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It was a clear black night, a clear white moon. Warren G, “Regulate” (1994)Originally appearing on the soundtrack of the Tupac Shakur film “Above the Rim,” this song is built around a sample of Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).” I’m looking like a star when you see me make a wish. […] More
Why does it feel so good to cry this hard?I’m mobbing through Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the back of a cab, listening to Lady Wray’s “Piece of Me” for the 12th time in a row, and I’m crying — very, very hard — and no, it’s not ugly crying. In fact, I’m pretty sure I look beautiful right now.There is no greater balm in the universe than a Black woman singing (I said what I said). I remember being a young gay boy in San Francisco, hanging out at the Eagle bar in SoMa, when an older white gay explained to me that he only talks to Black women therapists. He went on: “I like my health care like I like my house music — I want a beautiful Black woman telling me that everything is going to be OK.” I was 23 and literally balked at the nerve of this man. I hate to admit it, but now that I’m 41 and I finally — maybe — understand what things like heartbreak are about, I completely agree with him.There has to be a reason it’s called soul music, right? Perhaps because that’s where it grips you the most? In my short lifetime, I feel like I’ve seen every nationality, age group and social class of singer do their jarring impersonation of a Black woman singing soul, but, cultural erasure be damned, it’s like Tammi and Marvin sang: Ain’t nothing like the real thing, goddamn it.Why this song? I wasn’t even breaking up with anybody the first time I heard it in an Oakland bar and the opening lines cut like a knife: “You’ve been the best at times/You walk me through my darkest days/Why must it turn around?” A few months later I was in New York, on what I thought would be my final rock ’n’ roll tour. I had been playing music since I was 12 and had achieved two goals I’d had since I was a kid: signing to the legendary indie label Sub Pop, and opening for Bikini Kill. My lifelong obsession with music had seemed to reach its logical conclusion. I decided it was time to get a new hobby — like baking, or veganism. I was saying goodbye to a part of my life, and I felt an internal shift: What next? Eventually I ended up in the back of a cab in Bushwick, listening to the song on repeat.Her voice transfixes me because she’s got that element of soul — hell, of singing in general — that one cannot reach by just ‘hitting the right notes.’I have been listening to Nicole Wray (before the “Lady” days) — a California-born soul singer with that kind of irresistible, honey-dipped voice one can only be born with, no doubt — since the 1990s, when Missy Elliott gave her a vote of confidence by rapping on her debut single, “Make It Hot.” But the thing I think I love most about “Piece of Me” — and really about every soul song about heartache, heartbreak or love lost — is that its conviction is all in the delivery. You’ve either lived through loss or you haven’t, and no amount of frenzied vocal trilling can make it otherwise. You can’t fake this: “I’ll let you take a piece of me. … And if that’s not enough/I’ll let you go peacefully.” I tear up as I type it. What Lady Wray did here is both genuine and colossal. Her voice transfixes me because she’s got that element of soul — hell, of singing in general — that one cannot reach by just “hitting the right notes.” That is only a small part; one must also land the character one is invoking. The perfect breakup song must also be a sort of theater, where the singer becomes the character fully. The very cadence of the song, her voice, sonically pristine, still spells out a certain longing and despair. Remember the definition of “soul”: the spiritual part of both human being or animal regarded as simultaneously immaterial and immortal. I am transformed every time I hear “Piece of Me,” which by the end of the night will probably be close to 30 times.“Piece of Me” gives that throwback feel — it’s heavy. The digital world exists in a cloud, and the music itself feels as ethereal. For all our complaints about A.I. “taking over music” (I would like to point out that this was foreshadowed more than a decade ago when autotune became omnipresent, condensing all emotion into that tinny computer sound), “Piece of Me” sits in counterpoise, a song mixed through tape reels and heavy wooden machinery. It feels as if the song were creating its own black hole when it was made. Who can escape the condensed emotional singularity of a breakup song?I grew up in Alabama, and though I defected to punk rock as a teenager, I was a child of the blues. My great-grandfather, Hard Rock Charlie, played the chitlin’ circuits from Chattanooga to Chicago in the 1930s. His son J.J. Malone, who came to California in his youth to play music (much like I did), worked alongside the likes of Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker and Creedence Clearwater Revival. It’s in my blood to understand a very true, very sad and very beautiful song. But who among us has not experienced deep loss yet still found a way to keep going? “Piece of Me” taps into that universal fact, reiterating the troubled paradox of both love and life: We are forever heartbroken, and forever hopeful.Brontez Purnell is a California-based writer whose books include “100 Boyfriends” (FSG, 2021), which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction. More
