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      Hannah Jadagu Turns Small Moments Into Big Pop Songs

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      The 20-year-old N.Y.U. student’s debut album, “Aperture,” aims for emotions and earworms.What does it mean to be a pop songwriter in 2023? Part of the job is what it has always been: coming up with catchy melodies, terse lyrics and instrumental hooks; creating crisply defined verses and choruses; capturing short attention spans while tapping into broadly shared experiences.“Pop structure is always happening in my songs,” said Hannah Jadagu, 20, whose debut album, “Aperture,” will be released on Friday. In a video chat from her dorm room at New York University, she added, “I love a good hook or a good chorus. I love a good banger. I love a pop hit.”Jadagu’s dorm room is spartan. One otherwise bare wall is decorated with a poster of a fierce-looking woman’s face, origin unknown; Jadagu rescued it from a discard pile. Another displays a few posters and passes from her recent tours; Jadagu paused her college education in 2022 to tour and write her album. Her room is now primarily a musician’s work space, with her computer, a MIDI keyboard and three guitars close at hand. When she came to N.Y.U., where she’s now in her third year, she contemplated becoming a music supervisor and leaned into studies of music as a business, but soon she began to focus on her own songs.Jadagu has a distinct visual presence — a cascade of long, blond braids frames her face — and a contagious smile, particularly noticeable when she’s citing musicians she’s learned from, famous and less so. She mentioned Charli XCX, Frank Ocean, SZA, Haim, Billie Eilish, Tame Impala, the Beatles, Ellie Goulding, CeeLo Green, Clairo, beabadoobee, Vampire Weekend, Steve Lacy, Snail Mail, M.I.A., Grouplove, Winnetka Bowling League, Ritt Momney, the Japanese House, Kevin Abstract and more. Many of them, she freely admits, have had an immediate influence on whatever song she was working on when she heard them.Most of the songs on “Aperture” lean into pop’s eternal subject: uncertain romance. She sings about being scared to get serious in the folk-to-grunge “Lose”; about trying to get someone to forget an ex in the lurching, psychedelia-tinged “Six Months”; and about trying to figure out where she stands in a relationship in “Say It Now,” which expands from a winsome plaint into a stomping pop chorus.“I’m not a dramatic person in my everyday life,” she said. “But when I sit down to write something, I’m like, How can I explain how this feels big to me, even though I might not show it on the outside?”“I owe everything to SoundCloud because it helped me build a little bit of confidence,” Jadagu said of the platform where she first released her music.Makeda Sandford for The New York TimesShe added, “When you’re a songwriter, it could be that even the smallest thing happens and then you’re like, ‘That’s going to be a big song.’ There’s a way of taking something in your life, even if it’s just a small moment, and then making it into this big experience for people to listen in on.”Throughout her album, Jadagu’s music keeps shifting styles, veering from indie rock to electronic to warped R&B. “I told my manager I want to be able to make an album where it feels like there are no borders,” she said. “I wanted each song to be different.”Jadagu has a singular sense of melody. Her phrases hopscotch around, full of angular leaps that also feel easy and conversational. Those melodies turn out to be equally effective whether they’re leaping across distorted guitar chords, suave keyboards or abstract soundscapes.Greta Kline, who records as Frankie Cosmos, became one of Jadagu’s early admirers and mentors. “She’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of all the different ways that music can go,” Kline said in an interview. “And she can picture all those parts before even laying them down. She’s got an amazing producer’s mind. And she knows everything cool that’s going on.”Kline added, “She’s going to be a star. I just hope someday I get to open for her.”Jadagu has always been absorbed in music. She grew up in Mesquite, Texas, the Dallas suburb where her parents settled after immigrating from Zimbabwe in the 1990s. She soaked up pop, hip-hop and indie rock from the radio and from the albums of her older sister, Tymie. She attended church regularly — along with youth groups and church camp — and sang in the choir, where she learned to love building vocal harmonies.Jadagu turned away from the church when she was in high school. “I know the Bible,” she said. “But it just got to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is something I’m really fully believing in with my heart.’”Two songs that frame the album, “Explanation” and “Letter to Myself,” sympathetically explore how believers seek answers to fundamental questions. “Everyone is looking for an explanation/Put your faith and hope in something,” Jadagu sings as the album begins. Then she starts to wonder: “How do you know?”In high school, Jadagu studied classical percussion and joined the school’s drum line. She also picked up electric guitar at 16, learning her favorite songs on her own. But as early as elementary school, she had already started recording her own music on computers.“I’ve always just had a knack for wanting to be on some electronic device, making some sounds,” she said. When she was told to play math games on the computer, she would secretly open up GarageBand and just start making beats. “Or I’d go to pbskids.org, and they had an ‘Arthur’ game where Arthur could help me make a song.”In high school, her songwriting grew more serious, and Jadagu started uploading her music to SoundCloud, cannily using hashtags like #indie, #electronic and #relaxing that drew her first listeners to a song she has now taken down, “Night Drive Boy.”“I woke up the next day and it had 2,000 plays,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Oh, people like my music.’ And even though it was an algorithmic thing that happened, I still felt like maybe I could keep doing this and keep posting them, not just for myself. I owe everything to SoundCloud because it helped me build a little bit of confidence.”“I love a good hook or a good chorus,” Jadagu said. “I love a good banger. I love a pop hit.”Makeda Sandford for The New York TimesJadagu’s self-released music somehow reached the Sub Pop label, which signed her in her senior year of high school. She recorded “What Is Going On?,” a five-song EP released in 2021, entirely on her iPhone, using GarageBand with a guitar and an outboard microphone. “People are always like, ‘Wow, you made your EP on an iPhone, how incredible!’ And I’m like, ‘I just didn’t have money,’” she said with a smile and a shrug.With “Aperture,” Jadagu had a budget for a studio and a producer. After constructing her new songs on her own, she worked with the French producer Max Robert Baby, selecting him as a collaborator after he sent her his own version of “Say It Now.” Via video interview from France, Max recalled that Jadagu sent back “a Google document detailing every second of the track, every teeny bit of the production I made,” adding, “She’s so precise. She’s a brilliant woman, really.”Working remotely and then together — in a historic French studio, Greasy Records — they turned Jadagu’s new songs into ever more surreal studio concoctions, toying with textures and spatial effects, coming up with whimsical countermelodies and head-spinning cross-rhythms. “I’ve never seen such maturity and determination — to make something that’s really her but also really OK with her influences,” Max said. “She had an idea, coming into the studio, how she wanted each song to sound, and that vision was crystal clear.”“Aperture” is absolutely 21st-century pop: personal and technical, candid and knowing, physical and virtual, shrewdly engineered. “Ever since I started making music, I’ve always had dreams of at least being heard by people,” Jadagu said. “Pop songs are supposed to be able to connect to almost anyone, and they’re supposed to be an earworm.”“I think there’s nothing better than hearing something catchy,” she added. “You’re walking on the street later and you’re like, ‘Oh no!’ That’s when you’re doing your job — where you’ve made something that is just so infectious that it’s burrowed itself into someone’s subconscious. So they start singing it when they’re cooking, later. You know?” More

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      Why I’m Obsessed With This KC and the Sunshine Band Song

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      A deep dive into the 1982 track “(You Said) You’d Gimme Some More.”KC and the Sunshine band, likely demanding more.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Every once in a while, I’ll be telling you about a random song I am currently obsessed with in an attempt to explore the root of this fascination (and perhaps convince you to join me). Today, it’s a little-known gem from KC and the Sunshine Band.Yes, KC and the Sunshine Band. Hear me out.The year is 1982. Seven years after “(That’s the Way) I Like It.” Three years after the notorious Disco Demolition Night. A year after the arrival of MTV.The hit-making formula that had worked so well for KC and the Sunshine Band throughout the commercial height of disco — from 1975 to 1976, they had four No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100! — was not going to cut it anymore. It was the ’80s now. The future. The moment had come to trash the bell-bottoms, buy a bunch of criminally expensive synthesizers, and set a low-budget and audaciously low-concept music video in an abandoned arcade. It was time for “(You Said) You’d Gimme Some More,” the irresistible and barely remembered leadoff track from the Florida band’s 1982 album, “All in a Night’s Work.”I was previously unaware that KC and the Sunshine Band ever sounded like this. There’s a dark intensity to “Gimme Some More” — a warped synthesized bass backbone and a hard-driving, mechanized beat that undercuts those signature blasts of celebratory brass. The first time I heard this track, I could have easily been convinced that it was produced not by the group’s founders, Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, but Giorgio Moroder.I must here confess that the first time I heard this song was not that long ago. And that the reason it came into my life is, shall we say, accidentally Anglophobic: Remember right after Queen Elizabeth died last year, when a bunch of Irish soccer hooligans went viral for singing some regally disrespectful lyrics to the tune of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up”? Well, that reminded my boyfriend that “Give It Up” is actually a pretty great song, and when he went to stream “All in a Night’s Work,” he stumbled upon this stone-cold jam.You know those songs that become localized smash hits within your friend circle or group chat? “Gimme Some More” quickly became one of those. It’s now the song I put on when I have control of the aux cord, usually challenging unsuspecting people to guess — just try and guess — who recorded it. A few months ago I made a friend play it in his car and then also forced him to watch the entire seven-and-a-half-minute music video. His verdict: “Something about this guy’s energy is frightening to me.”The Moroder comparison isn’t so far-fetched. The producer behind both Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) and Blondie’s “Call Me” (1980) made the transition from disco to new wave about as gracefully as a musician could: His was an aesthetic path worth following. But it’s easy to understand why the ecstatic, upbeat “Give It Up” was an easier sell coming from the “Boogie Shoes” guy than the more aggressive and nervy “Gimme Some More.”I will not vouch for every song on “All in a Night’s Work”; the next track is titled “Party With Your Body” and contains the lyric, “Now Jazzercise is the latest trend.” So to make this journey down the rabbit hole of ’80s KC and the Sunshine Band a little gentler on you, I’ve made a short playlist that throws in a few contemporary Moroder tracks — ones that also bridge those gaps between disco, funk and new wave. I have not secured an abandoned arcade for you to dance in. That work I will leave up to you.Don’t stop what you’re doin’,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Gimme Some More (and More)” track listTrack 1: KC and the Sunshine Band, “(You Said) You’d Gimme Some More”Track 2: Giorgio Moroder, “Chase”Track 3: Donna Summer, “Pandora’s Box”Track 4: Giorgio Moroder, “Palm Springs Drive (American Gigolo Soundtrack Version)”Track 5: KC and the Sunshine Band, “Give It Up”Bonus tracksThis week I am mourning the loss, in a brutal Game 7 of the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference semifinals, of my beloved but singularly star-crossed Philadelphia 76ers. To them, through tears, I dedicate Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.”And to sweet, 31-year-old Bobi, the world’s oldest dog: Oasis’s “Live Forever.” It is beautiful to me that a dog who was born before the release of “Definitely Maybe” is still alive. More

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      Listen to the Mother of All Playlists

