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      Scott Johnson, Playfully Inventive Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      In works like “John Somebody,” he mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Scott Johnson, a composer and guitarist who forged an original style involving the rhythmic cadences of speech and the gestures and timbres of popular music, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70.Mr. Johnson’s sister Susan Lee Johnson said the cause was complications of aspiration pneumonia. Mr. Johnson had also been diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2021.Mr. Johnson immersed himself in music and art from an early age and played in rock bands in high school. His artistic breakthrough came with “John Somebody,” a playfully inventive work for solo electric guitar with taped accompaniment, which he assembled from 1980 to 1982, and which, as performed regularly and recorded in 1986, won him considerable acclaim.To create that work, Mr. Johnson transcribed into approximate musical notation portions of a friend’s telephone conversation he had recorded in 1977 (“You know who’s in New York? You remember that guy, John somebody? He was a … he was sort of a…”), along with other snatches of speech and laughter.Mr. Johnson added dense layers of guitar, saxophone and percussion, and a virtuosic solo part for live guitarist, with pitches, melodic motifs and rhythms derived from the recorded vocalism. The result mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.“To these ears, the music mirrors the subterranean rumble, the welter of voices and other overlaid sounds of the city, with the cries of superamplified guitars hovering like angels above the fray,” Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote about “John Somebody” in 1986. “It’s a compelling marriage of rock elements and classical formalism that doesn’t shortchange either.”Mr. Johnson refined and extended the process he developed for “John Somebody” in several subsequent works. He also created purely instrumental works and, for a time, led an ensemble comprising three saxophonists, two electric guitarists, an electric bass guitarist and two drummers.The technical demands of Mr. Johnson’s music could make collaboration a daunting prospect. But he formed close bonds with younger artists and groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound and the guitarist and composer Mark Dancigers, who came of age at a time when fluency in rock and pop idioms became more prevalent among concert-music composers and performers.“He was a player who embraced complexity,” Mr. Dancigers said in a phone interview. “The writing is challenging from a number of perspectives: There are leaps, there are rapid virtuosic passages, there are chord voicings that change very rapidly.”Mr. Dancingers suggested that Mr. Johnson’s compositions paved the way for younger composers similarly inclined toward hybridity. “The first time I heard him present his music,” he said, “I thought, this guy’s a little ahead of his time.”Mr. Johnson developed a passion for electric guitar in high school, and his music mixed the structural rigor of classical composition with the ebullient sound and attitude of rock.Patricia NolanScott Richard Johnson was born in Madison, Wis., on May 12, 1952. His father, Robert Warren Johnson, worked in marketing, merchandising and sales positions for a battery company. His mother, Janet Mary (Stecker) Johnson, was a homemaker. They both belonged to a church choir and attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra.Intellectually inquisitive and artistically inclined, Mr. Johnson played clarinet before switching to electric guitar in high school. An early infatuation with folk groups like the Kingston Trio ceded to a passion for Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.“His bands practiced in the family basement,” his sister Susan wrote in an email, “and the practice sessions shook the house.”Hearing Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” sparked Mr. Johnson’s interest in modern classical composition. By college, he wrote in a biography on his website, “I was studying music theory during the week and playing in bars on the weekends.”Daunted by the serialist compositional style that held sway in academia, Mr. Johnson turned to visual art. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a bachelor’s degree in art in 1974 and then drove a cab in Madison for a year to finance his move to New York City in 1975.By that time he had temporarily set music aside. But he quickly established himself among a rising generation of versatile, inquisitive Downtown creators, including the composers Rhys Chatham, Peter Gordon and Arthur Russell, the choreographer Karole Armitage and the interdisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, with all of whom he collaborated.On arrival, Mr. Johnson supported himself by demolishing and renovating lofts with a friend from Madison, Scott Billingsley, later known as the filmmaker Scott B. He also joined Mr. Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra.“It sometimes took Scott days to be able to use his fingers for guitar, after sanding floors all day” Mr. Gordon said by email. Like many other downtown composers, including Mr. Gordon, Mr. Johnson also worked as a tape editor for the sound artist and performer Charlie Morrow.Tape played a key role in Mr. Johnson’s oeuvre. For the earliest work he acknowledges on his website, “Home and Variations” (1979), he manipulated the voices of members of a dance company to accompany a dance.In the liner notes he wrote for a 2004 reissue of “John Somebody” on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Mr. Johnson said that germinal material for the piece dated as far back as 1977. At that time, he had to cut up strips of magnetic tape and then tape them back together. One particular passage in the work, he recounted, required a tape loop 25 feet long.Addressing the work’s development in a 2018 interview for the web publication NewMusicBox, Mr. Johnson cited several inspirations: early tape works in which Steve Reich looped and layered recorded speech, the call-and-response convention fundamental to the blues, and compositions in which Olivier Messiaen transcribed and notated bird song. In turn, “John Somebody” announced a signature style that anticipated Mr. Reich’s landmark 1988 piece “Different Trains,” and had a strong influence on other composers.Despite the seeming novelty of his approach, Mr. Johnson asserted his alliance to a historic lineage of rigorous formal composition. In his view, bringing elements of rock into the concert-music world extended a tradition of composers borrowing from vernacular styles, like folk songs. “John Somebody,” he wrote, resulted “when the partially developed elements laid out on my table met the animating idea of the Baroque dance suite, episodic but unified.”Mr. Johnson performed the work regularly. A 1986 recording made for the upstart record company Icon benefited from a partnership with Nonesuch, a more established label whose cachet was growing, and the commercial clout of that label’s corporate parent, Warner Bros.Mr. Johnson’s score for the 1988 Paul Schrader film “Patty Hearst” was released on Nonesuch. So were portions of “How It Happens” (1991-93), an evening-length composition for the Kronos Quartet with the recorded voice of the political commentator I.F. Stone, scattered across three different albums.Mr. Johnson, increasingly used his speech-manipulation technique to address social and philosophical concerns. In “Americans” (2003), he sampled the speech of immigrants recorded in Queens to examine cultural isolation and assimilation. For “Mind Out of Matter” (2009-15), a 75-minute work for Alarm Will Sound, he employed the voice of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has examined the history of religion.The Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson grew familiar with Mr. Johnson’s exactitude while preparing “Mind Out of Matter.” The percussion parts included some nearly impossible passages, and at one point players suggested altering a few notes.“Even as a conductor and a listener, I’m thinking you’re probably not even going to hear those notes,” Mr. Pierson said by phone. “But having to rethink that was so intense for Scott. Watching the amount of attention that he would put into reconsidering just a couple of notes, in a passage where there was so much going on, was really something to see.”In addition to his sister Susan, Mr. Johnson is survived by another sister, Lynne Ann Johnson. His wife, Marlisa Monroe, a classical-music publicist, apparently died on Friday: A Police Department spokesperson confirmed on Saturday that a 70-year-old woman was found unconscious and unresponsive, and later pronounced dead, at the Manhattan address where Mr. Johnson and Ms. Monroe lived. No cause of death has yet been determined; an investigation is ongoing.In his last months, Mr. Johnson completed a final composition: a wholly acoustic work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano. The piece, titled “Map,” features an elegiac text by Mr. Johnson, which reads in part:Every route is a branching fatewell worn path or departureshared inherited highwaysengineered exitsor unmarked dirt swervesaccidents, errors, discoveries. More

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      What’s Driving a Fresh Wave of Irish Music? Tradition.

