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    Listen to the Mother of All Playlists

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    Hear songs by Brandi Carlile, 2Pac, Merle Haggard and more for Mother’s Day.Brandi Carlile’s “The Mother” is one of the more honest songs about motherhood in the canon.Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York TimesDear listeners,A lot of music about motherhood gets a bad rap.Given how much our culture devalues women’s work — and domestic work most of all — this shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but it’s still a bummer. That nebulously defined genre of dad rock has, over the years, earned a begrudging cultural respect, but the phrase “mom rock,” in the rare instances it’s used, still sounds like an insult.I remember discussing this double standard a few years ago when I was interviewing the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, who won a Tony for her score for the hit musical “Hadestown” and releases incisively observed folk music under her own name. Becoming a mother had ushered in a drastic change in her perspective — “a relocation of myself in the world and in my family,” in her words. She wanted to be able to write about that experience with all the richness and depth it deserved, even if it ran the risk of being labeled, as she put it with a laugh, “culturally irrelevant mom art.”Luckily, plenty of other songwriters have charted the choppy waters of motherhood — and of being mothered — proving it to be one of the most complicated, challenging and (at least sometimes) rewarding of human experiences. In honor of Mother’s Day (don’t forget: this Sunday!), I’ve put together a playlist of songs that reflect motherhood in all of its unruly complexity.But at the same time: not too unruly, on this day of celebrating moms. There is a time and a place for Danzig’s “Mother,” but it is neither now nor here on this playlist. Ditto John Lennon’s primal scream of “Mother,” though the Beatles’ “Julia” might have been a more appropriate choice. I would here like to acknowledge the existence of the Spice Girls’ “Mama” and Good Charlotte’s “Thank You Mom” without asking you to listen to them.The aforementioned Anaïs Mitchell, however, did make the cut, along with an eclectic group of artists including 2Pac, Brandi Carlile and Beyoncé. Mamma mia, here we go.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Kacey Musgraves: “Mother”The shortest, sparsest song on Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 album, “Golden Hour,” is also the most emotionally piercing. “I’m just sitting here, thinking ’bout the time that’s slipping and missing my mother,” the country renegade sings with heartbreaking plaintiveness, before zooming out a generation and imagining that her own mother is probably doing the same. Musgraves has said that “Mother” is one of the “Golden Hour” songs she wrote while tripping on LSD — but don’t tell her mom that part. (Listen on YouTube)2. Beverly Glenn-Copeland: “La Vita”The pioneering composer and new age artist Beverly Glenn-Copeland has, in recent years, experienced a long-delayed and much deserved uptick in popularity thanks to a series of reissues and the enthusiastic embrace of a younger generation of musicians. The enchanting “La Vita,” from Copeland’s self-released 2004 album “Primal Prayer,” features operatic vocals from the soprano Maggie Hollis, over which Copeland intones a stirring lyric that ends with a profoundly grounding reminder: “And my mother says to me, ‘enjoy your life.’” (Remember that refrain; it’s going to make another appearance later in this playlist.) (Listen on YouTube)3. Brandi Carlile: “The Mother”Carlile doesn’t sugarcoat the experience of motherhood in this beautifully written standout from her 2018 album, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” but that gives the song a lived-in honesty, and makes its warmth come across as something more powerful than empty sentiment. “They’ve still got their morning paper and their coffee and their time,” she sings of her “rowdy” friends without children. But for all that is lost, she realizes, so much has also been gained since the birth of her daughter: “All the wonders I have seen I will see a second time from inside of the ages of your eyes.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Merle Haggard: “Mama Tried”“Instead of life in prison I was doing one-to-15 years,” Merle Haggard once admitted of the slight embellishment as to how he spent his 21st birthday in one of his most famous (and semi-autobiographical) songs. “I just couldn’t get that to rhyme.” Though its title gives repentance some lip service — hey, at least he’s not blaming her! — Haggard still sounds like a hellion on this 1968 hit. The more sincere Mother’s Day gift would arrive much later, in 1981, when he released the gospel album “Songs for the Mama That Tried,” and even put sweet Flossie Mae Harp on the cover. (Listen on YouTube)5. 2Pac: “Dear Mama”The rap game “Mama Tried”? Of his cleareyed but thoroughly loving tribute to his mother, Afeni Shakur, Tupac once said, “I aimed that one straight for my homies’ heartstrings.” Mission accomplished. (Listen on YouTube)6. Anaïs Mitchell: “Little Big Girl”This one’s a heartstring-tugger, too. Mitchell is caught between being a child and an elder on “Little Big Girl,” a poignant song from her 2022 self-titled album. There’s a striking moment toward the end when she catches her reflection in a window and sees her mother, tired, “coming home from work.” Mitchell sings with great empathy, “Tell her you love her/Tell her you’re her.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Beyoncé featuring Blue Ivy: “Blue”Named after Beyoncé’s first child, “Blue” is all the more tender for its placement at the end of her imperial 2013 self-titled album; it follows “Heaven,” a wrenching ballad about suffering a miscarriage. Bey’s candor about both the grief of pregnancy loss and the joys of a hard-won motherhood helped this album feel like a turning point in her career: the beginning of her grown-woman era. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Shirelles: “Mama Said”The vocal sound of most ’60s girl groups was chatty and communal — a musical means of sharing wisdom, commentary and advice from woman to woman. This classic from the great early ’60s hitmakers the Shirelles passes on some maternal know-how that mama acquired in the days when she, too, was just a teenager in love. (Listen on YouTube)9. Romy: “Enjoy Your Life”Remember that Glenn-Copeland refrain? The xx’s Romy Madley Croft samples it to extraordinary effect in this recently released and stirringly soulful solo single. “I made a promise to my mother to stop worrying ’bout my problems,” she sings, as Glenn-Copeland’s voice rings out like a compassionate elder bestowing glowing benevolence on a musical daughter: “My mother says to me, ‘Enjoy your life.’” (Listen on YouTube)Hi, Mom,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Mother of All Playlists” track listTrack 1: Kacey Musgraves, “Mother”Track 2: Beverly Glenn-Copeland, “La Vita”Track 3: Brandi Carlile, “The Mother”Track 4: Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”Track 5: 2Pac, “Dear Mama”Track 6: Anaïs Mitchell, “Little Big Girl”Track 7: Beyoncé featuring Blue Ivy, “Blue”Track 8: The Shirelles, “Mama Said”Track 9: Romy, “Enjoy Your Life”Bonus TracksSome wise words from the Swedish pop queen Robyn, on her 2010 song “Include Me Out”: “All hail to the mamas, who hold it down/Hail to the pillar of the family/This one’s for the grannys, take a bow.”Also, few songwriters have captured the experience of adoption as poignantly and prismatically as Joni Mitchell did on “Little Green,” from her legendary 1971 album, “Blue.”Speaking of Joni: Hear a newly released recording of her performing “Both Sides Now” at last year’s Newport Folk Festival (and music from Dolly Parton, Rhiannon Giddens and more) in this week’s Playlist. 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      Best Songs of 2022

