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      Angel Olsen, Yaya Bey and Others On Their Favorite Songs of Summer

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      These tracks will make for a lovely dinner playlist and all but guarantee some after-hours dancing.A lot of us still remember the labor of love that was the mixtape, those countless hours spent pressing record, stop, rewind and play. But, while less time-consuming, curating a digital playlist, rather than relying on an algorithm-fueled compilation, can still be a thoughtful gesture, one that might make all the difference at a dinner party. Song choices can be a way to share (or forget) what’s going on in the world, act as a conversation starter and, above all, set the mood. More

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      Billie Eilish Contemplates Distraction, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Flo Milli, Jessie Ware, Montell Fish and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Billie Eilish, ‘TV’“TV” — from a pair of modestly strummed but richly produced “guitar songs” Billie Eilish has just released — starts out like one of her hushed, breathy ballads about estrangement, self-doubt and a longing for numbness, this time using TV; she considers putting on “‘Survivor’ just to watch somebody suffer.” But she’s onto something larger — the ways entertainment nurtures distraction, alienation and apathy — and she turns pointedly 2022 topical: “The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial/While they’re overturning Roe v. Wade,” she sings. But Eilish hasn’t forgotten she’s an entertainer herself; as she ponders her isolation in a closing refrain — “Maybe I’m the problem” — she dials in an arena audience, singing and clapping along. JON PARELESJessie Ware, ‘Free Yourself’Jessie Ware reaches for time-tested disco tools in “Free Yourself,” abetted by the stalwart producer Stuart Price (Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, Dua Lipa). There’s a bouncing-octave piano riff, a solidly thumping beat and eventually the sounds of a swooping, hovering string section, as Ware promises that freedom will feel good: “Keep on moving up that mountaintop,” she urges. “Why don’t you please yourself?” The breakdowns and buildups assemble with a sense of glittery inevitability, strutting toward a big finish that, startlingly, never arrives: “Don’t stop!,” Ware sings, “Baby don’t you …” Suddenly, she’s left hanging. PARELESFlo Milli featuring BabyFace Ray, ‘Hottie’A Flo Milli song is like a Blingee filter: loud, flashy, and confrontationally femme. This week the Alabama rapper put out her major-label debut album, “You Still Here, Ho?,” a kind of spiritual sequel to her irresistible 2020 mixtape “Ho, Why Is You Here?” Following an introductory invocation of the muse, which in this case is the reality TV legend Tiffany “New York” Pollard, the album is a showcase for Flo Milli’s braggadocious humor and the chatty ease of her signature flow. Plenty of other rappers would slow their tempo when given a beat as dreamy as the one on “Hottie,” but Milli is relentless as ever, antically flirty while still taking a breath to set some boundaries (“I don’t text back if I’m cranky”). Here, as on other highlights from the record, she spits like a cartoon character gleefully gliding across a rainbow. LINDSAY ZOLADZTyler ICU featuring Nkosazana Daughter, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, ‘Inhliziyo’Three notable South African producers — Tyler ICU, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa — worked on “Inhliziyo” (“Heart”), a spacious amapiano track built from shakers, sustained keyboard chords, sparsely tapping percussion and shadowy, nearly subterranean bass lines. What makes it even more haunting than most amapiano songs are the vocals by its songwriter, Nkosazana Daughter: quiet and nearly private, hinting at non-Western inflections and suffused with the inconsolable heartbreak of her Zulu lyrics. PARELESSun Ra Arkestra, ‘Somebody Else’s Idea’The Sun Ra Arkestra conjures a loose communality, the feeling of mavericks gathering for a shared purpose. When the Arkestra recorded “Somebody Else’s Idea” during Sun Ra’s lifetime, June Tyson sang lyrics like “Somebody else’s idea of things to come/Need not be the only way.” The current Arkestra, led by the saxophonist Marshall Allen, reclaims the song without words, as a leisurely bolero with saxophones or wordless voices carrying the succinct melody over Afro-Caribbean percussion. They’re joined at times by Farid Barron’s floridly dissonant piano, by brass interjections, by flute trills, and by wavery strings, each adding its own contribution until, like a caravan at sunset, the tune settles into a resting place. PARELESJulianna Riolino, ‘You’“You,” from the Canadian singer-songwriter Julianna Riolino’s forthcoming debut album, “All Blue,” is a twangy, deliriously catchy blast of power-pop. Riolino’s impassioned delivery and boot-stomping energy will appeal to fans of the more upbeat songs on Angel Olsen’s “My Woman,” but Riolino also blends the sounds