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      Michael Hurley, an Original Folk Iconoclast, Turns 80

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      For six decades, the folk singer has chronicled his woes and loves on records he’s mostly made himself. His new album celebrates that independence — and the community it fostered.When the singer-songwriter Michael Hurley was 24, Moe Asch handed him $100 and told him to go make his second album. They never spoke again.It was 1965, and Asch was a 60-year-old impresario of New York’s folk revival. As the founder of the label Folkways, Asch had released records by Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, plus foundational collections from Harry Smith and Alan Lomax. Hurley, however, was a scrappy itinerant from the rural Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. He had just issued his first home-recorded, noise-pocked set of tunes about wine, tea bags and werewolves on Folkways. Asch ordered him to take the money and cut his follow-up in proper studios.“Now that was a different situation,” Hurley, 79, said in a recent interview, scoffing into his cordless phone as he puttered around the cluttered kitchen of his home near Astoria, Oregon. “I’m still uncomfortable with booking a studio, the mood. If you can record at home, you live there.”Hurley used Asch’s cash to pay bills; five years later, he recorded his second LP in his bedroom for another label. “I was always very practical,” he said, laughing.This reluctance to work by anyone else’s code epitomizes the recalcitrant idealism of Hurley, one of American folk music’s longest-running survivors and visionaries. For six decades, Hurley has chronicled his passions, problems and curious predilections on several dozen albums, often self-made or self-released. His dependable strangeness and self-reliance cast him as a spiritual forebear and elder ally for songwriters at the country and folk fringes of indie rock. Cat Power, Hiss Golden Messenger and Yo La Tengo have covered Hurley; others have called him “our Bob Dylan.”“The refrain is, ‘What would Michael Hurley do?’” the songwriter Will Oldham said by phone from his Kentucky home. “His amount of aspiration seems sustainable.”After a five-year absence, Hurley will release “The Time of the Foxgloves” on Friday, less than two weeks before his 80th birthday. A careworn clutch of country odes to booze or wildflowers and trickster warnings about lust or death, it is a fitting capstone for an artist who rarely cared if he sang only for himself. “I never thought of a career in music,” he said. “What I do is goof off — and try to get away with it.”Hurley’s mischievous relationship with music predates his memory. When he was a toddler, his older sisters hoisted him onto a 78-r.p.m. turntable and spun him while he squealed. He wrote his first song at 5 while standing atop a board at the bottom of a rope swing, fantasizing he was an airplane that a passenger named Butch struggled to catch. He still sings it upon request.The family sang at picnics and gathered around a hulking AM console. When Hurley was 16, one of his sisters’ boyfriends left behind a guitar when he headed to college. Hurley leafed through songbooks, learning what he could without understanding tuning.“I started making up stuff right away,” said Hurley, who speaks softly and slowly until he happens upon something of interest. “If you don’t know the proper way, you do it your way. Sometimes, that gives you a better song.”“I never thought of a career in music,” Hurley said. “What I do is goof off — and try to get away with it.”Will Matsuda for The New York TimesThis guitar indoctrination coincided with the start of the ’60s and New York’s folk renaissance. While still a teenager in Bucks County, Penn., Hurley made frequent liquor runs 90 minutes northeast to the city, crashing in friends’ apartments. Often credited in that famous revival, he bristled at the idea six decades later. He was more interested, he insisted, in sitting on an abandoned outdoor sofa and people watching with a quart of beer and a salami sandwich than joining that scene.During the summer of 1962, Jesse Colin Young and a cadre of other “Bucks County Boys,” Hurley included, shared a home in Pennsylvania. Young paid the rent with his restaurant job; Hurley, meanwhile, shimmied through a hole in the ceiling into the stifling attic, where he reused Tetley tea bags. His ode to his diet, “The Tea Song,” convinced Young that a peculiar talent roosted upstairs.“We were all coming alive, all in different directions,” Young said from his home in South Carolina. “What came out of the attic was a fully formed songwriter with a wonderfully quirky perspective, so different than mine.”Young and Hurley’s paths soon diverged drastically. Young became famous with his rock band the Youngbloods. Hurley promoted his Folkways debut by decamping to Mexico with his then wife, Pasta Hurley. (He was there when The New York Times panned it.) “I had no inkling that, if you have a record, you should tour,” he said.For years after taking Asch’s money, Hurley hopscotched odd jobs near Boston. As the ’70s began, Young arrived unannounced at his small apartment, recording gear in tow. Warner Brothers had given the Youngbloods a label, Raccoon, and Hurley was Young’s priority. “They thought it would be hilarious if I got famous — not a bad idea,” Hurley said, chuckling.Hurley cut two albums for Raccoon, but the label folded before he could finish a third. Those LPs became de facto business cards for ski-town gigs in Vermont, where he lived off and on until 1986. There were other brushes with a proper career, like a stint on Rounder Records that included a joyfully demented collaboration with his cronies, the Holy Modal Rounders.Still, Hurley balked at music executives who suggested he recruit rock virtuosos as a backing band or a German promoter who implored him to portray an American hobo for the European press. Every couple of years throughout the ’80s and ’90s, he released another record on his label, Bellemeade Phonics. He festooned the LPs with surrealist paintings of characters he’d drawn for years in his own comics, like wolves named Boone and Jocko or smiling tugboats.Hurley’s sounds have always danced along the continuum between the blues and bluegrass, resistant to trends. Characters and entire songs recurred. He compared the process to jazz groups that recombine basic elements into novel results.“If I liked something as a kid, I still like it,” he said boastfully. “There is a routine, but you pull up the blanket and shake off the dust. It’s an exercise in possibilities.”Around the start of the millennium, just as Hurley settled in Oregon after time in a dozen states, a genre revival so strange it was christened “freak-folk” accepted him as its forerunner. A spate of reissues, exhaustive interviews and even a short documentary earned him young audiences. Devendra Banhart, a scene flag-bearer, remembered ordering records directly from Hurley and being stunned by comics stuffed inside. The connection between Hurley’s life and work was clear.“He hasn’t created a character just to sell records,” Banhart said by phone. “He has created his own world for the sake of enjoying making it come to life.”Mike Quinn was a Hurley convert of that moment, too. While working in a Philadelphia record store, he heard a 2002 reissue of Hurley’s debut and began buying more. In Hurley’s songs, he recognized that sincerity and silliness could share space. As Quinn’s label No Quarter grew, Hurley climbed the wish list.When the No Quarter guitarist Nathan Salsburg mentioned that Hurley hoped to record with him and Oldham in Kentucky, Quinn offered help. When lockdown scuttled their plans, Hurley wondered if he’d missed one studio session too many. “I could sense his frustrations,” Quinn said.But Hurley bided his time with hobbies he’d acquired over eight decades — fermenting homegrown apples, studying antique radios, tending his 1973 Dodge Coronet, growing mustard greens. In June of this year, while trimming blackberry bushes that threatened to overrun his two acres, he began longing for music festivals. He’d played Ohio’s Nelsonville Music Festival a dozen years running, after all, even meeting Merle Haggard there. Young musicians who played there for joy, not their job, reminded him of his blissful early days.An entire new song — his ode to Nelsonville, “Are You Here for the Festival?” — flashed into his head. He raced inside and pressed record on his reel-to-reel. He took the tape to an Astoria studio weeks later and asked friends to play along. His neighbors’ twin fiddles felt so right that the song begins “The Time of the Foxgloves,” like Hurley had waited all lockdown for the tune to cross his door.