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Lit Trivia: Do You Know Which Books Inspired These Songs?
Lit Trivia: Do You Know Which Books Inspired These Songs? – The New York Times
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4 New Artists You Need to Hear
Listen to Jana Horn, Water From Your Eyes, Debby Friday and Anna B Savage.Debby Friday is on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Katrin BragaDear listeners,Each year when I watch the Grammys, I am reminded of the absurdity of the best new artist category. New to whom, I always wonder. The qualifications are notoriously fuzzy and historically unstable — just ask the country musician Shelby Lynne, who released her debut record in 1989 and was amused to find herself winning best new artist in 2001. (“Thirteen years and six albums to get here,” she remarked wryly from the stage.) In 2007, Justin Vernon’s folk-pop project Bon Iver put out the lauded “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but it took five years and two more acclaimed releases to pull off one of the category’s most dramatic upsets, when he took home the 2012 trophy by beating the fan favorite, Nicki Minaj — who, as it happened, put out her first mixtape all the way back in 2007, too.And yet I did feel sympathy for the Grammy nominating body while putting together today’s playlist, which is full of up-and-coming artists who have recently caught my ear. No, they’re not exactly “new” — all have previously released music, and in some cases a few albums. But they’re new to me, and I hope that means at least a few of them will be new to you, too. They’re an eclectic bunch, making confessional acoustic folk, brash electro-pop and off-kilter art-rock. All have fresh albums that have either just been released or will be very soon. I would happily break Milli Vanilli’s (rescinded) best new artist Grammy from 1990 into four pieces and redistribute it to the following acts.Listen along here on Spotify as you read, or hit the YouTube links as you go.Jana HornJana Horn is a native Texan with a poised, glassy voice that reminds me a bit of the great ’60s folk singer Vashti Bunyan, except Bunyan’s voice evoked pastoral realism instead of Horn’s subtly mischievous mirror-world. The sparse, spine-tingling “After All This Time” — from a new album coming out next week, “The Window Is the Dream” — was what first caught my ear, but it’s since led me back to her great 2020 album, “Optimism,” and the absolutely haunting song “Jordan,” a poetic meditation on a Bible verse that Horn unfurls with the fixed gaze and confident pacing of an expert storyteller.Water From Your EyesSonic Youth never made a guest appearance on “Sesame Street,” but what the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes presupposes with its latest single, “Barley,” is, well … what if the band did? “1, 2, 3, counter,” the vocalist Rachel Brown intones in a bone-dry deadpan. “You’re a cool thing, count mountains.” Nate Amos provides the perfect complement by kicking up dust storms of distorted, deconstructed guitar riffs. “Barley” stacks familiar words and musical elements in unpredictable shapes, creating an internal logic as alluring as it is mysterious. It all bodes very well for the group’s album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26.Debby FridayThe Nigerian-born, Toronto-based singer and rapper Debby Friday’s ambitious, charismatic album “Good Luck” is one of my favorite debuts of the year so far. The strobe-lit club banger “I Got It,” which features Uñas, has been a mainstay of my running playlist for the past few months — it’s bona fide sprint fuel! But Friday shows off her range on the more introspective “So Hard to Tell,” which she frames as a tender but direct address to her younger self: “Lady Friday,” she sighs in a voice weighted down with the wisdom of hindsight, “all you do is rebel.” No matter her mood, though, Friday has what the kids call main character energy: She’s a shape-shifting, swashbuckling dynamo journeying through different tempos and genres, always on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Anna B SavageWhere does love go — like, energetically speaking — after the relationship that contained it ends? That’s the question that the British singer-songwriter Anna B Savage stares down in “The Ghost,” a quivering, emotionally raw incantation that begins her gripping new album, “In/Flux.” “I thought you were gone, but six years on, you’re back again,” Savage sings through gritted teeth before unlatching her jaw to let out a keening plea: “Stop haunting me, please.” There’s a rattling immediacy to Savage’s music; she writes like