More than a dozen sweaty people in various states of undress giggled as a capoeira instructor directed us to crawl around on the floor. Make eye contact, he told us as we tried to follow the flow of one another’s bodies. But it was hard not to stare at the sparkling blue Ionian Sea.On one side of an open-air pavilion in Dhermi, a village on the Albanian Riviera, those waters glimmered under the summer sun, free of the yachts that crowd the Croatian and Greek shorelines to the north and south. On the other side, palm trees dotted the landscape. Behind them loomed the lush, green Ceraunian Mountains.A sound check interrupted the class, an abrupt reminder of the larger reason we capoeira novices had gathered: Kala, a weeklong music-and-wellness festival. I was part of a crowd of about 3,500 mostly young people, resplendent in transparent flare pants, crop tops and cowboy boots, who had descended on Dhermi in late May and early June to sway and spin in the moonlight, hypnotized by the beats, and to pack our days with Kundalini yoga, breath work, massage and capoeira classes.Across four stages, D.J.s like Hunee and Antal, CC:Disco!, Grace Sands and Daphni performed nightly, spinning techno and electronic beats mixed with funk, disco, jazz and more. A fifth stage, open during the daytime, beckoned from Gjipe, a canyon with soaring red cliffs, a short, scenic boat ride away.Dhermi is becoming a popular stop on the festival circuit, offering beautiful beaches and delicious, inexpensive food. Residents often join in the fun, blasting their own music from balconies and cars at night.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesIn Dhermi, restaurants served fresh, delicious seafood and drinks at reasonable prices. Kala’s weeklong packages, which included tickets and accommodations, started at $370. (Similar U.S. festivals this year charged about $200 to $400 for a two- or three-day ticket, without lodging.) Residents joined in the fun, blasting their own music from bars, cars and balconies at night. And in the morning, some hung-over revelers were surprised to find themselves face to face with wandering goats on the village streets.“I’ve gone from Ibiza, which got really built up, to Croatia, which got really busy. And I’ve spent a lot of time in India, and now Goa is super busy, too. And Greece is so expensive now,” said Annabel Turbutt-Day, 38, a corporate affairs director from London who drove to Kala from Tirana, Albania’s capital, with her partner and three friends. “Albania is still a little bit undiscovered, and a bit more affordable.”By day, Kala attendees sunbathed, attended wellness programs like Kundalini yoga and capoeira classes, or took boats that shuttled them from the Yacht Club bar, above, to the beachside stage at Gjipe Canyon.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesFrom hermit state to hot spotSince its debut in Albania in 2018, Kala has helped drive a boom in international tourism in Dhermi. Three more events have joined Dhermi’s summer dance card, with support from Mainstage Festivals, the company that runs Kala, including the upcoming Ion Festival, which takes place there from Sept. 6 to 13. The tourism season in Dhermi, which used to last about six weeks, now runs from the end of May through September.Dhermi’s landscape was integral to Kala’s appeal: The beaches where people sunbathed during the day turned into parties that lasted till sunrise — and the cycle repeated every day.Each open-air stage was its own little world — a cozy cove, a platform jutting into the sea, a vast space surrounded by palm trees. When I got tired of bobbing my head to the music in one spot, I could weave down the street through shouting, laughing festivalgoers and slip into a different crowd swaying to a different set.The beach at Gjipe, a scenic canyon a short boat ride away from Dhermi that hosted performances during the day. The other four stages in Dhermi came alive after sundown.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesA beach in Dhermi, part of the Albanian Riviera, a stretch of pristine sand that has opened up to the world only in the last quarter-century, after Albania overcame an iron-fisted Communist leader and then civil unrest.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesSpontaneous parties formed in the streets, too. One evening, after hours of dancing, I devoured a slice of pizza while watching a trio of locals and visitors join hands and spin in a circle, first to Albanian songs and then to Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”Dhermi’s rising popularity has mirrored Albania’s as a whole. In 2022, a record 7.5 million people visited the country, spending around $3.1 billion, compared with 6.4 million and $2.4 billion in 2019, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Environment. And in the first three months of 2023, Albania experienced a 54 percent jump in visitors compared with the same period in 2019, according to the World Tourism Organization.John Gómez performing at the Gjipe stage. Dhermi began to take off as a music hot spot about 15 years ago when international D.J.s accepted invitations to perform at local clubs, leading up to the first Kala, which took place in 2018.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesMany of those tourists head straight for the resort towns and beaches of the Albanian Riviera, which are drawing European sun-and-sea seekers who find the Greek island of Corfu and Dubrovnik, Croatia, too expensive and crowded. On Instagram and TikTok, influencers compare Albania’s seascape to that of the Maldives or Bali.At the same time, history buffs are flocking to Albania’s ancient Greek and Roman ruins, Ottoman-era architecture and the tens of thousands of repurposed concrete bunkers built by Enver Hoxha, who ruled the formerly Communist country with an iron fist for four decades. UNESCO World Heritage sites like the prehistoric ruins of Butrint and deep, ancient Lake Ohrid add to the attractions.Outdoorsy types come to bicycle along the wild Vjosa River and hike in the Albanian Alps. Nearly 300 government-certified agritourism operators offer farm tours, wine tastings and homemade meals at properties growing cherries, walnuts, plums, quince and more.D.J. Joy Orbison spinning for revelers in Dhermi. The beaches where people sunbathed during the day turned into parties that lasted till sunrise, and the cycle repeated itself daily.