“At home, you can record at optimum times — instantaneously,” he said, as if he’d just taken Moe Asch’s money. “That’s how I caught it.”A Michael Hurley PrimerDigging into any discography that is six decades deep can be intimidating, especially when it’s scattered among labels. Try starting with five songs about five of his favorite subjects: booze, breaking up, sex, wolves and art for everyone.“Werewolf” (1971)Hurley ended his first album and began his second with this radical expression of empathy for the monster inside everyone. He’s included it on so many of his LPs it’s become his own tragic anthem. Bonus: Cat Power’s devastating take was a millennial boon for Hurley.“I Think I’ll Move” (1980)When Hurley is ready to leave, “the floorboards are coming up at me,” he said. This breakup song grows bitter and mean, with any good feeling he’s ever had curdling in about three minutes.“I Paint a Design” (1987)One of the most guileless tunes in Hurley’s catalog, this feels like the hymn for his personal religion. Find a relationship that feels right, and the whole world can become your canvas.“The Time Is Right” (2009)For fear of self-incrimination, Hurley doesn’t say much about the subjects of his love songs. This one isn’t shy about its desire to push past the platonic once and for all. It’s a jingle for what comes after courting.“Beer, Ale and Wine” (2021)Rolling Rock, hard cider, orange Curaçao: Name it, and Hurley likely has a tale about drinking it. The soft harmonies of this ode to alcohol of all tastes and temperatures have the sedative charms of a nightcap, nice and neat. More

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      Mary J. Blige’s Daily Affirmation, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Grimes, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Kim Petras 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.Mary J. Blige, ‘Good Morning Gorgeous’Once again, Mary J. Blige battles and overcomes self-doubt. “I’m so tired of feeling empty,” she sings in a gritty croon over a slow-rolling, vintage-style soul track, abetted by a moody string arrangement. But she’s got the solution: looking in the mirror every morning with the self-affirmation, “Good morning, gorgeous.” She adds, “I ain’t talking about getting no hair and makeup/I’m talking about soon as I wake up.” The video makes clear she’s waking up in a mansion, toned and bejeweled, a long way from “all the times that I hated myself.” JON PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Jupiter’s Dance’“Jupiter’s Dance” is an exercise in tenderness. It is a welcome departure for Alynda Segarra, who typically makes warm folk-punk as Hurray for the Riff Raff, here trading grit for cosmic reverie. In a breathy whisper, Segarra coos: “Seven revolutions around the sun/Blessings on our way, it has only begun.” The video juxtaposes celestial NASA images with found footage of people dancing to the Afro-Puerto Rican genres bomba and plena. It is a galactic prayer, a belief in the promise of the future, rooted in the vitality of the past. ISABELIA HERRERAKali Uchis and Ozuna, ‘Another Day in America’Pointedly released on Thanksgiving Day, “Another Day in America” borrows the tune of “America” from “West Side Story,” anticipating the release next week of the Steven Spielberg remake. Over syncopated guitar and a boom-bap beat, Kali Uchis sings and raps in English, keeping her tone cheerful but not mincing words: “Say ‘land of the free’/But the land was always stolen.” Ozuna, from Puerto Rico, sing-raps in Spanish, declaring, “Quisiera tumbar las fronteras de México a Nigeria”: “I would like to bring down the borders from Mexico to Nigeria.” It’s a conversation starter. PARELESAurora, ‘Heathens’The Norwegian songwriter Aurora has announced her next album, due Jan. 21, is titled “The Gods We Can Touch,” and on “Heathens” she sings about Eve, Eden and falling from grace to a life on Mother Earth. It’s a shimmering, wide-screen production, with pealing harp, Aurora’s choir-like harmonies and a seismic beat that comes and goes. It’s also a warning that paradise was lost. “Everything we touch is evil,” Aurora sings. “That is why we live like heathens.” PARELESGrimes, ‘Player of Games’Recently “semi-separated” from the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, with whom she has a child, Grimes (Claire Boucher) coos club-ready recriminations in “Player of Games,” which she sometimes sings like “play your love games.” Over a brisk house track written and produced with Illangelo, she asks questions like “Baby, will you still love me?” and “How can I compare to the adventure out there?” as the arpeggios repeat and the four-on-the-floor thumps. “If I loved him any less, I’d make him stay,” she asserts, teasing the gossip-industrial complex. PARELESKim Petras, ‘Coconuts’A deliriously comic, sexually playful disco anthem from Kim Petras, advocating for, one could say, one kind of fruit over all the rest: “Strawberry, mango, lime/don’t compare to these.” JON CARAMANICAKerozen, ‘Motivation’Kerozen, from Ivory Coast, praises patient, diligent hard work in “Motivation,” but the song provides instant gratification anyway. A galloping six-beat groove carries exultant close-harmony vocals, punched up by pattering snare drums and bursts of synthesizers and simulated horns — pure positive energy. PARELESJoe Meah, ‘Ahwene Pa Nkasa’The latest find from the indefatigable crate-diggers at Analog Africa is “Essiebon Special 1973-1984: Ghana Power House,” from the archives of the Essiebons and Dix labels. It’s Ghanaian highlife souped up with funk, Afrobeat, synthesizers and psychedelia, like “Ahwene Pa Nkasa,” a groove that materializes out of a funk backbeat, turns into a chattery, competitive stereo dialogue between two synthesizer keyboards and eventually gets around to its call-and-response vocals, fading out before the chorus gets done. PARELESCordae featuring Lil Wayne, ‘Sinister’A casually excellent rhyme workout from Cordae, who reveres the complexity of the 1990s — “Eight months with no phone, dog/we aiming for brilliance” — and Lil Wayne, who at his late 2000s mixtape peak, which he recalls here, turned complexity into extraterrestriality. CARAMANICAEladio Carrión and Luar la L, ‘Socio’A strategically placed beat change is more than a secret weapon: It can turn a standard rap track into delicious deviance. Elado Carrión’s “Socio” opens with a soulful piano intro and snare-driven beat reminiscent of something Drake’s go-to producer Noah “40” Shebib might pull out of his hard drive. But before long, the barbs arrive. A muted echo of Russell Crowe’s infamous “Gladiator” line “Are you not entertained?!” crashes into the production, and a muscular, speaker-knocking beat unravels. The guest rapper Luar la L shoots off punch lines like rounds of silver bullets, his full-throated baritone landing each with serrated precision. HERRERAChayce Beckham and Lindsay Ell, ‘Can’t Do Without Me’A good old-fashioned power country duet, with references to the grim day job, a speeding car and the high-horsepower intensity of a rough-hewed love. CARAMANICAChristian McBride and Inside Straight, ‘Gang Gang’The Village Vanguard is where the bassist Christian McBride first performed, over a decade ago, with Inside Straight, which has become maybe the most distinguished acoustic quintet in jazz. McBride’s latest release with Inside Straight, “Live at the Village Vanguard,” was recorded there years later, in 2014, during another weeklong run. “Gang Gang,” written by the vibraphonist Warren Wolf, is the album’s longest track and its most intense. The group centers itself around the drummer Carl Allen’s heavy, spiraling swing feel, and Wolf takes a solo full of pelted, bluesy notes, painting a cloud of energy in pointillist strokes. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSara Serpa and Emmanuel Iduma, ‘First Song’The Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa traces an etched, wordless line while Sofîa Rei and Aubrey Johnson circle her with sung melodies of their own, and ambient street sounds gargle below. Soon Serpa begins singing words from the Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma’s book, “A Stranger’s Pose,” about his travels across the African continent: “I can recite distances by heart feet memory/I can tell wanderlust rounded as the eyes,” she sings. Then Iduma’s voice enters, accompanied by the pianist Matt Mitchell, reading a passage on the power of language to create a space “between reality and dream.” “First Song” opens Serpa and Iduma’s impressive new collaborative album, “Intimate Strangers,” a collage of her swimming melodies and his words — many of which describe the experiences of laborers seeking their fate on the road, sometimes heading north to Europe, but in many cases stuck waiting for something to change around them. RUSSONELLO More