someone with a direct, unimpeded channel to her innermost feelings. “The Orange,” the album’s cautiously optimistic closer, provides a satisfying counterpoint to “The Ghost” and, I’d venture, a pretty good ending to this little playlist. “My new love is wind in the poplar trees,” Savage sings, finally free of the ghost’s interruptions and able to take stock of the simple pleasures all around her: “Round pebbles, poetry/Orange peel hacked on my knee.”If that’s not enough new music, Jon Pareles and I have 9 more song recommendations for you in this week’s Playlist.Yours in imagining Kim Gordon meeting Cookie Monster,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Best New (to Me) Artists, 2023” track listTrack 1: Jana Horn, “After All This Time”Track 2: Water From Your Eyes, “Barley”Track 3: Debby Friday, “I Got It”Track 4: Anna B Savage, “The Ghost”Track 5: Jana Horn, “Jordan”Track 6: Debby Friday, “So Hard to Tell”Track 7: Anna B Savage, “The Orange”Bonus tracksI cannot mention Vashti Bunyan without stopping everything and listening to “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind,” and if you have two minutes and 15 seconds to spare, I suggest you do the same.Another absurd Grammy fact I learned this week and must share with you: Guess which song earned Bob Dylan his first ever solo Grammy? Actually, don’t guess, you’re never going to get it so I’m just going to tell you: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won best rock performance in 1980. Think about that: Bob Dylan didn’t win a single solo Grammy until 1980. (In 1973, when Ringo Starr accepted a podium full of album of the year awards for the many artists featured on “The Concert for Bangladesh,” Dylan got one of those. But still.) As it happens, I do love “Gotta Serve Somebody” — even more after seeing him play it at the Beacon Theater in November 2021 — so here’s to Bob Dylan’s first Grammy. Maybe that is what Soy Bomb was trying to protest. More
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How Taylor Swift Shapes the Story of Her Eras
Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTaylor Swift’s Eras Tour began this month in Glendale, Ariz., and will continue through early August in stadiums throughout the United States. The performance is grand-scaled: almost four dozen songs over more than three hours.It is the first major Swift tour since her dates supporting “Reputation” in 2018, and even though it touches on tracks from each of her 10 albums, it focuses heavily on her last four: “Lover,” “Folklore,” “Evermore” and “Midnights.” Those are vastly different albums, and the segments of the concert devoted to them varied very widely.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how Swift translates her music for a live audience, how she reconciles the different categories of her catalog and the persistent fervor of the fans who support her.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More
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Alex Newell From ‘Shucked’ Sings Their Favorite Whitney Houston Song
After growing up listening to powerhouse voices, the actor brings their own back to Broadway.Amid the sweet, folksy ballads (and many, many corn jokes) of “Shucked,” the new Broadway musical opening April 4, comes a soulful, commanding number performed by Alex Newell that provides the show some unexpected heft — a song full of riffs and modulations and belted notes that seem to reach both ends of the actor’s expansive range.Roles that showcase the breadth and power of Newell’s voice are familiar territory: The actor made their Broadway debut in 2017 as the maternal goddess Asaka in the revival of “Once on This Island” (1990) and may be most recognizable for their time on “Glee,” from 2012 to 2015, as the transgender teenager Unique Adams. But their character in “Shucked” — Lulu, a whiskey entrepreneur — and that song, “Independently Owned,” offer the chance to inhabit something new: “The expectation of plus-size people is that they cannot be sexy; all my life, I’ve heard you’re either fat and jolly or fat and a bitch,” says Newell, 30. “So to have this dimension of this person, to just exude sex, is so much fun for me because it doesn’t happen often — especially on the Broadway stage.”