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      Nora Forster, 80, Who Married (and Stayed Married to) a Sex Pistol, Dies

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      A German publishing heiress and music promoter, she settled in London in time for the 1970s punk-rock explosion and became the muse to its baddest boy.Nora Forster, a German-born publishing heiress and music promoter who gained fame as the wife of John Lydon — otherwise known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols — and the mother of Arianna Forster, or Ari Up, the lead singer of the influential all-female punk band the Slits, died on Thursday. She was 80.Her death was announced by Mr. Lydon on Twitter. “Nora had been living with Alzheimer’s for several years,” the announcement said. “In which time John had become her full time career.” He did not say where she died.For more than four decades, music fans knew Ms. Forster as the emotional rock for the ever-volatile Mr. Lydon, who in the late 1970s became Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of British polite society for spitting invective in every direction, including the Queen’s, as the frontman for the incendiary punk progenitors the Sex Pistols.When the band imploded after its brief, explosive career, he scarcely mellowed; he continued on as the creative force of the fiery post-punk band Public Image Ltd., or PiL.Because of her husband’s enduring notoriety, particularly in England, Ms. Forster’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease unfolded as a public drama after he went public about her diagnosis in 2018.“It’s vile to watch someone you love disappear,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in February. “All the things I thought were the ultimate agony seem preposterous now.”Her illness, he said, had “shaped me into what I am.”“I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” he added. “I don’t see how I can live without her. I wouldn’t want to. There’s no point.”The previous month, he had teared up when taking a more wistful turn in an interview on the television show “Good Morning Britain” about “Hawaii,” a haunting PiL ballad that he had written as a tribute to her and that was the Irish entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. (Mr. Lydon was born in England to Irish parents.) “Remember me,” Mr. Lydon sang, “I remember you.”“I can see her personality in her eyes,” he said. “She lets me know that it’s the communication skills that are letting her down.”Nora Maier was born on Nov. 6, 1942, in Munich. After the war, her father, Franz Karl Maier, was a prosecutor who helped bring wartime Nazis to justice. He was later the editor and publisher of the newspaper Tagesspiegel.Ms. Forster went on to work as a model and to marry the singer Frank Forster, who was “kind of a swing pop star, always appearing on TV back in the ’60s,” Arianna Forster said in an interview with the music site Pitchfork in 2009, a year before she died.Nora Forster’s survivors include her husband and three grandchildren.As the 1960s unfolded, Ms. Forster promoted West German tours for acts like Jimi Hendrix and Yes, which gave her prominence on the German rock scene. “People were walking around in the living room back then, like the Bee Gees and all these big groups,” her daughter recalled in the Pitchfork interview.The bohemian lifestyle of her rock friends eventually ran afoul of the local authorities. “In Munich, the police were knocking at the door every night because of the loud acid parties,” her daughter once said. “She was fed up with it. You have to go to London to live that lifestyle.”Ms. Forster did just that in about 1970, and by the middle of the decade she had become enmeshed in the punk-rock scene that was starting to roil Britain and the music industry as a whole. She became “a den mother to all the young punks,” said Arianna, who in 1976, at age 14, would rename herself Ari Up and join with a drummer called Palmolive to found the Slits, which became a leading female punk band of the era.In 1975, Ms. Forster met Mr. Lydon, who was nearly 14 years her junior, at Sex, the boundary-pushing clothing boutique on London’s King’s Road run by the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren.It was anything but love at first sight.“There was no physical attraction at first,” Ms. Forster said in a 2004 interview with The Sunday Mail of Britain. “I didn’t even think to be nice to him. I was at another gig and John passed by my table and said, ‘Drop dead.’”Despite the mutual hostility, Mr. Lydon was intrigued. “Her nose went 10 feet in the air in her ’40s film star outfit,” he said in the same Sunday Mail interview. “Long blond hair, padded shoulders — that entire femme fatale look, which I was a complete ham for.”Eventually she softened. “I fell in love with John because he surprised me,” she said. “He had a sweet attitude. He was more innocent and not like the rest of the group.”The couple married in 1979, to the horror of Ms. Forster’s father. And, to the likely amazement of those who considered Mr. Lydon a human mushroom cloud, the marriage endured.Even so, it might never have happened if Ms. Forster had listened to her friends’ advice in those early days. “One day he came up and asked why I had never invited him to my house,” she later said of Mr. Lydon. “I replied, ‘People told me you would destroy everything.’” More

