Keys, Alicia

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      Alicia Keys’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ to Open on Broadway This Spring

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      The musical, now midway through a sold-out Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, will transfer to the Shubert Theater in March.Alicia Keys’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” has been selling out night after night during its Off Broadway run at the Public Theater. Next up, to no one’s surprise: The show is transferring to Broadway.Keys, a singer-songwriter who has sold millions of albums and has won 15 Grammy Awards, announced at a Public Theater fund-raiser on Monday night that the musical, which ends its 12-week downtown run on Jan. 14, will transfer to the Shubert Theater — one of Broadway’s most desirable houses. The first preview is scheduled for March 28, and opening night is set for April 20.“I’m out of my mind with joy, excitement, thrill,” Keys said in a telephone interview. She noted that her mother, as a teenager, had moved to New York from Ohio to pursue an acting career, and said she saw in this moment the arrival at a long-sought destination for her family.“We get to announce the ultimate dream — the dream that my mother chased from a little girl, that brought her here, which is the reason why I’m here, which is the reason why this city raised me, and the reason why I can even tell this story,” she said. “Hell’s Kitchen,” a loosely fictionalized story inspired by Keys’s own childhood, depicts a short chapter in the life of a 17-year-old growing up surrounded by artists in a New York housing development where most of the units are subsidized for performers. The protagonist, a girl being raised by her single mother, discovers a love for piano, and an attraction to an adult man, while chafing at her mother’s efforts to keep her safe in a gritty neighborhood.The musical features new arrangements of Keys’s biggest hits, including “Fallin’,” “Girl on Fire,” “No One” and “Empire State of Mind,” as well as several new songs the pop star wrote for this show. Keys, who does not perform in “Hell’s Kitchen,” has been working on it for more than a decade with the playwright Kristoffer Diaz, who wrote the book.In an unusual move that demonstrates Keys’s long determination to retain control of her own intellectual property and career arc, the musical’s lead producer will be AKW Productions, which is a company Keys owns and describes as “focused on creating diverse, real, authentic and genuine stories in film, television, theater and music.” Asked whether the stage production, like most commercial Broadway musicals, would also have investors, Keys said, “Yes, there’s going to be some really special people that are coming along for the ride.”The musical is directed by Michael Greif, and choreographed by Camille A. Brown. The downtown cast is led by Maleah Joi Moon as the protagonist, joined by Shoshana Bean as the mother, Brandon Victor Dixon as the absentee father, and Kecia Lewis as the piano teacher. The Broadway cast has not yet been announced.Reviews were mixed, with many critics praising the performances and the production but saying they wanted more from the story. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the first act “thrilling,” but said it “disappoints after the mid-show break.” In The Washington Post, the critic Peter Marks was underwhelmed, calling it “a perfectly nice musical,” but in The Los Angeles Times, the critic Charles McNulty was far more enthusiastic, writing, “I was surprised by how rapturously I fell under the musical’s spell.”Keys said she does not concern herself with reviews.“I’m not a huge, huge review reader — that’s been a practice of mine since I did my second album, because I’ve realized everybody’s going to have a thought, everybody’s going to have an opinion,” she said. “The true critics, to me, are the people in the seats, and when they come away feeling uplifted, inspired, ignited, transformed — they’re crying because they feel so connected to the stories in their lives — those are the critics that I really pay attention to.”Having said that, Keys also added that the creative team would continue to work on the show.“Of course, you always are able to refine, you’re always able to find places that you want to bring more, bring less, try this, do that, and that’s going to, of course, happen as we transfer to make it just better and better and better,” she said. “But I’m really proud that the spirit is there. It’s been there since the beginning of it, and now the goal is to keep that spirit and make it even better.” More

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      ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Review: Alicia Keys’s Musical Is Ambitious

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      A promising Off Broadway jukebox musical features hits by the R&B star (including “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No One”) and a story much like her own.Even in the Golden Age of musical theater, shows so commonly died after intermission that critics came up with a name for the disease. “Second act trouble” presented in many ways: unmoored songs, desperate cutting, illogical crises, hasty workarounds. Yet all those second act symptoms arose from the same underlying condition: first act ambitions.So it’s not really surprising that an enormously ambitious new musical like “Hell’s Kitchen,” the semi-autobiographical jukebox built on the life and catalog of Alicia Keys, disappoints after the mid-show break, tumbling directly into the potholes it spent its first half so smartly avoiding. What’s surprising in this promising show, which opened at the Public Theater on Sunday with the obvious intention of moving to Broadway, is how thrilling it is until then.Surprising to me, anyway. I find that jukeboxes — especially biographical ones, like “Motown” and “MJ” — almost inevitably add to the ordinary difficulties of musical construction with difficulties unique to their provenance. The involvement of the original artists (or their estates) leads to historical sugarcoating. A rush to hit all the high points results in a cherry-picked résumé. The catalog retreads, written for a different reason, fail to move the action forward. And since those songs are the show’s selling point, they wind up wagging the story.But Keys, working with the playwright Kristoffer Diaz and the director Michael Greif, steps around most of those pitfalls in the show’s first hour, setting up the story with notable verve and efficiency. In neat succession it introduces the main characters (17-year-old Ali and her single mother, Jersey), the primary setting (the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1990s), the parameters of the plot (Ali’s thirst for love and art) and an imminent source of conflict (Mom).At the same time, it floods us with music to establish the worlds it’s taking us into, well beyond the R&B and pop that Keys is best known for. In a marvelous elevator sequence, Ali encounters opera, jazz, merengue and classical piano as she descends from the one-bedroom 42nd-floor apartment she shares with Jersey, a sometime actor juggling two jobs. (The building, Manhattan Plaza, offers affordable housing for artists.) Then, when Ali reaches the street, a giant rush of sound enfolds her; all of New