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

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

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

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

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

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

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      The Exquisite Darkness of Depeche Mode

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

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour: Pop’s Maestro of Memory Returns to the Stage

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      The opening night of the star’s Eras Tour traversed her 10-album career, revisiting crossover hits, rowdier experiments and more restrained singer-songwriter material.GLENDALE, Ariz. — The most meaningful Taylor Swift recording of the past few years is almost certainly “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault),” as layered and provocative as its title is unwieldy. A revision and expansion of one of her most gutting songs — the original appears on her 2012 breakthrough pop album, “Red” — it dissects a problematic, lopsided and ultimately scarring relationship with forensic detail. It’s a scathing commentary on the ex who inspired the track, and it also has something to say about the version of Swift who first committed this story to song over a decade ago: Swift now understands things that Swift then couldn’t possibly have known.Around halfway through Swift’s three-hour performance at State Farm Stadium here on Friday — the opening night of the Eras Tour, her first roadshow in five years — she was at the center of the long runway stage, elevated on a platform, holding 70,000 people rapt with this tale of righteous fury and anguish. Plenty were singing along with her, but somehow, the accumulated voices sounded like one huge hush, students in awe of the master class.Swift opened the show with a run of songs from “Lover,” including “The Man,” performed in full office cosplay.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThere were plenty of peaks during this concert drawn from the full arc of Swift’s career — the first of a sold-out 52-date national tour that made news for its disastrous rollout of ticket sales — but none quite like this. Throughout the night, she zigzagged between stretches of high-octane hits from older albums and mixed-bag selections from more recent ones — celebration with splashes of duty. What this ambitious and energetic if sometimes scattershot performance underscored, however, was just how many pivots Swift has undertaken in her career, and how the accompanying risks can have wildly different consequences.In modern pop parlance, album rollouts are often described as eras, but Swift’s career hasn’t always been that cleanly delineated. She’s made a few key turns over the years, though — on “Red,” when she divebombed into gleaming, centrist pop; on “Reputation,” when she made some of her sleekest and most au courant music; and on “Folklore” and “Evermore,” when she transformed into a woodland fairy.Songs from “Red,” one of Swift’s most acclaimed albums, arrived mid-show, and they were potent wallops — a jubilant and cheeky “22” followed by the indignant “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.” And when Swift, in a one-legged bodysuit embroidered with a snake motif, performed selections from “Reputation,” she showed just how wrongly maligned that album was upon its release. “Don’t Blame Me” was husky and alluring, while “Look What You Made Me Do,” performed in front of dancers trapped in glass boxes dressed as old versions of Swift, brimmed with attitude.Swift was cheerily, proactively defensive about “Evermore” — “an album I absolutely love despite what some of you say on TikTok” — but that segment of the show was particularly limp, especially the gloomy and spare “Marjorie” and “’Tis the Damn Season.” And the jolt from the melancholia of that restrained singer-songwriter release to the brazen stomp of “Reputation” was awkward. Songs from “Folklore” fared slightly better, especially “Cardigan” and “Betty,” but this section teetered toward melodrama, as if compensating for the less assured production on those songs.The set list over-indexed on the four albums Swift released after her last major tour, supporting “Reputation” in 2018 — the chipper and jaunty “Lover,” the one-two bucolic swaddle of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and “Midnights,” released last October. But the Eras conceit also meant that Swift wouldn’t have to exclusively lean on songs from these albums, which have in general been less popular, consistent and ambitious than her earlier ones.Sometimes, Swift joined her dozen-plus dancers in crisp choreography.