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      Record Shopping in New Jersey: A Playlist From a Fresh Haul

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      Thumbing through the crates at the Princeton Record Exchange, and rediscovering albums by Stevie Wonder, Linda Ronstadt, Broadcast and Merle Haggard.Lindsay ZoladzDear listeners,I love the unpredictability of walking into a record store with a regularly replenished New Arrivals section. You never know what you’ll find: maybe that obscure rarity you’ve spent years hunting down, maybe a familiar classic discounted too low to resist, maybe a chance purchase that sends you down a rabbit hole of related artists. To honor this spirit of musical serendipity, here’s the first of a recurring Amplifier segment, My Record Haul, featuring playlists from my recent finds at brick-and-mortar record shops.I’m going to begin close to home, with a visit to one of my favorite record stores in the world (maybe one of my favorite places in the world, full stop) the Princeton Record Exchange: a vast 4,300-square-foot music lover’s paradise tucked down a side street near Princeton University’s campus. I try to swing by the PREX (as it’s known to regulars) as often as possible; inventory there turns over so quickly (by some estimates, they move 40,000 items a month), the New Arrivals shelves are always fresh.Some of my recent finds talk to each other in unexpected ways. Listen along here on Spotify as you read, and hear 12 new songs out this week in the Playlist.1. Linda Ronstadt: “You’re No Good”“Working at a store like this,” one of the managers told me at the register, “you really get a sense of who was selling massive quantities of records back in the day.” He was talking about Billy Joel (“so much Billy Joel”), but also Linda Ronstadt, whose 1976 collection “Greatest Hits” went seven-times platinum — which means there are now enough used copies floating around to make it a cheap investment. ($2.99, in this case.) I know that Ronstadt is currently enjoying an uptick in popularity with a younger generation thanks to her 1970 ballad “Long, Long Time” being featured on an episode of “The Last of Us,” but — being woefully behind on pretty much all TV shows — what inspired me to dig deeper into her catalog was the fantastic, heartbreaking 2019 documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Stevie Wonder: “Superstition”My colleague Jon Pareles’s fantastic 50th-anniversary commemoration of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album “Talking Book” made me realize it’s probably the classic Stevie release I’m least familiar with. How serendipitous, then, to find a mint-condition used copy in one of the first stacks of new releases I flipped through! I am, of course, not suggesting that you will be discovering “Superstition” through this playlist. I am merely suggesting that it has been far too long since you’ve really listened to “Superstition,” even if you listened to it five minutes ago. (Listen on YouTube)3. Broadcast: “Goodbye Girls”Last October, on a vacation in Nashville, I found myself fiddling around with a small vintage keyboard in the hands-on “novelties lounge” at the wonderfully curated Third Man Records store. Its sound was warm, staticky and viscerally reminiscent of a particular album I couldn’t place until the walk back to my hotel, when it hit me — it was the British electronic group Broadcast’s singular “Tender Buttons” from 2005, which for some reason I hadn’t listened to in ages. I’ve been correcting that error in the months since, and though I mostly buy used records, I couldn’t resist dropping $22 on a new pressing of this baby. If only that synthesizer had been priced as reasonably … (Listen on YouTube)4. Merle Haggard: “Where No One Stands Alone”I’ve been going through a Merle Haggard phase for the past few months, since reading the recently released second edition of David Cantwell’s excellent book on the Hag, “The Running Kind.” While I didn’t find the exact Haggard record on my wish list (his eclectic 1979 midlife crisis record “Serving 190 Proof”), I did find an LP that ranks high on Cantwell’s listening guide: “Songs for the Mama That Tried,” a 1981 collection of gospel standards dedicated to the long-suffering mama name-checked in one of Haggard’s most famous songs. I find his bare-bones arrangement of Mosie Lister’s gospel standard “Where No One Stands Alone” quite moving. (Listen on YouTube)5. Stevie Wonder: “Big Brother”This song has such a gorgeous lead vocal melody, the intricate layering of musical elements that makes “Talking Book” such a symphony of self, and lyrics that (“I live in the ghetto, you just come to visit me ’round election time”) are as unfortunately relevant as ever five decades later. (Listen on YouTube)6. Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “The Fightin’ Side of Me (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center)”The Country section at PREX certainly doesn’t get pride of place — I actually had to sit on the floor to flip through it — but that also means you can find some gems for pretty cheap. In addition to “Songs for the Mama,” I picked up the rollicking 1970 live album “The Fightin’ Side of Me (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center),” which of course has a fiery rendition of the title track, a Haggard live staple. I like how, in the sequencing of this playlist, Wonder and Haggard seem to be talking back to one another … (Listen on YouTube)7. Broadcast: “America’s Boy”… and how Trish Keenan, on this icy indictment of American military might, seems to be talking right back to Haggard. (Listen on YouTube)8. Linda Ronstadt: “When Will I Be Loved”A recent argument I had with a friend: Is Kelly Clarkson her generation’s Linda Ronstadt? (As in, “an expert interpreter of familiar material, and an effortlessly fluent liaison between the worlds of rock, pop and country,” as I put it in a piece last year about Clarkson the cover artist.) Discuss! (Listen on YouTube)9. Bonnie Owens with Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “Philadelphia Lawyer (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center)”I’ll leave you with this charming cameo from Haggard’s wife at the time, the country singer Bonnie Owens, topically tackling Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer.” I love how she admits to flubbing the lyrics — “Oh I forgot to say what the Philadelphia lawyer said to Bill’s Hollywood maid!” — and launches back into the song without missing a beat. (Listen on YouTube)Very superstitious,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Record Shopping at Princeton Record Exchange: Hear My Haul” track listTrack 1: Linda Ronstadt, “You’re No Good”Track 2: Stevie Wonder, “Superstition”Track 3: Broadcast, “Goodbye Girls”Track 4: Merle Haggard, “Where No One Stands Alone”Track 5: Stevie Wonder, “Big Brother”Track 6: Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “The Fightin’ Side of Me (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center”Track 7: Broadcast, “America’s Boy”Track 8: Linda Ronstadt, “When Will I Be Loved”Track 9: Bonnie Owens with Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “Philadelphia Lawyer (Live at the Philadelphia Civic Center)”Bonus tracks“The store has withstood the coming of CDs. Now it must face the internet.” Here’s a Times report from 2000 about the Princeton Record Exchange at a crossroads. (Spoiler: Almost 23 years later, they’re still in business.)Also, here’s my favorite passage from David Cantwell’s aforementioned Merle Haggard biography, discussing Haggard’s 1994 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame: “Merle’s acceptance speech was perfectly in character. Rather than thanking a Young Country music industry that applauded him tonight but wouldn’t play his records come morning, he made a point of recognizing first ‘my plumber out in Palo Cedro … for doing a wonderful job on my toilet.’” (It’s true! You can watch the video here.) More

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      Drake Surprises With a Kim Kardashian Sample, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kaytraminé, Blondshell, Yaeji 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.Drake, ‘Search & Rescue’“I didn’t come this far, just to come this far and not be happy” — so said Kim Kardashian on the 2021 series finale of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” discussing why it was time to split from her husband, Kanye West. Two years later, their divorce is finalized, but the narrative persists. That line appears at a pivotal moment in Drake’s new song, “Search & Rescue.” Hovering above a morbid, anxious piano figure, Drake raps about the hollowness of being lonely, and after the chorus, uses Kardashian’s words but reframes them, making them sound like a lament about the single life. Here are two contrasting forms of despair, played off each other. Drake is pleading for connection: “Take me out the club, take me out the trap/Take me off the market, take me off the map.” Kardashian is yearning to be free. But Drake is also a sometime high-profile antagonist of West’s, and his leveraging of Kardashian’s words — an official sample, certainly approved by her — is unlikely to be understood as anything but a broadside from two seemingly unattached people, who would cause a whole lot of trouble were they to attach to each other. JON CARAMANICAKaytraminé featuring Pharrell Williams, ‘4EVA’“4EVA” is the winningly bubbly debut single from Kaytraminé, the duo of the rapper Aminé and the dance music producer Kaytranada. It pairs the irreverence of Leaders of the New School with the sumptuous physicality of A Tribe Called Quest, all delivered at a tempo that triggers a sense of freedom and release. