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      How Fred again.. Jolted Dance Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe most rapid ascent in dance music over the past three years belongs to the British producer and songwriter Fred again.., a protégé of Brian Eno and a onetime songwriter for Ed Sheeran and others who has built a formidable catalog using found vocals — from YouTube, Instagram or regular conversation — as the skeleton for high-energy club-pop.Fred’s main innovations aren’t necessarily musical, though. They’re his open-eared and arms-outstretched approach to production, which has made room for a wide range of collaborators, and his sense of live whimsy — whether announcing a last-minute rave with Skrillex and Four Tet at Madison Square Garden, or playing a peculiarly intimate set on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about dance music’s new wave of big-tent ambition, how Fred again.. turns unlikely source material into catchy pop, and how far interpersonal good will can go as a music-making tool.Guest:Foster Kamer, the editor in chief of Futurism, who writes for New York magazine, The New York Times and othersConnect 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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      Morgan Wallen Fends Off Metallica for a Seventh Week at No. 1

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      The country star has two releases in the Top 5 of Billboard’s album chart, continuing a dominating run anchored by streaming.The country star Morgan Wallen fended off a challenge from Metallica to hold the top spot on the Billboard album chart for a seventh week with “One Thing at a Time,” his latest streaming blockbuster.In its most recent week out, “One Thing at a Time” had the equivalent of 166,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total, a composite that incorporates both streams and old-fashioned unit sales, included 202 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a complete package. Since its release, “One Thing at a Time” has been streamed nearly two billion times in the United States.For weeks, Wallen has stayed at No. 1 by holding off challenges from new releases by the alt-pop singer Melanie Martinez, the rapper NF and the K-pop acts Jimin and Twice.Metallica posed more of a threat to Wallen than any other with “72 Seasons,” its first studio album in seven years. It opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 146,000 sales, including 16 million streams and 134,000 copies sold as complete albums. The album’s publicity campaign included a four-night residency on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and an online “Metallica Logo Generator” that let fans render their chosen text in the band’s signature lightning-bolt font.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” is No. 3, Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 4 and Wallen’s last album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is in fifth place. More

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      Jessie Ware Centers Herself With ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’