York, it seems, is singing, playing and, in Camille A. Brown’s excitingly contextual choreography, dancing.Shoshana Bean, left, and Brandon Victor Dixon as the young protagonist’s parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are only a few minutes into the show and its armature is fully in place. We know that this is going to be a mother-daughter love-and-letting-go story, as Jersey (Shoshana Bean, warm and pyrotechnic) tries to keep Ali fed and safe. Though race isn’t explicitly an issue between them, Jersey is white and Ali is biracial, and Ali (Maleah Joi Moon in a sensational debut) will gradually be drawn away from her mother’s smothering by the wider group of people she encounters.One is the classical pianist, Miss Liza Jane (the magisterial Kecia Lewis), who will demand that Ali take lessons from her — though in truth Keys started studying at 7, not 17. And out on the street, to the strains of the 2003 hit “You Don’t Know My Name,” Ali will flirt with a bucket drummer named Knuck (Chris Lee, sweet as pie) even though he’s in his mid-20s. He’ll resist — at first.And so, over the course of 11 songs, the first act does the work of ambitious first acts everywhere: expanding the show’s horizon to the larger world in which the action takes place (not a fair world for young Black New Yorkers) and deepening our knowledge of the main characters through conflict. Also humor: Diaz — whose hilarious professional wrestling play, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — saves the story from too much earnestness. Credit Greif, too, whose steady management of tone and tension coaxes drama from a tale that could easily have been too interior.Together with Keys they also solve, or at least delay, many of the jukebox problems. By keeping a very narrow focus on just a few weeks in Ali’s life, “Hell’s Kitchen” chooses the possibility of dramatic depth over career highlights. Nor is there much sugarcoating: Keys seems quite willing to present her ambitious stand-in as a hormonal teenager immune to common sense — and Moon, 21, is precociously clever and fearless in delivering that complex portrait.Most important, Keys’s songs, even hits like “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No One,” fit into the story (and into the mouths of a variety of characters) without too much jimmying. If they don’t, the situation is acknowledged effectively. When Ali finally does spend the night with Knuck — right on time, just before the various story lines merge in a dreadful event at the end of the first act — Ali’s friend Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson) is miffed, for this is supposed to be an unapologetically woman-centered story. “The world is hers ’cause she got a man now?” she complains, interrupting the 2012 banger “Girl on Fire,” here repurposed as a joyful “I’m on top of the world” song. “That’s what we’re doing?”Moon’s dreamy Ali tries to woo Chris Lee, who plays a bucket drummer named Knuck.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlas, “that’s what we’re doing?” is how I felt the moment the second act started. As if the creators had run out of time for finesse — though Keys and Diaz have been working on “Hell’s Kitchen” for more than a decade — its wit curdles into lectures as the story, especially Jersey’s, goes blurry. Her strained relationship with Ali’s father, here a jazz pianist though in reality a flight attendant, bears the characteristic signs of dramaturgical whiplash. (On the other hand, he’s played by Brandon Victor Dixon, a human aphrodisiac, vocally and otherwise.) An argument between Jersey and Miss Liza Jane feels similarly trumped up, until it is resolved in an obvious twist of pathos. And despite Bean’s skill, Jersey’s love for her daughter, the core of the show, gets lost in the attempt to complicate it.The second act songs follow suit; it is no coincidence that the three new ones Keys wrote for the production, all good, are at the top of the show. And though well-structured musicals typically have far fewer songs in the second half than the first to make way for the complexities of plot resolution, here there are a whopping 14, ending indulgently if unavoidably with the 2009 New York anthem “Empire State of Mind.” As a result, “Hell’s Kitchen” nearly becomes what it tried to avoid at the start: a hit dump.But because those hits are hits for a reason, there is still pleasure in hearing them. The singing, arrangements and orchestrations (by various hands including Adam Blackstone, Tom Kitt, Dominic Follacaro and Keys herself) are thrilling, if strangely unbalanced in Gareth Owen’s sound design. The fire-escape sets (by Robert Brill), expressive projections (by Peter Nigrini), saturated lighting (by Natasha Katz) and often hilarious costumes (by Dede Ayite) are all Broadway-ready.I hope “Hell’s Kitchen” will be too. Of course, many musicals make the transfer without ever solving their first act problems, let alone their second. That would be a shame here. Though not perfectly told, Ali’s discovery that art is love, with or without the guy, is too rich not to reach a bigger audience, and a million more girls on fire.Hell’s KitchenThrough Jan. 14 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Alicia Keys Steps Into a New Spotlight

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway.One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighborhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” and “Little Girls” from “Annie”). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.Maleah Joi Moon is making her professional stage debut as the show’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ali.Elias Williams for The New York TimesThat day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened nonprofit where “Hell’s Kitchen” is to begin an Off Broadway run on Oct. 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.“I am thinking a lot about ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and obviously the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.Her musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalized, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing development just outside Times Square where 70 percent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’s own upbringing.At its heart, “Hell’s Kitchen” is a mother-daughter love story, featuring the stage veteran Shoshana Bean, left, during a rehearsal with Moon.Elias Williams for The New York Times“We’ve highly fictionalized the specifics,” said Kristoffer Diaz, a playwright and librettist who has been working with Keys on the show for more than a decade. Along the way, Keys and Diaz have been joined by the Broadway veteran Michael Greif, who directed “Dear Evan Hansen,” and by the choreographer Camille A. Brown, an in-demand dance-maker.In some ways, the show’s narrative structure resembles that of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans”: It is a coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager with a fractured family; it ends with the protagonist’s trajectory unclear, but audiences can fill in the blanks based on what they already know about the author’s accomplishments.Keys resisted suggestions that the musical give audiences a road map to Ali’s future — a future in which she might, like Keys, become a big star. “Sometimes they would push: ‘And how about we…?