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    Rosalía Issues an English Request, and 9 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by Fever Ray, Chloë, Cécile McLorin Salvant 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.Rosalía, ‘LLYLM’Just before the first chorus of Rosalía’s airy new single “LLYLM,” the Spanish phenom sings, “Lo diré en ingles y me entenderás” — I will say it in English and you will understand me. There’s a brief moment of silence before Rosalía launches into a lilting, pop-radio-friendly hook, sung, yes, in English: “I don’t need honesty, baby, lie like you love me.” In the context of the song, it’s a plea to an uncaring partner, but in the grander scheme of Rosalía’s career, it’s also a playful wink at the idea of an English-speaking crossover hit. The nimble “LLYLM” pivots restlessly between these two worlds, and finds Rosalía — for now at least — having it both ways. LINDSAY ZOLADZFever Ray, ‘Kandy’The eerily alluring “Kandy” is almost a Knife reunion. Though it’s technically by Karin Dreijer’s shapeshifting solo project Fever Ray, it’s one of four songs on the upcoming album “Radical Romantics” that was co-written and co-produced by Karin’s brother and Knife bandmate Olof Dreijer. (It even features the very same synthesizer Olof used on the pulsating “The Captain,” from the Knife’s classic 2006 album “Silent Shout.”) Still, thematically, “Kandy” is of a piece with the other promising glimpses of “Radical Romantics” that Karin has previously offered, at once dark and hypnotically sensual: “After the swim,” the musician sings in a low croon, “she laid me down and whispered, ‘All the girls want kandy.’” ZOLADZClark, ‘Town Crank’Christopher Stephen Clark, the English musician who records as Clark, has built a huge, polymorphous catalog of instrumental music that ranges from stark, austere techno to exquisite chamber-music soundtracks. But he hasn’t sung lead vocals until now — on “Town Crank” from an album due in March, “Sus Dog,” with Thom Yorke of Radiohead as executive producer. “Town Crank” hurtles into motion, starting with dry, jittery acoustic guitar before mustering a full sonic barrage: a relentless electronic bass line, blasts of drums and distortion, orchestral flurries. Clark’s voice turns out to be like Yorke’s, a high, pensive tenor shading into falsetto; he sometimes multitracks it into Beach Boys-like harmonies, while his lyrics offer stray bits of sage advice: “Nothing comes about without a little tweaking.” JON PARELESCécile McLorin Salvant, ‘D’un Feu Secret’Cécile McLorin Salvant, one of her generation’s finest jazz singers, throws a high-concept curveball on her coming album, “Mélusine.” It retells a European folk tale — about love, a curse, broken promises and reptilian transformations — in songs new and old. “D’un Feu Secret” (“Of a Secret Fire”) is indeed old. It was composed in 1660 by Michel Lambert. “I could be cured If I stopped loving/But I prefer the disease,” it vows. McLorin sings it like an early music performer, poised and delicate with feathery ornaments. But the accompaniment, from her longtime keyboardist and collaborator Sullivan Fortner, is on synthesizers, savoring the anachronism. PARELESChlöe, ‘Pray It Away’The Beyoncé protégé Chlöe — of the sisterly R&B duo Chloe x Halle — goes full church girl on the fiery “Pray It Away,” the first single from her upcoming debut album, “In Pieces.” An unfaithful lover brings Chlöe to her knees and makes her wrestle with cravings for vengeance but, as she puts it in breathy vocals stacked to heaven, “I’ma just pray it away before I give him what he deserves first.” ZOLADZASAP Rocky, ‘Same Problems?’ASAP Rocky mourns the many rappers who have died young by questioning himself: “Am I a product of things that I saw?” he sings. “Am I a product of things in my songs?” His self-produced track is a haunted waltz, seesawing between two perpetually unresolved chords, with ASAP Rocky’s doleful voice cradled and answered by vocal harmonies from Miguel. “How many problems get solved if we don’t get involved?” he wonders. PARELESKimbra featuring Ryan Lott, ‘Foolish Thinking’Kimbra, a singer and songwriter from New Zealand, had her global triumph in 2011 as the duet partner (and comeuppance) for Gotye in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which won the Grammy