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesToday’s tourist-friendly environment stands in sharp contrast to the Albania of the early 1990s as it emerged from four decades of isolation as one of the poorest countries behind the Iron Curtain. An economic crisis and a near descent into civil war followed. In early 1997, during a popular uprising, an estimated 550,000 weapons were looted from armories and at least 2,000 people died as government forces cracked down and insurgents battled. The United Nations finally sent in a multinational force to restore order. But all this left Albania with a reputation as a crime-ridden, dangerous country.“The image of Albania was not the real one,” said Mirela Kumbaro, the country’s minister of tourism and environment. “It was only the bad parts.” Now, Albania want to show its “real face,” she said.“Kala is one of our best ambassadors,” said Ms. Kumbaro, who had dropped by the festival for a news conference, following in the footsteps of other officials, including Prime Minister Edi Rama, who showed up to the first Kala in 2018 and later sent a pallet of free beer.An influx of foreign visitors has brought prosperity to Dhermi even as the crowds have occasionally tested locals’ patience and raised concerns about damage to the environment.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesGratitude and growing painsDevelopment in the Dhermi area has accelerated at a breakneck pace: Half of the adjacent village of Drymades seems to be a construction site. The influx of foreign visitors to a place that only a few decades ago was sealed off to the world has brought both prosperity and challenges.“It’s been a 100 percent transformation,” said Erjon Shehaj, 46, whose family opened a 10-table restaurant in Dhermi in 2016. “When we started, there was nothing.” Today, they own and operate the Empire Beach Resort, a luxury hotel on the same land where the small restaurant once stood. The resort hosted the biggest stage of the festival and was booked solid all seven days.“I’ve never encountered so many tourists in Albania,” said Anisa Koteci, 33, a lawyer, who was born in the country then emigrated with her family to London when she was 8. Returning to Albania for Kala for the first time in four years, she said, has been “a bit of a shock to the system.” The abundance of foreign visitors made her excited and happy, she said, but she also worried that Albania might become known as just a party destination. She called the wave of tourism a “stress test” for her homeland.In Dhermi, the electricity or water was sometimes turned off at hotels without warning, and bathrooms in restaurants and bars were left uncleaned for long stretches. On the second day of the festival, one local shopkeeper wiped her brow and grumbled as she surveyed an endless line of impatient bathing-suit-clad tourists waiting to buy chips, water, beer and sunblock. She was running the grocery store and the adjacent currency exchange alone, she explained, because her brother had stayed up all night registering local SIM cards for tourists.The flood of visitors is also raising fears about possible harm to the region’s flora and fauna. In the city of Vlore, about an hour’s drive from Dhermi, an airport construction project the government promotes as a way to bring more tourists to the Albanian Riviera has faced protests from environmental groups that say it could endanger sanctuaries for birds like flamingos and pelicans.Tomi Gjikuria, 34, an entrepreneur and a D.J. who grew up in Dhermi, said he was happy with all the new business and hoped for more visitors, but wondered how all the new construction would affect the landscape.“When I was a child, there was no tourism,” said Mr. Gjikuria, who operates a campsite called the Sea Turtle Camp on land that his family owns in Drymades.“I have 5,000 square meters where I put a campsite,” he said. “I could have built a casino, but I don’t want to cut down the trees.”During the day at Kala, music and partying gave way to massage and other wellness activities.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesA spirit of hospitalityDespite all the challenges of development, residents of Dhermi have kept the welcome mat out — even if it sometimes has had a few wrinkles.Alan Crofton, the manager and director of Mainstage Festivals, recalled the fall of 2017, when he and Rob Searle, Kala’s creative director, went to Gjipe Canyon to ask the owner of a local campsite if they could use its beach during Kala. The man they met insisted that before they agreed to anything, they needed to break the ice by toasting each other with a shot of raki, a local liquor. One shot turned into several, until finally the man told Mr. Crofton and Mr. Searle — by then quite buzzed — that he would lease them a space for the festival, Mr. Crofton said.But when Mr. Crofton and Mr. Searle returned several months later, they found out that their raki-toasting host was not actually the landowner. He was the security guard who looked after the campsite in the winter.Andrea Kumi, 47, founded Havana Beach Club, a place that helped draw some of the area’s first waves of tourists, after moving to Dhermi, his father’s hometown, when he was 24. Mr. Kumi, who grew up in Vlore and Athens, began inviting world-famous D.J.s to perform at the club about 15 years ago.Sunset from a restaurant in Dhermi. Many festival attendees at Kala contrasted the