of vintage country and jangly garage rock in a way that’s uniquely her own. “Everyone is fine until they are drowning in someone,” Riolino sings on this ode to devotion, with the intensity of someone hanging on for dear life. ZOLADZMamalarky, ‘Mythical Bonds’The indie-rock band Mamalarky, formed in Austin and now based in Atlanta, celebrates a deep, joyous friendship in “Mythical Bonds,” the first single from an album due in September, “Pocket Fantasy.” With a teasing smile in her voice, the guitarist Livvy Benneett sings, “I don’t care what I do so long as I do it with you.” The complications — and there are plenty of them — are in the music: stop-start meter changes, peculiar chords, gnarled counterpoint, all packed into two playful minutes. Mamalarky makes math-rock sound like fun. PARELESBlondshell, ‘Kiss City’“Mama, I’m adjacent to a lot of love,” the Los Angeles singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum sings, in one of several highly quotable lines from her second single as Blondshell. (Also: “I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty.”) During the first half of “Kiss City,” Teitelbaum delivers these lines in an arch, somewhat self-deprecating croon, accompanied by an understated arrangement of piano and guitar. But around the midway point, “Kiss City” rips open and becomes a towering rock song, giving Teitelbaum the space to shout those same lines with all of her heart, as if she’s suddenly in a dream, confessing the sorts of things she’d be terrified to admit in waking life. ZOLADZKelsey Waldon, ‘Simple as Love’Sometimes, amazingly, romances actually work out. With a pedal steel guitar sighing affirmations behind her, the plain-spoken country singer Kelsey Waldon rolls out images and similes — “like a monarch to a mimosa tree,” “simple as a cotton dress,” “patient as the moon” — to marvel at a reliable, nurturing love: no drama, just comfort and gratitude. PARELESMontell Fish, ‘Darling’Recorded in Montell Fish’s bedroom in Brooklyn, “Darling” — from his new album, “Jamie” — is a love song infused with fragility, delivered as a serenely undulating waltz. “Did you fall out of love, my darling?” he wonders in an otherworldly falsetto, over acoustic guitar picking and low-fi string squeaks. A big, bedroom-grunge chorus arises as he begs, “Please don’t run away,” but the beat falls away and ghostly piano chords are his only accompaniment as he resigns himself: “I’m finally letting you go,” he decides. PARELESObjekt, ‘Bad Apples’TJ Hertz, the electronic musician who records as Objekt, uses the proudly unnatural tones of techno to generate constantly escalating tension in “Bad Apples.” He undermines the methodical predictability of most dance music. Even as the beat stays foursquare and danceable, sounds and silences keep arriving, accreting, suddenly vanishing or fracturing themselves. Buzzes, chimes, nagging nasal tones, deep bass cross-rhythms, slides and crackles, blips that turn into swarms: in the next two bars, anything might appear, from any direction. PARELES More

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      William Hart, Driving Force Behind the Delfonics, Dies at 77

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      With hits like “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” his group pioneered the soulful Philadelphia sound.William Hart, who as the lead singer and chief lyricist of the soul trio the Delfonics helped pioneer the romantic lyrics, falsetto vocals and velvety string arrangements that defined the Philadelphia sound of the 1960s and ’70s, died on July 14 in Philadelphia. He was 77.His son Hadi said the death, at Temple University Hospital, was caused by complications during surgery.The Delfonics combined the harmonies of doo-wop, the sweep of orchestral pop and the crispness of funk to churn out a string of hits, 20 of which reached the Billboard Hot 100. (Two made the Top 10.)Almost all of them were written by Mr. Hart in conjunction with the producer Thom Bell, including “La-La (Means I Love You),” “I’m Sorry” and “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” all released in 1968, and, a year later, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” which won a Grammy for best R&B vocal by a duo or group.Alongside Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, the Philadelphia sound was a pillar of soul and R&B music in the 1960s and ’70s. More relaxed than Motown and less edgy than Stax, it drew on both the doo-wop wave of the late 1950s — especially groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Little Anthony and the Imperials — and a slowed-down version of the funk perfected by James Brown.Mr. Hart looked to all those artists, along with songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, as inspiration. He preferred to write lyrics after the melodies were in place, working around the strictures they imposed to weave stories about heartbreak, jealousy and old-fashioned romance.