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      How Julie Byrne’s Astral Folk Music Took Flight

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      After the loss of her closest collaborator, the singer-songwriter paused but didn’t retreat. “The Greater Wings,” the follow-up to her 2017 breakthrough, is due Friday.“I’m not trying to be eccentric, I promise!” Julie Byrne joked as she carefully arranged colorful tiles and bits of clay on the dining room table of her minimally furnished Queens apartment. The singer-songwriter, cozily stylish in a milk chocolate-colored tank top, cargo pants and snug knit slippers, located a pair of jagged white tiles that bore a phrase scribbled in black Sharpie: “Letting go.”“There was a third one that said ‘future,’ but I gave it to a friend,” Byrne said, explaining that those messages help tell the story of her first record in six years, an incandescent collection of ambient folk titled “The Greater Wings,” due Friday.Byrne, 32, hadn’t necessarily planned the long gap after her 2017 breakthrough, “Not Even Happiness,” an elegant and emotionally astute album that brought her critical acclaim. But that album’s closing track, “I Live Now as a Singer,” became something of a manifestation. She toured for two years and relocated to Los Angeles from New York in late 2018, and found herself living as a working musician for the first time. It was an uneasy transition.“It was a period of tremendous absorption in my own doubt,” Byrne said. “It took me a long time to learn to work well on my own time.”Byrne grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where she passed time climbing grain mills and exploring the city’s abandoned Central Terminal. She picked up the guitar at 17 and taught herself on an instrument that belonged to her father, a fingerstylist who stopped playing after a diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis. “My guitar work,” she noted, “is a family inheritance.”After high school, Byrne spent the next few years floating across the United States. “My mom traveled quite a bit when she was that age, and I fell in love with her stories about that time,” Byrne said. “I had hardly been anywhere and was hungry to experience more. There was a lot of romance in that dream.” She developed her songwriting voice along the way, releasing several cassettes of haunting folk songs, which were later compiled into her 2014 debut, “Rooms With Walls and Windows.”Three years later, “Not Even Happiness” brought her music to a wider audience, propelled by Byrne’s dedication to nonstop touring. The success, however, generated some stress around her process. “While there is mysticism in creativity, there would be times where I was lost in a mind-set of only wanting the process to be mystical,” she explained, letting loose a bright chuckle before turning pensive again. “When I was younger, I approached writing as something that occurred spontaneously, rather than through perseverance and the raw, honest effort of showing up day in and day out.”“The deep wild romance of friendship is very much at the heart of the record,” Byrne said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn the winter of 2020, Byrne had recently moved to Chicago from California to be closer to Eric Littmann, her longtime creative collaborator. After meeting in 2014 at South by Southwest, where Littmann engineered a performance that featured Byrne playing in a dried-up creek bed, the pair were immediately aligned, creatively, and for about a year, romantically. Littmann became Byrne’s go-to musical partner while also making his own bedroom pop under the moniker Steve Sobs and leading Phantom Posse, a New York-based collective featuring artists like iLoveMakonnen, Vagabon and Emily Yacina, whose solo music he also produced.After a first attempt at recording “Not Even Happiness” in Brooklyn, where they struggled to capture a tranquillity amid the chaos, Littmann and Byrne relocated to her childhood home in Buffalo for four months. Both were eager to recapture that immersive creative energy for “The Greater Wings.” While Littmann worked as a cancer researcher by day, in the evenings and on weekends he and Byrne would tinker away at song drafts that became tracks like “Summer Glass,” a shimmering, synth-driven standout on the new album that ends with the line, “I want to be whole enough to risk again.”By early 2021, Byrne and Littmann were working steadily on songwriting, traveling the country to record harp and string arrangements. But in June of that year, Littmann died suddenly at 31. Byrne declined to speak to the circumstances of his death, which remains a profoundly destabilizing loss.“He was a truly brilliant person, he had so much faith in me and what we had set out to do together — that never wavered,” Byrne said. “It wasn’t even his vision or technical skill or artistry that made the collaboration so rich and singular, it was his love and care.” Work on “The Greater Wings” paused for seven months as Byrne moved back to New York to be closer to her support system; her current apartment is just down the street from the one she and Littmann shared around the time they made “Not Even Happiness.”Byrne toured for two years and relocated to Los Angeles from New York in late 2018, and found herself living as a working musician for the first time. OK McCausland for The New York TimesAt the time of Littmann’s death, most of the album had been mapped out and at least four songs were near completion. When it came time to reopen the record, Byrne sought outside support. Ghostly, the experimental and electronic record label that later signed Byrne, connected her with Alex Somers, a producer known for his work with Sigur Rós and Julianna Barwick.