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      Seventy-two tracks that identify, grapple with or simply dance away from the anxieties of yet another uncertain year.Jon Pareles’s Top 25Full disclosure: There can’t be a definitive list of best songs — only a sampling of what any one listener, no matter how determined, can find the time to hear in the course of a year. For discovery’s sake, my list rules out the (excellent) songs on my favorite albums of the year, and it’s designed more like a playlist than a countdown or a ranking. Feel free to switch to shuffle.1. Residente featuring Ibeyi, ‘This Is Not America’Backed by implacable Afro-Caribbean drumming and Ibeyi’s vocal harmonies, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente defines America as the entire hemisphere, while he furiously denounces historical and ongoing abuses.2. The Smile, ‘The Opposite’Thom Yorke of Radiohead — in a side project, the Smile — wonders, “What will become of us?” Prodded by a funky beat and pelted by staggered, syncopated guitar and bass notes, he can’t expect good news.3. Wilco, ‘Bird Without a Tail/Base of My Skull’With Wilco picking and strumming like a string band, Jeff Tweedy spins a free-associative fable about elemental forces of life and death, leading into a brief but probing jam that reunites country and psychedelia.4. Rema featuring Selena Gomez, ‘Calm Down’The crisply flirtatious “Calm Down,” by the Nigerian singer Rema, was already a major African hit when Selena Gomez added her voice for a remix. He’s confident, she’s inviting — at least for the moment — and the Afrobeats syncopation promises a good time.5. Emiliana Torrini and the Colorist Orchestra, ‘Right Here’A plinking Minimalist pulse and a deft chamber-pop arrangement carry the Icelandic songwriter Emiliana Torrini through fond thoughts of hard-won but durable domestic stability.Thom Yorke, left, and Jonny Greenwood of the Smile performing at Usher Hall in Edinburgh in June. The band also includes the drummer Tom Skinner.Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns, via Getty Images6. Lucrecia Dalt, ‘Atemporal’“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” Lucrecia Dalt’s heady concept album about time, physicality and love. It’s a lurching bolero that dovetails lo-fi nostalgia with vaudeville horns and an electronically skewed sense of space.7. Burna Boy, ‘Last Last’The Nigerian superstar Burna Boy juggles regrets, justifications and resentments as he sings about a romance wrecked by career pressures, drawing nervous momentum out of a strumming, fluttering sample from Toni Braxton.8. Aldous Harding, ‘Lawn’The tone is airy: unassuming piano chords; a high, naïve voice; a singsong melody. But in one of Aldous Harding’s least cryptic lyrics, she is trying to put the best face on a confusing breakup.9. Madison Cunningham, ‘Our Rebellion’Madison Cunningham sings, wryly and fondly, about an opposites-attract relationship in a tricky, virtuosic tangle of guitar lines.10. Big Thief, ‘Simulation Swarm’Adrianne Lenker’s wispy voice belies the visionary ambition — and ambiguity — of her lyrics. So does the way the band, not always in tune, cycles through four understated folk-rock chords, swerving occasionally into a bridge. It’s a love song with a backdrop of war and transformation, delivered like a momentary glimpse into something much vaster.11. Margo Price, ‘Lydia’Somewhere between folk-rock plaint and short story, Margo Price sings about a pregnant woman at a clinic, with a hard-luck past and a tough decision to make.12. Ice Spice, ‘Munch (Feelin’ U)’Cool, fast, precise and merciless, the Bronx rapper Ice Spice dispatches a hapless suitor by designating him as a new slang word: “munch.”13. Jamila Woods, ‘Boundaries’Mixing a suave bossa nova with a tapping, stubbornly resistant cross-rhythm, Jamila Woods neatly underlines the ambivalence she sings about, as she ponders just how close she wants someone to get.14. Stromae featuring Camila Cabello, ‘Mon Amour’The cheerful lilt of Stromae’s “Mon Amour” is camouflage for the increasingly threadbare rationalizations of a compulsive cheater; he gets his comeuppance when Camila Cabello asserts her own freedom to fool around.15. Giveon, ‘Lie Again’Giveon floats in a jealous limbo, hoping not to be exposed to hard truths. His voice is a baritone croon with an electronic penumbra, in a track that hints at old soul translated into ghostly electronics.16. Tyler ICU featuring Nkosazana Daughter, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, ‘Inhliziyo’No fewer than three leading producers of amapiano, the patient, midtempo South African club style, collaborated on “Inhliziyo” (“Heart”), creating haunted open spaces for the South African singer and songwriter Nkosazana Daughter to quietly lament a heartbreak.The Nigerian star Burna Boy addresses the challenges of balancing a relationship with his growing career on “Last Last.”Ferdy Damman/EPA, via Shutterstock17. Tinashe, ‘Something Like a Heartbreak’Nothing feels entirely solid in this song: not Tinashe’s breathy vocals, not the beat that flickers in and out of the mix, not the hovering tones that only sketch the chords. But in the haze, she realizes, “You don’t deserve my love,” and she moves on.18. Jessie Reyez, ‘Mutual Friend’Revenge arrives with cool fury over elegant, vintage-soul strings as Jessie Reyez makes clear that someone is definitely not getting a second chance.19. 070 Shake, ‘Web’Danielle Balbuena — the songwriter and producer who records as 070 Shake — overdubbed herself as a full-scale choir in “Web,” a pandemic-era reaction to the gap between onscreen and physical interaction. She wants carnality in real time, insisting, “Let’s be here in person.”20. Holly Humberstone, ‘Can You Afford to Lose Me?’In an ultimatum carried by a stately crescendo of keyboards, Holly Humberstone reminds a partner who’s threatening to leave just how much she has already put up with.21. Brian Eno, ‘There Were Bells’“There Were Bells” contemplates the slow-motion cataclysm of global warming as an elegy and a warning, with edgeless, tolling sounds and a mournful melody as Brian Eno sings about the destruction no one will escape.22. Caroline Polachek, ‘Billions’Is it love or capitalism? Caroline Polachek sings with awe-struck sweetness — and touches of hyperpop processing — against an otherworldly backdrop that incorporates electronics, tabla drumming and string sections, at once intimate and abstract.23. Stormzy, ‘Firebabe’In a wedding-ready, hymnlike ballad, Stormzy sings modestly and adoringly about a love at first sight that he intends to last forever.24. Hagop Tchaparian, ‘Right to Riot’A blunt four-on-the-floor thump might just be the least aggressive part of “Right to Riot” from the British Armenian musician Hagop Tchaparian, which also brandishes traditional sounds — six-beat drumming and the snarl of the double-reed zurna — and zapping, woofer-rattling electronics as it builds.25. Oren Ambarchi, ‘I’The first section of an album-length piece, “Shebang,” by the composer Oren Ambarchi, is a consonant hailstorm of staccato guitar notes, picked and looped, manipulated and layered, emerging as melodies and rejoining the ever-more-convoluted mesh.Jon Caramanica’s Top 22There are plenty of ways to try out something new — fooling around with your friends, tossing off a casual but not careless experiment, disappearing so deeply into a feeling that you forget form altogether.1. GloRilla featuring Cardi B, ‘Tomorrow 2’Kay Flock featuring Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory300, ‘Shake It’It was a great year for the Cardi B booster plan. Like Drake before her, she is an attentive listener and a seven-figure trend forecaster, as captured in these two cousin-like feature appearances. “Shake It” is as credible a drill song as a non-drill performer has yet made — Cardi’s verse is pugnacious and tart. And “Tomorrow 2,” with its big BFF energy, helps continue construction of a new pathway for female allyship in hip-hop.2. Ice Spice, ‘Munch (Feelin’ U)’Ice Spice is a gleefully patient rapper. On “Munch,” she pulls off a perfectly balanced tug of war between neg-heavy seduction and the affect of being utterly unbothered.3. Bailey Zimmerman, ‘Rock and a Hard Place’The trick of this catalog of a couple’s catastrophic collapse is that the arrangement never lets on that the circumstances are dire, but atop it, Bailey Zimmerman sings like he’s narrating a boxing match.4. Lil Yachty, ‘Poland’A non-song. A koan. A cry from beneath the ravenous eddies. A memory bubbling up from repression. A tractor beam. A stunt. A hopeful warble. A promise of infinite tomorrows.5. The Dare, ‘Girls’Epically silly and epically debauched, “Girls” marks a return(?) of quasi(?)