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesShe opened the show with a run of songs from “Lover,” a hit-or-miss album that still yielded some excellent tracks. “The Man,” performed in full office cosplay, was biting and hilarious, and “Cruel Summer” had an almost ecstatic chill to it. From there, she jumped back to “Fearless,” her second album, and the first one made with an understanding that her relationship with country music might only be a dalliance. The earnest pleas in “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story” still had their old bite.Before “You Belong With Me,” she asked if the crowd was “ready to go back to high school with me,” both a dare and a legitimate question. Of late, Swift — obsessive about memory and even more obsessive about lore — has made revisiting her old work integral to her public presentation. Her ongoing rerecordings project layers a veneer of artistic liberation atop a business tug of war with the owners of her master recordings. And the very notion of the Eras Tour suggests a desire to thread Swift’s many selves into one, to find common cause between the 16-year-old who first shocked Nashville, the 33-year-old who has since become one of the defining pop stars of the 21st century and all the Swifts in between.If this show was an opportunity to perform songs from all of those phases, she did not always choose the tracks that are truly the most emblematic of those moments in time — sometimes specificity doesn’t age terribly well. (For what it’s worth, a song it would have been great to hear from each album, chronologically: “Picture to Burn,” “White Horse,” “Dear John,” “Stay Stay Stay,” “This Love,” “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” “Paper Rings,” “Exile,” “No Body, No Crime,” “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”)Fans did not appear to be playing favorites — many of them were dressed as Swift from various eras, or as song titles or specific lyrics, or as Swiftie inside jokes. And Swift herself tackled each period of her career — the dynamic ones and the flaccid ones alike — with real gusto, in outfits covered in glitter, or fringe or glittery fringe. Her stage was set up for both big-tent power and maximum intimacy; it jutted out into the crowd for almost the entire length of the floor. Sometimes, she joined her dozen-plus dancers in crisp choreography, like on “ … Ready for It?” “Bad Blood” and, most vividly, “Vigilante ___,” for which she performed an enthusiastic chair routine.She concluded with a selection of songs from “Midnights,” a challenging album to wrap a show of this magnitude — it’s more an amalgam of old Swift ideas than a harbinger of a new direction. During “Anti-Hero,” the screen behind Swift showed a version of her as a kind of King Kong, bigger than everyone and unfairly besieged, and on “Lavender Haze,” she was surrounded by dancers hoisting huge cloudy puffs.Swift tackled each period of her career with real gusto, in outfits covered in glitter, or fringe or glittery fringe.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThere was a distinct shimmer that ran through the night’s final three selections, the tinny “Bejeweled,” the spacey “Mastermind” and the needling “Karma.” All of those songs, which can be brittle from a lyrical perspective, benefited from the scale of the production here.But something far more meaningful had come just before that show-closing run. During an acoustic segment, she came out to the very farthest point of the stage, sat at a small piano and played her very first single, “Tim McGraw” (the only song she performed from her self-titled 2006 debut album).In addition to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” it was the night’s other pillar performance. It’s a song about memory and the ways in which people fail each other, and she sang it heavy with regret and tinged with sweetness.But unlike “All Too Well,” which now benefits from the wisdom that time affords, “Tim McGraw” remained as raw as the day it was recorded. No real tweaks, no rejoinder from the new Swift to the old one — just a searing take on the sort of love that makes for a better song than relationship. There are some things Swift simply has understood all along. More

