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      For the Gloriously Over-the-Top Rina Sawayama, Less Is Less

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      The pop singer and songwriter’s first album was a master class in maximalism. Its follow-up, “Hold the Girl,” still carries weighty subjects, but largely without its chaotic edge.The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama’s kaleidoscopically eclectic debut, “Sawayama,” ranks among the best and most imaginative pop albums of this still-young decade. Gloriously excessive but intimately personal, “Sawayama” sounded like an internet browser with too many open tabs blasting away — perhaps a vintage Christina Aguilera hit, a black metal song and an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — that somehow overlapped in synergistic, mashed-up harmony.Though she was a pop outsider who’d self-funded her head-turning 2017 EP “Rina,” Sawayama’s album, which arrived in April 2020, garnered her A-list fans like Elton John, with whom she later rerecorded a version of her queer anthem “Chosen Family,” and Lady Gaga, who tapped Sawayama and her producer Clarence Clarity to remix — with their signature over-the-top flair — a track off “Chromatica.”But toward the end of Sawayama’s catharsis-chasing second album, “Hold the Girl,” out Friday, there’s a song so sparse and restrained, it almost sounds like the work of a different artist. “Send My Love to John” is a narrative-driven ballad, crooned over country-tinged, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, subtle enough to spotlight the pathos in Sawayama’s voice and the song’s lyrics.“Threw away my name/It’s easier when it sounds the same,” Sawayama sings, from the perspective of an immigrant mother who came to the States in the early 1970s. The titular John is her son’s partner; Sawayama wrote it for a friend whose mother had difficulty accepting their sexual identity. The song is, in some ways, a fantasy of compassion, understanding and acceptance. “He’s there for you,” Sawayama sings on the wrenching bridge, “in all the ways I never was.”The therapeutic practice of “reparenting” — or learning to meet, as an adult, the needs you were denied as a child — is a core idea running through “Hold the Girl.” “Reach inside and hold you close, I won’t leave you on your own,” Sawayama, 32, sings on the title track, a bracing torch song that eventually fragments into skittering electro-pop. On the theatrical “Phantom,” she once again addresses her inner child, but this time it’s her older self that needs comfort: “I was wrong to assume I would ever outgrow you/I need you now, I need you close.”If this sounds like heavy lifting for a four-minute pop song, know that Sawayama has never stuck to light, conventional subjects. Part of what made her previous album so fresh was the way it fit under-sung human experiences — the slow but painful erosion of a friendship (“Bad Friend”), feeling disconnected from one’s birth country (“Tokyo Love Hotel”) or even the familial lineage of depression (“Akasaka Sad”) — into the familiar grammar of catchy pop songs. The gleeful gear-shifting nature of Sawayama’s sound, though, still made the album feel like joyride.“Hold the Girl” continues to mine deep material — “Imagining” addresses a mental health crisis; the opener, “Minor Feelings,” takes its title from a Cathy Park Hong essay collection — but the protruding eccentricities that once made Sawayama’s music so distinct often sound sanded down. Previous Sawayama standouts like “XS” and “STFU!” paired blingy pop production and hip-hop swagger with crushingly aggro guitars; what elevated them beyond simple Y2K nostalgia was the way they sounded, simultaneously, like every single song playing across the radio dial in 1999.The songs that fall flat on “Hold the Girl” — like the Kelly Clarkson-lite “Catch Me in the Air”; or the MTV reality-show-theme-song-that-never-was “Hurricanes” — instead sound like a faithful and earnest homage to a single bygone aesthetic. The big-tent affirmation of the closer, “To Be Alive,” shares a surprising affinity with Christian pop, not necessarily a sin, except for the way it tones down Sawayama’s idiosyncrasies in favor of something more universal. In creating a soft place for herself and her inner child to land, Sawayama has blunted some of her music’s sharper edges.There is, however, a bold and satisfyingly angry stretch across the middle of the album with some of its strongest material. The antsy, strobe-lit hyperpop of “Imagining” effectively captures a loss of control, while the brash, earth-quaking “Your Age” proves again that Sawayama is the rare contemporary artist who’s managed to make effective use of nü-metal. That song, too, derives its force from a cleareyed reconsideration of the past. Sawayama might be again addressing a lack of parental compassion, but the lyrics are ambiguous enough (“Now that I’m your age, I just can’t imagine/Why did you do it, what the hell were you thinking?”) that it could also serve as a re-examination of a relationship with a large age gap, à la Demi Lovato’s recent “29.”When things risk getting too heavy, Sawayama still knows how to take flight. The album’s best single is the devilishly fun “This Hell,” which throws a breezy shrug at high-strung homophobia (“God hates us? All right then/Buckle up, at dawn we’re riding”) and gets down to the more pressing business of partying. The mid-tempo highlight “Forgiveness” strikes a perfect balance between naturalistic sincerity and lavish melodrama. “I’m looking for signs,” Sawayama belts in an ascending melody that keeps escalating to the stratosphere. For one ecstatic moment, she sounds not like her own parent or even her own therapist — just her own co-pilot, ready to navigate the uncharted skies ahead.Rina Sawayama“Hold the Girl”(Dirty Hit) More

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      ‘Moonage Daydream’ Review: David Bowie’s Sound and Vision

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      Brett Morgen’s new documentary about the singer uses archival material, not talking heads. But the film is more séance than biography.The usual way of making a documentary about a famous, no-longer-living popular musician is to weave talking-head interviews (with colleagues, journalists and random celebrities with nothing better to do) around video clips of the star onstage and in the studio. The story tends to follow a standard script: early struggles followed by triumph, disaster and redemption. Movies like this clog the streaming platforms, catering to eager fans and nostalgic dads.Brett Morgen’s new film about David Bowie is something different. Titled “Moonage Daydream” after a semi-deep cut from Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” and showing in IMAX as well as other formats, it’s less a biography than a séance. Instead of plodding through the chronology of Bowie’s life and career, Morgen conjures the singer’s presence through an artful collage of concert footage and other archival material, including feature films and music videos. There are a lot of great songs, and thanks to Morgen’s dexterous editing, Bowie himself seems to provide the narration, a ghostly effect (he died in 2016) that resonates with some of his ideas about time, consciousness and the universe. He is not so much the subject of the film as its animating spirit.