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      Hear songs by Brandi Carlile, 2Pac, Merle Haggard and more for Mother’s Day.Brandi Carlile’s “The Mother” is one of the more honest songs about motherhood in the canon.Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York TimesDear listeners,A lot of music about motherhood gets a bad rap.Given how much our culture devalues women’s work — and domestic work most of all — this shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but it’s still a bummer. That nebulously defined genre of dad rock has, over the years, earned a begrudging cultural respect, but the phrase “mom rock,” in the rare instances it’s used, still sounds like an insult.I remember discussing this double standard a few years ago when I was interviewing the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, who won a Tony for her score for the hit musical “Hadestown” and releases incisively observed folk music under her own name. Becoming a mother had ushered in a drastic change in her perspective — “a relocation of myself in the world and in my family,” in her words. She wanted to be able to write about that experience with all the richness and depth it deserved, even if it ran the risk of being labeled, as she put it with a laugh, “culturally irrelevant mom art.”Luckily, plenty of other songwriters have charted the choppy waters of motherhood — and of being mothered — proving it to be one of the most complicated, challenging and (at least sometimes) rewarding of human experiences. In honor of Mother’s Day (don’t forget: this Sunday!), I’ve put together a playlist of songs that reflect motherhood in all of its unruly complexity.But at the same time: not too unruly, on this day of celebrating moms. There is a time and a place for Danzig’s “Mother,” but it is neither now nor here on this playlist. Ditto John Lennon’s primal scream of “Mother,” though the Beatles’ “Julia” might have been a more appropriate choice. I would here like to acknowledge the existence of the Spice Girls’ “Mama” and Good Charlotte’s “Thank You Mom” without asking you to listen to them.The aforementioned Anaïs Mitchell, however, did make the cut, along with an eclectic group of artists including 2Pac, Brandi Carlile and Beyoncé. Mamma mia, here we go.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Kacey Musgraves: “Mother”The shortest, sparsest song on Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 album, “Golden Hour,” is also the most emotionally piercing. “I’m just sitting here, thinking ’bout the time that’s slipping and missing my mother,” the country renegade sings with heartbreaking plaintiveness, before zooming out a generation and imagining that her own mother is probably doing the same. Musgraves has said that “Mother” is one of the “Golden Hour” songs she wrote while tripping on LSD — but don’t tell her mom that part. (Listen on YouTube)2. Beverly Glenn-Copeland: “La Vita”The pioneering composer and new age artist Beverly Glenn-Copeland has, in recent years, experienced a long-delayed and much deserved uptick in popularity thanks to a series of reissues and the enthusiastic embrace of a younger generation of musicians. The enchanting “La Vita,” from Copeland’s self-released 2004 album “Primal Prayer,” features operatic vocals from the soprano Maggie Hollis, over which Copeland intones a stirring lyric that ends with a profoundly grounding reminder: “And my mother says to me, ‘enjoy your life.’” (Remember that refrain; it’s going to make another appearance later in this playlist.) (Listen on YouTube)3. Brandi Carlile: “The Mother”Carlile doesn’t sugarcoat the experience of motherhood in this beautifully written standout from her 2018 album, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” but that gives the song a lived-in honesty, and makes its warmth come across as something more powerful than empty sentiment. “They’ve still got their morning paper and their coffee and their time,” she sings of her “rowdy” friends without children. But for all that is lost, she realizes, so much has also been gained since the birth of her daughter: “All the wonders I have seen I will see a second time from inside of the ages of your eyes.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Merle Haggard: “Mama Tried”“Instead of life in prison I was doing one-to-15 years,” Merle Haggard once admitted of the slight embellishment as to how he spent his 21st birthday in one of his most famous (and semi-autobiographical) songs. “I just couldn’t get that to rhyme.” Though its title gives repentance some lip service — hey, at least he’s not blaming her! — Haggard still sounds like a hellion on this 1968 hit. The more sincere Mother’s Day gift would arrive much later, in 1981, when he released the gospel album “Songs for the Mama That Tried,” and even put sweet Flossie Mae Harp on the cover. (Listen on YouTube)5. 2Pac: “Dear Mama”The rap game “Mama Tried”? Of his cleareyed but thoroughly loving tribute to his mother, Afeni Shakur, Tupac once said, “I aimed that one straight for my homies’ heartstrings.” Mission accomplished. (Listen on YouTube)6. Anaïs Mitchell: “Little Big Girl”This one’s a heartstring-tugger, too. Mitchell is caught between being a child and an elder on “Little Big Girl,” a poignant song from her 2022 self-titled album. There’s a striking moment toward the end when she catches her reflection in a window and sees her mother, tired, “coming home from work.” Mitchell sings with great empathy, “Tell her you love her/Tell her you’re her.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Beyoncé featuring Blue Ivy: “Blue”Named after Beyoncé’s first child, “Blue” is all the more tender for its placement at the end of her imperial 2013 self-titled album; it follows “Heaven,” a wrenching ballad about suffering a miscarriage. Bey’s candor about both the grief of pregnancy loss and the joys of a hard-won motherhood helped this album feel like a turning point in her career: the beginning of her grown-woman era. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Shirelles: “Mama Said”The vocal sound of most ’60s girl groups was chatty and communal — a musical means of sharing wisdom, commentary and advice from woman to woman. This classic from the great early ’60s hitmakers the Shirelles passes on some maternal know-how that mama acquired in the days when she, too, was just a teenager in love. (Listen on YouTube)9. Romy: “Enjoy Your Life”Remember that Glenn-Copeland refrain? The xx’s Romy Madley Croft samples it to extraordinary effect in this recently released and stirringly soulful solo single. “I made a promise to my mother to stop worrying ’bout my problems,” she sings, as Glenn-Copeland’s voice rings out like a compassionate elder bestowing glowing benevolence on a musical daughter: “My mother says to me, ‘Enjoy your life.’” (Listen on YouTube)Hi, Mom,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Mother of All Playlists” track listTrack 1: Kacey Musgraves, “Mother”Track 2: Beverly Glenn-Copeland, “La Vita”Track 3: Brandi Carlile, “The Mother”Track 4: Merle Haggard, “Mama Tried”Track 5: 2Pac, “Dear Mama”Track 6: Anaïs Mitchell, “Little Big Girl”Track 7: Beyoncé featuring Blue Ivy, “Blue”Track 8: The Shirelles, “Mama Said”Track 9: Romy, “Enjoy Your Life”Bonus TracksSome wise words from the Swedish pop queen Robyn, on her 2010 song “Include Me Out”: “All hail to the mamas, who hold it down/Hail to the pillar of the family/This one’s for the grannys, take a bow.”Also, few songwriters have captured the experience of adoption as poignantly and prismatically as Joni Mitchell did on “Little Green,” from her legendary 1971 album, “Blue.”Speaking of Joni: Hear a newly released recording of her performing “Both Sides Now” at last year’s Newport Folk Festival (and music from Dolly Parton, Rhiannon Giddens and more) in this week’s Playlist. More

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      How Liverpool Put on a Song Contest for Ukraine

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      This year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party,” a broadcasting official said. It just happens to be taking place in Britain.When Ukraine won last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it gained the right to hold this year’s event. And despite Russia’s invasion, it insisted it would do it.Ukraine’s public broadcaster issued plans to host the spectacle in the west of the country, out of reach of Russian missiles, while politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the nation would make it work.Even some foreign leaders backed its cause. Last summer, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister at the time, told reporters that Ukraine won Eurovision “fair and square,” so it should host, regardless of the war.“It’s a year away,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be fine.”But Ukraine’s dream of staging this year’s Eurovision has failed to materialize. On Saturday night, the final of the glitzy contest — which is expected to draw a television audience of around 160 million — will take place 1,600 miles from Kyiv, in Liverpool, England.Last summer, after months of discussions, the European Broadcasting Union, which oversees the contest, agreed with Ukrainian authorities to the change of location. With Britain finishing second in last year’s contest, it was an obvious choice. Its public broadcaster, the BBC, agreed to organize the event.This is Britain’s ninth time hosting the contest since it began in 1956, but the BBC team knew this year would be different. Broadcasters that host Eurovision normally use the contest to advertise their country and its culture to a global television audience. This time, Britain would need to take a back seat.Commemorative merchandise on sale in central Liverpool.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag displayed in a Liverpool branch of McDonald’s.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe historic buildings on Liverpool’s waterfront were lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York TimesMartin Osterdahl, the executive supervisor for Eurovision at the European Broadcasting Union, said in an interview that this year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party.” Britain just happened to be hosting it, he added, echoing a sentiment made by a British pop act.Shortly after the switch was announced, the BBC introduced a contest to select a city to stage the finals, eventually picking Liverpool over six other contenders. In October, the BBC hired Martin Green, an event producer who oversaw the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, to oversee the event.In a recent video interview, Green, 51, said he flew immediately to Warsaw and met with Ukrainian broadcasting officials.Those officials said they wanted a Eurovision that was a huge “celebration of great Ukrainian culture — past, present and future,” Green recalled. They also wanted the reality of Russia’s invasion shown onscreen — something with the potential to strike a downbeat tone for the traditionally campy, showy spectacle. But they insisted the contest should still be fun, Green said.Alyosha, who was Ukraine’s Eurovision entry in 2010, performing in Liverpool on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York Times“It was really important to have that blessing — that permission — about the nature and style of the show,” Green said.Back in Britain, Green had just eight months to arrange the contest. He assembled a team — including outside agencies — to work on the event. (Over 1,000 people have contributed, he said.) Every week, his staff had video calls with Ukrainian colleagues to discuss and agree on aspects of the competition. Those included this edition’s slogan, “United by Music”; its stage design; and the special performances that take place onstage during breaks from the competition.Sometimes, Green said, the Ukrainian side had to delay scheduled calls at the last minute “because an air raid siren had gone off,” or cancel meetings entirely because of power cuts.“Those were incredibly sobering moments,” Green said. “Ukrainians have such a sheer force of will to carry on, that sometimes you could easily forget.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s public broadcaster, was a vital sounding board for the British team, Green said. In a recent interview, Nenov said it was sometimes “surreal” to be discussing sparkly outfits and dance performances as Russian bombs fell on Ukraine. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said. “But thanks to Eurovision, I was able to stay strong. It gave me the ability to go on.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s state broadcaster, in Liverpool. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNenov, 33, is overseeing several special performances by Ukrainian musicians that will play during competition breaks. With those, he said, he wanted to change viewers’ perceptions of his country. When Ukraine hosted Eurovision in 2005 and 2017, he added, those broadcasts featured clichés of traditional life, including embroidered outfits and dancing girls with flowers in their hair. “That’s not Ukraine,” Nenov said; this time, he would show a more modern vision of the country.Both Nenov and Green declined to give details of Saturday’s grand final, insisting it should come as a surprise for television viewers, but both said the show included Ukrainian and British pop stars. The war would be mentioned, Green said, but in an elegant fashion that was appropriate for “a great big singing competition.”Osterdahl, the European Broadcasting Union official, said that this year’s collaboration between two countries to host Eurovision was “unprecedented.” But if Ukraine wins again on Saturday, he would need another country to step up to host Ukraine’s next party. One day, he said, he hoped the war would end, and Ukraine could host for itself. More