-electroclash(?), but, more pointedly, is a reminder of the perennial power of lust, sweat and arch eroticism.Cardi B didn’t put out a lot of her own music in 2022, but she showed up in a savvy selection of features.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters6. Sadie Jean, ‘WYD Now? (10 Minute Version) [Open Verse Mashup]’The logical endpoint of the TikTok duet trend: one extended posse-cut version aggregating everyone’s labor into a lofi-beats-to-study-to forever loop. The wooden spoon provides.7. Lil Kee, ‘Catch a Murder’From his arresting debut mixtape “Letter 2 My Brother,” a caustic and bleak pledge of revenge from the Lil Baby affiliate Lil Kee, who sing-raps as if in a trance of menace.8. Cam’ron, Funk Flex #Freestyle171Another year, another casual calisthenics lesson from Cam’ron, the last avatar of the intricately economical style that dominated Harlem rap in the ’90s and remains staggering to observe.9. Yahritza y Su Esencia, ‘Soy El Unico’The first song Yahritza Martinez wrote — at age 13 — was “Soy El Unico,” a defiantly sad retort from a discarded partner to the discarder that pairs the groundedness of Mexican folk music with a vocal delivery inflected with hip-hop and R&B.10. Kate Gregson-MacLeod, ‘Complex (Demo)’This song began life as viral melancholy on TikTok, a brief portrait of someone stuck in the gravitational pull of a person who doesn’t deserve their care. The finished song is desolate but resilient, a hell of a plaint.11. NewJeans, ‘Cookie’Most striking about “Cookie,” the best song from the debut EP by the impressive young K-pop girl group NewJeans, is its ease — no maximalism, no theater. Simply a cheerful extended metaphor over an updated take on the club-oriented R&B of a couple of decades ago, finished off with a tasteful Jersey club breakdown.12. Jack Harlow featuring Drake, ‘Churchill Downs’The student befriends the teacher. Both drop out for a life of partying, followed by self-reflection, followed by more partying.13. Ethel Cain, ‘American Teenager’Midwest emo as refracted through Southeastern parchedness under a filter of radio pop-rock, delivering devastating sentiment about the emptiness of the American dream and the hopelessness of those subject to its whims.Ethel Cain turns a critical eye on the American dream with her debut album, “Preacher’s Daughter.”Irina Rozovsky for The New York Times14. Joji, ‘Glimpse of Us’You OK, bro?15. Delaney Bailey, ‘J’s Lullaby (Darlin’ I’d Wait for You)’One long ache about the one who’s slipping away: “Darlin’, I wish that you could give me some more time/To herd the whole sky in my arms/And release it when you’re mine.”16. Muni Long, ‘Another’Luscious, indignant, scolding.17. Romeo Santos featuring Rosalía, ‘El Pañuelo’Two traditionalists at heart, each feeling out the outer boundaries of their appetite for risk while still honoring what the other can’t quite do.18. Hitkidd featuring Aleza, Gloss Up, Slimeroni and K Carbon, ‘Shabooya’Roll-call rap that bridges the early ’80s to the early ’20s, with a cadre of Memphis women reveling in filth and sass.19. Kidd G featuring YNW BSlime, ‘Left Me’Lil Durk featuring Morgan Wallen, ‘Broadway Girls’What is hip-hop to country music these days? A source of vocal inspiration? A place for experimentation? Close kin? Safe harbor?20. Fireboy DML and Ed Sheeran, ‘Peru’The globe-dominating update of the Fireboy DML solo hit features bright seduction delivered with jaunty rhythm from Ed Sheeran.Lindsay Zoladz’s Top 25Anxiety abounds in this modern world, and music is one surefire way to process it — or maybe, for a few minutes at a time, to escape from it. The songs on this list consider both options.1. Hurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Life on Earth’Conventional wisdom tells us that life is short, time flies and there are never enough hours in the day. But Alynda Segarra takes the long view on this elegiac, piano-driven hymn: “Rivers and lakes/And floods and earthquakes/Life on Earth is long.” As it progresses at its own unhurried tempo, the song, remarkably, seems to slow down time, or at least zoom out until it becomes something geological rather than selfishly human-centric. The thick haze of climate grief certainly hangs over the track (“And though I might not meet you there, leaving it beyond repair”) but its lingering effect is one of generosity and spaciousness, inspiring a fresh appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things.2. The 1975, ‘Happiness’Matty Healy, the gregarious leader of the British pop group the 1975, is rarely at a loss for words, but on the supremely catchy “Happiness,” infatuation leaves him tongue-tied: “My, my, my, oh/My, my, my, you.” Ultimately, though, the song becomes an ode to giving oneself over to forces beyond control: like love, the unknown or maybe just the groove — particularly the loose, sparkling atmosphere the band taps into here.3. Beyoncé, ‘Alien Superstar’The moon is a disco ball and it orbits around Beyoncé on this commanding dance-floor banger, a studied but lived-in ode to ball culture and Afrofuturism. Like the rest of the remarkable “Renaissance,” the song’s focus flickers constantly from the individual to the collective, as Beyoncé’s braggadocious boasts of being No. 1, the only one, share space with her exhortations to find that unicorn energy within: “Unique, that’s what you are,” she intones regally, before a transcendent finale in which the song takes flight on a Funkadelic spaceship of its own making.4. Amanda Shires, ‘Take It Like a Man’The melody keeps ascending to nervy, dangerous heights, like a high-wire walk without a net: “I know the cost of flight is landing,” Amanda Shires sings on this imagistic torch song, trilling like some newly discovered species of bird. The title is playfully provocative, but it takes a twist in the song’s final lyric, when Shires proclaims, “I know I can take it like … Amanda” — a fitting finale for such a singular song of self.Amanda Shires makes a strong statement on “Take It Like a Man,” also the name of her latest album.