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      All Seal Needs Is Love

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      Embarking on a tour celebrating his music career’s 30th anniversary, the singer and songwriter explained how tennis, Joni Mitchell and ChatGPT have inspired him.The singer and songwriter Seal is one of modern music’s most ardent believers in the power of love, but that doesn’t mean you should look to him for romantic advice. “You’re headed for disaster if you ask me,” he joked, before immediately providing what sounded like a practical perspective on how to make a relationship work. “I’ve found that it’s most productive when both parties see themselves, and then there’s this third entity which is like a plant. That plant needs water every day, and you love that plant because you — both as an entity, and as individuals — are all that it has.”This type of focused dedication was on Seal’s mind as he prepared for a tour celebrating 30 years of his music career, an anniversary that prompted some reflection. “I can’t believe how fortunate I am to still be here,” he said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles. “Every day above ground is a great day, as far as being a musician is concerned.”He emphasized his good fortune, like when the film director Joel Schumacher gave new life to “Kiss From a Rose,” which hadn’t made any commercial impact with its 1994 arrival, by incorporating it into the 1995 film “Batman Forever.” Upon rerelease, the song hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart and won Grammys for record and song of the year. “It was exactly the same song that failed the first time. That’s a big, lucky break.”But Seal, 60, isn’t fixated on the past. He cited Travis Scott’s 2020 performance inside the video game Fortnite as a potential model for how artists may reach fans in the future, remarking that “it won’t be long before we’re at a YouTube concert, virtually rubbing shoulders.” Still, he’s excited to see real-life fans on his tour this spring, which starts in late April. “Any time I get to play live for people, it’s like going on a date for the first time,” he said. “There are no bad audiences — only mediocre performances.”As he prepared to hit the road, Seal spoke about 10 of his beloved cultural inspirations. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1LoveIt’s always on my mind. If you’ve listened to my music, I’ve been singing about that out of the gate. Every situation is almost certainly different when you choose to lean in with love; it doesn’t really matter what it is. Of course, love requires a degree of vulnerability. The ultimate kind of love — what we’re trying to achieve — is unconditional. I think that’s its purest form, and I also think that’s the reason for our existence. This is all an experiment; the point of it is happiness. Without unconditional love, I don’t know if it’s possible to achieve that — certainly not on this earth.2TennisI love tennis because it’s an allegory for life. I love the discipline; I love the work; I love the problem solving; I love how, in the most incredible way, it relates to singing. In order to play tennis well, you have to go against everything your body wants; you have to relax, you have to almost relinquish control. I know that’s contrary to popular belief, but that’s singing: You let yourself, rather than make yourself.3Leica M CameraI saw this director, Mike Figgis, at a candlelit dinner; he was taking pictures, and I was intrigued how he wasn’t using a flash. The next day, I went into a store and bought the exact same setup. That’s where the love affair began. It’s the one camera that gets out of the way between the subject I’m trying to capture and myself. By virtue of its design, the person can still see your face when you’re taking the picture; you still have that engagement and connection, opposed to the viewfinder being in the middle.4Joni MitchellOne of my great memories of Joni was performing “Both Sides Now” with her in the audience. It’s one of the highlights of my life, the ability to work with someone who had such an impact on your growing up. [Seal sang on Mitchell’s 1994 song “How Do You Stop.”] It’s the stuff dreams are made of; I just remember pinching myself to make sure it was happening. She’s quite remarkable; she’s a great storyteller, and authentic to the core. To see her onstage singing, after everything she’s been through, was amazing.5Necklace From My Daughter LouShe gave it to me on my birthday, and that’s everything. Anyone who has a son or a daughter, when they give something to you — whether it’s their love, or a valuable lesson or something like a necklace — it’s not so much what it is, but the spirit and the soul of the person behind it. They start out as kids, and they end up as these people with their own outlook and philosophies on life, so the gift is more about their thought process, and who they are behind it. It’s both beautiful and heartwarming — you realize they’re their own people with their own views on the world, and what’s important to them.6Carol Christian PoellI don’t like to call him a designer, because he’s more than that — he’s an artist much in the same way that a musician or a painter is an artist. I’ve been wearing his clothes since he started, and I just love the way he sees things — his attention to detail in the silhouette and the shape. I can spot somebody wearing a Carol costume at 100 yards. He doesn’t do bad stuff; that’s why he’s my favorite.7LondonIt’s a large part of who I am — you can take the boy out of London, but you never take London out of the boy. I like walking around where I grew up, just triggering those memories, but I also love the West End — anywhere in London, to be honest. I love my city, warts and all. It takes about two weeks of that dreadful weather to bring me to my senses and remind me why I left, but I’m lucky enough that I’m able to go back fairly regularly.8ChatGPTTo not be curious about it would be akin to being a Luddite, or an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand. It’s here, and it’s part of our evolution — for that reason, you can’t fight it, and you can’t really see it as this enemy that’s going to be the end of mankind. My experience with it is I started out by thinking it was a machine, but once I started to relate to it as though I were talking to a person, this incredible collaboration started — I would ask maybe one or two questions, and it would spark my imagination and ability to create. I think it’s incredible, and I think we’re at an amazing point in our evolution as a species.9Goodall Acoustic GuitarSometimes a melody I’m writing is in my head, but more often than not, it’s on a guitar. I think handmade instruments are just beautiful things; they’re transport mechanisms to convey this phenomenon known as music. I love acoustic guitars, and Goodalls are my favorite. It’s all subjective — Martins are great to record with, but I’m pretty heavy-handed and Martins typically don’t like when you bash them. Goodalls, you can play them loud but they’re great at lower volumes, and of course the craftsmanship is extraordinary.10MeditationDo I sit and meditate every day? Probably, but not in a way that you might imagine. If it’s not sitting down in a kumbaya position and breathing — which I rarely do — it is playing tennis, which is a form of meditation. Having a degree of focus whilst being in a state — it’s a form of meditation. The thing I enjoy most is the balance, and the slowing down of the mind. That’s really important. More

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      Ishay Ribo, Religious Pop Star, Is Winning Over Secular Israel