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      Dolly Parton Goes Arena Rock, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jorja Smith, Rhiannon Giddens, Shakira and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Dolly Parton, ‘World on Fire’Dolly Parton has announced an album due Nov. 17, “Rockstar,” that will be full of remakes of hits, often joined by the original performers. But she also brought some songs of her own including this one, her worried, indignant assessment of a “World on Fire” that’s full of lies and conflict. It’s Dolly gone arena-rock goth, with power-chord blasts and martial drums. A gospelly bridge asks, “Can’t we rise above/Can’t we show some love?,” but then it’s back to minor chords as Parton belts her best intentions — “Let’s heal the hurt/let kindness work” — against a grim, stomping, “We Will Rock You”-style chant: “Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?” Parton concludes by posing that same question. JON PARELESJoni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now (Live at the Newport Folk Festival 2022)’Joni Mitchell’s surprise appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, bolstered and surrounded by dedicated admirers like Brandi Carlile, was a demonstration not only of gumption, support and resilience, but of enduring musicianship and control. “Both Sides Now” previews an official live album, “At Newport,” due July 28. As a piano ripples and strings swell behind her, with Carlile and Lucius adding vocal harmonies, Mitchell makes each phrase purposeful, reflective and improvisatory, and her lowered, roughened but precise voice makes every word a life lesson. PARELESRhiannon Giddens, ‘You’re the One’Fresh off winning the Pulitzer Prize for music for her opera, “Omar,” Rhiannon Giddens releases “You’re the One,” the title song of her first full album of her own songs (though she has written, adapted and collaborated widely). As she sings about finding a love that turns “shades of gray” into “a new Technicolor world,” the song explodes out of her string-band foundations — banjo and fiddle — into full-tilt rock choruses, bursting with euphoria. PARELESJorja Smith, ‘Little Things’A jazzy piano lick and frenetic beat drive the English R&B artist Jorja Smith’s new single “Little Things,” which captures the atmosphere of a vibey, intimate house party with a densely populated dance floor. “Just a little thing for you and I,” Smith intones before shrugging with a cool nonchalance. “And if it’s meant to be than that’s all right.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFatoumata Diawara and Roberto Fonseca, ‘Blues’Fatoumata Diawara, from Mali, rides a galloping six-beat modal groove topped by the Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca in “Blues,” which is by far the rawest song on her new album of international fusions, “London Ko.” She produced it with Damon Albarn of Gorillaz. The lyrics, in Bambara and English, are about gratitude to her family; the spirit is centered and fierce. PARELESShakira, ‘Acróstico’Acróstico means acrostic, and the first letters of the five-line verses for Shakira’s new song spell out the names of her sons, Milan and Sasha. It’s the latest missive following her breakup with the soccer player Gerard Piqué, and it’s a declaration of unswerving maternal devotion through her own pain. “Even if life treats me this way/I will be strong for you alone,” she sings over steadfast piano chords. “All I want is your happiness/And to be with you.” There’s a hint of U2’s “Every Breaking Wave” in the chorus as it climbs to a tremulous peak: wounded but resolutely compassionate. PARELESChristine and the Queens, ‘Tears Can Be So Soft’Hélöise Letissier, a.k.a. Chris, the songwriter and voice of Christine and the Queens, plunges into separation and consolation in “Tears Can Be So Soft.” It’s built on a sample of the string arrangement from Marvin Gaye’s “Feel All My Love Inside”: an octave-leaping, tremulous swoop that changes from major to minor. Chris sings about missing family, friends and a lover and crying while driving on the freeway, with only the warmth and release of tears for comfort; a string section pays witness. PARELESRob Moose featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Wasted’Rob Moose’s violin mirrors Phoebe Bridgers’s nocturnal anxiety on “Wasted,” a song from Moose’s upcoming EP, “Inflorescence.” Plucked notes echo her tense nerves while a groaning bed of strings brings an added pathos to the lyrics, which were written by Bridgers’s collaborator Marshall Vore. “I used to have the energy to get mad, used to know how to say sorry,” Bridgers sings with wry self-judgment and an escalating intensity. “But now I’m back with none of that.” ZOLADZNatural Wonder Beauty Concept, ‘Sword’A keyboard loop that hints at harpsichord or koto, pitch-shifted vocals, sporadic drum thuds, bits of static and the sound of a sword being unsheathed run through “Sword,” a stubbornly fragile track by the singer Ana Roxanne and the producer DJ Python. They have collaborated as Natural Wonder Beauty Concept for an album due July 14. “Sword” is at once transparent and elusive, with barely intelligible lyrics — “Everyone passes through,” Roxanne coos — and a willingness to tweak everything; the last section lowers and slows down every element but remains enigmatic. PARELESBen Chasny & Rick Tomlinson, ‘Waking of Insects’Ben Chasny records as Six Organs of Admittance; Rick Tomlinson records as, among other names, Voice of the Seven Woods. Both love minimalist repetition and gradual unfoldings, and in 2017 they made an album of duets. “Waking of Insects” was recorded live, just two acoustic guitars. They share interlocking fingerpicked patterns and, with moments of dissonance, nudge one another toward new ones, very gradually making their way from quick, fluttering interplay to tolling repose. PARELES More

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      How MTV Broke News for a Generation