“I could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I found I could just write about it. It’s like imagining what it’s like to jump off a cliff — you can write about it, but you don’t have to actually jump off that cliff.”In Philadelphia, the Delfonics became mainstays of the frequent “battles of the bands” held at the Uptown Theater, the white-hot center of the city’s soul scene, going toe to toe in satin lapels to see who could be the night’s smoothest crooners.Their reach went far beyond 1960s Philadelphia. Mr. Hart’s songs have a timeless, dreamy quality, at once emotion-laden and urbane. That’s one reason they have had second and third lives: Singers have remade them, rappers have sampled them, and filmmakers have featured them on soundtracks.The New Kids on the Block remade “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in 1989, taking it to No. 8 on the Billboard pop chart. Prince covered “La-La (Means I Love You)” in 1996, the same year the Fugees released a reinterpreted version of “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” titled simply “Ready or Not.”The next year the Delfonics and Mr. Hart experienced an even bigger resurgence when Quentin Tarantino featured “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” on the soundtrack of his film “Jackie Brown” and as a plot point, using the songs’ smooth, nostalgic sound to draw together characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster.“I think the fact that our music is clean helps us make the crossover into the next generation,” Mr. Hart told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2008. “We sing songs that everyone of every age can enjoy. I write most of the songs, and that’s one thing I’ve always tried to do.”William Alexander Hart was born on Jan. 17, 1945, in Washington and moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was a few months old. His father, Wilson, worked in a factory, and his mother, Iretha (Battle) Hart, was a homemaker.His father gave him the nickname Poogie, which stuck with him long into adulthood.Along with his son, he is survived by his wife, Pamela; his brothers, Wilbert and Hurt; his sisters, Niecy and Peaches; his sons, William Jr., Yusuf and Champ; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.William began writing songs when he was about 11 and immediately latched onto the themes of love lost and regained that would dominate his lyrics for decades.He joined his brother Wilbert and a friend from high school, Randy Cain, in a group they at first called the Orphonics, a variation on “aurophonic,” a term William saw on a stereo box. They tweaked the name to Delfonics at the suggestion of their manager, Stan Watson.Mr. Hart was still working a day job in a barbershop when a friend put him in touch with Mr. Bell, who was already well known around Philadelphia for the lush, sensual arrangements he had done for a local label.They became a hit-making duo, the Lennon and McCartney of West Philadelphia: Mr. Bell wrote the music and Mr. Hart supplied the lyrics, often almost simultaneously. Mr. Hart claimed they wrote “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in two hours.The original Delfonics split up in 1975, but Mr. Hart continued to perform under the name, with lineups that might or might not include members of the original group. Wilbert Hart went on to tour with his own Delfonics, even after his brother won an injunction against him in 2000.In 2002 Wilbert Hart and Mr. Cain successfully sued William Hart for back royalties. The courtroom clash didn’t prevent the three of them from occasionally reuniting, at least until Mr. Cain’s death in 2009.Mr. Hart continued to tour using the Delfonics name, his falsetto a bit weaker but his presence still commanding. He also released a number of side projects, including “Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics” (2013), with Mr. Younge producing and Mr. Hart singing and sliding effortlessly back into the lyricist’s chair.“It’s like a blank canvas,” he said in a 2013 interview for the music magazine Wax Poetics. “I’m an artist; just give me the canvas, and I’ll paint the painting.” More

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      Hayley Kiyoko Revs Up With Arcade Fire and Chills Out to ‘Friends’

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      The pop singer and songwriter has been doing some emotional spring cleaning as she prepares to release her second full-length album, “Panorama.”The pop singer and songwriter Hayley Kiyoko’s fans call her “lesbian Jesus,” and she’s become known for boldly and unapologetically putting every facet of herself into her artistry. That wasn’t always the case, however.