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      The Ukrainian Duo Tvorchi Will Sing of Wartime Bravery at Eurovision

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      With a song inspired by the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers, the pop group Tvorchi sees the beloved, often campy global song competition as a serious opportunity to represent their country.Whenever their rehearsals for the Eurovision Song Contest were interrupted by air raid sirens, the Ukrainian pop duo Tvorchi would race to the safety of underground bunkers, sometimes wearing their matching stage outfits.While recording a video in Kyiv of their contest entry, “Heart of Steel,” they lost electricity, sending them on a hunt for generators.But they are quick to stress that those inconveniences have been minor compared with what others are going through.“Everyone can meet hard and difficult times,” said Andrii Hutsuliak, 27, who formed the group with the singer Jimoh Augustus Kehinde, 26, describing what has become the theme of their song. “We just wanted to say, be a stronger and better version of yourself.”They are about to get a chance to project that message at the world’s largest, glitziest and, often, campiest song contest: Eurovision, in which entrants from countries across Europe and beyond are facing off Saturday on a broadcast that is expected to draw some 160 million global viewers, making it the world’s most-watched cultural event.This year’s contest should have been held in Ukraine because the country’s entrant last year, Kalush Orchestra, won with an upbeat track that mixed rap and traditional folk music. But with Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine continuing, the host city was switched to Liverpool, in England.Tvorchi, which means “creative,” won the right to represent Ukraine after performing “Heart of Steel” at a Eurovision selection contest staged in a metro station deep below Kyiv, out of reach of Russian bombs. They were flanked by backup dancers wearing gas masks, and images of nuclear warning signs flashed on screens behind them.“It still feels kind of unreal,” Hutsuliak said as he prepared to leave for Liverpool.Known now as a sprawling television extravaganza with wild costumes, eclectic mixes of acts and over-the-top performances, Eurovision began in 1956 as a way of uniting Europe after World War II. As it has grown — and expanded beyond Europe, with entries from Israel and Australia — it has often reflected wider political and social issues.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has taken the contest’s entanglement with politics to new heights. The European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the contest, banned Russia from competing immediately after its invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian victory at last year’s Eurovision, awarded by a mix of jury and public votes, was widely seen as a show of solidarity with the besieged nation.In Ukraine, which has won top honors three times since making its Eurovision debut in 2003, the contest has long been hugely popular and valued as a way for the nation to align itself culturally with Europe. Now it is also seen as a way to keep Europe’s attention focused on the war.As Hutsuliak and Kehinde sat down for an interview at a hip restaurant in central Kyiv called Honey, they apologized for having had to delay the meeting by a day, explaining that they had some urgent business: securing the paperwork that men of fighting age need to exit the country so they could travel to Liverpool.Their song “Heart of Steel” was inspired, Hutsuliak said, by the soldiers who worked to defend the now-ruined city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, holding out months longer than anyone imagined possible. The soldiers made their final stand at the sprawling Azovstal steel plant.Hutsuliak said he clearly remembered the online clips that soldiers filmed of their defense.“When I saw these videos, I saw people with strength, staying solid even in the most terrible conditions,” he added. Soon afterward, the pair wrote the track with lyrics seemingly aimed at invading Russians.“Get out of my way,” Kehinde sings. “’Cause I got a heart of steel.”When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February last year, martial law meant that Hutsuliak couldn’t leave, while Kehinde, a Nigerian citizen originally from Lagos, could. His mother, panicked, called him on the morning Russia started bombing Ukrainian cities and urged him to get out.“That day I think I had 25 to 30 relatives call me,” Kehinde recalled. “They wanted me to leave.”Tvorchi performed in a train station in Kyiv last month. Their Eurovision track, “Heart of Steel,” is inspired by Ukrainian soldiers. Zoya Shu/Associated PressKehinde, whose stage name is Jeffery Kenny, visited his mother in Nigeria for a week — “because she wouldn’t stop panicking,” he said — but then quickly returned, as he’d built a life in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine. At first he thought the war would last only a few months, but then the reality of the conflict set in.The band would never have formed if Kehinde had not made the unusual decision to move, in December 2013, to Ukraine for college to study for a pharmacy degree. As one of the few Black people in Ternopil, Kehinde stood out, he recalled, but that proved instrumental to the band’s formation. One day, Hutsuliak introduced himself and asked if he could practice his English, promising that Kehinde could try out his Ukrainian in return.The pair soon became friends, and a year later, at Hutsuliak’s birthday party, they decided to try making music together, with Kehinde singing mostly in English but also in Ukrainian. At first it was just a hobby, but they’ve gone on to release four albums and pick up awards.Tvorchi in Amsterdam. The duo had to secure special paperwork to leave Ukraine at a time when men of fighting age are forbidden to leave.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesMany of their early tracks were love songs, but the invasion led them to write a series of more intense tracks including “Heart of Steel” and “Freedom,” which has defiant lyrics including “These walls / You can’t break them down.” Those songs were not written with Eurovision in mind, but in December the pair competed in a live contest in Kyiv to become Ukraine’s entry.Tvorchi has also supported Ukraine by playing concerts on the back of trucks for troops and partnering with United24, a Ukrainian charity, to raise money to buy incubators for premature newborns in the country’s strained hospitals.The concert that got them to Eurovision, performed in a metro station where Russian bombs couldn’t interrupt the acts, was surreal, Kehinde recalled. Trains sped past throughout rehearsals and the final event.“I thought more than once, ‘What in the world is going on right now?’” Kehinde said. But when he watched the broadcast later, he was amazed to discover it looked like a professional studio, with lighting and graphics.The pair didn’t expect to win, but they became Ukraine’s choice. Ever since, they have been trying to live up to that decision, which they called an honor.This year, they reworked their track a little to make it even more representative of the country. While Eurovision songs are frequently sung in English, the version of “Heart of Steel” that will be performed on Saturday now contains a section in Ukrainian.“Despite the pain, I continue my fight,” Kehinde sings during it. “The world is on fire, but you should act.” More