“Does it matter? Do I bother?” he asks at the beginning, musing on the transience of existence. For anyone who grew up following the iterations of his persona and the evolution of his music, the answer, at least as far as the movie is concerned, is emphatically yes.Morgen, who has made documentaries about the Chicago 7, Kurt Cobain, Jane Goodall and the Hollywood producer Robert Evans, subordinates the dry facts of history to the mysteries of personality. “Moonage Daydream” is interested in what it felt like to be David Bowie, and also, as a corollary, what it felt like, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, to be interested in him. Context and evaluation — the sources and influences of his music; its relation to what was happening in the wider world — are left to the viewer to supply or infer. The work, and the artist’s presence, are paramount.For the most part, this approach works. Though Morgen bends and twists the timeline when it suits him, he traces an arc from the early ’70s into the ’90s, beginning in the Ziggy Stardust years and immersing the audience in Bowie’s otherworldly charisma at that moment. His bright orange hair, his brilliantly inventive fashion sense, his frank bisexuality and his almost casual mastery of divergent musical idioms made him an irresistible puzzle for the media and an idol to the restless and curious young.Appearing onstage in dresses, flowing suits and shiny space gear, he undid gender conventions with insouciant ease. He changed his look and his sound from one album to the next, leading critics to question his authenticity and interviewers to wonder about his true self.That mystery seems more easily solved now than it might have back then, and “Moonage Daydream” explains some of Bowie’s process and a lot of his thinking. The combined effect of the present-tense voice-over and the earlier interviews is to emphasize Bowie’s essential sanity. Perhaps more than most of his peers, he seems to have approached even excesses and transgressions with a certain intellectual detachment, taking an Apollonian perspective on an essentially Dionysian form.His postwar childhood is dealt with quickly. He notes the coldness of his parents’ marriage, and the influence of his older half brother, Terry Burns, who introduced young David to jazz, outlaw literature and modern art. Mainly, though, “Moonage Daydream” tacks away from Bowie’s personal life, editing sex and drugs out of its version of rock n roll.His first marriage, to Angie Barnett, isn’t mentioned at all. His second, to Iman, marks a transition from restless solitude to contented middle age. The emphasis, in both the narration and the images, is on Bowie’s work. His explanations of changes in style and genre are illuminating, and illustrated by shrewd musical selections. You don’t hear all the obvious hits — where was “Young Americans”? — but you do get a sense of his range and inventiveness, and a taste of some less-well-remembered songs. I was glad to be reminded of the anthemic “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me.”The documentary mainly focuses on Bowie’s work, and tacks away from his personal life.NeonWatching Bowie move through the phases of his career, from the avant-garde to the unapologetically pop, it’s clear, at least in retrospect, that his creative life was a series of experiments in an impressive variety of media. Morgen devotes some time to Bowie’s painting and sculpture, and to his acting, in films like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and in a Broadway production of “The Elephant Man.”Bowie was a pretty good actor, and also — this is shown rather than said — an exceptionally good dancer. His devotion to his work, and the pleasure he took in it, are the themes of “Moonage Daydream.” It’s a portrait of the artist as a thoughtful, lucky man. And perhaps surprisingly, given the mythology that surrounds so many of his contemporaries, a happy one.Moonage DaydreamRated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, the way it used to be. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Art Rosenbaum, Painter and Preserver of Folk Music, Dies at 83

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      As an artist and exponent of American traditional songs, he sought to blur the lines between outsider and insider art, and became a guiding force in the Athens, Ga., scene.ATLANTA — Art Rosenbaum, a painter and folk musician acclaimed for a half-century of field recordings of American vernacular music, including old-time Appalachian fiddle tunes and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved people, died on Sept. 4 at a hospital in Athens, Ga., his adopted hometown. He was 83.His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was complications of cancer.Art Rosenbaum’s passion for documenting a broad range of American musical traditions as they were passed down and performed at work camps, church gatherings and rural living rooms expanded upon the famous field recording work of the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. An important inspiration was Pete Seeger, another high-profile 20th-century champion of folk music. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Seeger had once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.”Mr. Rosenbaum called it “good advice, and the kick in the rear that got me going.”“Outside Carnesville,” oil on linen, 1983-84. Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, as he did here, with Mabel Cawthorn on the banjo.Art RosenbaumIn 2007, the Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Mr. Rosenbaum’s trove, “Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” which won a Grammy Award for best historical album.The pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “an indispensable counterpoint to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music,’” a reference to the 1952 song compilation that remains a canonical touchstone for folk musicians.Like Mr. Smith, the bohemian polymath who compiled the “Anthology,” Mr. Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent the bulk of his career at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where his energetic paintings, often depicting the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an influence that resonated far beyond the classroom.Michael Stipe, the visual artist and singer with the Athens rock band R.E.M., who was a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s in the early 1980s, said Mr. Rosenbaum’s goal “was to blur the lines between what is outsider and insider, and to bring together this untrained music and art with trained music and art, and acknowledge that each have immense power, and that they’re not that far apart.”A portrait of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. singer, a student of Mr. Rosenbaum’s, as well as a subject of his paintings.Art Rosenbaum, Collection of the Peasant CorporationArthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on Dec. 6, 1938, in Ogdensburg, N.Y., in St. Lawrence County. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged her children’s artistic inclinations. His father, David Rosenbaum, was an Army pathologist who sometimes sang what his son described as “Northern street songs.” Arthur later recorded one of these songs, his father’s a cappella version of the ribald 18th-century Child ballad “Our Goodman,” and included it in the 2007 box set.The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, entranced by traditional music, absorbed the Harry Smith anthology and the contemporary folk stars of the day. In high school he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize money on a five-string banjo. He went on to become a pre-eminent expert on traditional banjo playing and tunings and to record several albums.In the mid-1950s Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, then the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, earning an undergraduate degree in art history and a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University. In the summers he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began making recordings of nearby field workers from Mexico and the American South.In 1958, Mr. Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded in Indianapolis a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, whom he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” Back in New York, as Mr. Rosenbaum was fond of recalling, a fellow roots music obsessive named Bob Dylan would pester him for any details he could muster about Mr. Blackwell’s life and playing style.“Shady Grove,” 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum sought out traditional Black and white musicians, revealing a shared cultural history.Art RosenbaumIt was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark, who became his wife and lifelong collaborator. She survives him.In addition to her and his son, Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by a sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, a writer; and a brother, Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist.After eight years of teaching studio art at the University of Iowa, Mr. Rosenbaum in 1976 took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. With Athens as a home base, he and Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum continued making field recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, and giving the musicians they met opportunities to play before new audiences.“As these traditional musicians were identified and then brought out,” said Judith McWillie, an emerita art professor at the university, “and as there were more festivals and opportunities for them to play, people began to envision an identity for Georgia that was somewhat different from the one that it had. This was the 1970s, and coming off some extremely difficult times in the South.”Folk music, she said, revealed a shared cultural history: “The musicians Art brought out were Black and white.”In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of stories and songs by Howard Finster, the self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “man of visions” whose work has become indelibly associated with 20th-century Georgia after its use on album covers by R.E.M. and the band Talking Heads.Untitled Diptych, 2014. Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s paintings are allegorical works in which the old and the new cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space with modern-day hipsters.Art RosenbaumHe also recorded the McIntosh County Shouters, an African American group from coastal Georgia who performed the “ring shout,” which Mr. Rosenbaum described as “an impressive fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion and expressive and formalized dancelike movements.” The ring shout, he asserted, was “the oldest African American performance tradition on the North American continent.”Brenton Jordan, a member of the group, said of the Rosenbaums, “It’s their legwork that actually kind of introduced the McIntosh County Shouters to the world.” He noted that the ring shout, once on the verge of extinction, has in recent years been performed by his group in Washington at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.The Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. With drawings of the performers by Mr. Rosenbaum and photos of them by Ms. Newmark Rosenbaum, it depicts a place and a culture that seems beguilingly out of phase with modern life.Many of Mr. Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loose allegorical works in which the old and the new clash and cohabitate, with traditional musicians sharing space on the canvas with modern-day hipsters, skateboarders and documentarians (often Mr. Rosenbaum himself).As a painter, he was inspired by Cezanne and Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist. At times his work recalls the painting of Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist. Some of Mr. Rosenbaum’s works are large murals on historical themes.Pete Seeger once told Mr. Rosenbaum, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from.” That advice set him on a decades-long project of seeking out unrecorded musicians.via Rosenbaum familyBeginning in the late 1970s, Athens saw an explosion of forward-thinking rock musicians, many of whom, like Mr. Stipe, had ties to the Georgia art school. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passions always ran to traditional music, but he remained an inspiration for contemporary musicians.Lance Ledbetter, the founder and co-director of the Dust-to-Digital label, recalled Vic Chesnutt, the brilliant, idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, speaking of Mr. Rosenbaum, quoting him as saying:“When you move to Athens, and you hear about this guy who plays banjo and knows all of these songs, you just follow him around like a puppy dog. And I’m not the only one who did that.” More

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      Ramsey Lewis, Jazz Pianist Who Became a Pop Star, Dies at 87

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      His 1965 recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” brought him to a place few jazz musicians reached in that era: the Top 10.Ramsey Lewis, a jazz pianist who unexpectedly became a pop star when his recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” reached the Top 10 in 1965 — and who remained musically active for more than a half century after that — died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 87.His death was announced on his website. No cause was given.Mr. Lewis, who had been leading his own group since 1956, had recorded with the revered drummer Max Roach and was well known in jazz circles but little known elsewhere when he and his trio (Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums) recorded a live album at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in May 1965. The album included a version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which had been a hit for the R&B singer Dobie Gray just a few months earlier, and which was released as a single.Instrumental records were a rarity on the pop charts at the time, jazz records even more so. But its infectious groove, Mr. Lewis’s bluesy piano work and the ecstatic crowd reaction helped make the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s rendition of “The ‘In’ Crowd” a staple on radio stations and jukeboxes across the country. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — eight points higher than the Dobie Gray original had reached.Two more singles in a similar vein quickly followed: covers of “Hang On Sloopy,” which had been a No. 1 hit for the McCoys in 1965, and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” “The ‘In’ Crowd” won Mr. Lewis the first of his three Grammy Awards. (The others were for the 1966 album track “Hold It Right There” and a 1973 rerecording of “Hang On Sloopy.”)Mr. Young and Mr. Holt left in 1966 to form their own group and had hit singles of their own. Mr. Lewis carried on with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White, later a founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, on drums. That trio had a Top 40 hit in 1966 with a version of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”That record proved to be the end of Mr. Lewis’s career as a purveyor of Top 40 singles, but it was far from the end of his career as a jazz musician. Over the years he would record scores of albums, in contexts ranging from trios to orchestras to collaborations with his fellow pianist Billy Taylor and the singer Nancy Wilson, and he was a constant presence on the Billboard jazz chart.There was always more to Mr. Lewis than his soulful hits suggested; he was a virtuoso with a thorough grasp of the harmonic complexity of modern jazz and a smooth touch reminiscent of earlier jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. But his success on the pop and R&B charts — where he returned in 1974 with “Sun Goddess,” an album partly written and produced by Mr. White and featuring members of Earth, Wind & Fire, on which Mr. Lewis played electric keyboards — led some jazz purists to view him with skepticism.That skepticism was long gone by 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor for a jazz musician.Mr. Lewis in an undated photo. He once said he had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesCommenting on the perceived conflict between “jazz as entertainment and jazz as art” in a 2007 interview with DownBeat magazine, Mr. Lewis noted, “Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.” He himself, he said in another interview, had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.”In announcing his Jazz Master honor, the N.E.A. pointed to Mr. Lewis’s eclecticism, praising him for a style “that springs from his early gospel experience, his classical training and a deep love of jazz.” It also acknowledged him as “an ambassador for jazz,” citing his work both in academia (he had taught jazz studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago) and in the media: In the 1990s he began hosting a syndicated weekly radio program, “Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,” and in 2006 he hosted a public television series of the same name, which featured live performances by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Tony Bennett and many others.At around this time he also began composing large-scale orchestral works. His “Proclamation of Hope,” written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where he was artistic director of the jazz series, and performed there by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009.Mr. Lewis found the challenge of composing that work daunting, he told The Associated Press, until he “threw away the thought of Tchaikovsky and others and sat at the piano and started improvising.” As a result, he said, “I was able to compose from my spirit rather than from my intellect.”In 1995, Mr. Lewis formed Urban Knights, an all-star ensemble with an ever-changing lineup of musicians who, as he himself had long done, straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. The group, whose lineup at various times included the saxophonists Grover Washington Jr., Gerald Albright and Dave Koz, released seven albums, the most recent in 2019.Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago, one of three children of Pauline and Ramsey Lewis. His father worked as a maintenance man.Ramsey began taking piano lessons when he was 4 — he recalled his teacher telling him, “Listen with your inner ear” and “Make the piano sing” — and was soon playing piano at the church where his father, who encouraged his interest in jazz, was choir director.He attended DePaul University in Chicago but did not graduate; his career as a professional musician had already begun before he enrolled. While still a student at Wells High School, he had joined a local seven-piece jazz band, the Clefs. When four members of the band were drafted, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young became the Ramsey Lewis Trio.The trio signed with Argo Records, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based blues label Chess, and released their first album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentle-Men of Swing,” in 1956. The trio became a fixture on the Chicago nightclub scene, and many other albums followed, as did engagements at Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. But the group remained relatively unheralded beyond Chicago.That changed with “The ‘In’ Crowd.”Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Janet; his daughters, Denise Jeffries and Dawn Allain; his sons, Kendall, Frayne and Bobby Lewis; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His sons Ramsey Lewis III and Kevyn Lewis died before him.During the pandemic, Mr. Lewis presented a monthly series of livestream performances. An album drawn from those performances, “The Beatles Songbook,” is slated for release in November.While in lockdown he also wrote a memoir, “Gentleman of Jazz,” in collaboration with Aaron Cohen. It is scheduled for publication next year. More

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      Rivers Cuomo’s Very Complicated, Highly Organized Life

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      Preparing to release a new EP in Weezer’s “Sznz” series, the band’s leader explained how he keeps himself on track — and how he learned to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language.The Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo knows how people think about Weezer. The veteran rock band has dedicated much of 2022 to promoting “Sznz,” a four-part series of EPs that ostensibly correspond to the different seasons, but also stand in for eras in the band’s history. “‘Spring’ was the easy-breezy side of Weezer, nobody’s really going to object to that,” he said. “‘Summer’ was more like ’90s alt-rock Weezer, which lots of people will be relieved to hear.”The trick now was “Autumn,” due Sept. 22, which was still being written when we talked in mid-July. “‘Autumn’ is dance rock, which is not something we’ve traditionally been able to get away with,” he admitted. “It’s really hard to make it both dance and rock and Weezer. It’s very easy for that to turn into something that nobody likes.”Weezer certainly enjoys multitasking. Earlier this year, the band concluded the Hella Mega Tour, a joint bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy that wrapped in Europe, where Cuomo said he experienced “the big dream when you were 12 years old lying in bed at night — 50,000 fans in stadiums, feeling the power of rock.” The band released two full-length records in 2021 and planned a Broadway residency for this fall that was ultimately canceled because of production costs and lagging ticket sales. And Cuomo is heavily involved in running his own Discord, a private chat server where Weezer fans are invited to talk with him, weigh in on new music and even act as de facto creative assistants.At home in Los Angeles during a rare moment of downtime, Cuomo spoke via phone about 10 of his beloved cultural products. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Mr. Rivers’ Neighborhood” The core musical values of my Discord are probably quite similar to the people who were posting on Weezer message boards in 2001, and maybe similar to people who were writing fan letters to [the Weezer superfans] Mykel and Carli in 1996. There’s maybe six or seven thousand people who have joined the server, and often the results of what I’m working on turn out better if I have lots of smart people helping out.2. Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas The thing I’ve found most fulfilling in my life in the last year or two is that every night, I go on my Discord and I livestream myself playing Beethoven’s sonatas in order. I play anywhere from 45 to 75 minutes, and it’s just so deeply satisfying to me. It’s like going on this tour of the most sublime emotional landscape — from the most tender moments to the most head-banging moments, tragic moments, frightening moments. It doesn’t matter what happened that day or what kind of mood I’m in — by the end of that hour, I’m good.3. Mouth Taping Sleep has historically been a little challenging for me — I’ll often wake up in the middle of the night, wide-awake, and my body and mind have no interest in going back to sleep. But somebody told me if you tape your mouth shut with athletic tape, you’ll get much deeper sleep. I tried it, and it works great. At night, I say good night to my wife and then keep my mouth shut. The first night I was a little panicky, and gasping for breath through my nostrils, but then my body calmed down and I got a great night’s sleep.4. TikTok As a consumer, TikTok is obviously amazing; it’s freakishly good at knowing what I’m actually interested in. As a creator, it’s a real game changer because now songs that would otherwise have zero chance of reaching an audience can become gigantic without the help or approval of any gatekeepers. The song “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” was a B-side from “Pinkerton,” and now it’s getting 100,000 streams a day. Another example is “The Good Life” — that’s a song we tried to release as a radio single, but nobody would play it. I just made a TikTok of me doing a stupid dance, and within 24 hours it had a half a million views.5. Coding The process of building and writing the script that would solve the problem — I realized I enjoy that more than whatever work I was supposed to be doing with the results. It satisfies a very deep part of my brain to work on making the systems around it more efficient, more automated; I’d be happy to spend 10 hours working to make something that would save 10 seconds of mindless labor. For decades, I’ve had boxes of cassettes and Dropbox folders of MP3 of demos, thousands of them. It didn’t seem right to put out vinyl or CDs, or even iTunes or Spotify. Building Weezify seemed like a cool solution to that longstanding problem of what to do.6. Asana Work Management Platform My life is quite complex now, and I have all these complicated projects like building apps, or building the four-part “Sznz” tetralogy. There’s all these ideas, so it’s great to have them in Asana; it’s like my long-term memory storage. When you move a task from the to-do column to the in-progress column, and click it, this rainbow-colored unicorn flies across the screen. It’s all very rewarding.7. Audible Semi-famously, we have a song called “The Grapes of Wrath,” which is all about my love for Audible and listening to it in the middle of the night. I’m listening to “The Corrections” now, and I’m not sure why, but there’s moments that strike me as so funny I burst out laughing at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I wake up my wife. It’s definitely a corrective against any sense of romanticization you might have about life before the hyper-internet era — and for me, life back in Connecticut, because I grew up in Connecticut. It’s like, [shocked voice] Oh, yeah! That was super bleak. That’s why I moved to L.A., and that’s why I’m doing what I do, and that’s why we invented the internet.8. Farm Tourism At the end of the tour, we spent a few days in the Cotswolds, in the English countryside. We would do things like go to a farm and feed the cows, or do some falconry. My daughter’s 15, so she wanted something a little more thrilling. There’s this giant, ancient castle called Warwick, with a dungeon you can go through. It’s one of those horrifying experiences where you have to participate. I had to go up there in front of everyone and go through this torture routine where they humiliate me; they’re not actually touching me, but they make me bend over in front of the whole crowd and basically castrate me. It was just horrifying, but I guess that’s the kind of tourism we’re into these days.9. Vipassana Meditation In May of next year, it will mark my 20th year of meditating two hours every day. It’s kind of the foundation on which everything else I do is placed. In 2003, I was kind of stuck after our fourth album; I started working with Rick Rubin, and he suggested meditation. When I first started, it was specifically like, “I’m doing this so that I can write better songs.” Now, it’s a little broader — I just want a better life, whatever that means. At the deepest level, it’s strengthening my equanimity so that whatever’s happening outside — good news, bad news — I can stay calm and be happy. And if I’m calm and happy, then I tend to treat other people better, and I tend to make decisions that are better for my own future and the people around me. Less shooting myself in the foot.10. Foreign Language Banter I’ve taken language classes before, but to do it systematically is new. This is me looking for ways to make touring fun, and it’s also helpful because it improves my stage banter, which is always the part of the show I’m most stressed about. I’m saying pretty basic stuff, but because it’s in their native tongue, it’s automatically amazing. I worked really hard at it, and then I was also able to write a script that accesses a Google spreadsheet. I have 100 common phrases in there, and then each column is a different language — all these different places we went, including Gaelic and Celtic and Basque. The script will look up the translation automatically and auto-populate any empty cell in the spreadsheet, so I can just look through that and know how to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language. More

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      My Chemical Romance, Reunited and It Feels So Bruised

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      Back on the road after more than a decade, emo’s most theatrical outfit let its songs and fans provide the drama as it revisited its anthems about fearlessness and individuality.In 2006, My Chemical Romance — by then, an edgy screamo band turned ostentatious pop-punk dramatists — released “The Black Parade,” a flashy and theatrical opus that established the group as art-house emo sophisticates. It maintained some of the scabrousness of its earlier albums, and smeared big-tent pop ambition atop it: “The Wall” for the “TRL” era.On Saturday night at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, while performing “Welcome to the Black Parade,” a caffeinated march that’s one of that album’s signature songs, the band’s frontman Gerard Way saw the crowd pumping fists in the air, and encouraged it to go even harder.“C’mon, I’m 45 doing this,” he said — a little tart, a little bemused, maybe a little fatigued.The passage of time is an inevitable subtext of all reunion tours. This show, the first of four arena shows in the New York area, was part of the group’s first proper tour in a decade. (Its last studio album, “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” came out in 2010.) In that time, emo has gone through its second or third revival, Way’s comic book The Umbrella Academy has become a Netflix hit and something about the My Chemical Romance mythos has deepened and hardened — it is now a misfit beacon.Mikey Way, left, the frontman’s brother and the band’s bassist, celebrated his 42nd birthday onstage.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEveryone is older now, and reality sometimes weighs down memory. At this show, that played out as a tug of war between been-there-done-that fatigue and we-survived-this-together triumph, with triumph ultimately triumphing.The band started tentatively, lading the show’s first half with late career singles that felt much like conventional rock songs — “The Only Hope for Me Is You,” “Boy Division.” It was almost as if this rigorously flamboyant band was somehow shy about its own hits.