“Growing up I would write music in my bedroom with a guitar on my bed, or in my journal,” she said, “and I would use he/him pronouns, and it took a long time for me to obviously speak my truth, lyrically.”Kiyoko, 31, was born and raised in Los Angeles, and expressed her interest in music and performing at a very young age, acting in commercials, then in films and on TV. In 2007, she joined a girl group called the Stunners that also included the R&B singer Tinashe. After its 2011 split, she started carving out a solo career. Her 2015 EP “This Side of Paradise” provided a breakthrough moment with the electro-pop track “Girls Like Girls,” which was also a coming out of sorts. Kiyoko directed its video, a queer teen love story depicting a girl with a boyfriend falling for her best friend, which has 147 million views on YouTube.For her second album, “Panorama” (due July 29), Kiyoko said she’s presenting a more refined version of herself sonically, melodically and lyrically — the result of some crucial emotional spring cleaning. “You have a lot of stuff in your room and it’s like, do you really need all of that?” she explained. Part of the process involved taking down the walls she’d built as a young songwriter who was trying to mask what she was actually trying to say. “Hey, I’m comfortable with myself,” she said she realized. “I love myself and I’m at a place in my life where I don’t need you anymore.”For “Panorama,” Kiyoko brought back a few collaborators from her first album, “Expectations,” (the writers Nikki Flores and Brandon Colbein) and introduced some new ones (the producers Danja, Patrick Morrissey and Kill Dave). The album’s first single, “For the Girls,” is a bass-boosted anthem of empowerment that arrived with a queer “Bachelorette” parody music video, featuring a cameo from the real-life “Bachelor” contestant Becca Tilley. (Kiyoko and Tilley have been dating for four years.) On the mid-tempo thumper “Deep in the Woods,” Kiyoko softens her voice to describe meeting someone and feeling like you’ve known them forever. And on “Luna,” a love letter to a crush, Kiyoko jumps octaves as she sings, “You get me wild you know/I’ll chase your shadow.”“We spent a lot of time making sure that everything that you hear and experience is as close to and true to my experience,” she said.On a phone call from her studio at home in Los Angeles, Kiyoko shared a list of the things that continue to inspire her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Voice of Knowledge” by Don Miguel Ruiz I recently started reading and I’m not going to be ashamed to say that, because it’s just the truth. I fell in love with this book. It really supports you and helps you find a way to navigate those voices in your head, what is reality and what is your 5-year-old self afraid of, or your past trauma, or fears. It’s really helped my mental health a lot.2. Arcade Fire’s “Ready to Start” If I’m having a hard day or not feeling inspired I’ll go for a walk and listen to “Ready to Start” and it is like what that title is: It’s a reset for me. It invigorates me and inspires me to keep going. It validates my fears and my sadness. Arcade Fire is one of my favorite bands and I listened to them a lot growing up, so I think I find a lot of comfort and nostalgia listening to Arcade Fire, but then that song specifically, I really resonate with the lyrics.3. Her own fragrance, Hue Growing up as a queer kid in the closet, I had a really hard time having conversations with cute girls. My only way of having conversations with cute girls was when I smelled good. I would put on perfume and go to school and they’d be like, “Hey, you smell really good” or “What are you wearing?” It was a conversation starter and also boosted my confidence when I felt really insecure, so I wanted to create a perfume that could give my fans confidence and was gender inclusive. I think I’ve always struggled with my femininity and masculinity and which box I fit in, so I wanted to create a perfume that kind of symbolized and represented both my masculine and feminine energy in one bottle. It has this really nice balance of fruity floral and musk.4. “Friends” I probably watch three episodes every single night. Jennifer Aniston is like my safe space. I can always laugh and just decompress watching that show. I remember going through a hard breakup and I was living alone and I would just turn on “Friends” and felt like I was with a bunch of friends. I feel like I can watch that show and see little bits and pieces of my friends and family in the characters, so it’s just ever-evolving.5. Monopoly Deal It’s basically like a more convenient Monopoly but you can play it faster and you get your properties at random. It’s one of my favorite games because each card is worth millions of dollars. I used to play it all the time during the pandemic. I love playing it with my friends because you can charge your friends $11 million and they have to give it to you. I bring it with me everywhere in my purse.6. Journaling I have so many journals. Growing up, aunts, uncles or random parental friends would gift me journals and I’d be like, “What am I going to do with this?” They would just sit on my desk and then I began to love writing in them. It’s so incredible just to have a dialogue with myself for therapy. I also like to go back and read my journals because it reminds me of the things that I’ve overcome, especially during the dark times. It helps me feel centered in where I’m at, that I can keep going and that I’m resilient and strong. If I’m on a plane for six hours I’m not watching the TV, I’m journaling.7. Fried eggplant Growing