relatively inexpensive and uncrowded Albanian Riviera with similar areas of Croatia and Greece. “Albania is still a little bit undiscovered,” one visitor said.Maria Mavropoulou for The New York TimesToday, besides the Havana Beach Club, Mr. Kumi owns two other restaurants. As the area continues to change, Mr. Kumi said, everybody is trying their best to be gracious and helpful hosts. As an old saying in Albania goes: “Our house belongs to God and guests.”He illustrated this point with a story. In 2009, Mr. Kumi persuaded the Dutch D.J. Tiësto to perform in Dhermi. There were no luxury hotels, so, eager to please, he rented a three-story, 80-foot yacht for Tiësto to sleep on, but the D.J. started feeling seasick as soon as he boarded.All the hotel rooms in the area were booked with the thousands of guests who’d come to see Tiësto perform, so Mr. Kumi offered up his own bedroom in his family’s house in the hills. Tiësto accepted, and the next day, Mr. Kumi said, the D.J. joined his parents and nephew for homemade pancakes.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More
On an afternoon in June while wildfire smoke enveloped Manhattan, people lined up outside Irving Plaza — some before dawn, some sporting face masks, some fresh off red-eye flights — to see Dave Matthews. That night, the 56-year-old balladeer was playing a rare solo gig celebrating his namesake band’s new album, “Walk Around the Moon.”Josh Roberts, 42, a special-education teacher in Las Vegas, who has seen the Dave Matthews Band, or DMB, 523 times, stood in that line. Mr. Roberts estimates that he has spent $100,000 on tickets and travel since discovering the band as a struggling high school junior in 1995. “This band has songs about love, depression, sex, things that you connect to,” he said.Mr. Matthews is the first to admit he doesn’t always get it right. “I’ve written lots of terrible lyrics,” he declared at the Four Seasons hotel in TriBeCa the next day, scanning a printout of a song generated by ChatGPT in the style of DMB. He cringed and added, “I would never say, ‘Grab my guitar, strumming with all my might.’”Still, plucking his guitar with abandon is exactly what Mr. Matthews has done since 1991, when DMB established itself in Charlottesville, Va. DMB is the second-largest ticket-seller in the world, according to the trade publication Pollstar, which tracked the top touring artists of the last 40 years. Mr. Matthews believes that curiosity “about how to write a good song” may be one reason his band has stayed in the spotlight for more than three decades, attracting hundreds of thousands of concertgoers on their 45-stop summer 2023 tour.Yet, the band’s ardent fan base contrasts with its paradoxical pop-culture standing: In 2020, the Dave Matthews Band was nominated by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for induction and was entered into a public voting contest, which the group won. The band, however, did not garner enough support from the organization’s voting committee and was not included in the nominees list for the next three years.With more than 30 years in the music industry, Dave Matthews knows you can’t please everyone. “If you make stuff, some people will like it, and some people won’t,” he said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesFor a certain set of music enthusiasts born between 1970 to 2000, DMB is synonymous with summer. “When this time comes, I can’t wait for it. It’s the kid in me,” Mr. Roberts said on a follow-up call during a 17-hour drive from Wisconsin to New Hampshire to see two more DMB shows. “I have more friends through DMB than I do through high school and college.”Since 1992, the band, or some iteration of it, has toured relentlessly from Memorial Day to “Labor Dave Weekend” and beyond (except in 2020, because of the pandemic). Superfans routinely follow DMB around for regional legs of tours. Many have seen hundreds of shows, displaying a band-as-religion level fandom with tattoos, license plates and jewelry professing their piety.Coupled with DMB’s taping-friendly policy (fans are allowed to audio record shows with professional equipment) and its hippie reputation, the band’s music frequently gets lumped together with the Grateful Dead and Phish.A lot of “Deadheads,” as the Grateful Dead fans affectionately call themselves, either gravitated toward DMB or Phish when the band’s lead songwriter, Jerry Garcia, died in 1995, said Jeff Travitz, 61, a franchise development manager in Downingtown, Pa., who has taped over 100 DMB concerts. The bands are each unique, he said, but they filled the same “major void” to meet up with friends, tape shows and trade recordings.“I don’t think too much about what we replaced,” Mr. Matthews said. Still, he understands the Phish comparison. In general, he thinks ’90s music critics dismissed improvisation, which, as far as he is concerned, is the only quality these groups share. “We all got thrown into the same category, even though we’re all different,” he said. “What do they call it? Jam bands?”Whatever it’s labeled, fans have gone to great lengths for DMB. In 1998, the band launched the Warehouse, its official fan association, which allows members to pre-order tickets before the public, enter contests and access a message board. “I literally stole my mom’s credit card to join,” Mr. Roberts, the teacher, said. He now spearheads a Facebook group of about 850 DMB followers. Multiple times a tour, he will buy extra pit tickets, which cost about $50 to $150, with his own money and distribute them among the group at face value to combat scalping. (Mr. Matthews, too, laments the current business of ticketing: “I think half the profits that the ticket brokers make should be given back to the theaters, artists or charity, because they make so much money, and they’re really just scalpers.”)Lisa Treat has seen 308 shows, owns a tattoo parlor called Dreaming Tree Ink (named after one of the band’s songs) and tattooed her neck with the band’s fire dancer logo.