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      MTV News bridged a gap between news and pop culture without talking down to its young audience. As it prepares to shut down, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway Calloway and others reflect on its legacy.A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.Boxers or briefs?“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”SuChin Pak, left, an MTV News correspondent, with Fergie, of the rap group the Black Eyed Peas, and Snoop Dogg. Ms. Pak said of MTV News, “We were the kids elbowing in.”Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter that is preparing to file for bankruptcy, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.MTV was able to corner a young audience who could name the entire catalog of the band Flock of Seagulls but also had a curiosity about current events, he said.The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.” But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Mr. Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Mr. Thompson said.“It was live TV at its best, I suppose, for an awful event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “elevate the conversation” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do so with credibility.“MTV News took news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure that we kept integrity in what we did.”Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio program on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level when he was sitting in the Blue Room of the White House with President Barack Obama.“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would take it this far?’ I never thought that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we would be able to have a discussion through hip-hop culture that resonates on a global basis,” Mr. Calloway said. “That’s because of MTV News.”From its inception, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that first hand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” get-out-the-vote campaign, and in the White House.“People were very earnest and sincere in wanting young people to be educated voters, not just willy-nilly, get anybody to the ballot box,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were informed.”For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, being able to connect with a younger audience was made easier because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the intifada and going to Bosnia to follow American troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity most of the time lined up with what the audience wanted to hear about.”During a town hall-style forum on MTV in 1994, President Bill Clinton was famously asked about his preference in underwear.Diana Walker/Getty ImagesThat rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.“A lot of people were getting their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms. Pak said. “For all of us it was, OK, what is the audience, what’s our way in here that feels true? You do that by sitting down with them versus standing over them.” More

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      Graham Nash Has a Few More Songs Before He Goes

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      At 81, the singer-songwriter admits his time could be short, especially after losing David Crosby. But in the meantime, he’s got plenty to say and sing.ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Graham Nash was slow to smile on a recent Wednesday afternoon, sitting in early spring sunshine on the porch of a cafe near Washington, D.C.The night before, the 81-year-old singer-songwriter had bounded onto the stage of the folk bastion the Birchmere, and wooed the sold-out crowd with his tunes that long ago became generational standards, like “Teach Your Children” and “Military Madness.” He shared the songs and candid stories of longtime pals like Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell, landing expertly practiced punch lines.But he’d awakened in the daze of emotional hangover. Exactly three months had passed since the January death of David Crosby, his best friend and closest collaborator since they first harmonized together in August 1968, at the Laurel Canyon cottage that Nash would soon share with Mitchell. “It is like an earthquake,” he said, his English accent softened by nearly 50 years in California and Hawaii. “The shock was terrifying. Then I see his face, and it makes me really sad.”The day’s aftershock stemmed from a video tribute Nash recorded for Neil Young and Stephen Stills to use at an autism benefit. It was another unwelcome opportunity to contemplate all that Nash and Crosby left unsaid during the prior decade, as the pair traded barbs in the press, left an album with Rick Rubin unfinished and rarely spoke. In early January, Crosby emailed Nash to say he wanted to talk, then left a voice mail message telling him he wanted to apologize for, as Nash remembered, “all the stupid things I said about you and, particularly, Neil.” After Nash set a time, Crosby stood him up. Three days later, he was dead.Nash, left, and David Crosby in 1976. The two bandmates and close friends had fallen out of touch before Crosby’s death in January.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, via Getty Images“David was a very interesting couple of people: He was generous, funny and the most unbelievably great musician. On the other hand, he could make an entire room feel bad with two words,” Nash said, making his way through the first of three lunchtime lattes. “I wanted to remember the good music we made and the great times we had, let that satisfy you. But he’s gone.”Nash is now a member of the rarest class of living rock legend — old enough to have witnessed the genre’s genesis and eager to talk about his wild days, but also inspired enough by his current work to rave about new songs. This year alone, he has reunited with a childhood chum, the Hollies co-founder Allan Clarke, for the sentimental and charming album “I’ll Never Forget,” singing backup on most songs. And on May 19, Nash will release “Now,” 13 tracks about American unrest and the renewal inspired by his third marriage and a move to New York.Still, several of his favorite former musical partners, like Crosby, the drummer Jim Gordon and the multi-instrumentalist David Lindley, have all died since January. He knows his life’s work is increasingly a race against mortality.“I tried to be the best husband, the best friend, the best musician, but I’ll never make it,” he said. “I’m still healthy, but so was David. I could drop dead in the middle of this conversation.”“I wanted to remember the good music we made and the great times we had, let that satisfy you,” Nash said of Crosby. “But he’s gone.”Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesNash’s life story reads like a rock ’n’ roll fantasy. He was raised working-class in Salford, near Manchester, and first heard hints of the stateside musical revolution by pressing his ear to his bedpost on Sunday nights. As his parents listened to Radio Luxembourg downstairs, the sound traveled through the wooden beams of their close quarters, sparking his imagination.“My mother and father didn’t tell me to get a real job because music’s not going to last,” he said by phone during an earlier conversation from his East Village recording and photography studio. “My mother always said to me, ‘Follow your heart, and you will always make the right choices. Life is just choices.’”Already playing the proto-rock of skiffle, Nash skipped school to score tickets to see Bill Haley & His Comets with Clarke, days after his 15th birthday. The duo soon beat the Beatles (before they were the Beatles) in a talent show. Three years later, they stalked the Everly Brothers to their hotel, where they received the encouragement they needed to start the Hollies. (“Keep doing it,” Phil Everly said in the rain. “Things’ll happen.”)The Hollies’ suave R&B covers and bittersweet originals made them pop sensations, part of the Beatles’ global sea change. During their first U.S. appearance, they shared a bill with Little Richard and the young guitarist he scolded for upstaging him, Jimi Hendrix.But soon after his father’s 1966 death, Nash tired of the group’s strict parameters. When he first sang with Stills and Crosby in California, he knew his future lay in its libertine lifestyle. He fell in love with Mitchell. His mother didn’t realize he had left the Hollies, his first marriage and England altogether until a copy of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut LP arrived, a chart-topping postcard home. The split blindsided Clarke, especially because Nash refused to tell him directly.“I really believed, in my mid-70s, ‘I’m coming to the end of my life. It’s all finished,’” Nash said. “I wanted to wear my heart on my sleeve, as I try and always do.”Daniel Arnold for The New York Times“He was my brother, really, and he had gone and fallen in love with someone else,” Clarke said, shrugging in a video interview. “I had a family, and I was devastated. What was going to happen to me now?”That ceaseless need for reinvention — bordering perhaps on an obsession with relevance — has threaded together Nash’s career and life. He indulged drum machines and synths for his lampooned 1986 album “Innocent Eyes” (perhaps not coincidentally, his final solo album for 16 years). He used augmented reality for a prescient but lambasted high-tech concert series a decade later. A zealous photographer and art collector, Nash was an early adopter of fine-art digital prints, an enduring side enterprise.He was a self-professed cad during his first marriage, ultimately leading him to Mitchell. He has always believed he should have proposed to her in the early ’70s, but she worried he wanted her to play housekeeper to his rock star. (“Am I going to tell Joni Mitchell not to write?” he scoffed, loudly, in the cafe. “Get real here.”) In the half-century since they split, he’s never forgotten to send her birthday flowers.But for the final eight years of his 38-year marriage to the actress Susan Sennett, he was not in love, something he said they both acknowledged. In 2014, he met the artist Amy Grantham, four decades his junior, backstage at a Crosby, Stills & Nash show during one of their final tours. In that first moment, he realized happiness was again possible. He told Sennett about the attraction, and they split two years later. Sennett died soon after Nash and Grantham’s 2019 Woodstock wedding.From left: John Sebastian, Nash, Joni Mitchell, Crosby and Stephen Stills onstage at the Big Sur Folk Festival in September 1969.Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesIn the acrimonious annals of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nash generally seemed the best-adjusted, least controversial member. He quit hard drugs relatively early and devoted decades to charity. For some, his divorce and remarriage represented a heel turn. But, he reiterated, it was worth it.“I’ve never been upset with any major decision I have made,” he said, noting that he did regret missing his parents’ deaths. “I have enjoyed my life and made some incredibly correct decisions for me. I hope to be going on for a few more years yet.”After a lifetime of restlessness, “Now” feels remarkably content, as if Nash has slipped into a favorite old overcoat to find a cache of new tunes stuffed inside a pocket. There are political jeremiads that decry “MAGA tourists,” plus a next-generation hymn that echoes “Teach Your Children.” He wrote “Buddy’s Back,” a glowing celebration of the Hollies forebear, for Clarke; they cut different takes for their respective albums, joyously closing a broken boyhood circle.Love songs for Grantham shape nearly half the album, gentle and guileless tunes that glow. “It Feels Like Home” is “Our House” recast for the East Coast, Nash walking through the door to find “the answer to a prayer.” He apologizes for lashing out during “Love of Mine,” a true-to-life mea culpa after Grantham told him to stop clogging Manhattan sidewalks. “Now” unspools in hard-won tranquillity.“I really believed, in my mid-70s, ‘I’m coming to the end of my life. It’s all finished,’” he said. “In many ways, Amy saved my life. I wanted to wear my heart on my sleeve, as I try and always do.”As Nash relaxed on that sunny porch, he pulled up the sleeves of his black T-shirt to reveal three tattoos. There was the Hindu god Ganesha below his left shoulder, his ex-wife below his right. He lingered longer on his left forearm, where the black ink of the vegvisir, often called the “Viking compass,” was fading.“It’s so I don’t get lost,” he said, lifting his gaze and grinning. “But it might be upside down, so who knows?”Daniel Arnold for The New York Times More

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      Beyoncé Returns to the Stage With a ‘Renaissance’ Spectacle