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘No,’” she said. “You just need to know that she is going to find something. Everything else is irrelevant.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And, in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’s identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’s best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show, but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.“I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love,” Keys said, reflecting on her initial aspirations for “Hell’s Kitchen.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is the overlap between the recording industry and musical theater is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (“MJ,” about Michael Jackson) and fictional (“& Juliet”), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (“Here Lies Love”).Keys is a lifelong theatergoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of “The Wizard of Oz” and had a cameo on “The Cosby Show” at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast — she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’s father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theater tickets. Her mother recalls an early trip to “Cats,” and Keys remembers “Miss Saigon,” but the show that stands out most is “Rent,” in part because it’s about AIDS, which hit Manhattan Plaza, with its high population of gay artists, quite hard. “Rent,” like “Hell’s Kitchen,” was directed by Greif.She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School, and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of “Fallin’,” and boosted by an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” her career took off.Keys has continued to see theater when she can, and in 2011 she co-produced a Broadway play, “Stick Fly,” about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theater, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said of Keys (above, at a rehearsal). “There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Stick Fly,” Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up “Hell’s Kitchen,” she had audacious goals.“Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love.”Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theater? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together, and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)And what about reinventing theater? When I ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”I write about the business of Broadway, so one thing that has struck me, as I’ve been working on this profile, is Keys’s ownership — economic as well as artistic — of “Hell’s Kitchen.” Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.“I want to own my story,” she told me. “And I deserve to.”She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.Keys has been shuttling between her recording studio in Chelsea and the rehearsal space, while fine-tuning the show’s sound.Elias Williams for The New York Times“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public. “She’s been as involved as any artist I’ve ever worked with — she gets involved on a level of granularity that’s just astonishing. It’s not just music, but every sentence, every relationship, every actor. There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Maleah Joi Moon, who at 21 is making a professional stage debut playing Ali, was taken aback to realize that Keys, whose music was a staple in Moon’s childhood home, would actually be involved on a day-to-day basis.“When I saw the project, I was like, no way was she really attached to this,” Moon said. “And to find out, once I got into the rehearsal room, that she was going to be so heavily involved — it was insane.”Keys radiated warmth as well as intensity during a rehearsal, a novel (“The Vanishing Half”) at her elbow while she bounced in her chair to the beat and tapped out ideas on her phone. “She’s very specific with her notes,” said Shoshana Bean, the actress playing Ali’s mother.She teaches songs to the ensemble. (“You’ve never been to a more charged, lively and thrilling music rehearsal than when she’s running them,” Greif said.) She instructs the stars on vocal technique. (“She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Ali’s father.)She even attended auditions for understudies, and she told me she was relocating a piano in her studio to try to replicate the sonic environment of the theater, thinking she would record the songs in the show and give demos to the band “so they get the feel, they get the swing, they get the idea, they get the energy.”“I’m very, very anal,” she said, “and I know how I want everything to sound.”Control has been a central theme of Keys’s career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mold her image and sound.“It’s important for me to properly express how I feel at the moment and not have it filtered through other people,” she told Oprah at age 20. Now she preaches self-determination. “If you don’t know what you want for yourself, then you’ll never, never get there,” she told me. “You’ll always be deterred.”Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”“I feel like as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.The score is a mix of new songs and Keys’s best-known hits, including, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z.Elias Williams for The New York Times“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right, but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”One night in mid-July, I took the subway to Barclays Center to watch Keys do what she is best known for: perform. For 90 minutes she entertained a rapturous crowd of 11,894 — strikingly more diverse, and younger, than most theater audiences. Her sparkling Yamaha piano was in the center of the arena, on a rotating stage, with runways extending out so she could work the crowd.Just before the concert, as she often does, she presided over what she calls a Soulcare Session, promoting her skin care line (“I call them offerings, not products — products is too transactional”), talking up empowerment (“The theme today is reminding ourselves to own our own power”), and posing for pictures with superfans who had paid a steep premium for up-close access (“You can talk to me about anything you want,” she said). Her staff sprayed the patrons with a “reviving aura mist” and invited them to select keys (get it?) with words of affirmation; attendees sat on embroidered pillows, black beanbags and purple cushions and asked Keys about her wardrobe, her writing process, her childhood. Some spoke about how her songs had helped them endure disease or emotional hardship.Keys has long had an entrepreneurial streak — she started a babysitters club when she was 11 — and it is ever-expanding. “I’m really interested in business at this point,” she told me when I asked about what’s next.She’s all-in on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of course. She intends to further build up Key SoulCare. And she’ll make more music.“I feel like I’m in a place where I can express myself clearly,” she said. “I am clear about what I want, what I don’t want. Who I want to do it with, who I don’t want to. I’m unafraid to be very vocal and verbal about that, and I feel like I’m in a place where I can do anything, anything. And I haven’t even begun yet.” More

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      Alicia Keys Is Making a Musical. Her Own Life Inspired the Story.