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Terms and Conditions’The English R&B singer Mahalia sets out her own EULA — the page everyone clicks through on the way to a website or app — in “Terms and Conditions.” She specifies “the man you’re required to be” over a briskly ticking beat, vocal harmonies and bursts of strings; she wants honesty, attention and fidelity, which don’t seem that much to ask. Can she treat a relationship as a matter of cold internet metrics? The penalties are spelled out: “I’ll cut you off and I won’t regret it,” she sings. JON PARELESIndigo De Souza, ‘You Can Be Mean’With a proudly discordant yelp in her voice, Indigo De Souza vents every bit of her annoyance at her latest hookup in “You Can Be Mean,” a grungy stomp topped by a mock synthesizer. “I can’t believe I let you touch my body,” she snarls. “It makes me sick to think about that night.” She briefly considers extenuating factors, like a bad parent, but not for long. “I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he was,” she notes. PARELESBlondshell, ‘Salad’The brooding “Salad” is a rock-song revenge fantasy cut through with the Blondshell singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum’s wry humor: “Look what you did,” she sings, “you’ll make a killer of a Jewish girl.” Still, a genuine sense of menace lurks just out of frame, in a crime Teitelbaum alludes to but can’t name outright when she wails, “God, tell me why did he hurt my girl.” Here, as on the rest of her self-titled debut album as Blondshell, which is out on Friday, Teitelbaum offers candid dispatches from the darker, often unsung corners of a young woman’s experiences. LINDSAY ZOLADZLucinda Williams, ‘New York Comeback’A characteristic grit and defiance courses through “New York Comeback,” a new single from the country-rock legend Lucinda Williams, which features Bruce Springsteen and his wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, on backing vocals. The song comes from “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart,” Williams’s forthcoming album and her first release since suffering a stroke in 2020. That context adds a bit of weight to the song, but as ever, Williams is gimlet-eyed and unsentimental, singing in her signature growl, “No one’s brought the curtain down, maybe you should stick around.” ZOLADZYaeji, ‘Passed Me By’The D.J. and producer Yaeji, whose debut album “With a Hammer” comes out on Friday, pens a letter to her younger self on the booming but introspective “Passed Me By.” The song — on which Yaeji oscillates between English and Korean — begins as a kind of free-form incantation, but all at once a slow, echoing drum beat drops and gives it a loose pop structure. “Do you know that the person is still inside of you, waiting for you to notice?” she sings in the song’s final moments, a question that both lingers and haunts. ZOLADZUncle Waffles, ‘Asylum’Lungelihle Zwane, the D.J. and producer who calls herself Uncle Waffles, distills her new album, “Asylum,” into a five-minute megamix and dance extravaganza for her “Asylum” video. Uncle Waffle was born in Swaziland (now Eswatini) and is now based in South Africa. With a quick-changing array of singers and rappers — men, women, soloists, groups — she works countless variations on the midtempo beat, shaker percussion and gaping open spaces of South African amapiano. It’s still only a small sampling of what she concocts in the course of the album. PARELESArthur Moon, ‘7 O’Clock Clap’Lora-Faye Ashuvud, the songwriter, singer and producer behind Arthur Moon, finds joy in disorientation in “7 O’Clock Clap.” As speedy staccato blips and skittering percussion race above a languid bass line, the song has advice what to do when “you’re a foreigner in your own production/in your own bed, in your own body.” There’s a big grin in the vocal as Ashuvud sings, “Take your shoes off, get a move on/Pray to someone, break your cover!” PARELESLabrinth, ‘Never Felt So Alone’“Never Felt So Alone” first surfaced as part of Labrinth’s soundtrack for “Euphoria,” and snippets thrived on TikTok for years. The full-fledged version — a collaboration by Labrinth, Billie Eilish and Finneas — luxuriates in heartache. Labrinth intones the title as a falsetto plaint above hollow, puffing organ chords that hark back to Brian Wilson; the beat is slow, sporadic, almost stumbling. Midway through, the track stages a near-collapse, with fragmented lyrics and bits of dead air, then grandly reassembles itself. Eilish takes over to deliver her side of the story — “Who knew