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      Jody Miller, Singer of ‘Queen of the House’ and More, Dies at 80

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      Best known for a 1965 homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, the Oklahoma native had a hit the same year with the very different “Home of the Brave.”Jody Miller, a versatile singer with a rich, resonant voice who won a Grammy Award for “Queen of the House,” a homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, and had her biggest hit with a teenage anthem, “Home of the Brave,” died on Oct. 6 at her home in Blanchard, Okla. She was 80.Her daughter, Robin Brooks, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”The song was a crossover hit, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart and No. 12 on the Hot 100, and earned Ms. Miller the Grammy Award for best female country and western vocal performance in 1966. (Mr. Miller won five Grammys for “King of the Road” that year.)That accolade did not prevent some country radio stations from shunning another single she put out in 1965, “Home of the Brave,” an empathetic ode to a boy who is bullied and barred from school because he doesn’t wear his hair “like he wore it before,” has “funny clothes” and is “not like them and they can’t ignore it.”“Home of the brave, land of the free,” went the chorus of the song, written by the Brill Building stalwarts Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. “Why won’t you let him be what he wants to be?”Despite the opposition of some radio programmers to its anti-establishment theme, “Home of the Brave” became Ms. Miller’s best-selling U.S. single.“I loved that song,” she said in a 2020 interview for an Oklahoma State University oral history project. “Unfortunately, it got a bad rap.”Over time, Ms. Miller landed about 30 singles on the Billboard charts, 27 of them in the country category and several of those in the top five. In the 1970s she worked with the prominent Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who guided her to another crossover hit with a cover of the Chiffons’ 1963 song “He’s So Fine,” which reached No. 5 on the country chart and No. 53 on the pop chart in 1971.Ms. Miller made her last major-label album in 1979, then mostly stayed in Oklahoma to raise her daughter and to help her husband, Monty Brooks, with his quarter-horse business. She resurfaced later with an album of patriotic material and then, after becoming a born-again Christian, sang gospel music.“I like to sing all kinds of songs, so I didn’t fit into a mold,” she told The Tulsa World in 2018.Ms. Miller at the Grammy Awards in 1966 with her fellow winners Johnny Mandel, left, and Herb Alpert. Her “Queen of the House” was named the year’s best female country vocal performance.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMyrna Joy Miller, the youngest of five sisters, was born on Nov. 29, 1941, in Phoenix, a stop on her family’s move from Oklahoma to Oakland, Calif., where her father, Johnny Bell Miller, a mechanic, had a job lined up. Her mother, Fay (Harper) Miller, was a homemaker.The family often played music and sang together. Johnny Miller was a skilled fiddler, and Myrna’s sister Patricia, whom she idolized, taught her to harmonize.Aware of their daughter’s talent, Myrna’s parents entered her in singing contests, and her father sneaked her into bars, where she would climb atop tables and, she said, “sing my heart out.” She became known as “the little girl with the big voice,” according to Hugh Foley’s book “Oklahoma Music Guide III.”The Millers eventually divorced, and when Myrna was 8 she was put on a bus to Blanchard, a small town just outside Oklahoma City, to live with her paternal grandmother.Two songs Ms. Miller heard growing up made her want to become a professional singer. One was Mario Lanza’s version of “La Donna è Mobile” from “Rigoletto.” The other was a No. 1 hit for Debbie Reynolds in 1957.“The day I knew I would devote my life to singing was the day I first heard Debbie Reynolds sing ‘Tammy,’” Ms. Miller wrote on her website.After graduating from Blanchard High School in 1959, she got a job as a secretary in Oklahoma City and moved into the Y.W.C.A., where she would practice the folk songs she learned at a local library.Her hopes of a recording career got a jump-start one night at a coffeehouse where she was the opening act for the singer Mike Settle. The popular folk trio the Limeliters came in to see Mr. Settle, but also caught Ms. Miller’s performance. Impressed, the group’s Lou Gottlieb urged her to move to California if she was serious about a singing career.She married her high school sweetheart, Mr. Brooks, in January 1962, and together they headed to Los Angeles. After arriving, they contacted the actor Dale Robertson, a fellow Oklahoman and a friend of Mr. Brooks’s family. He helped arrange an audition at Capitol Records, which quickly signed Ms. Miller and suggested that she change her first name.Her first record, “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe,” was a collection of folk songs on which she was accompanied by session players like Glen Campbell and, she told the Oklahoma publication 405 magazine in 2012, an “unknown teenager” providing some of the backup vocals who later became known as Cher.The record’s timing was unfortunate.