O’Donovan, Aoife

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    Aoife O’Donovan’s Songs Poured Out When Touring Shut Down

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    The singer-songwriter’s third solo album, “Age of Apathy,” is filled with personal touchstones and musical surprises.“I still, to this day, don’t even really think of myself as a songwriter,” Aoife O’Donovan said in a video interview from her home in Orlando. In conversation, as in her songs, her voice often carried a tune, with bursts of syncopation as she explored an idea or a feeling. “I think of myself as a band person, someone you can call to be in your band or play a show. It’s an identity crisis,” she added with a laugh.Her prolific catalog suggests otherwise. This week, O’Donovan (her first name is pronounced EEE-fa) will release her third solo studio album, “Age of Apathy,” a set of quietly startling songs that are at once intimate and ambitious, autobiographical and metaphysical. In “B61,” named after a Brooklyn bus route, she recalls the beginnings of a romance but then muses, “How will I know if I’m the last one alive?”O’Donovan’s songs are rooted in folk tradition but full of musical surprises: daring melodic leaps, unexpected chord progressions, subtle rhythmic shifts. “I’ve always just been drawn to melodies and chordal structures that were unexpected,” she said. “They’re just more fun. When you have the whole arsenal of the tone row in your head, you can just have a lot more freedom to mess around with it.”Her voice is at once open and mysterious, compelling in its understatement. Where another singer might head for a showy, dramatic peak, O’Donovan often eases back, letting her phrases evaporate like mist. “Sometimes I feel like, ‘In order to to be heard, do I have to be the loudest person in the room?’ But I think I’ve come to the realization that I don’t, and I don’t want to be,” she said. “The goal is to create a listening environment for people with your words or with your sounds, or with the song itself, where they want to be right there with you, and they’re willing to go along with everything you’re saying.”The mandolinist Chris Thile, who welcomed O’Donovan as a regular performer on his public radio show “Live From Here,” said, “She’s not selling us anything. She’s telling us secrets — kind of a secret about the magic in the world that she’s finding.”O’Donovan’s three studio albums represent only a fraction of her songwriting. She has also written for and with her groups Crooked Still, Sometymes Why and I’m With Her (whose “Call My Name” won a Grammy in 2020 as best American roots song) and as a collaborator with the chamber-Americana project Goat Rodeo, which includes Yo-Yo Ma and Thile.During the pandemic, along with her album, O’Donovan completed two song cycles: “Bull Frog’s Croon,” based on poems by Peter Sears and recorded with a string quartet in 2020, and “America, Come,” a group of orchestral songs drawing on century-old letters and speeches by the women’s suffrage crusader Carrie Chapman Catt. O’Donovan performed it in October 2021 with the Cincinnati Pops. And one day in May 2020, sequestered at home when she was living in Brooklyn, O’Donovan recorded her own versions of the songs from Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska”; she released “Aoife Plays Nebraska” online last year.When quarantine restrictions eased enough to allow concerts in summer 2020, O’Donovan recorded a live album, “Live from Black Birch,” with her husband, the cellist and conductor Eric Jacobsen, and his brother, the violinist Colin Jacobsen. At that show, she recalled, “I remember having a moment of panic when I said, ‘Sing along!’ And then I spent the rest of the song being, like, ‘No, don’t sing, don’t open your mouth!’”Until the pandemic, O’Donovan, 39, had been a working, touring musician for nearly two decades. She grew up in an Irish family — her father came to the United States in 1980 — that regularly sang old songs together, and she soaked up Celtic traditions and their American offshoots along with adventurous songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega and Joanna Newsom. She also studied music more formally at the New England Conservatory.O’Donovan onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2021. In addition to her solo work, she plays with the groups Crooked Still, Sometymes Why and I’m With Her.Douglas Mason/Getty ImagesIn Boston in 2001, O’Donovan and some fellow music students started Crooked Still, a string band that offered radical rearrangements of Appalachian-rooted songs and, over the next decade of playing clubs and folk festivals, added some of O’Donovan’s new songs to its repertory. In 2005, O’Donovan also found time to form another group, the folky trio Sometymes Why, which released albums in 2005 and 2009. And along the folk circuit, she found plenty of chances to collaborate onstage and in the studio.