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      As Ireland reimagines itself, musicians including the singer Lisa O’Neill and the band Lankum are reimagining the island’s music with an ever-growing sense of pride.DUBLIN — The 40-year-old Irish singer Lisa O’Neill’s north Dublin flat is filled with books, records, instruments and talismanic chachkas. A Sinead O’Connor photo flanks a Johnny Cash portrait on a shelf next to a ceramic teapot; a Patrick Kavanagh poetry collection tops a pile of paperbacks; a Margaret Barry LP jacket gets pride of place on her upright piano’s rack.Barry was a street singer “discovered” by the folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1950s; she busked with a banjo and a beautiful bray of a voice, brazenly Irish, singing songs of the day alongside traditional ballads. Her work has become a touchstone for O’Neill. “I kind of really learned to sing from these recordings,” she said in an interview in her high-ceilinged kitchen last month. “She was like the Edith Piaf of Ireland.”O’Neill is a cultural hero in her own right. She has released five albums since 2009, building a reputation as a modern artist tapped into the ancient. In song, her voice becomes a wild thing, cutting the air like the cry of Dublin’s omnipresent sea gulls; it can silence a noisy pub crowd when it lays into a ballad, swooping boldly into high notes or creaking fiercely. She spent Ireland’s strict lockdown largely by herself here in one of the city’s weathered Georgian townhouses, writing the incantatory songs that inform her recent album, “All of This Is Chance,” which was released in February.“Folk” might not be the best word to describe O’Neill’s striking mix of originals and interpretations, which echo singer-songwriter, alt-country and indie-rock traditions. In this, she is not alone. Over the past decade she has found community and common cause with a Dublin tribe leaning into Ireland’s older traditions.There’s the sublimely harmonizing brother duo Ye Vagabonds, who opened shows for Phoebe Bridgers last summer; the mighty bass-baritone singer-songwriter John Francis Flynn; Eoghan O Ceannabhain, a master of Irish-language song in the sean nos tradition; and Lankum, a gang of drone-loving experimentalists who have become a lodestar for the scene, and released their fourth album on March 24.This creative bounty has been echoed in other Irish arts resonating abroad despite — and arguably because of — their rich, resolute Irishness: the TV series “Derry Girls” and “Bad Sisters,” the films “The Quiet Girl (An Cailin Ciuin)” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” both part of the so-called Green Wave at this year’s Oscars.All this has coincided with significant sociopolitical change in Ireland. The legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage — alongside the exposure of the horrors inside the religious institutions known as “mother and baby homes” that proliferated until the 1990s — have marked the diminished power of the Roman Catholic Church alongside the greater empowerment of women. Brexit, while further complicating Ireland’s ever-fraught relationship with England, has perhaps sharpened the Irish sense of self.Lankum’s singer and multi-instrumentalist Radie Peat, 36, sees this cultural churn accompanying a resurgence of interest in Irish folklore and language “with absolutely zero sense of embarrassment,” describing an atmosphere where artists are “confident about their identities as Irish people, and not trying to recreate things they’ve seen done somewhere else.” She credits the abortion and marriage referendums, driven by decisive popular vote, as giving people “a sense of pride.”Her bandmate Ian Lynch, 42, a singer who plays contributes both uilleann pipes and tape loops, added a clarification. “Not a jingoistic, blinkered sense of pride,” he said. “Not like some right-wing, ‘oh, we’re the best,’ but actually a sense of pride for good reasons.”The Lankum crew, who often finish each other’s sentences, mulled this notion on a blustery February afternoon at Guerrilla Sound, the workshop of the group’s producer/low-key fifth band member John Murphy, 39, who’s known as Spud. The catacomb studio is stocked with esoteric electronic instruments, some of which shaped the band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album, “False Lankum.”The band’s “folk song” approach, which can equally suggest the vast dronescapes of the composer Sarah Davachi and the experimental metal band Sunn O))), appears in microcosm on their nearly nine-minute single “Go Dig My Grave.” Peat’s piercing delivery of the centuries-old “forsaken girl” ballad, which has many variants (“The Butcher Boy,” “Died for Love”), charts a bottomless grief as the track layers instruments alongside other sounds: minor-key hurdy-gurdy notes, steely fiddle harmonics, witch-coven murmurs, potato-chip crunching and the subliminal flicker of Murphy digging holes for tomato plants in his garden.Spider Stacy, 64, the English musician and actor who exploded the possibilities of Irish traditional music with the Pogues in 1980s and has performed with Lankum, admired the group’s “profound understanding of the possibilities of sound” and “intimate knowledge of their art” in an email exchange. “For me anyway, they surpass pretty much anyone,” he added. “They’re the best band in the world.”“Go Dig My Grave” is a song Peat had plumbed for years at casual pub sessions, social hubs that remain central to Irish music tradition. The tradition got a boost in the late ’00s, when the financial crisis left young people with more time on their hands than cash. Lankum’s members met at a Dublin session. Diarmuid and Brian Mac Gloinn, of Ye Vagabonds, found a home in them, as did O’Neill. For a time, she and the Mac Gloinns anchored separate nights at Walsh’s, in the north side Stoneybatter neighborhood.O’Neill sat in on a recent session there, a lively assembly that ran until 1 a.m. and nearly veered into a brawl when a bystander picked up a concertina without asking. A labor-themed sequence included O’Neill’s “Rock the Machine,” about a Dublin dockworker losing his job to automation. Kilian O’Flanagan, a rising talent, sang Ewan MacColl’s “Tunnel Tigers,” about the digging of the London Underground, and Paddy Cummins, taking a night off from his band Skipper’s Alley, delivered “McAlpine’s Fusiliers,” another rueful worker’s tale popularized by 1960s folk revivalists the Dubliners.The mother ship of Dublin session pubs, however, remains the Cobblestone in nearby Smithfield. In a scenario echoing the 1970s New York punk crucible CBGBs, a dive bar in a rough neighborhood was transformed by a music lover — here, in the late 1980s by Tom Mulligan, who now runs the Cobblestone with his children. Roughly 10 years ago, the bar began hosting “The Night Larry Got Stretched,” a monthly session in the back room aimed at involving younger people in traditional singing. It’s been going strong ever since.But Dublin has changed. Smithfield became a desirable district, and the Cobblestone was the locus of a civic controversy in 2021, as developers planned to build a hotel on top of it, eliminating the pub’s back room and courtyard. Community protest was swift; petitions circulated, and a media savvy march included musician pallbearers parading a coffin inscribed “RIP Dublin.” The hotel project stalled, and developers withdrew an appeal last year.The Cobblestone’s cause, like that of the Dublin scene writ large, has been furthered by a dedicated network of culture workers. Filmmakers have been key. Luke McManus is a local who shot a moving clip for Lankum’s 2016 breakthrough single, “Cold Old Fire,” gratis; his new documentary, “North Circular Road,” is a musical love letter to hardscrabble North Dublin. “Song of Granite,” Pat Collins’ haunted 2017 biopic of the sean nos legend Joe Heaney, featured vivid performances by O’Neill and Damien Dempsey, the north side singer-songwriter who just completed a run of his “Springsteen on Broadway”-style “Tales From Holywell” at the venerable Abbey Theater. The filmmaker and musician Myles O’Reilly, possibly the hardest-working man in Irish trad, maintains a YouTube Channel that’s a master course in how to present, preserve and promote a nascent music scene.From left: Ian Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada, Radie Peat, Daragh Lynch of Lankum. The band’s intense, darkly psychedelic new album is titled “False Lankum.”Ellius Grace for The New York TimesImaginative boutique festivals (Quiet Lights in Cork, Roise Rua on the island of Arranmore) have helped, too, as well as the Irish Arts Council’s traditional arts arm, who have lent support in spite of grumbling from some folk music old-schoolers skeptical of the current scene.Perhaps the biggest boost to international outreach has been the attention of Rough Trade Records, founded by Geoff Travis; the label was known for signing post-punk acts like the Smiths and the Raincoats in the 1980s. The label’s co-owner Jeannette Lee sharpened her appreciation of traditional music touring with Public Image Limited, whose frontman, John Lydon, liked blasting Irish folk alongside dub reggae