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      in Music

      Rock Around the Clock: 8 Songs About Very Specific Times of Day

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      Hear tracks by the Strokes, beabadoobee, Normani and more.The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas onstage in 2011. (Sadly, we don’t have the specific time.)Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,On Friday, the R&B artist and former Fifth Harmony member Normani will finally release her debut album, “Dopamine” — a long (long) awaited, endlessly delayed release she has been teasing for nearly six years. Not that I’ve been watching the clock. Or at least I wasn’t until last month, when Normani dropped the album’s sultry lead single, “1:59.” That ode to not-quite-2-in-the-morning got me dreaming up a playlist of songs about incredibly specific times of day. Now that Normani is ready to share her opus with the world, so am I.Plenty of songs celebrate the hour on the hour; Drake has an entire playlist’s worth of songs with titles like “6PM in New York” or “8AM in Charlotte.” But that’s not what I’m interested in here. With all due respect to Ariana Grande, I’m not even talking 6:30. I’m talking absurdly precise, random time stamps glimpsed on a digital clock or a lock screen and forever burned into one’s memory: “12:51,” “10:35,” “11:59.”Luckily, there is no shortage of such songs, from artists as varied as Moby Grape, Tiësto and Elliott Smith. And weirdly enough, there exists a trio of unrelated songs that are named after three subsequent minutes in the middle of the 10 o’clock hour. Go figure! Naturally, I sequenced the track list in chronological order — like an incredibly abbreviated playlist version of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock.” It certainly won’t last you 24 hours, but it’ll take you on a temporal journey just the same.All right, you know what time it is: Press play.It’s 11:59 and I want to stay alive,LindsayListen along while you read.1. The Strokes: “12:51”We begin exactly 51 minutes after midnight, “the time my voice/Found the words I sought,” as Julian Casablancas specifies on this catchy leadoff single from the Strokes’ 2003 album “Room on Fire.” “12:51” is a mumbled tale of rekindled romance, the acquisition of malt liquor and other sordid things that happen after the clock strikes 12.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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

    • 100 Shares169 Views

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      My Starting Five Songs From Boston and Dallas

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      Catch the N.B.A. Finals spirit with Erykah Badu, Pixies, Kelly Clarkson and more.Erykah Badu, repping for DallasErik Carter for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last night marked the start of the 2023-2024 N.B.A. Finals, a best-of-seven matchup between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks. As a long-suffering and perpetually annoying fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, I do not really have a horse in this race*, but I also have an excess of energy I would normally reserve for rooting for one of these two teams. I have decided to put that energy to productive use by making a playlist of music by artists from both Boston and Dallas.Consider these musicians my starting five from each city. Both Boston and Dallas have rich and varied musical histories, as you’ll hear in this playlist’s blend of rock, pop, country, R&B, blues and hip-hop. It features bona fide superstars (the Texan Kelly Clarkson; the Dorchesterite Donna Summer) and influential legends (Dallas’s own Stevie Ray Vaughan; the Beantown art-rockers the Pixies). Sure, there are some omissions, but these are just my personal starting fives — and given how many times the ABC broadcast played “Sweet Emotion” when throwing to commercial last night, you’ve probably already hit your Aerosmith quota for the week.Game 1 was quite anticlimactic, with Boston blowing out Dallas 107-89, so hopefully the human Golden Retriever that is Luka Dončić will be able to galvanize his Mavericks into giving us a more competitive series. And if not, well, there’s always this playlist.She knows the highest stakes,Lindsay*Beyond an inborn and semi-irrational distaste for all Boston sports teams, of course.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

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      ‘Queenie’ Is a Fun Coming-of-Age Show