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      How Taylor Swift Fans Got Each Other Eras Tour Tickets

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      After “historic demand” led to a Ticketmaster debacle, the singer’s most devoted online fans sprang into action to get each other into the Eras Tour at fair prices.When tickets for Taylor Swift’s first tour in nearly five years went on sale last November, Tina Studts, the mother of two young girls, thought she was well prepared.Like millions of others, Studts signed up for Ticketmaster’s “verified fan” program for early access, and she logged previous purchases of Swift merchandise that were supposed to provide a “boost.” She even watched hours of YouTube tutorials about how best to sign in and pick seats during a high-intensity drop.Her family had moved to Colorado from Kentucky in 2020, and adjusting amid a pandemic was tough, especially for her older daughter, Shannon, 15, who is autistic. But Swift had been Shannon’s “special interest” since elementary school, her mother said, and the vibrant fan culture around the pop star had provided a lifeline.With the holidays approaching, Studts knew that tickets to the stadium spectacle of Swift’s Eras Tour, which begins Friday in Glendale, Ariz., would give Shannon something to look forward to. Her daughter’s best friend from back home in Kentucky was even planning a surprise visit to Denver so they could all attend together.“It was the most obsessive thing I’ve ever done,” Studts, 51, said of training for her ticket mission. “I had this extreme self-imposed pressure to not disappoint my 15-year-old.”But as the Ticketmaster calamity unspooled that day, her hope dissipated. Studts waited and waited for eight hours at work, clicking around fruitlessly while fielding anxious texts from her daughter. The next morning, Shannon “didn’t even want to go to school because she was afraid of seeing people who had tickets,” Studts said.Their crushing experience matched the struggle of many Swifties — as the singer’s superfans are known — whose vocal anguish and collective online might, paired with Swift’s own public frustration, led to a canceled general sale and a congressional hearing. But what happened next was a welcome surprise to Studts and others who know pop fandom as a cutthroat (and pricey) battle royale — an arms race of haves and have-nots all jockeying for limited access.Instead of leaving one another to scrap it out on the official secondary market, where ticket prices were astronomical and scammers were salivating, some resourceful fans banded together, using their tight-knit community on social media to problem solve: From Twitter and Facebook to Tumblr and TikTok, on pages like @ErasTourResell and TS Tour Connect, volunteers created a network of spreadsheets, Google Forms and online bulletin boards to facilitate face-value sales and exchanges among fellow devotees.“The fandom can be kind of crazy,” said Amanda Jacobsmeyer, 29, the founder of the TS Fandom Fund, a Tumblr collective that seeks to address, however incrementally, economic inequality among Swifties. “But it really is a community and we look out for each other. With Ticketmaster just completely failing at their one job, people have really stepped up to make sure that actual fans are in the audience.”In a sea of bots, frauds and profit-seekers, most Swift fans involved are merely matchmaking and amplifying seemingly trustworthy deals for those in need, rarely touching the money or tickets themselves.Their only motive, Jacobsmeyer said, is altruistic enthusiasm: “We want Taylor to look out and see people who actually know the words to these songs, and we want to be surrounded by the people who make up our community, not just randoms.”Looking for tickets became “like my second job,” Studts said. “It felt like this puzzle to solve.” But with the help of the @ErasTourResell Twitter account, where tickets were vetted and announced by city, she was able to secure four seats with no markup in time to surprise her daughters on Christmas morning.