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      The show is a highlight of the Public Theater’s new season, which will also include plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Itamar Moses, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Ife Olujobi.For more than a decade, Alicia Keys has been quietly developing a musical inspired by her own turbulent adolescence growing up among artists in New York City. Now that musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is almost ready for viewing: It will be staged this fall at the Public Theater, the downtown nonprofit where “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton” were born.By any measure, the musical will be big: It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys, an R&B and pop singer who has sold tens of millions of records. The show will feature some of Keys’s best known songs, as well as new material she has written for the musical.“This is my pride and joy,” she said in an interview. “This is a major, major turning point in my journey.”“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t precisely track the events of Keys’s own life, but there are strong parallels. Set in the 1990s, it takes place over a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali, who is being raised by a single mother in Manhattan Plaza, a large housing complex where many of the residents are performing artists; there is family tension, sexual exploration and musical discovery. (Ali, like Keys, is transformed by a passion for piano.)Keys has been deeply involved with the show’s development, and her own production company has the commercial rights to whatever life the show might have beyond the Public. “I’m never hands off,” Keys said. “There’s not one page, there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song, there’s not one melody, there’s not anything that happens in this piece that moves without me completely immersed in it and ensuring its authenticity.”The musical was Keys’s idea, and in 2011 she selected the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) to write its book; in 2018, the two asked Michael Greif (“Rent”) to join the project as director, and Greif then brought it to the Public.“It’s very much about a young woman testing boundaries,” Greif said. “It’s a story about a series of collisions she has with very important people in her life when she’s 17, and how those collisions affect the person she was to become.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 24 and to open Nov. 19. An emerging actor named Maleah Joi Moon will play Ali; her mother will be played by Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”), and her estranged father will be played by Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton”); Camille A. Brown will choreograph.The Public is already planning to stage “Hamlet” this summer, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Ato Blankson-Wood, as its sole Free Shakespeare in the Park production, but now will follow that with a new Public Works adaptation of “The Tempest,” with songs by Benjamin Velez and directed by Laurie Woolery. The Public Works program, which stages musical adaptations of classics featuring a handful of professional actors and a large ensemble of amateur New York City performers, began in 2013 with a different adaptation of “The Tempest.”“The Tempest” will be the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until 2025; the Public is trying to figure out whether and where it might stage a production next summer while the Delacorte is being renovated.In October, the Public will partner with NYU Skirball to present three Seán O’Casey plays staged by Ireland’s Druid theater.Starting in November at its downtown theater, the Public plans to stage “Manahatta,” a play that connects Manhattan’s Native American history with its contemporary finance industry, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Woolery. That will be followed in February by “The Ally,” written by Itamar Moses and directed by Lila Neugebauer, starring Josh Radnor as an atheistic Jew whose social justice commitments are complicated by Middle East politics. In March comes “Sally & Tom,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, about a contemporary theater company trying to do a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. And in April is “Jordans,” written by Ife Olujobi and directed by Whitney White, a comedy about Blackness in an overwhelmingly white workplace.One thing the Public will not be doing: presenting its previously annual Under the Radar Festival of experimental work. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” said Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “This does not mean the Public is abandoning its relationship with downtown experimental artists, but we’re going to be looking for a new way of embodying that.” More

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      11 Songs That Will Make You Want to Move

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      The key to a great exercise playlist, our critic writes, is a mix of novelty and familiarity.Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,I have heard some truly horrific music at the gym.I am loathe to even tell you about it, but if I must: I have been subjected to an EDM remix of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” and a clubby re-imagination of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” I have heard Iggy Azalea songs that are not “Fancy.” I have experienced things I have had to purge from my memory in order to carry on.The pandemic forced me, like so many of us, to find ways to work out at home. This was sometimes difficult, and once involved lugging a 20-pound kettlebell nearly a mile home from Target — do not recommend — but it also meant I had much more freedom to determine what I listened to while swinging my new gear around. I started seeking out YouTube workouts without background music, or ones I could do with the sound off. And, naturally, I started making playlists. A bunch of them, actually.For me, a successful exercise playlist combines novelty and familiarity. It mostly functions to distract my brain from the fact that I am exerting myself and sweating profusely and would much rather not be doing those things, so ideally I want to switch things up to help the time pass. But I also appreciate when a song I know and love comes on when I need some extra motivation. Whether dancing or working out, sometimes moving your body to a song you already know can make you appreciate it in new ways.I’ve been fine-tuning this playlist for a while, rotating songs out when I get tired of them, or tinkering with the sequencing. I like the way it combines some more recent artists with their influences and forebears (a dynamic explicitly captured by Daft Punk’s great, shouted-out homage to its heroes, “Teachers,” from what itself is now a dance music landmark, “Homework,” from 1997). This is not the playlist I go to for my most high-intensity workouts or runs, though I’ll definitely share one of those in a future Amplifier. This is instead something slightly more sustained and intermittently low-key — a playlist I’d listen to when doing a strength-training routine, a jog or a very brisk walk.Rest assured, you are not required to move a muscle while listening to it. Maybe you just need an energetic, gradually crescendoing pick-me-up in the middle of a long workday. But be forewarned: There’s always a chance these songs will inspire a spontaneous dance party.