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      This smart and poppy British series melds the good parts of the semi-autobiographical sadcom with more predictable rom-com traditions.“Queenie,” based on the novel by Candice Carty-Williams (who also created and executive produced the show), follows a rough season for a bright, self-destructive 25-year-old Londoner. When we meet Queenie (Dionne Brown), she is at a crummy appointment with a rude gynecologist, the first of many characters we see treat Queenie with casual — and physically painful — disrespect.After a disastrous family dinner, Queenie’s boyfriend dumps her, which sends her into a spiral of booze, sex and lousy decisions. “Abandonment issues,” she cites, and the show slowly explains the exact nature of her estrangement from her mother and her tight but stressful relationship with her Jamaican immigrant grandparents and aunt. Yes, of course there is an episode told in gentle flashback that traces the torch relay of generational trauma. (All eight episodes arrive Friday, on Hulu.)Queenie has grim sex, too-rough sex, anonymous sex, sex with men who are not as single as they claim, and all her encounters leave her feeling worthless. Her girlfriends, in a group chat called “the Corgis,” offer support and sometimes tough love as the screen fills with sleazy messages from white dudes on dating apps. Despite the emphasis on Queenie’s sexual exploits and exploitation, the show is often prim: A car horn bleeps out a naughty word, and even the sex scenes are clothed and rather chaste.A friend — or maybe more than a friend? — tells Queenie that he admires how well she knew herself when they were kids. “I didn’t know who I was then, and I still don’t know now,” she says in voice-over. It’s one of many times the show uses voice-over to state what’s clear from Brown’s luminous performance and from the story in general. Beyond the vestigial interior monologue, other characters on “Queenie” also make the subtext the text. “You are going to have to face up to those demons at some point,” Queenie’s boss warns. Yeah, lady, that’s … that’s the show.The last decade of TV has brought us many messy 20-somethings bottoming out before finding self-actualization through embracing and metabolizing their greatest shame or insecurity. Often those shows are semi-autobiographical sadcoms, and “Queenie” captures the good parts of those shows in its humor and specifics. The show also pulls from rom-com traditions and from sweeter, tidy story styles; while its friction feels raw and authentic, its resolutions feel awfully pat in their sunniness.“Queenie” can feel “young adult” instead of young and adult, but the flip is that the show is never a miserable slog through trauma and degradation. It’s smart, poppy and fun — critical, but not cynical. More

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      The Ultimate Charli XCX Primer

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      Prep for the arrival of her new album, “Brat,” with 11 songs from her catalog (and 10 bonus tracks!).Charli XCXHarley WeirDear listeners,I don’t think there’s a single song I’ve listened to more over the past few weeks than “360,” the endlessly quotable, deliriously catchy synth-pop song by one of my favorite working pop stars, Charli XCX.I believe that most great pop music strikes a precise equilibrium between the smart and the stupid, and few artists working today understand that balance more intuitively than the 31-year-old English singer-songwriter born Charlotte Aitchison, whose rich and prolific career I’m celebrating with today’s playlist. Charli’s back catalog is deep and some of her songs can be as self-referential as an episode of “Arrested Development,” so ahead of the release of her highly anticipated album “Brat” on Friday, here’s a chance to catch up.I first heard Charli’s music in 2011, when I was hypnotized by her early single “Stay Away,” a dark and immersive ballad that sounded like a photo negative of T’Pau’s 1987 bubble gum jam “Heart and Soul.” (I sequenced those two tracks back-to-back on an iPod playlist I listened to incessantly that summer.) Two years later, “Stay Away” appeared on Charli’s debut full-length, “True Romance,” a brilliant pop album that should have been as big as, say, Katy Perry’s “Prism” or Miley Cyrus’s “Bangerz” (to name two giants of 2013) but failed to break through beyond a small but fervent cult fan base that came to be known as (what else?) Charli’s Angels.Over the past decade, that fan base has grown, and Charli has come to occupy her own unique space somewhere between the A-list and the underground. She’s had flirtations with mainstream success, usually as a featured artist (her brash hook was the best part of Iggy Azalea’s 2014 smash “Fancy”) or a songwriter (you can hear her voice in the mix of Icona Pop’s 2012 anthem “I Love It,” which she helped write). But Charli has ultimately remained a little too adventurous and uncompromising for superstardom. As she put it in a recent profile for British GQ with characteristic shrugging candor, “I know that if I suffered in silence, pushed through it and didn’t say what was on my mind, and maybe got like a brow lift or whatever, I could probably operate in a more commercial world.” The singles from “Brat” find her sounding more comfortable and creatively fulfilled than ever in that middle ground. As she puts it on the kinetic “Von Dutch,” “Cult classic but I still pop.”This playlist is a chronological tour through Charli XCX’s many eras, from her time as a precocious club kid to her more recent reign as a forward-thinking pop experimentalist. Her discography is loads of fun but it can also be overwhelming, so if you’ve previously been intimidated by it, consider this a road map. I had such a hard time whittling this playlist down to 11 tracks, though, that I’ve included 10 more recommendations in the Bonus Tracks, if you’re wondering where to go next.In the meantime, grab the keys to your lavender Lamborghini, fill it up with a thousand pink balloons and get ready to party, Charli-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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      Revisiting the Women Who Defined Lilith Fair’s Sound

