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      My Favorite Concerts I Saw This Winter

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      Hear music from Father John Misty, Mustafa and other artists our critic caught onstage so far this year.Father John MistyEmma McIntyre/Getty Images for AbaDear listeners,Even during this long, often bitterly cold winter, I sometimes made it out of my apartment — please clap — to see live music. To commemorate this monumental human achievement, today I’m offering you a playlist of some of the best artists I’ve caught onstage so far this year.They include a one-woman band with a flair for electronic wizardry (Time Wharp), a young poet turned songwriter with a gorgeously heavy-hearted voice (Mustafa) and a sharp satirist who knows exactly when to get unexpectedly sincere (Father John Misty). I intend for these occasional reports from live shows to become a new recurring Amplifier feature, so look out for more of them in the near future — once the weather turns temperate enough that I am compelled to leave my home even more frequently. Spring: Please hurry!I spent a hundred bucks on gas, baby, let’s just have a good time,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Father John Misty: “She Cleans Up”Last Wednesday, the singer-songwriter Father John Misty played Manhattan’s storied Beacon Theater for the first time. Toward the end of the sold-out show, he told the crowd he wanted to commemorate the occasion with a tribute: “Here’s five minutes from Jerry Seinfeld’s set from his Beacon run last year.” Classic Father John Misty banter — and not true at all, since he immediately launched into another of his own wryly incisive tunes. FJM (whose real name is Joshua Tillman) certainly has a way with a Harry Nilsson-style ballad, as he demonstrated throughout the Beacon set, but one of my favorite moments of the night came when he played this verbose rocker from his latest album, the wide-ranging 2024 release “Mahashmashana.” Elaine Benes dance optional.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube2. Time Wharp: “Lupron”It remains by far the most imaginative, technically impressive live cover I’ve seen so far this year: One late January night at Berlin, a small venue in the East Village, the experimental musician Kaye Loggins, who records as Time Wharp, used loop pedals and a distorted electric guitar to build a completely singular instrumental rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote.” You will, unfortunately, just have to take my word for it, since that seems to have been a one-off performance. But this luminous, hypnotic track from Time Wharp’s excellent 2022 album “Spiro World” gives a sense of Loggins’s style and her inventive virtuosity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ Was Inspired by Her Husband Carl Dean

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      She wrote the hit 1973 song after a bank teller caught the eye of Dean, who died on Monday. She attributed its success to its simplicity and the universal emotions it evokes.In the early years of her nearly six-decade marriage, Dolly Parton noticed that her husband was spending a lot of time at the bank, where he had developed a crush on a teller. She told him to knock it off.She later channeled her feelings into “Jolene,” a hit 1973 song. Her fans have been singing its haunting chorus ever since.Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, JoleneI’m begging of you please don’t take my manJolene, Jolene, Jolene, JolenePlease don’t take him just because you can.The song is one of several that Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, an asphalt paver who died on Monday at 82, inspired in the decades after they met outside a Nashville laundromat in 1964. It never reached No. 1 on Billboard’s main singles chart, but it topped the Billboard country chart, earned a Grammy nod and became the most-recorded song of any Parton has written.The album cover for “Jolene” by Dolly Parton.Donaldson Collection/Getty ImagesIn interviews over the years, Parton attributed the song’s staying power to a variety of factors, including the simplicity of its chorus and its “kind of mysterious” minor key.She said many women had told her that they found its story — a woman acknowledging Jolene’s beauty while pleading with her to not steal her husband “just because you can” — relatable.When the song appeared, “Nobody had been writing about affairs from that side of it — to go to the person who was trying to steal your man,” she told the entertainment news site Vulture in 2023.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Khalil Fong, Hong Kong Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 41

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      Singing in both Mandarin and English, he brought a soul and R&B sensibility to Chinese pop.Khalil Fong, a Hong Kong singer-songwriter who infused a soul and R&B sensibility into Chinese pop songs, died on Feb. 21. He was 41.His death was announced on Saturday by his record label, Fu Music. The announcement did not say where Mr. Fong had died or specify a cause of death, but it said he had battled a “relentless illness” for five years.Beloved for its soulful vocals and distinctive blend of soul and Mandarin pop, Mr. Fong’s music found an audience in Hong Kong, mainland China and much of the wider Chinese-speaking world.“Trying to introduce soul music, or soul R&B, was not the easiest thing,” he said in a 2016 interview with The South China Morning Post, noting that the genre was not widely embraced in the region. “One of the things I wanted to do was to introduce this type of music within the context of Chinese language.”He broke into the popular music scene in 2005, when Warner Music Hong Kong released his funky, syncopated debut album, “Soulboy.” In the following decade, he released eight albums and performed in stadiums and large concert halls around the world, wearing his signature thick black glasses.But Mr. Fong’s career was cut short by health problems, and in recent years he had largely retreated from the public eye. Inspiration never stopped flowing, however, and he sporadically released singles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why These Oscars Mean So Much to Brazil