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York Times5. Taylor Swift, ‘Anti-Hero’Rejoice, you who have suffered through “Look What You Made Me Do,”“Me!” and even “Cardigan”: For the first time in nearly a decade, Taylor Swift has picked the correct lead single. “Anti-Hero” is one of the high points of Swift’s ongoing collaboration with the producer Jack Antonoff: The phrasing is chatty but not overstuffed, the synthesizers underline Swift’s emotions rather than obscuring them and the insecurities feel like genuine transmissions from Swift’s somnambulant psyche. Prospective daughters-in-law, you’ve been warned.6. Rosalía, ‘Despechá’Rosalía, smacking her gum, eyebrows raised, one hand on an exaggeratedly cocked hip: That’s the attitude, and this is its soundtrack. “Despechá” — abbreviated slang for spiteful — is a lighter-than-air, mambo-nodding dance-floor anthem, and an invitation to join the ranks of the Motomamis. As always, she makes pop perfection sound as easy as A-B-C.7. Pusha T, ‘Diet Coke’Pusha T, is, as ever, part rap-poet and part insult comic on the razor-sharp “Diet Coke,” bending language to his will and laughing his enemies right out of the V.I.P. room: “You ordered Diet Coke — that’s a joke, right?”8. Chloe Moriondo, ‘Fruity’“Fruity,” like the best hyperpop, is an anarchic affront to refinement and restraint, an ever-escalating blast of melodic delirium and warped excess. It’s a sugar rush, it’s brain-freeze-inducing, it’s recommended by zero out of 10 dentists. Turn it up loud.9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs featuring Perfume Genius, ‘Spitting off the Edge of the World’Yeah Yeah Yeahs grow elegantly into their role as art-rock elders here, not just by slowing to a tempo as confidently glacial as the Cure’s “Plainsong,” but by placing a spotlight on the existential dread of the next generation. “Mama, what have you done?” Karen O sings, channeling the voice of a frightened child. “I trace your steps in the darkness of one/Am I what’s left?”10. Grace Ives, ‘Lullaby’Grace Ives makes music of interiority, chronicling the liminal moments of her day when she’s by herself, daydreaming: “I hear the neighbors sing ‘Love Galore,’ I do a split on the kitchen floor,” goes the charming “Lullaby,” a passionately sung, welcoming invitation into her world.11. Weyes Blood, ‘It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’The pandemic left many people isolated in their own heads, questioning their perceptions, feeling disconnected from a larger whole. The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering has written a soothing anthem for all those lost souls in the emotionally generous “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”; its title alone is an offering of solace and sanity.12. Florence + the Machine, ‘Free’A bass line buzzes like a live wire, snaking continuously through this exorcism of anxiety. “The feeling comes so fast, and I cannot control it,” Florence Welch wails as if possessed, but she eventually finds her catharsis in the music itself: “For a moment, when I’m dancing, I am free.”13. Ice Spice, ‘Munch (Feelin’ U)’“I’m walking past him, he sniffing my breeze,” the rising star Ice Spice spits expeditiously on this unbothered anthem; before he can even process the insult, she’s gone.14. Drake, ‘Down Hill’A sparse palette from 40 — finger snaps, moody synth washes, light Afrobeats vibes — gives Drake plenty of room to explore his melancholy on this standout from the welcome left turn “Honestly, Nevermind.”15. Alex G, ‘Miracles’An aching, bittersweet meditation on the holiness of the everyday, and an expression of intimacy from one of indie rock’s most mysterious, and best, songwriters.16. Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Western Wind’The one-time “Call Me Maybe” ingénue shows off a breezier and more mature side, as impressionistic production from Rostam Batmanglij helps her conjure California sunshine.17. Mitski, ‘Stay Soft’“You stay soft, get eaten — only natural to harden up,” Mitski sings on this sleek but deceptively vulnerable pop song, as her voice, fittingly, oscillates between icy cool and wrenching ardor.Drake takes a refreshing swerve into dance music with the songs on “Honestly, Nevermind.”Prince Williams/Wireimage, via Getty Images18. Miranda Lambert, ‘Strange’Down is up and wrong is right in this topsy-turvy, tumbleweed-blown country rocker, on which a wizened Miranda Lambert sings like a woman who’s seen it all: “Pick a string, sing the blues, dance a hole in your shoes, do anything to keep you sane.”19. Plains, ‘Problem With It’Katie Crutchfield, better known as Waxahatchee, embraces her twang and her Alabama upbringing on this collaboration with the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson; the result is a feisty, ’90s-nodding country-pop gem.20. Charli XCX, ‘Constant Repeat’“I’m cute and I’m rude with kinda rare attitude,” she boasts on the best song from her aerodynamic “Crash” — a top-tier lyric befitting some next-level Charli.21. Alvvays, ‘Belinda Says’As in Belinda Carlisle, whom the Alvvays frontwoman Molly Rankin addresses at the climactic moment of this blissfully moody song: “Heaven is a place on Earth, well so is hell.” Towering waves of shoegaze-y guitars accentuate her melancholy and give the song an emotional pull as elemental as a tide.22. Jessie Ware, ‘Free Yourself’A thumping, glittery one-off single from the British musician finds her continuing in the vein of her 2020 disco reinvention “What’s Your Pleasure?” and proving that she’s still finding fresh inspiration from that sound.23. Koffee, ‘Pull Up’The Jamaican upstart Koffee has a contagious positivity about her, and this reggae-pop earworm is an effortless encapsulation of her spirit.24. Anaïs Mitchell, ‘Little Big Girl’“No one ever told you it would be like this: You keep on getting older, but you feel just like a little kid,” the folk musician Anaïs Mitchell sings on this moving standout from her first solo album in a decade, which poignantly chronicles the emotions of a demographic drastically underexplored in popular music: women at midlife.25. The Weather Station, ‘Endless Time’“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in a mirror-fogging exhale, eulogizing a whole host of things taken for granted — love, happiness, the inhabitability of Earth — expressing a fragile, and very human, disbelief that they won’t last forever. More

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      Carly Rae Jepsen’s Brand-New Boy Problems, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by DJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom, the 1975 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.Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Beach House’Boy problems? Carly Rae Jepsen’s got them in spades on “Beach House,” a cheeky earworm from her forthcoming album “The Loneliest Time.” Jepsen employs her deadpan sense of humor as she lists off the red flags and deal-breakers that marred relationships with “Boy No. 1” to “Boy No. I Can’t Keep Count Anymore.” Amid all the silliness, though (“I got a beach house in Malibu,” one prospect tells her, “and I’m probably gonna hurt your feelings”), the song effectively taps into the romantic frustration of endless, “Groundhog Day”-esque first dates and long-term singledom: “I’ve been on this ride, this roller coaster’s a carousel,” Jepsen sings on the anguished pre-chorus, “And I’m getting nowhere.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, ‘Staying Alive’A quizzically melancholic opening salvo from the upcoming DJ Khaled album “God Did,” “Staying Alive” nods casually to the Bee Gees on the way to somewhere far less ecstatic. In this construction, staying alive is an act of defiance, not exuberance. Drake bemoans “This life that allow me to take what I want/it’s not like I know what I want,” while in the video, he plays a doctor smoking hookah in the hospital and absently signing off on charts of patients who might need some help achieving the song’s title. JON CARAMANICABenny Blanco, BTS and Snoop Dogg, ‘Bad Decisions’Equally unimaginative as the BTS English-language breakthrough hit “Dynamite” but somehow less cloying, this collaboration benefits from the grandfatherly presence of Snoop Dogg, who at this stage of his career always raps as if his eyebrow is arched, and he can’t quite believe what he’s called upon to do either. CARAMANICAThe 1975, ‘Happiness’“Happiness,” the latest single from the eclectic British pop group the 1975, manages to sound both sleek and a little spontaneous; the dense, ’80s-inspired production gleams but there’s always enough air circulating to keep the atmosphere well ventilated. The frontman Matty Healy sounds uncharacteristically laid back here, trading in his usual arch, hyper-referential lyrics for simpler sentiments: “Show me your love, why don’t you?” he croons on an ecstatic chorus that’s catchy without feeling overdetermined. The