up, I hated Japanese nights because my mom would make this fried eggplant and we’d have spinach and rice and ginger and all these things. There were so many plates. The soy sauce plate, the ginger plate, the edamame plate. Every time after Japanese night, my mom and dad would be like, “OK, kids, you guys can do the dishes.” And I remember being like, “No, I don’t want to do the dishes!” Now looking back, it’s one of my favorite meals and it’s a meal that I probably have once a week to comfort myself. If I’m stressed or just needing to feel love I’ll make that meal and I don’t complain about the dishes anymore.8. Premiere Pro I’m going to shout out Premiere Pro because as an artist, I became a director out of necessity. Wanting to be a storyteller and learning how to edit and having to kind of do everything myself, I was really grateful for Premiere Pro because it was a way for me to be able to tell my stories and have my stories come to life visually. It gave me the courage to be like, “Hey, I can direct, and I can do this.”9. Acupuncture Acupuncture has been a huge part of my healing process: taking care of my body and making sure that my blood circulation is good. I think I struggled with meditation, and acupuncture helped me get to that point of being able to practice meditating because when I go to acupuncture I just lay and I’m able to just be. It’s such an incredible reset for my body and my mind.10. Claude Monet I have always been inspired by color and I want to say a lot of that has to do with really connecting to Claude Monet’s Impressionism. My mouse pad is the sunrise painting and I have big Claude Monet paintings all over my apartment. Color has just always created a sense of ease, calm and safety. I think that translates in my music videos and directing — wanting to create a world where the color palette feels inviting, warm, safe and nostalgic. When I write music, and when I was working on “Panorama,” I always see color. I listen to a song and I’m like, “OK, this is like dark purple or this is like purple and lime green.” More

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      Lizzo’s Empowerment Pop Gets Stuck in the Same Groove

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      “Special,” her second major-label album, gestures toward complexities that would broaden her image as the queen of the mirror pep talk, but retreats to her comfort zone.Since her charismatic breakout hit “Truth Hurts” dominated the Hot 100 in 2019, the music of the Houston-raised singer, rapper, songwriter and flutist Lizzo has been a pop cultural omnipresence — a glossy sonic lacquer ready to provide any humdrum moment with a hater-repellent sheen.That signature spirit of uplift is all over “Special,” Lizzo’s fourth album, and the follow-up to her 2019 major-label debut, “Cuz I Love You.” “In case nobody told you today, you’re special,” Lizzo sings on the title track, briefly abdicating her role as the rap game Mae West to become a millennial Mister Rogers. Later, on the bouncy, brassy “Birthday Girl,” she asks, “Is it your birthday, girl? ’Cause you looking like a present.” Another propulsive, synth-driven track succinctly captures Lizzo’s bawdily empowering ethos in its title: “I Love You Bitch.”As a self-described “big grrrl” preaching unapologetic sex positivity and self-love, Lizzo, 34, is a refreshingly radical personality, on red carpets and on social media, where she is candid and outspoken. But the cultural ubiquity of her recent music emphasizes its general agreeability and attests to its political limitations: Now many Lizzo songs have come to signify the treat-yourself mood major corporations wish to capture when they want you to buy something. In the past few years, Lizzo’s music has appeared in advertisements for several competing technology companies, alcoholic beverages and soft drinks, a food-delivery app and the rebranded Weight Watchers (for which she was criticized by some fans and semi-apologized, stating, fairly, “I deserve the space to learn from my actions”). The “Cuz I Love You” diversity anthem “Better in Color” accompanied a 2021 commercial introducing the many hues of iMacs.In 2022, there’s no such thing as selling out — everyone is entitled to make money in a challenging music industry — but artists run the risk of diluting their message. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that on “Special” Lizzo often sounds caught between the personal and the personal brand. Occasionally, on songs that chronicle her less-than-ecstatic feelings, she gestures toward complexities that challenge the one-dimensional image of her as the high priestess of the mirror pep talk — only to retreat back to the anodyne comfort zone of songs like “Special” (which debuted as part of a Logitech ad campaign early this year) and “Birthday Girl,” which features a spoken-word segment of people gleefully shouting out their astrological signs.Like her irresistibly fun 2019 single “Juice,” many of Lizzo’s best songs cruise in the same lane that Bruno Mars skillfully dominates: uncannily reproduced ’70s-funk and ’80s-pop