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      ‘Personality Crisis: One Night Only’ Review: New York Droll

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      David Johansen, once the lead singer for the New York Dolls, proves a first-rate raconteur in this documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi.When David Johansen’s alter ego, Buster Poindexter, swings into “Funky but Chic” early in “Personality Crisis: One Night Only” — a documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi — a viewer should consider herself primed for a droll and cheeky evening. A first-rate raconteur, Johansen — wearing a pompadour, sunglasses and bespoke suit — brings the funk. The storied Café Carlyle delivers the chic. The song was the first single Johansen released after having been the lead singer of the iconic 1970s band the New York Dolls.In January 2020, Johansen celebrated his 70th birthday with a cabaret show at the Carlyle. And the film treats that happening as a hub as it ventures into a rich visual archive of Johansen’s (and New York City’s) renegade past and his ruminative present. Interviews with the boundlessly inquisitive artist, conducted by his stepdaughter Leah Hennessey, are intercut with the performance and Johansen’s vagabond history, which includes fronting the Harry Smiths, named for the Chelsea Hotel denizen who compiled the “Anthology of American Folk Music” album that put a spell on so many.The cinematographer Ellen Kuras captures the singer and his terrific ensemble, the Boys in the Band Band, with suave fluidity. Downtown luminaries including Debbie Harry of Blondie are among the assembled.In clips of the New York Dolls performing “Personality Crisis,” Johansen belts and the late Johnny Thunders’s guitar rattles. In addition to Thunders, the Dolls Sylvain Sylvain, Arthur Kane, Billy Murcia and Jerry Nolan have died. Johansen is mindful of his ghosts — there are many. Yet to quote Sondheim’s battered and triumphal tune, a standard at cabarets like Café Carlyle, Johansen’s still here.Personality Crisis: One Night OnlyNot rated. Running time: 2 hours. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      Alison Goldfrapp Dials Up Her Own Disco Fantasy

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      The singer of the London duo Goldfrapp is going solo with “The Love Invention,” an album of dance music that reflects her craving for euphoria.For nearly 25 years, the name Goldfrapp has represented the musical partnership between the singer Alison Goldfrapp and the keyboardist and producer Will Gregory.The duo recorded seven stylistically varied studio albums that drifted from trip-hop to glam rock to disco to indie to folk, sometimes crossing back, with a common thread: the airy-yet-hearty multi-octave voice of its namesake. Aside from some early shows, Gregory didn’t tour with the group, operating so far out of public view that he joked about being paranoid that people didn’t know he existed.But for Goldfrapp, going it alone for the first time — at age 56 — “feels very different,” she said from behind round sunglasses in a video interview. The vocalist and producer was speaking from her London home as she prepared for the release of her debut solo album, “The Love Invention,” out May 12. The music sounds different, too, teeming with maximalist, ecstatic club bangers crafted with the help of Richard X (Erasure, Róisín Murphy) and James Greenwood (Daniel Avery, Kelly Lee Owens).“I don’t think maybe I had the confidence to go and do something on my own,” Goldfrapp said in a second conversation via phone from a vacation in Spain. “Maybe I didn’t think I could.” (Her group, she clarified, has not disbanded.)Resisting self-mythology, Goldfrapp was more inclined to chalk her solo era up to a confluence of circumstances. Maybe most crucial is that she had the time: After the release of “Silver Eye,” the group’s last album, in 2017, and a subsequent tour, Goldfrapp decided to “check out for a bit” in a self-imposed musical sabbatical. Also, she explained, “Silver Eye” “had a kind of seriousness to it, and a sort of darkness” that she wanted to offset when her musical itch finally returned, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.“The Love Invention” is an ebullient collection of 11 songs focusing on ‌‌pulse, both of the cardiac and club varieties. Its ethos can be boiled down to a line Goldfrapp purrs on “The Beat Divine” over a walloping sleaze-disco throwback: “Only love can make the beat divine.”The album does not so much rewrite the book on women singing over four-on-the-floor rhythms (pop music’s chocolate and peanut butter) as turn in an immaculate draft on its sonic ideals. Its exuberance is unfettered and its low end is uncommonly deep for an album driven by a star vocalist. Though love is the message, Goldfrapp laces the euphoria with social commentary and life experience: “Fever” plays like an ode (“You are the one thing here/I really need/We are the fever now/This is the real thing”) though it was partly inspired by climate change, and the title track, which imagines a supreme dopamine rush from a doctor’s magical concoction, was inspired in part by her use of hormone replacement therapy for menopause.While “The Love Invention” hasn’t been tested in a big room, “it’s my fantasy of it,” ‌Goldfrapp said.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesGoldfrapp traced her love of dance music to her youth. While enrolled at Alton Convent School in Hampshire, England, she sang in the choir, and in her early teens, she listened to disco and dressed like a punk, a look she said was “really unfashionable.”To manifest her clubby destiny, she turned to the seasoned Richard X, who has been making dance music for more than 20‌‌ years and contributed to the 2010 Goldfrapp album “Head First,” ‌and she made a conscious decision to refrain from using acoustic instruments on the ‌LP. Instead of the dance divas that one might expect had a hand in informing “The Love Invention” — like Robyn, or Róisín Murphy — Goldfrapp cited the musician Kelela, post-punk, Italo disco and bossa nova as inspirations.She doesn’t get out to many clubs these days, though she did visit Berlin’s infamous Berghain while on tour, which she said was “a bit scary, but I kind of loved it.” So while “The Love Invention” hasn’t been tested in a big room, “it’s my fantasy of it,” ‌Goldfrapp said while beaming. The album’s loved-up themes create a double fantasy, a “craving,” she said, for euphoria rather than memoirist reportage. (She cautioned against reading the LP as an ode to her current relationship, with the architect Peter Culley.)