically woke?” The production wanders from chugging string ensemble to fingerpicked folk-rock to saxophone choir, with all of them mingling near the end. It’s pandemic confusion, self-questioning and ennui, with melodies to spare. JON PARELESAlvvays, ‘Pharmacist’A plain-spoken, everyday admission — “I know you’re back, I saw your sister at the pharmacy” — kick-starts the latest single from the Canadian dream-pop band Alvvays; as soon as the vocalist Molly Rankin sings that line, the song suddenly transforms into a fantasia of melancholic melody and squalling guitars. Hints of My Bloody Valentine and Japanese Breakfast hang in the hazy atmosphere, but Rankin’s bittersweet delivery gives “Pharmacist,” the opening track from the upcoming album “Blue Rev,” a distinct emotional undertow, like a stirring dream that ends a little too soon. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulien Baker, ‘Guthrie’“Guthrie” is a quietly harrowing postscript to Julien Baker’s 2021 album “Little Oblivions” from a collection, “B-Sides,” being released later this month. Like “Little Oblivions,” the song confronts what it’s like to be an addict: “Whatever I get, I always need a little more,” she sings. But while Baker overdubbed herself into a rock band on “Little Oblivions,” in “Guthrie” she’s solo, picking a soothing waltz on her guitar as she tears into her own failings. The song is a crisis of conscience and of faith, with a voice humbled by self-knowledge. “Wanted so bad to be good,” she offers, “but there’s no such thing.” PARELESKing Princess, ‘Change the Locks’“A year without no separation just might have broke us, baby,” King Princess sings in “Change the Locks,” a song about how pandemic proximity — and friction — could destroy a relationship. It’s three-chord folk-rock that explodes into hard rock when King Princess (the Brooklyn songwriter Mikaela Strauss) realizes how bad things have gotten. She wants to hold on; she knows she can’t. PARELESFlo, ‘Immature’English R&B lags American innovations by years or sometimes decades. The vocal trio Flo is catching up with what American acts like Destiny’s Child accomplished in the 1990s: calling out male assumptions while mastering recording techniques and harnessing voices, instruments and machines to sharpen their message of self-determination. The way Flo juggles individual voices and two or three-part harmonies, flirtation and fury, harks back to Destiny’s Child, but unerringly: “Why you gotta be so immature,” they sing, adding “Tell me how can I relate/If you don’t communicate?” Even before a crying-baby sample slips into the mix, it’s easy to know who’s in the wrong. PARELESGhetto Kumbé, ‘Pila Pila (Trooko Remix)’Ghetto Kumbé is a group from Bogotá that fortifies Afro-Colombian drumming and socially conscious lyrics with electronics; it released a potent self-titled debut album in 2020 and has opened for Radiohead. The group handed over tracks from its album to various producers for “Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes,” an album due in November. “Pila Pila,” a brawny tribute to the power of drums, got reworked by the Grammy-winning Honduran producer Trooko (who worked on “Residente” and “The Hamilton Mixtape”). He revved it up even further, switching the meter from 6/4 to 4/4, moving its incantatory lead vocal to the start of the song and bringing in a hopping salsa bass line, electronic hoots, jazzy piano and twitchy drum machines, constantly hurtling ahead. PARELESKiller Mike featuring Young Thug, ‘Run’A verse from a still-jailed Young Thug only adds to the urgency of “Run,” Killer Mike’s first new track as a solo artist since his vital 2012 album “R.A.P. Music.” Across four fruitful albums with Run the Jewels, it’s become commonplace to hear Mike rapping over El-P’s kinetic, collagelike beats, but it’s refreshing here to hear him link up once again with the veteran No I.D., whose understated production allows Killer Mike to tap into a smoother flow. “The race to freedom ain’t won,” he raps on the chorus, providing some welcome counterprogramming to your standard Independence Day jingoism. ZOLADZDomi & JD Beck (featuring Anderson .Paak), ‘Take a Chance’Jazz might be one of the only spaces left where the term “internet star” still means anything. Domi & JD Beck are Exhibit A, a duo of virtuosic post-jazz Zoomers who seem to have leaped out of a cartoon, and whose wow factor is suited to the small screen: A blond keyboardist rips solos while a diminutive drummer taps out hyper-contained, hyperactive beats. References to jazz history are funneled into the aesthetics of a sped-up TV jingle. Domi and Beck have found a champion in Anderson .Paak, and their debut album, “Not Tight,” is being jointly released by his new label and Blue Note Records. Redolent of lounge, ’70s fusion, trip-hop and breakbeat, this LP offers the nonstop dopamine drip of a doom-scroll, and it’s heavy on star features: Thundercat, Snoop Dogg and Mac DeMarco all pull up. “Take a Chance” is their moment with Paak, and if his earnest, rapped pledges of devotion don’t exactly square with the song’s feel-good vibes and the geometrically sound pop hook that Domi and Beck sing, you’re hard-pressed to hold it against them. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTyshawn Sorey Trio, ‘Enchantment’A multi-instrumentalist, composer, University of Pennsylvania professor and MacArthur “genius” grantee, Tyshawn Sorey is likely to be found writing suite-length experimental works, or serving as composer in residence with an opera company, or conjuring up new systems for group improvisation. It’s been a long time since anyone really thought of him as “just” a jazz drummer. So, for Sorey, recording an album of standards with a piano trio qualifies as a curve ball. Of course, he has a big fondness for throwing curves. Sorey recently joined up with the pianist Aaron Diehl, one of jazz’s standard-bearing traditionalists, and the versatile bassist Matt Brewer to record “Mesmerism,” an album of jazz classics and lesser-known pieces from the canon. Horace Silver’s “Enchantment” is usually played as a tautly rhythmic samba, but the trio retrofits it, with Diehl putting the lush precision of his harmonies to work over a loose-limbed, shuffling beat from Sorey. RUSSONELLO More