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      Rita Lee, Brazil’s Queen of Rock, Is Dead at 75

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      As a member the 1960s band Os Mutantes and later as a solo artist, she drew a following that included Kurt Cobain, Beck and the Prince of Wales.Rita Lee, a convention-flouting titan of Brazilian music who emerged with the seminal experimental band Os Mutantes and went on to become a solo star known widely as her country’s Queen of Rock, died on Monday at her home in São Paulo. She was 75.Her death was announced in a statement posted on her Instagram account. She had been receiving treatments for lung cancer, which she learned she had in 2021.With Os Mutantes, Ms. Lee was a product of the tropicália movement (also known as tropicalismo), an anti-authoritarian Brazilian cultural flowering that started in the late 1960s. She ultimately became a commercial powerhouse, selling a reported 55 million records over a career that stretched over half a century.As a solo artist, she churned out a string of hits in the 1970s, among then “Ovelha Negra” (“Black Sheep”) and “Mania de Você” (“Mania For You”), that became enduring classics. She was accompanied by the band Tutti Frutti in her early years, and later, by her husband, Roberto de Carvalho.In 2001, Ms. Lee took home a Latin Grammy Award for best Portuguese-language rock or alternative album for “3001.”Her reach was global. Kurt Cobain, David Byrne and Beck are among the many musical innovators who hailed the subversive oeuvre of Os Mutantes. In 1988, King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, requested one of her records for a dance at a banquet at the British Embassy in Paris. He was said to know the words “by heart,” according to The Daily Mirror.But she was no pop confection. After a troubled and rebellious youth, she was arrested in 1976 for marijuana possession and held up as a cautionary tale by Brazil’s military dictatorship. She also made multiple trips to treatment facilities for drug and alcohol use.In 2001, Ms. Lee’s “3001” won a Latin Grammy Award for best Portuguese-language rock or alternative album.Amanda Perobelli/ReutersIrreverent and candid, Ms. Lee carried herself with rock-star swagger. (After her cancer diagnosis, the mordant Ms. Lee nicknamed her tumor Jair, a jab at Brazil’s incendiary president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro.)As one of the few female rockers to play guitar onstage in the 1960s, and as a solo artist who explored sexuality from a woman’s point of view, Ms. Lee was hailed as a feminist hero. When informed of Ms. Lee’s death during a Senate commission hearing, Brazil’s cultural minister, the singer Margareth Menezes, was visibly overcome with emotion, describing Ms. Lee as a “revolutionary woman.”Ms. Lee herself was a little more blunt about her triumphs.“When we talk about feminism and all these things, I don’t really have the theory of it, I’m more of the action,” Ms. Lee said in a 2017 television interview. “They used to say that women couldn’t wear long pants. Huh? Yes, we can, I wore mine. They used to say that women couldn’t play rock. I would get my ovaries, my uterus, I’d play my rock ’n’ roll.”Rita Lee Jones was born on Dec. 31, 1947, in São Paulo, the youngest of three daughters of Charles Jones, an American-born dentist descended from Confederates who fled to Brazil after the Civil War (Rita’s middle name was inspired by Gen. Robert E. Lee), and Romilda Padula, a pianist.When she was a child, Ms. Lee recounted in “Rita Lee: Uma Autobiografia” (2016), a sewing machine repairman sexually abused her in her home, a traumatic experience that fueled her rebellious spirt. .Musically inclined, she played in several groups as a teenager and, despite her early stage fright, formed Os Mutantes (the Mutants) with the brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista in 1966. In an early interview, she claimed that the band, whose name was inspired by a science fiction book called “O Planeta dos Mutantes” (“The Planet of the Mutants”), had “come from another planet to take over the world.”The band was to São Paulo “what the Grateful Dead were to San Francisco, the Velvet Underground to New York or Nirvana to Seattle,” Larry Rohter of The New York Times wrote during a comeback tour in 2007.Ms. Lee performing in São Paulo in 2012. Her songs often served as a pointed rebuke to Brazil’s authoritarian climate.Marcos Mazini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn terms of psychedelic trappings and extravagant plumage, the band was far more Dead than Velvets, although it took the free-for-all spirit of the ’60s to absurdist levels, mixing American and British psychedelia with Brazilian genres like bossa nova, and adding electronic experimentalism and a prankster sensibility that served as a pointed rebuke to Brazil’s authoritarian climate.Os Mutantes made their mark backing Gilberto Gil at the Festival of Brazilian Popular Music in 1967. The next year the band appeared on the groundbreaking compilation album “Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circenses,” featuring songs by Mr. Gil, Caetano Veloso and other leading lights of the movement.The band’s debut album, released that same year, was sprinkled with environmental sounds, jagged guitar riffs. and other sonic detritus. It was, Rolling Stone wrote when including it in a 2013 roundup of the greatest stoner albums of all time, one of the late 1960s’ “most mischievous head trips, which is saying something.”Ms. Lee left the band to pursue a solo career after it released its fifth album, “E Seus Cometas No Pais Do Baurets” (“Mutants and their Comets in the Country of Weed”), in 1972. She retreated from the limelight after her final studio effort, “Reza” (“Prayer”), in 2012, although she did release a new song, “Change,” with her husband and the producer Gui Boratto in 2021.She is survived by her husband; her sons, Beto, João and Antônio; and two grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Arnaldo Baptista of Os Mutantes, ended in divorce in 1972.A vegan and animal rights activist, the onetime countercultural firebrand spent much of her final years “confined to my den, in a little house in the middle of the woods surrounded by animals and plants,” only going out shopping or to the dentist, she wrote in a 2020 essay for the Brazilian magazine Veja.“Today,” she added, “I do everything over the internet and pray I don’t break a tooth.” More