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      Best Albums of 2021

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      Less isolation didn’t mean a return to normalcy. Albums with big feelings and room for catharsis made the most powerful connections.Olivia Rodrigo, Moneybagg Yo and Allison Russell stood out in 2021.From left: Grant Spanier; Noam Galai/Getty Images; Bethany Mollenkof for the New York TimesJon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesSongs of Trauma, Fear and TriumphThe past year was awash in recorded music — not only the stuck-at-home recordings that musicians occupied themselves with when touring evaporated during the pandemic, but also many albums that had been made before the lockdowns but had been shelved in hopes of some return to normalcy. The albums that resonated most with me during 2021 were songs of reflection and revelation, often dealing with traumas and crises, transfigured through music.1. Bomba Estéreo, ‘Deja’The Colombian duo Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs tied to the ancient elements: water, air, fire, earth. Each new one broadened an album that entwines folklore and electronics, personal yearning and planetary concerns. With Liliana Saumet’s tartly endearing singing and rapping and Simón Mejía’s meticulously kinetic productions, the songs dance through their fears. (Read our interview with Bomba Estéreo.)Simón Mejía and Liliana Saumet of Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs.Valerie Amor C2. Allison Russell, ‘Outside Child’Allison Russell, the longtime frontwoman of Birds of Chicago, transforms a horrific childhood — she was abused by her stepfather — into songs of joyful survival. “I’m still rising, stronger for my pain and suffering,” she sings. Drawing on soul, country, folk and deep blues, she connects her own story to myth and metaphor, remembering the trauma yet decisively rising above it. (Read our interview with Allison Russell.)3. Mon Laferte, ‘Seis’Sometimes visitors can see what residents take for granted. Mon Laferte is from Chile, but she has been living for more than a decade in Mexico and has immersed herself in its music. On “Seis,” she wrote songs that draw deeply on regional Mexican traditions — mariachi, banda, ranchera, corrido, norteño — to sing, in a voice that can be teasing or furiously incendiary, about deep passions and equally deep betrayals. (Read our interview with Mon Laferte.)Mon Laferte drew on Mexican traditions for one of two albums she released this year, “Seis.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times4. The Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’Tamara Lindeman, who writes songs and records as the Weather Station, surrounded herself with a jazzy, intuitive backup group for “Ignorance,” clearly aware of Joni Mitchell’s folk-jazz precedent. The rhythms are brisk and precise; winds, keyboards and guitars ricochet respectfully off her breathy vocal lines. She sings about impending disasters, romantic and environmental, and the widespread disregard for what’s clearly about to happen. (Read our interview with the Weather Station.)5. Mdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitarist born in Niger. Like Tinariwen, his band plugs North African rhythms and modal vamps into rock amplifiers and drums. But “Afrique Victime” further expands the sonic possibilities for Tuareg rock, from ambient meditation to psychedelic onslaught. Six-beat rhythms and skeins of guitar lines carry Moctar’s voice in songs that can be modest and introspective or unstoppably frenetic.6. Julien Baker, ‘Little Oblivions’“Beat myself until I’m bloody/And I’ll give you a ringside seat,” Julien Baker sings in one of the brave, ruthlessly self-indicting songs that fill “Little Oblivions,” an album about the toll of one person’s addictions on everyone around her. She played all the instruments herself, scaling her sound up to arena size and chiming like U2, even as she refuses herself any excuses or forgiveness. (Read our review of “Little Oblivions.”)7. Black Midi, ‘Cavalcade’The virtuosic British band Black Midi bristles in every direction: with jagged, skewed funk riffs; with pointed dissonances; with passages of Minimalistic, ominous suspense; with lyrics full of bitter disillusion. And then, just to keep things unsettled, come passages filled with tenderness and wonderment, only to plunge back into the fray. (Read our interview with Black Midi.)8. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’Olivia Rodrigo, now 18, fixates on a breakup with an adolescent’s obsessiveness on “Sour,” building on the audience she found as a cast member in Disney’s “High School Musical.” With Taylor Swift as a role model for craftsmanship, her songs are as neatly detailed as they are wounded, and the production whipsaws through styles — calm piano ballad, ethereal choir harmonies, fierce distorted guitars — to match every mood swing. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)Olivia Rodrigo’s songs are neatly detailed.Erica Hernandez9. Esperanza Spalding, ‘Songwrights Apothecary Lab’“Songwrights Apothecary Lab” was the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding’s pandemic project; she consulted neuroscientists, music therapists and ethnomusicologists to devise music for healing, and an online user’s guide prescribes the purpose of each song. But the songs are equally effective off-label; they encompass meditations, serpentine jazz compositions, calm or turbulent improvisations, open-ended questions and sly bits of advice, the work of a graceful, perpetually questing mind. (Read our interview with Esperanza Spalding.)10. Tyler, the Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’A life of luxury can’t mollify Tyler, the Creator. He’s no longer the trolling provocateur he was a decade ago when he emerged with Odd Future, but he’s still intransigent and high-concept. After singing through most of his 2019 album, “Igor,” he’s back to rapping, now simulating a mixtape with DJ Drama as hypeman. In his deep voice, he raps about all he owns and all he can’t control — mostly romance — over his own dense, detailed productions, at once lush and abrasive. The album peaks with an eight-minute love-triangle saga, “Wichita”: a raw confession, cannily orchestrated. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)Tyler, the Creator swings back to mostly rapping on his 2021 album.Luis “Panch” PerezAnd here are another 15 deserving albums, alphabetically:Adele, “30”Arooj Aftab, “Vulture Prince”Khaira Arby, “New York Live”Billie Eilish, “Happier Than Ever”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, “Promises”Flock of Dimes, “Head of Roses”Rhiannon Giddens with Franceso Turrisi, “They’re Calling Me Home”Idles, “Crawler”Ka, “A Martyr’s Reward”Valerie June, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers”L’Rain, “Fatigue”Arlo Parks, “Collapsed in Sunbeams”Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, “Raise the Roof”Omar Sosa, “An East African Journey”Jazmine Sullivan, “Heaux Tales”Jon CaramanicaProcessing Pain, Blurring BoundariesIn the second year of global quasi-paralysis, what made the most sense were, once again, albums that felt like wombs and albums that felt like eruptions. When there was nowhere to go, literally or metaphorically, there were still places to retreat — to the gut, to history, to memory, to forgetting.1. Mustafa, ‘When Smoke Rises’Did you mourn this year? Were you broken in some way that was beyond words? Mustafa’s debut album was there with you, a startling, primal chronicle of relentless loss and the relentless grace required to navigate it. In moments when the ground buckled, this album was a cradle. (Read our interview with Mustafa.)Mustafa’s debut album is a profound meditation on loss.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times2. EST Gee, ‘Bigger Than Life or Death’The latest in a string of excellent releases from the Louisville, Ky., rapper EST Gee, whose verses are refreshingly burly and brusque, and who tells stories sprinkled with surprisingly vivid left-field details. A bold back-to-basics statement, utterly free of filigree.3. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’The most important new pop star of the year delivered a debut album of poppy punk and punky pop that’s sometimes musically blistering and always emotionally blistered. A reminder that a failed relationship might leave you icy or bruised or drained, but in truth, it frees you to be emboldened. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)4. Moneybagg Yo, ‘A Gangsta’s Pain’Moneybagg Yo is a casually sassy rapper — a don of tsk-tsking, fluent in arched eyebrows, dispositionally blunt. This is his fourth major-label album, and it’s punchy and robustly musical. À la peak 2 Chainz, Moneybagg Yo boasts so long and so intently that he sounds fatigued, and in turn, uproarious.5. PinkPantheress, ‘To Hell With It’This is music about listening to music, about the secret places we burrow into in order to make sure our favorite songs can wash over us unimpeded. The singing is sweet and melancholic, and the production flirts with memory and time — stories of right now and back then, all told as one. (Read our review of “To Hell With It.”)6. Summer Walker, ‘Still Over It’The most emotionally direct vocalist working in R&B today, Summer Walker is a bracing listen. And this album, her third full-length release, is rawly vindictive and unconcerned with polish, the equivalent of a public-facing Instagram account that feels like a finsta. (Read our notebook on Summer Walker.)Summer Walker’s third album is appealingly unpolished and intimate.Theo Wargo/Getty Images7. Lana Del Rey, ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’Lana Del Rey albums have become pop music’s most compelling ongoing saga about American loneliness and sadness. This, the better of her two albums this year, is alluringly arid and dreamlike. (Read our review of “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.”)8. Tyler, the Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’In which the rapper who introduced himself a decade ago as the genre’s great anarchist reveals something that was long clear to close observers: He reveres tradition. Brick-hard rhyme structures. Ostentatious taunts. Mixtape grit. All of it. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)9. Playboi Carti, ‘Whole Lotta Red’Just an unyieldingly odd record. Notionally a cousin of mid-2010s SoundCloud rap, it also has echoes of 1980s industrial rock and also the glitchcore of the 2000s. It’s buoyant and psychedelic and totally destabilizing.10. Kanye West, ‘Donda (Deluxe)’“Donda” lives at the intersection of Kanye’s “Yeezus” era and his Jesus era. On the one hand, there’s scabrous, churning production that sets a chaotic mood. On the other, there are moments of intense searching, gasps for air amid the unrest. (Read our notebook on “Donda.”)11. Rauw Alejandro, ‘Vice Versa’Rauw Alejandro, the most imaginative meta-reggaeton Latin pop star, dabbles in drum ’n’ bass and baile funk on his second major-label album. But the star is his hypertreated voice, which is synthetically sweet and appealingly lush, almost to the point of delightful suffocation. (Read our review of “Vice Versa.”)Rauw Alejandro’s latest album puts a spotlight on his vocals.Thais Llorca/EPA, via Shutterstock12. Doja Cat, ‘Planet Her’Outlandish, eccentric, lustrous, mercenarily maximalist pop from the sing-rapper with the richest and keenest pop ear not named Drake.13. Chloe Moriondo, ‘Blood Bunny’Openhearted and effortlessly catchy indie punk-pop about lovelorn confusion and beginning to figure out you’re too cool for that. (Read our notebook on Chloe Moriondo.)14. Kidd G, ‘Down Home Boy’Why yes, those are Juice WRLD cadences in the singing on the year’s best country debut album. (Read our interview with Kidd G.)15. The Armed, ‘Ultrapop’Shrieking sheets of nervy noise — a battering ram.16. Carly Pearce, ’29: Written in Stone’A brief marriage, a messy divorce, a helluva album.17. Yeat, ‘4L’If “Whole Lotta Red” is too coherent for you, try Yeat.18. Conway the Machine, ‘La Maquina’A cold, cold, cold growl of a classic-minded hip-hop album.19. Farruko, ‘La 167’“Pepas” is here, along with a confidently expansive range of reggaeton styles.Farruko’s “La 167” is a showcase for reggaeton styles.Rich Polk/Getty Images20. Mickey Guyton, ‘Remember Her Name’A pop-country winner that feels both universal and singular. (Read our interview with Mickey Guyton.)… and 20 more albums for a more well-rounded year.42 Dugg, “Free Dem Boyz”Gracie Abrams, “This Is What It Feels Like”Aespa, “Savage”Jay Bahd, “Return of Okomfo Anokye”Benny the Butcher and Harry Fraud, “The Plugs I Met 2”Ivan Cornejo, “Alma Vacía”Jhay Cortez, “Timelezz”Dave, “We’re All Alone in This Together”Drake, “Certified Lover Boy”Halsey, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”Cody Johnson, “Human the Double Album”NCT 127, “Sticker”RXK Nephew, “Crack Dreams”serpentwithfeet, “Deacon”Spirit of the Beehive, “Entertainment, Death”Don Toliver, “Life of a Don”Rod Wave, “SoulFly”Tion Wayne, “Green With Envy”Wiki, “Half God”Young Thug, “Punk”Lindsay ZoladzOpening Up Hearts and MindsIn an emotionally hung over year when so many people were trying to process loss — of loved ones, of charred or flooded homes, of the world as we once knew it — some of the best music offered an opportunity to slow down and reconnect with feelings we may have rushed right by before truly acknowledging. Sometimes we just needed a voice to capture and echo the absurdity all around us, but other times records gave us a way of experiencing nothing less than mass catharsis.1. Adele, ‘30’It takes a certain kind of record to make me want to quote Rumi, but Adele really killed this, so let me say: “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”Adele has been our mass-cultural bard of heartbreak for the past decade, but in her music — save for the handful of instant-classic ballads scattered across her discography — I did not really get the sense that she was truly open in all the terror and glory that implies. Then she turned 30. “I’m so afraid but I’m open wide,” she sings on the divine “To Be Loved,” her imperial voice trembling but assured. Most breakup albums are full of anger, scorn, and blame, but this one is remarkably self-directed, a grown woman making a deeply considered choice to leap into the void and break her own heart wide apart. “I took some bad turns that I am owning,” she sings, audibly italicizing that last phrase, as if the preceding 10 tracks in all their startling honesty hadn’t already made that clear.On “19,” “21,” and “25,” Adele acted wise beyond her years: “We both know we ain’t kids no more,” she chided an ex on an album about being in her mid-20s, which also included a world-wearied number called “When We Were Young.” “30” refreshingly winds back the clock and finds her admitting that all along she was “just a child, didn’t get the chance to feel the world around” her. But now she sings like a mature woman who knows there’s still plenty of time to get wine-drunk on the everyday wonders of her own freedom, to break her heart open again and again in her newly omnivorous and sonically eclectic songs. This, at last, is Adele living up to her promise, pop majesty at the highest count. (Read our review of “30.”)Adele breaks her own heart open on “30.”Cliff Lipson/CBS2. Tyler, The Creator, ‘Call Me if You Get Lost’He’s still on the boat! Tyler has never sounded this breezy yet in control, but for all the luxurious braggadocio, there’s a darker undercurrent at work, too. “I remembered I was rich so I bought me some new emotions,” he raps at the beginning of the album; by the stunning penultimate track, the heart-tugging epic “Wilshire,” he’ll have to admit that’s impossible. Full of playful reflections on his past (“I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers”) and auspicious blessings for his future, “Call Me” finds Tyler dropping a stone into that murky blue and discovering unexplored new depths. (Read our review of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”)3. Snail Mail, ‘Valentine’Lindsey Jordan begs, bargains and finally accepts the pain of heartache in this searing song cycle that further establishes her as one of indie rock’s brightest young stars. There’s a raw immediacy to these 10 songs that make them almost feel hot to the touch — the thrashing title track, the keening acoustic ballad “Light Blue,” even the slinky, synth-driven vamp “Ben Franklin.” Her nimble guitar work highlights a sharp ear for off-kilter melody, but at the core of “Valentine” is Jordan’s passionately hoarse voice, lungs filled to the brim with sound and fury. (Read our review of “Valentine.”)4. Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Heaux Tales’The chatty, candid interstitials woven through this wonderful album play out like an adult reunion of those young girls in the classroom from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” — now grown women swapping secrets, recollections and hard-earned wisdom. “Heaux Tales” is a prismatic, multiperspective snapshot of female desire in the 21st century, enlivened by the testimonies of friends like Ari Lennox and H.E.R. but made cohesive by the soulfully versatile voice of Jazmine Sullivan. She breathes life into a spectrum of emotions, from the sassy assertion of “Pick Up Your Feelings” to the naked yearning of “The Other Side,” proving that it would be too limiting to choose between being a hard rock or a gem. Aren’t we all a little bit of both? (Read our review of “Heaux Tales.”)Jazmine Sullivan explores the multiple dimensions of female desire in the 21st century on “Heaux Tales.”NAACP, via Reuters5. Illuminati Hotties, ‘Let Me Do One More’The indie producer turned surprisingly ebullient frontperson Sarah Tudzin is a personable and occasionally hilarious guide through the surreal ruins of late capitalism. “You think I wanna be a part of every self-appointed start-up?” she seethes in a punky, cartoonish voice, but a few songs later she’s exhausted enough to sound resigned to inevitable compromise: “The corner store is selling spit, bottled up for profit,” she sighs, “can’t believe I’m buying it.” Still, Tudzin’s songs glow with the possibility of human intimacy amid all the rubble, and they show off her mastery of so many different genres that by the end of the record, it seems like there’s no ceiling to her talent as both a producer and a finger-on-the-pulse songwriter. (Read our interview with Illuminati Hotties.)6. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Sour’Hell hath no fury like a young woman out to prove she’s no one-hit wonder. From the opening guitar-crunch of the Zoomer primal scream that is “Brutal,” Olivia Rodrigo proves there’s so much more to her than could be expressed even in a song as exquisitely expressive as her seismic smash “Drivers License.” Rodrigo fashions teen-girl sarcasm into a lethal weapon on the dream-pop “Deja Vu,” rails against the Instagram industrial complex on the barbed social critique “Jealousy, Jealousy” and transforms a sample of one of her idol Taylor Swift’s sweetest love songs into a tear-streaked heartbreaker on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back.” If it feels comparatively weak on the back end, that’s only because the first half of this album is probably the most impressive six-song run anybody put together this year. (Read our review of “Sour” and watch her “Diary of a Song.”)7. The Weather Station, ‘Ignorance’How do you make music about climate change without it sounding too didactic and abstract? Tamara Lindeman, the Canadian musician who records as the Weather Station, came up with a winning solution on her stirring album “Ignorance,” which finds her singing elegiac love songs to a dying planet. The graceful melancholy of “Tried to Tell You” surveys the natural beauty we’ve been too numb to mourn, while the sparse, jazzy “Robber” is a kind of musical tone-poem about large-scale corporate destruction. With her nimble voice — sometimes high and fluttery, other times earthy and low — and evocative lyricism, the songs of “Ignorance” animate, as one of her bandmates puts it, “the emotional side of climate change,” employing music’s depth of feeling to ignite political consciousness. (Read our interview with the Weather Station.)Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station finds artful ways to sing about the climate crisis.Angela Lewis for The New York Times8. Low, ‘Hey What’If only every band could sound this adventurous 30 years into existence. As their eerily heartfelt harmonies cut through with rhythmic blurts of electronic noise, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk sound, quite literally, like ghosts in the machine, imbuing vast, steely soundscapes with a disarming beauty. Following the sonic reinvention of the stunning 2018 album “Double Negative,” the Duluth band have continued to frame human yearning amid a churning and apocalyptic backdrop, with career-best songs like “Disappearing” and “Days Like These” capturing both the difficulty and the necessity of finding light in a dark age.9. Lucy Dacus, ‘Home Video’Lucy Dacus’s wrenching third studio album is as much an achievement of memoir as it is of songwriting, a vividly conjured coming-of-age story so personal that she used her own teenage diaries for research. “In the summer of ’07, I was sure I’d go to heaven,” she sings on “VBS” (as in, Vacation Bible School), before a gradual and all-consuming doubt begins to creep in. By the final song, when a friend tells her she’s afraid that their desires have rendered them “cursed,” Dacus responds, “So what?” As thoughtfully crafted as a collection of short stories, “Home Video” achingly chronicles the tale of a young person who loses her religion but in the process gains autonomy, a sense of identity and the glorious strength to tell her own truths in song. (Read T magazine’s interview with Lucy Dacus.)10. Dry Cleaning, ‘New Long Leg’“Are there some kind of reverse platform shoes that make you go into the ground more?” the ever-droll Florence Shaw asks, one of many absurdist yet somehow relatable philosophical questions she poses on the English post-punk band Dry Cleaning’s singular debut album. The instrumentation around Shaw swells like a sudden squall, but her deadpan, spoken-word musings — a mixture of found text, overheard chitchat and offbeat poetry — are the eye of the storm, remaining steady and strangely unperturbed in all kinds of weather.11. Billie Eilish, ‘Happier Than Ever’No record grew on me more this year than Billie Eilish’s patient and personal sophomore effort, which shuns repeat-the-formula predictability and unfolds at its own unhurried pace. It’s somehow even quieter than her sumptuously ASMR-triggering debut, until those sudden moments when it isn’t — as on the corrosive conclusion to the Nine-Inch-Nails-like “NDA,” or the fireworks display of pent-up frustration that rips open the title track. Exquisitely sequenced, this is a rare pop album that doesn’t show all its cards right away, but instead saves its strongest material for the end, building toward a satisfying finale and a hint at the potential versatility of her future. (Read our review of “Happier Than Ever.”)Billie Eilish’s second album, “Happier Than Ever,” reveals itself at its own pace.Rich Fury/Getty Images12. Mdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’The fluid and incandescent playing of the Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar transcends borders, seamlessly fusing Western psychedelia with North African desert blues. “Afrique Victime,” his strongest and most focused record to date, showcases not only his quicksilver fingerwork but his innate gift for melody and songcraft, proving in every one of these nine blazing tracks that shredding is a universal language.13. Bitchin Bajas, ‘Switched on Ra’This shouldn’t work, or at least not nearly as well as it does: A drone synth outfit tackling the otherworldly compositions and complex harmonies of cosmic jazz pioneer Sun Ra? But Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas approach the task with equal parts reverence and playfulness, assembling an Arkestra of 19 different analog synths and in the process creating a prolonged musical meditation on time, space and the meaning of retrofuturism. The vibes are exquisite, and the whole thing sounds like the Muzak that would play in an intergalactic portal’s waiting room.14. Remi Wolf, ‘Juno’Here’s to anyone who takes a technically skilled voice and chooses to do something delectably weird with it. The Palo Alto native Remi Wolf’s pipes are strong enough to have propelled her to Hollywood on the 2014 season of “American Idol,” but she’s since carved out a much less conventional path, making bold, psychedelic pop that bursts at the seams with ideas, melodies and truly wild wordplay (“I love my family intrinsically, like Anthony Kiedis,” she sings, which — sure!). On “Juno,” one of the most promising debut albums of the year, Wolf throws everything she’s got at the wall — and a surprisingly high percentage of it actually sticks. (Read our interview with Remi Wolf.)Remi Wolf makes bold, psychedelic pop that bursts at the seams with ideas.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesSome runners-up worth mentioning:L’Rain, “Fatigue”Rostam, “Changephobia”Flock of Dimes, “Head of Roses”Lana Del Rey, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”/“Blue Banisters”Halsey, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power”Palberta, “Palberta 5000”/Lily Konigsberg, “Lily We Need to Talk Now” More