you were just out to get me?” — before each moves on, resigned to loneliness. PARELESPeter Gabriel, ‘I/O’The title of Peter Gabriel’s first new album in 21 years, “I/O,” stands for input/output, a metaphor he earnestly spells out in its title track, preaching the oneness of humanity and nature over solemn keyboards; “Stuff coming out, and stuff going in/I’m just a part of everything.” But the song takes off in the nonverbal moments of the chorus, when electric guitars surge and the Soweto Gospel Choir backs him in the exultant vowel sounds of “i, o, i, o.” PARELESThis Is the Kit, ‘Inside/Outside’Calm on the outside but bustling within, “Inside Outside” ponders fate, physics and free will. “All the molecules were focused on your next move,” Kate Stables sings, as complex counterpoint gathers around her. The sparse acoustic guitar at the beginning is deceptive; soon she’s in a polytonal tangle of horns, guitars and cross-rhythms, living up to her admonishment: “Bite off as much as you can chew.” PARELES More

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      The Friendship Harmonies of boygenius

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIn 2018, the rising indie rock singers Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus teamed up to form boygenius, a collaborative side project that quickly took on outsized importance. For fans, it reinforced the characteristics that made each singer so appealing individually, and also created a new layer of lore.The debut boygenius EP was released in 2018, but it wasn’t until last week that the group released its first full-length project, “The Record.” It continues the group’s familiar combination of emotionally acute songwriting, rich harmonies and inside-joke banter.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the music of boygenius overlaps with the solo work of its three members, the ways in which friendship can be rendered in musical terms and how even the most beloved artists can be subject to a backlash cycle.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticCat Zhang, an associate editor at PitchforkConnect 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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      ‘Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now’ Review: Breakout Crooner in Meta Form

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      The Scottish musician’s infectious presence makes every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi knows the drill: In pop star documentaries, we hear the rough cut of a song and then, inevitably, we watch as the crowd eats up every word of the resulting hit. When he mocks just how commonplace that particular scene is in his own doc, “How I’m Feeling Now,” you sense he gets it — this one will be different. But the director Joe Pearlman sticks to that trajectory, where triumph comes after a tough era for Capaldi, who released his debut in 2019 and then returned home during the pandemic to live with his parents in his hometown in Scotland. That would be more of a knock had the film not already winked at embracing that conventional course as the outcome, or if Capaldi’s infectious presence alone didn’t make every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.In the film, his charmingly crass persona is in contrast to his sensitive ballads, a revealing dichotomy that runs through “How I’m Feeling Now,” which examines the fragmented ways in which people appear to be and the ways they actually are. On Instagram, where he has amassed over six million followers, Capaldi has acted like a jaunty college frat boy; in the film, we see a darker side of him, where his palpable discomfort with anxiety and Tourette’s syndrome are deserving of sympathy. Remarkably, “How I’m Feeling Now” manages to escape most of the promotional trappings of its ilk, striking a more meaningful note than other pop star docs. By the time it reaches its predictable end, I still wanted to grab a beer with Capaldi and celebrate his healing, and I don’t even drink beer.Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Springsteen Comes Alive

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      With the E Street Band electrifying audiences on the road for the first time since 2016, listen to live versions of songs from the current tour.Nils Lofgren and Bruce Springsteen onstage at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesDear listeners,In October 2020 — a time when a lot of touring musicians were wondering when, and if, they’d ever play live again — I interviewed Bruce Springsteen over video chat.