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesA fan wearing a custom Dave Matthews Band T-shirt.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesRidge Richter, a 35-year-old airline-ramp agent in Columbus, Ohio, who has seen 160 shows, doesn’t have any tattoos himself but runs in a crowd of DMB-saturated limbs. “A lot of people, if they’re crazy enough, if Dave signs their arm at a show, they’ll get a tattoo that day,” said Mr. Richter, who also moonlights as a DMB party planner. For each tour, he has organized six or seven tailgates complete with DMB cover bands.Such fanaticism invites detractors. Many stereotype the fans as pot-smoking, tie-dye touting former fraternity bros fawning over craft beers in parking lots between cornhole games. The pop-culture mockery is especially palpable with DMB. See the “Trepidation of the Dave Matthews Fan” bit from the comedian Marc Maron; the cool factor of Anthony Bourdain snarking their fan base odium; and “Saturday Night Live” skits imitating Mr. Matthews’ distinct warble. (Mr. Matthews says that “Bill Hader might be the best one.”)“I feel like his music is just elevator music” said Jody Harper, 44, a technology executive at an arts nonprofit in Manhattan. “The way I see it, everybody hanging out together at DMB concerts are just a bunch of people that want to hang out in an elevator together.”With more than 30 years in the music industry, Mr. Matthews knows you can’t please everyone. “If you make stuff, some people will like it, and some people won’t,” he said. “I don’t have to prove anything to anyone.” He divulged that even his beloved grandfather didn’t understand his music.He continued: “For people that hate me, I would just say, ‘Ignore me. Don’t waste your time!’”“I have more friends through DMB than I do through high school and college,” said Josh Roberts, who has seen the band 523 times. Mr. Roberts estimated that he has spent $100,000 on tickets and travel since discovering the band.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMr. Matthews attributed the band’s enduring allure, in part, to offering fans a singular experience every night. “I think about people that love our music but aren’t crazy fans,” he said. “I want them to have the best time. And then I want to play music for people that love us deeply. I want to play for everyone.”The group has about 1,100 titles in their catalog and a core rotation of about 275 songs. Set lists vary substantially, and there are guest musicians for a night or two throughout the tour, including Warren Haynes and Brandi Carlile, as well as lesser-known local acts.Mr. Travitz, the manager in Pennsylvania, appreciates that the band covers songs and interpolates snippets of others into its tunes. Some covers include Pink Floyd’s “Money,” Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” and Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My.” “It always makes the show fun when they play a song you’re totally not expecting,” Mr. Travitz said.Mr. Matthews said the rapport among members of the band and crew was paramount to DMB’s longevity. When the band is crafting set lists, Mr. Matthews said he prioritized giving “everyone a moment to shine.”The band members’ different ages and backgrounds may also explain their long-lasting appeal, added Mr. Matthews, citing his upbringing in New York, England and South Africa. “We all experienced different versions of the world,” he said. “Great friendships often come from people that have very different experiences.”To broaden his perspective, Mr. Matthews often leans on his children. His 21-year-old twin daughters are either “full of praise where they think it’s deserved” or “they’ll tell me as quickly, ‘This is not a good song’ or ‘I don’t buy those lyrics.’” Mr. Matthews recurrently finds himself asking them and his 16-year-old son about his place in the world from their Generation Z perspective.The band performing in New York this summer.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMeghan Brennan, a 24-year-old customer service manager in Boston, is part of a crop of new admirers and has seen some 50 shows. “I’m definitely one of the younger big fans,” she said, adding that her peers “think that I’m insane for doing what I do, which I am.” Her sister, 18 months her junior, in particular, doesn’t get the obsession. She “just hates how much I like them,” Ms. Brennan said.Traveling to see the band has marked what Ms. Brennan calls a transitional life stage of college and living on her own for the first time. She appreciates the friends she has made at tailgates and preshow meetups from Nashville to Hartford, Conn. Her DMB friends are older and can offer advice from a different perspective, she said.Mr. Matthews’ values also resonate: “He really is vocal about the environment,” Ms. Brennan said. (They are the first band to be designated as a Goodwill Ambassador by The United Nations Environment Programme.)Rob Bokon, a 48-year-old technology consultant in Cincinnati and a co-founder of DMBAlmanac.com, an encyclopedia website for the band, has attended 154 shows in 18 states and 44 venues. For Mr. Bokon, his DMB concert experience is a reflection of his entire career trajectory. When he was young, working as a pizza delivery boy and making minimum wage, Mr. Bokon said he could only afford local shows. He eventually made enough money to attend destination shows, but he and his friends couldn’t afford hotel rooms, so they would often drive six hours back home after concerts, “sometimes in the snow, sometimes on two-lane roads,” he said. Of course, DMB poured out of the car’s tinny