“Shucked” is set in a small farming town with a thriving corn crop — until the stalks start dying, spurring a local woman (Lulu’s cousin and confidante, Maizy, played by Caroline Innerbichler) to leave home in search of a solution. Newell heard about the piece through a friend, who did an early reading before the pandemic. But they didn’t see the script, written by Robert Horn, until the show’s musical director and orchestrator, Jason Howland, texted Newell about the role. They were immediately drawn to the show’s humor — nearly every line is a pun or punchline or both, the laughs offset by a warm score from the country songwriting duo Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark.Newell grew up singing in church in Lynn, Mass., and listening to other big voices, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Holliday among them. They had early aspirations of becoming a gospel artist, but performing in a choir proved challenging — “I mean, I never fit in. I was always loud.” After seeing a local production of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” when they were 11, Newell began thinking about a career in musical theater.When Fox held an open call for “Glee” hopefuls to audition online in 2011, Newell, then a sophomore in high school, submitted a self-taped clip performing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls.” (Starring as Effie, a role in the musical originated by Holliday, has long been a goal.) Newell later started making pop music, including the queer anthems “Kill the Lights” and “All Cried Out,” and in 2020 eventually returned to TV as Mo, a gender-nonconforming D.J. on the musical series “Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist.” But for now, Newell says, they’re content to stay onstage: “The endorphins that are released after you’ve sung and everyone is standing and screaming and that wall of sound is pushing right back at you: It’s beautiful.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Newell to sing and discuss their favorite song by one of their idols: Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” (1985). More
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‘I’m an Electric Lampshade’ Review: My Accountant, the Pop Star
A 60-year-old retiree travels to the Philippines to follow his dreams of stardom in this documentary.The documentary “I’m an Electric Lampshade” follows an unlikely subject: Doug McCorkle, who has spent nearly 20 years working as a corporate accountant in New York state. He’s a person of unassuming appearance — an older gentleman in glasses who is balding and not trying to hide it. His colleagues speak fondly of him in interviews, and McCorkle is happily married to his wife, Gina. They have no children, and they are economically comfortable enough to retire early.But despite his commonplace appearance, McCorkle’s retirement is an event that few are likely to forget. With Gina’s encouragement, McCorkle has decided to reinvent himself as a pop star, and his retirement party serves as a launch party for his first music video, an electronic track referencing drugs and sex.The director John Clayton Doyle follows McCorkle on his transformation, and the documentary changes as McCorkle’s project grows. What begins as a mixture of vérité footage and interviews morphs into a surreal travel documentary when McCorkle joins a training center for drag queens and aspiring actors in the Philippines. The film ends as a concert documentary for its 60-year-old star, who performs scantily clad and in glam-rock makeup.The film’s most direct critiques of McCorkle’s project pass by briefly in interludes during his trip to the Philippines. He is confronted by a fellow trainee, a Filipino drag queen named Fandango, who reminds McCorkle that he is essentially a tourist. But the film doesn’t linger on political critique, and it largely avoids asking the practical questions that might add dramatic weight to McCorkle’s dreams. The documentary hides the financial costs, physical tolls and even artistic philosophy, leaving only an exercise in ego.I’m an Electric LampshadeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on most major streaming platforms. More
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Spring Forward: Songs for a New Season
Hear a playlist tuned to rebirth, as well as the risk to bloom. Plus: a selection of tracks that explain our readers.The cover of Waxahatchee’s “Saint Cloud.”Merge RecordsDear listeners,A few days ago, I was buried up to my neck in volcanic sand.Literally, and by choice! My sister and I spent a very restorative weekend at a spa, to celebrate her upcoming wedding and to shake off a winter that had been a challenge for each of us. This particular spa has imported natural volcanic sand from Ibusuki, a city in southwest Japan, and for a cool $30 they will have someone rake a hot, heaping quantity of it atop your body until you cannot move. Then you lay there for 15 minutes, letting the mineral-rich sand work its supposedly detoxifying magic and, if you