“Julie and I had been friends for years and Eric was a big part of my community,” Somers recalled over the phone. A friend at the label gave him a message: “Julie doesn’t want to retreat.”After several informal hangouts at Somers’s Los Angeles home, Byrne and her collaborators regrouped in January 2022 at a cozy studio in New York’s Catskill Mountains. “It was a really charged experience,” Somers said. “Every single day, at least one person was in tears.”But as Byrne sings on the serene “Portrait of a Clear Day,” “Love affirms the pain of life.” So while loss loomed over the album’s completion, Byrne emphasized that “a majority of it came from life, our life together, not from death and grief.” She added, “The deep wild romance of friendship is very much at the heart of the record.”It’s a sentiment clearly articulated on the title track, which Byrne completed after Littmann’s death. Atop a meditative guitar melody and celestial ambience, Byrne sketches scenes from her shared past with Littmann while committing to continued artistic evolution: “I hope never to arrive here with nothing new to show you, as so many others have.”“There’s a sense of responsibility in that line, to embody the statement with my actions, not only with my words,” Byrne said. “Perhaps the act of finishing the song itself is one of many beginnings in that effort.” More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ Takes a Note From Taylor Swift

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      The pop singer’s new single dismantles a former paramour who was entranced by fame, borrowing a tactic from Swift’s career-shifting “Dear John.”On “Drivers License,” one of the great singles of the 2020s, Olivia Rodrigo has been played for a fool by an ex, but the song — pulsing, parched, destitute — remains centered in her pathos. She may have been abandoned, but the person who did the damage is still an object of, if not exactly affection, then obsession: “I still hear your voice in the traffic/We’re laughing/Over all the noise.” At the song’s conclusion, she is alone, and lonely.That was the Rodrigo from two and a half years ago, when she was reintroducing herself to the world as a human after a stretch as a Disney actress automaton. The Olivia Rodrigo who appears on “Vampire,” the first single from her forthcoming second album, has now lived through some things. Her sweetness has curdled.“Vampire” is nervy and anxious, a tripartite study in defiance that begins with Elton John-esque piano balladry à la “Drivers License” — a head fake in the direction of naïveté.But Rodrigo knows better now, or at least knows more: Rapid stardom has both bolstered and cloistered her. “I loved you truly,” she sings, deadpan, then almost cackles the next line, “You gotta laugh at the stupidity.” The song continues in this vein, through a boisterous up-tempo midsection and a rowdy, theatrical conclusion. Her subject matter — romantic disappointment, being left in the lurch — is the same, but the stakes are much greater now.“I used to think I was smart/But you made me look so naïve,” she sings. It is the sort of insider-outsider awareness that can only come from being both the object and the subject at once — powerful enough to author your own story, vulnerable enough to fall prey to someone else’s wiles.It is, in short, Rodrigo’s “Dear John.”Over a decade after its release, “Dear John” remains one of the most powerful songs in Taylor Swift’s catalog, and also among the most idiosyncratic. Purportedly about a dismal romantic engagement with John Mayer, it is produced in the style of Mayer, dressed liberally with blues guitar noodling.Lyrically, it’s not only astute, it’s vicious. Swift begins with a similar unjaundiced shrug — “Well, maybe it’s me/And my blind optimism to blame” — then goes on to surgically, savagely disassemble her foe: “You are an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry/Never impressed by me acing your tests.”“Dear John” appeared on “Speak Now,” Swift’s third album, released when she was 20. It wasn’t a single, but it was one of a pair of songs on the album — the other was “Mean,” about a fierce critic of her artistry — in which Swift began creatively and publicly reckoning with the public version of herself. Her earlier songwriting felt winningly insular, almost provocatively emotionally intimate. But “Dear John” announced Swift as a bolder and riskier performer and songwriter, one unafraid of using stardom as her ink, and who understood that the celebrity most people knew provided as much fodder as her inner life.Rodrigo is 20 now, and “Guts,” due in September, will be her second album. And while “Drivers License” and its fallout became tabloid fodder, the public narrative wasn’t encoded into the song itself.