“Let me put on my sunglasses so I can look like an authority figure,” Way said, after a dry half-hour of bits and bobs. What followed was exuberant, rowdy, winningly messy: the chipper swing of the wry “Teenagers” giving way to the frenzy of “Welcome to the Black Parade.” “Mama” brought the Nutcracker to the mosh pit. “Helena,” perhaps the band’s most memorable song, was part victory march, part plea.These epic anthems about fearlessness, rebellion and individuality were bracing. But the tension between the show’s two halves exposed a light quirk about this band, which is that often what set it apart from its peers was its sense of performance and its willingness to be ambitious while its actual music remained more conventional.That accessibility is what allowed My Chemical Romance — Way; his brother, Mikey, who plays bass; the guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero — to survive long enough to thrive once more. They play with confidence, if not always warmth. (It was Mikey’s 42nd birthday, and some speakers onstage were adorned with drawings made by his children; most of the band wore T-shirts celebrating him.)In front of trompe l’oeil installations of demolished buildings, the group was musically robust — Toro delivered taut chaos, and the touring drummer Jarrod Alexander was blistering, closing out the heart-rending anthem “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” with sensitive aggression and then shifting right into the punchier intro of “House of Wolves.” There were occasional flickers of rockabilly, ska, even death metal. Way is a lauded wailer, but his growl is just as potent.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAt times throughout the show, Way appeared lightly cautious, never quite oversinging, even on the songs that demand abandon. He wore a camouflage jacket and a T-shirt featuring a smiley face with a bullet hole in its head, blood dripping down the cheerful yellow visage, and toward the end of the night, he put on a tight clear mask that had echoes of Patrick Bateman.It was a manque version of the hypertheatricality that elevated the band out of scene notoriety to pop ubiquity. Late in the show, Way described a conversation he’d had about how to navigate a comeback tour after so many years, and the tension between performing for oneself and performing for the crowd.“Maybe for a time it was for me,” he conceded.But not now. “It’s not about the ego,” he said.And yet. “Sometimes it’s about that,” he continued. “That’s a really delicate way of telling you I’m going to control you right now.” Everyone pumped their fists in unison.My Chemical Romance performs at Barclays Center in Brooklyn Sunday night, and at Prudential Center in Newark on Sept. 20 and 21. The tour continues in North America through Oct. 29. More

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      For Jann Wenner, the Music Never Stopped

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      In his memoir, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine is serenaded by Springsteen, nursed by Midler and breaks bread with Bono. There’s journalism, too.LIKE A ROLLING STONEA MemoirBy Jann S. Wenner592 pages. Little, Brown. $35.Jann Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” is the literary equivalent of a diss track: a retort to Joe Hagan’s biography, “Sticky Fingers,” which was published five years ago, after Wenner’s initial cooperation curdled into public repudiation. This it accomplishes with that ultimate diss, the silent treatment — acting like Hagan’s book never existed.Also, perhaps, by being a little longer, if not more searching. Hagan interviewed scores of intimates, plenty disgruntled; Wenner is fond of quoting laudatory letters and speeches, supplemented with color candids and a cover portrait by his longtime colleague Annie Leibovitz.Not counting Robert Draper’s 1990 “uncensored history” of Rolling Stone magazine, which Wenner co-founded and headed for five decades, the reading public now has over 1,100 heavily annotated pages on the guy, a print publisher who calls the internet “a vampire with several hundred million untethered tentacles” and curses the iPhone from his hospital bed. Generation Spotify might be baffled.One thing Wenner didn’t like about Hagan’s book was the title, a homage to the Rolling Stones album, of course, but perhaps too redolent of thievery and salaciousness for his taste. Choosing “Like a Rolling Stone” instead implies “I’m just as good friends with Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning poet, as that naughty, bum-wiggling sensualist Mick Jagger.” One of the revelations in this overwhelmingly male tale is that each singer has a limp handshake, though Dylan wins this particular contest, his paw tending to “stay motionless in your palm as if you were holding a dead fish.”But the new title also strikes a note of melancholy. Wenner sold the majority stake in his flagship publication in 2017, a couple of months after the disdained biography came out. How does it feel, how does it feel, to be without a home (luxury real estate in Sun Valley, Montauk, etc. notwithstanding)?This devoted and daring sportsman — he also founded Outside magazine — had a triple coronary bypass, valve replacement and hip surgery that year. Candidly, he notes that fluid retained during the procedures made his scrotum swell “to the size of a head of cauliflower — not a grapefruit, not two papayas.” He “dramatically undraped” it for the amusement of Bette Midler.This isn’t the only time Wenner gets clinical. He describes his ex-wife Jane’s cesarean section for their second of three sons, Theo, and being “spellbound by how they pulled out various organs and laid them on her stomach.” (The third son, Gus, is currently C.E.O. of Rolling Stone.)Years later, as an unnamed gestational carrier is delivering twins to Wenner and his new partner, Matt Nye — the man who ushered him out of the closet in the ’90s — her organs are placed on cheesecloth. “It didn’t bother me,” the author writes coolly, as if playing the old battery-powered game Operation. Well, my buzzer went off.“Like a Rolling Stone” is about birth, the origin of a scrappy San Francisco music rag and its development into a slick, bicoastal boomer bible. But that story has always been intertwined with untimely death, starting with Otis Redding’s a month after its founding in 1967. The magazine’s coverage of the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where an 18-year-old Black student, Meredith Hunter, was killed by one of the Hells Angels paid in beer to do security, helped put it on the map. Curiously for someone so associated with the epochal events of his generation, Wenner decided at the last minute not to attend; nor was he at Woodstock. When he did show up, the experience was often blurred or oversharpened by recreational drugs: pot, LSD, cocaine.Narcotics were what took Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison — all at the age of 27. When Elvis goes, it’s “our equivalent of a five-alarm fire,” Wenner writes, four days before deadline, after a move to New York offices in 1977. The murder of John Lennon, a Wenner favorite, is what finishes his ’60s idealism, and he continues to bathe the Beatle in white light here, glossing over the harm to their friendship caused by his publishing the acidic interview “Lennon Remembers” in book form, and the magazine’s partisan mistreatment of Paul McCartney’s brilliant early solo efforts.