video, directed by Samuel Bradley, is a hoot, finding the group mugging in all variety of louche, gorgeously lit environments — basically the visual equivalent of the lush saxophone solo that drops in the middle of the song. ZOLADZBandmanrill, ‘Real Hips’A surprisingly luscious and nimble offering from the Newark rapper Bandmanrill that makes plain the through lines that connect drill music, Jersey club and bass music. CARAMANICAPanda Bear & Sonic Boom, ‘Edge of the Edge’Fans of Panda Bear’s beloved 2007 album “Person Pitch” will likely enjoy the sunny, collagelike “Edge of the Edge,” which will appear on “Reset,” the Animal Collective member’s collaborative album with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, out next week. “Edge of the Edge” pairs a playful sample of the doo-wop group Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise” with Panda’s serenely melodic vocals, which cut through the carefree, pop-psychedelic vibe with some light social critique: “Can’t say it’s what you bargained for,” he sings, wagging a finger at the frenzied escalation of technology, “It’s forever at the push of a button.” The song, in opposition, sounds contentedly off the grid. ZOLADZBonny Light Horseman, ‘Exile’The voices of Eric D. Johnson and Anaïs Mitchell entwine beautifully on “Exile,” the opening track from the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman’s upcoming second album “Rolling Golden Holy.” The song is a duet in the truest emotional sense, as Mitchell swoops in to finish some of Johnson’s lines and, on the chorus, provides a warm, glowing harmony that meets his lonely plea, “I don’t wanna live in exile.” ZOLADZYoungBoy Never Broke Again featuring Rod Wave, ‘Home Ain’t Home’The two loneliest howlers in hip-hop unite for a meditation on the joylessness of fame. CARAMANICA More

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      After 16 Years in ‘Hadestown,’ Anaïs Mitchell Emerges With a New Album

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      The singer-songwriter fully plunged into her acclaimed theater project. Since then, her life changed wildly — and she recaptured the desire to record her own music.BRISTOL, Vt. — Eight years ago, shortly before the birth of her first child, the musician Anaïs Mitchell was instructed in a hypnobirthing class to envision her “happy place,” and was flooded with a sense memory from her rural Vermont childhood.She was in her grandparents’ house, which her father helped build, “laying on the carpeted floor in a sunbeam coming through the sliding glass door,” she recalled. Something fragrant was cooking on the stove. Her grandmother quilted while young Anaïs stenciled, crafted, or, later, scribbled lines that would become the basis of her earliest songs.In early January, a now 40-year-old Mitchell stood in that same living room, taking in the house’s rich history. Her wide blue eyes smudged with dark liner, she wore a flannel button-down and a Brooklyn Nets beanie, not an expression of fandom so much as a sartorial homage to the city she used to call home.In the decades since that childhood memory, she’s become an accomplished singer-songwriter and a force behind one of the most successful and celebrated Broadway musicals of the past few years, the eight-time Tony-winning hit “Hadestown.” By this time next year, Mitchell hopes to be living in this house with her husband and children, bringing up her two daughters on the very same family farm on which she was raised.“It’s intense to go home,” she said. “I know everyone; it’s a small town.” When she runs into people she has known her whole life, she admitted, it can be easy to revert to her childhood self. “I was a little scared to move back for that reason,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not the thing you should do.”In some sense, leaving Brooklyn for Vermont was a practical choice: Mitchell was nine months pregnant with her second child when Covid-19 hit New York. “One day I pulled our older kid out of school and the next day we bought a car,” she said. “And then the next day Broadway closed and I was like, we’re leaving. We drove to Vermont and the baby was born a week later at my parents’ farm.”It’s in many ways an ordinary story — how many city-dwellers fled to the country? — but her telling has the narrative beats of an epic myth. In that way, it feels like an Anaïs Mitchell song.Foreground from left, Eva Noblezada, Andre De Shields and Amber Gray in “Hadestown,” which opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There’s something in the way her ideas connect and always come back around,” said Josh Kaufman, the musician and producer who plays with Mitchell in the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman. “She has a very lived-in knowledge of traditional music and folk songs. But as a human she’s also incredibly in-the-moment, which allows her to anchor everything in the present.”Once a prolific solo artist, it’s been nearly a decade since Mitchell released music under her own name. But on Jan. 28, she’s returning with a self-titled album, produced by Kaufman — a collection of the most personal songs she has ever released. She sometimes attempted to write her own music during those long, busy years of working on “Hadestown,” but she ultimately “felt like I was cheating on it if I did anything else.”“I’m so proud of what we made and there was so much joy in the making of it,” she added, “but it was also an unsustainable way of living, that level of stress.”Adapted from a humble, low-budget community theater project she debuted in Montpelier in 2006, “Hadestown” brought the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into conversation with such modern phenomena as capitalism, climate change and New Orleans-style jazz.In 2010, Mitchell released a concept album called “Hadestown,” featuring songs from the initial Vermont theater production sung by some of her folk peers: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver voiced Orpheus, Ani DiFranco was Persephone. But Mitchell still dreamed of adapting a more ambitious stage production.“Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin said in a phone interview. “So often the process of creating can seem really abstract,” she added. “What is very beautiful about Anaïs is that she lives very openly in the process of turning over words and images, feeling them around in her mouth and on her guitar.”When “Hadestown” opened at the Walter Kerr Theater in April 2019 (taking over for “Springsteen on Broadway”), Mitchell became just the fourth woman to compose the music, lyrics and book of a Broadway musical. The moment was a turning point in her journey with a project she’d been living with for 13 long years. But there comes a time in a show’s life when even the most involved writer must find a new space.“There was a funny moment that happened as soon as the show opened on Broadway, where suddenly I didn’t have a home in the theater anymore,” Mitchell said when we first met up in Manhattan in the courtyard of the Standard Hotel last November. “Literally: It used to be, this is my seat, this is where I go play guitar in the stairwell. And then suddenly the audience is there and there’s nowhere for me.”But this necessary step back from “Hadestown” finally gave her the opportunity to reconnect with the music world from which she’d long been absent, and return to her own, more intimate form of songwriting.“Hadestown” and her stirring 2012 album “Young Man in America” involved a lot of “dressing up in costumes, getting access to some kind of larger-than-life feelings and language, like, ‘I’m the king of the Underworld,’” she said, laughing for a moment as she did her best Hades impression. “I do really enjoy that. But these songs are all me, the stories are my stories. That feels very different.”