“Vampire” changes that. Rodrigo’s target here is someone attempting to be glamorous, or perhaps glamour itself: “Look at you, cool guy, you got it/I see the parties and the diamonds sometimes when I close my eyes/Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise.”Perhaps the song is about the Los Angeles nightlife fixture Zack Bia, one of Rodrigo’s rumored partners — if so, the structural shift from the first to second part might be pointed — that’s when the music becomes coffeehouse EDM, possibly a veiled allusion to Bia’s emergent career as a producer and D.J., and an echo of the Mayer-ian blues-pop Swift channeled on “Dear John.”The relationship itself, Rodrigo learns, is a transaction, too. “The way you sold me for parts/As you sunk your teeth into me,” she yowls, before anointing her ex with the coldest moniker imaginable: “fame [expletive].” That insult usually begins with “star” rather than “fame,” but Rodrigo knows that the condition of fame is far more toxic than any one person, and that someone who craves it is perhaps uninterested in personhood at all.On “Drivers License,” Rodrigo still saw the other woman as an enemy, or source of tension, but now on “Vampire,” she understands what the lines of allegiance truly are, marking an emergent feminist streak. Here, she finds kinship with her ex’s other partners, and lambastes herself for thinking she ever was the exception: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called ’em crazy too.”There’s an echo here of Swift’s realization on “Dear John” that she, too, is closer kin to the other aggrieved women than to her ex: “You’ll add my name to your long list of traitors who don’t understand/And I look back in regret how I ignored when they said/‘Run as fast as you can.’”After sweeping past it for most of her career, Swift has just begun revisiting this moment — last month, she played “Dear John” live for the first time in over 11 years, at one of the Minneapolis stops of her Eras Tour. That’s likely because Swift’s rerecording of “Speak Now,” part of her ongoing early album reclamation project, is being released this week.But she also used the moment to both reflect on her maturation, and to urge her devoted, sometimes ferocious fans not to live in, or dwell on, her past.“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together,” she said from the stage. “So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.”When Swift began reporting on her own fame on “Dear John,” it had the secondary effect of activating phalanxes of fans who went to war on her behalf, too. But over the course of the past decade, something interesting happened: The battle became theirs more than hers. They hold on to her wrongs with pitbull-like grip, ensuring, in a way, that Swift can’t fully grow up.So if “Dear John” is a creative guidepost for “Vampire,” this cautionary note offers a suggestion of what might come from it: a call to arms, a hardening of your outer shell, a conflagration that burns long after you light the match and walk away. More

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      Paul Justman, Who Shed Light on Motown’s Unsung Heroes, Dies at 74

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      After establishing himself as a leading music video director in the 1980s, he found acclaim with his 2002 documentary about session musicians.During the filming of a climactic scene in his critically acclaimed documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a celebration of the unheralded session musicians behind countless 1960s hits, Paul Justman could have found himself foiled by Detroit’s harsh winter.Arriving at the city’s MacArthur Bridge one morning to interview the guitarist Eddie Willis about Motown’s fateful move to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Justman and his crew found the bridge blanketed with fresh snow, seemingly impenetrable. But the director was undeterred.“To Paul, this was an opportunity,” his brother, the musician Seth Justman, said by phone. “The glistening snow helped accentuate the feeling of loss.”Throughout his career, Mr. Justman blended a photographer’s eye with a musician’s feel for the pulse of pop as a prominent director of music documentaries and videos.He died on March 7 at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 74. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his brother.While Mr. Justman enjoyed a long and varied career, he is best known for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” That film, released in 2002, brought to light the lasting contributions made to pop music by the session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers, who fueled countless era-defining Motown hits despite working in obscurity.“This salute to the literally unsung and underrecognized studio heroes of Motown is so good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment,” Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote in a review. “And it is one of the few nonfiction films that will have you walking out humming the score, if you’re not running to the nearest store to buy Motown CDs.”Among Mr. Justman’s other documentaries were “The Doors: Live in Europe 1968” (1990) and “Deep Purple: Heavy Metal Pioneers” (1991). He also made features, including the 1983 battle-of-the-bands tale “Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel,” which he directed with Richard Baskin, and “Gimme an ‘F,’” a romp about cheerleaders, released the next year.Still, none of his films could match the ubiquity of the music videos he made in the 1980s, capturing the era’s Day-Glo look and Pop Art sensibility as MTV reshaped the pop landscape.Mr. Justman brought a quirky sense of deadpan to videos like the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone,” Diana Ross’s “Muscles” and Rick Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” as well as the MTV staple “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band — for which his brother happened to play keyboards.Some of the studio musicians behind the Motown sound got back together for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” among them, from left, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina. Joe Hunter and Bob Babbitt.