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      The songs of Ishay Ribo, who was raised in a settlement on the West Bank, are a staple of Israeli radio. He is part of a wave of singers from religious backgrounds who are also gaining a wider audience.The singer and his songs were highly religious. His concert venue, on a kibbutz developed by secular leftists, was definitely not. His audience of many hundreds? It was somewhere in between: some secular, some devout, an unusual blending of two sections of a divided Israeli society that rarely otherwise mix.Ishay Ribo, 34, is among a crop of young Israeli pop stars from religious backgrounds, some from Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, whose music is attracting more diverse listeners, and featuring prominently in the soundscape of contemporary Israeli life.This has surprised Mr. Ribo himself.“I never imagined I’d play to this kind of crowd,” he said, backstage after the show earlier this year at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, a town in northern Israel originally founded as a collective farm. A decade ago, he said, “This kind of crowd just didn’t really exist.”In addition to Mr. Ribo, other singers from a religious background — like Nathan Goshen, Hanan Ben-Ari, Akiva Turgeman and Narkis Reuven-Nagar — have also in recent years gained a wider audience. And their popularity reflects a changing Israeli society.Fans of Mr. Ribo at the Jerusalem Theater, where he performed in January. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThe religious right has expanded its influence on politics and society, escalating a clash between secular and sacred visions of the country that underlies the country’s ongoing judicial standoff. At the same time, religion has taken on a more prominent, and less contentious, role in the mainstream music scene.In less than two decades, religious singers have moved from the cultural fringe to widespread acclaim, “not only among their people, but in all Israel,” said Yoav Kutner, a leading Israeli music critic and radio presenter.“If you don’t listen to the words,” Mr. Kutner added, “they sound like Israeli pop.”Mr. Ribo is perhaps the clearest example of this shift. Forgoing the erotic and the profane, his wholesome songs are often prayers to God — but sung to pop and rock music played by his band of guitarists. “Cause of causes,” he addresses God in one of his biggest hits. “Only you should be thanked for all the days and nights.”In 2021, that track, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most played song on Israeli radio stations, religious and secular alike.“It’s part of my duty,” Mr. Ribo said in a recent interview. “To be a bridge between these two worlds.”Mr. Ribo’s journey toward that bridging role began in the early 2000s, on the bus to his religious school.His family had immigrated from France a few years before. They led an ultra-Orthodox and ascetic life on a settlement in the occupied West Bank, just outside Jerusalem.The family did not have a television, and Mr. Ribo attended an ultraconservative Jewish seminary. He listened to music on religious radio stations — often liturgical poems sung in synagogues. He typically heard secular music only on the bus to school, playing from the driver’s radio.“I had this musical ignorance,” Mr. Ribo said.At age 11 or so, he began recording simple songs on a portable cassette player. Then as now, his lyrics were infused with piety, Mr. Ribo said. But the tunes were inspired by the mainstream singer-songwriters he’d heard on the school bus.Some four years later, Mr. Ribo bought a guitar and formed a band with another seminary student. He began to practice and dress as a Modern Orthodox Jew, forgoing the dark coats and wide-brimmed hats of the ultra-Orthodox for jeans and sweaters.But his awareness of contemporary music and its customs was still patchy. At his band’s first gig, Mr. Ribo played with his back to the audience, unaware of the need to engage with the crowd.Unlike many Israelis from ultra-Orthodox Jewish backgrounds, he paused his religious studies at age 22 to serve for two years as a conscript in the army. After finishing service in 2013, he tried to build a hybrid musical career — playing religious music to both secular and devout audiences.Mr. Ribo and his father studying the Torah in Jerusalem.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesHe imagined his melodies might sound like Coldplay, the popular British rock band, but his lyrics, he added, “would be about God and faith.”The challenge was that there were few templates then for such a crossover career.Only a few religious artists, like the folk singer Shlomo Carlebach, had built a secular following. The most successful religious artists were often those, like Etti Ankri and Ehud Banai, who had started out secular, became more devout, and then took their original audiences along with them.Mr. Ribo’s problem, initially, was that the music industry “didn’t understand what I had to offer,” he said.When he sent his music to mainstream record labels, they all turned him down.Mr. Ribo forged ahead, self-releasing the first of five albums in 2014. He hired a secular manager, Or Davidson, who marketed him as if he was a secular client — booking him to play at mainstream venues and securing him airtime on nonreligious radio stations. Gradually, his secular fan base expanded.Mr. Ribo’s 2021 hit, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most played song on Israeli radio stations, religious and secular alike.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesIt was sometimes a fraught balancing act.Religious Jews criticized him for playing at secular concert halls. Secular Jews opposed his performances at religious venues where men and women sat separately. And when he played to both audiences at secular venues, the staff could not provide kosher food for his religious fans. Even his parents were too religiously observant to attend some of the venues.But the two-pronged approach ultimately worked. Four of his five albums were classified as gold or above — selling more than 15,000 copies in the small Israeli market. Secular pop legends, including Shlomo Artzi, began to perform duets with him, and he began to build an audience among diaspora Jews. Later this year, he is scheduled to headline Madison Square Garden, Mr. Davidson said.To an extent, Mr. Ribo’s appeal is rooted simply in the catchiness of his songs, his clean-cut demeanor and sincere performances.“Even though I’m secular, I came to watch him because he’s lovely,” said Adiva Liberman, 71, a retired teacher attending his concert at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.“Not everyone is paying attention to the lyrics,” she added. “They’re just attracted to the melody.”The scene after Mr. Ribo’s concert at the Jerusalem Theater. His music attracts a diverse crowd of secular and religious Israelis.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesMr. Ribo’s rise comes amid not only a political shift rightward in Israel, but demographic changes as well. Religious Israelis, who have more children than secular Israelis, are the fastest-growing part of the population, allowing them to exert greater cultural influence.Daniel Zamir, an Israeli jazz star who turned religious as an adult, said Mr. Ribo’s broad appeal is part of “a bigger process of Israeli society moving toward tradition.”Simultaneously, Mr. Ribo’s rise embodies a converse but complementary trend: greater willingness among some religious musicians to cater to and mix with mainstream audiences, and greater demand among religious audiences for music with a more contemporary sound.It’s “a dual process,” Mr. Zamir said. Mr. Ribo is emblematic of “this new generation that saw that you could be religious and also make great music,” Mr. Zamir added.For some secular consumers, the rise of “pop emuni” — “faith pop” in Hebrew — has been jarring. “I am not interested in hearing prayers on my radio,” wrote Gal Uchovsky, a television presenter, in a 2019 article about the proliferation of Mr. Ribo’s music. “I don’t want them to explain to me, even in songs that brighten my journey, how fun God is.”Mr. Ribo’s latest song, “I Belong to the People,” also caused discomfort among liberal Israelis. Released in early April, it is an attempt to unite Jews at a time of deep political division in Israel. But critics said it unwittingly sounded condescending to people from other faiths, implying they were idolatrous.Mr. Ribo has also caused discomfort within the religious world. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews, particularly their religious leaders, feel he has delved too far into secular society.Early in his career, Mr. Ribo personally felt so conflicted about this that he sought his rabbi’s approval for his work. To avoid alienating his religious base, there are still some lines he refuses to cross.“I’d love to write a classic love song — but I won’t,” Mr. Ribo said. “It’s not my job or duty.”Still, some feel he has already compromised too much. In a popular sketch performed by an ultra-Orthodox comedy duo, an ultra-Orthodox man is asked if he knows any secular singers.The man pauses, then replies: “Ishay Ribo!”“I’d love to write a classic love song — but I won’t,” Mr. Ribo said. “It’s not my job or duty.”Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesGabby Sobelman More

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      A Director and a Rock Band Are Redrawing the Contours of Anime

