Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

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

      by

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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

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

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Shakira and Ozuna’s ‘Monotonía,’ and 7 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Caroline Polachek, John Cale featuring Weyes Blood, iLe 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.Shakira and Ozuna, ‘Monotonía’Here’s a rarity: a no-fault breakup song. Well, not entirely. “It wasn’t your fault, nor was it mine,” Shakira offers at the start. “It was the fault of the monotony.” Shakira, from Colombia, meets Ozuna, who was born in Puerto Rico to a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother, closer to his musical territory: a Dominican bachata, with staccato guitar arpeggios and flurries of bongos. As they trade verses, accusations emerge: he was a narcissist, she was distant, what was incredible turned routine. Bachata puts heartbreak at a distance by placing it within a neatly syncopated grid; both Shakira and Ozuna sing like they’ll get over it. JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Sunset’Flamenco might seem an odd sound for the avant-garde pop star Caroline Polachek to embrace — Rosalía’s influence, perhaps? — but her ever-gleaming vocals dance nimbly enough across “Sunset” to make the whole thing work. “These days I wear my body like an uninvited guest,” she sings on the verse, her fleet-footed verbosity conveying a sense of itchy anxiety. But that’s all resolved by the chorus, when Polachek’s vocal pacing suddenly slows, comforted by a romantic embrace: “He said, no regrets, ’cause you’re my sunset.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJohn Cale featuring Weyes Blood, ‘Story of Blood’The legendary John Cale — whose crucial contributions to the development of the Velvet Underground’s sound Todd Haynes refreshingly reasserted last year in his documentary about the band — has long been a generous collaborator with younger artists at this later stage in his career. His forthcoming album “Mercy,” his first collection of new songs in a decade, continues that pattern, featuring contributions from Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso and Laurel Halo. The haunting “Story of Blood,” the first offering from “Mercy,” features bewitching vocals from the indie luminary Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood. Across a patiently paced seven-minute reverie of synth chords and skittish electronic beats, their voices entwine balletically, as if locked in some kind of otherworldly dance. ZOLADZNxWorries featuring H.E.R., ‘Where I Go’Anderson .Paak brings the plush nostalgia of Silk Sonic, his Grammy-winning alliance with Bruno Mars, back to an earlier collaboration: Nxworries, his project with the producer Knxledge, which released an album in 2016. In “Where I Go,” Anderson .Paak professes love, generosity and regrets for past affairs. But H.E.R. sings about lingering suspicions and, in the video, finds solid evidence; neither his blandishments nor the purr of an electric sitar can smooth things over. PARELESKelela, ‘Happy Ending’After a long absence, Kelela wafted back into public earshot with the abstract “Washed Away.” Now, she embraces the beat with telling ambivalence in “Happy Ending.” A double time breakbeat churns far below a vocal that starts out barely paying attention to the underlying propulsion. But as Kelela finds herself in a club and spots her ex, she latches onto the beat: “I won’t chase you but it’s not over,” she sings. “If you don’t run away, could be a happy ending after all.” Then they’re dancing together, and intertwined in a kiss. But the beat falls away, and the song leaves the situation entirely in suspense. PARELESiLe, ‘(Escapándome) de Mí’Romance is often toxic in the songs on “Nacarile,” the new album by the Puerto Rican songwriter iLe. “Everything beautiful about you scares me,” she sings in “(Escapándome) de Mí” (“Escaping Myself”). “It scares me because I like it.” As the track builds around her, from a lone plucked guitar to an electronic citadel, she recognizes her own vulnerability, ponders it and takes the leap anyway. PARELESOkay Kaya, ‘Inside of a Plum’The serene drift of “Inside of a Plum,” from Norwegian American indie artist Okay Kaya’s forthcoming album “SAP,” was inspired by doctor-administered ketamine therapy, which is sometimes used to treat depression. That might sound heavy, but Kaya Wilkins’s characteristically wry approach gives the song an alluring weightlessness and even a sense of humor. There’s an amusing mundanity to the way she describes the procedure (“in a building. in an office, in a chair under a weighted blanket”) and then a vivid psychedelia once her trip begins. Amid floating strings, Wilkins murmurs the song’s indelibly descriptive hook: “Now I’m scuba diving in space.” ZOLADZHagop Tchaparian, ‘Right to Riot’Hagop Tchaparian is a British-Armenian musician whose tastes have led him from playing guitar in the grungy 1990s band Symposium to the electronic music on his new album, “Bolts.” Through the years, Tchaparian has also gathered recordings of performances — live and in video clips — of Armenian and Middle Eastern music and gatherings. The first sounds that leap out of “Right to Riot” are traditional: an aggressive six-beat drum pattern and the nasal, biting snarl of what Armenians call the zurna, a double-reed instrument used under various names across the Balkans, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Asia. Programmed beats, synthesizer swoops, bass drones and layers of percussion only make the track bristle more intensely. PARELES More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A New Taylor Swift LP? Metacritic Crunches the Reviews, as Fans Watch.