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      The British singer and songwriter’s fifth album, “That! Feels Good!,” adds a soulful spin to her recent dance-floor music. Her offstage life is fueled by eggs, Lisa Vanderpump and musical theater.Onstage at Webster Hall in New York last fall, Jessie Ware glided through choreography in a faux-fur-trimmed turquoise caftan, and later swung a black whip while singing the title track from her 2020 disco LP, “What’s Your Pleasure?” Backstage, however, was a different vibe.“I had a bat mitzvah lesson in my dressing room,” the British singer and songwriter, 38, said in an interview last month. “That’s when your worlds are colliding.”Ware has become an expert at hilariously exposing the gap between the luxuriousness of her music and the realities of life as a touring musician, a mother of three young children, a cookbook author and a successful podcaster (“Table Manners,” co-hosted by her mother, Lennie, is in its 15th season).“What’s Your Pleasure?,” an album designed for escape, gave her music career a jolt. Her fifth LP — “That! Feels Good!,” out Friday — is a sequel of sorts, but the earlier album’s synth thump is joined by a new dimension: soulful, brassy warmth, often thanks to Kokoroko, an eight-piece band. “I’ve always longed to make soul music,” Ware said. “I’ve done bits and bobs of it, but this felt very focused and authentic.”Scrolling through a list of cultural influences on her phone in the bar of a New York hotel, Ware debated what to include. “You think Fran Lebowitz would be my friend if I put her in the Top 10?” she asked, before deciding, “She wouldn’t want to be my friend because I’m on my phone too much.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Photo BoothsI’m constantly trying to make my phone take pictures that look old and romantic, and the photo booth just does that. And also the fact that you can’t change it — I like that, and that they’re these four pictures that can take you back to a nostalgic moment. My husband did a photography degree but he’s [expletive] at taking photos of me: terrible angles, manages to always take them when my eyes are half open. What I’ve just started doing is taking selfies of myself, but pretending that I’m being caught off guard so that I can get really good photos with my children.2‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’It’s dirty and naughty and I probably should be doing something else, but I’m there, invested in the Kathy and Kyle drama. And I love it. It centers me. And my husband walks in and he’s like, What are you watching? And I’m like, Don’t judge me, these are really important women that are telling very important stories and they’re very entertaining. I love Mauricio. I live for the moments when he’s stoned. Dorit has really grown on me, I think she’s got real wit. I really miss Lisa Vanderpump. I loved her.3EggsBecause they’re versatile. Because you can have them at any meal. Because I wrote a book called “Omelet.” They solve a lot of problems. I feel at home with an egg anywhere. I said this in my book, but if there was a crisis, my mum would be like, “Do you want an omelet, darling?” So it became like this thing where like my brother was like, I don’t want a [expletive] omelet.4My Saved Places on Google MapsI hate missing out on good food in a new place. It’s kind of slightly stressful. When we were on holiday for our honeymoon, I wasn’t a bridezilla, I was a honeymoonzilla. But I didn’t have the Google Maps saved lists that could have made my life easier. So when I’m on tour, I save places that people recommend. It’s so good for being able to work out your route for the day, like, I’m going to go to this coffee shop, then I’m going to go to the famous cemetery in Buenos Aires, and then I’m going to walk from there.5MatineesJamie Lee Curtis said that whole thing about like, Why doesn’t Coldplay do a matinee? I completely agree with her. Apparently Little Mix have always been doing matinees. Much respect to them. The idea of going onstage at 9 p.m. sometimes fills me with total dread, when I’m usually in my pajamas watching “Real Housewives” or something. Can you call a lunch a matinee? Anything that’s, like, in the day. Then you have time to digest it, understand it, enjoy it. But also time for that eight hours sleep.6Handwritten LettersI don’t do it enough, but I appreciate them so much. And handwritten cards. Emails, I’m over it, I know that that’s how we function. Text messages, I get it. But there’s nothing more thoughtful than a handwritten letter. I think I read that Reese Witherspoon did this, but I write my children a letter every year. They’ve all got their own book, and I write them a letter, mainly so I can remember what they did in the year. Because I know that when they get to like, 21, then they’re going to ask me and I’ll be like, I don’t know what your first word was.7MusicalsIt’s kind of where I began singing. It’s something that’s really inspired how I make music — that idea of escapism and the idea of melodrama combined with emotion. I like that fantasy aspect of it, that it can kind of elevate. If you say you hate musical theater, I’m going to question our friendship, because I don’t believe that you’ve gone to see good enough musical theater.8‘The Traitors’I’m talking about the first season of the British series. If anybody played the game at university called Mafia, where you have to say who the killer is and they have to kill other people whilst you’re like, staring? The premise is that, and we would all be very rich if whilst we were getting stoned at uni, we thought that could be a great format for television.9Foreign PharmaciesThere was a time when you could get Valium in India when I was in my 20s. That was a fantastic time. But also for the products, particularly in the French pharmacies, the beauty products. I mean, you can now get Bioderma everywhere now, but there was a time where everybody would come back from Fashion Week with loads of Bioderma. I love perusing the aisles of a foreign pharmacy and getting any kind of insect repellent, sunglasses, chewing gum.10Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge, or the KnockoffI got it for my husband for Christmas, but I wear it. It’s obscenely expensive. One day my beautician came ’round to give me a wax, and I said, “You smell really good!” She went, “Oh babe, I got it in Zara.” I was like, You’re kidding me. Zara has done a knockoff, so you don’t need to spend the bloody amount of money that I did. It smelled exactly the same. More