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoPaul Evans Justman was born on Aug. 27, 1948, in Washington, the second of three children of Simon Justman, a government systems analyst, and Helen (Rebhan) Justman, a school drama teacher.Growing up in Washington, in Newton, Mass., and in Margate City, N.J., Mr. Justman was drawn to music (he played drums and guitar in rock bands as a teenager) and dance (at 9, he choreographed his own routines for courses at the Boston Conservatory). He also fell in love with photography.After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he moved to New York City and took a job with a team making short films about American culture for Swedish television.He soon started working as an assistant to Robert Frank, the lauded documentary photographer and filmmaker. He eventually served as an editor on Mr. Frank’s notorious warts-and-all documentary about the Rolling Stones’ raucous 1972 North American tour, which became famous, in part for its obscene name, although it was never officially released.Mr. Justman, who moved to Los Angeles in 1980, was also a fixture behind the scenes with the J. Geils Band as it was climbing from the clubs of Boston toward fame. In the mid-1970s, he made a short documentary, “Postcards,” about the high-energy blues-rock band’s frenzied life on the road. That film, which featured appearances by the rock critic Lester Bangs, was broadcast on PBS.In addition to his brother, Mr. Justman is survived by his wife, Saundra Jordan, and his sister, Peggy Suttle Kligerman.Not all Mr. Justman’s work with the J. Geils Band was behind the camera. He often collaborated on songs with his brother, and he contributed lyrics for all the songs on the band’s final studio album, “You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd” (1984), recorded after the kinetic frontman, Peter Wolf, left the band. (Seth Justman handled most of the lead vocals.)But, his brother said, it was Mr. Justman’s ever-present videos that helped break the band into the pop stratosphere. His “Freeze Frame” video, featuring band members dressed in white and splattering one another in paint as if they were human Jackson Pollock canvases, received heavy airplay on MTV. The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart in 1982.But it could not match “Centerfold,” from the previous year, in ubiquity. The video for that song, featuring models marching around a high school classroom in teddies and, famously, a snare drum filled with milk, become a token of Generation X pop culture, and the song became the band’s first and only No. 1 hit.“MTV was really starting to cook,” Seth Justman said of “Centerfold,” “and that cinematic and energetic approach, along with splashes of humor, resonated and lit the fuse. The song, and the video, shot like a rocket.” More

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      Morgan Wallen Tops the Album Chart for a 15th Time

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      Young Thug opens at No. 2 and Peso Pluma at No. 3 as the country superstar continues to dominate the Billboard 200.A month ago, the country superstar Morgan Wallen seemed sidelined. A vocal cord injury had benched him from his arena and stadium tour, and after a 12-week perch atop the Billboard album chart he had ceded No. 1 to Taylor Swift and the K-pop group Stray Kids.But Wallen didn’t stay down for long.He returned to the stage in late June, and “One Thing at a Time,” Wallen’s latest streaming blockbuster, came back to No. 1 after two weeks in second place, and it has stayed on top. This week, “One Thing” notches its 15th week at No. 1. Watch out, Adele, whose “21” was No. 1 for a total of 24 weeks in 2011 and 2012.In its latest week, “One Thing” had the equivalent of 110,500 sales in the United States, up slightly from the week before. That total includes 140 million streams and 4,500 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release in March, Wallen’s album has racked up the equivalent of just under three million sales, and been streamed 3.5 billion times.The list of artists whom Wallen has blocked from No. 1 — among them Metallica, Ed Sheeran, Niall Horan, Lana Del Rey and the K-pop acts Ateez, Seventeen, Agust D and Jimin — now includes Young Thug and Peso Pluma, who released new albums last week.Young Thug, the veteran Atlanta rapper, opens at No. 2 with “Business Is Business,” which had the equivalent of 89,000 sales, including 106 million streams. (He remains incarcerated in Georgia on racketeering charges in a wide-ranging RICO case.)Peso Pluma, a 24-year-old songwriter and performer from Mexico, starts at No. 3 with “Génesis,” which had the equivalent of 73,000 sales, and 101 million streams. According to Billboard, “Génesis” reached the highest-ever chart position for an album of regional Mexican music, which has lately been on a winning streak online and on tour.Also this week, Swift’s “Midnights” holds at No. 4 and Gunna’s “A Gift & a Curse” falls two spots to No. 5. Kelly Clarkson’s latest, “Chemistry,” arrives at No. 6. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Idol’ Season Finale Recap: What Was the Point?