speakers the entire way home. “It was the best.”Mr. Bokon’s fascination began when he started collecting cassettes of the band’s concerts in 1998. He initially tracked DMB’s set lists in spreadsheets but after one of the band’s concerts in Washington in 2001, he and his friend Matías Niño, who is a programmer, decided to build a fan site. That fan site became the Almanac, which is known as, among fans, the band’s de facto encyclopedia.Alexa Miller Hall, a 48-year-old sales executive in Pittsburgh who has seen 164 shows, is used to telling naysayers about the band’s global impact and defending the magic of a DMB show. It never gets old, said Ms. Miller Hall, who saw her first show in 1992, after becoming a passionate tape trader in college. She guesses she has traveled over 100,000 miles and spent nearly $200,000 to see the band, at least $60,000 of that on tickets alone. Coordinating tickets “is like a part-time job,” she said.Karissa Nash wearing a hat with the fire dancer logo.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesA tattoo of Mr. Matthews on the calf of Lisa Treat.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesIn 2012, Ms. Miller Hall met a bassist in a DMB cover band called Grux in the pit at a DMB concert in New Jersey. “We started holding hands” during the show, she said. In 2015, they married. (Meeting partners through message boards, tailgates or concerts is not uncommon; Ms. Miller Hall knows another married couple that met at that same show.)Ms. Miller Hall said the most extreme thing she ever did for the band was camp out during a snowstorm with a group of friends before the band headlined “The Night Before” performance in Minnesota during the Super Bowl in February 2018. To get close to the stage, the group had planned to sleep outside the arena in the freezing temperatures. “Thankfully by the grace of a security guard,” she said, “they let us into the foyer area, and we spent the night with the cigarette butts and gum.”As for Mr. Matthews, his desire to make the best of whatever muck or gold life throws his way can be traced to his father (a scientist he described as “brilliant beyond my understanding”), who died of cancer when he was 10. This is why, he said, “I feel it’s necessary to remind myself of our temporary nature.” While he is unsure whether his father would have liked his music, he thinks he would have appreciated that attitude.Though Mr. Matthews can’t pinpoint exactly why the band has remained so popular, he believes that luck may have played some kind of role. “It’s just what has happened to us, as much as we’ve done it,” he said. “Some worms end up in beautiful, rich, wet soil, and some worms end up on the sidewalk on a hot, sunny day.” More
Seismometers can pick up many types of ground vibrations but this drew comparisons to the “Beast Quake” of 2011, when Seattle football fans roared in celebration of a last-minute Seahawks touchdown.“I shake it off, I shake it off,” Taylor Swift sang. And boy did her fans deliver.A Taylor Swift concert in downtown Seattle last weekend shook the ground so hard, it registered signals on a nearby seismometer roughly equivalent to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, seismologists said.“It’s certainly the biggest concert we’ve had in a while,” said Mouse Reusch, a seismologist at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which monitors earthquake activity in the Pacific Northwest. “We’re talking about 70,000 people and all the music and paraphernalia associated with the concert.”The so-called “Swift Quake” recorded a maximum ground acceleration of roughly 0.011 meters per second squared, said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist at Western Washington University.Seismologists use acceleration to measure ground vibrations, which are then converted to the more conventional Richter scale, the common measurement for earthquakes.Seismometers can pick up ground vibrations of all types — including from cars and stampeding cattle — but the magnitude of the “Swift Quake” has drawn comparisons to the pro football “Beast Quake” of 2011. That seismic activity was triggered when Seattle Seahawks fans roared in celebration following a last-minute touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, the running back whose nickname is “Beast Mode.”Reusch of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network said that the activity at the time was close to a magnitude 2.0 earthquake. The “Swift Quake” was recorded by the same seismic station, located just outside Lumen Field.The readings occurred throughout both of Taylor Swift’s concerts on the nights of July 22 and 23 and was sustained throughout. The shaking of the ground was more than “twice as hard” as at the 2011 Seahawks game, Caplan-Auerbach said. While this was 0.3 magnitude greater than in 2011, that’s a twofold difference under the Richter scale, which is logarithmic.A comparison of ground vibrations recorded by a seismometer near Lumen Field in Seattle for the pro football “Beast Quake” of 2011 and the Swift Quake, which shook the earth twice as hard.Jackie Caplan-AuerbachThe likely cause was a combination of the music from the concert’s sound system and Taylor Swift’s fans — sometimes known as Swifties — dancing in sync with it, seismologists said.The pop megastar is currently four months into her Eras Tour, a sold-out 52-date national tour that has drawn immense crowds of Swifties to hear her perform songs spanning her 10-album career.Her opening Arizona show in March drew about 70,000 fans. Ticket prices for her show in Santa Clara on Friday were selling for up to $20,000 on Vivid Seats, a secondhand ticket exchange.The two back-to-back concerts in Seattle logged a near-identical pattern on the seismometer, Reusch said, which suggested the sets were nearly identical as well.