“By the time I cut my first LP with Capitol, folk music was on its way out,” she said. Thus began her pivot to pop and country and a career that took her to, among other places, Hawaii on a tour with the Beach Boys; television shows like “American Bandstand,” “Hullabaloo” and “Hee Haw”; and a 15-year run as a top draw in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.Her album of patriotic songs, recorded in 1987, found its way to Vice President George Bush, who invited her to sing at his campaign rallies when he ran for president the next year. When he was elected, she sang at an inaugural ball.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Miller is survived by two sisters, Carol Cooper and Vivian Cole, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 2014.Ms. Miller’s final recording, “Wayfaring Stranger,” is to be released next month on what would have been her 81st birthday. A mix of country and gospel songs, it includes a new version of “Queen of the House” and the title song, a 19th-century spiritual that was part of her repertoire when she started out as a folk singer 60 years ago.Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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      How Fred Again.. Turns Digital Bricolage Into Dance-Floor Weepers

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      The Brian Eno-mentored musician Fred Gibson is amassing a following with tracks built from social feeds and his iPhone. The intricate and emotional results can sometimes even start a party.On a recent Friday night in Manhattan, pandemonium surrounded a waffle truck parked on the corner of 56th Street and 11th Avenue, as thumping beats and the aroma of fresh batter poured from within. An enthusiastic young woman thrust an inflatable giraffe head festooned with a red glow stick through one of the truck’s windows, bopping it to the music. A security guard ripped it away.Inside the vehicle, holding court, stood a grinning Fred Gibson, the 29-year-old British songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist better known as Fred again.., who was following up a show at the Hell’s Kitchen venue Terminal 5 with an ad hoc after-party.“Chaotic,” he later happily proclaimed the impromptu event, where he previewed tracks from his third album, “Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9, 2022),” out Friday. “Just great.”“Actual Life 3” is the culmination of music that Gibson — a pop hitmaker for Ed Sheeran, BTS and the British grime star Stormzy — started releasing at the end of 2019, after his mentor Brian Eno urged him to forgo writing for others and prioritize his own work. The result is lush electronica-rooted piano balladry, wistful nu-disco anthems and the occasional U.K. garage firestarter, all threaded with samples culled from the far reaches of YouTube, Instagram and his iPhone camera roll — a sonic bricolage of digitally documented lives.A few days after the concert, Gibson — a smiley, ebullient, occasionally sheepish presence — rolled a cigarette on a West Village bar patio and recalled Eno needling him when he was experiencing a peak of commercial success but had a brewing fear of artistic complacency. He had met Eno at one of the artist’s occasionally star-studded a cappella gatherings as a teenager, and wowed him with his production talents, which led to Eno (“a wizened cliff-pusher,” as Gibson described him) bringing him on as a producer on some of his projects.“I know that Fred has sometimes referred to me as a mentor, but actually, it works both ways,” Eno said by phone. “What he’s doing is quite unfamiliar — I’ve actually never heard anything quite like this before. He always seems to be doing it in relation to a community of people around him — the bits of vocal and ambient sounds.”Eno was referring to the basic construction of a Fred again.. song. Many tracks start with Gibson using one of thousands of ambient drones Eno once gave him. From there, he’ll go into his digital scrapbook of found footage. While some samples employ familiar voices — the moaning rap of the Atlanta superstar Future, an Instagram Live freestyle of the rapper Kodak Black, vocals from a call with the Chicago house D.J. the Blessed Madonna — the vast majority are relatively obscure. They include a stadium worker Gibson joked around with after a Sheeran show, audio from a nightclub he recorded with his iPhone, spoken word poets and burgeoning bedroom pop singers he caught glimpses of while scrolling his various social media feeds.Brian Eno, Gibson’s mentor, described his music as “romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesGibson then cuts, distorts, pitch-shifts, stretches or compresses the samples