“Like a Rolling Stone” does gather moss, it turns out: celebrities in damp clumps — from when Jann, born Jan in January 1946 and a real handful, is treated by Dr. Benjamin Spock, to “the black-tie family picnic” of his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he helped erect.His father was a baby formula magnate; his mother helped with the business but was also a novelist and free spirit whom he compares to Auntie Mame; and the newspaper young Wenner ran at boarding school had a gossip column. A career headline spinner who hired and fired with gusto, he writes here in crisp sentences more descriptive than introspective, giving résumés for even minor characters.“The apple cart was balanced,” he shrugs of the double life he long led — till Nye’s declaration of love, and the times a-changin’, tips it over.Though his journalists regularly championed the downtrodden, Wenner proudly recounts a life of unbridled hedonism, and seems disinclined to reconcile any contradiction. His staffers aggressively cover climate change while he revels in his Gulfstream (“My first flight was alone, sitting by myself above the clouds listening to ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’”). At the 60th-birthday party he throws at Le Bernardin, the fancy Manhattan fish restaurant, Bruce Springsteen gets up and sings of the honoree that “Champagne, pot cookies and a Percocet/Keep him humming like a Sabre jet.” A private chef makes pasta sauce for the Wenner entourage at Burning Man. Wenner and Bono wave to each other from their Central Park West terraces, and join McCartney for a midnight supper by the “silvery ocean.” (“Stars — they’re just like us!,” per another former Wenner property, Us Weekly.)Were there better ways for Johnny Depp to spend a million dollars than shooting the longtime Rolling Stone fixture Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon the height of the Statue of Liberty, as Wenner watched approvingly? Surely.“Like a Rolling Stone” is entertaining in spades but only sporadically revealing of the uneven ground beneath Wenner’s feet. Long sections of the book read like a private-flight manifest or gala concert set list. You, the common reader, are getting only a partial-access pass. More

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      Alex G and the Art of Interesting Choices

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      The 29-year-old musician has recorded with Frank Ocean, released a film score and made oodles of outré indie rock. One thing has guided his unusual career: gut decisions.Alex G in the studio earlier this year. The musician has become a Philadelphia hero, but his listenership is far from just local.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesPHILADELPHIA — On a blustery Thursday in June, the 29-year-old musician Alex Giannascoli sat on a bench in tranquil Penn Treaty Park, overlooking the Delaware River, the breeze occasionally shaking loose acorns from an overhead tree. Giannascoli, who is known professionally as Alex G, has dark, shaggy hair and a disheveled handsomeness that makes him look a bit like a softer, more approachable Andrew W.K. He clutched a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup and, whenever he felt like he’d gone on a tangent, blamed the caffeine.Before long, a hiply dressed 20-something walking an old dog came up and interrupted to politely ask if Alex G was indeed Alex G.Alex grinned sheepishly and laughed. “Yeah.”“I knew it!” the man said, shaking his head. “I just moved to Philly — and what do you know!”To a certain type of indie music fan, Alex G is a regional celebrity, the kind of artist who stands almost as a metonym for the place where he lives and works. Since 2010, he has released a string of albums that have showcased both his outré, D.I.Y. ethos and a melodic pop sensibility at the core of his music. Vocally and aesthetically, he is a restless shape shifter, altering the pitch of his voice, embodying uncanny characters (like, say, a cowboy who has survived the nuclear holocaust or an insecure teenage girl named Sandy), and plundering innumerable genres. All of these elements together make his albums feel like warped, scratchy transmissions from a sonic collective unconscious. Yet, somehow, they still sound unmistakably like Alex G.Over the past decade, his fandom has grown far beyond local love. It now includes Frank Ocean (who personally tapped Alex to play guitar on his 2016 opus, “Blonde”), a lively Subreddit whose members cheekily but reverently refer to him as “Mr. G,” and Michelle Zauner, the author of the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart” and the leader of the Grammy-nominated indie band Japanese Breakfast, which opened for Alex on a 2017 tour.“A lot of the music is still relying on my gut,” Alex G said. “Like, if I have a guitar part, and it gives me a gut feeling, I add that.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“Honestly, he is one of my favorite contemporary songwriters,” Zauner said in a phone interview. “Everything he does is so brilliant and singular and bizarre. Every time you think you know what he’s up to, he does something else, and then a bunch of people just try to copy what he does.” Trying to pin down his personality, she gave up: “He’s just a really unique, weird man.”Alex G’s signature eccentricity was in full force in May when he released “Blessing,” the introductory single from his ninth album, “God Save the Animals,” due Sept. 23. On first listen, it sounded like an entirely different artist: Perhaps one of those vaguely goth, subtextually Christian alternative rock bands that proliferated during the nu-metal boom. “Every day is a blessing,” he whispers with menacing intensity. “If I live like the fishes, I will rise from the flood.”“I guess it’s kind of left-field,” he said at the park, shrugging. “After a long time of not really putting stuff out, I thought it would be the most interesting choice.”The cult of Alex G, a group down for interesting choices, has grown with each album. His last release, the wildly eclectic “House of Sugar,” was his most acclaimed and successful yet. This year he released his first ever film score, for the indie horror flick “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” He also recently played on a major late-night show for the first time, performing a memorable rendition of his single “Runner” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”Yet at a time when so many musicians feel a professional obligation to share intimate details of their lives with fans on social media to grow their audience, Alex has carefully erected barriers protecting his privacy. (His longtime partner Molly Germer, a violinist who sometimes plays in his band, and his sister, Rachel, a painter who does the cover art for most of his records, both declined to comment for this article.)Still, there are moments on “God Save the Animals” that are so frank and plain-spokenly sincere — from inquiries about spirituality to anxiety about when to start a family — that some listeners will be inclined to wonder whether they are extensions of Alex’s inner dialogue.Alex remains reluctant to ascribe any meaning — least of all autobiography — to anything he writes. “It’s honesty like catching a ball or something,” he said of his songwriting process. “I just don’t allow myself to think, ‘Should I put my hand here or here?’”He laughed, looking at his now-empty coffee cup. “Maybe there’s someone who’s very good at this, buried deep down, who’s just not in touch with the dumb part of me that’s navigating the world.”