“It’s really refreshing,” she said of the fan efforts. “I can’t believe that somebody would voluntarily spend this much of their time to make sure that we can get to the concerts. They just love seeing Taylor fans not getting screwed over by scammers and not being overcharged three or four times over.”Long a struggle for followers of the most popular live acts — I need a miracle, goes the ancient Grateful Dead fan prayer — landing hot concert tickets without taking out a second mortgage has only become more difficult amid rising prices and fees, post-pandemic demand and the continued consolidation of an industry that some lawmakers say is dominated by a monopoly. (The Justice Department is said to be investigating Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, the concert giant that merged with the ticketing behemoth in 2010.)Last month, amid extended hand-wringing about ticket prices, a leading Bruce Springsteen fanzine announced it would shut down after 43 years. To avoid a repeat of the Swift debacle, a more elaborately plotted set of staggered presales for Beyoncé’s new tour had rules and requirements resembling a brainteaser — with some fans opting still to travel to distant locations for easier, better deals. This week, it’s fans of the Cure feeling the pain.“It’s like a lottery to get stolen from now,” said Holly Turner, 26, who recalled spending just $23 — on the day of the concert — for floor tickets to her first Swift stadium show in 2011.By 2020, when Swift’s Lover Fest tour was planned to kick off, competition had turned steeper; Turner said she waited eight hours in a digital queue for those tickets, but had eventually gotten them. (The shows were later canceled because of Covid-19, only heightening demand for the Eras Tour, the singer’s first set of concerts since 2018.)Still, on Tumblr, the niche social network where many of Swift’s longest-serving and most loyal fans congregate, ticket release days were known to be a time of shared nervousness and then celebration. But this time around, joy was in short supply. Even among those who had managed to get Eras tickets, a sense of guilt prevailed.“Once the general sale got canceled, everyone just felt really, really distraught,” Turner said. “But the next day, after it set in, there was a lot of, ‘O.K., here’s what we’re going to do. Don’t give up hope.’”Using her sizable Tumblr following of some 20,000 Swifties, Turner’s TS Tour Connect page became a hub for those looking to sell tickets they could no longer use — at fair prices — to other loyalists. “I don’t have the resources to confirm if a ticket is real,” she said, “but what I can do, because I’ve been in the Tumblr community for so long, is make sure that they’re an actual fan who’s selling.”Risks abound regardless. Even as Jacobsmeyer was facilitating deals for others via the TS Fandom Fund, she lost $1,200 when she tried to buy tickets to attend Swift’s Nashville date with her sister from a Facebook group that turned out to be bogus.“It’s ripe for scammers, but it’s also been very ripe for showing the good sides of the community,” Jacobsmeyer said.Courtney Johnston, 24, of San Francisco, said she was inspired to start @ErasTourResell on Twitter after seeing similar pages dedicated to tickets for Harry Styles and other pop stars.She then recruited Channette Garay, 24, and Angel Richards, 27 — who met through the online fandom and are now dating and living together in Connecticut — to lend a hand. The three fans estimate that they are cumulatively spending more than 40 hours per week, in between work and school, sorting through ticket submissions and trying to verify them via screen recordings and confirmation emails before blasting the listings out to eager Swifties.With nearly 38,000 followers, the group has now helped arrange more than 1,300 deals and counting — a milestone they will celebrate when they meet up in Arizona to enjoy the opening night of the tour together.“I get to play a small part in someone getting tickets that they never thought they would get,” said Johnston, who plans to attend eight shows in all. “That’s really cool to me.”Garay and Richards, who have tickets to four tour dates, agreed. “At the end of the day,” Garay said, “honestly, we just love Taylor.” More