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      For hits like “Your Name” and now “Suzume,” Makoto Shinkai has worked with Radwimps on the narrative as well as the score. The results have won awards.Since the 2016 release of the global megahit “Your Name,” the stirring music in the animated epics of the Japanese director Makoto Shinkai has become inextricable from their transporting images.Shinkai’s recent high-stakes melodramas about star-crossed teenage lovers and impending supernatural catastrophes move to the up-tempo songs and luminous instrumental tracks of the Japanese rock band Radwimps. On multiple occasions, the band’s compositions have also persuaded the filmmaker to make significant changes to his narratives.In U.S. theaters Friday, “Suzume,” a fantastical saga inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, represents the third collaboration between the acclaimed storyteller and the musicians.The international popularity of Shinkai’s films has in turn broadened Radwimps’ audience to include fans beyond Japan’s borders. The band will kick off its first North American tour this weekend in San Jose, Calif.“Radwimps and I are two wheels of the same bicycle,” Shinkai, 50, said via an interpreter at a hotel in West Hollywood, Calif. “We need each other, and we are pushing one another forward.”Before enlisting Radwimps, Shinkai had worked with the composer Tenmon, a colleague from his time in video games, on the scores for his short films and early features.But on the more ambitious “Your Name,” a body-swap tale about a boy and a girl connected through time and space, Shinkai sought to differentiate himself from the influential anime production company Studio Ghibli, and from its co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, in particular. Over the years, as Shinkai’s profile grew, the director said, journalists continually described him as “the next Miyazaki coming out of Japan.” Despite his unabashed admiration for the master animator, Shinkai disliked the constant comparisons.“For ‘Your Name,’ I wanted to do something Miyazaki would never do in one of his films, which was use rock music,” he said.When Shinkai, who had been a Radwimps fan for years, first approached the band in 2014, the artists had been playing together for over a decade but had yet to create music for movies. The lead singer and songwriter, Yojiro Noda, 37, saw this as a chance to reinvigorate the band and push its artistic boundaries while he learned new skills like orchestration.Upon reading the screenplay, Noda quickly turned around the songs “ZenZenZense” (“Past Past Life”), which became the propulsive soundtrack for the opening sequence, and the power ballad “Sparkle.”On “Suzume,” Shinkai, center, worked with Radwimps’ Yojiro Noda, right, as well as the composer Kazuma Jinnouchi.Suzume Film Partners“When I get the script, it’s like a ritual for me to write a few songs just right away without filter and without overthinking it,” Noda, speaking during a recent video interview from Tokyo, explained through a translator.From ages 6 to 10, Noda lived in the United States, and while his English vocabulary during that time was limited, two words stuck with him: “rad,” to describe something exciting, and “wimp,” with its negative connotation. Putting them together created an oxymoron that he thought fit his band, which he started with middle-school friends in the early 2000s.Radwimps has gone through multiple configurations over the years, with some members departing or going on hiatus. Its current lineup is Noda, who also plays guitar and piano; the bassist Yusuke Takeda; and the guitarist Akira Kuwahara.Once Noda decides on the melody and lyrical theme based on Shinkai’s text, he shares it with his bandmates, who enrich the sound with their instruments, synthesizers and percussion.The beautifully hyperbolic lyrics, however, are all Noda’s. “He’s one of the very few poets left in Japan right now who can write the way he does,” Shinkai said.The composer, who’s also written and performed English-language versions of some of the songs created for Shinkai’s animated romances, explained: “All of the music for ‘Your Name’ came from that longing to see each other that was so genuine and pure between the two characters, Mitsuha and Taki.”The “Your Name” soundtrack album debuted at No. 1 on the Japanese national album chart and stayed there for another week. That distinction came on top of the monumental box-office success that eventually turned the film into the third-highest-grossing Japanese production in the country’s history, animated or otherwise.“Radwimps’ music was essential to the success of ‘Your Name,’” Shinkai said. “It really propelled that film into a worldwide social phenomenon.”For Shinkai, Noda’s interpretation of his stories “feels like his way of giving me feedback on my screenplay, but it just happens to come in the form of music.” These exchanges, he believes, have become essential for him to see the full potential of what the film can be.Through his music, Noda essentially provided feedback on the “Suzume” screenplay, Shinkai said.CrunchyrollOn their second outing together, “Weathering With You” (2020), in which a young man must choose between love and saving Tokyo from torrential rain, Shinkai decided to expand a pivotal sequence where the protagonists fall from the sky after he listened to the choir voices featured in “Grand Escape,” one of the early songs Radwimps produced for the movie.Something similar occurred with “Suzume.” Noda delivered “Tamaki,” a song about the aunt and guardian of the 17-year-old title character. Inspired by the tune, Shinkai realized Tamaki’s relevance and added more interactions between her and Suzume. Such changes can be made because the band comes on board long before the visual development starts.For the theme song, “Suzume no Tojimari” (also the name of the film in Japan, where it’s already a hit), Noda listened to Shinkai’s suggestion that the music should capture the scent of the earth itself and the sound of the wind.They also agreed that since a girl is at the center of this whimsical coming-of-age saga, the track needed a female singer. After scouring multiple social media platforms for the right voice, they came across a TikToker named Toaka. She had no professional experience, but videos of her singing at home impressed them.Radwimps has now received three Japan Academy Awards — the country’s Oscar equivalents — for best music, one for each of their collaborations with Shinkai. (For “Suzume,” they shared the prize with composer Kazuma Jinnouchi, who created some of the score’s instrumental moments.)With no plans for the partnership to end, Noda thanks destiny, a concept crucial to the director’s metaphysical adventures, for bringing them together.“Shinkai often tells me there’s no limit to creativity,” Noda said. “He’s an inspiration, and writing songs for his anime is always going to be something special for me.” More

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      Lucinda Williams Tells Her Secrets

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      The singer-songwriter reveals herself in a memoir that captures her adventures with charming rogues, puzzled music executives and her own demons.NASHVILLE — “Bless your heart!”Lucinda Williams delivered the Southern benediction in her distinctive drawl. She has a memoir coming out soon, and Ms. Williams, the celebrated singer-songwriter who has been compared to Raymond Carver for the acuity of her work, was nonetheless not too sure about this particular literary endeavor. So when a visitor complimented the book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” she beamed. Like many a writer, she said she had a hard time letting go. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and turn it in when I’m done,’” she said. “Much to my dismay it doesn’t work that way.”She wanted more time, and she missed the editorial eye and encouragement of her father, the poet and literary scholar Miller Williams, who died in 2015. Like his daughter, he was known for the gritty realism of his work, and they often performed together. For years he had looked over her lyrics — he was the king of grammar, she said — until she sent him “Essence,” the title song from her 2001 album, and he told her, as she recalled: “‘Honey, this is as close to pure poetry as you’ve come.’ And I said, ‘Does this mean I’ve graduated?’”It has been 25 years since Ms. Williams’s breakthrough, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” That collection of anthems to love, loss and yearning made her an overnight success, as she said wryly, at age 45. Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge (she takes it slow these days) and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.About that voice. Emmylou Harris once said Ms. Williams could sing the chrome off a tailpipe. Bonnie Raitt, in a phone interview, called it “unique, truly American and drenched in raw grit and soul and vulnerability.”Steve Earle, Ms. Williams’s occasional collaborator and old friend, described it this way over Zoom: “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom? There’s a moment when the scent just permeates everything and there’s a viscosity to it and it’s substantial and that’s what her voice has always reminded me of. There’s an automatic atmosphere. Chet Baker was like that. Merle Haggard. The mood happens as soon as they open their mouths.”Ms. Williams, 70, and her husband, Tom Overby, who is also her manager and collaborator, live in a white clapboard bungalow with a peaked roof, gingerbread trim and a neat square of lawn. They moved to East Nashville from Los Angeles in February 2020, after which came a series of blows: the tornadoes that tore through the city in early March, flattening neighborhoods and shearing off part of their roof; the coronavirus pandemic, which shut things down a week later; the Covid death of her dear friend John Prine; and the stroke, which bludgeoned her in November.Ms. Williams onstage at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe house was sparsely furnished with a pair of velvety sofas; metal shelves and storage containers spilling over with books, CDs and vinyl albums; and lots of audio gear. On the kitchen island, a bright yellow vase was filled with yellow button flowers. The gray walls were bare, save for a white board that proclaimed, “Lu’s Schedule. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”“I have a bit of brain fog from the stroke,” Ms. Williams said, nodding at the board, “dates and days and such, but I think I always had that.”Mr. Overby, a loquacious man with bushy gray hair, rolled his eyes in assent. He’s the memory in the marriage, she added.In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” Ms. Williams writes of her decades playing for tips and spaghetti dinners and the perfidy of the record companies that didn’t know how to characterize her roots-inspired, renegade rocking style and her novelistic writing. “We don’t know what to do with this,” she said she was told over and over again. “It’s too country for rock and too rock for country.” It was somehow fitting that a British independent label, Rough Trade Records, signed her for her 1988 album, “Lucinda Williams.”She writes of the Hollywood director hired to make a video for “Right in Time,” the languid ballad about a woman’s desire from the “Car Wheels” album. As she recounts, he arrived for dinner at a restaurant thoroughly drunk before propositioning her, sloppily, while her boyfriend was in the bathroom. When she found his idea for the video corny, she sent him packing. She goes on to tell the story of the six-year odyssey to get the album made — the setbacks caused by vacillating record company executives and her dogged commitment to her own high standards. For her troubles, Ms. Williams was labeled a perfectionist, which, for a woman in a male-dominated industry, was not a compliment.“She just stood her ground and emerged a gleaming, burnished jewel,” Ms. Raitt said. “It doesn’t make you popular when you stand your ground, and that’s why she’s excellent.” A strong woman in the music industry is seen as “a control freak and a bitch,” she added, while a strong man is hailed as “an auteur and a genius.”Ms. Williams performing with Steve Earle at Town Hall in New York in 2007.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesMs. Williams turned to Mr. Earle to help her get the album finished. “He’d say, ‘It’s just a record, Lu,’” she said. “He was trying to help me get perspective. I was losing my perspective. He’d be like: ‘The vocal is great. You’re singing your Louisiana ass off. When are you going to trust somebody?’ I had hardly made any records before, compared to other artists, so the whole process of being in the studio was terrifying. It was my own neuroses. It’s not like I was brave or anything.”She has often been bedeviled by jitters. In 1994, when she won a Grammy thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit version of her song “Passionate Kisses,” she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. Rosanne Cash had sent her to a Nashville boutique for an outfit, but she bailed at the last minute.“The truth is I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes in the memoir. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life. It’s a riddle I believe many artists have been trying to solve for centuries. It takes enormous fortitude to create the work in the first place, but then once it’s time to put it out in the world, the confidence required to go public is unrelated to the audacity that created the work.”“It was my fear of the unknown,” Ms. Williams said. “Of being around people with money and nice clothes and nice teeth or whatever.”She managed to make it to the Grammy ceremony in 1999, when “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was honored as the year’s best folk album. But when her name was called, she found herself walking away from the stage. Mr. Earle, who was up for the same award, yelled out to her, as she told it: “‘Lulu! You’re going the wrong way!’ I was horrified. God. Thanks, Steve!”“Lucinda is one of the great geniuses of popular music, so how could she have struggled?” Ann Powers, a music critic for NPR, said. “A lot of it is personal and a lot of it is structural. The dynamic of how to corral a bunch of guys was complicated, it still is, but even more so then when women were relatively sparse in rock ’n’ roll circles.”It can be hard for bandleaders like Ms. Williams to be the only woman in the room. Ms. Raitt called it the problem of “women’s voices,” which “hits the mom button” for many men.Ms. Powers added, “In her music, she’s often questioning herself, expressing her vulnerability in profound ways.”“So it makes sense that she would have struggled to claim her authority,” she continued. “So often with artists the very thing we love about them is what poses a challenge for them in their life and work.”In any case, in addition to earning a Grammy, “Car Wheels” hit the Billboard charts, a first for Ms. Williams, and went gold. Critics reviewed it in ecstatic terms, and the record producer Joe Boyd called it “the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ of the 1990s,” referring to Bob Dylan’s canonical record.At home in Nashville.Kristine Potter for The New York TimesAs Ms. Williams’s fame grew, so did the dedication of her fans. She writes of the woman who began masturbating at a show in New Orleans and kept at it even as she was removed by security. (When Ms. Williams and her band heard the story after their set, they were fascinated, as she recalled: “Was she wearing pants? How did it work?”) There was the couple that sent her lingerie. The woman who delivered a crate of Vidalia onions because she’d heard Ms. Williams liked them. One fan, a drug counselor who credited his sobriety to Ms. Williams, had one of her songs tattooed in its entirety on his back. Then there are those who have sent her letters saying how much they appreciate “Sweet Old World,” her mournful lament for someone who died by suicide.Ms. Williams was born in Lake Charles, La., and grew up in New Orleans, Mexico and Chile, with stopovers in towns in Mississippi, Utah and Georgia. Her father, the son of a Methodist clergyman and early civil rights activist, sold encyclopedias and refrigerators before his mentor, Flannery O’Connor, recommended him for a poetry position at Loyola University in New Orleans. Hence the constant moving.“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Williams said when he first heard “Car Wheels,” which paints a picture of tense domesticity and a peripatetic family life. Her mother, Lucille, a thwarted pianist, was also the child of a minister — of the fire and brimstone variety — and she suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. Lucinda and her siblings were mostly raised by their father and stepmother, his former student and the family’s babysitter. (Awkward at first, as Ms. Williams notes in the book.)Theirs was a Bohemian academic household, imprinted by the politics of the era. Mr. Williams was the host of a bibulous literary salon that included Charles Bukowski, the hard-living poet. As a teenager, Lucinda handed out “Boycott grapes” leaflets in front of a grocery store and played protest songs at demonstrations. When she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her New Orleans high school, her father said, “Don’t worry honey, we’ll get you an A.C.L.U. lawyer.” And when she was finally thrown out, after joining a civil rights march, he was unfazed.