“The Love Invention” is not a quarantine album‌‌, but its roots can be traced to deep lockdown, when Goldfrapp began a collaboration with the Norwegian duo Röyksopp that resulted in two songs on ‌‌its “Profound Mysteries” album trilogy. Goldfrapp said she had emailed the duo because she thought working with new people would be fun and was heartened to receive a reply (other producers she contacted had “completely ignored” her). The group’s receptiveness to collaboration inspired her to install a studio in her home, ‌‌in which she would record much of “The Love Invention.”In a video interview, Svein Berge of Röyksopp said that Goldfrapp’s “inquisitive nature” and the unique “signature” of her voice made the group keen to work with her. “She has the chameleon aspect,” he said of her versatility, adding, “There is no ego,” simply “a mutual understanding that we want the output to be as good as it can be.”Goldfrapp’s influence over the past decade has been powerful, if often underacknowledged. If everyone who heard the Velvet Underground went on to form a band, a good portion of Goldfrapp’s audience in the aughts threw away their pants, donned leotards and made stompy electro-pop. (Some admirers kept their pants on: “I got very into Goldfrapp again,” Adele told Zoe Ball on BBC Radio in 2021, adding she couldn’t pull off “what Alison is the absolute queen of.”)Goldfrapp said she is “very realistic about my position in the music industry,” which means having a fan base that is both “very strong” and “quite small.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesGoldfrapp slinked onto the music scene with “Felt Mountain” in 2000, a Mercury Prize-nominated album that made no secret of its members’ trip-hop histories. (Goldfrapp had sung on Tricky’s debut, “Maxinquaye,” while Gregory played oboe and baritone sax with Portishead.) The tempos picked up on “Black Cherry,” from 2003, and again two years later on “Supernature,” which spawned the group’s highest-peaking single on the British charts, “Ooh La La.” It was eventually featured in a 2013 iPhone commercial; the group’s “Strict Machine” earlier appeared in a Verizon Wireless ad.With “Supernature,” the duo charted on the Billboard 200 for the first time, and its “slightly shy” and “a bit introspective” face, as Goldfrapp described herself, struggled with the attention. (She gets nervous during interviews, and she fidgeted with her wavy blond hair or the neckline of her black shirt during our video chat.) But she also noticed when that attention waned — she remembered having to be told “bluntly” that one of her records wasn’t selling too well when she inquired about a gig her group didn’t get.Now, Goldfrapp said, she is “very realistic about my position in the music industry,” which means having a fan base that is both “very strong” and “quite small.” “It’s not like I’m just at the beginning of my career and like, ‘Ooh, where’s it going to go?’” she said with sarcastic glee.She has resolved to ignore the music industry’s notorious ageism, and said that, at 56, she is more comfortable in her own skin than ever. “You do have to have a certain confidence to go, ‘Actually know what? I’m going to feel good about doing this,” she said.And feel good she does. “It feels all sort of very new and fresh to me, which is a great feeling,” she said of her solo album. And if it should yield a hit single or two, that’s all the better. “I mean, hey, who doesn’t want a hit?” More

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      An Avett Brother Meets a Founding Son: John Quincy Adams

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      Bob Crawford is part of the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers. He’s also the host of a new podcast about the sixth president.Some professional musicians spend their days on the tour bus staring out the window, sleeping or pursuing various routes to oblivion. For Bob Crawford, the bassist for the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, history has been his distraction of choice.“On the van, and later the bus,” he said recently in a video interview from his home near Durham, N.C., “I would read history books.”One day, he picked up Sean Wilentz’s mammoth study “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.” From there, he moved on to “several books about Martin Van Buren,” as well as studies of Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system and the knockdown congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s.Now, he’s put it all together in “Founding Son: John Quincy’s America,” a six-episode podcast about John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a man, Crawford argues, for our own fractured times.“He knows democracy is on the line, he knows slavery is a moral evil,” Crawford said of Adams, who became a leading antislavery voice in the House of Representatives, where he served after leaving the White House. “He’s one of those transcendent characters. He deserves to be in the pantheon.”“Founding Son,” available through iHeartRadio starting April 13, is the latest entry in the crowded field of history podcasts. But it’s one where Crawford (who composed and played the show’s old-timey mandolin theme) hopes to use his musical celebrity and serious historical chops to illuminate a complex, formative period in the evolution of American democracy.The Early Republic, as scholars call it, may be a rich field of study. But it’s largely a blank for most Americans, who are a bit foggy on what exactly happened between the American Revolution and the Civil War.Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving office, is a vehicle for tracing the arc of the period, which saw the United States transform from a nation dominated by its founding elites (like the Adamses) into an expansionist, populist democracy where every white male had the vote, regardless of property or station.