in its van. She started the folk-adjacent River Lea label with Geoff Travis as, in his words, “a labor of love, to a degree,” but also as a proving ground for young artists. Flynn, Ye Vagabonds and O’Neill debuted on River Lea; with a growing audience, her latest album was issued on Rough Trade proper.While the tide of interest is lifting many boats, no one’s getting especially rich. Ian Lynch felt so priced out of Dublin’s ballooning housing market, he moved back in with his parents. (“I get to see them, which is good,” he said. “But, I mean, I’m 42.”) Side hustles help. Along with lecturing on Irish folklore, Lynch produces “Fire Draw Near,” a fascinating and often very funny Patreon-funded podcast devoted to modern and historic Irish traditional music. O’Reilly supports his video work in part via Patreon, too, with enough success that he can often film emerging musicians without charge, helping grow the scene.O’Neill, one of the first musicians O’Reilly ever filmed, back in 2010, is an object lesson in how the collective work bears fruit. She quit her barista job at Bewley’s, the famous Grafton Street tearoom, and after years of shares, was finally able to get a flat of her own. Her February album release concert at the town hall in Cavan — her hometown, roughly a 90-minute drive from Dublin — felt like the homecoming it was. On a stage made homey with vintage table lamps, guest artists came and went as old songs flanked new, and the show ended on a spectacular, dissonance-spiked version of “All the Tired Horses,” her remarkable Bob Dylan cover that recently capped the popular period crime drama “Peaky Blinders.”Afterward, naturally, a session bubbled up, in the lobby of a small hotel down the road. O’Neill’s father ferried in rounds of Guinness from the pub next door. A young man spoke of health struggles, and beautifully sang “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.” The Corkonian legend John Spillane, a national treasure who is something of Ireland’s John Prine, reprised an earlier onstage duet with O’Neill on his aching “Passage West,” then laid into the raucous WWI lament “Salonika,” with hearty accompaniment from the novelist Patrick McCabe, a friend and fan of O’Neill’s who came in for the show.And on it went until sometime after 3 a.m., when the holdouts finally called it a night. More

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      Lana Del Rey Talks Back to the Songbook

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      Hear a companion to her sprawling new album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.”Neil KrugDear listeners,I love these lyrics from the title track of Lana Del Rey’s sprawling ninth album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” which comes out today:Harry Nilsson has a song, his voice breaks at 2:05Something about the way he says “Don’t forget me”Makes me feel likeI just wish I had a friend like himSomeone to get me byDel Rey’s music is both vividly intimate and highly referential. She writes like a devoted but conversational fan of music history — talking back to the modern songbook and to many of her favorite artists, guided by popular song to her own personal epiphanies.Del Rey’s old-soul reverence collapses the distance between generations, too. People listening to Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” when it first came out — on “Pussy Cats” from 1974, the notorious chronicle of his “Lost Weekend” with John Lennon — were just as likely to be moved by that wrenching part when his voice breaks, but they probably wouldn’t have known its precise time stamp. Del Rey’s homage speaks the language of digital-era listening (“his voice breaks at 2:05”), but her emotional connection to Nilsson is so deeply felt, it seems to transcend time and turn him into a peer.Elsewhere on the album, the much-covered, centuries-old folk standard “Froggy Went a Courtin’” makes Del Rey feel connected to her ancestors when she hears it at a funeral. Leonard Cohen’s famous lyric “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” echoes throughout “Ocean Blvd” like a cherished mantra. On “The Grants,” the album’s stirring, gospel-tinged opening number, she interprets the words of a pastor by likening them not to, say, a particular Bible verse, but to “‘Rocky Mountain High,’ the way John Denver sings.”“Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” is as rich, challenging and singular as anything Del Rey has released yet, and given that its run time is a daunting hour and 17 minutes, it’s going to require a little time to sink in. Today’s playlist puts some of its best songs in conversation with the other artists it references or, in the case of Father John Misty, features. May it serve as an entry point, or maybe just as a means to tunnel deeper into Lana Del Rey’s slow, subterranean sound.Maybe Del Rey would even say that these are some of the songs that explain her. Which reminds me: I’m still reading through your (many) great submissions from earlier this week, and I look forward to sharing some with you in Tuesday’s Amplifier.That’s how the light gets in,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Lana Del Rey Talks Back to the Songbook” track listTrack 1: John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High” (1972)Track 2: Lana Del Rey, “The Grants” (2023)Track 3: Tex Ritter, “Froggy Went a Courtin’” (1945)Track 4: Father John Misty, “Goodbye Mr. Blue” (2022)Track 5: Lana Del Rey featuring Father John Misty, “Let the Light In” (2023)Track 6: Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” (1992)Track 7: Lana Del Rey, “Kintsugi” (2023)Track 8: Harry Nilsson, “Don’t Forget Me” (1974)Track 9: Lana Del Rey, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” (2023)Bonus tracksLana isn’t the only artist to appreciate the broken beauty of Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me,” of course. Here are two cover versions I love: Neko Case’s spirited rendition, from her great 2009 album “Middle Cyclone,” and a faithful take from the Walkmen, on which the frontman Hamilton Leithauser sounds so much like Nilsson that it’s a little bit spooky.Also, if you’re looking for some newer music: On Fridays, our chief pop music critic, Jon Pareles, and I select some of the week’s most notable new songs for the Playlist, which you can listen to here. More

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      Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro’s Love Trilogy, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks from Meshell Ndegeocello, the Japanese House, Hannah Jadagu and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Beso’“Beso” (“Kiss”) quivers with fear of separation, as Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro tell each other that “Being away from you is hell.” The song is part of a three-track collaborative project called “RR” the couple released on Friday; the “Beso” video hints at an engagement. They keep their voices high, small and tremulous over a brusque beat topped with quasi-Baroque keyboards and strings, a genteel backdrop for deep neediness. PARELESMeshell Ndegeocello, ‘Virgo’“They’re calling me back to the stars,” Meshell Ndegeocello declares in “Virgo” from her coming album, “The Omnichord Real Book.” It’s a funky march that revels in cosmic imagery, cross-rhythms and multifarious vocals: singing, chanting, making percussive sounds, high harmonies, husky low confidences and an occasional “la-la.” Morphing through nearly nine minutes, the track struts on Ndegeocello’s synthesizer bass lines; twinkles and hovers with Brandee Younger’s harp; and sprints toward the end with double time drumming, headed somewhere new. PARELESMoor Mother featuring Kyle Kidd, Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, ‘We Got the Jazz’Moor Mother seethes about Black achievements met with disrespect in “We Got the Jazz”: “We ain’t ’bout to stand for no national anthem,” she declaims. “When we was swinging they couldn’t even stand in attention.” Her testy voice is surrounded in a rich, polytonal murk: multiple tracks of Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet, Keir Neuringer’s saxophone and Kyle Kidd’s vocals over a slowly heaving bass line, burdened but determined. PARELESThe Japanese House, ‘Boyhood’The British musician Amber Bain, who records as the Japanese House, reckons with her past and present on the flickering synth-pop track “Boyhood,” which pairs smooth sonic surfaces and effervescent electronic flourishes with her yearning, achingly human vocals. “For a moment there, I swear I saw me,” Bain sings, her 20-something growing pains palpable as she yearns — in vain — for a stable, unchanging sense of self. ZOLADZRina Sawayama, ‘Eye for an Eye’The British-Japanese pop musician Rina Sawayama makes her film debut on Friday in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” and has released a new song from the soundtrack, the slinky “Eye for an Eye.” The track splits the difference between Sawayama’s gloriously bombastic debut album, “Sawayama,” and the softer, more recent “Hold the Girl.” Propelled by a mid-tempo, industrial chug, Sawayama vamps with the confident menace of an action star. “A life for a life,” she sings. “I’ll see you in hell on the other side.” ZOLADZBully, ‘Days Move Slow’“Days Move Slow,” from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy indie-rock project Bully, is a song about being caught in the muck of grief — she wrote it after the death of her beloved dog, Mezzi — but it also has a propulsive, bouncy energy that promises eventual forward motion. “There’s flowers on your grave that grow,” Bognanno sings in her signature holler, battling her buzzing guitar. “Something’s gotta change, I know.” ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Woe (I See It From Your Side) (Björk Remix)’Björk’s remix of Shygirl’s “Woe” is equal parts endorsement and disruption. Shygirl, born Blaine Muise in England to parents from Zimbabwe, has worked with pop experimenters like Sophie, Arca, Tinashe and Sega Bodega, and she was a founder of the label Nuxxe. “Woe,” from her 2022 debut album, “Nymph,” was a smoldering counterattack to a toxic partner: “Smiling faces fade just to leave a shell,” she charged. Björk, playing fourth-dimensional chess, offers both sympathy — agreeing with Shygirl that “I see it from your side” — and outside perspective. The new track lurches from the dark groove of “Woe” to something else: Björk’s vocal harmonies, warped keyboard vamps and mystical life lessons. “Forever we shoot for the sublime,” she advises. PARELESHannah Jadagu, ‘Warning Sign’“Warning Sign” is a hushed, hazy song that maps interpersonal tensions onto musical contrasts: quiet and loud, sustained and rhythmic, dulcet and distorted. Jadagu is an N.Y.U. student who grew up in a Texas suburb and recorded her first EP, in 2021, entirely on an iPhone. She has more resources since signing to Sub Pop. “Warning Sign” could have been an easygoing R&B vamp, but Jadagu has other imperatives; the song coos with keyboard chords and airborne harmonies, then crashes or glitches. What she hears goes with what she feels: “I can’t stand to hear your voice when it’s oh so loud/Could you quiet down?” PARELESLucinda Chua featuring Yeule, ‘Something Other Than Years’The songs on “Yian” (Chinese for “sparrow”), the new album by the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua, are meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings. In “Something Other Than Years,” she sings, “When all I fear is all I know/Show me how to live this life,” and she’s answered by the higher voice of Yeule, who promises, “There’s more in this life/Angel being of light.” PARELES More

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      Everything but the Girl Breaks a 24-Year Silence With a Bang

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      Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s personal partnership has thrived since their duo’s last release. During the pandemic, they reconnected musically for “Fuse,” reclaiming the group’s modern melancholy.At first, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt didn’t want to admit to themselves that they were re-emerging — after 24 years — as Everything but the Girl.The duo, who built a dedicated following in the 1980s and ’90s making elegantly troubled music and had an international smash with “Missing” in 1995, returned to writing and recording together during the pandemic. But Thorn and Watt carefully labeled their first new collaborations “TREN” — for Tracey and Ben — instead of reviving a moniker with as much of a back story as Everything but the Girl. They were well aware, as Thorn said understatedly in a video interview, that “it’s not going to be a small deal to come back after this length of time.”They spoke from their home in London, sitting side by side and dressed in shades of gray and black, in a room where they’ve sometimes recorded music. There was a small keyboard on a table behind them, next to full bookshelves. Each listened fondly and attentively as the other spoke.Thorn and Watt, both 60, remained partners while Everything but the Girl was dormant. They have been together since 1982, when they were students at University of Hull in England, and they raised three children — now adults — after suspending Everything but the Girl, which gave its last performance in 2000. In April, the duo returns with “Fuse,” its first album since 1999 and one that fully lives up to its best work.During the intervening decades, Thorn and Watt maintained separate, prolific careers. Watt produced albums; traveled the world as a D.J.; founded a label, Buzzin’ Fly; and made solo albums and toured as a singer-songwriter, which he’d been planning to do in 2020 when the pandemic shut things down. After some years devoting herself to their toddlers, Thorn got back to songwriting, releasing four solo albums; she also wrote books, including the wryly revealing career memoir, “Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star,” and “Naked at the Albert Hall,” her reflections on the physicality and mentality of being a singer.Working independently, with projects appearing at different times, allowed them to “tag-team” bringing up their family, Watt explained.“We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” he said. “And I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”But they hadn’t entirely put Everything but the Girl behind them. In the 2010s, Thorn and Watt oversaw expanded reissues of the group’s catalog that found an eager audience. By then it was clear that their music had aged to sound classic, not dated.“There’s an emotional simplicity and directness that’s just so powerful to me lyrically,” Romy Madley Croft of the British band the xx said in a phone interview; she first heard Everything but the Girl because her parents were fans and “Missing” was on the radio. Thorn has recognized their musical kinship by recording her own version of the xx’s “Night Time” in 2011.“You feel close to Tracey and in her words and voice that is very, very intimate and just the emotion that is carried,” Madley Croft said. “One of my goals always is to say a lot while saying very little, and to leave people with space to make their own minds up about what it means, and I definitely think that Tracey does that. When you hear that line that just says a huge amount very, very simply, it’s very satisfying.”Everything but the Girl got its name, with post-punk cheekiness, from the sexist tagline of a local furniture-store advertisement that showed a model next to the goods on sale. “For God’s sake, if we had known we were going to carry on for years we would have come up with a better name,” Thorn wrote in “Bedsit Disco Queen.”For its first decade, the group maintained a solid midlevel recording career — until 1995, when a remix of “Missing,” by the American D.J. Todd Terry, became an international smash. With each album, Everything but the Girl took a different approach: from skeletal to maximal, bossa nova to rock, retro Wall of Sound to sleek Los Angeles pop. Its songs used subtlety as a stealth tactic, with smooth, richly tuneful music concealing lyrics that challenged political and psychological assumptions. Through every change of style, Thorn’s voice — low, smoky and pensive, rarely indulging in vibrato or ornamentation — gave the duo’s songs an emotional equipoise.“I can see the through line,” Thorn said. “We’re exploring things with a different costume on. You know, if you were a film director, your vision, or the ideas that you keep, might be identifiable whether you make a western or a detective movie or a romance. There’s something of that going on in these records. Complexity and simplicity is very key to it.”Watt picked up her thought. “Ambivalence and mixed feelings is a big through line in all our stuff as well,” he said. “That’s true both in the choice of notes we use and in the lyrics that we write. There’s that element of suspension. The space that you leave allows room for the listener. I always like the idea that people can step into our audio picture, you know, and almost walk around in the reverbs.”A life-threatening health crisis for Watt in 1992 — he has a rare autoimmune disorder, Churg-Strauss syndrome — led Everything but the Girl to pare away verbal and musical frills to reveal rawer feelings on “Amplified Heart” and “Walking Wounded,” the albums that would mark its artistic peak in the 1990s.“There was a period in the ’90s where we had to learn what it was like to live with each other again, mostly because of the aftermath of my illness, which left me a very changed person,” Watt said. “And Tracey had to witness that change, which was very difficult in its own way. Both ‘Amplified Heart’ and ‘Walking Wounded’ — it’s there in the titles of those albums, you know? — they’re very much songs about us both feeling isolated by the experience, but also learning to live with each other again.”