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      Meat Loaf, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ Singer and Actor, Dies

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      In his six-decade career, the singer, born Marvin Lee Aday, sold millions of albums and acted in films including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Fight Club.”Meat Loaf, the larger-than-life rocker whose 1977 debut album, “Bat Out of Hell,” was one of the best-selling albums of all time, died on Thursday. He had given conflicting information about his age over the years, but was widely reported to have been 74.His death was confirmed by his manager, Michael Greene. A statement on the musician’s Facebook page said his wife was by his side and that his friends had been with him in his final 24 hours. A cause of death was not given.Meat Loaf, who was born Marvin Lee Aday and took his stage name from a childhood nickname, had a career that few could match. In six decades, he sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, the statement said, and appeared in several movies, including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Fight Club.”“We know how much he meant to so many of you and we truly appreciate all of the love and support as we move through this time of grief in losing such an inspiring artist and beautiful man,” the statement said. “From his heart to your souls … don’t ever stop rocking!”Meat Loaf’s death came just a year after that of Jim Steinman, the songwriter who wrote “Bat Out of Hell,” a record that brought operatic rock to audiences at a time when, in the face of disco and punk, it couldn’t have been more unfashionable. The pair met when Mr. Steinman was commissioned to co-write a musical called “More Than You Deserve,” which ran at the Public Theater in New York in 1973 and 1974. Meat Loaf auditioned and later joined the cast.Jim Steinman, left, with Meat Loaf in 1978. Mr. Steinman wrote all the songs on Meat Loaf’s debut album, “Bat Out of Hell,” which became one of the best-selling albums of all time.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesLater, Mr. Steinman was trying to write a post-apocalyptic musical based on “Peter Pan,” but, unable to secure the rights for the tale, he turned the work into “Bat Out of Hell,” bringing in Meat Loaf to give the songs the style and energy that made them hits. The title track alone is a mini-opera in itself, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes and featuring numerous musical breakdowns. The album’s seven tracks also included the songs “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”Meat Loaf and Mr. Steinman went on to have legal disagreements, but still worked together, writing a sequel to “Bat Out of Hell” in 1993 — “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell” — which included “I’d Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That),” Meat Loaf’s only track to top the Billboard 100 singles chart. The song also won him the 1994 Grammy Award for best rock vocal solo performance.“Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose,” released in 2006, also included some songs by Mr. Steinman, who created a musical based on “Bat Out of Hell” that premiered in England in 2017. Mr. Steinman died in April 2021 at age 73. Meat Loaf told Rolling Stone shortly afterward that Mr. Steinman had been the “centerpiece” of his life.Some critics could be sniffy about Meat Loaf’s music and spectacle. John Rockwell, reviewing a 1977 live show for The New York Times, started by remarking that “Meat Loaf is the rather graceless name that a large rock performer has chosen for both himself and for the band built around his singing.” Despite that, Mr. Rockwell was soon convinced that Meat Loaf was worthy of being the center of attention. “He has fine, fervent low rock tenor, and enough stage presence to do without spotlights altogether,” he wrote, adding that, “one had to admire the unabashed intensity with which he was willing to wallow in such soap‐opera silliness.”Meat Loaf ultimately released 12 studio albums, the last being “Braver Than We Are” in 2016.In addition to his music, Meat Loaf also appeared in dozens of television shows and movies, according to IMDb. His first major role came in 1975 in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” where he played Eddie. He also appeared in “Wayne’s World” (1992), “Spice World” (1997) and “Fight Club” (1999). More recently, he had a role in several episodes of the TV series “Ghost Wars” from 2017-18.Marvin Lee Aday was born and grew up in Dallas, the son of Orvis Wesley Aday, a former policeman, and Wilma Artie Hukel, an English teacher. “I stayed at my grandmother’s house a lot,” Meat Loaf wrote in “To Hell and Back,” his 1999 autobiography, adding that he did not know if those stays were because his mother was busy working or because she did not want him to see his father “on a bender.”According to his autobiography, Meat