simulacra, updated for the present moment with slangy, winking vocals. Her current hit, the disco-lite summer jam “About Damn Time” (produced by her “Truth Hurts” collaborator Ricky Reed and Blake Slatkin) is a bit Lizzo-by-Numbers: a showy flute solo, relentlessly vampy delivery, lyrics that could double as Instagram captions. But the bass line’s gummy groove holds all the disparate parts together, allowing Lizzo to glide elegantly from arch, semi-rapped verses to a belted-out bridge that shows off the full range of her vocals. When it works, it works.And when it doesn’t, well … you get a song like overzealous-ally anthem “Everybody’s Gay,” which aims for Paradise Garage euphoria but lands closer to Target’s collection of Pride month apparel. The energy of the opening track, “The Sign,” somehow manages to be both relentless and listless, Lizzo’s usual cheeky wit blunted by generic lines like, “I live inside his head and pay no rent, yeah/It’s lit, yeah.” The best thing about the abrasive, Beastie Boys-sampling “Grrrls” is that it is the shortest song on the album.“Grrrls” is one of several tracks on “Special” centered around an interpolation of another older and more famous song, which, repeated often on a relatively short pop album, starts to feel less like homage and more like an overreliance on other people’s hooks. The soulful, midtempo “Break Up Twice,” produced by Mark Ronson, draws out a melodic line from Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” to address a disappointing partner, but after the dueling “Ex-Factor” samples in Drake’s “Nice for What” and Cardi B’s “Be Careful” in summer 2018, interpolating the untouchable Hill has come to feel like an overused trope. “Coldplay” features a sped-up and ill-fitting sample of “Yellow,” which Lizzo later shouts out as her go-to soundtrack for nursing a broken heart: “It made me sad, I cried,” she sings over a skittish, jazzy beat, “Singin’ Coldplay in the night.”“Coldplay,” the album’s final track, concludes the loose thematic arc of “Special,” which finds Lizzo wondering if all this work on her self-confidence has made it more difficult to let her guard down and allow herself to be swept away by romantic love. “I’ve learned to love me as myself,” she sings on the searching ballad “If You Love Me,” “But when I’m with somebody else/I question everything I know.” On the energetic “2 B Loved (Am I Ready),” which has a bright, synth-driven chorus reminiscent of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the antic butterflies of a new romance make Lizzo question her hard-won identity as an independent single woman. “I’m good with my friends, I don’t want a man, girl,” she sings, before the ringing of her phone upends that stability: “And now he callin’ me, why do I feel like this? What’s happenin’ to me?”What happens when the woman who proclaimed she would “put the sing in single” finds herself in a monogamous relationship? Or when the queen of empowerment pop wakes up feeling something less than good as hell? In its more tantalizing moments, “Special” articulates these questions but falls short of committing to an answer. On her major-label albums, Lizzo has yet to risk traveling to a depth from which she cannot immediately pull herself up, with triumphant fanfare, on the very next song.Lizzo“Special”(Nice Life Recording Company/Atlantic) More

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      ‘The Day the Music Died’ Review: ‘American Pie,’ the Life of a Hit

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      Don McLean tries to clear up some misapprehensions about the eight-an-a-half-minute song that took on a life of its own, in this documentary.Even those who don’t like Don McLean’s song “American Pie” have to admit that it’s a distinctive pop culture achievement. A nearly eight-and-a-half minute allegory that goes from mournful to infectious to mournful again, the monster 1971 radio hit is seemingly known to all generations and still sung at bar-closing times the world over.That last fact is according to this reverent documentary about the song. Directed by Mark Moormann, the movie travels all over America to bring home the idea that “American Pie” says something profound about the country. It interweaves McLean’s biography with an account of the last days of the ’50s rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, creating a compelling narrative about the effect the plane crash that took their lives in 1959 had not just on young McLean, but American music itself. The movie then alternates with a history of McLean’s professional career (including his mentoring by the folk legend Pete Seeger) and scenes in which stars including Garth Brooks rhapsodize about the song.Back in the day, kids analyzing the lyrics surmised that the bits about “the devil” expressed McLean’s moral and aesthetic disapproval of Mick Jagger. But to many of the interviewees here, including Brooks (who brought McLean onstage to sing it with him at his giant Central Park concert in 1997) and the Cuban-born musical artist Rudy Pérez, the song is “about