“Aoife finds a way to make the people around her sound better,” Thile said. “She can find family anywhere via music.”But O’Donovan has brought her boldest material by far to her solo albums: “Fossils” in 2013, “In the Magic Hour” in 2016, both made with the producer Tucker Martine, and the new “Age of Apathy.” All three open with songs contemplating death, and her other solo songs explore desire, myth, memory and transfiguration: as narrative, as images, as parable. They also stretch accepted structures of verse, chorus and bridge and push against genre.For “Age of Apathy,” O’Donovan enlisted the producer and songwriter Joe Henry, who has worked with Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Bettye LaVette, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint. They recorded the album under pandemic conditions. Instead of working alongside her musicians in one room for a limited time, as she had with Martine, O’Donovan recorded her voice, guitars and piano in a studio in Florida and sent the results to Henry, in Maine, who in turn sent them to his core studio musicians. They sketched ideas, consulted with O’Donovan and Henry, and then layered on their parts, one by one.The process took most of a year. “It allowed me and Aoife the opportunity to really listen to each element as it came in,” Henry said from his home in Maine. “And to decide, you know, do we need more? How much farther do we take this?”Amazingly enough, the resulting album sounds cohesive and intuitive. “It does feel very collaborative, but it also feels just bizarre and futuristic,” O’Donovan said.For O’Donovan, “Age of Apathy” is her most personal album. Unlike her other solo albums, it’s full of specifics: a bus route, a highway, the sense of a historical moment. “I’ve never really written so literally before,” she added. “In the past, I would shade it in a way that would try to make it a little bit more universal. But all these things really did happen.”In the title song, O’Donovan mentions the Taconic Parkway, which runs into upstate New York, and continues, “Go east on 23, past the farms and the festival memories.” She’s citing the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, N.Y., along Route 23 at the foot of the Berkshires, where Crooked Still found its first eager audience of folk listeners and the band sold a miraculous 1,000 independent CDs, kick-starting its career. The song also recalls her going to a vigil at the Christian Science Center in Boston a few days after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and wondering, “Was it the end or the beginning?/All I remember is the singing and the music, trying to drive away the fear.”The album’s centerpiece, O’Donovan said, is “Elevators,” a brisk waltz that sometimes skips a beat, as if it can’t wait to leap ahead. O’Donovan sings about “this big experience of being a touring musician, the kind of amnesia that you get when you’re on tour, the comfort of having no idea where you are, and yet knowing exactly where you are,” she said. “Is it going to go back to this? Am I going to be back there saying like, where am I? Who is that person running out the door? Is that me? Is that just my ghost of tours past?”O’Donovan’s personal touchstones are swept into the mood of the album: pensive, determined, ambivalently and then determinedly hopeful. “Age of Apathy” ends with “Passengers,” a quick-strummed, major-key song that glances back toward Joni Mitchell. It imagines a journey through interplanetary space: a way forward, post-pandemic, post-uncertainty, happily in motion again.“Music is everything to me — it’s literally the most important thing,” she said. “When I think about where do I want my life to go, where do I want to be when I’m older, what’s going to happen after we die — the music is the thing that will get us through to the end. And music is what will be there after we’re gone.” 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

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      Abba Previews First Album in 40 Years, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Charli XCX, Bobby Shmurda, Japanese Breakfast 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.Abba, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’Before Max Martin’s hit factory ruled radio playlists, another Swedish pop phenomenon had its run: Abba, which is reuniting after nearly 40 years. A new album, “Voyage,” is due on Nov. 5 and quasi-concert dates are scheduled in London in May; the singers will be digitized images backed by a live band. Though the verses of “Don’t Shut Me Down” are about a woman surprising an ex with her return, the choruses also recognize the strangeness of Abba’s reappearance: “I’m not the one you know/I’m now and then combined,” Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad sing, backed and produced by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. “And I’m asking you to have an open mind.” Meanwhile, the music reclaims familiar ground: a strutting march with gleaming orchestration and scrubbing disco guitars, stolid and earnestly tuneful. JON PARELESCharli XCX, ‘Good Ones’Charli XCX oscillates between big-gesture pop and artier impulses, but “Good Ones” swings the pendulum back to pop. It’s produced by Oscar Holter, from the Max Martin stable that also concocted the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” and it looks back directly to the 8th-note synthesizers of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Hopping between registers, Charli XCX indicts herself — “I always let the good ones go” — neatly and decisively. PARELESJuls featuring Niniola, ‘Love Me’Everything is rhythm in “Love Me”: the shakers and hand drums, the squiggles of electric guitar, the overlapping call-and-response of the blithely syncopated Nigerian singer Niniola and a saxophone that eventually claims the last word. Juls, a Ghanaian-British producer, neatly balances 1970s Afrobeat, the