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      The season finale, like the rest of the series, had little of substance to say about either pop music or power dynamics.“The Idol” has concluded its five-episode run, and there’s one question I can’t help but ask: What was the point of all of that?The season finale of the series from Sam Levinson, Reza Fahim and the star Abel Tesfaye (the Weeknd) had shockingly little to say about either pop music or power dynamics. Well, maybe not shockingly. Nothing in the first four episodes suggested that there was going to be some brilliant revelation in the eleventh hour, but a girl could hope that we might get a bit more than an underwhelming ending in which the baffling character known as Tedros Tedros is both exposed for the creep that he is and ultimately forgiven by Lily-Rose Depp’s heroine, Jocelyn.Sure, if you want to, you can argue that there is a transference of who has the upper hand in their relationship. In the finale, Tedros’s back story as a pimp has been publicly revealed in a Vanity Fair article planted by Jocelyn’s manager Chaim. Tedros loses his club and is apparently being investigated by the I.R.S. And yet Jocelyn gives him a pass to her tour date at SoFi Stadium. Backstage he receives a strongly worded warning from her other manager, Destiny, before being embraced by Jocelyn.“None of this means as much without you,” she says. And then she introduces him onstage to about 70,000 screaming fans as “the love of my life.”We are ostensibly supposed to read this as Jocelyn now being in control. In her dressing room he looks at the wooden hairbrush she claimed her mother used to beat her. “It’s brand-new,” he says, realizing that she had deceived him. She addresses her fans as “angels,” the very thing he called her. And, after they make out in front of that audience, she tells him, “You’re mine forever. Now go stand over there.”Are we supposed to believe it was all a ruse on Jocelyn’s part? That she used her own story of abuse to manipulate him? That’s what I think Levinson and Tesfaye are getting at, but it’s more confusing than anything. If Jocelyn were a real pop star, aligning herself with a man who went to prison for holding a woman hostage would tank her career. That’s not power — that’s a man’s idea of what power looks like for a woman.But let’s back up for a second. For most of this episode it looks like Jocelyn is going to fully kick Tedros to the curb, a conclusion which would have been predictable but at least more satisfying than this one.Angry that their meeting was not organic but instead a product of his scheming, she calls him a “con man and a fraud.” She has a plan to take over his empire of young talent by making them all her tour openers. When her team arrives for a meeting about whether this endeavor is going to happen, Jocelyn has all the scantily clad singers put on a performance for the label. Despite initial skepticism, everyone is impressed by the vocals and the grinding. They are less so by Tedros, who is wasted and belligerent.At this point, it is unclear what it would take for Jocelyn to kick the patently useless Tedros out of her house. But we get the answer when it comes out that her ex-boyfriend Rob has been accused of sexual assault. The charge comes thanks to the photo that Xander orchestrated in the previous episode, which placed Rob in a compromising position with one of Tedros’s followers.Upon hearing the news, Jocelyn immediately recognizes it as Tedros’s doing and finally orders Chaim to take care of him. Chaim obliges, with Hank Azaria chewing his way through a monologue about Little Red Riding Hood. Meanwhile, Jocelyn performs a sexualized interpretive dance to one of her new songs as proof of concept for the tour.But once Tedros is gone, Jocelyn is back to being bored. She swims. She trains. She smokes, morosely. Fast forward to six weeks later: The tour is already underway, and the disgraced Tedros is invited back into the fold, much to the dismay of the suits who thought they had rid themselves of him for good.And that brings me back to the question of what “The Idol” wanted to accomplish. Speaking with The New York Times before the series debuted on HBO, Tesfaye said his pitch was “about celebrity culture and how much power they have.” But we never really see Jocelyn wield her celebrity power. Tedros may be hers “forever,” but she is still clearly beholden to him as evidenced by the fact that she welcomes him back.So I’m left believing that what Levinson and Tesfaye thought they were creating was a messed up love story, in the style of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread.” In that 2017 film, Anderson pulls off a switcheroo in which a demanding mentor is dominated by his adoring pupil. But over the course of that 130-minute movie we come to understand much more about the central couple than we do over five hours of “The Idol.”That is the greatest failing of “The Idol”: After all of this, I still don’t know what drives Jocelyn and Tedros. Music, I guess? But I have trouble believing even they care all that much.Liner notesHow does an entire tour get put together in six weeks on the basis of three singles? Yes, presumably some of it was in the works