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Caroline Polachek: “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings (A.G. Cook Remix)”A.G. Cook, one of the wily masterminds behind the PC Music collective, reworked this dreamy version of a fun, flirty Caroline Polachek single from her 2019 album, “Pang.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Jessie Ware: “Free Yourself”The British pop musician Jessie Ware — my personal favorite instigator of a recent disco revival — found a new groove with her great 2020 album, “What’s Your Pleasure?” She released this thumping, house-inflected jam last year as what seemed like a one-off single, but it will also appear on her next album, “That! Feels Good!,” which comes out later this month. (Listen on YouTube)3. Anita Ward: “Ring My Bell”Speaking of disco, why not go straight to the source with this blissful, weightless 1979 hit? I’m a fan of the eight-minute extended mix myself, but in the interest of keeping things moving, I opted for the three-and-a-half-minute single edit here. (Listen on YouTube)4. Giorgio Moroder: “From Here to Eternity”The ascending synthesizer arpeggios make this title track from Giorgio Moroder’s landmark 1977 album feel truly heavenly. (The opening vocoder line is a little callback to that A.G. Cook remix earlier in the playlist, too.) (Listen on YouTube)5. Yaeji: “Raingurl”The New York-born songwriter and D.J. Yaeji strays from her dance-music roots a bit on “With a Hammer,” the eclectic debut album she put out earlier this month. But for the purposes of this playlist, I prefer this playful and pulsating cult favorite from 2017. (Listen on YouTube)6. Daft Punk: “Teachers”The iconic French duo nods to the artists who inspire them on this fluid and funky cut from the group’s 1997 breakout album, “Homework.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique featuring Maluca: “Love Is Free”The euphoric 2015 EP “Love Is Free” marked the final collaboration between Swedish pop star Robyn and her longtime friend, the late producer and D.J. Christian Falk. This kinetic, house-inspired title track is the project’s undeniable highlight. (Listen on YouTube)8. Alicia Keys: “In Common (Xpect Remix)”A minor Alicia Keys hit that should have been a massive one, “In Common” inspired its own remix EP featuring re-workings by four different producers. I like this one by Xpect, which dials up the original’s Afrobeats sound. (Listen on YouTube)9. Todd Edwards: “Shall Go”The garage pioneer Todd Edwards got a shout-out from Daft Punk on the aforementioned “Teachers” — and then he started working with the group on later albums “Discovery” and “Random Access Memories.” I love this transcendent title track from his 2012 EP “Shall Go.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Daphni: “Yes, I Know”Also from 2012, here’s a soulful and transfixing track from the dance project of Dan Snaith (who also records as Caribou), centered around a memorable sample from Buddy Miles’s 1971 song “The Segment.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Britney Spears: “Stronger”Oops! I just couldn’t resist. (Listen on YouTube)Pump it up,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“11 Songs That Will Make You Want to Move” track listTrack 1: Caroline Polachek, “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings (A.G. Cook Remix)”Track 2: Jessie Ware, “Free Yourself”Track 3: Anita Ward, “Ring My Bell”Track 4: Giorgio Moroder, “From Here to Eternity”Track 5: Yaeji, “Raingurl”Track 6: Daft Punk, “Teachers”Track 7: Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique featuring Maluca, “Love Is Free”Track 8: Alicia Keys, “In Common (Xpect Remix)”Track 9: Todd Edwards, “Shall Go”Track 10: Daphni, “Yes, I Know”Track 11: Britney Spears, “Stronger”Your workout mixI’m always looking for new additions to my workout playlist, and would love to know the songs that help you forget the pain of a squat or push you through an extra mile.So tell me: What’s a song that never fails to pump you up? And what is it about the song that motivates you?Let me know by filling out this form here. We may use your response in an upcoming newsletter. More

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      15 New Christmas Albums for 2022

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      New releases from Alicia Keys, Lindsey Stirling, Regina Belle and others revisit songs already entrenched in the Christmas canon and hope to introduce some future contenders.Holiday albums are more than background music played in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. They offer artists a chance to recontextualize themselves, play around in a nostalgic format, reinvent traditions and even strike gold in what’s become a lucrative season for the music business. Here’s a spin through 15 of the latest releases.Louis Armstrong, ‘Louis Wishes You a Cool Yule’Of all the music Louis Armstrong made in his lifetime, none of it was recorded for a Christmas album (despite Armstrong having put out a bunch of Christmas songs). But on “Louis Wishes You a Cool Yule,” we hear his unmistakable voice in all its remastered glory on standards like “Winter Wonderland” and “White Christmas,” and originals like “Christmas Night in Harlem” and “Christmas in New Orleans.” “What a Wonderful World,” Armstrong’s most recognized song, isn’t quite a holiday tune but shows up on this compilation anyway alongside “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” a reading he recorded at home shortly before his death in 1971. What wound up being his last recording ends this album on a wistful note. MARCUS J. MOOREBackstreet Boys, ‘A Very Backstreet Christmas’Backstreet Boys offer up the expected blend of poppy R&B, tight harmonizing and soft-focus romanticism on their first holiday album, “A Very Backstreet Christmas.” The group fares best with competently sung, lightly modernized renditions of classics like “O Holy Night” and “White Christmas”; it sounds out of its depth grappling with the singer-songwriter poeticism of Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” The album closes out on an upbeat note, though, with the peppy, self-referential (“We’re gonna party like it’s 1999”) new song “Happy Days,” which its members said was partially inspired by “Can’t Stop the Feeling!,” the 2016 hit from — of all people! — Justin Timberlake. Happy Xmas, boy-band war is over (if you want it). LINDSAY ZOLADZRegina Belle, ‘My Colorful Christmas’Christmas has long been associated with snow and warm cider. But Regina Belle’s reggae-centered version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” evokes hot sand and rum punch. She follows this thread throughout her first Christmas album, flipping gospel standards like “The First Noel” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” into bouncy modern soul with cross-generational appeal. MOOREKadhja Bonet, ‘California Holiday’The first holiday EP by the pensive soul singer Kadhja Bonet consists mostly of supple covers of connoisseur Christmas classics — “Keep Christmas