into shimmering cinematic soundscapes, and sings atop them in his soft, pleading croon. Some are cavernous, others dense, but they all retain the deep warmth of something homespun — the ideal foundation for lyrics about feeling too much and not nearly enough that map thin fault lines demarcating love and loss. The result are tracks that leave listeners both laughing and weeping on the dance floor.Gibson estimated that he’s experimented with thousands of different ways to turn the speech of complete strangers into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. “But at the beginning it was very labored, quite tortured, if I’m honest,” he added. “It felt like I was distorting their spirit.”One track was crafted from footage of a young Toronto-based performance artist named Sabrina Benaim performing her piece “Explaining My Depression to My Mother,” which would go on to become the thumping dirge “Sabrina (I Am a Party).”The source material is a full-tilt confessional characterizing the vicissitudes of anxiety and depression — not exactly the kind of thing obviously complemented by beats from a successful pop producer. “I was anxious with everything I was putting onto these people,” Gibson said. “I felt like I was projecting onto them.”Speaking by phone from Toronto, Benaim remembered hearing the finished track for the first time, after Gibson reached out over Instagram. “It was the wildest thing,” she said and laughed. “It was like I left my body. He handled the emotional center of it so well — he just cared so much about not ruining or soiling the poem in any way. It’s coming from such a careful place.”Romy Croft — a singer-songwriter in the xx who tapped Gibson to produce her own debut solo single, “Lifetime” — worked with Gibson and Haai on “Lights Out,” a song released earlier this year, in nearly the same way. Croft had given Gibson an xx demo that never came to fruition; a year later, Gibson mentioned having done something with it.As she explained in a recent phone call, she was gobsmacked by the result, a dance track that mixes laser squelches, piano chords, a skittering beat and Croft’s wistful vocals. “He had just given it a new lease of life,” Croft said. To her, the record reflects a thematic link in his work: “A thread of emotion and vulnerability within it that ties it together, as well as a lot of joy.”Gibson continues to experiment with turning strangers’ speech into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEno said he finds many of Gibson’s samples to be “tender and beautiful.” “To marry that with the kind of energetic chaos of the music he does is, I think, a beautiful combination,” he added. “It’s romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”The new album may be the apotheosis of this aesthetic. Gibson’s first two LPs, made during and immediately after the pandemic lockdown, concerned the illness of a close friend and its aftermath, and are often pensive affairs. “Actual Life 3” is an unfurling of sorts, a more cathartic, misty-eyed dance-floor moment. Its unlikely collaborators include Kieran Hebden, a.k.a. the electronic musician and producer Four Tet, known for the kind of dense, protean electronica compositions that rarely (if ever) abide anything close to a typical pop song’s structure.“He pulls me in a direction I wouldn’t normally be working in,” Hebden said on a recent FaceTime call. Gibson’s songs, he explained, are “great melodies and chord sequences, elegantly done. The work that has been done is considered. It doesn’t always sound ridiculously slick — there’s nothing very cynical about it. It’s quite direct, and honest; it just feels deeply refreshing, isn’t hidden away, and isn’t super mysterious.”“But,” Hebden paused, “the mystery of it is: How can anybody make it look so easy?” He laughed.At the waffle truck earlier this month, after playing the last in a series of then-unreleased songs to his increasingly hyped crowd, Gibson told Hebden — who was among his mischief-makers that night — to pick a final song. Hebden looked at him knowingly, and changed tracks. Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” blasted over the speakers. The crowd exploded into verse, and Gibson danced along, laughing. The musicians made their way out of the truck and back into the venue thronged by fans, another memory made in the night, soon to be posted for posterity — potentially, the start of another song. More

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      On ‘Midnights’, Taylor Swift Is Revising Her Own Love Stories