Loaf was born on Sep. 27, 1947, but news reports of his age varied over the years. In 2003, he showed a reporter from The Guardian newspaper a passport featuring a birth date of 1951 and later said about the discrepancy, “I just continually lie.”Meat Loaf at a news conference promoting his album “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose” in 2006.Bobby Yip/ReutersAs an adult, Meat Loaf said he changed his first name to Michael from Marvin because of childhood taunts about his weight and, he said, the emotional impact of a Levi’s jeans commercial that had the slogan, “Poor fat Marvin can’t wear Levi’s.”He later cited the commercial when petitioning to change his name, which the judge granted it within 30 seconds, Meat Loaf wrote in his autobiography.Meat Loaf also told numerous stories about how he got his stage name, including one about a high school stunt in which he let a Volkswagen run over his head. Afterward, a child shouted, “You’re as dumb as a hunk of meat loaf.” But Meat Loaf wrote in his autobiography that the name came from his father: “He called me Meat Loaf almost from the time my mother brought me home.”Meat Loaf had health problems throughout his career. He had heart surgery in 2003 after collapsing onstage at Wembley Arena in London and told an audience in Newcastle, England, in 2007 that the concert was “probably the last show I’ll ever do” after another health scare.Meat Loaf performing in the Netherlands in 2013.Ferdy Damman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 2013, he told The Guardian that he was definitely retiring from music after another farewell tour. “I’ve had 18 concussions,” he said. “My balance is off. I’ve had a knee replacement. I’ve got to have the other one replaced.” He wanted to “concentrate more on acting,” he added, since “that’s where I started and that’s where I’ll finish.”A full list of survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Fred Parris, Creator of a Doo-Wop Classic, Is Dead at 85

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      His “In the Still of the Night” (originally “Nite”), recorded with his group the Five Satins, came to define a sort of dreamy 1950s nostalgia.Fred Parris, who was a love-struck 19-year-old missing his fiancée while serving in the Army when he wrote one of pop music’s most enduring songs, the wistful doo-wop ballad commonly known as “In the Still of the Night,” and recorded it with his group the Five Satins in 1956, died on Jan. 13 in New Haven, Conn. He was 85.His current group, Fred Parris and the Five Satins, posted news of his death on its Facebook page, saying only that he had died after a short illness.Over the years Mr. Parris varied the story of his signature song a bit, but this was the gist of it: He had met the “girl of my dreams,” as he put it, at the Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven, Conn., in 1954, and by the next year they were engaged. On the train ride back to his Army base in Philadelphia after a particularly nice visit with her, he reminisced about their first night together and began thinking about lyrics and tunes.“When I arrived at camp, I went straight to the day room,” he told Smithsonian magazine in 2004. “There was a piano there, and I started playing the chord in my head and the words in my heart.”But soon he had to report for his shift. That’s when the song really came together.“Before I realized it,” he said, “it was time to go to guard duty. It was a cold, black night, and the stars were twinkling.”The result was a song that was originally titled “(I’ll Remember) In the Still of the Nite,” to distinguish it from Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night,” said Ralph M. Newman, an R&B historian who filled in some of the details of Mr. Parris’s life. In February 1956, again on leave from the Army, Mr. Parris and three pals, backed by some local musicians, recorded the song on a relatively primitive two-track system in an echoey, frigid basement room at St. Bernadette’s Church in New Haven.Somehow they captured acoustical magic.“Because we did it at the church,” Mr. Parris said in a 2013 interview with the Florida radio show “Doo Wop Revival,” “I think the song was blessed. And so was I.”Though it was originally only a minor hit, “In the Still of the Night” (as the title is now commonly rendered) achieved doo-wop immortality, thanks to cover versions by Boyz II Men, the Beach Boys and others; its use in “Dirty Dancing,” “The Irishman” and other movies; and its tuneful timelessness. Mr. Newman, a former editor of the R&B history magazine Bim Bam Boom and a former executive with Broadcast Music Inc., traced the record’s slow ascent in an email:“After this icon of vocal group harmony was recorded and first released by the local Standord record label in New Haven, the master was leased to the larger Ember label, which in 1956 landed it on Alan Freed’s nightly radio show on WINS in New York. There it became, for years, the No. 1 listener-requested song of the period, with which Freed often closed the show with a long list of dedications, and went on to become the perennial No. 1 song on oldies stations around the country.”Mr. Parris later in his career. In 1982 he and the Five Satins returned to the charts for the first time in more than 20 years with “Memories of Days Gone By.”Debra ReedMr. Parris kept writing, performing and recording for more than a half century with an ever-changing lineup, mostly under the Five Satins name. When the oldies boom hit, the song came to define the doo-wop era. The critic Greil Marcus included it in his 2014 book, “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs.”