      by

      As pop fandoms go to battle on social media wielding data about their favorite stars, Metascores averaging critical opinions have become ammunition, much to the site’s chagrin.For Metacritic, a website that collects and quantifies reviews of music, movies, TV shows and video games, a Taylor Swift album drop is one of the best days of the year.“There’s nothing quite like Taylor Swift,” Marc Doyle, 51, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview last week. “We get a great deal of traffic and user participation, a lot of people sharing it on social media.” In 2020, when Swift released “Folklore,” her eighth studio album, traffic swelled by “roughly a half million page views,” including user review pages, he said.Metacritic, as its name suggests, aggregates entertainment criticism using a principle of meta-analysis, stripping reviews of their qualitative assessments and assigning them a value between 0 and 100. And it has helped turn pop culture into a game of sabermetrics.Its tallies, known as Metascores, started off simply as a consumer guide. But over the past decade, as music superfans have gone to battle on social media wielding data — sales and streaming figures, Billboard chart positions, tour grosses, number of Grammys won — Metascores have increasingly become ammunition. Passionate fan armies keep careful track of the scoreboard, and one of the most fervent is devoted to Swift, who will release her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” on Friday.But who is behind Metacritic, and how does it tabulate its figures?In 1999, Jason Dietz, like Doyle, a graduate from the U.S.C. Gould School of Law, had the idea for a website that applied meta-analysis to a range of media, and asked Doyle to join his effort to build one. (The movie aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes went live that year, but Dietz was unaware of it.) Dietz, the site’s current features editor, had learned how to code HTML, creating websites including one called List of Possible Band Names.In late 1999, Doyle’s sister and her husband contributed the majority of Metacritic’s start-up fund. (Earlier this month, Metacritic and six other sites were acquired by Fandom, a developer of entertainment platforms dedicated to superfans, in a deal estimated at $50 million; Doyle declined to comment on the sale.) Together, they began poring over thousands of print and online reviews, compiling them into an Excel spreadsheet and organizing them according to their own schematics — what would soon become their trademark Metascores.Doyle said the group started making daily visits to publications that run reviews. “Every time they publish a review, you throw it in the system,” he said. “Once you get to four reviews, then you generate the Metascore, which is an average score.” For the games section, the site sends outlets a list of questions “so you can really get to know their scoring philosophy,” he added, a process it has only recently started “for potential movies section partners.”Metacritic went live in January 2001 with a film vertical and a rundown of how its staff calculated Metascores. For letter grades (used by publications like Entertainment Weekly), an A represents 100, while an F corresponds to zero. For reviews that aren’t assigned an alphanumeric value, the site’s staff — Metacritic currently has five full-time employees who work remotely from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Portland, Ore. — will assess the tone of the review before assigning a value themselves.Metacritic’s page for Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation,” which divided critics. The website Consequence of Sound recently said it regretted its D+ rating. “We get comments all the time like, ‘This review seems so much better than a 3/10,’ so then I’ll take that comment to another editor, ask what they think, and we’ll give it a reread,” Doyle wrote over email. “Over the years, we’ve also been lobbied to either de-publish a review or drop a publication from our system for a variety of reasons. If it’s not a case of plagiarism or fraud (which usually is self-reported