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      Hear songs by Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, Meredith Brooks and more.Sarah McLachlan onstage at Lilith Fair.Susan Farley for The New York TimesDear listeners,Every once in a while, it’s good to be reminded that Sarah McLachlan is more than just the voice behind that depressing pet commercial that makes me look away from my TV. (You know the one, for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I’m getting a lump in my throat just thinking about it.) The writer Grayson Haver Currin provided just such a reminder, in an incisive profile of McLachlan published by The New York Times this week.McLachlan is also, among other things, the leader of a school that provides free musical education to children, an avid surfer (which I learned from the article!) and, of course, one of the founders of Lilith Fair, a highly successful if unjustly stereotyped late-90s concert tour that celebrated female artists.Lilith Fair came during a period of critical and commercial prosperity for female artists in a number of traditionally male-dominated genres like rock, folk and that wide-ranging radio format called “alternative.” But as often happens when women gain power and visibility in a certain space, it also provoked a backlash. Even as it was raking in millions, Lilith Fair was the butt of many a late-night TV joke. As the critic Rob Sheffield put it in a 2019 oral history of Lilith Fair for Vanity Fair, “Certainly nobody on late-night TV comedy in 1997 felt obligated or encouraged to make jokes about Ozzfest or the Horde tour.”Lilith Fair wasn’t perfect and is not beyond scrutiny. Most of the performers booked in its first year were white, though the bills in its second and third years became more diverse. And I’m not here to argue that every act who played Lilith Fair has stood the test of time.Still, many have: Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris … I could go on and on. But instead, I made a playlist.For brevity’s sake, I limited myself to artists who played on Lilith Fair’s inaugural 1997 tour. That still gave me plenty of great songs to choose from, as you’ll hear. I’ve included some obvious choices (did you really think I would leave off a certain karaoke classic by Meredith Brooks?) and some deeper cuts you may have forgotten about (that Tracy Bonham song still rips). Although an attempt to revive the tour in 2010 didn’t quite work, I do hear the influence of Lilith Fair artists in this current generation of pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Haim and, yes, even Taylor Swift, which means it’s an especially interesting time to look back at the artists who defined the so-called Lilith Fair sound.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

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Music’s Most Neglected Day of the Week

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      Seven songs for Tuesdays from Stevie Wonder, iLoveMakonnen and more.Stevie Wonder, a bard of TuesdayChris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,The day after Memorial Day — or any day that directly follows a beginning-of-the-week holiday — is one of those Tuesdays that feels like a Monday. A certain temporal fog lingers and will continue to confuse you all week: “Wait, what day is it again?” Well, today it is Tuesday. And I am here to offer you a sonic cure for that fog, something to ground you in the present: a playlist of Tuesday songs.Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all perennial muses of popular music; even the dreaded Monday (Monday) has its memorable anthems. Tuesday, though, tends to get short shrift — or at least it did until 2014, when the rapper iLoveMakonnen released a ubiquitous ode to clubbing on the most banal day of the week. But Makonnen’s “Tuesday” certainly wasn’t the first song to pay tribute to (or shake a fist at) the second day of the traditional workweek. Decades earlier, Stevie Wonder and Lynyrd Skynyrd both used it as a backdrop for heartache, and it also inspired the moniker of a fictitious Rolling Stones heroine, in a song later covered beautifully by the recently departed folk singer Melanie.All those songs are featured on today’s playlist, along with tracks from Blood Orange, the Pogues and, of course, the ’80s new-wave act ’Til Tuesday. If you find yourself wondering what day it is, just hum one of these tunes and all will be well. As long as they don’t stick in your head until tomorrow …Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Stevie Wonder: “Tuesday Heartbreak”It’s bad enough to be heartbroken — but being heartbroken on a Tuesday? Stevie Wonder understands the double indignity of that situation on this jazzy number from his great 1972 album “Talking Book”: “Tuesday heartbreak seems to be unfair, ’cause you say that you found another man.”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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      in Music

