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      Eddie Adcock, Musician Who Pushed Bluegrass Forward, Dies at 86

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      A master improviser on banjo, he understood the genre’s roots but was also in the forefront of the later “newgrass” movement.Eddie Adcock, a virtuoso banjo and guitar player who served as a bridge between the formative early years of bluegrass and the innovative “newgrass” movement of the 1970s and beyond, died on March 19 in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 86.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Dan Hays, a former executive director of the International Bluegrass Music Association, who said Mr. Adcock had a number of chronic health problems.Mr. Adcock brought his improvisatory fretwork to musical settings ranging from the first-generation traditionalism of Bill Monroe to the newgrass, or “new acoustic,” sounds fashioned by forerunners of modern bluegrass like the Country Gentlemen and II Generation.Mr. Adcock was best known for his tenure in the 1960s with the Country Gentlemen, a group based in Arlington, Va., that, through advances in style and repertoire, all but redefined bluegrass music. Employing a traditional string-band format, they broadened the genre’s appeal with their impromptu arrangements of folk and pop songs and material written by artists, like Hedy West and Gordon Lightfoot, whose work fell outside the bounds of bluegrass.Mr. Adcock’s contributions were consistently among the quartet’s most daring, notably his dazzling string-bending and his use of the thumb-style guitar technique of Merle Travis to create a unique jazz- and blues-inflected approach to playing the banjo.“I released all my insides, all my creativity, into the band,” Mr. Adcock said of his heady early years with the Country Gentlemen in a 2016 interview with Scottsville Monthly, the magazine of his hometown, Scottsville, Va. “I was ready to say something of my own, and that’s where I made my mark.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      11 Songs to Keep St. Patrick’s Day Going

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      Extend the holiday with tracks from Sinead O’Connor, the Pogues, Kneecap and more.Sinead O’ConnorPaul Bergen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,This year St. Patrick’s Day was on a Monday, a particularly cursed fate for a holiday associated with merriment. I propose extending the celebration all throughout the week — a feat of endurance that will require the proper soundtrack. Today, I offer you just that.This playlist contains tracks from 11 very different artists from Ireland.* It features some interpretations of traditional Irish tunes from legends like the Pogues (I’ll get to their origins in a moment) and the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem; a few superstars who put Irish rock on the global map in the 1980s and ’90s (U2 and the Cranberries); and some younger upstarts refreshing Irish sounds for a new generation (the imaginative post-punk group Fontaines D.C. and the raucous rap trio Kneecap, whose 2024 biopic I highly recommend).Whether you’re playing this while sipping a pint of Guinness or trying to conjure that pub atmosphere within the secrecy of your headphones, I hope this playlist keeps you in the St. Patrick’s Day spirit all week (and maybe even all year) long.Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake,Lindsay*Before you email me about their exclusion, a friendly reminder that the Dropkick Murphys are from Massachusetts. As for Hozier, well … something tells me that there are at least a few other playlists out there where you can hear his music.Listen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jesse Colin Young, Singer Who Urged Us to ‘Get Together,’ Dies at 83