from a member publication), such appeals are generally unsuccessful.”Before they are averaged, the scores are weighted according to the critic’s perceived prestige and volume of reviews. “From the very beginning we’ve believed there are so many critics out there who are so incredible at what they do — why should they be treated exactly the same as a brand-new critic at a regional paper?” Doyle said.But Metacritic declined to explain more about which publications and critics are given priority status. “That’s really the secret sauce,” Doyle said. So, how do they avoid biases? “You just have to trust us,” he added. “We’re a professional outfit.” The site makes money from advertising, licensing Metascores and affiliate revenue.Metacritic’s music section began in March 2001 with a scoreboard of recent album releases. Pulling data from 30 publications — today, that number has expanded to 49 — on launch day, Aimee Mann’s “Bachelor No. 2” ranked highest with a Metascore of 90, while Juliana Hatfield’s “Pony: Total System Failure” landed lowest with a Metascore of 25. (The site has tracked reviews from 131 sites in its history.)For almost a decade, the section didn’t gain much online traction. Attention remained mostly fixed on the site’s games vertical, which has had the “greatest notoriety and impact,” Doyle explained; its metrics have affected game design, marketing strategies, even employee compensation.In an interview, the game designer Chris Avellone said that in 2010, Bethesda, the publisher of the game Fallout: New Vegas, “chose to include a clause in the contract that said if you deliver a title with a Metacritic score above 84, we’ll give you a bonus.” The game missed by one point.Metacritic began playing a larger role in music around the same time. In December 2009, after collating 7,000 reviews, the site released its first top artists of the decade list. Its No. 1 came as a surprise: Spoon, the indie-rock band.Before long, users began posting Metascores on Twitter as empirical proof that an artist had succeeded or failed. “Kanye got 93 on Metacritic, Taylor Swift got 75. Yeezy Forever!” one fan tweeted in 2010.“People used Metascores as an argument settler, a metric to put in each other’s faces,” Doyle said. “That really was not the intention of the site, and we hate to see it used as a sword or shield to go into battle with different pop fandoms.”Critics themselves got caught in the crossfire. In 2016, an anonymous Ariana Grande fan started a petition against Christopher R. Weingarten, a writer who had reviewed Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” for Rolling Stone. In June 2020, a Pitchfork editor was doxxed and threatened after writing what fans perceived as an unjust review of Swift’s “Folklore” that would lower its Metascore.“I’ve heard from critics whose inboxes have been slammed with complaints,” Doyle said, noting that low scores are often equated with bias. “Despite this, we certainly want to encourage critics to tell it like it is.”Swift, who has a particularly active online fan base, has been the spark for other Metacritic dust-ups. The music site Consequence of Sound announced last month that one of its biggest regrets was giving her 2017 album, “Reputation,” a D+ and “screwing up the Metacritic score.”The idea of scoring artists may seem unnecessary or make some critics uncomfortable — Rolling Stone recently abolished its star rankings — but there’s a strong appetite among listeners to have numbers at their fingertips. Perkins Miller, the chief executive of Fandom Inc., compared Metacritic to the N.F.L. — where he previously worked — and its Next Gen stats platform, noting, “There is a greater crossover between sports fans and music fans today.”Among very online pop fans, data capital is tied to social capital. “Metacritic is always brought up on Taylor Swift Twitter,” said PJ Medina, a 21-year-old fan from the Philippines. “If she gets a high score, it means that she’s critically acclaimed. It means that more people will care.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Mary McCaslin, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies at 75