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      Sonny Osborne, Bluegrass Innovator, Is Dead at 83

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      He and his brother, Bobby, pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing that broke with bluegrass tradition. He was also an influential banjo player.NASHVILLE — Sonny Osborne, the banjo player and singer who, with his older brother, Bobby, led one of the most innovative and beloved bands in bluegrass music, died on Sunday at his home in nearby Hendersonville, Tenn. He was 83.His death, after a series of strokes, was confirmed by his friend and protégé Lincoln Hensley.Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.Addressing the group’s critics in a 2000 interview with the music magazine No Depression, Mr. Osborne recalled the allegations of betrayal that were leveled against the band for “going electric” — censure redolent of that heaped on Bob Dylan for appearing with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.“They thought, ‘Oh, they’ve changed, they did this, they did that, they’ve changed’ — well, we didn’t,” Mr. Osborne insisted. “We played the same things we normally played. We just added this stuff all around us.”Despite — or perhaps because of — their unorthodox approach, the Osbornes emerged as one of the few bluegrass bands of the 1950s and ’60s to consistently place recordings on the country charts. In 1971 they were named vocal group of the year by the Country Music Association, a rare distinction for a bluegrass ensemble.The Osbornes’ repertoire was as expansive as their sonic palette, encompassing “Old Kentucky Home,” by Randy Newman, and “Midnight Flyer,” a song written by Paul Craft (who also wrote the 1976 Bobby Bare hit, “Dropkick Me, Jesus”) and popularized by the Eagles shortly after the Osbornes recorded it in the early ’70s.The album “Yesterday, Today & the Osborne Brothers,” released in 1968, connected bluegrass’s past with its future.In 1968 they released “Yesterday, Today & the Osborne Brothers,” an album that connected bluegrass’s past with its future, broadening the idiom’s vocabulary while serving as a harbinger of intrepid inheritors like Newgrass Revival and Alison Krauss & Union Station.The first side of the original LP consisted of traditional fare associated with the bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe. The second side was steeped in material arranged in a more contemporary vein, including “Rocky Top,” a song written by the husband-and-wife team of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant (best known for their Everly Brothers hits).A Top 40 country hit spurred by hurtling instrumental solos by both Osborne brothers, “Rocky Top” was later adopted as an official song by the state of Tennessee. Like “Tennessee Hound Dog,” another Top 40 country hit written for the Osbornes by the Bryants, “Rocky Top” was an unabashed paean to the mountain culture of the brothers’ childhood:Rocky Top, you’ll always beHome sweet home to me.Good ol’ Rocky TopRocky Top, TennesseeRocky Top, Tennessee.Sonny Osborne was born on Oct. 29, 1937, in Thousandsticks, an Appalachian enclave near Hyden, Ky., where he and his brother grew up. Their parents, Robert and Daisy (Dixon) Osborne, were schoolteachers; their father supplemented the family income by working in his parents’ general store.Mr. Osborne took up the banjo at 11, after the family had moved to Dayton, Ohio. He and his brother started their own band in 1953, while Sonny, still in high school, also played briefly with Bill Monroe. In 1954 the brothers made a half-dozen recordings with the flamboyant bluegrass bandleader Jimmy Martin.“We didn’t want to be farmers,” Mr. Osborne said in his No Depression interview. “Music was the only thing we wanted to do, that’s it.”The Osbornes joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va., in 1956 and remained there for the rest of the decade. Among their most acclaimed recordings from this period were “Ruby, Are You Mad?,” a barnburner, featuring both Osborne brothers on banjo, written by the old-timey singer Cousin Emmy (a.k.a. Cynthia May Carver), and “Once More,” an old-fashioned love song. Both were released by MGM Records in the late 1950s and credited to the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen, who was featured on tenor vocals and acoustic guitar in early incarnations of the group.The Osbornes became the first bluegrass band to perform on a college campus, appearing in 1960 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio before taking their Appalachian “folk” music to places in the northeast like New York University and Club 47 in Boston.The Osbornes signed with the Nashville division of Decca Records, then headed by the celebrated producer Owen Bradley, in 1963. A year later they joined the Grand Ole Opry. They also began bucking bluegrass tradition in earnest by, among other things, supplementing their performances with drums and dobro.The Osbornes recorded extensively for Decca (which later became MCA) before they left the label in 1974, disappointed over not having had more than middling success on country radio. A return to a more traditional approach rejuvenated their career, securing their reputation over the next three decades as bluegrass elders alongside giants like Flatt & Scruggs, Mr. Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. They were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1994.From left, Bobby Osborne, Sonny Osborne and Daryl Mosley in concert in 2002.John Dunham/The Messenger-Inquirer, via Associated PressMr. Osborne retired from performing in 2005 after suffering a shoulder injury. He nevertheless remained active in bluegrass circles by promoting his own line of banjos and writing “Ask Sonny Anything,” a weekly column for Bluegrass Today that brimmed with the same energy and wit he had once flashed onstage.Besides his brother, Mr. Osborne is survived by his wife of 63 years, Judy Wachter Osborne; his sister, Louise Williams; a son, Steven; a daughter, Karen Davenport; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.In 1965 Mr. Osborne began experimenting with a special tuning that gave his banjo a timbre redolent of that of an electric instrument, or even at times of horns or a steel guitar. What he discovered, fed by his omnivorous taste in music, did more than shape his approach to banjo-playing, which became more wide-ranging; it also shaped the sonic directions the Osbornes would take for the remainder of the decade — and beyond.“The notes themselves came from constant listening to every other kind of music that you can imagine,” Mr. Osborne explained in 2000. “Steel guitars and electric guitars, horns, saxophone, trumpet, piano — if you listened to all that stuff, if you were to be a huge fan of the kind of music that I listened to, you’d hear a little bit of everything in there.“There’s some of everybody in the notes that I played, but when you put them on the banjo, then it’s a whole different ballgame.” More

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      Paddy Moloney, Irish Piper Who Led the Chieftains, Dies at 83