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      The best picture and best actress nominations for “I’m Still Here” have inspired national pride in a country whose culture has long been overlooked.The streets of Rio de Janeiro have been littered with Fernanda Torres imitators.They drink beer, clutch plastic Oscars and deliver the impromptu acceptance speeches that they hope their idol, the Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, will give on Sunday night at the Academy Awards.“It’s the peak of fame in Brazil: to become a costume of Carnival,” Ms. Torres said at a film festival in California this month, referring to her many impersonators during pre-Carnival celebrations over the past several weeks.Ms. Torres was already widely famous in Brazil, but now she has become the nation’s star of the moment for achieving something that has long eluded most of her peers and predecessors here: international recognition.Since winning a Golden Globe for best actress last month, she has been on an international Oscars campaign for “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian film about a mother of five navigating the disappearance of her husband during Brazil’s military dictatorship.Ms. Torres is nominated for best actress while the film is up for best international feature and — in the first such nomination for a Brazilian movie — best picture.Breno Consentino, 21, dresses up as “Fernanda’s Oscar” during a street party in Rio de Janeiro. The year’s hottest Carnival costume in Brazil is Fernanda Torres, who is nominated for an Oscar for best actress.Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Makes the Red Carpet? Steve.

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      On a recent weekday morning in La Mirada, a suburb outside Los Angeles, Steve Olive, 58, walked among hundreds of carpet rolls in red, green and lavender in a white, sun-drenched, 36,000-square-foot warehouse.Laid out on the floor was a 150-foot stretch of rug, delivered by truck from Georgia a few days before, in the custom shade of Academy Red that is only available for the Oscars.Mr. Olive himself may not be famous, but celebrities have strolled the plush craftsmanship of his carpet for nearly three decades.His company, Event Carpet Pros, has supplied carpets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys and Emmys, as well as for Disney, Marvel and Warner Bros. movie premieres and the Super Bowl.And, at a moment when carpets have moved beyond the classic red and become splashier and more intricate, his handiwork has become more prominent. He has crafted custom designs like a shimmering, sunlit pool carpet for the 2023 “Barbie” world premiere and a green-and-black ectoplasm drip carpet for the “Ghostbusters” world premiere in 2016 that took a month to create.“I haven’t come across anything that we couldn’t do,” Mr. Olive, who founded the company with his brother-in-law, Walter Clyne, in 1992, said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      100 Years Ago Recording Studios Got a New Tool: Microphones

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      On Feb. 25, 1925, Art Gillham’s session made history. The technology changed who was heard in recordings, how artists approach their music and how we hear it.One of the most significant innovations in recorded music took place a century ago in New York City. On Feb. 25, 1925, Art Gillham, a musician known as “the Whispering Pianist” for his gentle croon, entered Columbia Phonograph Company’s studio to test out a newly installed electrical system. Its totem was positioned in front of him, level with his mouth: a microphone.This was the moment when the record industry went electric. By the end of the year, a writer for the Washington, D.C. newspaper the Evening Star marveled at “the capitulation of the world’s leading musical artists to the power of the microphone.” (Hollywood’s sound revolution with “talkies” wasn’t far behind.) Today, a performer’s microphone technique can help define their sound. Yet no plaque marks the spot where Gillham made history with the first commercially released electrical recording.Archivists at the oldest label in the world, now owned by Sony Music, cannot confirm the studio’s exact location. The best guess is a site now occupied by the Rose Theater, the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue in Midtown Manhattan where Columbia’s offices once stood. The current building, a vast glass complex in Columbus Circle, is also home to the recording studio for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house label, Blue Engine Records.Todd Whitelock, an award-winning engineer who runs the studio, called the advent of the microphone the most important technological development in recorded music. “It’s got to be the top of the pyramid,” he said in an interview from his home studio in Cranford, N.J.Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and the period until 1925 is known as the acoustical era. A conical recording horn would capture the music being performed; sound waves caused a stylus to cut grooves into a rotating wax disc, marking it with audio information.Whitelock collects antique 78 rpm records, which he plays on a windup Victrola phonograph. “Acoustical recordings are magnificent, but there’s no dynamic range,” he said. “It all stays at the same volume. Be it pianissimo or mezzo piano or forte, it’s all one dynamic.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Coming Soon to Trump’s Kennedy Center: A Celebration of Christ

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      President Trump took control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington only last week. But his administration is already making plans for reshaping the institution’s programming.Chief among them: a celebration of Christ planned for December. Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump named as the Kennedy Center’s new president, told a conservative gathering on Friday that the “big change” at the center would be that “we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”“How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production, to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ?” Mr. Grenell said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.The Kennedy Center has long held Christmas-themed events.Last December, the center hosted “A Candlelight Christmas” by the Washington Chorus; “A Family Christmas” by the Choral Arts Society of Washington; and “Go Tell It,” a Christmas celebration by the Alfred Street Baptist Church, a prominent Black church in Virginia. (On Sunday, the church said it would cancel its Christmas concert there this year because the Kennedy Center’s new leaders stood in opposition to the “longstanding tradition of honoring artistic expression across all backgrounds.”)Mr. Grenell’s comments were his first public remarks in which he discussed his plans as the Kennedy Center’s new leader. His appointment was part of a series of extraordinary actions Mr. Trump took to solidify control over the Kennedy Center, which has been a bipartisan institution throughout its 54-year history.Mr. Trump, who stayed away from the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after some of the artists being honored criticized him, stunned the cultural world when he decided this month to purge the center’s board of all Biden appointees and install himself as chairman, ousting the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. The new board fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade, and the post was given to Mr. Grenell, a Trump loyalist who was ambassador to Germany during the president’s first term.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More