With You” from “Sesame Street”; the Jackson 5’s “Little Christmas Tree.” But the title track, an original, is something different: a lightly exhausted digest of a relationship that never seems to break free of cyclical fatigue. “Another holiday,” Bonet sighs. “Another holiday.” JON CARAMANICARay Charles, ‘The Spirit of Christmas’Be it country, R&B or gospel, Ray Charles knew how to put his own spin on well-worn classics, turning them into bluesy ballads with soulful piano at the center. That was evident on “The Spirit of Christmas” from 1985, reissued this year as a set that includes tried-and-true favorites like “Winter Wonderland,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” as well as the cult classic “That Spirit of Christmas,” which was featured in the holiday film “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” But Charles’s brilliance comes barreling through on the down-tempo “The Little Drummer Boy”: Mixing the twang of country and the melodic stomp of gospel-soul, he lands on something that isn’t quite either, but is glorious all the same. MOOREDavis Causey and Jay Smith, ‘Pickin’ on Christmas’In 1998, two guitarists from Georgia, Jay Smith and Davis Causey (who, among many credits, was a member of jazz-tinged Southern rock bands led by Randall Bramblett and Chuck Leavell) gathered a studio band, recorded an instrumental Christmas album and pressed 100 CDs for family and friends. Smith died soon after the album was made. It wasn’t a casual jam session; the tracks are thoughtfully arranged, often with multiple layers of lead and rhythm guitars. Now released publicly, the album radiates companionship, with the guitars — acoustic and electric, picking and sliding — entwined in amiable colloquies. “Silver Bells/Silent Night” turns into a chugging, countryish boogie; “We Three Kings/God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” eases toward modal jazz and psychedelia, and “What Child Is This?” moves from a tentative duet to a swinging jazz waltz. The familiar songs become shared confidences. JON PARELESGloria Estefan, Emily Estefan and Sasha Estefan-Coppola, ‘The Estefan Family Christmas’One of Latin pop’s queens shares top billing with her 28-year-old daughter, Emily, and 10-year-old grandson, Sasha, on her second Christmas album (the first came out in 1992). A solo Emily shines — and sounds remarkably like her mother — on a poignant ballad she wrote herself, “When I Miss You Most,” though much of the record relies a bit too much on Sasha’s precocity. Delightfully, the LP finds the family sharing the spotlight and the occasional laugh, and even a surprise: A Spanish-language rendition of the Paul Williams tune “I Wish I Could Be Santa Claus” features the sweetly assured singing debut of Gloria’s husband, Emilio. ZOLADZClockwise from top left: holiday albums by Chris Isaak, Thomas Rhett, Lindsey Stirling and Regina Belle.Debbie Gibson, ‘Winterlicious’Debbie Gibson has been a fixture on Broadway far longer than she was atop the pop charts in the late ’80s, which explains why the songs on “Winterlicious,” her first holiday album, skew toward the sorts of tunes that connect plot points in a musical — fiercely restrained singing with heavy syllabic emphasis, a curious abundance of detail, a saccharine quality that feels like a Christmas cookie overdose. CARAMANICAVivian Green, ‘Spread the Love’Vivian Green and her co-producer, Kwame Holland, wrote four of the five songs on her EP “Spread the Love.” Togetherness (and absence) is on her mind in all of them. She’s eagerly anticipating it in the Motown-meets-reggae “Spread the Love (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza)” and in the hand-clapping, pointillistic “Everybody’s Gathered.” And she bemoans being separated — even by her own choices — in the torchy “Around the Tree” and in the tinkling march “No Holiday.” Whether she’s convivial or lonely, she’s always got eager backing vocals for company. PARELESChris Isaak, ‘Everybody Knows It’s Christmas’The holidays arrive with plenty of twang and reverb on Chris Isaak’s suavely retro “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas.” Isaak wrote most of the songs, offering a little comedy (“Almost Christmas,” about last-minute shopping, and “Help Me Baby Jesus,” about a plastic yard display) and some convincing lonely-guy melancholy (“Holiday Blues,” “Wrapping Presents for Myself” and “Christmas Comes But Once a Year”). The sound harks back to 1950s country and rockabilly, with Isaak’s voice echoing Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and, in a big-finish “O Holy Night,” Elvis Presley, completing a slyly poised period piece of an album. PARELESAlicia Keys, ‘Santa Baby’Alicia Keys brings her coziest voice to the largely secular songs on “Santa Baby.” Her delivery is high, breathy and playful, and she allows herself to show scratches and imperfections. The productions often tuck elaborate arrangements under a low-fi veneer, like her version of “The Christmas Song,” which begins as a piano-and-voice, mistakes-and-all version and suddenly sprouts strings and voices. The album touches on old-school soul — her gospelly, tear-spattered versions of “Please Be Home for Christmas” — as well as the willful eccentricity of “My Favorite Things,” which has modal-jazz piano chords, a wordless version of the Rodgers melody and spoken words about favorite things like “feeling so good, we drama-free.” Four songs of her own — including a reprise of “Not Even the King” from “Girl on Fire” — are about longing and affection, and she radiates fondness in “December Back 2 June” and “You Don’t Have to Be Alone.” Throughout the album, she invites loved ones closer. PARELESNelson, ‘A Nelson Family Christmas’The brothers Nelson approach “O Come All Ye Faithful” with a pair of billy clubs, beating upon each syllable as if playing a mirthless game of Whac-a-Mole. Not all of this holiday collection is so violent — it includes a handful of shimmery tracks from their elders, father Ricky and grandfather Ozzie; and also a soothing “This Christmas,” sung with Carnie and Wendy Wilson, Brian’s daughters. The Nelson brothers’ take on “Blue Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” are lightly comforting, but Lord, please protect “Away in a Manger” and “Mele Kelikimaka.” CARAMANICAThomas Rhett, ‘Merry Christmas, Y’all’The gentleman country kingpin Thomas Rhett is Nashville’s MVP of singing within the lines. And he might have gotten away with it on this EP, his first Christmas collection in a decade-plus career. But on “Winter Wonderland,” he’s nudged along by a horn section that’s more curious than he is. And if you detect a touch of ambition on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” maybe it’s because the band simply will not stop rejoicing, so what’s he got to lose? CARAMANICALindsey Stirling, ‘Snow Waltz’A millennial violinist with spirited energy and a large YouTube following, the 36-year-old Lindsey Stirling builds on the strengths of her 2017 holiday record, “Warmer in the Winter,” with this lively new collection. The thumping electronic beats that accompany her arrangements of classics like “Sleigh Ride” and “Joy to the World” are tasteful enough to resist gimmickry, and originals that feature pop vocalists like Bonnie McKee and the “American Idol” alum David Archuleta are effectively cheery. The title track is also a new composition that turns Stirling’s instrument into an expressive vessel for wintry melodrama and childlike wonder. ZOLADZJoss Stone, ‘Merry Christmas, Love’Joss Stone reaches for old-school Hollywood luster and unblinking sincerity on “Merry Christmas, Love.” She deploys sleigh bell-topped orchestras and choirs in holiday standards (“Winter Wonderland,” “The Christmas Song,” “Away in a Manger”) along with the Motown perennial “What Christmas Means to Me” and a less familiar Irving Berlin Christmas song, “Snow.” Stone sings with clarity and earnest humility. When she does let loose her cutting high register on a new song of her own, “If You Believe,” it’s clear how carefully she was holding herself back. PARELES More