before Tedros came along, but these things are monstrous undertakings and Jocelyn has been a little preoccupied.What other songs is she going to sing during her set? One of the show’s biggest oversights is that we have no sense of who Jocelyn was as an artist before her crisis.One moment Nikki is trying to recruit Tedros and then the next she’s laughing about his demise. It is totally baffling character behavior. (Similarly, I still don’t understand why Xander has any allegiance to Tedros, unless he is supposed to be literally brainwashed.)Justice for Leia, the one character with any sense. I wonder what was in her note to Jocelyn.Nikki briefly mentions that Andrew Finkelstein’s employees walked out to protest Jocelyn’s misogynistic music. That seems like a bit of an attempt to acknowledge the potential backlash to the series, which has already come and gone.Will there be a Season 2? I have a hard time imagining what that would even look like unless Jocelyn and Tedros turn into Bonnie and Clyde. But don’t get any ideas, please, HBO. More

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      Inside the Shed’s Sonic Sphere

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      A hanging concert hall at the Shed in Manhattan purports to offer something “experimental, experiential and communal.” Our critic climbs the stairs.“Whoa,” a man near me said as the curtains swept open.He, I and a couple of hundred other people had been waiting in a large room at the Shed, the arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Portentous, woozy background music was playing, as if an alien encounter was imminent.Then those curtains parted, and a much larger room was revealed: the Shed’s vast McCourt space, in which a sphere, 65 feet in diameter and pocked like Swiss cheese, had been suspended from the faraway ceiling and bathed in red light.This arresting — indeed, “whoa”-inducing — sight was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a concert hall design by the brilliant, peerlessly loopy composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who inspired Germany to build the first one for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.Stockhausen, an impresario of electroacoustic experimentation and far-out notions like a string quartet playing inside a helicopter, imagined the audiences for his “Kugelauditorium” sitting on a sound-permeable level within the sphere, so that speakers could be placed under, as well as around and over, them.During the six months that the Osaka exposition was open, hundreds of thousands of people came and heard taped music adapted for the in-the-round playback possibilities, as well as live performances. Then, for the next half century, the idea lay dormant; Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein remained intact, having not been replaced by giant spheres.Enter, a few years ago, a team led by Ed Cooke (whose biography calls him “a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness”), the sound designer Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie, the project’s engineering director.They have built Sonic Spheres in France, Britain, Mexico and the United States. Each time, like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” the contraption has grown. The Shed iteration, open through the end of July, is the first to hang in midair, at a cost of more than $2 million.As in Osaka, some of the presentations offer taped music; some, live. On Saturday, I climbed the many steps to the sphere’s entrance and reclined, like everyone else, in a comfortable hammock-like seat, listening to the seductively sullen 2009 debut album by the British band the xx. Forty-five minutes after that was over, the pianist Igor Levit appeared in person to perform, for a fresh audience, Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” from 1986.Colors and configurations of lights on the fabric skin of the Sphere tended to shift with the music’s beat as Levit performed.James Estrin/The New York TimesLights, in colors and configurations that tended to shift with the music’s beat, played on the fabric skin of this big Wiffle ball. But for an audience that could be seeing the high-definition stadium shows of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift this summer, the visuals were blurry, rudimentary stuff; this was the aspect of the presentation that felt most trapped in 1970.And the audio experience that emerged from the 124 speakers was unremarkable at best. The xx remix did nicely separate the bass, coming up palpably but not too heavily out of the bottom of the sphere, from the voices around and above. To no compelling end, though, and the album’s whispery intimacy was supersized into a much blander grandeur.The situation was more distressing for Levit. While the spare, spacious chords of “Palais de Mari” registered more or less cleanly, with only slight fuzz, the sound was muddy for the Bach chorale he played as a prelude; it was the perennial challenge of amplifying acoustic instruments, times 124. And the jittery lighting, a collaboration between Levit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, could hardly have been more uncomprehending of Feldman’s glacial austerity.For all the