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      Jim Gordon, Top Rock Drummer With a Troubled Life, Dies at 77

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      He was an elite studio musician who played with A-list artists and helped write the Eric Clapton hit “Layla.” But his life was shattered by mental illness and a murder conviction.Jim Gordon, a talented but troubled drummer who was ubiquitous in the recording studios of the 1960s and ’70s and who, as a member of Eric Clapton’s band Derek and the Dominos, helped write the romantic ballad “Layla” — but who suffered from schizophrenia and spent nearly 40 years in prison, convicted of murdering his mother — died on Monday in a prison medical facility in Vacaville, Calif. He was 77.His death was announced by Robert Merlis, a publicist for Joel Selvin, the author of a forthcoming biography of Mr. Gordon. Mr. Selvin said he did not know the cause.“When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived,” Mr. Clapton wrote in “Clapton: The Autobiography” (2007), “I think it’s true, beyond anybody.”Tall and muscular, with a head full of curly hair, Mr. Gordon first attracted attention in 1963 on an English tour with the Everly Brothers. Over the next 15 years, he worked on studio recordings with A-list artists, including John Lennon (“Imagine”), George Harrison (“All Things Must Pass”), the Beach Boys (“Pet Sounds”), Harry Nilsson (“Nilsson Schmilsson”), Carly Simon (“No Secrets”) and Steely Dan (“Pretzel Logic”).As part of the informal group of elite Los Angeles studio musicians that came to be known as the Wrecking Crew, Mr. Gordon could book several sessions a day around the city. .He backed Joe Cocker on his “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour and performed with Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa, who nicknamed him Skippy for his All-American demeanor and his all-American looks. And for several months in 1971 he was a member of the British rock band Traffic.“He had a surgical, scientific skill on the drums,” Mr. Selvin said by phone, “and he had an extraordinary gift of intuition. Every time he played on a record, he brought something special to it.”After Mr. Gordon did a stint with the white soul band Delaney & Bonnie, with whom Mr. Clapton also recorded and toured, Mr. Gordon became a member of Derek and the Dominos, the band Mr. Clapton formed in 1970, along with the singer and keyboardist Bobby Whitlock and the bassist Carl Radle. The band released  only one studio album, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” featuring Duane Allman on second guitar, in 1970.“Layla,” released as a single, rose to No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the next year.    The credit for writing “Layla” went to Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon, but its instrumental second movement, called the “Piano Exit,” was composed by Mr. Gordon and the singer Rita Coolidge, his girlfriend at the time. As she recalled in her autobiography, “Delta Lady” (2016, with Michael Walker), Mr. Gordon created a melody, to which she responded with a countermelody “that answered and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo.”Mr. Gordon and Ms. Coolidge made a cassette demo of what they intended to be a separate song and gave it to Mr. Clapton. Ms. Coolidge did not know what became of it until she heard “Layla” on the radio and learned that she had received no credit.  She was infuriated.“What they’d clearly done,” she wrote, “ was take the song Jim and I had written, jettisoned the lyrics, and tacked it on to the end of Eric’s song.”When Mr. Clapton released the album “Unplugged” in 1992, his acoustic version of “Layla” peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. When “Layla” received the Grammy Award for best rock song the next year, Mr. Clapton and Mr. Gordon shared the award as songwriters, but Ms. Coolidge’s role received no acknowledgment.Derek and the Dominos around the time they recorded their one and only album, in 1970. From left: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Mr. Gordon and Carl Radle.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesJames Beck Gordon was born on July 14, 1945, in Elizabeth, N.J., and grew up in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His father, John, was an accountant. His mother, Osa Marie (Beck) Gordon, was a pediatric nurse.As a boy, Jim made a set of drums from garbage cans and played them until his parents bought him a drum kit. He started performing professionally as a teenager. In 1963, he was playing with Frankie Knight and the Jesters when Joey Paige, the bassist for the Everly Brothers, scouted him at a club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Soon Jim, at just 17, was off to England with the Everly Brothers for a tour that also included Little Richard and Bo Diddley.At some point during the next 15 years, Mr. Gordon started hearing voices — most menacingly and hauntingly, that of his mother — and displaying erratic behavior. He interrupted a recording session by telling his fellow musicians, “You’re the devil”; he punched Ms. Coolidge in the eye with such force that she was lifted off the floor and slammed into a wall.The sound of his mother’s insistent voice in his head tormented him, causing him pain and leaving his unable to play his drums, according to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994. He was treated at hospitals. Work dried up, but he was able to get by on the royalties from “Layla.”“The symptoms were getting so powerful, starting about 1975 and 1976,” said Mr. Selvin, a former pop music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. “It was an extraordinary battle. Command hallucinations are the most extreme in all of mental illness.”Mr. Gordon was also taking drugs. “I guess I was an alcoholic,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Before, I was drinking every night, but I wasn’t getting up in the morning for a drink; I would put a needle in my arm. When I stopped taking the heroin, I began to drink all day.”On the night of June 3, 1983, he attacked his mother at her home in North Hollywood, first banging her head with a hammer and  then stabbing her with a knife. “When I remember the crime, it’s like a dream,” he told The Inquirer. “I can remember going through what happened in that space and time, and it seems kind of detached, like I was going through it on some other plane. It didn’t seem real.”He told Rolling Stone that he had felt that he was “being guided like a zombie.”He was found guilty of second-degree murder. Despite having been diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic, he did not qualify for an insanity defense based on California law at the time. He was sentenced in 1984 to 16 years to life and later denied parole several times.“This is not a murder case,” Scott Furstman, Mr. Gordon’s lawyer, told The Los Angeles Times after the verdict. “This case is a tragedy.”Mr. Gordon is survived by his daughter, Amy, and his brother, John Jr. His marriages to Jill Barabe and Renee Armand ended in divorce. More

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      Jerry Samuels, Creator of a Novelty Hit, Is Dead at 84