* He was preparing to release “Letter to You,” his first album with the E Street Band in six years, and he knew that putting out an E Street Band album without an accompanying tour was, to his fans, a total tease.He’d just turned 71; the fleeting nature of time was on his mind and all over his album, from the elegiac ballad “One Minute You’re Here” to “Last Man Standing,” a rocking tribute to the late members of the band he joined as a teenager, the Castiles. After the 2018 death of the guitarist and vocalist George Theiss, Springsteen was the group’s last surviving member.In our conversation, Springsteen was palpably antsy to get back on the road — he knew precious time was wasting. “My band is at its best,” he said, “and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’”He told me that the original plan had been to tour with the E Street Band in 2021, but “I would say we’ll be lucky if it’s 2022” — a year that, at that time, felt impossibly far away. (As it turned out, Springsteen would take the stage in 2021, albeit a smaller and less populated one than he’d imagined; his solo “Springsteen on Broadway” show, which had its initial, 236-date run in 2017 and 2018, returned for a limited, 31-date run in New York from June to September.)His prediction wasn’t far from the mark: On Feb. 1, 2023, Springsteen and the E Street Band finally kicked off a 90-date international tour, playing their first show together in seven years. I caught them at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, and they sounded every bit as tight and spirited as they did the last time I’d seen them there, on the River Tour in 2016.An E Street Band show is an ensemble performance, a veritable rock ’n’ roll circus of eclectic personalities — at its most crowded, there were 18 musicians onstage — each receiving a solo moment in the spotlight. I would personally like to shout out Curtis King for his angelic falsetto vocals on the cover of the Commodores’ “Nightshift,” Max Weinberg for — still! at 71! — being a drummer of exceptional steadiness and flair; and Little Steven, for the continued glory of just being Little Steven, day in and day out.Maybe you’ll get to see Springsteen on this tour. And maybe you won’t — some people still don’t feel comfortable sharing a respiratory experience with 20,000 strangers, and let’s not forget that these shows are happening during a particularly rocky moment for ticket buyers. So if you can’t make it out to one of the concerts — or if you did and want to keep reliving it — I have a playlist for you.It’s culled from my favorite live versions of Springsteen songs that the band played on April 1 at Madison Square Garden. There are only 10, but it’s still well over an hour long, because it’s Bruce. It represents a variety of venues and eras in the band’s five-decade run, including what a lot of Springsteen aficionados believe to be the greatest live recording of “Born to Run,” from an August 1985 show at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. (Every one of them who doesn’t believe that is probably drafting me an email right now.)It includes a wild, 16-minute (!) rendition of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and the sparse, poetic solo reading of “Thunder Road” from the 2018 recording of “Springsteen on Broadway,” which blew me away when I was lucky enough to see it in 2021. If you’re avoiding set-list spoilers, I will say: This is only about a third of the material that the band has been playing on this tour, and most of these songs were likely to make the set list anyway — but you do you.Of course, even the all-time greatest playlist of Bruce Springsteen live cuts will not replicate the experience of seeing him — or anybody, really — in concert. I’ll give the last word to the Boss himself, who, at the end of our interview, was bemoaning the loss of live performances (in quotes that didn’t make the final piece). “It’s still important, and it’s an experience that cannot yet be simulated,” he said. Even then-trendy livestreams didn’t cut it: “It’s not the same as being in a little room, or even a stadium, wherever you are, and having that music wash over you while standing next to your neighbors and friends. There’s still just that.”Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night,Lindsay*I am from New Jersey, so telling this to anyone in my family was sort of like saying I was going to Skype with Shakespeare. The assignment came together at the last minute, and as I was prepping I decided I could not tell my mother about it until after it had happened, because she was going to freak out in such a way that would have made me even more nervous than I already was. Her reaction — “no … no …. NOOOOO!” — when I called her after the interview confirmed that this was indeed the right decision. Hi, Mom!The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Springsteen Comes Alive” track listTrack 1: “No Surrender” (Live at the Wachovia Spectrum; October 2009)Track 2: “Out in the Street” (Live at Madison Square Garden; June/July 2000)Track 3: “Trapped” (Live at the Meadowlands; August 1984)Track 4: “Johnny 99” (Live at Giants Stadium; August 1985)Track 5: “Backstreets” (Live at the Roxy Theater, July 1978)Track 6: “Because the Night” (Live at Nassau