“Amplified Heart,” released in 1994, included the original version of “Missing.” Then Terry’s club-ready remix with a new, danceable beat, carried Everything but the Girl to a worldwide audience; the single went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain. The song has had an endless afterlife, and a broad influence, for its precise chemistry of melancholy, suspense and propulsion. With Thorn’s voice leaping as she sings “like the deserts miss the rain,” “Missing” is a dance-crying milestone: equally potent on the dance floor or at home alone through headphones.Watt and Thorn were already intrigued by the fast-evolving music in London’s dance clubs. For its late-1990s incarnation, Everything but the Girl merged moody introspection with electronic dance music for two albums: “Walking Wounded,” and “Temperamental” from 1999. It’s a sound that “Fuse” reclaims and determinedly expands.“We talked about trying to find new ways of writing, new ways of using our voices, new ways of landing on different notes,” Watt said.“Fuse” embraces electronic soundscapes and grown-up empathy. It opens with a subterranean bass throb and a declaration of vulnerability in “Nothing Left to Lose,” as Thorn sings, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” And it ends with a husky, ardent mission statement that sums up Everything but the Girl’s dual imperatives. In “Karaoke,” Thorn vows that she sings both “to heal the brokenhearted” and “to get the party started.”In between, “Fuse” proffers compassionate advice in the gloomily majestic “When You Mess Up,” goes on a surreal European club-hopping chronicle in “No One Knows We’re Dancing” and makes a pinging, handclapping, gamelan-tinged plea for “something I can hold onto” in “Forever.”It took the pandemic to bring Thorn and Watt back to working together. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now? Are we going to go back to what we were doing? Or is this the start of something new? And we weren’t really sure.”Isolated at home — and sometimes distancing even from each other because of Watt’s illness — they began trading small musical ideas: chords, lyrics, sounds.“We were trying to do that thing that artists sometimes do,” Thorn said, “where you trick yourself into thinking that we’re not really doing this thing that feels like a bit of a big deal. We’re doing something much smaller and more manageable. We’re just making some music. We don’t need to tell anyone. We don’t need to have anyone waiting on it or expecting anything of it or putting pressure on. Let’s just see what happens.”The album’s beginnings were decidedly lo-fi. “I started to put things on my phone,” Watt said. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”The music that emerged at first was slow and atmospheric. Danceable, upbeat songs came later, after the duo relocated to a recording studio in Bath, England. “The record started out in this mood of, you know, ‘We’re not putting any pressure on,’ with a couple of fairly downbeat, quite ambient-sounding tracks,” Thorn recalled. “And within about three days of being in the studio, we started getting more and more excited. There was a period when we had about eight tracks and, ostensibly, you know, we’ve almost got an album here.“But I think that was the moment when we both had a kind of awakening and sat up and went, ‘Do you know what? This can be better,’” she added. “We started with low expectations, but actually we’ve impressed us. Our expectations had gone right up. And if you’re going to come back after a long gap, then come back with a bang.”It took the pandemic to reunite Everything But the Girl. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now?”Edward BishopThey also reveled in technology that arrived after Everything but the Girl last made an album. In some songs, digital effects warp Thorn’s vocals. “We allowed ourselves to be a bit more disrespectful of Tracey’s voice,” Watt said. “It wasn’t just this kind of sacred sound that always sat on the top of the music. We started mistreating it with pitch-shifting plug-ins and Auto-Tune, seeing if we could just turn it into a texture rather than a vehicle for the lyrics and the emotion of the track. It was another interesting color to add onto the canvas.”In one new song, “Lost,” Thorn sings a list — “I lost my place/I lost my bags/I lost my biggest client” — that moves from prosaic to heartbreaking. Some of the lyrics, Watt said, came from typing the words “I lost” into Google. But as the song unfolds, a quietly devastating line arrives: “I lost my mother.”Amid all of the electronic modifications, Everything but the Girl never hides its heart. Thorn and Watt strove to stay in a freely creative state as they made the album, but their usual self-consciousness wasn’t far away. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency in a lot of the lyrics about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”There are no plans for a tour. “It brings a lot of baggage with it, more so than with recording an album,” Thorn said.“One of the problems with touring, in part, is that you have to constantly look backwards for your audience,” Watt said. “You’re expected to perform the hits, so you are as much an entertainer as you are a creative artist. And if we’re really honest, neither of us have a great appetite for the old stuff. You know, it was good at the time. We respect it.” He shrugged. “We did our best.” More

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      Fuzzy Haskins, Who Helped Turn Doo-Wop Into P-Funk, Dies at 81

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      As a teenager, he joined forces with George Clinton. Their vocal group, the Parliaments, morphed into Parliament-Funkadelic, one of the wildest acts of the 1970s.Fuzzy Haskins, a foundational member of the vocal group that morphed into Parliament-Funkadelic, the genre-blurring collective led by George Clinton that shook up the pop music world in the 1970s, died on March 16 in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich. He was 81.His son Nowell Scott said the cause was health problems complicated by diabetes.Mr. Haskins, one of Parliament-Funkadelic’s vocalists and songwriters, was a distinctive presence onstage during the group’s propulsive performances, often wearing tight long johns and sometimes suggestively straddling the microphone.“Fuzzy was always able to capture your attention,” Mr. Scott said by email, “rhythmically gyrating the audience into a deeper consciousness where night after night they were forced to consider if they were really getting it on.”Mr. Haskins was living in Edison, N.J., and was in his last year of high school and singing in a vocal group when he met Mr. Clinton, who had a barbershop in nearby Plainfield and his own fledgling vocal group. Someone from Mr. Clinton’s group had left.“So they chose me out of my group to come and sing with them,” Mr. Haskins recalled in 2011 in a short biographical video. He joined up with Mr. Clinton, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas and Ray Davis, and, Mr. Haskins said, “the rest is history.”Parliament-Funkadelic in 1971. Mr. Haskins is at the far left; George Clinton is fifth from left, uncharacteristically in the background.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe group was called the Parliaments, named after a cigarette brand, Mr. Clinton said in his book “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” (2014).Mr. Clinton didn’t smoke, but, he wrote, “I thought cigarettes were cool as a symbol, a little dangerous, a little adult, and Parliament was a big brand, so we became the Parliaments.”The group worked a doo-wop sound at first.“Each of us had a distinctive style,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “sometimes in imitation of people who were famous then, sometimes in anticipation of people who would be famous later.”“Fuzzy,” he added, “who was second lead, was a soulful tenor with all the bluesy inflections, like Wilson Pickett, real rough.”The Parliaments had a Top 20 pop hit in 1967 with “(I Wanna) Testify.” Soon the group became simply Parliament and developed an alter ego, Funkadelic. Two different groups, they recorded for two different labels but drew on the same ever-growing collection of musicians. Parliament remained vocally oriented; Funkadelic borrowed from psychedelic rock and the funk sound of groups like Sly and the Family Stone.“White rock groups had done the blues, and we wanted to head back in the other direction,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “be a Black rock group playing the loudest, funkiest combination of psychedelic rock and thunderous R&B.”Mr. Haskins wrote the song “I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody’s Got a Thing” for Funkadelic’s debut album, called simply “Funkadelic” and released in 1970. He joined Mr. Clinton in writing “My Automobile” for Parliament’s first album, “Osmium,” released the same year. He was one of four writers (including Mr. Clinton) of “Up for the Down Stroke,” the title song on Parliament’s second album, released in 1974. And he had a hand in other songs for both groups as they released records throughout the ’70s.The stage shows accompanying the album releases grew increasingly elaborate, culminating in the P-Funk Earth Tour, which began in 1976, continued for several years and featured an outer-space theme, including an onstage spaceship.But the original Parliaments were clashing with Mr. Clinton. Mr. Haskins, who had recorded a solo album in 1976, “A Whole Nother Thang,” left the group in 1977 along with Mr. Simon and Mr. Thomas. Under the name Funkadelic, the three released an album that same year, “Connections & Disconnections,” which included tracks openly criticizing Mr. Clinton.Mr. Haskins recorded a solo album in 1976, shortly before leaving Parliament-Funkadelic.Mr. Haskins released another solo album, “Radio Active,” in 1978.In the early 1990s, he, Mr. Simon, Mr. Thomas and Mr. Davis formed a group called Original P, whose repertoire was heavy on songs from the Parliament-Funkadelic catalog.