souped-up spiffiness of the Sonic Sphere, the programming on Saturday felt like a retread of artists who were more interesting when Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, presented them during his stint at the Park Avenue Armory uptown.There, in 2014, the xx did a celebrated (live) residency in front of only a few dozen people per show. Levit, the following year, played Bach as part of an ornate concentration exercise orchestrated by Marina Abramovic. (Will he, now a fixture of New York’s more unconventional spaces, end up hanging upside-down at the piano once the Perelman Performing Arts Center opens this fall?)Those Armory shows were more memorable than either Shed set. Both of them on Saturday were under 40 minutes, but I found myself getting antsy well before time was up. Perhaps the audiences at Burning Man, the techno-hippie hedonist bonanza in the Nevada desert where a Sonic Sphere was built last year, were more engrossed, experiencing it on harder drugs than the Coke Zero I’d had with dinner.Sober, none of the music was more interesting, effective, illuminated or illuminating in this space than it would have been elsewhere. It was clear that the main point was that first reveal, as the curtains opened and everyone’s phones came out, ready to post images of something big and glamorous on social media.So, millions of dollars for Instagram bait — but fine, if its creators didn’t also hype it as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.” I felt, in fact, more distant from my fellow audience members in the Sonic Sphere, even the ones reclining next to me, than I have at most any traditional concert hall.In this, the sphere is of a piece with the other current offering at the Shed: a weird virtual-reality simulacrum of a solo piano concert by the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.The Sonic Sphere was billed as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.”James Estrin/The New York TimesEmpathy? Communal experience? No, the hologram-like specter of Sakamoto was more vivid and substantial than the other people watching with me, who, while I wore the VR glasses, faded into transparent ghostliness.The wall text in the holding room for the Sonic Sphere acknowledges that technology can isolate us from each other, but adds that mustn’t necessarily be the case: “We need it to delight and inspire us, not just passively, but in ways that provoke action.”But, as with so much ambitious, empty-headed, underwhelming, ultimately depressing tech, the action that’s provoked by this expensive spectacle is merely a passing moment of “whoa.” More

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      Boy George Loves His Deeply Flawed Heroes

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      The Culture Club leader on the complicated artists that shape his worldview, and the grand hats that help him make a statement.Boy George was chatting with Leonardo DiCaprio, an acquaintance from years ago, at a Cannes party in May when he realized the actor wasn’t particularly interested in their reunion.“What I said was kind of like what your mum would say: ‘Oh, you’ve done well,’” he recalled in an interview. “He was probably thinking ‘You’re a lunatic,’” he added. “You know, he’s Leonardo DiCaprio, but so what? I’m Boy George!”The musician, 62, was speaking from London’s East End, where he was preparing to go on tour with Culture Club, the new wave band he led to tremendous success in the 1980s. Though the group has been reunited for nearly a decade, not all has been rosy: The original drummer (and George’s ex) Jon Moss left in 2018 and subsequently sued over lost income. (A settlement was reached earlier this year.)The pandemic, George said, pushed him to change old habits, and recapture this buoyant attitude: “As a kid, I was very gregarious and friendly — but fame kind of knocks out of you a bit.” He quoted an adage from David Bowie, about how aging allows you to become the person you should’ve been all along. “You can stay a fool all your life. But if you decide to not be like that, it’s such a relief,” he said. “And you go, Oh my God, Bowie was right about everything.”In addition to the wise Ziggy Stardust, George spoke about 10 cultural inspirations. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart TolleWith every thought — anger, sadness — there’s also a whole range of feelings in between those things. You start to realize how little we use our imaginations, even when we think we’re radical and out there. Joy is in the mundane — it doesn’t come from Cannes, although Cannes is fabulous.2‘The Naked Civil Servant’Quentin Crisp was a mad eccentric who moved to New York in his 70s and did these amazing one-man shows. He said some amazing things; he also said some really bad things. I suppose I love a lot of people that are deeply flawed, because I’m one of them. Do you want your heroes to be dull?3Hanging Out With TreesThe pandemic made me realize how mad nature is, and how beautiful it is. I’d take a bike to Hyde Park and be out for hours, sitting with trees, hanging around.4Great HatsHow many hats do I have? Probably a few hundred. You’re either a hat person or you’re not. I’m not a big fan of color coordination; I quite