freedom.”The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.McLean, who has frequently been portrayed as a prickly figure, and worse, puts on his most ingratiating mien here. And why not. Few musicians are given such generous opportunities to be docent to their legacies.The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      Lizzo Conquers Self-Doubt With an ’80s Jam, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Brent Faiyaz, Pink, Marcus Mumford and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lizzo, ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)” — from Lizzo’s new album, “Special” — is a self-questioning self-help pop track with 1980s drum machines and synthesizers pumping syncopated octaves and handclaps over an aerobics-friendly beat, heading toward the upward key change of a classic pop single. As Lizzo sings about temptation and insecurity contending with the promise of pleasure, it’s clear what’s going to win.Pink, ‘Irrelevant’Self-doubt turns to defiance and then to righteous anger in “Irrelevant,” a thumping, guitar-strumming, generalized pop-rock protest that makes up in spirit and momentum what it lacks in focus. As the arrangement builds behind her, Pink sings about fear, calls out religious hypocrisy, makes common cause with “the kids” and finally, backed by a mass of vocals, belts, “Girls just wanna have rights/So why do we have to fight?”Demi Lovato, ‘Substance’After all Demi Lovato’s travails, the singer wails a 21st-century plaint about superficiality and loneliness: “Am I the only one looking for substance?” The backup is pure professional punk-pop, pushing those loud guitars and muscular drums as Lovato works up to a near-shriek and flings “whoa-oh” as a hook. But the frustration comes through as loudly as the guitars.Brent Faiyaz, ‘Loose Change’Brent Faiyaz, an R&B singer, songwriter and producer, has landed collaborations with Drake, Alicia Keys and Tyler, the Creator. His surprise-released second album, “Wasteland,” which is full of songs and skits about romantic suspense — both good and bad — is poised for a big debut on the Billboard 200 album chart. “Loose Change” backs him with an implied beat — no drums, lots of space — sketched by syncopated chords from a string ensemble, skulking synthesizer tones and his own imploring voice. In a tremulous tenor croon that echoes Usher, he sings about how infatuation can turn to irritation, indicting his own worst impulses and wondering, “What’s left of us, what’s left of our lives?”The A’s, ‘When I Die’“When I Die” is morbid but practical, and ultimately affectionate. The A’s are Amelia Meath, from the electronic band Sylvan Esso, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig from Daughter of Swords. Their new album, “Fruit,” is mostly other people’s songs, but “When I Die” is their own. Singing close harmony in what could almost be a nursery-rhyme melody, they add percussion and synthesizer bass lines over what sounds like marching feet. And they calmly provide instructions for a memorial — loud music, flowers, dancing, toasts and a funeral pyre “to light your way back home” — to remind survivors that “I’m sorry I left you behind/and I’m kissing you through this song.”Marcus Mumford, ‘Cannibal’Marcus Mumford, from Mumford and Sons, confronts deep and confusing trauma in “Cannibal,” from a solo album due in September. He doesn’t specify what happened, but he insists, “That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child.” Most of the track is just his voice and a few guitar notes picked on low strings. But as he faces up to how hard it is to speak about the events, and pleads “help me know how to begin again,” a arena-filling band suddenly materializes behind him; it’s the breakthrough he longs for.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Because I Liked a Boy’Things go wrong fast in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Because I Liked a Boy” from her new album, “Emails I Can’t Send.” It starts out sounding cozy and old-fashioned, with just an echoey electric guitar playing 1950s chords as she sings about what could be a rom-com flirtation: “We bonded over black-eyed peas and complicated exes,” she coos. “It was all so innocent.” But the chorus changes everything; an ominous synthesizer bass tone arrives and she’s being accused of being “a homewrecker” and “a slut” and getting truckloads of death threats, and the bass and drum machine heave beneath her like the ground is shaking. She keeps her composure, but just barely.Pantha du Prince, ‘Golden Galactic’Pantha du Prince — the electronic musician Hendrik Weber — works where ambient and dance music overlap. He’s fond of nature imagery and pretty, consonant sounds, but his music is changeable and contemplative rather than saccharine. “Golden Galactic,” from his upcoming album “Golden Gaia,” uses plinking, harplike motifs, repeating them a few times and moving on, constantly changing up the implied rhythms instead of settling into a loop. That restless motion is enfolded in swelling string-section chords, going nowhere in particular yet not staying still. More