Coliseum, December 1980)Track 7: “Jungleland” (Live at Madison Square Garden, June/July 2000)Track 8: “Thunder Road” (“Springsteen on Broadway” version)Track 9: “Born to Run” (Live at Giants Stadium, August 1985)Track 10: “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” (Live at Madison Square Garden; June/July 2000)Bonus tracks“This, too, is the promise that has always been sold in Bruce Springsteen’s music. The ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have.” I love this essay that the great critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib wrote upon seeing the River Tour in 2016, reflecting on music, American myths and the experience of being Black at a Springsteen show.Also, here’s a June 2021 dispatch from the reopening of “Springsteen on Broadway” by me and our chief theater critic Jesse Green, debating whether it was live theater or a rock concert. Writing it the next day, I was still in awe of that rendition of “Thunder Road” — which is why I included this version on today’s playlist — and reassessing a song I thought I knew inside and out. More

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      How Cold War Politics Destroyed the Band Blood, Sweat & Tears

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      A new documentary chronicles the strange, intrigue-filled saga of Blood, Sweat & Tears and its disastrous Eastern Bloc tour in 1970.Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”Now the band members are telling their side of this bizarre story in the new documentary “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” While everyone involved agrees with Rolling Stone’s conclusion — that the band’s career never recovered from that 1970 tour — the saga turns out to be more complicated than was previously known.“This isn’t a music doc, it’s a political thriller,” the director John Scheinfeld said in a telephone interview. “It’s about a group of guys who unknowingly walked into this rat’s nest, and how political forces impacted a group of individuals.”It is largely forgotten just how big Blood, Sweat & Tears was in its day. “Child Is Father to the Man,” the band’s 1968 debut, drew critical notice for its blend of big-band horns with rock and soul structure and style, but struggled commercially. After the group recruited the stentorian Toronto vocalist David Clayton-Thomas, its self-titled second album exploded, generating three Top 5 singles: “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.”The band performed at Woodstock (though, like many of the bigger groups on the bill, its management refused participation in the movie that made the festival a legend), and “Blood, Sweat & Tears” won the album of the year Grammy over the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Johnny Cash at San Quentin.”But in 1969, Blood, Sweat & Tears had to cancel a concert in Maryland when Clayton-Thomas was detained by Canadian immigration authorities; the United States had blocked his re-entry. No explanation was given, but the band assumed it was politically motivated.“I thought that because he’s Canadian, and we were — not collectively, but individually — speaking against the war,” the drummer Bobby Colomby said by phone, “some ultra-white congressmen probably said, ‘Who the hell does this Canadian guy think he is?’”The band’s manager, Larry Goldblatt, met with officials to resolve his singer’s visa status, and what happened next remains unclear — whether he or the State Department came up with the idea of having Blood, Sweat & Tears tour Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia as a way to promote democracy in Soviet-aligned countries that were potentially exploring closer ties to the West.“To use the language we use today, a quid pro quo was agreed upon,” Scheinfeld said. “If the band does this tour, the State Department will make David’s immigration problems go away. The band gets to keep their lead singer, and the State Department has the hottest band going working to advance their interests in Eastern Europe, so it’s kind of a win-win.”A planned movie of the tour fell apart as did a proposed TV special. The footage, smuggled out of the Eastern Bloc, was found in a vault.AbramoramaClayton-Thomas noted that such cultural exchange tours had been happening for decades, so the band didn’t think it was a big deal. “Most of the guys were jazz musicians, and they were used to the idea that Louis Armstrong would go to Moscow, and they’d send the Bolshoi Ballet to Lincoln Center,” he said by phone. Only the guitarist Steve Katz voted against the trip.It was agreed that the tour would be filmed for a possible documentary, organized by the executive producer Mal Klein. Blood, Sweat & Tears played seven concerts between June 17 and July 7, 1970, and when they first arrived in Yugoslavia, they were surprised by what they saw.