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      On “Midnights,” the singer-songwriter probes the realizations and reckonings of many millennial women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.On the plucky, bucolic “Love Story” — the first single from her 2008 sophomore album “Fearless,” and one of the mainstream smashes that initiated her crossover from country to pop — a then 19-year-old Taylor Swift felt emboldened to rewrite Shakespeare, imagining a happy ending for literature’s most famously doomed couple.“Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” Swift’s Romeo proposes in the final chorus, as an accelerating tempo and sudden key change kick the song into an ecstatic gear. The answer to the couple’s woes, “Love Story” earnestly suggests, and the only sacrament that could prevent their story from becoming a tragedy, is that trusted deus ex machina of Shakespeare’s comedies: holy matrimony.Fourteen years later, on her moody 10th studio album, “Midnights,” Swift doesn’t sound quite so sure that Juliet should have accepted the offer. “Midnights” oozes with ambivalence, not just about the sorts of starry-eyed, fairy-tale endings Swift’s earlier songs used to dream of, but also about the expectations and traditional timelines of adulthood writ large.“All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride,” Swift sings on “Lavender Haze,” the album’s sleek introductory airing of grievances, adding, “The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.” Later, on the smeary, pulsating “Midnight Rain,” Swift revisits an old relationship seemingly thwarted by her professional ambition and ambivalence about settling down: “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name,” she sings, Jack Antonoff’s production pitching her voice down to a notably masculine register.At 32, Swift is still as much an object of tabloid scrutiny as when she was that 19-year-old ingénue. But the excessive energy that the gossip pages used to spend on who she was dating has now transformed into a fixation on whether she and her longtime partner, the actor Joe Alwyn, are ready to get engaged, or have already gotten engaged, or have been secretly married for who knows how long. Swift’s relationship with Alwyn has been her most resolutely private and also her longest, having now reached a duration that can invite unwanted speculation even for people who are not megawatt superstars but mere mortals trying to make it through a Thanksgiving dinner. Frustration with this line of questioning bubbles over throughout “Midnights.”In both its self-referential, backward-glancing sound and its lyrical preoccupations, “Midnights” is a record about stasis, arrested development, and that liminal time between yesterday and tomorrow. “I’ve got this thing where I get older but just never wiser,” Swift sings on the album’s infectious, playfully self-flagellating lead single, “Anti-Hero.” (In a sense, it’s a sequel to her affecting 2019 song “The Archer,” on which she plays pop star as Peter Pan and admits, “I never grew up, it’s getting so old.”)As inwardly focused as these songs are, they also reflect something about the way Swift is perceived in pop culture. On a recent episode of Vulture’s podcast “Into It,” the host Sam Sanders asked his guest, the NPR music critic Ann Powers, why Swift — more than fellow stars who entered the spotlight young, like Adele and Beyoncé — has stayed fixed in the public imagination as a kind of eternal, “crimp-haired” teenager. “Taylor doesn’t have a child,” Powers answered, in an exchange that has since sparked a lively discussion on social media. “And in our patriarchal society, when does a woman change? When she becomes a mother.”“We don’t know how to accept childless women as adults,” Powers added. “I’m going to thank you, Taylor, for not having kids yet because we really need more childless women out there showing their path.”While Swift has almost never explicitly imagined motherhood in her songs (save for a brief, hypothetical lyric on the “Folklore” track “Peace”), there are a few lines on “Midnights” that feel striking in that context. Take that spiky third verse of “Anti-Hero” — which Swift expands and dramatizes in the music video she directed — when she sings, “I have this dream my daughter-in-law kills me for the money/she thinks I left them in the will.” Even in this darkly comic rendering, motherhood is presented as a potential dilution of the legacy over which Swift has always exerted meticulous control. (Swift, with the last laugh and the tightest rein, has left her fictional heirs nothing.)Then, of course, there’s the song’s instantly memed, irresistibly quotable bon mot, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I’m a monster on the hill.” The lyric is enigmatic enough to invite plenty of speculation — Is it about distorted body image? Is it a “30 Rock” reference? — but it certainly suggests some kind of anxiety about aging in an industry that fetishizes feminine youth. The Gen Z star Olivia Rodrigo has lovingly referred to Swift as “mom,” and when Rodrigo’s debut single, “Drivers License,” became a hit, Swift winkingly quoted something her own mother once said about her: “I say that’s my baby and I’m really proud.”Since Swift is one of the most famous people on the planet, it’s hard to consider much of anything about her life “relatable” — which poses an artistic challenge for a singer-songwriter who prizes connection with her audience. The divide between Swift and Swiftie felt most