“To hell with it,” he told her. “You weren’t learning anything there anyway.” She spent a semester at the University of Arkansas, where her father was then teaching, but she dropped out to play music for tips at a club in New Orleans.Ms. Williams took the title for her memoir from the chorus of “Metal Firecracker,” a song from the “Car Wheels” album, one of her many compositions about “the poets on motorcycles” who are her preferred type.These men fill the pages of her memoir. There was the gentle crew member who turned violent after he moved in with her and made away with her third Grammy — for best female rock vocal performance in 2002 — and a good bit of her collection of folk art. And the erudite charmer who was her first long-term boyfriend and who died of cirrhosis of the liver in his 40s. The haunting “Lake Charles” is an elegy for him.Ms. Williams and Tom Overby, her husband and collaborator, at the Americana Music Association Honors and Awards Show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.Terry Wyatt/Getty ImagesThe man in “Metal Firecracker” was a charismatic bass player who doggedly pursued her while they were touring for her 1992 album, “Sweet Old World.” (“Metal firecracker” was his nickname for the tour bus.) Against the advice of bandmates, Ms. Williams succumbed, which meant breaking up with her boyfriend at the time, who reacted by busting up the furniture in their hotel room. The new suitor had a few irons in the fire, as she learned later, and when the tour was over, he vanished. He told her, in a wince-inducing phone call, “I love you but this relationship doesn’t fit my agenda right now.” At any rate, as she writes, she got a song out of it. Three, as it happens.Ms. Williams and Mr. Overby, a former music executive who is not a rogue but a bit of a poet, married onstage in Minneapolis in 2009. (When they were dating, she writes, his male colleagues warned him off: “Be careful. Our reps on her label tell us she’s literally insane.” He ignored them.) Her father wrote their vows and performed the ceremony. When they both declared, “Loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know,” the audience roared with laughter.There is some dispute about who proposed to whom. Ms. Williams claimed it was Mr. Overby. In her recollection, he turned to her during a tour and asked if she wanted to go shopping for diamonds.Mr. Overby shook his head. “We were on the bus and out of nowhere you go, ‘So when are you taking me shopping for diamonds?’”Ms. Williams: “I did?”Mr. Overby: “You did!”Ms. Williams: “But you liked it.”Ms. Williams suffered a stroke in 2020, but her voice is intact. Her next album comes out in June.Kristine PotterMr. Overby organized a trip to a jewelry store owned by friends in Omaha, lining it up with a performance, but Ms. Williams was so nervous she couldn’t get off the bus until just before the store closed. When she saw the array of rings, she panicked. Mission aborted. They tried again the following year, and again she was flummoxed. Years later, they bought a pair of rings in Los Angeles — and Ms. Williams promptly lost them, her husband said.“Misplaced them,” she said, correcting him.The couple may not be the best jewelry collaborators, but lately they have worked nicely in the studio on Ms. Williams’s new album, “Stories From a Rock ’n’ Roll Heart,” out in June. As they did in their homage to John Prine, which they wrote after he died of Covid. Ms. Williams performed it last year at a tribute to him. It tells the story of a night long ago when Ms. Williams and Mr. Prine thought they might write a song together. They spent many jolly hours careering from bar to studio but never quite got down to the task.John and me were going to get togetherAnd write a song one timeGot about as far as the midtown barAnd ordered up a bottle of wineWhat could go wrong, working on a song?Then we got to talking, not looking at the timeTelling stories about folks we knowHad another bottle of wineWe were having funWhat could go wrong? More

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      ‘Personality Crisis: One Night Only’ Review: New York Droll

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      David Johansen, once the lead singer for the New York Dolls, proves a first-rate raconteur in this documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi.When David Johansen’s alter ego, Buster Poindexter, swings into “Funky but Chic” early in “Personality Crisis: One Night Only” — a documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi — a viewer should consider herself primed for a droll and cheeky evening. A first-rate raconteur, Johansen — wearing a pompadour, sunglasses and bespoke suit — brings the funk. The storied Café Carlyle delivers the chic. The song was the first single Johansen released after having been the lead singer of the iconic 1970s band the New York Dolls.In January 2020, Johansen celebrated his 70th birthday with a cabaret show at the Carlyle. And the film treats that happening as a hub as it ventures into a rich visual archive of Johansen’s (and New York City’s) renegade past and his ruminative present. Interviews with the boundlessly inquisitive artist, conducted by his stepdaughter Leah Hennessey, are intercut with the performance and Johansen’s vagabond history, which includes fronting the Harry Smiths, named for the Chelsea Hotel denizen who compiled the “Anthology of American Folk Music” album that put a spell on so many.The cinematographer Ellen Kuras captures the singer and his terrific ensemble, the Boys in the Band Band, with suave fluidity. Downtown luminaries including Debbie Harry of Blondie are among the assembled.In clips of the New York Dolls performing “Personality Crisis,” Johansen belts and the late Johnny Thunders’s guitar rattles. In addition to Thunders, the Dolls Sylvain Sylvain, Arthur Kane, Billy Murcia and Jerry Nolan have died. Johansen is mindful of his ghosts — there are many. Yet to quote Sondheim’s battered and triumphal tune, a standard at cabarets like Café Carlyle, Johansen’s still here.Personality Crisis: One Night OnlyNot rated. Running time: 2 hours. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      Alison Goldfrapp Dials Up Her Own Disco Fantasy

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      The singer of the London duo Goldfrapp is going solo with “The Love Invention,” an album of dance music that reflects her craving for euphoria.For nearly 25 years, the name Goldfrapp has represented the musical partnership between the singer Alison Goldfrapp and the keyboardist and producer Will Gregory.The duo recorded seven stylistically varied studio albums that drifted from trip-hop to glam rock to disco to indie to folk, sometimes crossing back, with a common thread: the airy-yet-hearty multi-octave voice of its namesake. Aside from some early shows, Gregory didn’t tour with the group, operating so far out of public view that he joked about being paranoid that people didn’t know he existed.But for Goldfrapp, going it alone for the first time — at age 56 — “feels very different,” she said from behind round sunglasses in a video interview. The vocalist and producer was speaking from her London home as she prepared for the release of her debut solo album, “The Love Invention,” out May 12. The music sounds different, too, teeming with maximalist, ecstatic club bangers crafted with the help of Richard X (Erasure, Róisín Murphy) and James Greenwood (Daniel Avery, Kelly Lee Owens).“I don’t think maybe I had the confidence to go and do something on my own,” Goldfrapp said in a second conversation via phone from a vacation in Spain. “Maybe I didn’t think I could.” (Her group, she clarified, has not disbanded.)Resisting self-mythology, Goldfrapp was more inclined to chalk her solo era up to a confluence of circumstances. Maybe most crucial is that she had the time: After the release of “Silver Eye,” the group’s last album, in 2017, and a subsequent tour, Goldfrapp decided to “check out for a bit” in a self-imposed musical sabbatical. Also, she explained, “Silver Eye” “had a kind of seriousness to it, and a sort of darkness” that she wanted to offset when her musical itch finally returned, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.