      by

      A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Cavetown’s Heartfelt Bedroom Pop Brings Kindness to a Cruel World

      by

      The 23-year-old British singer-songwriter Robin Skinner has a listenership devoted to his sensitive (but not despairing) music.If you want to get Robin Skinner to open up, ask about his cat. In conversation, the musician who records and performs as Cavetown is soft-spoken and cautious. But he excitedly recounted Juno’s growth from a timid kitten who hid for a week when she arrived at his London apartment to his affectionate companion who presides over the windowsills of his current house in Cambridge. Then he apologized for rambling.Juno makes frequent appearances on Cavetown’s social media channels. She also shows up a few times on his new album, “Worm Food,” due Nov. 4, most notably on the song that chronicles their bond in its devastating chorus: “I do it for Juno/Pretend her life is on the line/Manipulate myself into staying alive.”For almost a decade, Skinner, 23, ​has amassed a following with his melding of the whimsical and the weepy, revealing his vulnerabilities over melodious alt-rock. Though he’s a sensitive soul, he doesn’t wallow in misery. As a result, he’s found a natural audience in teenagers and some even younger children who are drawn to his kindness in an often cruel world.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” he said during a video interview, his usually red hair dyed black and thin-framed glasses dominating his face. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesSkinner sometimes takes his own struggles with depression and anxiety and turns them into characters in his songs. For “Lemon Boy,” from his 2018 album, he transformed his bitterness into a persistent garden creature in need of a friend. More recently, he’s returned to the bully who lives in his head as a representation of debilitating self-criticism. “It’s helped me to personify that as a separate thing, because often I forget that I’m more than that,” he said.Skinner was born in Oxford to two classical musicians. When he was 8, the family moved after his father got a job at the University of Cambridge, where he still leads a choir and teaches early music history. His mother gives flute and recorder lessons privately and in schools. The couple divorced when Skinner was 14, but he wasn’t upset by their split. On “Devil Town” from 2015, which remains one of Cavetown’s most popular songs, he nonchalantly sings, “Mom and daddy aren’t in love/That’s fine, I’ll settle for two birthdays.”But on “1994,” the crunchy and tuneful lead single from “Worm Food,” Skinner sounds wistful for a period in their lives that he never witnessed. “From pictures and from memories that they’ve shared with me, that sounds like a happy time for them when they were really in love with each other,” he said. “Part of me is curious about what that could have been like and I feel like I missed out a little bit.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. “I grew up pretty fast, for various reasons,” he said. “I missed out on the childhood that I would want to have. Then there’s also missing the freedom that I had then to be a kid. I didn’t realize that I had that freedom at that time.”When he was younger, Skinner’s parents encouraged his interest in music as he tried out instruments like the trumpet and violin. He resisted his mother’s attempts to teach him theory, and remains largely self-taught and self-sufficient, producing all his songs and playing most of the instruments himself.He didn’t have many friends at school during his early adolescence, but found a community online through Twitter, using the platform as a diary for his thoughts. He started a YouTube channel in late 2012 and eventually began uploading ukulele covers of songs by artists like Twenty One Pilots and the Libertines. As Skinner grew as a musician, the ukulele was replaced with guitars, the covers turned into original compositions, and the sparse arrangements were filled in with drums and shimmering electronic textures. His YouTube channel grew to over two million subscribers.In 2018, the musician Chloe Moriondo became one of the many teenagers who found the online Cavetown community, and when she posted a cover of “Lemon Boy,” Skinner left a supportive comment. They eventually became frequent tourmates and collaborators, and Moriondo, now an amped-up pop singer, contributes guest vocals to “Grey Space” on Cavetown’s latest album.“A lot of Robin’s writing is incredibly honest and relatable in a strange and a universal way,” she said. “He really puts himself out there completely and shares his heart with people. That is a really beautiful thing.”After several self-released albums, sold mostly through the digital distributor Bandcamp, Cavetown signed to Sire, and his major label debut, “Sleepyhead,” arrived at the end of March 2020. Skinner has mixed feelings about the LP, which was completed on the road and under stress.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” Skinner said. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesBut “Worm Food” was made at his own pace and in cozier spaces. The process included a pivotal songwriting trip to San Diego, where he connected with Vic Fuentes, the lead singer of the post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, Skinner’s favorite group when he was a teenager. They recorded the dynamic and serrated “A Kind Thing to Do” in Skinner’s rental house on the beach, with Skinner in a chair and Fuentes seated on the bed. “You can just tell he is just one of those natural talents waiting to explode,” Fuentes said in an interview.In October, Skinner, who is transgender, also created the This Is Home Project, which aims to give more than a million dollars to the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the next three years. It’s named for a Cavetown song that many fans interpret as being about Skinner reconciling his own identity. For years he has received GoFundMe links from people looking for help, but with This Is Home he hopes to formalize his contributions to foundations that can fund top surgeries, safe housing or other needs.It’s become an unofficial tradition at Cavetown shows for someone in the crowd to pass Skinner a trans flag, which he ties around his neck and wears like a cape. The first time it happened, it just felt like the natural thing to do. “I am part of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and it’s not something that I necessarily talk explicitly about very often,” he said. “I find it hard to find the right words to use and so just holding a flag or having it around me onstage is a silent way of being like, ‘I love you, I understand, and this is a space for us.’ It helps me feel like we’re part of the same world together.”Self-examination remains a major part of “Worm Food,” but Skinner’s also working toward self-forgiveness. On the anxiously peppy “Heart Attack,” he sings, “I’m measuring up against the wall again/It’s always the same, but maybe this time I’ve changed.”In the months leading up to the release of “Worm Food,” Cavetown has been performing the new song “Frog” live. With its blatantly romantic endearments (“I feel wrong/My head’s gone funny, princess/But I’m your frog/Kiss mе better all night long”) it’s already become a favorite, and young fans have thrown stuffed frogs onstage or come wearing frog hats. Skinner thinks a large part of the song’s appeal is just that kids like frogs, but maybe there’s something bigger happening too: “It’s the only happy song on the album that’s genuinely written about a happy thing.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      K-Pop’s Stray Kids Land Second No. 1 Album This Year