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      6 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      Listen to recent highlights from Foo Fighters, Avalon Emerson, Q and more.On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins,Leo Correa/Associated PressDear listeners,Avid Amplifier readers know that each Friday, the Times pop critics put together a selection of our favorite new songs in a feature called the Playlist, and now I am delivering a digest version right to your inbox. No more excuses that you don’t have time to keep up with new music anymore; I’ve got you covered.This mix is probably a combination of some names you know — Jessie Ware, Foo Fighters — and, ideally, a few that you don’t. It gets off to an upbeat start, drifts into some luminous ambience with a wordless, eight-minute Four Tet song, and then ends up somewhere right between those two extremes, with some soothing, synth-driven melodies from Avalon Emerson and Christine and the Queens.I field-tested this playlist while doing chores in my apartment and found it to run the exact length of time it took me to fold a load of wash and put on a fresh duvet cover. Its final moments were an adequate soundtrack for that blissful moment of relief and deep-seated pride when I turned the duvet cover inside out and realized that I had, indeed, put it on correctly. I am unstoppable.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Q: “SOW”I must tip my hat (that I am not wearing) to Jon Pareles for introducing me to this moody number from the profoundly difficult-to-Google R&B artist Q. The son of the Jamaican dance hall producer Stephen (Lenky) Marsden (who is responsible for the Diwali Riddim that was ubiquitous in the early-to-mid aughts), Q Marsden makes music that, in Pareles’s words, echoes “the introspective-verging-on-depressive sides of Phil Collins, Prince and Michael Jackson.” Similarly, on “SOW,” I hear the faintest tinge of Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (certified banger) updated for the age of the Weeknd. (Listen on YouTube)2. Jessie Ware: “Freak Me Now”It takes a special musician to suddenly kick things into a higher gear about a decade into her recording career, but on her 2020 neo-disco breakthrough “What’s Your Pleasure?” the British pop singer Jessie Ware proved to be one of those rare gems. That release was going to be a tough one to follow, let alone top — and then came “That! Feels Good!,” a record of such effervescent joy that even its punctuation makes me grin. This new album continues her streak of lovingly detailed, sumptuously atmospheric dance music, but it’s not just “What’s Your Pleasure? II.” Ware’s fifth album has a vampy sonic ’tude all its own (cut through with a hint of new-wave sass) as you can hear on the electric and immaculately titled dance floor anthem “Freak Me Now.” (Listen on YouTube)3. Foo Fighters: “Rescued”A good Foo Fighters song makes me want to give Dave Grohl a lozenge. Or maybe I shouldn’t, because there’s something distinctly powerful (… Grohlian?) about the way he can sound like he’s shredding his vocal cords beyond repair while still staying effortlessly in tune. I do not know how he does it, but it sounds very cool. On June 2, Foo Fighters will release “But Here We Are,” their first album since the untimely death of the drummer Taylor Hawkins, and if the first single “Rescued” is any indication, some of these songs are going to be about processing that tragedy, and at least one of them is going to make me cry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Four Tet: “Three Drums”Kieran Hebden, the British electronic musician who records as Four Tet, has been a known quantity in the relatively niche world of underground dance music for the past two decades, but he’s recently been getting some mainstream attention thanks to his appearances D.J.ing with the somewhat strange bedfellows Fred again.. and Skrillex. (The Three Caballeros of EDM? The Haim of EDM? I’m still workshopping a nickname.) The meditative “Three Drums” is proof that he’s not going pop just yet, though: The song contrasts live-sounding percussion with glowing gradients of synth sounds that unfurl like a sunrise. It’s bliss. (Listen on YouTube)5. Avalon Emerson: “Entombed in Ice”Avalon Emerson is known primarily as a techno D.J., but you wouldn’t guess that from listening to the serene and glacial “Entombed in Ice,” from her new album “& the Charm.” In some sense, she’s reinventing herself as a dream-pop singer-songwriter, but even her D.J. mixes had a kind of smeary intimacy that carries over into this latest release. I like the way she layers her murmured vocals, giving off the impression that the listener is eavesdropping on a conversation she’s having with herself. (Listen on YouTube)6. Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake: “True Love”“True Love,” from the French singer-songwriter Christine and the Queens, is a skeletally arranged low-burner, but it suddenly bursts forth with melodramatic pathos as Chris shifts into a sublime hook. “Angel of light, take me higher,” he sings in a trembling voice. “You’re making me forget my mother.” Not to leave you with a cliffhanger, but that’s a decently foreshadowing hint about the theme of Friday’s playlist. Till then! (Listen on YouTube)I always feel like somebody’s watching me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“6 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Q, “SOW”Track 2: Jessie Ware, “Freak Me Now”Track 3: Foo Fighters, “Rescued”Track 4: Four Tet, “Three Drums”Track 5: Avalon Emerson, “Entombed in Ice”Track 6: Christine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, “True Love” More

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      Frank Ocean Shows Us a More Human Way to Perform

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      As live concert broadcasts have grown increasingly staid, his electrifying Coachella set gave us an unruly digital experience to share.Frank Ocean was constructing an ice-skating rink in the Sonoran desert. This was his reported plan — to headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on the night of April 16 inside, or in front of, or atop a frozen pool, defying the basic logic of weather. What better metaphor could there be for an artist seemingly allergic to the typical mechanisms of the music industry than to accept the headlining slot at Coachella and then subvert it, to stage the opposite of the festival’s arid environment by scheming an icy exhibition among the sickening dust and heat? The rumored set design was ultimately scrapped, but the very concept of Ocean’s doomed ice rink felt symbolic — maybe of how distant this king of pop-world disenchantment felt from Coachella’s surroundings to begin with.I was not in the desert. Nor did I really believe that I would be able to watch Ocean’s set — his first major public performance since 2017 — on an officially sanctioned livestream. Before he came onstage, YouTube clarified that Ocean’s 10:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time set would not be broadcast on Coachella’s own stream — his representatives say he was, in fact, never scheduled to appear on the stream — though this was not surprising. Enigma has always been a tenet of Ocean’s public persona. Having previously spurned the Grammy Awards, dismissed major record labels and called attention to the very nature of livestreaming with his 2016 visual album, “Endless,” Ocean was primed to opt out without apology.It did not stop fans; links to spontaneous Instagram Live streams, by those on the ground, abounded. As it approached 1:05 a.m. in New York, I opened one of these links on my desktop and sat for an hour, waiting. Tens of thousands of us clicked on and waited. It was democratizing — there are no V.I.P. sections that I know of on Instagram Live — and the rumor was that Lorde was waiting in the same stream, too. We were all in it, waiting in the Frank Ocean IG Live, together.When the music finally started, this particular improvised stream proved to be shaky — while the set quickly revealed itself to be an unconventional, at-times rough-hewed spectacle — cutting in and out as Ocean sang a rock version of “Novacane,” his 2011 breakthrough single about emotionless sex and a couple who meet at Coachella. Fortunately, I soon found @Morgandoesntcare, a young musician from North Carolina who facilitated the guerrilla video stream that brought Ocean’s set to the masses, reaching 130,000 viewers. Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Maybe Ocean said no to the sanctioned livestream because he knew his set wouldn’t be what he “intended to show,” as he acknowledged in a statement later that week. (According to that statement, he sustained a leg injury in the days before Coachella, requiring a rework of the show.) Maybe the choice was intuitive. It’s enticing, however, to wonder if he made the decision in order to reject our on-demand culture of convenience. Some industry prognosticators have wondered if livestreams could supplant in-person concerts in the future — though it doesn’t seem likely — as ticket prices surge at the hands of exploitative corporations and make large-scale concertgoing increasingly unattainable to anyone but the rich. Livestreamed concerts by mainstream artists are often more like note-by-note recitals. With streaming more broadly, the data-driven music companies want to find patterns, to engineer us further into a culture of predictability. Intentionally or not, Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Watching a teenager’s ad hoc broadcast instead made for a more unruly digital experience that could not be predicted, planned for, optimized or controlled.The day after Ocean’s set, it still consumed my thoughts. Though I had watched it on a trembly hand-held broadcast that cut in and out, I felt that I had not only witnessed but participated in something significant — not in spite of but because of the spontaneous stream. Most reviews disagreed, criticizing how Ocean stoked “confusion” and commenting that his songs didn’t sound the way they do on his records. When I watched alone in my bedroom more than 2,000 miles away, these qualities made the music feel alive. Liveness has always carried with it an expectation of, and invitation into, risk and imperfection. But the media landscape’s flood of manicured concert-film and livestream events has largely normalized staid, smooth performances, a trend that mirrors the streaming era’s broader preference for formulaic culture. Lauryn Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests.Ocean’s set seemed like a rebuke of this trend. New arrangements of his most beloved songs, like “Bad Religion” and “White Ferrari,” sounded more astral and expansive than ever. “Solo” approached something resembling starry electric jazz and nearly brought me to tears. The speech Ocean gave about his younger brother, who died in a car accident in 2020 and with whom he went to Coachella multiple times, immediately did. The songs sometimes showed their seams, letting his voice reach higher and skate the sky. Delicate acoustic takes of “Pink + White” and “Self Control” brought to mind the intimacy of a theoretical Ocean appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”Pop music history is filled with incidents in which celebrated artists polarized their audiences from big stages, but one important precedent is Lauryn Hill’s 2001 performance on “MTV Unplugged.” On that show, and the unvarnished album that followed the next year, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she sang her biblical hip-hop folk profundities in a gorgeous raspy voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar. In between songs, she delivered monologues of uncompromising creative wisdom. At the time, this live session was considered bewildering and met with divided reviews. Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests. “Fantasy is what people want,” Hill said then, “but reality is what they need.”You can imagine the now-35-year-old Ocean growing up, absorbing Hill’s messaging and reflecting his own unpolished reality in concert. When he played Coachella in 2012, he covered “Tell Him” from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Ocean has a documented fondness for her “Unplugged” performance: His song “Rushes,” from “Endless,” interpolates Hill’s “Just Like Water”; he once rapped over a sample of “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a track on which Hill cries. “What I am is what I am, and I can’t be afraid to, you know, to expose that to the public,” Hill said during the “MTV Unplugged” performance. She defended her right to let her voice crack, which was a reflection of her lived experience. Such honesty calls people to be artists. But contemporary streaming culture, and the rigid aesthetic standards it widely supports, are hostile to frayed edges.On the spontaneous Ocean Instagram stream, I caught glory in flickers. Ocean’s set, which he himself called “chaotic” while emphasizing the “beauty in chaos,” was a presentation of his own humanity. In a just popular culture, that is what a “live” album, “live” stream, “live” concert and “live” artist is: raw, fallible and human.Source photographs: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images; Timothy Hearsum/The Image Bank/Getty Images.Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer, contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of “The Raincoats.” More

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      Sum 41 Says It Will Disband After Final Album and Tour

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      With catchy songs like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” the Canadian band was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and others.The band Sum 41 announced on Monday that it was breaking up after 27 years, unleashing a well of nostalgia for the early 2000s, when pop punk seemed ubiquitous on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and in memorable scenes in blockbuster movies.The Canadian group, fronted by the spiky-haired singer Deryck Whibley, was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne. Their hits included “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” which fans loved to belt out in their car or jump up and down to at shows.The band’s music was also featured in popular movies from the early 2000s, among them “Spider-Man,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “Bring It On.”In a statement on Twitter, Sum 41 did not explain why it was disbanding. It said it planned to finish its tour this year and that it would release a final album, “Heaven :x: Hell,” and announce a final tour to celebrate the end of its run.