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      Foo Fighters Begin a New Chapter, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Muna, Nathy Peluso, Salami Rose Joe Louis 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.Foo Fighters, ‘Rescued’“Rescued” is the first new song Foo Fighters have released since the sudden death of the band’s beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, and its lyrics seem to address that tragedy and the remaining members’ grief. “It happened so fast, and then it was over,” Dave Grohl sings before unleashing one of those signature screams that manages to be throat-lacerating and melodic: “Is this happening now?” Hawkins’s absence is a gaping void in “Rescued,” the first track from a June album, “But Here We Are.” But perhaps because of it, the Foos sound more focused than they have in a while, driven by a fresh sense of pathos and urgency. LINDSAY ZOLADZMuna, ‘One That Got Away’Katie Gavin lets a missed connection know exactly what they’re missing on the bold and sassy “One That Got Away,” a new single the pop group Muna debuted last weekend at Coachella. “If you never put it on the line, how am I gonna sign for it?” Gavin sings on the synth-driven track, as the booming, echoing production serves to effectively amplify her feelings. ZOLADZSalami Rose Joe Louis, ‘Dimcola Reprise’“I know that everything is feeling like it’s falling apart all the time,” sings Lindsey Olsen, who records as Salami Rose Joe Louis, in “Dimcola Reprise” from her coming album, “Akousmatikous” (which means “sound where there is no identifiable source” in Greek). Most of the track is a busily looping, pattering, burbling electronic backdrop for her whispery voice, which eventually advises, “It’s gonna be OK/Just make it through the day.” But before it ends, the song pivots completely, turning to slow chromatic chords and suspended vocal harmonies — a brief moment of respite. JON PARELESSbtrkt featuring Sampha and George Riley, ‘L.F.O.’Aaron Jerome, the English electronic music producer who calls himself Sbtrkt and performs behind a mask, has been working over “L.F.O.” since 2018, apparently making it stranger with each iteration. It’s an ever-evolving succession of thick, harmonically ambiguous synthesizer chords, coalescing into a rhythm and pushing it aside, accelerating and falling apart and reconverging. The lyrics, delivered in Sampha’s eerie falsetto and George Riley’s confessional breathiness, offer paradoxes and self-questioning: “I’m changing, moving, losing, higher,” Riley sings. The song will be on Sbtrkt’s new album, “The Rat Road,” in May. Whatever the context, it’s likely to be destabilizing. PARELESNathy Peluso, ‘Tonta’The Argentine singer Nathy Peluso enlisted the hitmaking producer Illangelo (the Weeknd, Post Malone) for the furious kiss-off “Tonta” (“Foolish”). A thumping, clattering beat propels her indictment of her ex from seething to sneering to a well-placed scream. She also shows some gleeful scorn as she overdubs her voice into a mocking horn section, trumpeting “tararatata” as she demolishes any hopes of reconciliation. PARELESGrupo Frontera x Bad Bunny, ‘Un x100to’Bad Bunny, proudly from Puerto Rico, is determined to expand his music into a pan-Latin coalition. With “Un x100to” (“One Percent”), he joins Grupo Frontera, a Mexican-rooted norteño band from Texas, for a song about using the last 1 percent of his cellphone power to call an ex and confess that he misses her. Grupo Frontera’s section of the song is a traditional-flavored, accordion-backed cumbia. Bad Bunny arrives with a different, rap-informed melody over arena-scale electronic chords. But with Grupo Frontera working, he returns to the clip-clop beat and chorus of the cumbia — another strategic alliance certified. JON PARELESFlorence + the Machine, ‘Mermaids’“I thought that I was hungry for love,” Florence Welch sings at the beginning of a menacing new song, “Mermaids,” adding, “Maybe I was just hungry for blood.” The dark, brooding track sounds of a piece with “Dance Fever,” the group’s 2022 album that often found Welch threading her personal recollections and musings into a more mythical tapestry. That contrast emerges in the second movement of “Mermaids,” when Welch sings memorably about long nights of London debauchery and “hugging girls that smelt like Britney Spears and coconuts.” ZOLADZChristine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, ‘True Love’At Coachella and now online, Chris of Christine and the Queens has gone primal and musically skeletal. “I need you to love me,” he sings in “True Love,” over a blipping, tapping two-chord track, joined by 070 Shake, who sees “your dark eyes staring at me.” The song is measured and quantized, but thoroughly obsessional. PARELESBéla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain featuring Rakesh Chaurasia, ‘Motion’The latest cross-cultural foray by the banjoist Béla Fleck is a collaboration with the bassist Edgar Meyer and two Indian musicians: Zakir Hussain on tabla and Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri (bamboo flute). For most of “Motion,” Fleck takes a supporting role behind rising, inquisitive melodies from the bass and bansuri as Hussain’s tabla stirs up a fluttering momentum. When banjo and bansuri share a melody in unison, the eerie timbre is an acoustic discovery. PARELES More

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      The Best of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Openers