“A songwriter is kind of a songwright,” Mitchell said. “It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTHOUGH SHE IS not quite at the level of Ben, Jerry or Bernie, Mitchell is certifiably Vermont Famous — the sort of New Englander who gets recognized in hushed tones at folk festivals and farmers’ markets. Her hair is shaggy and dyed darker than the blonde of her “Hadestown” days, and she speaks in a chiming voice that often sounds innocently wonder-struck, before a joke or a playful bit of profanity suddenly brings it back down to earth.Behind the wheel of her salt-kissed Chrysler Pacifica in January, she pointed out local landmarks on the 15-minute drive between the house she is renting in Bristol and her parents’ farm: her high school; a sign for a local “radical puppetry” company; a humorously and undeniably phallic-shaped headstone that has always made her laugh (“Who chose that?”).Mitchell describes her parents as “hippies, back-to-the-landers.” In the late 1960s, her father, Don, scored a book deal when he was still a Swarthmore undergraduate, for a semi-autobiographical hitchhiking novel he’d written called “Thumb Tripping.” He sold the movie rights, moved to Los Angeles with his young wife, Cheryl, and wrote the screenplay to a pulpy, “Easy Rider”-era film adaptation of his book. He cashed out in the early 1970s and used his Hollywood earnings to buy a 130-acre farm in Vermont’s Champlain Valley.For most of Anaïs’s childhood, her entire family lived on the property, including her grandparents in that wooden house her father helped build for them. Cheryl opposed television, so young Anaïs would sneak over to her grandparents’ place whenever she wanted to watch; she has fond and uncommonly subversive memories of the nightly news with Dan Rather. She rode horses, roamed the woods with her older brother and, like her namesake Anaïs Nin, journaled prolifically.She found those old diaries recently in a box in her grandparents’ house, and the experience inspired “Revenant,” a heartfelt, acoustic-guitar-driven song on the new album that finds her extending a mature grace to her younger self: “Suddenly I saw you there, runny-eyed in a wooden chair/Ran outside to hide your face in the wild Queen Anne’s lace,” she sings. “Come and let me hold you in my arms/Come and get my shoulder wet and warm.”Mitchell went to Middlebury College, and supported herself as a figure model for art classes. “I was always very comfortable nude because no one can see us here, so everyone would skinny-dip,” she said on the secluded farm. When she was 19, one of those gigs led to the sort of meet-cute that might appear in an R-rated comedy: Noah Hahn, a student in one of the classes, turned out to be the man she would marry.They were apart quite a bit in the early years of their relationship, as Mitchell was paying her dues on the road as an aspiring singer-songwriter. But — as she proposes on the new album’s ode to an artist’s muse, “Bright Star” — sometimes longing and distance can bear unexpected fruit. She was driving home alone from a show one night, hoping Noah was waiting up for her, when the melody and a few lyrics of what would become the first “Hadestown” song came to her out of the blue:“Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?”Mitchell and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin. “Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” Chavkin said.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesLIKE THE LONG gestating “Hadestown” (Chavkin compares the pace at which Mitchell works to “watching a tree grow, because it’s so deep, so imperceptible”), one of the most affecting songs on Mitchell’s new album took years to finish writing.“Little Big Girl” is partially about the tension she experienced returning to her hometown, appearing to the outside world as a grown and accomplished woman while, internally, still feeling like that same scrappy little Anaïs she was years ago. But the song is roomy enough to tap into a more universal sentiment — how strange it is that we all “keep on getting older” while still feeling “just like a kid.” Or, more specifically, that the world treats you as an ever-aging woman when you sometimes feel as defenseless as a little girl.“There’s so much art made by people in their 20s about the ups and downs of your love life,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been there and I love that music. It’s very deep and real. But there’s also all these other elements of being the age I am now, and being a mom, and relocating myself in the world and in my family. I want to be able to write about that stuff, too.”Mitchell knows this kind of work can be too easily dismissed as “culturally irrelevant mom art,” as she put it. But the remarkable specificity of her songcraft and the expansive, almost mythic scope she brings to her human experience as a wife, mother and 40-something woman demand to be taken seriously.“On her other records, it’s someone else’s epic poem that she’s running through her own beautiful sense of language and harmony,” Kaufman said. “On this one, she’s looking back like, ‘I have my own epic poem here. There’s these people, these relatives, my kids, my long relationship with my husband, my long relationship with my songwriting.’ It’s a self-portrait, but like any compelling self-portrait it’s vulnerable enough that you almost feel like you’re looking in a mirror. It resonates deeply because it’s so honest.”Ideally, Mitchell said, “the song could live on without you.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesFOR ONE NIGHT in November 2021, Mitchell once again had a designated seat in the theater when she attended the reopening of “Hadestown” following its pandemic closure. “It just made me miss the process of working on that show so much,” she said later. “I spent the first act of the show spinning wheels in my head like, ‘What musical could I write next? I need another story!’” She is content for now to focus on her work as a solo artist and with Bonny Light Horseman, though the thought of never writing another stage show after “Hadestown” would be like if she “went to grad school and then didn’t use the degree.”Mitchell doesn’t see such a clear delineation between the two artistic worlds she straddles, though. “I do think there’s a common denominator with writing for the theater and writing songs,” she said. “Ideally, the song could live on without you. You don’t have to sing it, someone else could sing it. I love that. Someone singing it at their wedding, or at a funeral, or at a protest.”She reached for a bit of lingual antiquity and metaphor that tracks closely to her own move to Vermont. “You know how you spell playwright as playwright, like you’re building or constructing something?” she asked. “A songwriter is kind of a songwright. It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.” More

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      Love, Trust and Heartbreak on Two Stages

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      The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More

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      in Theater

      Fehinti Balogun's Call to Action Unfolds Onstage at COP26