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      The band he fronted for nearly 60 years toured the world, collaborated with rock stars and helped spark a renaissance for traditional Irish music.Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.Mr. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger.Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Long Black Veil” (with Mr. Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Mr. Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.Mr. Moloney had an affinity for country music.“I always considered Nashville like another part of Ireland, down to the south or something,” he said on the website of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2020. “When I’ve come over there and played with musical geniuses like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas or Earl Scruggs, they pick everything up so easily. You don’t have to duck and dash.”The last track on “Another Country” — “Finale: Did You Ever Go A-Courtin’, Uncle Joe/Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — features Ms. Harris, Ricky Skaggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, described it as “the closest you will come to an Irish hooley on record,” a reference to an Irish party with music. The track, the magazine said, sounded like “a few pints were quaffed and the boxty bread was passed around before the assembled greats of music decided to have a musical free-for-all.”Mr. Moloney in 2012. That year, the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains embarked on a tour that ended on St. Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesPatrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Company. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker.Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of man known as the “King of the Pipers.”He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Company, a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by the Irish author John Montague.In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Mr. Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.On his own, Mr. Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains teamed up with 12 folk, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and indie rock artists — including Bon Iver, the Decembrists, the Low Anthem and Imelda May — to record the album “Voice of Ages.” They also embarked on a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day.“What’s happening here with these young groups,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times at the time, explaining the album’s concept, “is they’re coming back to the melody, back to the real stuff, the roots and the folk feeling of them all. I can hear any of them singing folk songs.” More

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      Brandi Carlile, Larger Than Life and Achingly Human

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      The singer and songwriter’s seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” realizes and polishes her ambitions.The quarantine and isolation of 2020 didn’t subdue Brandi Carlile. Just the opposite. Her seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” braves the extremes of Carlile’s songwriting. She empathizes, apologizes and lays out accusations. She’s righteous and she’s self-doubting. She proffers fond lullabies and she unleashes full-throated screams. The album reaffirms her ambitions and polishes them, too. The music Carlile makes with her songwriting partners and bandmates, Tim and Phil Hanseroth (on bass and guitar), harks back to the handmade sounds of 1970s rock. Songs on “In These Silent Days” pay clear tribute to Joni Mitchell (“You and Me on the Rock”) and the Who (“Broken Horses”). Yet Carlile is unmistakably a 21st-century figure: a gay married mother of two daughters who bypassed the country-music establishment to reach her own fervent audience.From the beginning — Carlile released her debut album, “Brandi Carlile,” in 2005 — her gifts have been obvious. She writes melodies that gather drama as they unfold, carrying lyrics filled with compassion, close observation and sometimes heroic metaphors. Her voice can be limpid and confiding or fiercely torn as she strategically reveals its startling range. As early as 2007, with the title song of her second album, “The Story,” Carlile proved she could sound confessional while belting to the rafters. There was no denying her emotional power, even though at times, on her early albums, it shaded into melodrama.“In These Silent Days” follows through on the long-deserved recognition that Carlile found with her 2018 album, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” and its flagship single, “The Joke,” a grandly crescendoing ballad that tells sensitive misfits that their time will come. It was nominated for the Grammy for song of the year in 2019, and Carlile’s showstopping prime-time performance introduced her to a new swath of fans.Carlile chose to share the added attention. She collaborated on writing and producing a Grammy-winning comeback album, “While I’m Livin’,” for the country singer Tanya Tucker, and she formed an Americana alliance, the Highwomen, with Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires. She also performed the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” in Los Angeles, a concert she’ll bring to Carnegie Hall on Nov. 6.When the pandemic curtailed her years of touring in 2020, Carlile completed her memoir, “Broken Horses,” and wrote songs with her band members in the compound they share in Washington state. They recorded the new album in Nashville with Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, who had also produced “By the Way, I Forgive You.”“In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political. It opens with her latest ballad showpiece, “Right on Time,” which pleads for a reunion and a second chance: “You might be angry now — of course you are,” Carlile admits with breathy hesitation at the beginning, before the song starts its big climb in the chorus. “It wasn’t right, but it was right on time,” Carlile declares, rising to an operatic peak and, in the final iteration, leaping up from there, perfectly poised between personal heartache and stagy flamboyance. In a few seconds of sound, she makes herself both larger than life and achingly human.“Broken Horses” doesn’t wait for its buildup. It’s an imagistic, nonlinear song full of defiance — “I’m a tried and weathered woman but I won’t be tried again,” Carlile vows — and from the start, Carlile’s voice is on the verge of breaking into a shriek, riding hard-strummed guitars and rumbling drums directly out of “Who’s Next.” There are moments of respite in paused, sustained harmonies, but Carlile is all scars and fury, as elemental as she has ever been.She makes a more measured ascent in “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” with electric guitars and orchestral strings mustering behind her for a final surge. The song is a parable about legalism, fundamentalism and immigration; a “God-fearing man” declares “You can’t break the law” and turns away “desperate souls who washed up on the sand” undocumented, only to find himself turned away from heaven.Carlile is equally telling in quieter songs. She sings to her children in “Stay Gentle,” a lilting compendium of advice — “To find joy in the darkness is wise/Although they will think you are naïve” — and, more moodily, in “Mama Werewolf,” which calls on them to hold her to account if she turns destructive: “Be the one, my silver bullet in the gun.”She neatly twists a knife in “Throwing Good After Bad,” a stately, pensive but resentful piano ballad about being left behind by someone who would always be “Addicted to the rush, the chase, the new.” And in “When You’re Wrong,” she sings to an aging friend — “The creases on your forehead run like treads on a tire” — who’s trapped in a relationship that “pulls you down while you slowly waste your days.” In Carlile’s songs, she sees human flaws clearly and unsparingly, including her own. More often than not, her music finds ways to forgive.Brandi Carlile“In These Silent Days”(Low Country Sound/Elektra) More

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      Karen Dalton, a Musical Mystery That Doesn’t Need to Be Solved