“Founding Son” focuses on John Quincy Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving the White House (and the earliest American president to be photographed).Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAs a seven-year-old, Adams, the son of John Adams, witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, when his mother, Abigail, took him to the top of the hill to watch the gunpowder rise in the distance. And he lived long enough to serve in the House alongside Abraham Lincoln.And in an impossibly dramatic ending, Adams (spoiler alert!) died in the Capitol, after having a cerebral hemorrhage as he stood up to cast a vote relating to the Mexican-American War, which he opposed.“It’s almost poetic,” Crawford said. (Oh, Adams also wrote poetry.)Crawford, 52, grew up in Cardiff, N.J., where he recalled himself as an unimpressive student, although one with a passion for history. He recalled how one of his high school teachers, Mr. Lawless, would ask the class, “Does anyone who isn’t Bob know the answer?”If there was one person he wished he could have interviewed for the podcast, Crawford said, it was William Lee Miller, the author of “Arguing About Slavery,” who died in 2012.Kate Medley for The New York TimesOver an hour-long conversation about the podcast, Crawford, his upright bass visible on a stand behind him, regularly pulled books from the shelf to underline a point. (William Lee Miller’s “Arguing About Slavery,” he said, was a particular inspiration.) He repeatedly apologized for diving into a rabbit hole before diving into another one.With his neatly trimmed hair and soulful eyes, he gives off the vibe of the intense, idealistic high school history teacher who is also “in a band.” Except that Crawford (who earned a master’s degree in history online in 2020) really is in a band.Crawford joined with Scott and Seth Avett in 2001, after a decade of jobs that included selling shoes, working in movie production and slinging grilled cheese sandwiches “in the parking lot of Grateful Dead shows,” as the band’s official bio puts it. (In an email, Crawford clarified it was actually Phish.)Scott Avett, the band’s banjo player and co-writer, said that the podcast reflected Crawford’s steadfast character.“He does hold a lot of facts, and it’s really impressive,” said Avett (who voices dialogue for Charles Francis Adams, one of John Quincy’s sons, and the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld). “But that’s not the point, which is how he carries those facts and who he is when expressing them.”Crawford, center, onstage with Scott and Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers.CrackerfarmAnd it’s not just Crawford’s friends who are impressed. Wilentz, who appears on the podcast, also praised his historical chops.“He’s really quite versed,” Wilentz said. “He had a lot of really specific questions to ask, some of which I didn’t know the answer to.”Crawford’s side gig as a history podcaster started in 2016 with “The Road to Now,” which he created with the historian Benjamin Sawyer. (Recent episodes have covered Benghazi, Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and the history of March Madness.)Last year, Crawford hosted “Concerts of Change,” a SiriusXM docuseries about human rights benefit concerts from the 1970s to the 1990s. While working on that, he got an invitation from a friend to pitch a show to iHeart, and suggested Adams.The initial response was lukewarm. “They asked, was he involved in any true crime?” Crawford recalled.But eight months later, they bit. Will Pearson, the president of iHeartPodcasts, said what ultimately sold him on the project was the combination of Crawford’s enthusiasm and knowledge and the unfamiliarity of the John Quincy Adams story.“In my opinion one of the strongest elements of a good history podcast is the element of surprise,” he said.Crawford wrote the show (a coproduction of iHeartPodcasts, Curiosity Inc., and School of Humans) himself, with help from James Morrison, a producer who also works on the Smithsonian podcast “Side Door.” (Adams is voiced by Patrick Warburton, familiar to some as Elaine’s boyfriend on “Seinfeld.” Andrew Jackson is voiced by Nick Offerman, of “Parks & Recreation.”)Crawford with notes for the podcast. “He’s really quite versed,” said the historian Sean Wilentz, who appears on the podcast.Kate Medley for The New York Times“Founding Son,” which takes a largely chronological approach, has a certain whiskery dad-history vibe. There are dramatic set pieces (some with Ken Burns-style voice-overs and sound effects) about events like the battle of the Alamo and the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meetinghouse in Philadelphia that was destroyed by a racist mob. (Burns himself pops up as the voice of Roger Baldwin, the lawyer who represented the enslaved people who revolted aboard the Amistad.)But even as Crawford focuses on elite politics and Congressional maneuvering, he makes clear that politics was far from just a white man’s game.He acknowledges the crucial role of Black abolitionists like David Walker, whom he likens to the Black musicians who inspired rock ‘n’ roll — the creative sparks who are rarely given enough credit.And he notes that the antislavery petition drives of the 1830s, which led to the notorious “gag rule” forbidding any mention of slavery in Congress, were largely the work of women, who played a growing role in national politics despite being denied the right to vote.“Founding Son” underlines the story’s resonance to contemporary politics, with terms like “one-term president,” “alternative facts” and “deep-state cabal.” There are even accusations of a “stolen election,” after Adams — despite losing the popular and electoral votes — was elevated to the presidency in 1825, following a back room deal in Congress.)But Crawford, who calls himself an “unaffiliated” voter, also allows plenty of room for those aspects of history that don’t satisfy a contemporary thirst for a simplistic morality play.Crawford said he wanted to avoid turning the past into an oversimplified morality play. In history, he said, “everyone’s a hero, everyone’s a villain.”Kate Medley for The New York TimesConsider the treatment of Adams’s archrival, Andrew Jackson. Today, Jackson — a slaveholder who pursued a brutal policy of Native American removal, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is anathema to Democrats who not so long ago celebrated him as a founder of the party. And Crawford seconds the opinion of Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian featured on the podcast: There’s a word for him, and it’s “not a nice one.”But he also notes that it was Jackson who blocked John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of “nullification,” which held that the Constitution allowed states to reject federal legislation.As for Adams, for all his noble fight against slavery, some of his rhetoric — like his lament that American leaders, unlike Europe’s, were “palsied by the will of our constituents” — does not sound great today.In history, Crawford said, “everyone’s a hero, and everyone’s a villain.”As for today’s politics, he laments the intensity of the polarization, and the loss of any connection with a “shared reality.” But the dysfunction, as he sees it, is not equally shared.