“The Love Invention” is an ebullient collection of 11 songs focusing on ‌‌pulse, both of the cardiac and club varieties. Its ethos can be boiled down to a line Goldfrapp purrs on “The Beat Divine” over a walloping sleaze-disco throwback: “Only love can make the beat divine.”The album does not so much rewrite the book on women singing over four-on-the-floor rhythms (pop music’s chocolate and peanut butter) as turn in an immaculate draft on its sonic ideals. Its exuberance is unfettered and its low end is uncommonly deep for an album driven by a star vocalist. Though love is the message, Goldfrapp laces the euphoria with social commentary and life experience: “Fever” plays like an ode (“You are the one thing here/I really need/We are the fever now/This is the real thing”) though it was partly inspired by climate change, and the title track, which imagines a supreme dopamine rush from a doctor’s magical concoction, was inspired in part by her use of hormone replacement therapy for menopause.While “The Love Invention” hasn’t been tested in a big room, “it’s my fantasy of it,” ‌Goldfrapp said.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesGoldfrapp traced her love of dance music to her youth. While enrolled at Alton Convent School in Hampshire, England, she sang in the choir, and in her early teens, she listened to disco and dressed like a punk, a look she said was “really unfashionable.”To manifest her clubby destiny, she turned to the seasoned Richard X, who has been making dance music for more than 20‌‌ years and contributed to the 2010 Goldfrapp album “Head First,” ‌and she made a conscious decision to refrain from using acoustic instruments on the ‌LP. Instead of the dance divas that one might expect had a hand in informing “The Love Invention” — like Robyn, or Róisín Murphy — Goldfrapp cited the musician Kelela, post-punk, Italo disco and bossa nova as inspirations.She doesn’t get out to many clubs these days, though she did visit Berlin’s infamous Berghain while on tour, which she said was “a bit scary, but I kind of loved it.” So while “The Love Invention” hasn’t been tested in a big room, “it’s my fantasy of it,” ‌Goldfrapp said while beaming. The album’s loved-up themes create a double fantasy, a “craving,” she said, for euphoria rather than memoirist reportage. (She cautioned against reading the LP as an ode to her current relationship, with the architect Peter Culley.)“The Love Invention” is not a quarantine album‌‌, but its roots can be traced to deep lockdown, when Goldfrapp began a collaboration with the Norwegian duo Röyksopp that resulted in two songs on ‌‌its “Profound Mysteries” album trilogy. Goldfrapp said she had emailed the duo because she thought working with new people would be fun and was heartened to receive a reply (other producers she contacted had “completely ignored” her). The group’s receptiveness to collaboration inspired her to install a studio in her home, ‌‌in which she would record much of “The Love Invention.”In a video interview, Svein Berge of Röyksopp said that Goldfrapp’s “inquisitive nature” and the unique “signature” of her voice made the group keen to work with her. “She has the chameleon aspect,” he said of her versatility, adding, “There is no ego,” simply “a mutual understanding that we want the output to be as good as it can be.”Goldfrapp’s influence over the past decade has been powerful, if often underacknowledged. If everyone who heard the Velvet Underground went on to form a band, a good portion of Goldfrapp’s audience in the aughts threw away their pants, donned leotards and made stompy electro-pop. (Some admirers kept their pants on: “I got very into Goldfrapp again,” Adele told Zoe Ball on BBC Radio in 2021, adding she couldn’t pull off “what Alison is the absolute queen of.”)Goldfrapp said she is “very realistic about my position in the music industry,” which means having a fan base that is both “very strong” and “quite small.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesGoldfrapp slinked onto the music scene with “Felt Mountain” in 2000, a Mercury Prize-nominated album that made no secret of its members’ trip-hop histories. (Goldfrapp had sung on Tricky’s debut, “Maxinquaye,” while Gregory played oboe and baritone sax with Portishead.) The tempos picked up on “Black Cherry,” from 2003, and again two years later on “Supernature,” which spawned the group’s highest-peaking single on the British charts, “Ooh La La.” It was eventually featured in a 2013 iPhone commercial; the group’s “Strict Machine” earlier appeared in a Verizon Wireless ad.With “Supernature,” the duo charted on the Billboard 200 for the first time, and its “slightly shy” and “a bit introspective” face, as Goldfrapp described herself, struggled with the attention. (She gets nervous during interviews, and she fidgeted with her wavy blond hair or the neckline of her black shirt during our video chat.) But she also noticed when that attention waned — she remembered having to be told “bluntly” that one of her records wasn’t selling too well when she inquired about a gig her group didn’t get.Now, Goldfrapp said, she is “very realistic about my position in the music industry,” which means having a fan base that is both “very strong” and “quite small.” “It’s not like I’m just at the beginning of my career and like, ‘Ooh, where’s it going to go?’” she said with sarcastic glee.She has resolved to ignore the music industry’s notorious ageism, and said that, at 56, she is more comfortable in her own skin than ever. “You do have to have a certain confidence to go, ‘Actually know what? I’m going to feel good about doing this,” she said.And feel good she does. “It feels all sort of very new and fresh to me, which is a great feeling,” she said of her solo album. And if it should yield a hit single or two, that’s all the better. “I mean, hey, who doesn’t want a hit?” More

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      An Avett Brother Meets a Founding Son: John Quincy Adams

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      Bob Crawford is part of the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers. He’s also the host of a new podcast about the sixth president.Some professional musicians spend their days on the tour bus staring out the window, sleeping or pursuing various routes to oblivion. For Bob Crawford, the bassist for the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, history has been his distraction of choice.“On the van, and later the bus,” he said recently in a video interview from his home near Durham, N.C., “I would read history books.”One day, he picked up Sean Wilentz’s mammoth study “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.” From there, he moved on to “several books about Martin Van Buren,” as well as studies of Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system and the knockdown congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s.Now, he’s put it all together in “Founding Son: John Quincy’s America,” a six-episode podcast about John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a man, Crawford argues, for our own fractured times.“He knows democracy is on the line, he knows slavery is a moral evil,” Crawford said of Adams, who became a leading antislavery voice in the House of Representatives, where he served after leaving the White House. “He’s one of those transcendent characters. He deserves to be in the pantheon.”“Founding Son,” available through iHeartRadio starting April 13, is the latest entry in the crowded field of history podcasts. But it’s one where Crawford (who composed and played the show’s old-timey mandolin theme) hopes to use his musical celebrity and serious historical chops to illuminate a complex, formative period in the evolution of American democracy.The Early Republic, as scholars call it, may be a rich field of study. But it’s largely a blank for most Americans, who are a bit foggy on what exactly happened between the American Revolution and the Civil War.Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving office, is a vehicle for tracing the arc of the period, which saw the United States transform from a nation dominated by its founding elites (like the Adamses) into an expansionist, populist democracy where every white male had the vote, regardless of property or station.“Founding Son” focuses on John Quincy Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving the White House (and the earliest American president to be photographed).Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAs a seven-year-old, Adams, the son of John Adams, witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, when his mother, Abigail, took him to the top of the hill to watch the gunpowder rise in the distance. And he lived long enough to serve in the House alongside Abraham Lincoln.And in an impossibly dramatic ending, Adams (spoiler alert!) died in the Capitol, after having a cerebral hemorrhage as he stood up to cast a vote relating to the Mexican-American War, which he opposed.“It’s almost poetic,” Crawford said. (Oh, Adams also wrote poetry.)Crawford, 52, grew up in Cardiff, N.J., where he recalled himself as an unimpressive student, although one with a passion for history. He recalled how one of his high school teachers, Mr. Lawless, would ask the class, “Does anyone who isn’t Bob know the answer?”If there was one person he wished he could have interviewed for the podcast, Crawford said, it was William Lee Miller, the author of “Arguing About Slavery,” who died in 2012.Kate Medley for The New York TimesOver an hour-long conversation about the podcast, Crawford, his upright bass visible on a stand behind him, regularly pulled books from the shelf to underline a point. (William Lee Miller’s “Arguing About Slavery,” he said, was a particular inspiration.) He repeatedly apologized for diving into a rabbit hole before diving into another one.With his neatly trimmed hair and soulful eyes, he gives off the vibe of the intense, idealistic high school history teacher who is also “in a band.” Except that Crawford (who earned a master’s degree in history online in 2020) really is in a band.Crawford joined with Scott and Seth Avett in 2001, after a decade of jobs that included selling shoes, working in movie production and slinging grilled cheese sandwiches “in the parking lot of Grateful Dead shows,” as the band’s official bio puts it. (In an email, Crawford clarified it was actually Phish.)Scott Avett, the band’s banjo player and co-writer, said that the podcast reflected Crawford’s steadfast character.“He does hold a lot of facts, and it’s really impressive,” said Avett (who voices dialogue for Charles Francis Adams, one of John Quincy’s sons, and the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld). “But that’s not the point, which is how he carries those facts and who he is when expressing them.”Crawford, center, onstage with Scott and Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers.CrackerfarmAnd it’s not just Crawford’s friends who are impressed. Wilentz, who appears on the podcast, also praised his historical chops.“He’s really quite versed,” Wilentz said. “He had a lot of really specific questions to ask, some of which I didn’t know the answer to.”Crawford’s side gig as a history podcaster started in 2016 with “The Road to Now,” which he created with the historian Benjamin Sawyer. (Recent episodes have covered Benghazi, Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and the history of March Madness.)Last year, Crawford hosted “Concerts of Change,” a SiriusXM docuseries about human rights benefit concerts from the 1970s to the 1990s. While working on that, he got an invitation from a friend to pitch a show to iHeart, and suggested Adams.The initial response was lukewarm. “They asked, was he involved in any true crime?” Crawford recalled.But eight months later, they bit. Will Pearson, the president of iHeartPodcasts, said what ultimately sold him on the project was the combination of Crawford’s enthusiasm and knowledge and the unfamiliarity of the John Quincy Adams story.“In my opinion one of the strongest elements of a good history podcast is the element of surprise,” he said.Crawford wrote the show (a coproduction of iHeartPodcasts, Curiosity Inc., and School of Humans) himself, with help from James Morrison, a producer who also works on the Smithsonian podcast “Side Door.” (Adams is voiced by Patrick Warburton, familiar to some as Elaine’s boyfriend on “Seinfeld.” Andrew Jackson is voiced by Nick Offerman, of “Parks & Recreation.”)Crawford with notes for the podcast. “He’s really quite versed,” said the historian Sean Wilentz, who appears on the podcast.Kate Medley for The New York Times“Founding Son,” which takes a largely chronological approach, has a certain whiskery dad-history vibe. There are dramatic set pieces (some with Ken Burns-style voice-overs and sound effects) about events like the battle of the Alamo and the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meetinghouse in Philadelphia that was destroyed by a racist mob. (Burns himself pops up as the voice of Roger Baldwin, the lawyer who represented the enslaved people who revolted aboard the Amistad.)But even as Crawford focuses on elite politics and Congressional maneuvering, he makes clear that politics was far from just a white man’s game.He acknowledges the crucial role of Black abolitionists like David Walker, whom he likens to the Black musicians who inspired rock ‘n’ roll — the creative sparks who are rarely given enough credit.And he notes that the antislavery petition drives of the 1830s, which led to the notorious “gag rule” forbidding any mention of slavery in Congress, were largely the work of women, who played a growing role in national politics despite being denied the right to vote.“Founding Son” underlines the story’s resonance to contemporary politics, with terms like “one-term president,” “alternative facts” and “deep-state cabal.” There are even accusations of a “stolen election,” after Adams — despite losing the popular and electoral votes — was elevated to the presidency in 1825, following a back room deal in Congress.)But Crawford, who calls himself an “unaffiliated” voter, also allows plenty of room for those aspects of history that don’t satisfy a contemporary thirst for a simplistic morality play.Crawford said he wanted to avoid turning the past into an oversimplified morality play. In history, he said, “everyone’s a hero, everyone’s a villain.”Kate Medley for The New York TimesConsider the treatment of Adams’s archrival, Andrew Jackson. Today, Jackson — a slaveholder who pursued a brutal policy of Native American removal, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is anathema to Democrats who not so long ago celebrated him as a founder of the party. And Crawford seconds the opinion of Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian featured on the podcast: There’s a word for him, and it’s “not a nice one.”But he also notes that it was Jackson who blocked John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of “nullification,” which held that the Constitution allowed states to reject federal legislation.As for Adams, for all his noble fight against slavery, some of his rhetoric — like his lament that American leaders, unlike Europe’s, were “palsied by the will of our constituents” — does not sound great today.In history, Crawford said, “everyone’s a hero, and everyone’s a villain.”As for today’s politics, he laments the intensity of the polarization, and the loss of any connection with a “shared reality.” But the dysfunction, as he sees it, is not equally shared.“Today the parties are clearly out of balance,” he said. “And yes, it seems to be that the Republican Party of 2023 bears no resemblance to its former self.”What comes next, he said, “is a story for someone else to tell many years from now.” In the meantime, he’s outlining another history podcast he hopes to record.“It’s juicy and reflects this moment,” he said, launching into an enthusiastic elevator pitch. “I’m not dallying in presentism — not doing that! But man.”He paused: “And I’ve already got a whole shelf of books.” More

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      Caroline Rose Takes Her Indie Rock Show on the Road