for record of the year. Since then, she has persevered with her own kind of electronic pop, and in “Foolish Thinking” she collaborates with Ryan Lott, a.k.a. Son Lux. It’s a clear pop structure with an eerie refrain — “thought I could remove the pain/but that’s my foolish thinking” — delivered in an echoey, shadowy production, full of furtive keyboard patterns and variously miked vocals, sketching the longings of a partner who’s loyal but utterly confounded. PARELESRickie Lee Jones, ‘Just in Time’Rickie Lee Jones takes on jazz standards on “Pieces of Treasure,” an album due April 28. Her version of “Just in Time” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, a song about last-chance romance — “The losing dice were tossed/My bridges all were crossed” — is simultaneously thankful and teasing. With Mike Mainieri’s vibraphone scampering around her voice, Jones places her phrases slyly behind the beat, pausing to land each note just in time. PARELESJobi Riccio, ‘For Me It’s You’“Everyone has a person they sing their love songs to,” Jobi Riccio sings in “For Me It’s You,” a slow, terse, old-fashioned country waltz complete with a plaintive fiddle. It just gets torchier as that love goes unrequited. PARELESSamia, ‘Breathing Song’Deep trauma courses through Samia’s “Breathing Song,” from her new EP, “Honey.” Over stark, sustained keyboard chords, she sings “Straight to the ER/While I bled on your car”; the driver asks, “It wasn’t mine, right?” The chorus, sharpened by Auto-Tune, is “No, no, no” — it’s simultaneously denial, reassurance and proof of life. PARELES More

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      Chuck E. Weiss, Musician Who, in Love, Inspired a Hit Song, Dies at 76

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      He and Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones were inseparable in the late ’70s, and when Mr. Weiss’s romantic life took a turn, Ms. Jones memorialized it in “Chuck E.’s in Love.”Chuck E. Weiss, blues musician, club owner and outsize Los Angeles character immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’s breakout hit song, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” died on July 20 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 76.His brother, Byron, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Weiss was a voracious musicologist, an encyclopedia of obscure jazz and early R&B artists, a drummer, a songwriter and a widely acknowledged rascal who in the mid-1970s landed in Los Angeles from his native Denver with his friend the singer-songwriter Tom Waits.At the Troubadour, the venerable West Hollywood folk club, where Mr. Weiss worked for a time as a dishwasher, they met another young singer-songwriter, a former runaway named Rickie Lee Jones. Mr. Waits and Ms. Jones became an item and the three of them became inseparable as they caroused through Hollywood, stealing lawn ornaments and pranking people at music industry parties (like shaking hands with dip smeared on their palms).Ms. Jones’s song about Mr. Weiss, “Chuck E’s in Love,” was the opening track of her debut album, in 1979. “It seems sometimes like we’re real romantic dreamers who got stuck in the wrong time zone,” Ms. Jones told Rolling Stone in 1979, describing Mr. Weiss and Mr. Waits as her family at the time.They lived at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy 1940s-era bohemia on Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was a regular DMZ,” Mr. Weiss told LA Weekly in 1981, “except everyone had a tan and looked nice.”In the fall of 1977, on a trip home to Denver, Mr. Weiss called his buddies back in Los Angeles, and when Mr. Waits put down the phone, he announced to Ms. Jones, “Chuck E.’s in love!”Two years later, Ms. Jones’s fanciful riff on that declaration — “What’s her name?/Is that her there?/Oh, Christ, I think he’s even combed his hair” — had made her a star. (Though the last line of the song suggests otherwise, it was not Ms. Jones whom Mr. Weiss had fallen for; it was a distant cousin of his.)The song was a hit single, the opening track of Ms. Jones’s debut album, “Rickie Lee Jones,” and a 1980 Grammy Award nominee for song of the year. (“What a Fool Believes,” performed by the Doobie Brothers, took the honor.)Mr. Weiss in an undated photo. “He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are,” Ms. Jones said. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn an essay in The Los Angeles Times on July 21, Ms. Jones wrote that when she first met Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss, she couldn’t tell them apart. “They were two of the most charismatic characters Hollywood had seen in decades, and without them I think the entire street of Santa Monica Boulevard would have collapsed.”In a phone interview since then, she said of Mr. Weiss: “There was mischief in him, he was our trickster. He was a thrilling guy, and a disaster for a time, as thrilling people often are.”Charles Edward Weiss was born in Denver on March 18, 1945. His father, Leo, was in the salvage business; his mother, Jeannette (Rollnick) Weiss, owned a hat store, Hollywood Millinery. Chuck graduated from East High School and attended Mesa Junior College, now Colorado Mesa, in Grand Junction.His brother is his only immediate survivor.In his early 20s, Mr. Weiss met Chuck Morris, now a music promoter, when Mr. Morris was a co-owner of Tulagi, a music club in Boulder, Colo. When blues performers like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker came through, they often traveled alone, and it was up to Mr. Morris to find them a local band. He would ask Mr. Weiss to fill in as drummer.In 1973 Mr. Morris opened a Denver nightclub called Ebbets Field (he was born in Brooklyn), which drew performers like Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mr. Waits. Mr. Weiss filled in there too.Mr. Weiss performing in 1999 at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Ebet RobertsAt the time, as Mr. Weiss recalled in 2014, he was trying to record his own music and in the habit of asking performers to play with him. That’s how he met Mr. Waits. “And I think what happened was I saw Waits do some finger-poppin’ stuff at Ebbets Fields one night,” he said, “and I went up to him after the show. I was wearing some platform shoes and a chinchilla coat, and I was slipping on the ice on the street outside because I was so high, and asked if he wanted to do some recording with me. He looked at me like I was from outer space, man.”Nonetheless, he said, they became fast friends.Mr. Waits, interviewed by The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1999, described Mr. Weiss as “a mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian.”Mr. Waits and Mr. Weiss ended up collaborating on a number of things, in one instance co-writing the lyrics to “Spare Parts (A Nocturnal Emission),” a barroom dirge on Mr. Waits’s album “Nighthawks at the Diner,” released in 1975. Mr. Waits produced two albums for Mr. Weiss; the first, “Extremely Cool,” in 1999, was described in one review as “a goofy, eclectic mix of loosely-played blues and boogie-woogie.”Though his songwriting was singular — “Anthem for Lost Souls” was told from the point of view of a neighbor’s cat — Mr. Weiss was best known for his live performances. Gravel-voiced, shaggy-haired and long on patter, he was a bluesman with a Borcht Belt sense of humor.Mr. Weiss in 2002 in Los Angeles.Damian Dovarganes/Associated PressFor much of the 1980s Mr. Weiss played at a Los Angeles club called the Central, accompanied by his band, The Goddamn Liars. He later encouraged his friend Johnny Depp to buy the place with him and others. They turned it into the Viper Room, the celebrity-flecked ’90s-era nightclub.He was often asked how he felt about his star turn in Ms. Jones’s hit. “Yeah, I was flabbergasted,” he told The Associated Press in 2007. “Little did we know that, all in all, we would both be known for that for the rest of our lives.”But the rest of their lives would no longer be intertwined.“When ‘Chuck E.’s in Love’ passed from the heavens and faded into the ‘I hate that song’ desert, from which it still has not really recovered, he and I became estranged, and everyone fell away from everyone,” Ms. Jones wrote of Mr. Weiss in her Los Angeles Times essay. “Waits left, the brief Camelot of our street corner jive ended. I had made fiction of us, made heroes of very unheroic people. But I’m glad I did.”Later, on the phone, she said, “Two of the three of us became very successful musicians, but not Chuck, and he knew a lot of people.” She added: “We think being the famous one is winning, but I’m not sure. Chuck did all right.” More