vast on 2010s blockbuster albums like “1989” and “Reputation,” on which Swift fixated on feuds with other celebrities and the minutiae of her public persona. “Midnights” is still largely about Being Taylor Swift, but the attention she brings to her own sense of inertia and discomfort allow her to tap into something larger than herself.Like Swift, much of her cohort is also putting off or forgoing supposedly transformative life events like marriage and parenthood, or at least attempting to reimagine what partnership and adulthood looks like in such a strange time to come of age. If “Folklore” was characterized as her pandemic album, “Midnights” feels like her are-we-ever-going-to-be-able-to-say-“post-pandemic” album, a work of exasperation and spiritual exhaustion. Here, Swift sounds more authentically like an ambassador of millennial unease than she has in some time.For all its evocations of stasis, though, “Midnights” does represent a maturation in Swift’s perspective, particularly when it comes to depictions of other women. Unlike, say, the regrettable “Better Than Revenge” or even the campily catty “Bad Blood,” the Swift of “Midnights” is no longer chastising other women from a suspiciously lofty position of moral superiority; she’s pointing a finger at a culture that has enforced a different set of rules for her female peers or — occasionally to uncomfortably self-deprecating excess — she’s blaming herself. “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid,” she sings on the intricately composed finale, “Mastermind.” “So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since.”Crucially, though, she’s also revising herself, revisiting those streamlined fairy tales she used to propagate and adding in all the doubts and complications she once left out — or wasn’t yet aware of. Most effective is “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” which plays out like a letter to her younger self, or maybe one of those side-by-side Instagram posts that points out what parts of a too-perfect picture had been Photoshopped. “I hosted parties and starved my body like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss,” Swift sings, presenting the supposedly innocent era of her early stardom with a new overlay of world-weariness and pain.As she suggests on a warm, contented ballad like “Sweet Nothings,” co-written with Alwyn under the pseudonym William Bowery, Swift now seems to have the love she so desperately believed would usher in her happy ending on her early classics like “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “Love Story.” But the brooding “Midnights” is also proof that love hasn’t solved all her problems. The only thing that can help with that, she realizes, at the exhilarating end of “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” is chasing the next song — even if it’s just a more accurate rendering of a scene she’s already set. That, though, is something of a flex. She used to rewrite Shakespeare. Now she rewrites Taylor Swift. More

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      Lil Baby Is No. 1, but Taylor Swift’s Huge Chart Takeover Nears

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      The singer-songwriter’s new album, “Midnights,” won’t hit the Billboard 200 until next week, but after just one weekend it is already the year’s biggest-selling LP.Lil Baby, the Atlanta rapper who turned to music after a stint in prison and became one of his hometown’s biggest new stars, has his third No. 1 album in three years this week with “It’s Only Me.” Meanwhile, the music industry is holding its collective breath for next week’s chart, in anticipation of a gigantic opening for Taylor Swift’s latest.“It’s Only Me,” which features guest spots by Young Thug, Future, Jeremih and EST Gee, had the equivalent of 216,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. Most of its popularity is attributed to streaming, with the album totaling 289 million clicks in its first week out — the third-best streaming tally for a No. 1 album this year, after Bad Bunny (357 million) and Kendrick Lamar (343 million).As impressive as Lil Baby’s numbers are, they have already been dwarfed by those for Swift’s “Midnights,” which was released on Friday and, after just one day, has already become the best-selling album released in 2022, with a strong possibility it could be the first album to open with more than one million equivalent sales in five years. (The last artist to do so? You guessed it, Taylor Swift, with “Reputation.”)In its first day on sale, according to a report in Billboard citing early data from Luminate — which has a longstanding partnership with the magazine for its charts — “Midnights” sold more than 800,000 copies as a complete unit, exceeding the 620,000 copies sold so far of Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which has been out for five months. A major factor in Swift’s success is her strategy of releasing the album in an array of collectible variants on physical media: in addition to