“The kids were wearing ripped jeans and they had cafes and rock ’n’ roll and street fairs,” Clayton-Thomas said. “We thought, ‘Wow, they’ve been lying to us — this ain’t so bad.’ Then we went to Romania, and you could hear the Iron Curtain slam shut behind you.”Dan Klein, Mal Klein’s then 14-year-old son, tagged along and described the whole thing as feeling “like a James Bond movie.” He said the officials in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania made no effort to disguise the bugs they placed in hotel rooms, and he recounted being observed during meals.“There was a man sitting at the table reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee,” Klein said by phone, “and after a while, he got up and left, and another person sat down at the same table and picked up the same newspaper and continued drinking the same cup of coffee.”But things turned from comedy to tragedy at the Bucharest concerts, where audience members got too rowdy and were beaten by security guards. The second night, the band members were instructed to dial things down, and when they didn’t, the guards set dogs loose on the crowd.“My father, in his naïveté, thought that if he got the camera people to film the policemen and the dogs attacking the spectators that it would make them stop,” Klein said. “But that was just stupid; that just made them angrier.” The crew had to smuggle its footage out of Romania, using blank reels of film as a decoy for officials to confiscate.Back in the United States, the musicians came under fire for aiding the government, accused of being a “fascist rock band” by both the underground press and mainstream journalists. The trouble immediately became evident at a hastily arranged, hostile Los Angeles news conference.“We came back saying, ‘Yeah, Nixon is awful, Vietnam is the worst thing in the world, but communism? You don’t want that here,’” Colomby said. “But back then, for the extreme left, that wasn’t acceptable to say.”Henry Kissinger even sent Richard M. Nixon a memo about the tour, and the president scrawled a note at the bottom inquiring how “youth leaders might get the message.” On July 25, the band played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies staged a protest, throwing horse manure onstage.The damage was simply too great. “Blood, Sweat & Tears 3,” which was actually released during the Eastern European tour, went to No. 1, but the group never had another hit single, and album sales plummeted. The strains of the tour and the backlash exacerbated tensions between band members, and by the end of 1971, four of the nine musicians — including Clayton-Thomas — had left the group.In its heyday, the band was among the biggest in the country, beating out the Beatles and Johnny Cash for the Grammy for album of the year.AbramoramaAs for the planned documentary, there was no formal directive, but Scheinfeld suspects that the footage, especially of the Romanian riots, was deemed too negative to help American efforts to thaw the Cold War. The feature film morphed into a proposed TV special, but that also seemed to go nowhere. What started as a win-win wound up being a disaster for all sides.And that was the end of the story, until Scheinfeld — whose film subjects have included John Lennon and Harry Nilsson — was introduced to Colomby, who had seen “Chasing Trane,” the director’s 2017 John Coltrane documentary. They got to talking, Scheinfeld learned about the 1970 tour debacle, and he set out on a coast-to-coast mission, combing through storage vaults and government facilities to locate the lost material.Scheinfeld determined that while 65 hours of film had been shot, both the production company and the postproduction house had gone out of business in 1971. After months of fruitless searching, an email showed up from a vault that Scheinfeld had already checked: Someone had found a reference to Blood, Sweat & Tears in a file, which turned out to be a pristine, 53-minute print of the abandoned television edit. That footage became the spine of “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”For Colomby, revisiting this pivotal chapter revealed much that he didn’t know, but he offered no apologies and no regrets for making the deal and taking the trip.“We were the most innocent musicians you ever met in your life,” he said. “We just wanted to play well and do something that would affect music in a positive way. So if you ask, ‘Would you do this again?’ In a heartbeat. It was fascinating. It was eye-opening in every sense of the word.” More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers, who scored the films “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant” and was a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.”Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace.“Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed.The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats.He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.”In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More