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      The pop superstar opened her first solo tour in seven years in Stockholm and performed tracks from her acclaimed 2022 album, but left most of the choreography to her dancers.They came from Iceland, Portugal, Switzerland, Detroit. Dressed in “alien superstar” chic — rhinestone boots and disco-ready, glittery cowboy hats — a huge crowd gathered on Wednesday at the Friends Arena, their cheers reaching an almost deafening pitch as a woman gradually emerged from below, lights bouncing off the sequins on her outfit.Beyoncé was back onstage.The singer, style icon and heroine of the global BeyHive fan community is on the road solo for the first time in seven years with her Renaissance World Tour, which opened on Wednesday in Sweden with elaborate visuals but with unusual physical restraint from Beyoncé herself.Onstage at the 50,000-capacity arena in Stockholm, she appeared flanked by dancers and backed by a live band, performing for three hours before a giant screen that displayed a constantly morphing tableau that was part retrofuturism and part disco fantasia. At one point, the 41-year-old artist traded dance moves with a pair of giant robot arms; at another, an image of a silvery alien dancer in heels hovered over a disco ball.But for one of pop’s ultimate dancing queens, Beyoncé’s performance was far less physical than on past tours. She often seemed to keep her feet stationary while shaking her upper body, and appeared to favor one leg. She spent much of one song sitting atop a prop.Fans came from around the globe, drawn in part by the more affordable ticket prices in Sweden.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe star’s eagle-eyed fan community speculated online that the singer was injured. A spokeswoman for Beyoncé did not respond to questions about her performance.Kristin Hulden, a Swedish fashion student who was wearing an embroidered jacket she had made that depicted Beyoncé riding a horse (the image on the cover of her latest album, “Renaissance”), said she had noticed the star’s more limited movement, but it hadn’t bothered her. “The show was so great,” she said. “The dancers, the visual — it never stopped.” Like many fans at the opening-night gig, she will attend several shows on the tour, returning to Friends Arena on Thursday and then heading to Hamburg, Germany, in June. “I’m very excited,” she added.Competition for tickets to pop’s biggest, priciest concerts has been stiff, and many in the crowd had traveled far — even thousands of miles — to guarantee that they would see Beyoncé this time. (Thanks in part to favorable exchange rates, tickets in Sweden ended up being far cheaper than in the United States or Britain, costing between 650 and 1,495 Swedish kronor, or about $63 to $146.)Rhoyle Ivy King, 26, an actor wearing a fluorescent turquoise jumpsuit and shades, said before the show that he had come from Los Angeles for the concert, spending about $2,500. “Anything for mother,” he said. “Seriously.”Beyoncé has not toured on her own since her Formation outing in 2016, following the release of her pop-culture-dominating “Lemonade.” In 2018, she performed at the Coachella festival and hit the road with her husband, Jay-Z, for their joint On the Run II Tour.Because Beyoncé offered few visual cues for her “Renaissance” era beyond her album artwork, fans came decked out in looks inspired by the disco cowboy aesthetic she nodded to there. The new tour is for “Renaissance,” a homage to decades of Black queer dance music. The LP, her seventh solo release, opened at No. 1 last summer, and its single “Break My Soul” became her first solo No. 1 hit since “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” in 2008.It was, notably, the first Beyoncé album in nearly a decade to arrive without a full suite of accompanying videos. Starting with her surprise self-titled LP in 2013, the singer has become synonymous with elaborately choreographed and highly produced visual pieces.On Wednesday, she revealed several futuristic fashion choices: an iridescent-effect minidress; a shimmery gold bodysuit festooned with black opera gloves covering strategic locations; a black-and-silver suit that resembled royal armor. At one point, Beyoncé was dressed in sci-fi bee chic: a yellow-and-black leotard with cutouts and sharp angles, and knee-high black boots. The cyborg theme was fully reflected at the merch stands, with T-shirts, hoodies and totes carrying images of Beyoncé in silvery, “Metropolis”-like robot costumes.The set list featured songs from her debut solo album from 2003 (“Crazy in Love”), her 2008 double album “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (“Diva”), her 2011 LP “4” (including “Love on Top,” which Beyoncé let the crowd finish for her) and her self-titled 2013 release (“Drunk in Love”), alongside a host of tracks from “Renaissance,” including “Move,” “America Has a Problem” and “Cozy.” For the closer, “Summer Renaissance,” the singer sat atop a silver horse that was hoisted from the rafters and then ascended above the crowd by herself, sporting a grand, sparkling cape.Beyoncé has not toured on her own since her Formation outing in 2016, following the release of her album “Lemonade.”Felix Odell for The New York TimesIn February, Beyoncé announced the Renaissance tour by simply posting an image to social media. Three months earlier, the demand for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour had led to a Ticketmaster meltdown, leaving many fans frustrated and calling for Washington to examine the outsize market power of Ticketmaster and its corporate parent, Live Nation.To handle the ticketing for Beyoncé’s tour — which is being promoted by Beyoncé’s company, Parkwood Entertainment, and produced by Live Nation — Ticketmaster had an elaborate plan that included rolling out sales in batches, rather than all at once, and the process went far more smoothly.Still, Beyoncé drew controversy this year when she performed a private show at a luxury hotel in Dubai, in United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal. “Renaissance” draws heavily on dance music of the 1990s and L.G.B.T.Q. culture; at the Friends Arena, signs denoted some “gender neutral restrooms” in the official tour font.Oless Mauigoa, 35, had traveled from Salt Lake City and said that “Renaissance” had made him desperate to see the show. “I feel like it’s dedicated to a lot of gay styles,” he said. “I’m connected to it more than anything she’s done.”Beyoncé played into those connections throughout the show, nodding to the ballroom and vogueing culture that inspired “Renaissance” at the end of the night by giving the stage over to her dancers, who tried to outperform each other to rousing cheers.Beyoncé’s tour continues in Stockholm on Thursday and then arrives in London for five shows at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, starting May 29. Its North American leg will open in Toronto on July 9, will head to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on July 29 and 30 and will close in New Orleans at the Caesars Superdome on Sept. 27. More