its four standard versions on LP and CD, there is an exclusive version sold by Target, not to mention the surprise “3am Edition” released digitally with seven extra songs. (K-pop groups like BTS and Blackpink, of course, have been using this strategy for years.)And those are just the numbers for old-fashioned sales. Both Spotify and Apple Music announced that “Midnights” had broken first-day streaming records on those services, and the album’s numbers are holding strong: On Spotify, for example, tracks from “Midnights” take up 18 of the top 20 spots on its daily U.S. streaming chart as of Monday.Also on this week’s album chart, Red Hot Chili Peppers open at No. 3 with “Return of the Dream Canteen,” their second LP this year, which had the equivalent of 63,000 sales.Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in second place, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is No. 5. More

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      Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

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      Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Dies at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Recording” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.That year, in the interview with The Times, she said that she thought music had the potential to be more emotionally powerful than other art forms, like dance or painting.“There’s something intangible and mysterious about music,” she said. “It can get you more; you can sob more. It’s got a stronger engine.”Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,’‘ she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      Review: ‘Midnights’ Finds Taylor Swift Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

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      The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album returns to the pop sound she left in 2019, and explores a familiar subject: how she is perceived, and how she perceives herself.Taylor Swift has always been at her best when writing about Taylor Swift — she is diaristically pinpoint, a ruthless excavator of her own internal tugs of war. But she also thrives when writing about “Taylor Swift” — the idea, the metanarrative, the character. Swift sees the world seeing her, and rather than shut it out, she absorbs it, making those points of view her own, too. Kind of.It’s those songs that stand out on “Midnights,” her overly familiar sounding and spotty 10th studio album, which is in places a careful recitation of raw love, in others a flashback to past romantic indignities, but maybe most pointedly and effectively a commentary on what it feels like to live as a deeply observed figure, constantly narrativized by others.“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman?” Swift muses on “Anti-Hero,” an eerily shimmering Kate Bush-esque number that’s one of the album’s high points. “Tale as old as time.” At the hook, she returns again and again to the eye-rolled self-own, “I’m the problem, it’s me.” In the song’s video, Swift tosses back drinks with a more exuberantly unhinged version of herself, and a third giantess Swift hovers over the proceedings, bumbling and lightly melancholy.On “Mastermind,” the album’s sparkly closer, she paints her villain origin story, if you’re inclined to see her as a villain: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”Into each pop star life, some outside perspective must intrude, and Swift has long spun gold from that raw material. But there are limitations to this approach, and Swift has hit a junction all superstars eventually arrive at — whether to continue to reckon with the past, or to forge forward boldly into the future.On this count, Swift is mainly looking backward on “Midnights,” an album that often plays like an extension of her 2019 LP “Lover,” which was similarly inconsistent, though fuller-sounding. The songs here are filled to the brim with syrupy synths, giving the album an astral, slow-motion effect, as if Swift were trapped in a reverb chamber.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s Music New LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it. Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose.After a handful of albums that felt like pivots ranging from soft to hard — bonkers pop on “1989”; (relatively) edgy experimentation on “Reputation”; earthy, pandemic isolation character studies on “Folklore” and “Evermore” — “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient.Sometimes, those old modes serve her well. On “Karma,” a largely dim song with an aggressively plastic sound, there’s a twinkle in her voice toward the end when she exhales, “Karma’s a relaxing thought/Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?” On the woozy “Question…?” she’s equally tart: “What’s that that I heard, that you’re still with her?/That’s nice, I’m sure that’s what’s suitable.”But some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century: “Don’t put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart,” she sings on the metallic and tense “Bejeweled.”