      by

      “Maxident” is the latest release to top Billboard’s album chart on the strength of CD or vinyl sales, rather than streams.Week after week, the Billboard album chart is a tale of two formats.Most of the time, the titles that reach No. 1 are the ones that are most popular on streaming services. So far in 2022, that has included Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack, various rap records (by Drake, Lil Durk, Future) and this year’s biggest hit, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which has held the top spot for 13 weeks.The rest of the time, the top position belongs to the records that make a splash with physical versions, like vinyl LPs, CDs and collectible boxed sets packed with goodies like posters and T-shirts. Some of the most skilled marketers of physical media these days have been K-pop groups, like BTS and Blackpink.This week, the eight-member Stray Kids, from South Korea, opens at No. 1 for a second time this year with “Maxident,” which had the equivalent of 117,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. As with its last release, “Oddinary,” which topped the chart back in March, most of the sales of “Maxident” were on CD, with the band releasing the album in as many as 10 different packages, including exclusive versions for retailers like Target and Barnes & Noble.Of its total, 107,000 were for CDs. “Maxident,” like “Oddinary” before it, is officially a “mini album,” with just under 27 minutes of play time on its standard versions. The eight tracks on “Maxident” — by comparison, “Un Verano” has 23 — collected a little less than 10 million streams in the United States, or about 6 percent of the total consumption of the release in its opening week.The success of “Maxident” bumps “Un Verano” to No. 2 with the equivalent of 76,000 sales. Now in its 23rd week out, “Un Verano” still has never dipped lower than second place, and it has racked up about 3.7 billion U.S. streams alone.Bad Bunny’s reign at the top may soon be coming to an end, however, with the arrival of two new albums: Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” which came out on Friday and is already a major streaming hit, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights.”Swift, whose ingenuity as a marketer may be unsurpassed in the industry, has been paying close attention to physical media in recent years, and for “Midnights,” which comes out this Friday, she has a clever offering. The four variant vinyl editions, when turned around and placed in a grid, contain numbers that form the hours of a clock.“It’s a clock,” she said when showing it off on Instagram. “It can help you tell time.”The popularity of physical media can be surprising, since streaming now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States. But vinyl has been growing at double digits for years, and in 2021 had just over $1 billion in sales, for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.For artists, CDs and LPs can be especially appealing when it comes to climbing the charts — according to the formulas used by Billboard and Luminate to determine chart positions, it takes as many 1,250 track streams on paid services, or 3,750 on free ones, to count as much as a single album sale.Also on this week’s album chart, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” rises two spots to No. 3, after its vinyl version became widely available. (Perhaps you caught Beyoncé’s retail takeover on TikTok, featuring the queen gamely signing LPs in jeans, cowboy boots and a Rolling Stones T-shirt?)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is in fifth place. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      BTS to Enlist in South Korea’s Military

      by

      Ending months of debate, the band’s label said that the seven members would serve their military conscriptions. They plan to reunite in a couple of years.The biggest question about the biggest K-pop band has been answered.The members of BTS will enlist in South Korea’s military as required by law, the band’s label said on Monday, ending months of public debate about whether the group qualified for an exemption to mandatory conscription.The announcement of the band’s decision — which came less than two days after it had performed its first concert in months — effectively confirms the hiatus that the members had first mentioned this summer. The seven members will reconvene “as a group again around 2025” after completing their service, the label, Big Hit Music, said in a statement posted on Twitter.Millions of dejected fans, who call themselves the Army, took to social media to express their support, grief and disbelief. The move is also likely to have wider ramifications, deprivingSouth Korea of the billions of dollars the band’s followers pump into its economy.South Korea requires all able-bodied men to enlist by the time they turn 30 and to serve for about two years. Exceptions can be granted, for example to athletes who win medals at international competitions like the Olympics and to some high-level classical musicians, but pop music artists do not qualify. The first member of BTS to enlist will be Kim Seok-jin, known as just Jin, who turns 30 in December.After the announcement, the stock price of Big Hit’s parent company, HYBE, fell 2.5 percent on Monday. The company has lost about half its market value since June, when BTS talked about a hiatus as the members pursued solo projects.Jin announced a solo project at the BTS concert on Saturday in Busan, South Korea, an event that was free of charge and drew about 50,000 fans. On Monday, the label had a message that seemed targeted to both fans and investors.“‘Yet to Come (The Most Beautiful Moment)’ is more than a track from their latest album, it is a promise,” the label said. “There’s much more yet to come in the years ahead from BTS.” More