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      Listen to songs by Muna, beabadoobee, Gracie Abrams and more.The pop trio Muna brought a surprise to Coachella last weekend. (It wasn’t Taylor Swift.)Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesDear listeners,Perhaps you have heard that Taylor Swift is currently on tour.I kid. Of course you have heard about the Eras Tour — the record-setting cultural juggernaut that nearly took down Ticketmaster. The concerts started in March, but Eras Tour fever shows no sign of abating. Fans are getting married in the front rows. Entire cities have been temporarily renamed in Swift’s honor. People are camping out overnight just to buy merch. A lavender haze has officially descended upon the nation.For today’s playlist, though, let’s focus on a less discussed aspect of this tour: the strength, variety and occasional surprises of Swift’s opening acts.Nine artists will be accompanying Swift throughout all the stops of the tour, two playing per night, which gives each performance a bit of novelty and, occasionally, some fun regional specificity. (Haim, those darlings of the San Fernando Valley, are only doing West Coast dates.) The bill is a mix of obvious choices (Haim and Phoebe Bridgers, both Swift collaborators) and unexpected co-signs (the cult-favorite pop group Muna and up-and-coming indie-rocker beabadoobee are welcome surprises). Others, like the Gen-Z singer-songwriters Gracie Abrams and girl in red, represent Swift’s artistic progeny; both have cited Swift’s music as formative influences on their own and share her sharp eye for emotional detail.This playlist culls some of the best songs by my favorite of the artists opening for Swift — and one song that features a cameo from Swift herself. Her tour also includes the teen phenom Gayle (whose viral hit “Abcdefu” you have most likely heard already) and Christian Owens, a former Swift backup dancer who has released a handful of songs under the name Owenn.Even if you’re not much of a Swiftie, this playlist conveniently doubles as both an exploration of the influence that ’90s pop-rock has had on a younger generation of artists, and as a fun, breezy soundtrack for the first warm days of the year. I field-tested it on a long walk in the middle of this gorgeous week in New York for that purpose and found it highly appropriate.Also: Thanks for all your submissions suggesting your favorite workout song! I’ll be publishing some of them in Tuesday’s newsletter. If you still have one you’d like to recommend, you can submit it here.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Haim: “The Steps”Is this song the clearest distillation of Sheryl Crow’s effect on millennial musicians? Is it the best song on Haim’s sprawling and fantastic 2020 album “Women in Music Part III”? How awesome was Haim’s performance of this song at the 2021 Grammys? I am up for debating any and all of these questions. (Listen on YouTube)2. beabadoobee: “Care”There are some excellent songs on “Beatopia,” the most recent release from the Filipino-British singer-songwriter beabadoobee, but this great single from 2020 is the one that first made me a fan. Even though she was born in 2000, “Care” shows how intuitively she understands something about the sort of scuzzy, anthemic indie-pop that underground labels like Slumberland Records were releasing in the ’90s. (A “Best of Slumberland Records” playlist in a future installment of The Amplifier? Now there’s an idea.) (Listen on YouTube)3. Muna featuring Phoebe Bridgers: “Silk Chiffon”Two Eras Tour openers for the price of one! Far and away my favorite song from Muna’s 2022 self-titled album, this one is pure pop bliss and a refreshing reverie of queer joy. (When the group played it last weekend at Coachella, it surprised the crowd by bringing out not just Bridgers, but also the other two members of the supergroup boygenius, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.) (Listen on YouTube)4. Paramore: “Crave”Here’s an underappreciated highlight from Paramore’s latest album, “This Is Why.” Hayley Williams’s vocals on the chorus give me some serious Alanis Morissette vibes. (Listen on YouTube)5. Gracie Abrams: “Best”I like the dramatic pause Gracie Abrams takes toward the end of this line: “You fell hard, I thought good … riddance.” I also always appreciate a heartbreak song on which the singer takes responsibility for doing the heartbreaking. “Best” is the opening track on Abrams’s 2023 debut studio album, “Good Riddance,” on which she worked with one of Swift’s “Folklore”-era collaborators, the musician and producer Aaron Dessner. (Listen on YouTube)6. girl in red: “I’ll Call You Mine”In the years since she started posting songs online as a teenager, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Marie Ulven Ringheim, now 24, has built a devoted fan base that hangs on her every angsty, sharply observed word. When Swift told her Instagram followers she had the girl in red album “If I Could Make It Go Quiet” “on repeat” in 2021, this was the track she was listening to. (Listen on YouTube)7. Phoebe Bridgers: “Chinese Satellite”Bridgers’s “Punisher,” released in June 2020, will always be one of the albums that defined the surreal loneliness of that first pandemic summer for me. Over the years I’ve cycled through several different favorite tracks — first “Moon Song,” then “Garden Song” — but if you asked me today I’d say it’s “Chinese Satellite.” The moment when Bridgers’s wry numbness suddenly gives way to a rush of earnestness when she sings, “I’d stand on the corner, embarrassed with a picket sign, if it meant I would see you when I die” never fails to give me chills. (Listen on YouTube)8. Haim featuring Taylor Swift: “Gasoline”Is “The Steps” the best song on “Women in Music Part III”? The twist ending to this playlist is that I think it may actually be “Gasoline.” And I get the sense that Swift agrees with me, given the conviction she brings to her guest verse on this remix. Taste! (Listen on YouTube)You needn’t ask what’s wrong with that,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Best of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Openers” track listTrack 1: Haim, “The Steps”Track 2: beabadoobee, “Care”Track 3: Muna featuring Phoebe Bridgers, “Silk Chiffon”Track 4: Paramore, “Crave”Track 5: Gracie Abrams, “Best”Track 6: girl in red, “I’ll Call You Mine”Track 7: Phoebe Bridgers, “Chinese Satellite”Track 8: Haim featuring Taylor Swift, “Gasoline (Remix)”Bonus tracksI highly recommend this dispatch from the Eras Tour — or, more accurately, a Tampa parking lot — by my colleague Madison Malone Kircher, on Swift fans’ frenzied quest for a certain blue crew neck sweatshirt. While reading it I was alternately touched and horrified, but always entertained. Make sure you get to the kicker at the very end.Speaking of fascinating-but-depressing reporting, I also appreciate this recent essay in Vulture, in which the writer Nate Jones asks, “Why Are My Secret Spotify Songs Following Me Around?” Jones puts a finger on the precise sort of algorithmic dependency I want to combat with this newsletter in favor of more personal forms of music discovery. Jones writes, “When you love a song, you feel a sense of ownership; it can become a marker of your personal taste in a way that feels private and individual, a feeling ‘Discover Weekly’ is designed to encourage. Encountering a secret Spotify song in the world broke the spell. It made me feel like a widget too.” More