hand-played, steady-state funk perfected by Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with the multitrack transparency of 20th-century Afrobeats. Even after the song erupts midway through, the groove keeps its sly composure. PARELESFred again.., ‘Billie (Loving Arms)’Sonically rich, big-tent-pop ambitious, soulful house music from Fred again.., a singer and songwriter who has worked with Ed Sheeran and Stormzy, was mentored by Brian Eno and has a soft spot for bright dance music that’s almost physically cheerful. JON CARAMANICATokischa and Rosalía, ‘Linda’On “Linda,” Rosalía — a white European woman who has dominated Spanish-language pop over the last few years — turns to the Dominican musician Tokischa and dembow for street cred. Tokischa is the genre’s resident insurgent, an iconoclast who makes government officials, homophobes and upper-class puritans clutch their pearls. It’s no surprise that “Linda” runs like a sexed-up playground chant; over a dembow-flamenco concoction, the two stars trill, “Nos besamo’, pero somo’ homie’” (“We kiss each other, but we’re homies”). This is the kind of song that sparks necessary reflection about race, power and collaboration — conversations about who these cross-cultural team-ups are designed to make rich, and who, if anyone, they intend to liberate. ISABELIA HERRERABobby Shmurda, ‘No Time for Sleep (Freestyle)’Bobby Shmurda’s first post-prison song — seven years after his breakout single “Hot ___” made him a star — feels like burning off excess energy. This six-minute freestyle is a workout; it’s delivered with a doggedness reminiscent of the fervor of Meek Mill, but leaves little room to breathe. The stakes here are purposely low. Releasing a song like this — no chorus, intense rhymes, cluttered flow — lightens the pressure that would come with seeking to score another hit as massive as his first. For now, he just wants to rhyme. CARAMANICAMartox featuring Gian Rojas, ‘Pausa’All cool grooves and saccharine strings, Martox’s “Pausa” is best enjoyed with a spiked seltzer. The Dominican duo, alongside the producer and vocalist Gian Rojas, collage disco grooves and syncopated bass lines into a prismatic beachfront boogie. HERRERAJhay Cortez, ‘Tokyo’The second track on Jhay Cortez’s new album, “Timelezz,” exemplifies a small rebellion happening in Spanish-language pop. At times, the production is aquatic; at others, its twinkling synths resemble a midnight drive through the streets of the Japanese capital. With a thumping four-on-the-floor rhythm, the track is another sign that reggaeton’s major players are embracing the textures of house music, and stretching the genre’s boundaries beyond the realm of stale pop. HERRERAJapanese Breakfast, ‘Glider’In “Glider,” a song she wrote for the video game Sable, keyboard patterns enfold Michelle Zauner, the singer, musician and producer who records as Japanese Breakfast. There’s wonderment in her voice as she sings about an excursion into the unknown: “It feels like everything is moving/Around me.” The keyboards start out plinking like music boxes, soon to be joined by sustained, cascading chords, an ever-thickening structure that can’t constrain her delight. PARELESAoife O’Donovan, ‘Reason to Believe’In a live-streamed home performance last year, the virtuoso folk singer Aoife O’Donovan played the 10 songs on Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” front to back. She accompanied herself alone on acoustic guitar, as Springsteen had on the original album in the early 1980s, but that’s about where the similarity ends. The original album was desperate and dark, with doubt coursing through its tracks like murky blood; O’Donovan treats them as canon, saluting Springsteen’s songcraft with clear, pitch-perfect articulation and affable delivery. The approach is suited best to “Reason to Believe,” the finale, a Springsteen classic that contemplates the mysterious pull of resilience. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORuby Landen, ‘Pt. 1’Ruby Landen’s blend of Celtic-tinged acoustic-guitar fingerpicking and bowed strings — cello and fiddle — echoes the introspection of songwriters like Nick Drake. But she has her own story to tell, with an unassuming but pointed voice, in songs like “Pt. 1.” It’s an anatomy of a failed relationship — “Was it the safety of my presence that made you come undone?” — that she relays patiently and quietly. Then she segues into a modal, accelerating instrumental coda, picking behind fiddle and steel guitar, that needs no words to capture the underlying pain. PARELESNate Smith featuring Joel Ross and Michael Mayo, ‘Altitude’On drums, Nate Smith is in the business of inspiriting. Far from flashy, he’s an ebullient technician who keys into the subtleties of his bandmates’ playing and laces joie de vivre into his own. Smith, 46, just released “Altitude,” a breezy original and the latest single from a forthcoming album, “Kinfolk 2: See the Birds.” His band, Kinfolk, is joined here by a pair of young and prodigious improvisers: the vibraphonist Joel Ross and the vocalist Michael Mayo. The music video captures the group recording the song in the studio, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck; when Mayo digs into a short scat solo, improvising flawlessly in little rhythmic zags in the lower register and high-flying longer notes, you can see — and hear — him passing inspiration back and forth with the drummer. RUSSONELLO More