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      Under the name Napoleon XIV, he recorded “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” and, to almost everyone’s surprise, it stormed the charts in 1966.Jerry Samuels, who under the name Napoleon XIV recorded one of the 1960s’ strangest and most successful novelty songs, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” died on March 10 in Phoenixville, Pa. He was 84.His son Jason said the cause was complications of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Samuels had had modest success as a songwriter and was working as an engineer at Associated Recording Studios in New York when, in 1966, he and a fellow engineer, Nat Schnapf, set a bit of doggerel that Mr. Samuels had written to — well, “music” may not be quite the right word, since the song consists of Mr. Samuels rhythmically talking over a backing of tambourine, snare and bass drums, and clapping.The narrator laments that he has been left by a loved one and has been driven insane as a result:They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaaThey’re coming to take me awayHo-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha, to the funny farmWhere life is beautiful all the timeAnd I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coatsAnd they’re coming to take me away, ha-ha.Only in the last verse does the listener learn that it wasn’t a woman who left the now crazed gent, but a dog.Through recording studio manipulation that was innovative for the time, Mr. Samuels’s voice morphed into high-pitched lunacy as the choruses went along.In a memoir, Mr. Samuels wrote that he wanted to use a stage name for the record and a drummer friend suggested Napoleon. Someone else suggested adding some kind of appendage.“I picked XIV strictly because I liked how it looked next to Napoleon,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “Rumors were rampant about hidden meanings, but there were none, at least not consciously.”The record was released by Warner Bros. in July 1966 (the flip side was the song played backward), but no station would play it until WABC in New York, one of the nation’s leading Top 40 stations, broadcast an excerpt as a gag, Mr. Samuels wrote. Listeners began calling in wanting to hear the whole thing.After that, stations everywhere picked up on it; news accounts of the day said it sold half a million copies in five days. Britain caught the fever, too.“The Beatles don’t usually find it hard work hanging on to the top spot,” The Derby Evening Telegraph of England wrote in August 1966, when “Yellow Submarine” was No. 1 on the newspaper’s record chart, “but in Derby’s Top Twenty this week they face tough competition from the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and Napoleon XIV’s incredibly sick ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’”The record was too sick for some: The influential Detroit-area station CKLW, among others, stopped playing it after receiving many complaints that it mocked mental illness.“Those naysayers kept it up,” Mr. Samuels wrote, “and the record rapidly spiraled off the charts.”But not before peaking at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song has been covered by various artists, and in the 1980s Mr. Samuels recorded a follow-up, “They’re Coming to Get Me Again, Ha-Haaa!” It drew little attention, but it did yield a funny story that Mr. Samuels recounted in the memoir.When he recorded the original, he had asked friends to show up at the studio to do the clapping part, but only two did. Wanting a bigger clapping sound, he suggested that they drop their pants and slap their thighs, to double the noise. They declined, and he and Mr. Schnapf ended up using overdubbing to beef up the sound. But when he recorded the sequel, a dozen clappers turned out.“Some were in shorts,” he wrote, “others lowered their trousers, but the whole group was slapping their tender thighs in that little studio.”Jerrold Laurence Samuels was born on May 3, 1938, in Manhattan to Joseph and Lillian (Wandler) Samuels. He grew up in the Bronx.His parents had bought a piano for his older brother.“He never took to it, but I did,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “My parents said that I began playing recognizable tunes at around 3 years old.”By his teenage years he had begun writing songs and shopping them to publishers. One in particular had potential, especially after the lyricist Sol Parker helped him polish it: “To Ev’ry Girl — To Ev’ry Boy.” It was recorded in 1954 by Johnnie Ray, a teenage-idol singer.Another of his songs, “The Shelter of Your Arms,” was recorded by Sammy Davis Jr., who made it the title track of a 1964 album.In an interview quoted on Wayne Jancik’s website about one-hit wonders, Mr. Samuels said that nine years before recording “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” he spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital.“When I did the record, I knew it wouldn’t offend mental patients,” he said. “I would have laughed at it if I had heard it when I was in the hospital.”His first marriage, to Rosemary Djivre, ended in divorce in 1968. He had a relationship with Petra Vesters from 1973 to 1987. In addition to his son Jason, from his relationship with Ms. Vesters (now Petra DeWall), he is survived by his second wife, Bobbie (Simon) Samuels, whom he married in 1996; a son from his first marriage, Scott; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Eric, died in 1991.Mr. Samuels, who lived in King of Prussia, Pa., outside Philadelphia, said he made one public appearance costumed as Napoleon XIV but found the experience humiliating and didn’t repeat it. He had a long history of playing piano in bars and other venues, his son Jason said, including senior centers.“He knew all the old standards from George Gershwin and Irving Berlin,” Jason Samuels said in a phone interview. “They loved him.”He was getting so many bookings that he saw a business opportunity. In 1984, he formed the Jerry Samuels Agency to book other acts into retirement communities and other small venues. Bobbie Samuels joined him in the enterprise, which, Jason Samuels said, had booked some 30,000 shows in the Philadelphia area by the time they retired in 2021. More