“That was surprising to me, that we’re able to see something so coherent,” she said. “One was offset by about 26 minutes because it was late.”The shaking at both shows reached a maximum peak twice, first around 7:30 p.m., and the second around 9:30 p.m., according to data shared with The Times.It was not immediately clear which Taylor Swift songs caused the peaks. Besides “Shake It Off,” the set list included “Love Story,” “Bad Blood,” and “Anti-Hero,” all songs guaranteed to get Swifties on their feet.While the concerts shook the ground exceptionally hard, Caplan-Auerback said, it is important to understand that seismometers pick up signals from “anything that shakes the ground,” including cars, trains and even wind.Nor are Taylor Swift’s earthshaking abilities unique to the music world.The seismometer also recorded signals when The Weeknd played at Lumen Field on Aug. 25, 2022, Caplan-Auerback said, though they were not as strong.Beyoncé will be playing there on Sept. 14, she said. “I’ll be looking at that for sure.”As for Reusch, she was encouraged by the public attention.“Maybe there’s some young Swifties out there that will some day become seismologists or earth scientists,” she said. “That would be a real happy ending.” More
The group’s original bass player, he was with the band from 1971 to 1977 but was uncomfortable with fame.Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles whose broad vocal range on songs like “Take It to the Limit” helped catapult the rock band to international fame, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the band said on its website.“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the group said.Mr. Meisner, the band’s original bass player, helped form the Eagles in 1971 along with Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Bernie Leadon. He was with the band when they recorded the albums “Eagles,” “Desperado,” “On the Border,” “One of These Nights” and “Hotel California.”“Hotel California,” with its mysterious, allegorical lyrics, became among the band’s best-known recordings. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and won a Grammy Award for record of the year in 1978.But Mr. Meisner was uncomfortable with fame.“I was always kind of shy,” he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wanted him to stand center stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” but that he preferred to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night in Knoxville, he said, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” he said, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Mr. Meisner told the magazine. “That was the end.”He left the band in September 1977 but was inducted with the Eagles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. An essay by Parke Puterbaugh, published by the Hall of Fame for the event, described the band as “wide-eyed innocents with a country-rock pedigree” who later became “purveyors of grandiose, dark-themed albums chronicling a world of excess and seduction that had begun spinning seriously out of control.”The Eagles sold more records than any other band in the 1970s and had four consecutive No. 1 albums and five No. 1 singles, according to the Hall of Fame. Its “Greatest Hits 1971-1975” album alone sold upward of 26 million copies.Before joining the Eagles, Mr. Meisner was briefly the bassist for Poco, another Los Angeles country-rock band, formed in 1968. He left that band shortly afterward and joined Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band.A list of survivors was not immediately available. His wife, Lana Meisner, was killed in an accidental shooting in 2016.Randall Herman Meisner was born in Scottsbluff, Neb., on March 8, 1946, and started practicing music at a young age.He got his first acoustic guitar when he was around 12 or 13 and, shortly after, formed a high school band, according to a 2016 interview with Rock Cellar magazine. “We did pretty good, but we didn’t win anything,” he said.He was still a teenager when he joined another band and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 or 1965, he told Rock Cellar.“We couldn’t find any work because there were a million bands out here,” he said.Years later, Mr. Meisner would find plenty of work with the Eagles.“From Day One,” he told Rock Cellar, “I just had a feeling that the band was good and would make it.”A full obituary will appear shortly. More
With her short hair and wide eyes, the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor, who has died at the age of 56, cast a powerful silhouette onstage during her music career. The height of her power came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including a divisive 1992 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in which she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.O’Connor told Rolling Stone in 1991 that her record company, Ensign, wanted her to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow her hair out. “I decided that they were so pathetic,” she said, “that I shaved my head.”O’Connor at the Olympic Ballroom in Dublin in 1988.Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesO’Connor performing at the Rock Torhout festival in Belgium in 1990.Paul Bergen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesO’Connor ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992.NBCO’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in Universal City, Calif., in 1993.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesO’Connor with Peter Gabriel at a fund-raising concert in the Netherlands in 1991.Michel Linssen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesO’Connor in Lourdes, France, in 1999.Michael Crabtree/PA Images, via Getty ImagesO’Connor at a protest in Dublin in 1989.Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesO’Connor holding her daughter, Roisin, in Dublin in 2000.ReutersO’Connor on Gay Byrne’s final episode of “The Late Late Show” in 1999.David Conachy/Independent News and Media, via Getty ImagesO’Connor and Courtney Love at the Old Vic theater in London in 2005.Dave Benett/Getty ImagesO’Connor in Bray, Ireland, in 2012.David Corio for The New York TimesO’Connor at Lincoln Center in New York in 2013.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesO’Connor at her home in Wicklow, Ireland, in 2021.Ellius Grace for The New York Times More