“Being in Sum 41 since 1996 brought us some of the best moments of our lives,” the band members wrote. “We are forever grateful to our fans both old and new, who have supported us in every way. It is hard to articulate the love and respect we have for all of you and we wanted you to hear this from us first.”News of the band’s decision led fans to mourn the end of an era. While many punk fans scorned Sum 41 and other groups like it as safe and conventional, pop-punk fans said the music was part of the soundtrack of their youth.“Fat Lip” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart after Sum 41’s breakthrough album, “All Killer No Filler,” was released in 2001. And decades later, fans still packed Sum 41’s shows clad in fishnet stockings or dark skinny jeans and heavy eyeliner, accented with tricolor wrist sweatbands.“Sum 41 is most definitely on the Mount Rushmore of early 2000s pop punk,” said Finn McKenty, the creator of the YouTube series “The Punk Rock MBA,” which features an episode on “The Strange History of Sum 41.”“To be able to ride the wave of the MTV-type hype that they had and turn that into a career with real longevity and respect is a rare thing that they were able to pull off,” Mr. McKenty said.The band’s music seemed to capture the spirit of suburban teenage high jinks.In an interview with Billboard in 2021, Mr. Whibley said that when the band, which formed in suburban Toronto in 1996, was trying to gain notice, its members filmed themselves “doing stupid stuff like drive-by water gunning people, egging houses, and cut it with some film of our shows.”The band’s manager then sent a three-minute version of the video to record companies.“And then, it was a matter of weeks,” Mr. Whibley said. “Every label in the U.S. was trying to sign us, and it turned into a big bidding war.”Mike Damante, the author of “Hey Suburbia: A Guide to the Emo/Pop-Punk Rise,” said that Sum 41 was one of the first popular pop-punk bands to fuse metal and hip-hop and that it was disbanding during “a really nostalgic time period for this time in music.”In recent years, Sum 41 had toured with Simple Plan and The Offspring.Mr. McKenty said the band had recently been producing music that was “as good or better” than its music from the early 2000s.“I always like to see people go out on top, rather than go out sad,” he said. More

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      Don Sebesky, Arranger Who Helped Broaden Jazz’s Audience, Dies at 85

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      He won Tonys for his orchestrations and Grammys for his compositions and arrangements. But he was best known for his genre-straddling work at CTI Records.Don Sebesky, who in a wide-ranging musical career played with leading big bands, was a behind-the-scenes force at CTI Records and other jazz labels, won Grammy Awards for his own compositions and arrangements, and orchestrated some 20 Broadway shows, died on April 29 at a nursing home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 85.The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Elizabeth Jonas said.Mr. Sebesky’s musical interests ranged far and wide. He created arrangements not only for jazz musicians but also for a diverse range of pop vocalists, including Nancy Wilson, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow. To jazz aficionados, though, he was best known — and sometimes criticized — for the work he did as a sort of house arranger for Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI, a jazz label that was a major force in the 1970s.From the beginning, Mr. Taylor and CTI were on a mission to broaden the audience for jazz by exploring intersections with pop, rock and R&B, and by making music that was more accessible to mainstream audiences than some of jazz’s more esoteric strains. It was an approach that displeased some purists, but it sold records, and Mr. Sebesky’s arranging skills were pivotal to that success.Mr. Sebesky arranged the saxophonist Paul Desmond’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), an album of interpretations of Simon & Garfunkel songs. He arranged the guitarist George Benson’s “White Rabbit” (1972), an album anchored by Mr. Benson’s rendition of the title track, the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane hit. Pairing Mr. Benson with that song was an idea Mr. Sebesky had proposed to Mr. Taylor, but with a twist.“I suggested we do ‘White Rabbit’ in a Spanish mode,” Mr. Sebesky told Marc Myers for the website JazzWax in 2010. “He agreed. George Benson doesn’t read music. He just heard the song and automatically fell into the groove.”Mr. Sebesky in the studio with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the guitarist Wes Montgomery in 1967, working on Mr. Montgomery’s album “A Day in the Life.” The album would be one of the most successful Mr. Sebesky arranged.Chuck StewartThose were just two of the countless records on which Mr. Sebesky worked for CTI from the late 1960s (when it was a subsidiary of A&M) through the 1970s. He also made his own albums as a bandleader, for CTI and other labels. These, too, often merged jazz and rock.His debut album, “The Distant Galaxy” (1968), included versions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna.” “Don Sebesky and the Jazz-Rock Syndrome,” released the same year, included his version of the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” as well as other covers.In 1984 Mr. Sebesky made his nightclub debut as a bandleader, bringing a 12-piece band to Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan to play selections from “Full Cycle,” an album he had just released on the Crescendo label that featured his arrangements of Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” John Lewis’s “Django” and other jazz standards.“At Fat Tuesday’s, a low-ceilinged, narrow room in which the 12 musicians must be strung out in a line, instrumental separation and clarity are a far cry from the possibilities of a recording studio,” John S. Wilson wrote in a review in The New York Times. “But what may be lost in this respect is made up for in the vitality and involvement projected by the musicians and the visual razzle-dazzle of the variety of instruments brought into play.”The next year, reviewing a return engagement at the same club, Mr. Wilson wrote, “This is a band full of fresh ideas and fresh sounds that set it apart.”By then, Mr. Sebesky had begun working on Broadway as well. His first credit was for some of the orchestrations for “Peg,” a 1983 autobiographical one-woman show starring the singer Peggy Lee.That show was short-lived, but many of his other Broadway shows did better. The 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” ran for more than two years and won him a Tony Award for best orchestrations. “An American in Paris” in 2015 also had a long run, and he shared a second Tony, with Christopher Austin and Bill Elliott, for the orchestrations of that show.His one attempt at writing the score for a Broadway show was less successful. “Prince of Central Park,” for which he wrote the music and Gloria Nissenson wrote the lyrics, closed after four performances in 1989.In 1999 Mr. Sebesky, after many nominations, won his first Grammy Award, for his arrangement of the pianist Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby” on his album “I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans.”The next year was a career highlight: He became one of the few people who could say that he didn’t lose a Grammy to Carlos Santana.Mr. Santana, thanks to his album “Supernatural,” was a Grammy juggernaut that year, winning eight awards. In the category of best instrumental composition, Mr. Sebesky won for “Joyful Noise Suite” — beating out, among others, Mr. Santana.