      A Bouquet of Songs for May Flowers

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      Tom Petty, Patrice Rushen, Billie Eilish and more.Tom Petty.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last month, I sent you a playlist of rainy songs, in honor of April showers. I also promised a sequel. I bet you have spent weeks racking your brain thinking what that playlist’s theme could possibly be. Well, wonder no more. It’s time for a selection of songs about (say it with me) …. um, no, not bell towers. And also not cauliflower, but that’s a fun guess.May flowers, guys! May flowers!Music history is, naturally, scattered with references to flowers — giving them to a lover, or maybe just buying them for oneself. There’s a song for just about every possible type of flora: irises, forget-me-nots, lilacs, you name it. Roses probably get the most mention of any flowers, but hey, even they have their thorns.Today’s playlist is just a smattering of the many songs out there about flowers. It features a few throwbacks from Scott McKenzie and Patrice Rushen, as well as a few freshly bloomed tracks — from Billie Eilish and Cassandra Jenkins — that came out this May. You’ll find a few wildflowers, a rhododendron and even a lotus. Consider this a sonic bouquet from me to you.Buy more stock in roses,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Tom Petty: “Wildflowers”We begin with the tenderhearted title track from Tom Petty’s great 1994 solo album. A few years ago I wrote about the deluxe edition of “Wildflowers” — a treasure trove for Petty fans — and a fact I stumbled upon in my research forever changed the way I hear this song. Written during a turbulent time in his life, the song is not a loving missive to someone else but rather, as Petty eventually realized with some help from a therapist, “me singing to me.”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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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      The Best of Cass Elliot

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      Hear her extraordinary range in 10 tracks.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesDear listeners,First of all, I’d like to thank the guest playlisters who filled in for me last week, Caryn Ganz and Ben Sisario. Caryn paid tribute to Madonna’s Celebration Tour (she’s seen it live seven times, which officially makes her an expert) and Ben supplemented his great profile of Mdou Moctar with a thorough primer on African guitar greats. That’s what I call something for everyone.I’m especially grateful to Caryn and Ben for taking over last week because it allowed me to finish a longer piece I’ve been wanting to write for some time: an essay about the life, legacy and music of Cass Elliot. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Elliot’s untimely death, which thwarted a brilliant career that could have branched out in so many directions. But it also spawned a frustratingly persistent and cruel myth about a certain ham sandwich, which Elliot’s daughter hopes to squash once and for all in her lovely new memoir, “My Mama, Cass.” I wanted to contribute to dispelling it, too, and bring the focus back to her charismatic artistry.Though Elliot died at 32, she left behind a robust and eclectic body of work that is ripe for rediscovery. And since I did not have time to delve too deeply into her discography in my article, I figured an Amplifier playlist was in order.Elliot has one of those voices that just puts a smile on my face, plain and simple. But there’s also nothing plain or simple about the particular type of joy her voice conveys. Hers is a hard-won happiness, as heard on perhaps her most beloved solo single, “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” a song of self that stays true in the face of opposition.An endlessly adaptable vocalist, Elliot could sing in a staggering number of styles, and I tried to highlight her range on this playlist. It pulls from pop (her indelible work with the Mamas & the Papas, the group that made her famous), rock (her collaboration with Traffic’s Dave Mason) and even some cabaret. Like watching old interview clips of her on YouTube (an activity I highly recommend; she was an uncommonly sharp talk-show guest), listening to Elliot’s music is a bittersweet experience, because it gets you imagining all the possible futures that could have been.Might she have become a star on Broadway or fronted a hard rock band? Anything seems possible. But there’s also plenty of enjoyment to be found in the bounty of music she left us. So clear your throat, throw on your most colorful caftan and get ready to sing along.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