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      As the leader of the Youngbloods, he sang one of the enduring anthems of the peace-and-love era. He went on to have a prolific career as a solo artist.Jesse Colin Young, whose sincere tenor vocals for the Youngbloods graced one of the most loving anthems of the hippie era, “Get Together,” a Top Five hit in 1969, before he went on to pursue a solo career that lasted more than five decades, died on Sunday at his home in Aiken, S.C. He was 83.His death was announced by his publicist, Michael Jensen, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Young didn’t write “Get Together.” It was composed by the folk singer Dino Valenti, later a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service, under the pseudonym Chet Powers. But Mr. Young’s voice idealized it, and the chorus he sang — “Come on people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try to love one another right now” — became one of the best-known refrains of the 1960s.“The lyrics are just to die for,” Mr. Young told the website The Arts Fuse in 2018. “To this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.”He composed many other key pieces of the Youngbloods’ repertoire during their prime in the late 1960s, including the brooding “Darkness, Darkness,” which reflected the terror he imagined American soldiers were experiencing during the Vietnam War; “Sunlight,” a ravishing ode to passionate love; and “Ride the Wind,” a jazzy paean to freedom.The lyrics to many of Mr. Young’s songs celebrated the gifts nature gives, from the dreamy play of sunlight on skin to the unfettered sweep of wind in the hair.“Love of the natural world is as much a theme in my music as romantic love,” he told the website Music Aficionado in 2016. “I get more out of walking over the ridgetop in Marin and looking out at the national seashore than any drugs I ever did” — a reference to the Northern California county where he lived for much of his career.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jason Isbell’s Bare-Bones Breakup Tune, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by I’m With Her, Nathy Peluso, Car Seat Headrest and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Jason Isbell, ‘Eileen’Jason Isbell’s new album, “Foxes in the Snow,” is decisively unadorned: just Isbell singing over his acoustic guitar. It arrives following his divorce from Amanda Shires, who has her own songwriting career and was a member of his band. Over bare-bones fingerpicking in “Eileen,” Isbell sings about separation, regrets, self-deception and how “It ended like it always ends / Somebody crying on the phone.” He contends, “Eileen, you should’ve seen this coming sooner,” but adds, almost fondly, “You thought the truth was just a rumor, but that’s your way.” It’s not about blame — it’s about getting through.I’m With Her, ‘Ancient Light’The virtuoso string-band supergroup I’m With Her — Sarah Jarosz, Aiofe O’Donovan and Sara Watkins — has reconvened with the intimately ambitious “Ancient Light.” The verses are in a gently disorienting 7/4; the instruments mix acoustic and electric, juxtaposing fiddle tune and math-rock; the lyrics lean into the metaphysical. As the song begins, Jarosz sings, “Better get out of the way / Gonna figure out what I wanna say / I been a long time comin’,” and it only gets more cosmic from there.Car Seat Headrest, ‘Gethsemane’Will Toledo’s band Car Seat Headrest has announced its first album since 2020, “The Scholars,” and it’s a full-scale rock opera. The first single, “Gethsemane,” is an 11-minute suite that ponders faith, morality, creativity, free will and love as the music unfurls with stretches of kraut-rock keyboard minimalism and roaring power chords that echo the Who’s “Tommy.” Toledo sings, “A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song / I don’t know how it happened,” but the structure is ironclad.Illuminati Hotties, ‘777’Sarah Tudzin — the songwriter and producer behind Illuminati Hotties — cranks up distorted guitars and harnesses quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics in “777,” a song that nearly explodes with joyful anticipation. “I wanna figure you out,” she declares, but she’s already sure that she’s won any gamble: “You’re my spade / lucky 777.” All the noise doesn’t hide the pop song within.The Ophelias, ‘Salome’​​”I want your head on a stake / I want your head on a platter,” sing the Ophelias, an indie-rock band from Cincinnati, turning “I” into a peal of vocal harmony. “Salome” adapts an incident from the Bible into a seething, churning, implacable crescendo of guitars, drums and voices, calmly announcing, “The knife sways heavy in my hand.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block

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      The reel-to-reel tape is from a Gaslight Cafe show in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Dylan was playing to audiences you could count in a glance or two.On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign

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      Lobbying the public to attract the votes of the academy is an odd practice — but you can’t say Chalamet hasn’t excelled at it.Democracy is broken, they say. The wants of the electorate are contradictory and rooted in base emotions rather than rational thought. Viable alternatives are nonexistent, so we treat the ensuing insanity as a spectator sport, posting impotently as the world burns. I could be talking about electoral politics, but in this instance I am actually talking about Oscar campaigns.We as individuals do not cast the ballots that determine the year’s best actor or finest cinematographer or most evocative sound design. That privilege falls to a shadowy elite, who decide these things based on their personal aesthetic judgments — but also, it turns out, based on larger narratives that all of us get to judge, narratives about who has achieved true stardom or whose moment has come. It’s a strange arrangement: The public has no official say, and yet our collective gut-check vibes appear to influence the result just the same. Hence the Oscar campaign, which aims not just to persuade academy voters that a given contender deserves their support, but also to create a good story around it — and, ideally, a culture-wide consensus that the nominee’s victory is nearly inevitable.The 2025 race has been weirder than most. Three campaigns stand out — one weirdly funny, one weirdly disastrous and one weirdly endearing. The funny one involved the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” An endless promotional push surrounded the film’s November release, and a clear bid for Oscar recognition followed, but the highlight of the whole thing was its strangest moment: a journalist solemnly informing the two lead actresses, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that fans of the film were “holding space” for the lyrics of the breakout song “Defying Gravity.” Erivo was visibly moved by this news; Grande then reached out to hold Erivo’s pointer finger. Both women appeared to be on the verge of tears. The moment was so eerie and absurd that it was rehashed online for weeks. Maybe it helped: Each woman did ultimately secure an Oscar nomination.The disaster involved “Emilia Pérez,” the polarizing Spanish-language French musical crime film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. For a moment, this looked like the film to beat: It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actress. But it was quickly subsumed by a series of controversies. There was criticism, from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, that the film was “a step backward for trans representation”; there was negative coverage from the Mexican press about how the country was portrayed. Most devastating, there were unearthed social media posts by the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, disparaging George Floyd and Islam, among other hot-button topics — most likely torpedoing the chances of the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.Then there was the third offensive, the one credited with “making Oscar campaigning fun again.” Timothée Chalamet claimed a best-actor nomination, his second, for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — a film he’s quite good in, especially when he evokes Dylan’s unique blend of mumbly insouciance and magnetic star power. His status as a favorite slipped after he lost out on early awards. But his campaign has been something else: not just fun, but a genuine masterpiece of self-promotion.It has scored so many hits, across so many platforms, that it’s helpful to break them into categories. In October, when Chalamet showed up to a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (and later posed with the winner at the Golden Globes), it made for the kind of charming general-interest story that would be shared widely on Facebook. When he appeared in a video with the internet personality Nardwuar and talked about how “I rip Milk Duds” at the movies: That one serviced a slightly different segment, the “extremely online.” Elsewhere he would give special attention to the niche demographic of “Bob Dylan nerds,” to which I personally belong. On Instagram, he posted a video of himself listening to the 1980s outtake “Blind Willie McTell.” Even more specific was a reference to Dylan’s bizarre, bewigged appearance at the 2003 Sundance premiere of his own Dylan movie, “Masked and Anonymous” — Chalamet copied that wardrobe at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” a gesture that only the most committed Dylanologists would fully appreciate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jesse Welles, a Folk Musician Who Sings the News, Is Turning the Page

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      In a small home recording studio on a Monday afternoon in January, Jesse Welles sat with a guitar on his lap, dressed head-to-toe in black.Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs. He’s managed to turn subjects like the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms. But the song he was recording in that basement in East Nashville, “Simple Gifts,” is a different beast.As he delicately plucked his acoustic guitar, he sang its earnest opening lines — “Slouching towards the sky’s extent from the edges of a waste / Was something darker than a hope, something brighter still than fate” — sketching out an imagistic tableau untouched by current events. Welles’s new album, “Middle,” due Feb. 21, is similarly minded.“The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” he said. “These are ones that are self-indulgent, or at least I feel like they are at times. I like to do both. They’re two different mediums.”Jesse Welles’s protest songs deftly blend the whimsical with the serious, turning topics like Walmart and the war in Gaza into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesThe producer, Eddie Spear, rose from behind a mixing board and adjusted the microphone in front of Welles. Most of the songs on “Middle” are recorded with a full band, but for “Simple Gifts” and the album’s title track, the setup was pared down to a solitary microphone. “I’m trying to honor what people are enjoying about Jesse,” said Spear, who has also worked with Zach Bryan and Sierra Ferrell. “We thought getting a really simple capture in this way might tie in where he’s come from and honor this particular period of his career.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tribute to Marianne Faithfull

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      Hear 10 tracks from a long, winding career.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesDear listeners,We lost one of the true greats last week when Marianne Faithfull died at age 78. A pop star turned punk rocker turned cabaret chanteuse, Faithfull was also a style icon, an actress with remarkable screen presence and a wonderfully unfiltered memoirist, among many other things. She will be greatly missed — but what a life she lived!Today’s playlist is a celebration of Faithfull’s long and varied musical career, which began at 17 — when she was signed on sight by the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham — and stretched until her late 70s. I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Faithfull in 2021, around the release of what is now the final album she released in her lifetime, “She Walks in Beauty,” which found her reciting Romantic poetry atop compositions produced by her friend and collaborator Warren Ellis. She was then recovering from a nasty bout of Covid-19 that had put her in a coma, but her resilience was something to behold.That toughness and durability was a through line of her career, as she sprung back from multiple near-death experiences and returned with music that seemed supercharged by those struggles. She was a bold, intuitive and one-of-a-kind artist, as you’ll hear on the following 10 tracks.Also, apologies for this newsletter going out a day late. My personal advice: Steer clear of that norovirus! Thankfully I’m now on the mend and The Amplifier will return to its regular schedule on Friday. Til then!It is the evening of the day,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More