are like me, expelling such an ungodly amount of perspiration from your face that an attendant who sees maybe a hundred people through this process each day remarks with slightly concerned awe, “Wow, you’re really sweating.”For the first few minutes, I felt like a corpse. By the end, though, as I wriggled out of the earth and once again stood upright, I have never felt more like a freshly sprouting flower in springtime. (Albeit an exceptionally sweaty one who had to sit on the bench for five extra minutes of observation because she’d been deemed a fainting risk.)The earliest weeks of springtime have such a distinct feeling that I decided to make a playlist to soundtrack them. Late March/early April is a time of rebirth but also of the friction and occasional struggle of transition — the lime-green shoot emerging from the dirt; the chrysalis stage before the butterfly. It’s the April-is-the-cruelest-month part of “The Wasteland.” It’s the “little darling, it’s been a long, cold lonely winter” part of “Here Comes the Sun.” It’s this perfect little 24-word poem by Anaïs Nin that I always find myself thinking of this time of year:And then the day came,when the riskto remain tightin a budwas more painfulthan the riskit tookto Blossom.Flowers are a recurring motif on this playlist: Waxahatchee’s blooming and then withering lilacs “marking the slow, slow, slow passing of time”; Hurray for the Riff Raff’s bemused cataloging of poetic plant names (“Rhododendron, night blooming jasmine, deadly nightshade…”). So, too, is rebirth and that worthwhile risk to bloom. Perhaps selfishly, I sneaked in one song in about “smoke floating over the volcano,” but that’s from an album I find speaks to a lot of these themes anyway, Caroline Polachek’s excellent, recently released “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” My perennial favorites Nina Simone and the Mountain Goats make appearances, but don’t say I didn’t warn you in my introductory “11 Songs That Explain Me.”Speaking of which! Thank you so much for all your wonderful submissions when I asked last week for a song that describes you. I wish I could have included every one of them, but I wanted to share a few of my favorites below. So many of your responses were such vivid reminders of the humanizing power of music and the bone-deep connection we all have to certain songs. It was great to get to know more about who’s out there reading, too. I feel like we’re building something special together.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Waxahatchee: “Lilacs”“And the lilacs drink the water/And the lilacs die,” Katie Crutchfield sings on this bittersweet, gently twangy tune from her most recent album, “Saint Cloud”; that succinct image and the song’s stark arrangement lay bare her increasing confidence as a songwriter. (Listen on YouTube)2. Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Rhododendron”Alynda Segarra has a knack for writing songs that both celebrate the natural world and articulate the dangers of ignoring its glory. “Don’t turn your back on the mainland,” Segarra sings here, on a tuneful but defiantly prickly chorus. (Listen on YouTube)3. Troye Sivan: “Bloom”Here’s an underrated gem from a few years back: smeary, romantic, ’80s-inspired pop as vibrant as a bouquet of roses in every color. (Listen on YouTube)4. Beach House: “Lazuli”And from an album called “Bloom,” this is an atmospheric reverie from the indie-pop duo Beach House, a band that — despite the summertime humidity its name conjures — always sounds to me like the arrival of spring. (Listen on YouTube)5. Jamila Woods: “Sula (Paperback)”Inspired by Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel “Sula,” the ever-inquisitive Chicago R&B singer and poet Jamila Woods crafts an ode to self-discovery and personal growth with a refrain that stretches upward like a verdant stalk: “I’m better, I’m better, I’m better …” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Mountain Goats: “Onions”I love the way this simple, guitar-driven meditation on early spring entwines the personal with the more cosmic cycling of the seasons: “Springtime’s coming, that means you’ll be coming back around/New onions growing underground.