“This act gives us the chance to perform these songs the way they were meant to be heard,” Mr. Haskins told Mountain Xpress, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, in 2000, “with solid arrangements and clear vocal harmonies. We were involved in the creation of these songs, and they are our children.”Whatever the disagreements were with Mr. Clinton, Mr. Haskins was among the 16 members who were honored in 1997 when the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Parliament-Funkadelic, who were introduced at the ceremony by Prince.“Parliament and Funkadelic were the mind-blowing, soul-expanding musical equivalent of an acid trip,” the hall’s website says. “They grabbed the funk movement from James Brown and took off running.”Clarence Eugene Haskins was born on June 8, 1941, in Elkhorn, W.Va. His father, McKinley, was a coal miner, and his mother, Grace Bertha (Hairston) Haskins, was a homemaker.“I listened to country when I grew up,” Mr. Haskins said in the biographical video, since there was not much R&B or other Black music on West Virginia radio at the time.“We used to sing church music — hymns, gospel — at home,” he added. “We’d harmonize.”The family relocated to New Jersey when he was still a child. Before long he had met Mr. Clinton, and he was on his way.“The P-Funk sound is perhaps one of the most significant and impactful crossed-over ideas to ever manifest into a sound,” his son said by email, “and Fuzzy was always excited to be a part of that.”Mr. Haskins lived in Southfield, Mich. His marriages to Estelle James and Lorraine Dabney ended in divorce. In addition to his son, his survivors include two other children, Crystal White and Michelle Fields; a sister, Julia Drew; and 10 grandchildren. Two other children, Michael and Stephanie, died before him.Mr. Haskins was to be inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in May. More

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      10 (or, Actually, 11) Songs That Explain Me

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      Introducing a new newsletter dedicated to music discovery, and your host, Lindsay Zoladz.Illustration by The New York Times; Bob Berg/Getty Images (Fiona Apple)Dear listeners,Welcome to the first installment of The Amplifier — a twice-weekly note about songs (new and old) worth hearing. I want The Amplifier to bring that mixtape-from-your-friend feeling back to musical discovery. Too often, in the streaming era, our choices are at the mercy of a shadowy, impersonal algorithm. The Amplifier will be a return to something more intimate and human.Of course, that requires you knowing at least a little bit about me and my particular musical perspective.But the easiest way to fill a music critic with crippling panic is to pose that seemingly simple question: “What’s your favorite song?” Most of us are likely to get defensive and philosophical, asking whether you mean “favorite” or “best,” and how you personally would define those terms — all as a stalling tactic while we spin through the bulging Rolodex of all the songs we’ve ever loved, trying and probably failing to arrive at a sufficiently revealing choice.So rather than make a monolithic list of My Favorite Songs of All Time — one that I’d immediately be adding tracks to in my head as soon as I hit send — I thought I’d opt for the more inviting language of a popular social media prompt: “10 Songs That Explain Me.”Except that I just. Could. Not. Do it. No matter how many times I tried, I always ended up with an extra song. So consider this to be a 10-song playlist with a bonus track — or perhaps an early indication that the knobs on this Amplifier go to 11.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Nina Simone: “Ain’t Got No — I Got Life”Only Nina Simone could transform two relatively kitschy numbers from the musical “Hair” into a song of self that rivals Walt Whitman. Simone is a lodestar to me: The excellence that she demanded from herself, the attention she demanded from her audiences and the classical virtuosity she brought to popular music all make her one of the greats. This rousing song can lift me out of just about any funk, and with such efficiency! Simone only needs less than three minutes to remind you exactly what it means to be alive. (Listen on YouTube)2. Fiona Apple: “Shameika”I grew up in suburban New Jersey and came of age in the late ’90s: a place and a time when conformity was currency. I wasn’t very good at fitting in, and like many an angsty youth, I found a kindred spirit in Fiona Apple. I first heard (and became obsessed with) her poetic and moody debut album, “Tidal,” when I was on the precipice of middle school, which is about the age Apple imagines herself to be in this elegantly unruly song from her 2020 album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” I see a lot of myself in it — both in the young, dissatisfied girl Apple remembers herself to be, and in the adult writer who made it out of that environment intact enough to tell the story. In my headphones, at least, Fiona said I had potential. (Listen on YouTube)3. The Dismemberment Plan: “Superpowers”When I was 18, I moved to Washington, D.C., for college and lived there until I was 25. My friend Drew put this song on a mix for me a few years into that stretch, and for a time it became my anthem: The Dismemberment Plan — an arty, verbose four-piece from D.C. that had broken up shortly before I got there — was a perfect bridge between the introspective emo I liked in high school and the more experimental strains of indie-rock I got into in college. Nothing brings me back to the ennui of early adulthood like the band’s 1999 classic “Emergency & I,” but my favorite of its records is the one that has “Superpowers” on it, “Change.” Luckily I got to catch a couple of amazing D-Plan reunion shows before I left town. (Listen on YouTube)4. Grimes: “Genesis”I have this theory that moving to New York knocks at least five years off your behavioral age. I made it here at 25, but for the first few years it felt like a second adolescence: catching shows every night at a bunch of now-defunct Williamsburg venues, making new friends, vying for the car stereo’s aux cord. Very often, the iPod was playing Grimes’s light and blissful album “Visions,” or sometimes just “Genesis” on repeat. It’s a song that can still make me feel, for a fleeting four minutes, like I’m the main character in my own video game and I’ve figured out the cheat code that makes me invincible. (Listen on YouTube)5. Frank Ocean: “Self Control”And here is the B-side of my roaring 20s: Frank Ocean’s tender voice was and remains a balm for whatever failure, loneliness and disappointment life decided to throw my way. (Consider “Self Control” a way to sneak another one of my favorite artists, and homes-away-from-home, onto this list, too, since the eclectic Philadelphia indie-rocker Alex G plays guitar on the track.) (Listen on YouTube)6. The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Wild Horses”Let’s continue wallowing while turning back the clock a bit to hear from another one of my all-time favorite singers, Gram Parsons. (I recently went on a Nashville vacation that was at least partially a spiritual pilgrimage to see his infamously sinful Nudie suit in the Country Music Hall of Fame.) A lot of the older music I love most has a kind of “near miss” quality about it — history’s beautiful losers, the artists who didn’t break through but deserved to, the ones who gesture toward all sorts of alternative presents and what-ifs. Maybe that’s why I prefer Parsons’s vocal take of “Wild Horses” to Mick Jagger’s more familiar one. (The Sundays’ version is great, too.) There’s a wobbly brokenness to it that I find incredibly moving, especially the way he emphasizes “a dull aching pain.” The origins of the song are notoriously disputed, but some insist that its titular line was inspired by something that Marianne Faithfull croaked when she came out of a six-day coma in 1969 — “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” — and that is one of those rock ’n’ roll stories that, even if it’s apocryphal, I have chosen to believe. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Star: “Daisy Glaze”Speaking of music history’s beautiful losers: Big Star, one of my favorite rock bands ever. Like many a teenage millennial, I first came to the band through one of the numerous covers of the acoustic ballad “Thirteen” (“one of my almost-good songs,” the ever-humble Alex Chilton once said). Once I’d immersed myself in the band’s back catalog, I became belatedly furious that it had never been as famous as Led Zeppelin. I will always be exhilarated by the moment in the middle of “Daisy Glaze” when Jody Stephens’s three kick-drum thumps initiate a sudden tempo change — a perfect encapsulation of the band’s thrilling brilliance. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Mountain Goats: “Up the Wolves”I got into the Mountain Goats toward the end of high school — my friend Matt and I would drive from Jersey diner to diner, listening to their seemingly limitless discography — and John Darnielle is probably my favorite contemporary lyricist. The album “The Sunset Tree,” and this song in particular, have gotten me through many a dark night of the soul. I have now seen the Mountain Goats live more times than I can count — I lost track in the low 20s — and I am not yet numb to the emotional power of these songs. They played “Up the Wolves” a few months ago at Webster Hall, and after all these years, it still made me cry like a big teenage baby. (Listen on YouTube)9. Buffy Sainte-Marie: “The Circle Game”This one’s a total cheat: a sneaky way to mention two artists I adore — Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joni Mitchell, who of course wrote “The Circle Game” — on a single track. Joni is probably my favorite living songwriter, and there are about 100 other songs of hers I could have chosen. But I like the story behind this cover, recorded when Joni was still a fledgling songwriter to whom the then-better-known Buffy was trying to bring some attention. Suffice to say, it worked. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Raincoats: “No Side to Fall In”I’ve identified as a feminist throughout many different cultural and personal phases: in seventh grade when the boys told me girls couldn’t skateboard; in college, when it was a somewhat unfashionable concern that meant I read a lot of literary theory; these days, when a more watered-down version of the word has been co-opted to sell things on Instagram. All throughout, music has given me the strength to keep fighting, dreaming and resisting psychic death. To me, the great post-punk group the Raincoats are emblematic of a kind of utopian feminist freedom: a sonic universe where women can sound like and do anything they want — yes, even skateboarding. (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison: “Ballerina”Oh, Van the (Facebook-hating) Man, my problematic fave. “Astral Weeks” is an album I love deeply, but I’ve always thought “Ballerina” should be the closing track. Since this is my playlist, with my rules, let’s try it out. I love this clip of a very young Leonard Cohen explaining to a confused interviewer on Canadian television what it feels like to be in “a state of grace.” It’s that “kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you.” I have found no better description of how I feel when I listen to this song. (Listen on YouTube)Thanks for listening,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“10 (or, Actually, 11) Songs That Explain Me” track listTrack 1: Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No — I Got Life”Track 2: Fiona Apple, “Shameika”Track 3: The Dismemberment Plan, “Superpowers”Track 4: Grimes, “Genesis”Track 5: Frank Ocean, “Self Control”Track 6: The Flying Burrito Brothers, “Wild Horses”Track 7: Big Star, “Daisy Glaze”Track 8: The Mountain Goats, “Up the Wolves”Track 9: Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Circle Game”Track 10: The Raincoats, “No Side to Fall In”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Ballerina”The song that explains youI’m really excited to go on this musical journey with you. I also want to make this newsletter a place for conversations about the songs and artists that mean something to you, so I’ll occasionally be asking for your thoughts on the topics we cover in this newsletter — and I’d love to hear from all of you.Today, I want to know: What’s a song that explains you? Tell me about it.If you’d like to participate you can fill out this form here. We may use your response in an upcoming edition of The Amplifier.Bonus tracksIf you want to read me going even deeper on my love of Fiona Apple, here’s an essay I wrote a few years back, as part of NPR’s “Turning the Tables” series on female artists. (My dear friend Jenn Pelly also tracked down the real-life Shameika and wrote a wonderful article about her.)And, if you’re a Van Fan, here’s me going incredibly long on “Astral Weeks,” for The Ringer, on the occasion of the album’s 50th anniversary.Finally, if you’re inclined to read my recent profile of the great Buffy Sainte-Marie (I was pinching myself just outside the Zoom frame!), might I suggest following it with this delightful clip of her showing Pete Seeger, on his short-lived TV show “Rainbow Quest,” how to play a mouth bow. More

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      The Exquisite Darkness of Depeche Mode

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      SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Martin Gore, who is now 50 percent of Depeche Mode, works in a studio on a low hill near Santa Barbara, hidden behind jungle-green foliage and fragrant flowering shrubs.On a Tuesday morning in January, he sat at a console in the center of the control room, which was spacious and orderly and full of California winter sunshine — a clean, well-lighted place to make songs about power, desire, faith and a world spinning ever further off its axis.Gore wore black clothes and spotless black boots. He looked like an Englishman who’s spent decades in California — vibrant tan, straight white teeth. He had the haircut you’d get if you asked a knowledgeable barber to give you “the Martin Gore”: high and tight, with several inches of unruly tuft up top.Two summers ago Gore turned 60, and it “really slapped me in the face,” he said with a morbid chuckle. “I don’t particularly feel like I’m 60, but you have to accept the facts. It feels like you’ve got one toe in the grave, at least.”On Friday Depeche Mode will release its 15th album, mostly recorded in this studio, by a pandemic-era skeleton crew: Gore, the vocalist Dave Gahan, the producer James Ford (Florence + the Machine, Arctic Monkeys) and an engineer/co-producer, Marta Salogni. As always, the sound is foreboding and sleek, sardonic yet soulful — music for lovers in black-leather-upholstered bullet-train compartments, racing toward ominous destinations.The title is “Memento Mori,” and the dominant theme is mortality — which isn’t, in itself, a departure. “Death is everywhere,” Gore wrote years ago, in a song called “Fly on the Windscreen,” whose narrator goes on to beckon, “Come here, kiss me, now,” because you never know.“Memento Mori,” though, is death-obsessed even by Depeche standards, with lyrics full of ghosts, angels and funeral flowers. Gore said that his own mortality had been on his mind, along with Covid-19, which was still cutting a swath through the world’s population as he wrote in 2020.But Gore knows the album and its title are destined to be read through a different lens. In May 2022, Andy Fletcher, known as Fletch, died at 60, suddenly and quickly, of an aortic dissection. Fletcher was a founding member of Depeche Mode; he and Gore had been friends since grade school.From left: Gahan, Andy Fletcher, Gore and Alan Wilder. Depeche Mode’s breakthrough in the U.S. came with the album “Some Great Reward” in 1984 and the single “People Are People.”David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNominally a keyboardist, Fletch’s true role in the band was nebulous, yet spiritually indispensable — somewhere between manager, quality-control supervisor and designated superfan.“Without Andy, there would be no Depeche Mode,” the longtime radio broadcaster and Depeche fan Richard Blade said in a video interview. “He was not the one composing the music, but he was the one pulling them together.”Gore saw Fletcher in person for the last time in 2019, at a wedding in England. He died just weeks before the band was scheduled to begin recording “Memento Mori,” the first collection of Depeche Mode songs he will never hear.Gore and Gahan say they both questioned whether they could or should continue without him. But Depeche Mode has survived potentially band-extinguishing events before — beginning with the departure of Vince Clarke, a founding member who left the group in 1981 after the release of its debut album, “Speak & Spell,” on which he’d been the principal songwriter.In the ’90s the band weathered the rise of grunge — which rendered synthesizers and drum machines temporarily taboo — as well as the departure of the keyboardist Alan Wilder and Gahan’s struggle with heroin addiction. (Technically, Gahan is the first member of Depeche Mode to die; in 1996, after an overdose, he said he flatlined for two minutes before paramedics revived him. He’s been clean and sober since.)Derided early on by the British rock press, Depeche Mode made converts in America, particularly in Southern California, where the band’s champions included Blade, then an influential D.J. at KROQ-FM. Its breakthrough in the U.S. came with the platinum album “Some Great Reward” in 1984 and the single “People Are People,” an