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      ‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’ Review: The Nitty-Gritty Beyond ‘Tutti Frutti’

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      This documentary presents the self-proclaimed “architect of rock ’n’ roll” as a man of contradictions.Judging from “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” the best way to understand the self-proclaimed “architect of rock ’n’ roll” is through his contradictions.In this documentary, directed by Lisa Cortés, Little Richard, who died in 2020, is seen as a musician who could simultaneously lay the groundwork for an entire genre and not get his due. Without him, we probably wouldn’t have the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie or Prince — artists who were happy to cite his influence even as they stole his thunder and his style.In the 1950s, he broke with the slower sounds of Ray Charles and B.B. King in favor of fast songs with lyrics not so subtly about sex. Yet over the years he seemed to have a conflicted relationship with his own sexuality. (He is shown in an early 1980s interview with David Letterman claiming both that he believed he was one of the first gay people to come out and that he was no longer gay.) He went from flamboyant rocker to gospel singer and back again.“He was very, very good at liberating other people through his example,” the pop-music scholar Jason King says in the film. “He was not good at liberating himself.”Mick Jagger, who credits Little Richard with teaching him how to work the whole stage, and John Waters, who says his mustache is a tribute, are among the famous faces here who testify to how he liberated them. “I Am Everything” also skews gratifyingly wonky for a pop-music bio-doc. The sociologist Zandria Robinson describes the cultural atmosphere in the South — a space, she says, for the different, the Gothic and the nonnormative — at the time Richard was formed as an artist. King describes Little Richard’s piano playing as a left hand of boogie-woogie and a right hand of Ike Turner-influenced percussion.Little Richard himself, seen in a bounty of archival footage, gives good quotes — “everybody likes to go to orgies,” he says at one point. And even in decades-old video, his musical performances, like a rendition of “I Can’t Turn You Loose” at the 1989 induction of Otis Redding to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, are showstoppers.Cortés tries a few things to upend the humdrum rock-doc template. She has musicians re-create breakout moments in Little Richard’s career, such as a night in the 1940s when Sister Rosetta Tharpe had him take the stage in Macon, Ga., or a spontaneous rendition of “Tutti Frutti,” before its lyrics were sanitized, at the Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans. (A montage depicts the song’s popularity as a cosmic explosion, even as Little Richard is shown complaining bitterly in an interview that Elvis and Pat Boone “sold more of ‘Tutti Frutti’ than I did.”) At the end of the day, though, “I Am Everything” is content to be a thorough, energetic, largely chronological appraisal, more interested in saluting a musical legend who shook things up than in shaking up conventions itself.Little Richard: I Am EverythingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Moonbin, Member of K-Pop Band ASTRO, Dies at 25