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      F.D.R. Speeches and Alicia Keys Album Added to National Recording Registry

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      A hit by the band Journey, radio accounts of the 9/11 attacks, “Buena Vista Social Club” and a recording of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run also made the registry.Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech about “a date which will live in infamy.” The rock band Journey’s song about “a small-town girl livin’ in a lonely world” who takes a midnight train going anywhere. And firsthand descriptions of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.Each of those are “unforgettable sounds of the nation’s history,” the Library of Congress said on Wednesday, adding that they are among 25 recordings selected this year for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.Since 2002, the Librarian of Congress, with advice from experts, has picked recordings that are at least 10 years old and are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” for inclusion in the registry.The program, library officials said, aims to provide a long-term archival home for the preservation of the recordings and to acknowledge their importance.The registry “reflects the diverse music and voices that have shaped our nation’s history and culture,” the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, said in a statement.“The national library is proud to help preserve these recordings,” she added.Other recordings selected this year include Alicia Keys’ first album, “Songs in A Minor”; the 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club”; a 1956 recording of Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival; and the 1974 radio call of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, which broke a record previously held by Babe Ruth.The 575 recordings already included in the national registry include classical music; opera performances; blues and pop songs; monologues and poems; and speeches and radio broadcasts reflecting momentous news events. Among those are Robert F. Kennedy’s speech upon the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 1973 Wailers album “Burnin’” and a 1977 recording of a Grateful Dead concert at Cornell University.That diversity can also be seen in this year’s selections, which include all of Roosevelt’s speeches as president and the 1981 Journey single turned karaoke favorite, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which the library described as “the personal empowerment anthem of millions.”One of the more somber recordings chosen this year consists of the Sept. 11, 2001, broadcasts by the radio station WNYC, which was located at that time in Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center.That morning station employees broke with scheduled programming to describe the chaos of the terror attacks on the Twin Towers, broadcasting what the library called “the tragedy’s first eyewitness accounts.”“As the story unfolded,” the library wrote, “the dedicated staff of WNYC remained on the air.” More

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      Camila Cabello Gets in Her Head, and 16 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kelsea Ballerini, Syd, Oliver Sim 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.Camila Cabello featuring Willow, ‘Psychofreak’Alienation gets an electronic lilt in “Psychofreak” from Camila Cabello’s “Familia,” which is actually stacked with songs about jealousy. In “Psychofreak” she sings about feeling dissociated, insecure and suspicious: “Tryin’ to get connected, no Wi-Fi/tell me that you love me, are you lying?” Against brittle percussion and impassive chords on the off-beats, Cabello sounds relatively unruffled despite what the lyrics say, but Willow (Smith) focuses and ratchets up the anguish. JON PARELESMiranda Lambert, ‘Actin’ Up’Miranda Lambert’s “Actin’ Up” could have been just another feisty, bluesy country-rock song. “I want a sunset ride, a velvet rodeo/A Colorado high, a California glow,” she declares. Its richness is in its arrangement: its stereo, reverbed guitar picking, its syncopated drumming, the echoes and pauses placed behind her boasts. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘Heartfirst’On her 2020 album “Kelsea,” Kelsea Ballerini honed her keen ability to spotlight the sort of anxiety and self-doubt that many other country singers conveniently crop out of the frame. The single “Heartfirst,” though, is all about pushing those impediments aside and jumping headlong into new romance: “That voice in my head says to slow down, but it can’t feel your hands on my hips right now,” she sings. Recommended for anyone who revisited Taylor Swift’s version of “Red” last year and wished someone were still making glimmering, wholehearted pop-country songs like that in the present tense. LINDSAY ZOLADZBanks, ‘Meteorite’Banks’s songs bring a deep wariness to her relationships. “We’re already in bed, you may as well lie,” she sings as “Meteorite” begins. But in this track, syncopation fights pessimism. Handclaps, stop-and-start drums and backup vocals that hint at Balkan and African call-and-response insist that this iffy romance could still push ahead. PARELESPieri, ‘Vente Pa Aca’It was only a matter of time until the textures of hyperpop collided with reggaeton. Consider the Mexican-born, Brooklyn-based artist Daniela Pieri its champion: Her new single “Vente Pa Aca” interlaces a muted dembow riddim, serrated synths and gauzy speaker feedback lifted straight from a PC Music compilation. In an Auto-Tuned shrill, one that carries just enough of a punk edge, she intones, “No te quiero perder/tú y yo hasta el amanecer” (“I don’t want to lose you/Me and you till dawn”). ISABELIA HERRERASyd, ‘Fast Car’“Broken Hearts Club,” the first album in five years from Syd — a member of the R&B collective the Internet and a one-time Odd Future upstart — is mostly an intimate chronicle of a relationship’s demise, but the sultry “Fast Car” conjures a moment before things went sour. A driving, 4-4 beat and glossy ’80s sheen provide a backdrop for Syd’s vaporous vocals (“No one can see inside,” she croons, “do with me what you like”) before a glorious, Prince-like guitar solo breaks the whole song open like a cracked sunroof. ZOLADZOliver Sim, ‘Fruit’Harnessing the high drama of a power ballad, but holding all the airiness of the xx’s gauzy R&B, Oliver Sim’s “Fruit” is the kind of queer anthem only he could make. Produced