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Caroline Polachek: “Smoke”“It’s just smoke floating over the volcano,” the avant-garde pop star Polachek sings, providing a potent reminder that all difficult periods — like, say, being buried up to your neck in a steaming pile of volcanic sand — do pass in time. (Listen on YouTube)8. Nina Simone: “Here Comes the Sun”This is such a deeply felt reading of a song so many of us know by rote: Simone’s particular phrasing cracks it open and makes you feel like you’re hearing George Harrison’s words anew. (Listen on YouTube)9. Dolly Parton: “Light of a Clear Blue Morning”Dolly Parton is, eternally, a human ray of sunshine, though perhaps never more explicitly than she is here, on this inspirational, soul-rattling classic from her first self-produced album from 1977, “New Harvest … First Gathering.” (Listen on YouTube)I feel that ice is slowly melting,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Spring Forward” track listTrack 1: Waxahatchee, “Lilacs” (2020)Track 2: Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Rhododendron” (2022)Track 3: Troye Sivan, “Bloom” (2018)Track 4: Beach House, “Lazuli” (2012)Track 5: Jamila Woods, “Sula (Paperback)” (2020)Track 6: The Mountain Goats, “Onions” (2000)Track 7: Caroline Polachek, “Smoke” (2023)Track 8: Nina Simone, “Here Comes the Sun” (1971)Track 9: Dolly Parton, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” (1977)The songs that explain youLast week, we asked readers about the songs that explain them. More than 500 of you wrote in. Thanks to everyone who shared their stories.Cameo: “She’s Strange”I’ve always thought of it as my personal theme song in a way … it’s a tribute to a woman committed to being her unique self in the world. When I think about the things I am most proud of in my life, it’s the fact that somehow I did not let the world, society, Groupthink or even my culture of origin diminish my quiet determination to live my truth as best as my circumstances would allow. — Idara E. Bassey, Atlanta (Listen on YouTube)Mitski: “Dan the Dancer”Or perhaps the whole album of “Puberty 2.” I’m 18 years old so I feel as though I am experiencing my own second puberty, not one of first periods and training bras but one of questioning my place in the world, having new experiences, first relationships etc. For me, Dan the Dancer encapsulates my fear and questioning of the future and my life through this metaphor of hanging onto a cliff, while connecting to this experience of new relationships and letting yourself be vulnerable with those around you. — Natalie, Singapore (Listen on YouTube)Sonic Youth: “Teen Age Riot”In high school, I boarded the bus every morning in my rural Louisiana hometown wearing thick black eyeliner and a scowl, always with some flavor of abrasive alternative music blasting in my cheap earbuds. This song carried me through many of those bus rides, away from my mostly conservative, evangelical Christian peers who I couldn’t identify less with to a place where my frustrations could be heard and understood. I’m now a student at a law school where I feel immense pressure to pursue a corporate career and give up the idealism that has served as my enduring motivation. This song inspires me to look to the teenage riot that still persists within me, and remember what’s really worth fighting for. — Amanda Watson, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube)Nina Simone: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”It encapsulates the world I want to see, coupled with the wistfulness that we’re not there yet. I love the way the song starts with barely any instrumental accompaniment, just Simone’s piano and a gentle drumbeat (or maybe finger snaps?) and then builds and builds until it’s speaking to the whole world. I’ve been some kind of activist most of my life (I’m now 55), and it’s easy to be deeply discouraged by the political and ecological present we’re in and lose hope for what the future might be. This song (re-)energizes me: Nina was singing at a moment when civil rights were a legal reality but mostly a aspiration for those living with the daily indignities and violence of racism, so if she can imagine a better world, so can I. — Sarah Chinn, Brooklyn, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)Brian Eno: “The Big Ship”I discovered this in the mid-80s at a time when I was a closeted gay teenager, longing for some sort of freedom. This ethereal piece of almost-ambience defies easy categorization. It simply builds, like a cloudy nebula descending from space, more and more sounds playing off one another until it envelopes you and reascends, taking you with it. If felt like an escape into another reality — like a peaceful transition to an open world. I’d play it on repeat with headphones to keep spiraling darkness at bay. It worked. It helped me survive. — George B. Singer, Long Beach, Calif. (Listen on YouTube)And a very special bonus track (from the artist)The dB’s: “Amplifier”I wrote this 40 years ago, and it’s probably my best-known song. It’s partially about me and my own life, but it has spoken to other desperate, depressed people, helping defuse some of their emotional distress with a little misplaced humor. Sometimes. People still react to it — this past summer, at the request of the hostess, I played the song with my dB’s rhythm section bandmates at a soundcheck for a book release party in Chapel Hill. An early attendee had a visceral meltdown over the words to the song, begging us not to play it again. So we didn’t. — Peter Holsapple, Durham, N.C. (Listen on YouTube) More