“Today the parties are clearly out of balance,” he said. “And yes, it seems to be that the Republican Party of 2023 bears no resemblance to its former self.”What comes next, he said, “is a story for someone else to tell many years from now.” In the meantime, he’s outlining another history podcast he hopes to record.“It’s juicy and reflects this moment,” he said, launching into an enthusiastic elevator pitch. “I’m not dallying in presentism — not doing that! But man.”He paused: “And I’ve already got a whole shelf of books.” More

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      Caroline Rose Takes Her Indie Rock Show on the Road

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      On a chilly day in New England at the start of a 43-city tour, the indie singer kills time before falling into the arms of her fans.BURLINGTON, Vt. — “I don’t mind walking in the rain,” Caroline Rose said on a recent afternoon, looking through the window of Crow Bookshop.It was about 40 degrees outside and pouring. Ms. Rose wasn’t dressed for the weather, but at least she was wearing a hat, with a camouflage pattern and the words “Buck Fever” across the front. Burlington, she said, was much nicer in the summer.Ms. Rose, an indie rocker who grew up on Long Island and lives mostly in Austin, Texas, had spent about seven months in this city writing the songs that appear on her new album, “The Art of Forgetting,” which chronicles a difficult breakup. She was back in Burlington to play the fourth show of an international tour that will keep her on the road into August.Standing in the “Psychology” section of the bookstore, Ms. Rose, 33, referred to the breakup that had inspired her new record. “I didn’t even really plan on splitting with my partner,” she said. “I thought we were going to work on it. But at a certain point I was like, I have so much I need to work on myself. It just felt irreconcilable for me. It makes me emotional to think about.”Her manager, Ari Fouriezos, whose hair had recently been bleached blond like Ms. Rose’s, lingered by the door.Crow Bookshop was one of the spots Ms. Rose frequented when she was living in Burlington early in the pandemic. Oliver Parini for The New York Times“I hadn’t done a kind thing for myself in a long time,” Ms. Rose continued, her voice wobbling. “Investing time in myself, it felt like the first nice thing I had done for myself in a really long time. And then, after that, it was like a deeper and deeper dive into my own head.”“The Art of Forgetting” is a departure from her previous albums, in which the singer, leaning into her theater-kid background, had often assumed alternate Caroline Rose-like personas. This time around she is simply, frighteningly, herself.She pulled down a book from a shelf: “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, a 2014 New York Times best seller about the physical and mental effects of trauma.“It changed my life, reading this,” she said. “It has to do with memory and the way our bodies might hold onto memories, even though our brain might forget. After reading this book, I realized there was a lot of stuff in my own life that my mind has just buried.”Outside the store, in the cold rain, Ms. Rose said she wanted to see if her favorite Burlington bar, Light Club Lamp Shop, was open. True to its name, lamp shades were strewn on the windowsill, but inside it was dark was empty.We kept walking — away from the restaurants and outdoor gear shops of the town center and onto the tree-lined streets of a residential neighborhood, dodging puddles and enduring several comically dreary splashes from passing cars.Ms. Rose onstage for soundcheck, practicing the song “Miami.”Oliver Parini for The New York TimesOutside a drab Victorian-style house with Halloween decorations on one of the front doors, Ms. Rose pointed to a window on the first floor.“That was my little room,” she said. Ms. Rose’s sound engineer, Jon Januhowski, had invited her to crash with him when her relationship in Austin was coming undone. It was April 2020, and Ms. Rose spent the quiet lockdown days messing around on her guitar and recording snippets of songs on her phone. A black and white cat named Rosie kept her company.“I felt very honored, because I didn’t learn how to pet a cat until I was 26,” she said.Someone else was living in the house now. Warm yellow light peeked through a gap in the curtains.Ms. Rose walked back to the town center, checking once more to see if Light Club Lamp Shop had opened. No luck, although it was after 4 p.m. The owners kept odd hours, she said, adding that it seemed like a nice way to live, to come and go as you please.Ms. Rose drinks a hot toddy with mezcal every night before she goes onstage. Her bandmate Lena Simon is on the sofa.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesTo some, it may seem as if the life of an itinerant musician assumes this shape. But Ms. Rose said she often longs for a simpler way of life. While making “The Art of Forgetting,” she said she unexpectedly fell in love with a woman whom she had met through mutual friends. She added that they’ll probably settle down in Los Angeles for a bit after the tour, which will take her to more than two dozen cities in the North America before stops in Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.