“When I’m thinking of a song,” Alex G said, “it’s not like, ‘This would be a great ‘me’ song.’ I’m just like, ‘This would be a cool song.’”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIN JANUARY, ALEX and his longtime collaborator Jacob Portrait, a founder of the band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, were in the final stages of mixing “God Save the Animals” at a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Wearing a beanie and a black hoodie, Alex spoke enthusiastically about the Beatles documentary “Get Back,” which he’d just watched (“I just love how it felt like you were their friend”) and his recent obsession with the folk songwriter Gillian Welch. Talking about his new album, though, still felt difficult.“A lot of the music is still relying on my gut,” he said. “Like, if I have a guitar part, and it gives me a gut feeling, I add that.”Portrait spun around in his chair in front of the mixing console to assist. “Some people, the way that they analyze it feels almost scholarly,” he told Alex. “But you’re always like, ‘It doesn’t feel right.’ And then you go in and change something and it’s like, ‘Oh wow. That’s incredible.’”Alex said his instincts are a part of a creative process that can skew obsessive. “I am beyond a control freak — I’m a monster,” he told me. “I say it straight up to my band sometimes, because I’ll have them play on some of the songs, and sometimes I’m like, ‘Honestly you could play something so amazing and I might not like it just because I didn’t do it.’”After self-recording a prolific run of early albums, Alex was reluctant to invite anyone new into his process, but Portrait, who arrived to work on the 2015 album “Beach Music,” slowly became a trusted partner.Portrait recalled a turning point in their relationship, when Alex was writing his next album, the tuneful, quasi-folk “Rocket.” Alex was so excited about a new song he’d just written that he drove from Philadelphia to Brooklyn just to tape a USB stick containing the demo to Portrait’s computer screen. (“Which is hilarious,” Portrait said, “because the internet’s definitely around.”) When he plugged it in and listened, Portrait was blown away by one of the best songs Alex had ever written, a fractured country lament called “Bobby,” which has since become a fan favorite.Around this time, an email from Ocean’s manager arrived out of the blue. Alex ended up credited as a guitarist and arranger on two tracks from Ocean’s “Blonde”: the plangent, pitch-shifted “Self Control” and the diffuse “White Ferrari.” He also played guitar throughout the amorphous visual album “Endless” and joined Ocean’s live band for a six-gig stint.The scope of their fame is certainly different, but, in an aesthetic sense, Alex and Ocean are kindred spirits. Both value privacy and continue to work with a trusted circle of collaborators, incubated from outside timelines and trends, which allows their music to retain a power of intimacy no matter how many people listen to it.“As a producer, Frank really was thinking of Alex when he got some of his music onto that record,” Portrait said, “because you can get the feeling of some of those moments. You’re like, ‘Damn, that really is Alex.’”ALEX GREW UP in Havertown, a quiet suburb nine miles outside of Philadelphia. He has two artistic siblings who are roughly a decade older than him, so it took him a while to figure out his place. His brother played jazz and had formal training in music, but 7-year-old Alex quickly grew bored with the piano lessons he’d begged his parents for.His sister, Rachel, though, was an avid music fan who introduced him to his first “cool bands”: Nirvana, Radiohead. In his early teens, influenced by another one of his sister’s favorite artists, Aphex Twin, Alex started fiddling around on the computer, making what he laughingly dismissed as “beep-boop [expletive].” His older sister heard something in it, though, and that meant the world to him.“You could show her any outlandish thing and she’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, OK,’” he said, of sending her his songs. “It basically pushed me into the world of DIY music, the fact that I had this confidence to be like, ‘She thinks I’m good at it.’” They’re still close today, and live down the street from each other.In high school, Alex was into “typical pot-smoking teenager” stuff, he said: drawing, reading, writing, and, of course, honing his musical sensibility. His school hosted coffeehouses where local bands could play. He went to his first one when he was in middle school and felt a world of possibility open up: “It clued me in as a kid that, ‘OK, you can make a band. You can just do it.’”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn recent years, as would-be creatives continue to be priced out of New York, Philadelphia has become a kind of beacon for young artistic types, especially independent musicians. As soon as he started playing music, Alex felt the support of a strong local scene. Early in high school, he and his friend Sam Acchione, who still plays in his band, formed a group called the Skin Cells and performed their first show in the basement of a local library, opening for the New Jersey punk stalwarts Screaming Females. “I remember afterwards they were like, ‘Hey, great job,’” Alex said. “And then we went home, like, ‘They said great job!’”Still, for all his DIY bona fides, Alex’s influences often skew surprisingly mainstream. At the park, Alex said the production on “Blessing” was inspired by a song he became obsessed with while working on “God Save the Animals,” which he’d listen to endlessly on loop. I leaned in, expecting him to name-drop some obscure, crate-dug rarity.“It was this song ‘Like a Stone’ by Audioslave,” Alex said. “It came on the radio one night and I was like, ‘What the …? This is the best thing I’ve ever heard!’”“Blessing” is an outlier sonically, though not thematically, on the new album. Its title included, “God Save the Animals” riffs on religious imagery and sometimes even evokes a kind of funhouse-mirror Christianity (“God is my designer,” a surreal, helium-voiced Alex sings on one song, “Jesus is my lawyer”). Though Alex wasn’t raised in a religious household, he admits that spirituality has been on his mind these past few years, and that some of the songs likely sprang from that part of his subconscious. “I don’t really have a set of beliefs,” he said, “but it seems like a place everyone has to go at some point.”Even if Alex’s music has never felt especially spiritual, there has long been a recurring sense of morality in it. Terrible things happen in and around the margins of his songs — nuclear bombs; fentanyl overdoses; bottomless longing — but never without the possibility of renewal and carrying on.Similarly, one of the most stirring moments on the new album comes in the middle of “Runner,” which until then has been a mild-mannered lite-rocker in the vein of Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train.” “I have done a couple bad things,” Alex sings in a pleasant voice, and then repeats the line several times, his voice becoming increasingly anguished until it turns into a bloodcurdling scream. It’s a gaping rupture in the song, but just as casually, it continues on.That it sounds nothing quite like anything he’s released before goes without saying — as does the fact that it’s still somehow so Alex G. “When I’m thinking of a song,” he said, “it’s not like, ‘This would be a great ‘me’ song. I’m just like, ‘This would be a cool song.’”“And so it sounds like me because I don’t know what I’m doing,” he added, his laughter rising against the wind. “But I’m pursuing it as far as I can go.” More