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Lana Del Rey ‘Ocean Blvd’ Review: Into the Deep, Without Leaving the Shallow
The singer and songwriter’s ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” asks big, earnest questions and isn’t afraid to get messy.“I wrote you a note, but I didn’t send it,” Lana Del Rey sings on her rangy ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” — a 16-song, 78-minute collection as sprawling, hypnotic and incorrigibly American as an interstate highway.Many of the tracks have the run-on, handwritten feel of letters never mailed, and this particular one, the fluttering piano ballad “Sweet,” is addressed to a paramour who seems unwilling to go as deep as the 37-year-old Del Rey. “Lately we’ve been making out a lot,” she sings, spinning her signature, soft-serve swirl of the sacred and profane, “not talking ’bout the stuff that’s at the very heart of things.”More than any of its predecessors, this Del Rey album is about the very heart of things. Its themes and lyrical preoccupations are philosophical and weighty: the existence of God; the afterlife; the precise moment the soul leaves the body; the concessions of marriage and motherhood; fate; familial bonds; and, on the strikingly melancholy centerpiece “Fingertips,” recent scientific progress into the attainment of eternal life. “God, if you’re near me, send me three white butterflies,” she sings three-quarters into the LP, in a voice that’s almost childlike in its surging sincerity. Throughout “Ocean Blvd,” an artist who arrived on the scene sounding like a nihilist is now searching and sincerely self-scrutinizing, sending earnest questions into a possible void.The album’s title itself suggests hidden depths beneath picturesque surfaces — something Del Rey knows a thing or two about. When she debuted with the 2011 viral hit “Video Games” and an awkward, excessively maligned “Saturday Night Live” performance, the musician born Elizabeth Grant was dismissed by some skeptics as nothing more than a pretty face, all retro artifice and pouty pastiche. But as she’s sharpened her pencil, most powerfully on the eerie 2014 LP “Ultraviolence” and her sublime 2019 album “Norman _____ Rockwell!,” Del Rey has proved to be an expert chronicler of her own interiority as well as a larger, more diffuse cultural subconscious. Del Rey, at her best, has a finger not just on the pulse, but somewhere beneath the flesh.And she is occasionally at her best here. “Ocean Blvd” is Del Rey’s strongest and most daring album since “Rockwell,” though it’s also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence. On an excellent four-song opening stretch, Del Rey establishes the album’s unhurried pace and her connection to that fabled tunnel, a sealed-up, subterranean bit of West Coast architecture — one of the few places in California where the sun can’t shine. “I can’t help but feel somewhat like my body marred my soul,” Del Rey croons on the mournful, gorgeously string-kissed title track.A few songs later, on the shape-shifting nightmare “A&W,” she finds an even darker line of inquiry: “Look at my hair, look at the length of it and the shape of my body,” she sings atop a droning, monotonous chord progression that conjures early Cat Power. “If I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?” The line is more shocking for the vaporous, ultra-femme falsetto in which she delivers it — as if the ballerina inside a music box opened her mouth and sang.Part of the thrill of Del Rey’s music is the sense that she can and will say absolutely anything, regardless of who it may offend. She makes a somewhat clumsy admission of her own white privilege on “Grandfather Please Stand on the Shoulders of My Father While He’s Deep-Sea Fishing”: “I’m blue, I’m green, regrettably also a white woman/But I have good intentions even if I’m one of the last ones.” The line is complicated by the fact that, save for her brief forays into hip-hop on her grab-bag 2017 album “Lust for Life,” “Ocean Blvd” is more conversant with Black music than any other entry in her discography. Gospel is a particular touchstone. Some of the first voices heard