“I want to live my life and take a break after this,” she said. “I don’t know what that will look like. But it’s the not-knowing part that excites me the most.”Ms. Fouriezos, her manager, reminded her that she was due at the club for soundcheck in about an hour. Ms. Rose suggested a quick bite first and started heading toward a small cafe, Stone Soup. Earlier that day, she said, she’d had breakfast there with her parents, who had driven up from Center Moriches, N.Y., with their dog, Paco, an 11-year-old mutt.At this hour, only Stone Soup’s buffet was available. We piled our plates with rice, sweet potatoes, salad and tofu. There was a silence as we ate. We were damp and cold.“So, how’s everyone feeling?” Ms. Rose said cheerily.Ms. Rose played the songs from “The Art of Forgetting” in the order in which they appear on the album. Before she went on, she talked through the transitions with her bandmates.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesShowtimeMs. Fouriezos was behind the wheel of a 2015 Subaru Forester, with Ms. Rose riding shotgun, as they pulled up to Higher Ground, a onetime movie theater that had been gutted and made into a music venue. A few people were sweeping rainwater off the roof. In the parking lot, Mark Balderston, Ms. Rose’s affable tour manager, told her that the club had sprung a leak.“It’s not dangerous or anything,” he added.Inside, a table had been laid with merch, including a pack of tissues that read, “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” During soundcheck, she played two songs: “Miami,” which starts softly before building into an edgy power ballad, and “Jill Says,” which is named for her therapist. Then Ms. Rose stepped down from the stage and practiced getting up and down from a trunk in the middle of the concert floor for a stunt that was meant to be a high point of the show.“Caroline loves antics,” Ms. Fouriezos said.In a narrow hallway backstage, a table wedged into a corner was laden with chili and cookies. Ms. Rose’s bandmates Riley Geare, Michael Dondero, Glenn Van Dyke and Lena Simon fixed tea, made drinks with the tequila and seltzer on the dressing table, and changed their outfits. Ms. Rose put on a red and white two-piece set with a spear-point collar.For her performance, Ms. Rose wore a two-piece set wit a spear-point collar created by Peter Heon and based on a design she drew on a napkin.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesIn the greenroom, Abbie Morin, the lead singer of the band opening, Hammydown, emphasized the importance of stretching before a performance to prevent a “bang-over” — a neck condition that can arise from headbanging during a show.Mr. Balderston, a tall man dressed in black, popped in and out of the room as the hall filled with about 450 people. Ms. Rose sipped from a hot toddy made with mezcal, her usual preshow drink. Then she dropped beads of various tinctures under her tongue. “Touring involves a lot of tinctures,” she said.At around 8, Mr. Balderston gave the two-minute warning, and the band pulled into a group hug, chanting, “Let’s have fun! Let’s have fun!”The crowd was rapt during the show, quiet for the quiet songs and loud for the loud ones. The concert was more stylized than the usual club show, with the singer separated from her bandmates by a scrim that cast their silhouettes against bright colors, creating a kind of Pop Art tableau.Ms. Rose had come up with the concept, and Ms. Van Dyke executed her vision with the help of a lighting director, John Foresman, who has worked with indie rock stalwarts like Car Seat Headrest and Mitski. The result, Ms. Rose said onstage, was “the most high-tech form of D.I.Y. you can imagine.”There were a few hitches. Ms. Rose asked to begin “Miami” again, after a false start; and there was an unplanned interlude before “Jill Says,” when her keyboard briefly stopped working. She made light of the snags, saying, “My ultimate goal for my career is to make music A.I. can’t reproduce. What you’re experiencing is a human performance.”Ms. Rose’s concert merch included a pack of tissues that read “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” It looked like some of her fans did.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesWhen it came time for “The Kiss,” a song about yearning “for the kiss of someone new,” Ms. Rose descended from the stage and wandered into the crowd. Her voice seemed to be floating, and the audience members undulated to make way for her. She stepped up onto the trunk.“We’re going to do a trust fall,” Ms. Rose told the room. “Get close.”As the music shimmered, she let herself drop, closing her eyes. Audience members caught her and gingerly passed her to the front of the hall.“Send me around again!” she said. “Send me around again!” More

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      8 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      A dive into tracks by Tyler, the Creator, Feist, Bully and more recent highlights.Tyler, the Creator released a new track as part of an expanded edition of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”Luis “Panch” PerezDear listeners,I have a constantly replenishing playlist on my phone called “Thursday Nights and Friday Mornings.” It’s named for the time I do some of my most focused new-music listening, in preparation for the publication of the Playlist, a weekly feature that I compile with my colleagues Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica.* Each Friday, we recommend a handful of songs released in the past week, a task that helps me stay on top of all (well, most) of the new music that comes out in a given week, and often the Jons’ picks point me toward what I missed.Every few weeks, I’ll be sending out an Amplifier digest of recent Playlist highlights. Today, we’ve got a mix of some possibly familiar names (Lucinda Williams; Feist; Tyler, the Creator) and hopefully some new ones, too.