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      A filmed version of Fehinti Balogun’s play about his awakening to climate issues is being shown at the COP26 summit. He is among the theater artists trying to make a difference through their work.The actor Fehinti Balogun knows that theater can mobilize people toward climate action, because that’s what it did for him.Back in 2017, while preparing for a role in “Myth,” a climate parable, he began reading books about climate change and became alarmed by the unusually warm summer he was experiencing in England. The play itself called for him and the other actors to repeatedly run through the same mundane lines, to the point of absurdity, as their environment ruptured terrifyingly around them — the walls streaking with oil, the stove catching fire, the freezer oozing water.The whole experience changed his life, Balogun said. Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than addressing the global crisis. Not even landing the lead in a West End production (a long-coveted dream) of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” His growing anxiety made him feel as if he were living a real-world version of “Myth” in which society kept repeating the same old script even as the planet descended into chaos.“Knowing all that I did made me angry at the world for not doing anything,” the 26-year-old Balogun (“Dune,” “I May Destroy You”) said in a phone interview. “I didn’t get how we weren’t revolting.”That sense of urgency is what he said he hopes to pass along to audiences in “Can I Live?,” a new play that he wrote, stars in and created with the theater company Complicité. A filmed version of the piece, which also features supporting actors and musicians and was originally conceived as a live show, was screened Monday as part of COP26, the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow. The resulting work is as innovative as any piece of theater to emerge during the Covid-19 era: Initially it appears to be just an intimate Zoom session with Balogun but evolves into an explosive mix of spoken word, animation, hip-hop and dialogue.Balogun in “Can I Live?,” which he conceived and wrote. The play, a mix of spoken word, animation, hip-hop and dialogue, can be streamed online through Nov. 12.David HewittThe hourlong production, which the Barbican Center has made available for streaming on its website through Nov. 12, combines scientific facts about how the greenhouse effect works with the story of Balogun’s own journey into the climate movement. It also focuses on the gap between the largely white mainstream environmental groups he joined, and the experiences of his primarily Black friends and family.Throughout the show, Balogun fields phone calls from family members about issues seemingly unrelated to the central thrust of the play, asking him when he’s going to get married or why he left a bag in the hallway at home. Though at first it seems as if they are interrupting Balogun’s primary narrative about “emissions, emissions, emissions,” as he sings at one point, their interjections hammer home one of his central ideas: If the movement isn’t willing to prioritize someone like his Nigerian grandma, it’s missing the point. Climate action, in other words, is for everyday people with everyday concerns.“The goal is to make grass-roots activism accessible, and to represent people of color and working-class people,” he said. To that end, he interweaves his own story with that of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned against destructive oil extraction on behalf of his Ogoni people. “So often we don’t talk about the global South,” Balogun said. “We don’t talk about the communities who’ve been leading this fight for years.”Though Balogun is the only theater artist on the official COP26 schedule, he is certainly not the first playwright to grapple with climate themes. Climate Change Theater Action, an initiative of the nonprofit the Arctic Cycle, was created to encourage theater-making that might draw greater attention to COP21, the U.N. climate meeting in 2015 that resulted in the landmark Paris Agreement. (The theater group has never been officially affiliated with any of the annual COP meetings.)Since its inception, the group has produced 200 works that have been performed for 40,000 people in 30 countries, said its co-founder, Chantal Bilodeau. The organization commissions plays with environmental themes, paying the writers and then providing the scripts free to theater companies, schools or any other groups that want to stage readings or productions.The first year, Bilodeau said, they ended up with a “whole lot of depressing plays.” Now they try to steer playwrights away from dystopia and toward visions of a livable future, and encourage those staging the works to pair them with programming that helps audiences get a deeper understanding of the issues.Superhero Clubhouse’s after-school program, Big Green Theater, helps produce works focusing on climate issues. One such piece, “The Mystical Jungle and Luminescence City,” being filmed above, was written by fifth-grade students in Queens and is now on YouTube.Rachel Denise AprilLanxing Fu, co-director of the nonprofit Superhero Clubhouse in New York City, spends part of her time focused on those who will be most affected by a hotter planet: the next generation. Through Superhero Clubhouse’s after-school program Big Green Theater, run in collaboration with the Bushwick Starr and the Astoria Performing Arts Center, public elementary school students in Brooklyn and Queens are taught about climate issues and write plays in response to what they’re learning.Over a decade after the program began, Fu said that what is most striking about the students’ plays is how instinctively the young writers understand a basic truth about climate that evades a lot of adults: to find long-term solutions, we’ll need to work together.“A huge element of climate resilience is in the community we build and how we come together,” she said. “That’s always really present in their stories; it’s often part of the way that something gets resolved.”The Queens-based playwright and TV writer Dorothy Fortenberry also spends plenty of time thinking about children’s roles in the movement. Her play “The Lotus Paradox,” which will have its world premiere in January at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C., asks, What happens when children are constantly receiving the message that it’s their job to save the world? Like much of Fortenberry’s work in TV (she’s a writer on “The Handmaid’s Tale”), “The Lotus Paradox” includes the subject of climate change without making it the singular focus of the story.From left, the actors DeBryant Johnson, Jason D. Johnson and Dayanari Umana during a workshop for “The Lotus Paradox,” which debuts in January at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C.Andrew Huang“If you’re making a story about anything, in any place, and you don’t have climate change in it, that’s a science-fiction story,” she said. “You have made a choice to make the story less realistic than it would have been otherwise.”That’s a sentiment also shared by Anaïs Mitchell, the musician and writer of the musical “Hadestown,” which reopened on Broadway in September. In her retelling of Greek mythology, Hades is portrayed in song as a greedy “king of oil and coal” who fuels his industrialized hell of an underworld with the “fossils of the dead.” Aboveground, the lead characters, Orpheus and Eurydice, endure food scarcity and brutal weather that’s “either blazing hot or freezing cold,” a framing that was inspired by headlines about climate refugees.It’s worth intentionally wrestling with climate narratives in the theater, not just because they make plays more believable, Mitchell said, but also because theater might just be one of best tools for handling such themes. Like Orpheus trying to put things right with a song that shows “how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is,” Mitchell sees theater as a powerful tool for helping us imagine our way into a better future.“Theater is capable of opening our hearts and our eyes to an alternate reality than the one we’re living in,” she said.That’s why Balogun — though he remarks more than once in “Can I Live?” that he’s “not a scientist” — said he believes he has just as crucial a role to play as any climatologist. “Scientists are begging for artists and theater makers to help deliver this message,” he said. “And there’s a need for it now more than ever.” More