“That was very much of a surprise,” Mr. Sebesky, who also won a Grammy that year for best instrumental arrangement, told The Home News Tribune of New Jersey in 2000. “We expected the Santana steamroller to run over everything.”Mr. Sebesky played accordion on the guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli’s 1998 album of Beatles songs. “My mother,” he once said, “thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.” But he had other plans.via Sebesky familyDonald Alexander Sebesky was born on Dec. 10, 1937, in Perth Amboy, N.J. His father, Alexander, was a laborer in a steel cable factory, and his mother, Eleanor (Ehnot) Sebesky, was a homemaker.He studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music but left before graduating in the late 1950s to pursue a nascent career as a trombonist, playing in the bands of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson.Before studying with the big-band trombonist Warren Covington, his instrument had been the accordion.“My mother was real disappointed” when he switched instruments, he told The Evening Press of Binghamton, N.Y., in 1982. “She thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Sebesky was concentrating on writing and arranging.“There seemed like nothing could be better than taking a group of instruments and seeing what sounds could be made to come out of them,” he told The Evening Press.Mr. Sebesky’s first marriage, to Janet Sebesky, ended in divorce. He married Janina Serden in 1986. In addition to Ms. Jonas, his daughter from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife; another daughter from his second marriage, Olivia Sebesky; two sons from his first marriage, Ken and Kevin; a brother, Gerald; and nine grandchildren. Two daughters from his first marriage, Cymbaline Rossman and Alison Bealey, died before Mr. Sebesky. Before moving to the nursing home in Maplewood, he lived for about 30 years in Mendham, N.J.Jamie Lawrence, an Emmy Award-winning musician and music director who worked with Mr. Sebesky on various projects, including playing synthesizer on demos for commercials Mr. Sebesky worked on, recalled that Mr. Sebesky’s charts could be hard to read — a result, he thought, of his working quickly because he always had so many jobs going on.“But if you could decipher them and get all the notes down,” he said in a phone interview, “they all made sense. They were the right notes. He was a musician’s musician.”Alex Traub More

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      When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

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      There’s a resurgence of interest in the pioneering singer-songwriter who disappeared when she was 50.Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. graduate student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”Seventy-five years ago, Ms. Converse was just another young artist trying to make ends meet in the city, singing at dinner parties and private salons, and passing a hat for her performances.She knew that her songs did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This type of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing company, where she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “lovely, but not commercial.”In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was never seen again.Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and though she was intensely private, she kept a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that were left behind after she drove away for good, offering clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and sites around the city that provided the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.The 1940s: Bohemians of the Upper West SideRiverside ParkIn 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote articles about international affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the topics she covered,” said the contemporary international relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “remarkable.”She lived on the Upper West Side. The image of her in Riverside Park, above, was found in an old filing cabinet that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is one of the first known images of Ms. Converse in New York.The Lincoln ArcadeMs. Converse, left, plays for friends at the Lincoln Arcade.Lois AimeSome of Ms. Converse’s closest friends lived and hung around the bohemian enclave known as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway between West 65th and 66th Street. With a reputation as a haven for struggling artists, it had been home to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the last of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court late at night. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, told me that Ms. Converse would often be clattering away at a typewriter, at a remove from the rest, though sometimes she did things he found shocking, like climbing out the front window well past midnight to stand on a ledge, several stories above the street.The 1950s: Making Music in the Village and Beyond23 Grove StreetPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her studio apartment at 23 Grove Street, where she wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and began a new phase of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was here, while living alone in a studio apartment at 23 Grove Street that Ms. Converse wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog (including everything on “How Sad, How Lovely”).The Village at that time “was the Left Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese told me, and it had “whiffs of the future in it” in terms of its permissiveness about lifestyle choices. Nicholas Pileggi, a writer and producer, suggested that given her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no problem hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.The upstart book publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was close to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, where jazz musicians often played, as well as the more respectable Village Vanguard.Grand CentralPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her first and only appearance on live television: The Morning Show, with Walter Cronkite. There is no recording of the live performance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCHer first and only television appearance was in 1954, on the “The Morning Show” on CBS (hosted that year by Walter Cronkite), though how Ms. Converse secured the appearance and what she played and talked about may never be known (shows at this time were broadcast live; no archival footage exists). Because the program was staged in a studio above the main concourse at Grand Central and shown live on a big screen in the hall, everyone bustling through the station that morning could have looked up and caught the young musician’s one and only brush with success.Ms. Converse was extremely close to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the first time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly kept diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”Hamilton HeightsMs. Converse took a photograph of the street below her W. 138th St. apartment in 1958.