The Irish singer’s shaved head was as much a part of her identity and allure as her sound.It was the bald head that became the avatar of a million dreamy rebellions; the shaved pate that bridged the gap between the angry and the sublime. It is almost impossible to think about Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singer whose death was reported on July 26, or her work, without thinking about her hair. Or lack of it.Without thinking about the striking curve of her shorn skull on the cover of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” her face below caught mid-scream; the nakedness it seemed to convey in the 1990 video of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” as her blue eyes brimmed with tears; the purity of the line on the cover of her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings.” Which contains an entire chapter entitled “Shaving My Head.”It was effectively her signature — in a 2014 story in Billboard Ms. O’Connor, 56 when she died, identified herself as “the bald woman from Ireland” — along with her Dr. Martens and torn jeans, and it followed her throughout her life, just as much as her ripping up the photo of the Pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 did. Even in the few periods when she grew her hair back, she was often referred to as the “formerly bald” Sinead O’Connor. And as such, she was an integral part of the renegotiation of old stereotypes of gender, sexuality, rebellion and liberation that is still going on today.“I just don’t feel like me when I have hair,” she told The New York Times in 2021.Now that female baldness has become more common, has become a badge of identity for women such as Ayanna Pressley, the representative from Massachusetts who went public with her alopecia in 2020, and X González, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student (then known as Emma) who became a campaigner for gun control, not to mention the Dora Milaje of “Black Panther,” it can be hard to remember how extraordinary it was when Ms. O’Connor emerged. “Shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing,” Ms. O’Connor told Spin in 1991. “I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.”Independent News and Media/Getty ImagesBut that seeming repudiation of her own porcelain beauty in the wake of a spate of teen pop queens, at a time when armoring yourself in a helmet of big hair was a big thing and shaving your head was still largely seen as a punishment, was as much of a statement of singularity as her sound. Perhaps, it was also the first sign of the controversial politics to come, including refusing to play the national anthem before her concerts and stenciling the logo of Public Enemy into the side of her head at the 1989 Grammys when the show’s organizers declined to televise the first-ever award for Best Rap Performance.She offered various explanations of the choice. All the stories come down to the same thing in any case, which was a refusal to cater to traditional definitions of “pretty” as established by the male gaze as long ago as Rapunzel and Lady Godiva.In shearing her head “she was literally shearing away a false narrative,” said Allyson McCabe, the author of “Why Sinead O’Connor Matters.” In 1991 Ms. O’Connor told Spin, “shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it.” However, she also said, “The women who are admired are the ones that have blond hair and big lips and wear red lipstick and wear short skirts, because that’s an acceptable image of a woman.” And, “Because I have no hair, people think I’m angry.”In a 2017 TV interview she told Dr. Phil that it was because during her abusive childhood her mother had compared her with her sister, who had long red hair, unlike Sinead. “When I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter,” Ms. O’Connor said in the interview. “And that’s why I cut my hair off. I didn’t want to be pretty.”The cover of Ms. O’Connor’s memoir.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via Associated PressA still from her music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.”In the interview she also said, “It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested everywhere I went,” and “I did not want to dress like a girl. I did not want to be pretty.”In her memoir, she wrote that she was working on her first album in London, and had been told by a male music executive she should grow her (buzzed but not shorn) hair long and start to dress more like a girl. The next day she went to a barbershop and had it all shaved off.During the period after the “S.N.L.” appearance, when she was rejected by the music industry and revealed she had been diagnosed as bipolar, Ms. O’Connor’s bald head was taken as a sign of instability (just as it was later with Britney Spears). The fact that she continued shaving her skull for the rest of her life suggested it was, rather, a sign of selfhood.The first time she looked in the mirror after that visit to the barbershop, she wrote in the book, “I looked like an alien.” Another way to put it, however, is she looked like the woman she became. And in becoming that woman — in giving herself that permission — she helped extend it to us all. More