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Jess Williamson: “Hunter”This is one of my favorite new songs right now. It’s from the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, whose music I’ve been following since her haunting 2014 debut, “Native State.” Last year, she teamed up with a fellow musician from the South, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and formed a country duo called Plains. Williamson’s contributions to Plains’ excellent record “I Walked With You a Ways” felt like a step forward for her as a songwriter, and I hear that growth on “Hunter,” the first single from her next solo album, “Time Ain’t Accidental,” out in June. It’s a bittersweet song about the spiritually exhausting process of looking for love, but on the chorus Williamson sounds hopeful and replenished, reminding herself, “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Bully: “Days Move Slow”My former colleague at Vulture Jesse David Fox once compared an early song from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy power-pop band Bully to “Sugarhigh,” the fictional alt-rock hit that Renée Zellweger’s character sings at the end of “Empire Records” — and now I will never un-hear that similarity as long as I live. (It’s definitely a compliment.) I interviewed Bognanno over video chat in August 2020, and I remember a very sweet dog named Mezzi dozing behind her. (A dog lover myself, I always ask my interview subjects about their pups. Always.) Sadly, Mezzi has since passed on, but “Days Move Slow,” from the forthcoming Bully album “Lucky for You,” is both an ode to her memory and a chronicle of Bognanno trying to propel herself out of the muck of grief. That probably makes it sound like a downer, but the song has a resilient, upbeat energy about it — sort of like an excitable canine. Rest in power, Mezzi! (Listen on YouTube)3. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro: “Beso”Some couples announce their engagement with a ring pic on Instagram. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, two of the brightest Spanish-language stars in the current pop firmament, hinted at theirs in a music video. Their sweet and sultry duet “Beso” is a highlight from their recently released collaborative EP, “RR” — and proof of their musical chemistry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Tyler, the Creator: “Sorry Not Sorry”Fun fact: In 2021, only two albums made appearances on all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists — Olivia Rodrigo’s head-turning debut “Sour” and Tyler, the Creator’s sprawling rap odyssey “Call Me if You Get Lost.” Last week, Tyler released an expanded edition featuring a few new tracks, including this one, the gregarious “Sorry Not Sorry.” I really like this song’s Jekyll-and-Hyde energy, as a repentant Tyler apologizes for a number of personal and professional slights and then, occasionally, a brasher version of himself takes it right back: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Mahalia: “Terms and Conditions”I’m a total mark for any song that mines and cleverly updates the sounds of Y2K pop or “TRL”-era R&B. (See also: The entire output of the young British girl group Flo.) “Terms and Conditions,” from the 24-year-old singer Mahalia, does just that. It’s giving me hints of Mya, Destiny’s Child and a whole lot of J. Lo’s glimmering millennial time capsule “If You Had My Love.” But it’s also got a contemporary twist, as Mahalia tells a potential suitor what she won’t tolerate (“If you look at her, consider bridges burned”), flipping the dry language of contractual agreements into something confident, fun and flirty. (Listen on YouTube)6. Lucinda Chua featuring yeule: “Something Other Than Years”Like the Mahalia song, I have my colleague Jon Pareles to thank for this next Playlist pick, from the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua. “Something Other Than Years” is a sparse, hypnotic duet with the Singaporean musician yeule, which finds Chua pleading in a glassy voice, “Show me how to live this life,” a request that seems to be answered by yeule’s celestial melody. Jon describes the rest of Chua’s new album “Yian” as a collection of “meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Feist: “Borrow Trouble”I love it when Feist — an artist often associated with calm and quietude — lets loose and makes a ruckus, as she does on this stomping tune from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Wait for her primal screams at the very end! (Listen on YouTube)Two Lucindas in a single playlist? Better believe it. The country-rock legend Lucinda Williams’s voice has sounded defiant since at least the 1980s, but since recovering from a 2020 stroke, her survivor’s rasp has taken on a whole new gravitas. “New York Comeback” — from the upcoming album “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” — has Williams’s characteristic grit and lack of sentiment (“No one’s brought the curtain down,” she sings wrly, “maybe you should stick around”) but there’s something poignant about hearing Amplifier fave Bruce Springsteen (along with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa) singing backing vocals to support her as if he’s just one more rock ’n’ roll lifer nodding to another. (Listen on YouTube)These are my terms and conditions,Lindsay*If the grammatically correct plural of “attorney general” is indeed “attorneys general,” maybe I should say “Jons Pareles and Caramanica.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Jess Williamson, “Hunter”Track 2: Bully, “Days Move Slow”Track 3: Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, “Beso”Track 4: Tyler, the Creator, “Sorry Not Sorry”Track 5: Mahalia, “Terms and Conditions”Track 6: Lucinda Chua featuring yeule, “Something Other Than Years”Track 7: Feist, “Borrow Trouble”Track 8: Lucinda Williams, “New York Comeback”Bonus TracksA few of you have written in to ask if we archive previous Amplifier playlists on Spotify. We do! The easiest way to find them is through our account page, where we also archive all the weekly Friday Playlists, too.And speaking of reader emails: Special thanks to Sharon Smith for — after I mentioned that Bob Dylan won his first Grammy nearly two decades into his career, for his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — directing me to this blistering performance of Dylan playing the song live at the 1980 Grammys. (Kris Kristofferson, as you’ll see, was loving it.) Apparently the producers asked him to cut the song down to three or four minutes; he played for six and a half. Classic Bob! More

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      Taylor Swift Fans Grapple With Joe Alwyn Breakup Reports