“Snow on the Beach,” a collaboration with fellow Great American Songwriter Lana Del Rey, begins with light Christmas music energy and never really ascends. Del Rey excels at a kind of rumbling, oozy stasis — it’s like the ecstasy of being caught in a spider’s web — but Swift’s vocals are a mite too cheery to achieve the same effect.Perversely, though, much of the rest of “Midnights,” which was produced by Swift with her regular collaborator Jack Antonoff, constrains her voice. Throughout the album, on songs like “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Maroon,” Swift’s vocals are stacked together to the point of suffocation. Only on “Sweet Nothing,” the romantic playground lullaby Swift wrote with her longtime romantic partner, Joe Alwyn (the actor who uses the pen name William Bowery), does she approach her signature wide-eyed vulnerability.A couple of songs point a way out of the fog. The fleet, breezy and lightly damp “Lavender Haze” includes some sweet singing, though it feels overly reminiscent of the thumping digital folk of Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska.”And the album’s high point is “Vigilante ____,” a slinky, moody electro-cabaret exhale about an antagonist that teems with narrative verve: “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man/You did some bad things but I’m the worst of them.” Here, Swift is leaning into the character version of herself — it’s funny, wry, slightly perturbing. Swift at her self-referential apex.Apart from her pandemic pivot to the bucolic, Swift has been devoting time to rerecordings of her old albums, an offshoot of the ownership battles spurred by the sale of her old masters. Such energy might be good for business, but bad for art. Perhaps similarly, “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments. (At 3 a.m. Friday, Swift released seven bonus tracks, which are comparatively chaotic. Of the new songs, only “Glitch” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” aren’t subtractive.)There is, perhaps, a slightly more cynical read to the sonic choices on “Midnights”: Swift hasn’t toured since 2018, after “Reputation.” The songs from “Lover” have never seen a big stage (and the songs from “Folklore” and “Evermore” largely weren’t designed for one). “Midnights” feels like a sonic place holder, with stadiums in mind.Which all prompts the question of where Swift might go as a midcareer pop star, if she were to pivot once more. Many of the other avenues currently open don’t apply to her — the emotionally icy nu-disco of Dua Lipa; a vocal and cultural flexibility that would allow her to freely collaborate with Latin or K-pop stars. There are songs on “Midnights” — “Midnight Rain,” “Lavender Haze” — that suggest an awareness of the ways Drake and the Weeknd have deployed overcast mood in their vocal and musical production, though she rarely commits. (There are also some not wholly cogent pitch-shifted vocals.) And she rather steadfastly has resisted a return to country, or pop-country, or country-pop.But a template for such a perspective-twisting album already exists: It’s called “Reputation,” and Swift released it in 2017. It was, at the time, somewhat derided, and deeply wrongly at that. Rarely has Swift sounded so amused, so aggrieved, so willing to reckon with the chasm between her self-perception and the perception of everyone else. It was a rowdy, sticky and unrelentingly clever album in which Swift took on herself, and also the world. “Taylor Swift” — bring her back.Taylor Swift“Midnights”(Republic) More

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      Taylor Swift Releases ‘Midnights,’ Her 10th Studio Album

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      The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.The Easter eggs have been thoroughly examined for clues. The marbled vinyl has been pressed and sorted into collectible variants. The fan hashtags are cued up.It is time for a new Taylor Swift album.“Midnights,” Swift’s 10th studio LP, was released at midnight on Friday, the latest chapter in what has been an extraordinarily productive couple of years for Swift, who at 32 remains one of the most potent creative forces in music. She announced the 13-track “Midnights” two months ago, calling it “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” and “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” (True Swifties — or, really, anybody who has paid moderate attention to Swift’s public presentation over the years — knows her fascination with the number 13.)It is Swift’s fifth album in just over two years, following her quarantine-era, indie-folk-style “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and then “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first two rerecordings of her early albums, a project she undertook after her former record label was sold without her participation. “Folklore” won album of the year at the