by his bandmate Jamie xx, “Fruit” is a love letter to a younger self coming to terms with queer identity. “You can dress it away, talk it away/Dull down the flame/But it’s all pretend,” Sim whispers, oozing melancholia. He may have been the last member of the xx to go solo, but it has been well worth the wait. HERRERAFlorist, ‘Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)’This one’s a tear-jerker. Emily Sprague — sometimes a solo artist, sometimes the leader of the Brooklyn indie-folk group Florist — recounts the life of her late mother and her own early childhood in a series of vivid, cleareyed snapshots (“I’ve seen photos of the living room, we didn’t have a lot”), sung atop a gentle, fingerpicked chord progression. Synthesizer whirs mingle with bird chirps in the song’s airy atmosphere; Sprague and the band actually recorded it on a porch. That sonic embrace of the natural world becomes even more poignant toward the end of the song, which will appear on a forthcoming self-titled Florist album, when Sprague sings in a peaceful murmur, “She’s in the bird song, she won’t be gone.” ZOLADZDaniel Rossen, ‘Unpeopled Space’“Unpeopled Space,” a dazzling highlight from the former Grizzly Bear guitar virtuoso Daniel Rossen’s first full-length solo album “You Belong Here,” is a searching meditation about leaving the city for the country, as Rossen himself did a decade ago. But his arrangement is so full of compositional surprises and instrumental chatter — shape-shifting acoustic guitar riffs, croaking strings and dynamic percussion from his former bandmate Christopher Bear — that he makes the natural world sound every bit as alive as a teeming metropolis. “Whatever was, whatever will,” he sings to the vast green space around him, “we belong here now.” ZOLADZPink Floyd featuring Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox, ‘Hey, Hey Rise Up’Andriy Khlyvnyuk from the Ukrainian band Boombox returned to his homeland to fight the Russian invasion. From Kyiv, he made an Instagram post of his defiant, full-throated rendition of a resistance anthem, “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” singing with a rifle slung across his chest. It moved Nick Mason and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd to build a full-length track around it — their first new Pink Floyd song since 1994, which will benefit Ukrainian relief. Pink Floyd accompanies Khlyvnyuk with somber gravity, buttressing him with organ chords and choir harmonies; a wailing, clawing Gilmour guitar solo sustains the mood of grim determination. PARELESJoyce Manor, ‘Gotta Let It Go’Emo bands tend to be verbose, but Torrance, Calif.’s Joyce Manor are unusually efficient — as if Taking Back Sunday had attended the Guided by Voices school of songwriting. “Gotta Let It Go,” a two-minute ripper from the band’s forthcoming album “40 oz. to Fresno” (out June 10 and named after an autocorrected text about Sublime) showcases the lead singer and guitarist Barry Johnson’s rabid but melodic holler, alongside the sort of crushing waves of distorted guitar that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on late-90s alt-rock radio. “You say it’s cute but you think it’s ugly,” Johnson shouts on the pummeling bridge — yep, a bridge in a two-minute song! Told you these guys are efficient. ZOLADZEl Alfa, Braulio Fogón, French Montana and Kaly Ocho, ‘Máquina de Dinero’El Alfa’s ascent as the king of Dominican dembow has come with its fair share of missteps: diluted EDM bangers, or pop-dembow tracks with a little too much gloss. So “Máquina de Dinero,” from his fourth studio album, “Sabiduría,” is an unexpected bombshell. El Alfa deploys his double entendres and witty raps over a gritty, shrapnel-like beat from his go-to producer Chael Produciendo, its deliciously raw, unfinished texture aligning more closely with the coarseness of his own early hits. His guests are surprising, too — Braulio Fogón and Kaly Ocho, titans of el bajo mundo (the underground dembow scene), along with French Montana. Just try not to laugh out loud when Montana says, “’Rican or Dominican, she bustin’ out the skirt,” and mimics the addictive hook from El Alfa’s summer heater “La Mamá de la Mamá.” HERRERAAlicia Keys, ‘City of Gods (Part II)’Alicia Keys let herself be treated as a mere hook singer alongside Fivio Foreign and Kanye West on “City of Gods,” shunted aside as they touted their careers. But with “City of Gods (Part II)” she reclaims the song as the plea of a spurned lover, begging, “Don’t leave me, go easy,” amid towering piano chords and cavernous bass tones, a voice trying to find its way through the cityscape. PARELESSun’s Signature, ‘Golden Air’Sun’s Signature is the partnership of Elisabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins and Damon Reece from Massive Attack. In the 1990s, both groups conjured encompassing atmospheres, but in different registers. Cocteau Twins were mistily ethereal; Massive Attack was bassy and seismic. “Golden Air,” the first song from an EP due in June, is more protean. It works through multiple transformations — tinkly Baroque-pop, Minimalist a cappella vocal layers, shimmering psychedelic march — as Fraser sings cosmic musings: “My heart shall say to me/Do with me something.” PARELESS. Carey, ‘Sunshower’S. Carey, a longtime collaborator with Bon Iver, goes for billowing bliss in “Sunshower.” His multitracked falsetto harmonizes with cascading guitars and saxophones as he surrenders to the unexplainable beauty of a deep connection: “I don’t know myself before I knew you,” he realizes. PARELESSam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz, ‘Something Real’One afternoon in Los Angeles, the saxophonist, keyboardist and composer Sam Gendel improvised some songs with Antonia Cytrynowicz, the younger sister of his partner, the filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz; at the time Antonia was 11 years old. They haven’t played them before or since. Luckily they recorded them, and realized they were good enough to release as an album; “Live a Little” is due May 13. In “Something Real,” Gendel circled through an undulating, slightly gloomy four-chord keyboard pattern as Antonia mused about what she was hearing: “Never knowing, never feeling/Like a sound, that is nice,” she sang. “You’re nice and gentle.” But dissonant feedback wells up at the end, suggesting that safety is fragile. PARELESMyra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet, ‘For the Love of Fire and Water: II.’On “For the Love of Fire and Water,” the esteemed pianist and bandleader Myra Melford helms a new band featuring some of the most distinctive players in improvised music today: Ingrid Laubrock on saxophone, Tomeka Reid on cello, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Susie Ibarra on drums. On Track 2 of the 10-part suite, the quintet pulls itself forward with a mix of lethargy and restlessness, Halvorson and Laubrock — longtime musical intimates — carrying the nervy melody over Melford’s halting left-hand pattern, then improvising together in dyspeptic bursts. The tune itself is hard to keep track of, and the meter tough to count, but the stubbornness of the pulse and the resonance of the harmony may linger in your ear long after the track fades away. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More