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      Joan Shelley’s New Songs Soothe Old Wounds

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      As a Kentucky farm kid, the singer and songwriter made music to have a voice in her troubled home. On her new album, “The Spur,” her songs finally process those times.SKYLIGHT, Ky. — The second week of November 2016: Donald Trump was president-elect, and Leonard Cohen was dead. The songwriter Joan Shelley and the guitarist Nathan Salsburg — her collaborator for the better part of a decade and boyfriend for the better part of a year — were the opening act on a tour that suddenly seemed meaningless. They listened to Cohen’s haunted farewell, “You Want It Darker,” on repeat and bickered about the news.“It was so masochistic: ‘Start it over, and let’s feel horrible,’” Shelley, now 36, remembered recently by phone from Kentucky during one of several interviews, laughing through a sigh. “Talk about bad reverb, the worst echo box.”But, Shelley recalled, as the sun sank to the couple’s west along the Indiana plains during that 2016 drive, she marveled at the outlines of homes scattered on the horizon, how they seemed to resist the tug of inevitable darkness. “It made a really beautiful point — the hopefulness of someone building a house out here, despite all the …” she said, pausing for words that never came. “It was lonely, but it was resilient. Everything became part of the sunset.”Standing in the kitchen of their bungalow three years later, Shelley played her newest tune for Salsburg — “When the Light Is Dying,” a snapshot of that gloomy scene and a portrait of hope through shared perseverance. “Oh God, I felt emptied out,” Salsburg, 43, remembered in a phone interview. “That was a desperate, desolate moment, but she turned it into something profoundly beautiful, this whole cocktail of being human.”The graceful song’s quiet redemption is the centerpiece of “The Spur,” Shelley’s sixth solo album, due Friday. Written largely during the pandemic while Shelley was pregnant with their daughter, Talya, its dozen songs deal not with her expectations for motherhood but instead with her difficulties as a daughter and sister, as an attentive observer of the cycles around her lifelong home and her worries about the place’s future, both politically and environmentally. There is death and renewal, romance and retreat, self-doubt and societal hope, all rendered with elegant restraint in her fireside alto.“I had to clean out this junk I’d been dragging around,” Shelley said on another interview day. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mom, but doing this made that possible. I was scared of hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me.”Shelley and Salsburg live on a 40-acre former tree farm 30 minutes northeast of Louisville, tucked at the end of a long driveway in the community of Skylight. She grew up on her mother’s nearby farm for Saddlebred horses, a world apart from Louisville and “punk kids that looked so hard.”“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mom, but doing this made that possible,” Shelley said, of writing her new album. “I was scared of hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me.”Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesHer parents split when she was 3. After her mother remarried, Shelley, quiet and pensive, struggled for space among four other children. She began mimicking songs of heartache from the radio, using the borrowed language of romance to explore adolescent anxiety. She won a songwriting contest at 9, then joined any chorus she could find, rehearsals providing trips to the big city. As high school began, she learned chords on a guitar salvaged from the attic.“I didn’t have a voice in that family, but I found one through music,” she said. “That’s 100 percent why I sing now. I was the only one in my family that had this expression, so I made a quiet corner in a noisy world in this very isolated family.”Shelley headed south to the University of Georgia, hoping Athens’s fabled music scene would motivate her when coursework didn’t. She majored in anthropology, dreaming of archaeological digs in exotic places. But after graduating, she fell into a small traditional music crew back in Louisville, starting the old-time trio Maiden Radio alongside two music therapists, Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell.“We didn’t want to go play around the world as ‘Kentucky’s Appalachian band,’ because that’s not who we were,” said Mize, who stayed up until dawn singing with Shelley when they met while camping in the state’s Red River Gorge. “Joan was writing in an old-time vein as an exercise; she started finding her style.”Shelley has steadily refined that style — a braid of folk immediacy and poetic insight, much like the writing of fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry — for a dozen years. The tree sanctuary has become another quiet corner, allowing her to “recoil into solitude” to raise chickens and goats, grow collards and kale, bake sourdough bread and write songs alone at the kitchen table. (When Salsburg walks in for a snack but finds her with a guitar, he disappears; she plays him songs only when they’re finished.)Birds, rivers, leaves and ridgelines animate her writing; images wrested from her surroundings offer unexpected lenses for self-reflection. “There is no facade that is useful out here,” Shelley said of life on a farm. “This privacy is a way to let go of the things you’ve said and try to say something else.”To write “The Spur,” however, Shelley opened her usually hermetic process. She joined a new group of local songwriters who met weekly to share their responses to a prompt. The time constraint inspired her to be satisfied with pieces she would have once considered unfinished, like “Fawn,” a playful but frank ode to safeguarding privacy. “I’ve been worried since the beginning,” she sings, tone gentle but clinched. “Am I safe in my skin?”And when she stalled on a tune that reflected all the birth, life and death she’d seen as a country kid, she emailed the sketch to Bill Callahan, a singer-songwriter she’s long admired. They’ve become pen pals in recent years, having met only once. “She writes songs that don’t feel like they’re trying to do something,” Callahan said from Austin by phone. “You’re never really sure if the tide is going in or going out.”