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      The K-pop star was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Seoul.Moonbin, a member of the K-pop band ASTRO, died on Wednesday at his home in Seoul. He was 25.The pop star’s death was confirmed by the band and its management agency in a statement in Korean posted to Twitter. They did not specify a cause.“On April 19, ASTRO member Moonbin suddenly left us and has now become a star in the sky,” the agency said. It called on fans to refrain from “speculative and malicious reports” so that his family could process the news. To respect their wishes, the agency added, the funeral would be held as privately as possible, with only family, friends and colleagues.According to the Korean news agency Yonhap, Moonbin was found dead at his home in the upscale neighborhood of Gangnam at about 8:10 p.m. on Wednesday by his manager, who contacted the Seoul Gangnam Police Station. Moonbin, born Jan. 26, 1998, was an actor, dancer and model as well as a singer, who also performed as part of the band Moonbin & Sanha. ASTRO, originally a six-person male K-Pop group, shot to fame in 2016 with their debut EP “Spring Up.” They were named to Billboard’s top 10 list of new K-Pop groups that year.In a statement shared early Wednesday, ASTRO announced the cancellation of the Moonbin & Sanha tour in Jakarta “due to unforeseen circumstances.”News of Moonbin’s death reverberated throughout the K-pop world, as fans praised the star for introducing them to the genre, and mourned the sudden loss.Moonbin is the most recent of a series of Korean celebrities in their 20s dying suddenly. In 2019, the deaths of two other K-pop stars left South Korea soul searching over what had gone wrong in one of its most popular cultural exports. Earlier this month, Jung Chae-yull, a 26-year-old South Korean actress, was also found dead in her home. Some, though not all, of the cases have been acknowledged as suicide.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

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      Otis Redding III, Who Followed His Father Into Music, Dies at 59

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      He was grateful for Otis Redding’s enduring legacy, he said, even if it overshadowed his efforts to make music of his own.Otis Redding III, the son and namesake of the celebrated 1960s soul singer, who made a name for himself as a singer and guitarist, died on Tuesday in Macon, Ga. He was 59.The cause was cancer, his sister, Karla Redding-Andrews, said in a statement posted on the Facebook page of the Otis Redding Foundation, the family’s charity.Mr. Redding was just 3 years old when his father died, along with several members of his band, in a plane crash on Dec. 10, 1967, outside Madison, Wis. Otis Redding III and his brother, Dexter, along with a cousin, Mark Lockett, went on to form the funk band the Reddings, which recorded six albums in the 1980s. Otis was a guitarist with the group; Dexter, who survives him, played bass and handled the vocals; and Mr. Lockett played keyboards.The band had some success on the Billboard charts: “Remote Control” reached No. 6 on the Hot Soul Singles chart and No. 89 on the Hot 100 in 1980. The group’s final album, called simply “The Reddings,” which contained the hit single “Call the Law,” reached No. 88 on the Billboard album chart in 1988.The Redding brothers never came close to matching their father’s success, but Otis Redding III nonetheless continued performing. When the soul singer Eddie Floyd hired him as guitarist for a European tour, Mr. Redding became comfortable singing “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and other songs made famous by his father, he told WCSH-TV in Portland, Maine, in 2018.“He said, ‘You can play guitar with me, but you’re going to have to sing a few of your dad’s songs,’” Mr. Redding recalled Mr. Floyd saying. “I was like, ‘Huh? I don’t sing,’ you know. And he was like, ‘Well, you’re going to sing “Dock of the Bay” with me tonight.’” He continued to perform his father’s songs live.He said he was grateful for his father’s enduring legacy even if it overshadowed his own music-making efforts.“I go ahead and do what people want, and I live with it,” he said, adding, “I don’t put myself mentally under any pressure to go begging for record deals.”Otis Redding III was born on Dec. 17, 1963, in Macon. His mother was Zelma Atwood.In later years he worked with his family’s foundation to organize summer camps that teach children to play music. He also served as board president of the local chapter of Meals on Wheels.In addition to his sister Ms. Redding-Andrews and his brother, Mr. Redding’s survivors include another sister, Demetria Redding.The New York Times contributed reporting. More