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      A new documentary about the blues-folk singer, who died in 1993, works to make her known without unraveling all of her riddles.The hauntingly soulful blues-folk singer Karen Dalton once described her dream concert: “She’d be in her living room with friends and playing music,” her friend and fellow musician Peter Stampfel recalls in the new documentary “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time.” “And then somehow the living room would be put on a huge stage, which would be surrounded by a massive audience who would be watching in rapt attention while she ignored them totally and just did whatever she wanted to do.”Born into postwar poverty and raised in Oklahoma, Dalton had a warm voice that was as creaky and lived-in as a beloved rocking chair. She sang “like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed,” as Bob Dylan put it in 2004 in the first volume of his autobiography, “Chronicles” — easily the most-quoted thing anyone’s ever said about Dalton. (Dylan accompanied her on harmonica for a handful of gigs on the early ’60s Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit; he has also called her his “favorite singer” of that whole scene.)But as that living-room-as-live-stage suggests, Dalton was not nearly as comfortable in the spotlight as many of her better-remembered peers. She was indifferent to fame, and her career sputtered because of a combination of hard luck and self-sabotage. She recorded just two albums in her lifetime, suffered prolonged drug and alcohol addictions and succumbed to an AIDS-related illness in 1993, at age 55.That name-drop in Dylan’s memoir and the rise of the so-called “freak folk” movement of the early aughts brought revival interest in Dalton’s oeuvre; both of her studio albums — the aching “It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best” (1969) and the cult classic “In My Own Time” (1971) — were then reissued, and several compilations of her home recordings were released. Dalton was at last applauded as one of ’60s and ’70s folk music’s most skilled and idiosyncratic interpreters. The unique, unhurried phrasing heard in her renditions of “Reason to Believe” and “When a Man Loves a Woman,” for example, make these familiar songs seem as though they’re being sung for the very first time.Plenty of posthumous appreciations of Dalton have been written in the past 15 years, and thanks to her untimely death and the crackling pain palpable in her voice, their headlines all seem to describe her with the same word: “tragic.”A first-time directorial effort by the filmmakers Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete, “In My Own Time,” refreshingly, adds a few more adjectives to Dalton’s story and personality.“She was charismatic, and the center of attention when she was in the room,” Yapkowitz said in a phone interview. (Neither of the filmmakers met Dalton, but they conducted enough interviews and research to speak about her with an easy familiarity.) He insisted that her drug use shouldn’t overshadow the other aspects of her life: “She just seemed fun, like a person that I would want to hang out with.”Peete and Yapkowitz became friends while working together in the art department of several independent films. Their mutual love of Dalton’s music first came up more than a decade ago on the Branson, Mo., set of Debra Granik’s brooding, woodsy drama “Winter’s Bone”: “It was the perfect movie to rekindle our interest in Karen,” Peete said with a laugh.Moving restlessly from Oklahoma to New York City to Colorado, Dalton lived a nomadic life, which presented a challenge for the filmmakers. “Archival materials, and the folks we interviewed — everything’s sort of scattered across the United States,” Yapkowitz said. “Some people didn’t even know they had them in their closets until we asked them to look,” he said of the many new photographs featured in the film.When they first had the idea to make a movie about Dalton — while hanging out at a bar one night and noticing that, in Peete’s words, “all of her peers were on the jukebox except for Karen” — they thought they could do it in less than a year. “That was almost seven years ago,” he said.From left: Bob Dylan, Dalton and Fred Neil. Dylan called Dalton his favorite singer of the early ’60s Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene.Greenwich EntertainmentBut making a film about the retiring Dalton posed a larger predicament, too: Mystery and a sense of elusiveness are inherent parts of her music’s appeal. Dalton resisted the industry’s star-making machinery at nearly every turn, so in some sense the incomplete nature of her body of work represents a conscious act of defiance against the music industry’s commercial imperatives. To romanticize her slippery nature would be a mistake, but to fill in the blanks too completely would be to dishonor her unruly spirit. Peete and Yapkowitz knew they had to strike a balance between presenting the facts of Dalton’s life and allowing for parts of her to remain unknowable.The author and Dalton fan Rick Moody articulates this tension at the beginning of the documentary, and Peete said they took his words as a kind of mantra: “Some of the incompleteness and the gaps in Karen’s output may have been decisive and part of who she was and how she expressed herself. The thing I don’t want to do is excessively imagine that you can interpret the fragments. I want to be with the songs that are actually there and to try and delight in the legacy of what’s actually there.”Still, their documentation of Dalton’s fragments became more meaningful than they even realized. Shortly after digitizing a collection of Dalton’s journals, doodles and poetry that she had left in the care of her friend Peter Walker, these papers were all destroyed in a fire. (In the film, the musician Angel Olsen reads from these journals and beautifully conjures the combination of playfulness and emotional intensity that characterized Dalton’s voice.)Though Dalton has audibly influenced artists like Joanna Newsom, Jessica Pratt and Nick Cave, “In My Own Time” is not the sort of music documentary overstuffed with critics and celebrities expounding on the canonical importance of her work. Most of the time, watching it feels like hanging on a porch with some of Dalton’s closest confidants and surviving family members, trading stories about her favorite horses, her humorously botched recording sessions or her homey hospitality. (“Karen made the best beans in the whole world,” we learn from one of her Colorado friends.) As a result, if only in fleeting glimpses, this long-lost musician comes vividly to life.In some sense, Dalton seemed to exist in the wrong time period for her talents to be fully appreciated, and this is part of her continued mystique. Dalton was something of a proto-indie artist, seeking out a more modest alternative to the mainstream before such well-trod pathways existed. When I heard Stampfel describe Dalton’s ideal performing space as a kind of amplified living room, I realized that last year I’d seen the film’s narrator, Olsen, do something quite similar, broadcasting an intimate solo livestream from the comfort of her own home.Maybe that is the tragedy of Karen Dalton: the fact that she was making music in the wrong era. “We’re definitely in a time now when artists can have more control over their own careers and public image,” Yapkowitz said. “If we could say ‘would have, should have, could have,’ the industry has changed and Karen would have been more comfortable in it, to say the least.” More

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      ‘Karen Dalton: In My Own Time’ Review: An Elemental Musical Force

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      A documentary chronicles the turbulent life of a singer whose music made a substantial impression on New York’s 1960s folk scene and still resonates today.Musicians working in pop modes often navigate their careers using a combination of talent and calculation. Karen Dalton, a singer and instrumentalist who made a substantial impression on New York’s 1960s folk scene, and whose small body of recorded work moves and inspires listeners to this day, was someone for whom calculation was inconceivable.That’s one impression left by “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time,” an excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz. Dalton, who died of AIDS in 1993 at age 55, was of Irish and Cherokee extraction, born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma. As her friend and colleague Peter Stampfel observes, she was one of the few musicians in Greenwich Village’s earnest Americana scene who was authentically “folk.” (He tells some truly hair-raising stories of Dalton here.)As a player and singer, she was an elemental force. While her voice resembles that of Billie Holiday, there’s no sense of imitation or affectation to it, as Dalton’s unique reading of Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” demonstrates.Archival footage provides a disquieting window into Dalton’s bearing. Early in the picture there’s a home movie of Dalton singing, accompanying herself on guitar. Her mastery seems effortless; she’s framed by a seemingly unshakable confidence. Once she puts the guitar down, that confidence falls away, and she becomes awkward, almost uncomfortable in her own skin.A visibly missing tooth in some performance footage testifies to a life of privation and of abuse. Some abuse was self-generated. Like her friend Tim Hardin, another artist for whom compromise was inimical, Dalton was a hard-living addict. And alas, this cinematic tribute ends with an account of Dalton’s bad breaks continuing even after her death.Karen Dalton: In My Own TimeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More