uncharacteristically strident anti-prejudice lament that became a pop-radio hit as well as a gay club anthem.The gay community was only one of many disparate subcultures from which Depeche Mode built a fan base. On the West Coast, Blade said, the band made converts among “the white kids who would go surfing” but also connected with Latino listeners who heard a reflection of their own experience in Depeche Mode’s misfit anthems. “They might have been third-generation Americans, but a lot of people looked at them and said ‘No, you’re not one of us,’” Blade said.Gore agreed that the band had become common ground for those who felt like they didn’t belong: “I think humanity is made up of a lot of outsiders, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve managed to do so well.”By 1988, the group was big enough to pack the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a show documented in the director D.A. Pennebaker’s film “Depeche Mode 101”; the triple-platinum album “Violator,” released two years later, yielded hit singles like “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy the Silence,” which pulsed like techno but brought guitars to the front of the mix for the first time.That album was the band’s commercial peak in America; minus a 2005 singles collection, no new Depeche Mode album has been certified gold in the U.S. in 22 years. But as long as there are new teenagers, there will always be new Depeche Mode fans, primed to respond to lyrics like “It all seems so stupid it makes me want to give up/But why should I give up when it all seems so stupid?”And the band’s fans, Gore points out, “don’t turn 30 and then decide, ‘Oh, I don’t like that anymore.’” If you have ever been between 15 and 17 years old, alienated, and a little bit in love with your own sadness, a part of you will never stop being that way; no one who goes through a Depeche Mode phase ever quite outgrows it.This means the band remains a powerful draw; its latest worldwide arena tour begins on Thursday. Against all odds, Gore and Gahan’s group has become a legacy act, and an influence on musicians who’ve become veterans themselves.“I think humanity is made up of a lot of outsiders, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve managed to do so well,” Gore said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAs frontman of the venerable Sacramento alternative-metal band Deftones, Chino Moreno has covered Depeche Mode songs like “Sweetest Perfection” and “To Have and to Hold”; his keyboard-driven side project Crosses openly channels his heroes’ stylish gloom. In a video interview, Moreno described his first Depeche Mode concert — a 1988 show at what was then the Cal Expo Amphitheater in Sacramento — as a life-changing moment.“I was pretty claustrophobic growing up,” he said, “but I just fought my way through all those feelings, and made my way to the front barricade. And they came out, and I was just captivated by them. Dave in particular — just his stage presence. I can loosely credit me wanting to sing, and be in a group and make music, to that experience. It was larger than life for me.”In the HBO series “The Last of Us,” people are still listening to Depeche Mode’s music after a fungal outbreak kills or zombifies much of the world’s population; survivors signal one another by blasting “Never Let Me Down.” Given their real-life endurance, the idea of Depeche Mode persisting even after the apocalypse, still helping people feel less alone, does not seem totally implausible.But Gahan said that even before Fletcher’s sudden death, he wasn’t sure he’d ever make another Depeche Mode album.In a video interview from New York, where he’s lived since the late ’90s, Gahan appeared onscreen against what appeared to be a red-velvet wall. It resembled the lining of a coffin, which prompted a question about the rumor that Gahan slept in one during Depeche Mode’s reportedly bacchanalian Devotional Tour in 1993. (Not true, Gahan said — although he did own a casket-shaped bed around that time, and once took a nap in an actual coffin a carpenter left backstage for him. But only once.)In 2019, Gahan and his band Soulsavers recorded “Imposter,” a collection of 12 high-drama covers of songs made famous by artists including Nat King Cole and Cat Power, performed by Gahan in a manner evocative of both Tom Jones and Nick Cave. Shelved during the pandemic, the album finally dropped in November 2021. The following month, when Gahan played the songs at a few shows in Europe, it felt like the end of something; he spent that Christmas wondering if he’d continue making music at all.Depeche Mode onstage in 1986. In the following decade, the group would weather the rise of grunge and the departure of the keyboardist Wilder.Rob Verhorst/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDuring Covid, he said, he’d enjoyed being at home, surrounded by family and friends, finally spending time at a Montauk vacation house that he’d barely gotten to use. “I can walk along the beach in winter. You don’t see another soul,” he said. “I’m out there playing my guitar along to Stones records. I’m like, ‘I like my life right now. Why would I want to disrupt all this, to jump into a Depeche Mode record, which will take me out of that for the next three years?’”The recording sessions for the previous Depeche Mode album, “Spirit,” had been contentious. Ever since Clarke’s exit, there’d been a clear division of labor in the band. Gore wrote virtually all the lyrics, and Gahan sang Gore’s words. But in the early 2000s, Gahan started making solo albums, and began bringing his own songs into Depeche Mode sessions as well.As Gahan sees it, he’s always been the Depeche Mode member who’s pushed the band outside its comfort zone. After Nirvana broke out in the early ’90s, it was Gahan who showed up to record “Songs of Faith and Devotion” with hair down to his shoulders, advocating for a grittier sound. Without him, you might never have heard live drums or a gospel choir on a Depeche Mode track. “All those things were considered threats,” Gahan said.But when Gahan pushed, it was traditionally Fletcher who pushed back. “He would always stand up for Martin,” Gahan said. “If there was a vote, I would lose.”At the “Spirit” sessions in 2016, those creative tensions reached what Gahan called a “boiling point.”“Martin wasn’t really keen on some of Dave’s songs,” the “Spirit” producer Ford said, “and Dave was pushing really hard for them to be on the record. It was very, very difficult.”Ford said he was told by Depeche’s management that the project was in jeopardy. His solution was to banish everyone except Gahan and Gore from the studio — including Fletcher, their traditional buffer. “Fletch did not like this,” Gahan said. “I think in the end our manager Jonathan had to literally, physically get him out.”Ford said the following day resembled a marriage-counseling session. Gahan recalled the confrontation “was really hard. After all those years — he said some stuff. I said some stuff.”They cleared the air enough to finish “Spirit,” released in 2017. And Gahan said any reservations he had about making the next album disappeared the moment he heard Gore’s demo for the song “Ghosts Again.” “I was like, ‘I can’t wait to sing this song.’”Then it was May, and suddenly Andy Fletcher was dead.“I felt, immediately, very supportive of Martin,” Gahan said. “Like, ‘I’ve got to take care of him — this is really much harder on Martin than it is on me.’”They decided to go ahead with “Memento Mori” — and according to both Gore and Gahan, Fletcher’s passing fostered an intimacy they’d never experienced in 40 years as bandmates.“Every decision that has to be made has to be made by the two of us now,” Gore said. “So we kind of have to talk things out when we disagree. I don’t think I’ve ever had a FaceTime with Dave before. Now we FaceTime.”Privately, Gahan said, Gore described their dynamic to him in more profound terms. “At one point — I always say too much, I’ll regret it later when I read this — he said to me, ‘It’s kind of like we’re long-lost brothers, isn’t it?’”Salogni, an Italian producer and engineer who’s worked with Björk, Frank Ocean and the xx — and the rare woman in this very male orbit — said it was “wonderful” to witness Gore and Gahan’s flourishing friendship, and the creativity it engendered. “With Andy being a filter — after he passed, the filter unfortunately disappeared, and suddenly the curtain dropped and they were there to face each other,” she said. “Honesty comes to the forefront, and you just face what you perhaps haven’t faced before.”The mood at the sessions, Ford said, “was very somber.” But there was also a lot of reminiscing — Fletcher stories told over long lunches. “It was honestly a really lovely, beautiful experience,” he said.Depeche Mode, Gahan suggested, has always survived by evolving. “Sometimes we’ve changed naturally, and sometimes change has been forced upon us,” he said, “and I think that’s what’s happening now. We lost an integral part of Depeche Mode, who’s irreplaceable. Circumstances forced us to be different, to think of each other in a different way. We need each other in a different way.” More