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      Alicia Keys’s Hypnotic Love Jam, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Anaïs Mitchell, Hurray for the Riff Raff, ASAP Rocky 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.Alicia Keys, ‘Best of Me’The steady, diligent beat is from Sade’s “Cherish the Day” by way of Raphael Saadiq; the promises of loyalty, honesty and absolute devotion are from Alicia Keys as she channels Sade’s utterly self-sacrificing love. “We could build a castle from tears,” Keys vows. The track is hypnotic and open-ended, fading rather than resolving, as if it could go on and on. It’s from a double album coming Dec. 10 featuring two versions of the songs: “Originals,” produced by Keys, and “Unlocked,” produced by Keys and Mike Will Made-It. JON PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Rhododendron’The first single from Hurray for the Riff Raff’s forthcoming album “Life on Earth” is frisky and poetic, contrasting the wisdom of the natural world with the chaos of humanity. The New Orleans singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra (who uses they/she pronouns) is so enthralled with the wonders of plant life that they are able to extract lyricism from simply listing off some famous flora (“night blooming jasmine, deadly nightshade”) in a wonderfully Dylan-esque growl. The chorus, though, comes as a warning in the face of ecological destruction: “Don’t turn your back on the mainland.” LINDSAY ZOLADZKylie Minogue and Jessie Ware, ‘Kiss of Life’Following her excellent 2020 disco-revival record “What’s Your Pleasure?” (and this year’s Platinum Pleasure Edition, which contained enough top-tier bonus material to make an equally excellent EP) Jessie Ware gets the ultimate co-sign from the dancing queen herself, Kylie Minogue, on this playful duet. Their breathy vocals echo throughout the lush arrangement, as they trade whispered innuendo (“Cherry syrup on my tongue/how about a little fun?”) and eventually join together in sumptuous harmony. ZOLADZBaba Harare featuring Kae Chaps and Joseph Tivafire, ‘Vaccine’Baba Harare, from Zimbabwe, is a master of the genre called jiti: a speedy four-against-six beat that carries stuttering, syncopated guitars and deep gospel-tinged harmony vocals. In “Vaccine,” he’s joined by fellow Zimbabweans Kae Chaps and Joseph Tivafire, and between the hurtling beat and the call-and-response vocals, the song is pure joy. PARELESBitchin Bajas, ‘Outer Spaceways Incorporated’The latest project from the freewheeling ambient drone group Bitchin Bajas is boldly conceptual: a homage to one of the Chicago trio’s formative heroes, Sun Ra. As daunting as it may sound to reinterpret some of the cosmic jazz god’s most innovative compositions, Bitchin Bajas approach the challenge with a playful ingenuity. Take their cover of “Outer Spaceways Incorporated,” which in its original form is a loose, interstellar groove. Bitchin Bajas refract it instead through the lens of one of their other major influences, Wendy Carlos (hence the title “Switched on Ra”) and turn it into a kind of retro-futuristic waltz. The guest vocalist Jayve Montgomery uses an Electronic Wind Instrument to great effect, enlivening the song with an energy that’s both eerie and moving. ZOLADZASAP Rocky, ‘Sandman’ASAP Rocky has been featured on plenty of other artists’ tracks over the past few years, but “Sandman” — released to commemorate his breakthrough 2011 mixtape “Live.Love.ASAP” finally coming to streaming services — is his first new solo song since 2018. Produced by Kelvin Krash and ASAP fave Clams Casino, “Sandman” toggles between hazy atmospherics and sudden gearshifts into the more exacting side of Rocky’s flow. Plus, it gives him an opportunity to practice his French: “Merci beaucoup, just like Moulin Rouge/And I know I can, can.” Quelle surprise! ZOLADZCollectif Mali Kura, ‘L’Appel du Mali Kura’The project Collectif Mali Kura gathered 20 singers and rappers to share a call for hard work, civic responsibility (including paying taxes) and national unity in Mali. Sung in many languages, with bits of melody and instrumental flourishes that hint at multiple traditions, the song starts as a plaint and turns into an affirmation of possibility. PARELESJorge Drexler and C. Tangana, ‘Tocarte’“Tocarte” (“To Touch You”) is the second deceptively skeletal collaboration released by Jorge Drexler, from Uruguay, and C. Tangana, from Spain; the first, a tale of a showbiz has-been titled “Nominao,” has been nominated for a Latin Grammy as best alternative song. “Tocarte” is a pandemic-era track about longing for physical contact: It constructs a taut, ingenious phantom gallop of a beat out of plucked acoustic guitar notes, hand percussion and sampled voices, and neither Drexler nor Tangana raises his voice as they envision long-awaited embraces. PARELESHayes Carll, ‘Nice Things’In the twangy, foot-stomping, gravel-voiced, fiddle-topped country-rocker “Nice Things,” which opens his new album, “You Get It All,” the Texan songwriter Hayes Carll imagines a visit from God. She (yes, she) runs into pollution, over-policing and close-minded religion. “This is why I blessed you with compassion/This is why I said to love your neighbor,” she notes, before realizing, “This is why y’all can’t have nice things.” PARELESAnaïs Mitchell, ‘Bright Star’Before she wrote the beloved Tony-winning musical “Hadestown,” Anaïs Mitchell was best known as a gifted if perpetually underrated folk singer-songwriter with a knack for traditional storytelling. The stage success of “Hadestown” (which itself began life as a 2010 Mitchell album) forced her to put her career as a solo artist on hold, but early next year she’ll return with a self-titled album, her first solo release in a decade. Its leadoff single “Bright Star” is a worthy reintroduction to the openhearted luminosity of Mitchell’s voice and lyricism: “I have sailed in all directions, have followed your reflection to the farthest foreign shore,” she sings atop gently strummed acoustic chords, with all the contented warmth of someone who, after a long time away, has at last returned home. ZOLADZAoife O’Donovan featuring Allison Russell, ‘Prodigal Daughter’Aoife O’Donovan sings delicately about a reunion that could hardly be more fraught; after seven years, a daughter returns to her mother with a new baby, needing a home and knowing full well that “forgiveness won’t come easy.” O’Donovan reverses what would be a singer’s typical reflexes; as drama and tension rise, her voice grows quieter and clearer, while Allison Russell joins her with ghostly harmonies. As a tiptoeing string band backs O’Donovan’s pleas, Tim O’Brien plays echoes of Irish folk tunes on mandola, a musical hint at multigenerational bonds. PARELESMarissa Nadler, ‘Bessie, Did You Make It?’How about a chillingly beautiful modern murder ballad to cap off spooky season? The folk singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler’s new album “The Path of the Clouds,” (out Friday on, appropriately enough, Sacred Bones) was partially inspired by her quarantine binge-watch of choice: “Unsolved Mysteries.” The opening track “Bessie, Did You Make It?” creates a misty atmosphere of reverb-heavy piano and arpeggiated guitar, as Nadler tells a tale of a nearly century-old boat accident that was never quite explained. “Did you make it?” she asks her elusive subject, who seems to have perished that day along with her husband. Or: “Did you fake it, leave someone else’s bones?” ZOLADZArtifacts, ‘Song for Joseph Jarman’Artifacts features three of the leading creative improvisers on the Chicago scene: the flutist Nicole Mitchell, the cellist Tomeka Reid and the drummer Mike Reed. All are deeply entwined in the lineage of their home city, and on “Song for Joseph Jarman” — from Artifacts’ sophomore release, “ … and Then There’s This” — the trio pays homage to an influential ancestor with this slow, hushed, deeply attentive group improvisation. It’s not unlike something Jarman himself might have played. Reid and Mitchell hold long tones more than they move around, sounding as if they’re listening for a response from within each note. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More