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      After “Entertainment Tonight” and People published stories reporting that the singer’s relationship with Joe Alwyn was over, many Swifties went online to vent their feelings.To quote Taylor Swift’s own lyrics, “The rumors are terrible and cruel, but honey most of them are true.”Fans of Ms. Swift spent much of the weekend grappling with the possibility that the “Midnights” singer and her longtime boyfriend, the British actor Joe Alwyn, had broken up, after reports from “Entertainment Tonight” and People magazine said the couple was through.“ET” was vague about how it had come by the information, saying in its story on Friday afternoon only that it had “learned” that Ms. Swift and Mr. Alwyn had split. A few hours later, People matched the report with a story of its own citing an unnamed person close to the pair as its source. Both outlets said the breakup had occurred weeks ago.With no comment from Ms. Swift, Mr. Alwyn or their representatives, fans of the singer were not sure whether to trust what they had read. Ms. Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this article.“I think it’s a poorly written, unconfirmed article,” Brittany Browning, a 30-year-old writer who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., said of the “ET” story.She added that she didn’t believe the pair had really split up and predicted that Mr. Alwyn would make an appearance at Ms. Swift’s next concert stop, in Tampa, Fla., “out of spite.” (Mr. Alwyn has not been sighted at any of Ms. Swift’s tour stops thus far.)Another fan, Tiffany Hammer, a tarot card reader from Puyallup, Wash., was also skeptical. “I won’t believe it’s true until I hear something officially affiliated with Swift, whether that’s Tree or whether that’s her mom mentioning it casually in an interview a year from now,” Ms. Hammer, 37, said, referring to Ms. Swift’s longtime publicist, who has become a celebrity in her own right among fans. “As respectfully as possible, it’s none of our business until we know what she wants us to know.”Ms. Hammer noted that some Swifties have gone into an online frenzy as they try to digest the unconfirmed report.“On Reddit, people are combing through her lyrics about this supposed breakup and grieving something that’s not even confirmed yet,” she said. “It’s like, your poor parasympathetic nervous system. Give yourself a breather until you know everything.”Other fans accepted the reports as truth, albeit with caution.“I think that media literacy is really important, and I have the benefit of having a few more years on some of these newer Swifties or younger Swifties,” said Katherine Mohr, a 31-year-old project manager from Madison, Wis. “I’ve been through the wringer on celebrity gossip before and know who you can trust and who you can’t.”Ms. Mohr said she had not been quick to believe earlier gossip items concerning Ms. Swift, including those about marriage, pregnancy and some recent online speculation on why the singer had made a change in her set list, replacing “Invisible String,” a love song believed to be about her relationship with Mr. Alwyn, with a different number. But the articles from “Entertainment Tonight” and People were enough to persuade her that the breakup news was legit.“There is a seriousness factor to this that there wasn’t with any of those rumors, and we need to be able to tell the difference,” Ms. Mohr said. “Otherwise, we’re never going to be able to survive in celebrity culture knowing what’s true and what’s not.”Morgan Chadwick, 27, recalled meeting Ms. Swift at an event years ago and chatting with her about how the two women had been dating their boyfriends for the same amount of time. Ms. Chadwick, a graphic designer in Chicago, said she would often joke to her boyfriend, who is now her husband, that each new love song Ms. Swift wrote was about them.“He would always roll his eyes,” she said.“It’s sad, but also I’m an adult,” Ms. Chadwick added.She said she wasn’t sure what to make of the breakup reports. “They’ve been so private in their relationship that I don’t know that there’s going to be any sort of confirmation other than, like, she might make some comment at a show, or he’s going to show up at a show,” Ms. Chadwick said.Katie Devin Orenstein, 23, a recent college graduate living in New York, said she is counting down the days until she gets to see Ms. Swift at one of her concerts in New Jersey in May. She is, however, rethinking her outfit, which she had planned to wear as a nod to “Invisible String”: a teal shirt and yogurt shop employee uniform in homage to the line “teal was the color of your shirt when you were 16 at the yogurt shop.”She added that she’ll be looking to Ms. Swift for the final word on her relationship status.“Every single thing she does onstage, especially those surprise songs, everyone’s going to analyze it like it’s the damn Torah,” Ms. Orenstein said. More

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      Morgan Wallen Spends a Fifth Straight Week at No. 1

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      The country superstar, on his latest chart streak, holds off challenges from the sardonic pop singer Melanie Martinez and a deluxe reissue from Tyler, the Creator.For the fifth time in a row, the country superstar Morgan Wallen tops the Billboard album chart with his latest extra-long LP, “One Thing at a Time,” easily holding off challenges from new releases by the singer Melanie Martinez and the indie-rock supergroup boygenius.In its latest week, the 36-track “One Thing,” Wallen’s third studio album, had the equivalent of 173,000 sales in the United States, including 216 million streams and 8,000 copies sold as a full album, according to the tracking service Luminate.It is Wallen’s latest streak atop the chart. At the beginning of 2021, he released “Dangerous: The Double Album” — which had 30 tracks — and held the No. 1 spot for 10 weeks straight, despite a temporary ban on country radio after he had been caught on video using a racial slur.Martinez, a teenage contestant on “The Voice” a decade ago who has since explored a sardonic form of art-pop as a recording artist, lands at No. 2 with her latest release, “Portals.” It had the equivalent of 142,000 sales, including 61 million streams and 99,000 copies sold as a complete album; in its physical form, “Portals” came in 21 versions, including 14 CDs in a rainbow of collectible variations — autographed, with “puzzle” or lenticular covers, with a tank top — along with six vinyl LPs and a cassette.Tyler, the Creator, jumped 134 spots to No. 3 with the deluxe version of his 2021 album “Call Me if You Get Lost,” which had 78 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package.Boygenius, featuring three acclaimed singer-songwriters — Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus — opens at No. 4 with its first full album, “The Record,” after an EP released five years ago. “The Record” had the equivalent of 67,000 sales, including 18 million streams and 53,000 copies sold of the full album.SZA’s “SOS” holds at No. 5 in its 17th week out. More