Grammys in 2021.In a sense, “Midnights” is Swift’s return to the pop pipeline after her digressions of the past couple of years. Many of the lyrics, as she suggested, resemble late-night ruminations, pondering life’s pressures, aging, the meaning of love. On the third track, “Anti-Hero,” she sings:I have this thing where I get older but just never wiserMidnights become my afternoonsWhen my depression works the graveyard shiftAll of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the roomAccording to the album’s credits, most of the songs were written and recorded with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, and much of it was recorded at Antonoff’s home studio in Brooklyn and at Electric Lady Studios, the Greenwich Village warren founded by Jimi Hendrix.Lana Del Rey is a featured guest, singing on the track “Snow on the Beach.” Some other intriguing names also pop up in the credits. The actress Zoë Kravitz, who has been making an album with Antonoff, is listed as one of the six songwriters of the first track, “Lavender Haze,” alongside Swift, Antonoff, Mark Anthony Spears (a.k.a. the producer Sounwave), Jahaan Sweet and Sam Dew. Swift’s friendship with Kravitz, as fans know, is close enough that she once acted as an uncredited assistant on a pandemic-era remote photo shoot of Kravitz for The New York Times Magazine.Another song, “Sweet Nothing,” was written by Swift with one William Bowery — an unfamiliar name that popped up in the credits to “Folklore,” which Swift later acknowledged was a pseudonym for the actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend. “They said the end is coming/Everyone’s up to something,” she sings on the track. “I find myself running home to your sweet nothings.”“Midnights” stands a very good chance of being one of the year’s biggest sellers. Swift’s marketing this time has involved a series of kitschy videos on TikTok that revealed song titles, one at time, taken from Ping-Pong balls in a basket, as if on a decades-old local TV spot. Swift even displayed her release-week plan on Instagram, with items laid out on a daily calendar: a “special very chaotic surprise” on Friday at 3 a.m. Eastern time; the release of the music video for “Anti-Hero” at 8 a.m.; “The Tonight Show” on Monday.The surprise turned out to be an expanded version of the album, titled “Midnights (3am Edition),” with seven additional songs, some featuring writing and production from Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” collaborator Aaron Dessner. On social media, Swift called the extra material “other songs we wrote on our journey,” and described the standard 13-track version of “Midnights” as “a complete concept album.”The video for “Anti-Hero,” written and directed by Swift, is a comic portrayal of Swift’s worries about her public image overshadowing her private life, set as a campy retro horror movie, complete with a tan rotary phone with the line cut. The clip includes a skit dramatizing the song’s lines about a dream in which Swift’s family reads her will after “my daughter-in-law kills me for the money.”Beside the coffin we see a portrait of gray-haired Swift cradling a bunch of cats, while her heirs Preston (the stand-up Mike Birbiglia), Kimber (Mary Elizabeth Ellis from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) and Chad (the comedian John Early) argue over whether the line “to my children I leave 13 cents” contains a secret encoded message that means something else. Then they read: “P.S. There’s no secret encoded message that means something else.”Swift announced the cast of actors for other videos from the album, including Laura Dern, Laith Ashley, Dita Von Teese, Pat McGrath, Antonoff and the three members of the band Haim.An important factor in the sales and chart prospects for “Midnights” may be Swift’s embrace of physical music formats like CDs and vinyl LPs, which, because of the way Billboard crunches data about how music is consumed, can have a major impact on chart positions. Swift is releasing four standard versions of “Midnights” on vinyl, each with its own disc color and cover art; they also correspond to four variant CD versions. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website says. Target, which has had a long relationship with Swift, has its own exclusive LP version (on “lavender” vinyl) as well as a CD with three exclusive tracks.The most ingenious or shameless part — take your pick — of Swift’s vinyl strategy is what she has done with the back covers. When turned around and placed on a grid, the four editions display 12 numbers that, when arranged properly, form the hours of a clock. “It could help you tell time,” Swift said, perfectly deadpan, in a recent Instagram video.And not just that. For $49, Swift’s website sells the actual clock — a kit including four walnut wood shelves to hold the LP jackets, “with brass metal clock center piece,” the description reads, “with 2 wooden hands that each have ‘Taylor Swift’ printed in brass ink.”The site adds: “While supplies last.” More