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCIn 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Street, in Harlem, a block away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat with her older brother, Paul, his wife, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a situation she called “a cost-saving measure.” The new apartment had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since lost), a series of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a song cycle based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophesy and then cursed to be never understood.Circle in the SquareThe 1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” which Ms. Converse attended. Sam Falk/The New York TimesAn avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and effectively launched the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I mention that I saw an in-the-round production of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ last month?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some four and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the last 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”The Blue AngelAt this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Street, unique at the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in covering Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make at least two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her show for decades to come.1960: The Lost Tape; Goodbye, New YorkNational Recording StudiosNational Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for only a year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to record an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just one or two takes of each tune, only took a few hours. The recording was a rumor until 2014, when Phil Converse unearthed a reel of it in his basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she made, remains unreleased.Upper West SideMs. Converse in her apartment on West 88th Street, her last known residence in New York. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by moving back to where she’d started: the Upper West Side. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Street, a half block from Central Park. This was her last known New York address; by 1961, she was gone.Her music, mostly made in isolation or at small gatherings, was nearly lost but for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could; David Garland, who played her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the students who, decades later, introduced her work to a new generation.“The first time I played a Connie Converse song for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula said. “From that moment I knew Connie’s magic would reach at least a few more people in a deeply personal and special way.”He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we first put out the record? Absolutely not. But also, yeah, kind of!”Howard Fishman is the author of the new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      Lewis Capaldi Will Break Your Heart. (But Don’t Take Him Too Seriously.)

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      The joke-cracking Scottish musician’s melodramatic ballad “Someone You Loved” is a blockbuster. Figuring out his next moves became more complicated than he’d anticipated.The first thing you have to know about Lewis Capaldi is that he is kidding. The Scottish musician, who specializes in pop treacle, is foulmouthed the way a young child is — cheekily and cuddly, without a fleck of harm. He is anti-piety, a bloke on a punchline bender. Almost everything he says is accompanied by a wink.One Wednesday afternoon last month, Capaldi jumped out of a chauffeured SUV in Times Square, joined by his manager and a handful of associates. Up on a billboard — which one wasn’t immediately clear — was an ad for a documentary Capaldi had released on Netflix that day, and he was there to film some shocked-and-awed promotional content for social media.The first time the ad rotated in, Capaldi tried a couple of photos pointing up at himself — eh, not so funny. By the third time, after several interruptions from fans surprised to see the global superstar out and about, he’d figured out a mischievous plan.He hit record. “People over here are having orgasms left, right and center,” he shouted into his phone’s camera, while clips from the film played behind him. He gave the phone a serious, shocked look, then added, “Whenever they see my face.”He seemed pleased. The next day, he posted the video to his Instagram story, quickly followed by footage of someone wheat-pasting posters over his own ads. “My 15 minutes of fame are over,” he deadpanned.Those minutes, though — they have been very, very intense. In late 2018, Capaldi released “Someone You Loved,” a startlingly crisp and uncommonly beautiful jolt of nuclear-grade mush. It is lightly schlocky in the 1980s way — ultra-saccharine, hyper-melodramatic — a diminishing resource in the contemporary pop landscape. It has become the fourth most streamed song in Spotify history, with 2.76 billion streams.Just before his Times Square outing, Capaldi, 26, was nursing a Sprite at an outdoor table at the classic New York City dive bar the Ear Inn, musing over the weight of such a massive hit.“Such an anomaly,” he said. “I hate saying this because it makes me feel noxious almost. It’s becoming quite an evergreen song. I still hear it as much as I did when I first put it out.” For those who feel that they have been oppressed by the song, he understands: “You get to a point where people might just be like, We don’t want to hear you whine again about something. Can you do something that’s a bit less?”He was wearing a ruddy brown vintage Carhartt jacket, a black Nike sweatshirt, dark pants and Vans — simple and unglamorous. Around a dozen times over two hours on a block with almost no foot traffic, he was politely interrupted by fans — at one point, a car screeched over to the curb so the driver could hop out to tell Capaldi he’d seen him perform in Philadelphia the previous night. (“He jumped out his car, just like I told him to,” Capaldi joked.)“It’s fine if that’s my song forever, and I kind of expect that to be” — at this moment, he was interrupted by a young girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and her mother, asking for an autograph.“What name should I put on it?” he asked. “Just your name,” the girl replied, and Capaldi guffawed.Capaldi’s nominally less scarred second album, “Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent,” will be released this month. Not every track on the album is a laser-targeted assault on the emotional stability of the listener, but the best ones are. Whether he’ll be able to unmoor his adoring public to the same degree he did the last go-round remains to be seen.Either way, Capaldi remains sanguine. “I went into releasing ‘Someone You Loved’ going, ‘This probably isn’t going to do that well.’ I’m going into this going, ‘This probably isn’t going to do as well as “Someone You Loved”’ — that’s a very big jump,” he said.“You get to a point where people might just be like, We don’t want to hear you whine again about something. Can you do something that’s a bit less?”Lyndon French for The New York TimesCapaldi has a scorched cannon of a voice, and it’s best deployed on songs about anguish. To date, his career has lurched forward one vocal bloodletting at a time. His debut single, “Bruises,” in 2017, was viral for that era. His debut album, “Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent,” was released in 2019 and featured “Someone You Loved” — which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for a song of the year Grammy — and also “Before You Go,” another howling and deeply moving catalog of despair.While all of this was happening, on the internet and in the media, he was a relentless jester — hilariously self-deprecating on Instagram and, later, TikTok. (“In the U.K. it’s like, This [expletive] guy again,” Capaldi said of his musical success there, whereas in the United States, “There are people here who just know the TikTok.”)Capaldi has had umpteen small moments in which his comedic persona has been as loud as his songs. At the Grammys in 2020, he had an Andy Kaufmanesque face-off on the red carpet with an unsuspecting Ryan Seacrest.“I was throwing a baseball at a brick wall, so there was no recoil,” Capaldi said of the appealingly peculiar interaction, adding that he’d been enjoying the fruits of Grammy weekend partying. “It was like, oh, this is so bizarre. But then in my head I’m like, this is even funnier.”All the while, his health was precarious. Last year, he announced that he’d been given a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome — for Capaldi, it manifests in physical tics that arrive at random and can be made worse by stress. Sometimes, they happen when he’s onstage — at one recent concert, the crowd finished the songs that he couldn’t. But the tics subside when he’s at ease: When fans came up to him outside the Ear Inn to chat, they all but disappeared.“This sounds gross, but it’s become part of like a marketing strategy,” he said. “Every piece of content or thing I see with my name next to it is closely followed by Tourette’s. Which is mental, ’cause then I’m like, Billie Eilish has Tourette’s, and she doesn’t bang on about it like I do.”He continued, “It feels dirty. It feels odd.” Then he added with a laugh, “Whatever sells the records!”Capaldi’s diagnosis and the management of his illness is a major theme of his new documentary, “Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now,” which was originally intended to capture him wrestling with how to navigate a musical answer to one of the biggest songs in recent years, but ended up also documenting a much darker and more worrisome stretch of events.The cameras hover over Capaldi at his most awkward — false starts in the songwriting room (“My insecurity was so sky high”), cold sores on his lips, his manager fretting about whether any of the songs he has recorded are a worthy follow-up to “Someone You Loved,” his parents critiquing his songs. And also the tics that have been a feature of his life since childhood, which he now understands are attributable to his Tourette’s. He talks about going on the medication sertraline, which gives him diarrhea and erectile dysfunction.“There’s so much on the line,” Capaldi said of following up his hit. “I totally get why people are nervous and jumpy.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe film ends on a lightly triumphant comeback note, but the original ending was more somber. Capaldi said watching it was disorienting: “I was like, ‘Do I die? Is this posthumous?’”The day after Capaldi’s Times Square adventure, he was performing at Radio City Music Hall. Backstage a few hours before the show, in between playing putt-putt and eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, he remarked that he was planning to take omeprazole pills before his upcoming appearance on the spicy wings challenge talk show “Hot Ones,” a booking that fulfilled what he called in a 2018 tweet “ma life long dream.”In this country, he is both very, very popular and, somehow, a bit of a cipher. Onstage at Radio City, he joked about how much smaller the room was than the shows he’d recently played in Europe. “Every minute I’m up here I’m losing money,” he said. “It’s really not worth it.” (The show was still his biggest American concert to date, a quirk of blowing up just before the pandemic.)Near the end of the set he played “Wish You the Best,” a song that is the logical inheritor of “Someone You Loved” — cataclysmically depressing, but somehow triumphant and engineered for universal acclamation. The video is primally gut-wrenching, if you’ll allow for it; on TikTok, Capaldi has been cheerfully reposting fans’ clips of themselves weeping uncontrollably at its ending.But he chose not to release it as the first single from the new album, because he wanted a bit of freedom from the success he’d earned for himself. “I mean, I would love to work with, like, the Thom Yorkes of this world, but unfortunately, I don’t think he’d answer the call,” Capaldi said. Lately he’s been listening to the Mount Eerie album “A Crow Looked at Me,” an anti-pop grief purge that arrives at the same affect as Capaldi’s music with absolutely none of the bombast.“There are ballads on the album for sure, and I think maybe the easy thing to do would’ve been to put them out first,” he said. “It’s not necessarily that I was trying not to be put in a box. I just felt it weird to come back straight in: Here’s a ballad. Again.”In the documentary, you see Capaldi and his manager grappling with the follow-up pressure. In the SUV heading to Times Square, Capaldi needled his manager for having a “major label mind-set.”He understands, though. “There’s so much on the line,” Capaldi explained. “I totally get why people are nervous and jumpy.”Capaldi closes the album with “How I’m Feeling Now,” an acoustic confession of his insecurities. “It’s like ‘The Elephant Man’ — ‘I am a human being!’” he said, emphasizing that he’s more than just a ballad automaton. “I wanted to suck the air out a little bit.”At Radio City, though, there was little sign that Capaldi was unhappy with his lot. “New York!” he shouted. “It feels so good to be inside of you!” At the merch stand, he was selling country-and-western-style T-shirts that read “America’s Sweetheart Returns: Stealing Hearts in Every State.” The Jonas Brothers joined him onstage for a song, and Capaldi shouted to the crowd about how … aroused he was.Before “Before You Go,” about the death of his aunt by suicide, he solemnly proclaimed, “I want to thank you, Pat, ’cause it made me a lot of money.” And during “Lost on You,” he playfully chided the crowd for singing along too enthusiastically — “The song’s not finished, shut the [expletive] up.”He paused, then gave the crowd a rascally grin: “It sounds much better when I sing it.” Everyone cheered. More