like things that clash. I’ve got a guy that sews on them and can cover them in fabric — I paint on them, I beat them, I set fire to them.5His ArtworkI’m making a lot of art out of cardboard, which I keep seeing popping up in galleries. People say my work is like Basquiat; I say I’m Basqui-gay. I’ve done this painting of Andy called “Andy Warhol Hates Me,” and I’ve put the quote of his: “I went to see Boy George at Madison Square Garden, and he’s really fat.”6FamilyI lost my mum in March, which was a spiritual experience beyond anything I’ve ever had. I’ve got a picture of her on the stairs, so when I come in and out, I see her. We talk every day.7Yachting in AmalfiTwo or three years ago, I went with my manager, his wife and my ex-boyfriend — I don’t know why I did that. You’re in Italy, you’re eating cacio e pepe, and it was just heaven. I was like, I want a boat. I’m probably never going to get one, but I really loved being in that space.8His Mother’s Yellow Piggy BankMy mum used to go out and buy stuffed parrots and things like that — she just loved bright, shiny things. The yellow piggy bank is the ugliest thing she loved. Every time I get some loose change, I put it in there.9Irish Sea MossI feel like it’s really been helping me with losing weight, and everyone keeps saying, “Your skin looks good.” I’m not vegan anymore, but I’m vegetarian mostly, and I like to eat clean. I use the handbag theory: If you stuff your handbag, it looks bulky. But if you just put a few things in, it looks nice.10His MusicI go back to: “What was I thinking when I was 17?” Obviously, I was in love with Jon, but I was also writing about my parents’ relationship. I had this weird, idealistic idea of what love was, and then I was 19 and didn’t really want to be in a relationship. It was all very confusing; I have to say, “poor Jon Moss.” I haven’t been in the music business since they stopped playing my music on the radio. What I do now is obviously so much better, and that’s a fact. More

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      Fall Out Boy Updates Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ in New Cover

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      Fall Out Boy has picked up where Billy Joel left off.Three decades have passed since Billy Joel released his hit single “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a song that chronicled cultural and historical events from 1949 to 1989. Its rapid-fire lyrics took listeners through a time machine, with references to figures such as Harry Truman and Marilyn Monroe and events such as the Korean War and Woodstock. Now, Fall Out Boy has picked up where the song left off with an updated cover version.The single’s cover art reads “A Fall Out Boy cover of the Billy Joel song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ covering newsworthy items from 1989-2023,” and the new lyrics refer to Myspace, the Mars Rover, Jeff Bezos and the deaths of Prince and Queen Elizabeth.“I listen to Billy Joel’s and so many of the things in it are either massive moments or just kind of shoulder shrugs within history now,” wrote Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy.Steve LucianoAssociated Press“I remember hearing the song when I was a kid,” Pete Wentz, the bassist, wrote in an email. “The ‘J.F.K. blown away’ line always stuck out to me. I would always start the verses but get kind of lost a few references in.”He continued, “This song was omnipresent in that era, but in a way where it crept through the cracks of pop culture. I remember talking about the lyrics in history class.”According to Mr. Wentz, instead of a straight cover of the song, the band wanted to amend the lyrics to reflect the 34 years that had passed since its release.“I listen to Billy Joel’s and so many of the things in it are either massive moments or just kind of shoulder shrugs within history now,” he wrote. “It’s interesting to see what he referenced from the ’50s and ’60s and what he didn’t. And in some ways it’s just etchings inside of a cave — documentation that we existed and these things happened, both triumphant and terrible. We made this song for ourselves and then we hoped our fans would have fun with it.”Brady Gerber is a rock music critic who contributes to New York and Pitchfork. As a fan of the original, he is quite fond of Fall Out Boy’s take.“I think every generation gets their own ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’” Mr. Gerber said. “I still think the melody is really catchy and fun. And I remember that the initial reaction to Billy Joel’s original version wasn’t really great. I think a lot of people actually hated the song at the time. So it’s funny, because I’m also seeing a lot of people criticizing the song thinking it’s ridiculous, but it’s also just a ridiculous song to begin with.”While it’s hard to capture every historical moment, the song mimics the original in that its references span a wide range, covering climate change as well as Pokémon and the “Twilight” films.Fall Out Boy did, however, leave out one of the most recent historical events: “I think our biggest omission was a Covid reference,” Mr. Wentz said, “and we debated it, but we leave that to the next generation’s update!” More