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      Mötley Crüe Guitarist’s Lawsuit Says He Was Kicked Out

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      Mick Mars accused his bandmates of gaslighting him and cutting him out of future profits after he said he was retiring from touring.Mick Mars, the guitarist for the veteran hair-metal band Mötley Crüe, filed a lawsuit this week accusing his bandmates of pushing him out of the group and cutting him out of its future profits.The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in Superior Court in Los Angeles County, details a falling out that the band had with Mars after he announced in October that he was retiring from touring, citing chronic pain from an inflammatory disease that affects the spine.The rest of the band responded, the suit says, by convening an emergency shareholders’ meeting of Mötley Crüe’s main corporate entity to throw Mars out of the band, fire him as a director of the corporation and take away his shares. The lawsuit says Mars has a 25 percent stake in each of the band’s affiliated business entities.“It is beyond sad that, after 41 years together, a band would try to throw out a member who is unable to tour anymore because he has a debilitating disease,” said Edwin F. McPherson, Mars’s lawyer. “Mick has been pushed around for far too long in this band, and we are not going to let that continue.”Mötley Crüe formed in Los Angeles in 1981 and became one of the most popular of the so-called hair-metal bands. Mixing glam-rock theatrics, heavy metal riffs and radio-friendly pop hooks, they were fixtures on MTV in the 1980s and, by that decade’s end, had topped the Billboard 200 chart with their 1989 album, “Dr. Feelgood.” The band’s tell-all memoir, “The Dirt,” which chronicled their rise to fame and rocky history, was adapted into a Netflix biopic in 2019.Mars, 71, whose real name is Robert Alan Deal, joined Mötley Crüe shortly after it was founded and, according to the lawsuit, came up with the band’s name. He was diagnosed at 27 with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease that can cause the vertebrae to fuse over time. The disease has caused his spine “to seize up and freeze completely solid,” the suit says, adding that he is in chronic pain and is not able to move his head in any direction.Last fall, Mars told his bandmates that, because of his “debilitating” ankylosing spondylitis, he couldn’t physically “handle the rigors of the road” and would no longer tour with the band, the suit says. Mars, who last performed with Mötley Crüe in Las Vegas on Sept. 9, 2022, said he would still record and perform with the band in a “residency situation.”After Mars publicly announced the change on Oct. 26, the band issued a separate statement saying that he had “retired” and that a guitarist named John 5 was replacing him.The other band members — Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil and Tommy Lee — called the emergency shareholders’ meeting, where they sought to fire Mars from seven band-affiliated corporations and limited-liability corporations, the lawsuit says. Those entities — Mötley Crüe Inc.; Mötley Crüe Touring Inc.; Red, White and Crue Inc.; Masters 2000 Inc.; Cruefest LLC; Mötley Records LLC; and Masters 2008 LLC — are listed as defendants in the lawsuit, which demands that Mars be allowed to review the band’s business records. He is also seeking reimbursement for his legal fees.Mars claims in his lawsuit that the band also demanded that he sign an agreement that his share of future touring profits and sales of merchandise featuring the band’s name and logo be reduced to 5 percent from 25 percent, and that he receive no income from sales of merchandise that “named or depicted” his replacement in the band.Sasha Frid, a lawyer for the band, said the lawsuit was “unfortunate and completely off base.” He said that Mars and other band members signed an agreement in 2008 that nobody would receive money from performances if they resigned.“Despite the fact that the band did not owe Mick anything — and with Mick owing the band millions in advances that he did not pay back — the band offered Mick a generous compensation package to honor his career with the band,” Frid said in an emailed statement. “Manipulated by his manager and lawyer, Mick refused and chose to file this ugly public lawsuit.”The lawsuit sheds light on the band’s tumultuous personal relationships, accusing Sixx, Mötley Crüe’s bassist, of making decisions on the band’s behalf without consulting his bandmates. Sixx also “gaslighted” Mars in recent years, the suit says, telling him that his guitar playing was subpar, that he often played the wrong chords onstage and that he had “some sort of cognitive dysfunction.”Frid provided The New York Times with signed declarations from seven members of the band’s crew, including the band’s production manager, who said Mars’s performance on Mötley Crüe’s 2022 stadium tour was “by far the worst I have ever seen in my years with the band.”“Mötley Crüe always performs its songs live, but during the last tour Mick struggled to remember chords, played the wrong songs and made constant mistakes which led to his departure from the band,” Frid said. “The band did everything to protect him, tried to keep these matters private to honor Mick’s legacy and take the high road.”In his lawsuit, Mars acknowledged occasionally playing the wrong chords on tour, but said it was because of a faulty in-ear monitor that made him unable to hear his guitar. Instead, he accused the other band members, including Sixx, of miming to recordings onstage. More