“Music made me a whole person — it allowed for the survival of the softer parts of me,” Shelley said.Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesKnowing of her rural circumstances, he supplied images of cows killed for hides or crops planted for harvest on “Amberlit Morning,” his trademark baritone the doomy inverse of her tender awakening. “When I was a child, I didn’t see the tragedy of, like, a colt dying. ‘A snake ate the ducks’ — that’s just what happened,’” Shelley said. “Only later did I learn to cry about the loss or ugliness or violence.”As new parents, married for a year now, Shelley and Salsburg talk about leaving the farm or even Kentucky, of finding some place where their elected officials reflect their values. “We have this community rich with really wonderful people, but is that enough to insulate Talya from the insidious stuff?” Salsburg asked, squinting in the sunlight outside the barn where he works remotely as the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. “For this child, we could use a different place, a different path.”Shelley, though, waffles with the seasons. The new song “Why Not Live Here” squares up to the troubles of making home in challenging places. Strolling toward Harrods Creek on the afternoon of an in-person interview, her billowing pants swishing against thick grass, she pointed out the culvert where she sits to read and stood over a possum’s carcass, unfazed as she contemplated its end.“As soon as all the trees leaved out, I was like, ‘I’m staying forever,’” she said of spring’s recent start, singing those last few words in a soprano vibrato. “But it’s still hard to imagine planting a child in this.”For now, the songwriting coterie that prompted much of “The Spur” has morphed into the Marigold Collective, an upstart group organizing letter-writing campaigns to conservative Kentucky politicians and a parade along an old bison trail to, as Shelley put it, “celebrate life on the edge of extinction.” These actions are small, she said, like writing new songs to process old wounds. But maybe they prove more meaningful than submitting to darkness.“Music made me a whole person — it allowed for the survival of the softer parts of me,” she said on a FaceTime call, walking through the yard as birds chirped. “It’s a way to be unstuck about it all.” More

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      Jim Seals, Half of a Popular 1970s Soft-Rock Duo, Dies at 79

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      Teamed with Dash Crofts, he hit it big with “Summer Breeze” in 1972. The two went on to have chart success with “Diamond Girl” and other songs.Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday evening at his home in Nashville. He was 79.His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly in 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon.”The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of chorus that sticks in the brain:“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a follow-up, “Hummingbird,” made the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached No. 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached No. 6.But the duo’s run of success basically ended when the decade did, and they called it quits for a time.“Around 1980, we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts,” Mr. Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”Six years earlier, though, the pair had begun to fall out of favor with some listeners and critics because of their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 not long after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights. The title track urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duo’s career.“It completely killed it for a while,” he said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, although there were also hundreds of letters of support. In the 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the pair never intended the song to be a lightning rod.“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue,” he said. “On one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other people were literally throwing rocks at us.“If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity,” he continued, “we might have thought twice about doing it. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.”James Eugene Seals was born on Oct. 17, 1942, in Sidney, Texas, to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields, and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a boomtown in southwest Texas.“There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”His father played a little guitar and his mother played the dobro, so informal jam sessions were a common way to pass the time in the household. When a fiddler came by one evening, young Jim was taken with the instrument, and his father ordered him one from a Sears catalog.Later he took up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called the Crew Cats that played at dances and in local clubs. The band’s drummer quit right before a show at a junior college, and the drummer from another band on the bill sat in — Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.The two became friends and played with the Champs for several years out of Los Angeles. Both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they hit it big as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter that they had pulled out of a previous European engagement.“We were going to tour there earlier, but we had a last-minute change of mind when we found out that we’d be playing with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a fine band, but I’m not sure that the audience would be quite right for us.”Mr. Seals, left, and Mr. Crofts in an undated promotional photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by their two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive him. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who had success in the late 1970s as a member of another soft-rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals’s death, with Jim Seals’s two sons sometimes playing with them.Maia Coleman More