on the record are Melodye Perry and Pattie Howard, onetime backing singers for Whitney Houston; later, the jazz musician Jon Batiste accompanies Del Rey on the pirouetting duet “Candy Necklaces” and stays, to testify, on a fiery three-minute interlude.At this unfettered stage in her career, Del Rey’s music is driven by a tension between freedom and structure; her greatest material finds its quivering equilibrium. Two six-minute compositions in the middle of “Ocean Blvd,” though, test the limits of Del Rey’s penchant for free verse. “Kintsugi,” an aching meditation on the deaths of several family members, mostly works; it’s discursive and diaristic, but a repeated refrain borrowed from Leonard Cohen (“that’s how the light gets in”) is an effective anchor. “Fingertips,” despite containing some of the record’s most piercing lyrics, simply drifts. The return of meter, on the elegant “Paris, Texas,” comes as a relief.Partly based on a piano-driven instrumental track by the indie composer SYML, “Paris, Texas” is one of 11 songs that Del Rey co-produced with Jack Antonoff, who has become a trusted collaborator. A handful of songs also evolved out of impromptu Sunday jam sessions that Del Rey’s boyfriend at the time, the film producer and amateur guitarist Mike Hermosa, recorded on his phone; a few of them (“Peppers,” “Let the Light In”) have a playful, flirtatious feel. (“When we broke up,” Del Rey said in a recent Rolling Stone U.K. interview, “I was like, ‘You know at some point we’re going to talk about the fact that you have half of this album.’” He is credited as a writer on five songs.)“Ocean Blvd” closes with a trio of those lighter and more irreverent tracks that stray from the heart of things, giving the album’s concluding moments the sense of a cosmic shrug: “Get high, drop acid, never die,” she sings in responses on the final track. But she also seems to have embraced the more superficial pleasures of gaudy, earthly delights. “Peppers” is at once inane and irresistible (“me and my boyfriend listen to the Chili Peppers”). Del Rey has asked God for guidance and accepted Anthony Kiedis’s scat-nonsense as the answer. What could be more Californian than that?That three-song suite that concludes “Ocean Blvd” can certainly feel like an anticlimax, or a retreat from the existential questions posed in its opening movement. But it’s also a perfect distillation of the duality that makes Del Rey’s 21st-century siren songs so singular. Nine albums into her career, she has become a musical mermaid, capable of breathing as easily on the surface as she can in the ocean’s darkest depths. More
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Morgan Wallen’s ‘One Thing at a Time’ Is No. 1 for a Third Week
The country star’s hit-stuffed streaming blockbuster is just shy of one million equivalent sales. U2 opens at No. 5 with an album of acoustic rerecordings.Morgan Wallen is not budging from No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with the country star’s latest hit-stuffed double album holding the top spot for a third week in a row.Wallen’s 36-track “One Thing at a Time” racked up the equivalent of another 209,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate, bringing its three-week total to just shy of one million. In its most recent week, it had 256 million streams and sold 12,500 copies as a complete package.Two years ago, Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” spent its first 10 weeks at No. 1, even amid a media controversy and temporary radio ban after Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur. Can “One Thing at a Time” match the success of its predecessor? That album’s success, by the way, is ongoing; this week “Dangerous” holds at No. 7, logging its 112th week in the Top 10.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” climbs two spots to No. 2, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” rises three to No. 3; both are former No. 1s that got boosts from their creators being on tour. Miley Cyrus’s “Endless Summer Vacation” is No. 4.U2, the veteran Irish rock band, is No. 5 with “Songs of Surrender,” a retrospective project of mostly acoustic rerecordings of some of the group’s signature songs. It arrived with the promotion of a Disney+ documentary and the recent announcement of a concert residency this fall at a high-tech new venue in Las Vegas, the MSG Sphere.The most complete form of “Songs of Surrender” — standard on streaming services, and a “super deluxe” four-LP doorstopper — includes 40 songs over nearly three hours. The album opens with the equivalent of 46,500 sales, mostly from copies sold as a complete package. More