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      On a chilly day in New England at the start of a 43-city tour, the indie singer kills time before falling into the arms of her fans.BURLINGTON, Vt. — “I don’t mind walking in the rain,” Caroline Rose said on a recent afternoon, looking through the window of Crow Bookshop.It was about 40 degrees outside and pouring. Ms. Rose wasn’t dressed for the weather, but at least she was wearing a hat, with a camouflage pattern and the words “Buck Fever” across the front. Burlington, she said, was much nicer in the summer.Ms. Rose, an indie rocker who grew up on Long Island and lives mostly in Austin, Texas, had spent about seven months in this city writing the songs that appear on her new album, “The Art of Forgetting,” which chronicles a difficult breakup. She was back in Burlington to play the fourth show of an international tour that will keep her on the road into August.Standing in the “Psychology” section of the bookstore, Ms. Rose, 33, referred to the breakup that had inspired her new record. “I didn’t even really plan on splitting with my partner,” she said. “I thought we were going to work on it. But at a certain point I was like, I have so much I need to work on myself. It just felt irreconcilable for me. It makes me emotional to think about.”Her manager, Ari Fouriezos, whose hair had recently been bleached blond like Ms. Rose’s, lingered by the door.Crow Bookshop was one of the spots Ms. Rose frequented when she was living in Burlington early in the pandemic. Oliver Parini for The New York Times“I hadn’t done a kind thing for myself in a long time,” Ms. Rose continued, her voice wobbling. “Investing time in myself, it felt like the first nice thing I had done for myself in a really long time. And then, after that, it was like a deeper and deeper dive into my own head.”“The Art of Forgetting” is a departure from her previous albums, in which the singer, leaning into her theater-kid background, had often assumed alternate Caroline Rose-like personas. This time around she is simply, frighteningly, herself.She pulled down a book from a shelf: “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, a 2014 New York Times best seller about the physical and mental effects of trauma.“It changed my life, reading this,” she said. “It has to do with memory and the way our bodies might hold onto memories, even though our brain might forget. After reading this book, I realized there was a lot of stuff in my own life that my mind has just buried.”Outside the store, in the cold rain, Ms. Rose said she wanted to see if her favorite Burlington bar, Light Club Lamp Shop, was open. True to its name, lamp shades were strewn on the windowsill, but inside it was dark was empty.We kept walking — away from the restaurants and outdoor gear shops of the town center and onto the tree-lined streets of a residential neighborhood, dodging puddles and enduring several comically dreary splashes from passing cars.Ms. Rose onstage for soundcheck, practicing the song “Miami.”Oliver Parini for The New York TimesOutside a drab Victorian-style house with Halloween decorations on one of the front doors, Ms. Rose pointed to a window on the first floor.“That was my little room,” she said. Ms. Rose’s sound engineer, Jon Januhowski, had invited her to crash with him when her relationship in Austin was coming undone. It was April 2020, and Ms. Rose spent the quiet lockdown days messing around on her guitar and recording snippets of songs on her phone. A black and white cat named Rosie kept her company.“I felt very honored, because I didn’t learn how to pet a cat until I was 26,” she said.Someone else was living in the house now. Warm yellow light peeked through a gap in the curtains.Ms. Rose walked back to the town center, checking once more to see if Light Club Lamp Shop had opened. No luck, although it was after 4 p.m. The owners kept odd hours, she said, adding that it seemed like a nice way to live, to come and go as you please.Ms. Rose drinks a hot toddy with mezcal every night before she goes onstage. Her bandmate Lena Simon is on the sofa.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesTo some, it may seem as if the life of an itinerant musician assumes this shape. But Ms. Rose said she often longs for a simpler way of life. While making “The Art of Forgetting,” she said she unexpectedly fell in love with a woman whom she had met through mutual friends. She added that they’ll probably settle down in Los Angeles for a bit after the tour, which will take her to more than two dozen cities in the North America before stops in Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.“I want to live my life and take a break after this,” she said. “I don’t know what that will look like. But it’s the not-knowing part that excites me the most.”Ms. Fouriezos, her manager, reminded her that she was due at the club for soundcheck in about an hour. Ms. Rose suggested a quick bite first and started heading toward a small cafe, Stone Soup. Earlier that day, she said, she’d had breakfast there with her parents, who had driven up from Center Moriches, N.Y., with their dog, Paco, an 11-year-old mutt.At this hour, only Stone Soup’s buffet was available. We piled our plates with rice, sweet potatoes, salad and tofu. There was a silence as we ate. We were damp and cold.“So, how’s everyone feeling?” Ms. Rose said cheerily.Ms. Rose played the songs from “The Art of Forgetting” in the order in which they appear on the album. Before she went on, she talked through the transitions with her bandmates.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesShowtimeMs. Fouriezos was behind the wheel of a 2015 Subaru Forester, with Ms. Rose riding shotgun, as they pulled up to Higher Ground, a onetime movie theater that had been gutted and made into a music venue. A few people were sweeping rainwater off the roof. In the parking lot, Mark Balderston, Ms. Rose’s affable tour manager, told her that the club had sprung a leak.“It’s not dangerous or anything,” he added.Inside, a table had been laid with merch, including a pack of tissues that read, “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” During soundcheck, she played two songs: “Miami,” which starts softly before building into an edgy power ballad, and “Jill Says,” which is named for her therapist. Then Ms. Rose stepped down from the stage and practiced getting up and down from a trunk in the middle of the concert floor for a stunt that was meant to be a high point of the show.“Caroline loves antics,” Ms. Fouriezos said.In a narrow hallway backstage, a table wedged into a corner was laden with chili and cookies. Ms. Rose’s bandmates Riley Geare, Michael Dondero, Glenn Van Dyke and Lena Simon fixed tea, made drinks with the tequila and seltzer on the dressing table, and changed their outfits. Ms. Rose put on a red and white two-piece set with a spear-point collar.For her performance, Ms. Rose wore a two-piece set wit a spear-point collar created by Peter Heon and based on a design she drew on a napkin.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesIn the greenroom, Abbie Morin, the lead singer of the band opening, Hammydown, emphasized the importance of stretching before a performance to prevent a “bang-over” — a neck condition that can arise from headbanging during a show.Mr. Balderston, a tall man dressed in black, popped in and out of the room as the hall filled with about 450 people. Ms. Rose sipped from a hot toddy made with mezcal, her usual preshow drink. Then she dropped beads of various tinctures under her tongue. “Touring involves a lot of tinctures,” she said.At around 8, Mr. Balderston gave the two-minute warning, and the band pulled into a group hug, chanting, “Let’s have fun! Let’s have fun!”The crowd was rapt during the show, quiet for the quiet songs and loud for the loud ones. The concert was more stylized than the usual club show, with the singer separated from her bandmates by a scrim that cast their silhouettes against bright colors, creating a kind of Pop Art tableau.Ms. Rose had come up with the concept, and Ms. Van Dyke executed her vision with the help of a lighting director, John Foresman, who has worked with indie rock stalwarts like Car Seat Headrest and Mitski. The result, Ms. Rose said onstage, was “the most high-tech form of D.I.Y. you can imagine.”There were a few hitches. Ms. Rose asked to begin “Miami” again, after a false start; and there was an unplanned interlude before “Jill Says,” when her keyboard briefly stopped working. She made light of the snags, saying, “My ultimate goal for my career is to make music A.I. can’t reproduce. What you’re experiencing is a human performance.”Ms. Rose’s concert merch included a pack of tissues that read “I cried at the Caroline Rose show.” It looked like some of her fans did.Oliver Parini for The New York TimesWhen it came time for “The Kiss,” a song about yearning “for the kiss of someone new,” Ms. Rose descended from the stage and wandered into the crowd. Her voice seemed to be floating, and the audience members undulated to make way for her. She stepped up onto the trunk.“We’re going to do a trust fall,” Ms. Rose told the room. “Get close.”As the music shimmered, she let herself drop, closing her eyes. Audience members caught her and gingerly passed her to the front of the hall.“Send me around again!” she said. “Send me around again!” More