“Though he continued to record new songs well into the 1980s,” Mr. Marcus wrote, “Parris and different versions of the Five Satins never played a show, whether in clubs around New Haven, for rock ’n’ roll revival concerts in New York, on PBS doo-wop fund-raisers, without ‘In the Still of the Nite’ being the reason the audience was there at all.”Mr. Newman said he once produced a show featuring the Five Satins on the excursion ship Bay Belle.“At that time I asked Fred whether he ever tired of singing that song, night after night, year after year,” Mr. Newman said, “to which he replied: ‘No way; I never stop loving doing that song for people who tell me that it occupies a special place in their lives. I consider it a privilege.’”The 1972 version of the Five Satins at Madison Square Garden. Mr. Parris once said of the group’s signature song: “I never stop loving doing that song for people who tell me that it occupies a special place in their lives. I consider it a privilege.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesFrederick Lee Parris was born on March 26, 1936, in Milford, Conn., to Ferdinand and Edna Parris, Mr. Newman said. He grew up in the New Haven area and attended Hillhouse High School. He was a decent baseball player; an entry on the Five Satins in Jay Warner’s “The Billboard Book of American Singing Groups: A History, 1940-1990” says he once had a tryout with the Boston Braves.Apparently he was a better singer than ballplayer, and he was in several groups before forming the Five Satins. One, which he formed with other Hillhouse students, was called the Scarlets, and in 1954 the group recorded “Dear One,” a song Mr. Parris had written, for the Red Robin label; it received some airplay in the New York market.The Scarlets cut several other records, but in 1955 military service split up the group. Mr. Parris ended up in Philadelphia and, during trips home to Connecticut, formed a new group. He had admired a doo-wop act called the Velvets and “liked the idea of something soft and red,” as the Billboard book put it; he chose the name the Five Satins.But despite that name, Mr. Newman said, there were only four Satins at the 1956 recording session: Mr. Parris, who sang lead on “In the Still of the Night,” Al Denby (low tenor), Eddie Martin (baritone) and Jim Freeman (bass). The group, usually with five members, continued on, even recording a minor 1957 success, “To the Aisle,” with Bill Baker singing lead because Mr. Parris, still in the service, was stationed in Japan. Two other records made the Billboard charts in those early years, with Mr. Parris as the lead singer: “Shadows” (1959) and “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1960).Mr. Parris, when telling the story of “In the Still of the Night,” usually didn’t identify the young woman who inspired the song, though in the Smithsonian article he said her name was Marla. In any case, there was no marriage; shortly after he wrote the song, he told The Hartford Courant in 1982, “she went to California to visit her mother.”“She never came back,” he said.Mr. Parris was married several times, most recently to Emma Parris, who survives him. Other survivors include three children, Shawn Parris, Rene Parris Alexandre and Freddy Parris, and eight grandchildren.“In the Still of the Night” endured, and for a time Mr. Parris and various versions of the Satins toured on the strength of it, but in the mid-1960s the British Invasion shoved the doo-wop era aside. He told The Courant that over the years he worked at the Olin and High Standard gun-making plants in Connecticut and delivered food at Southern Connecticut State University.“You do a lot of stuff to eat,” he said.But beginning in the 1970s he tapped into the rock ’n’ roll revival market, performing at oldies shows, and in 1982, for the first time in more than 20 years, he and the Satins landed briefly on the charts again with “Memories of Days Gone By,” a medley made up of snatches of “Sixteen Candles,” “Earth Angel” and other classics, including, of course, “In the Still of the Night.” More

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      What’s Left for the Weeknd to Conquer?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFollowing the Weeknd’s 2020 album, “After Hours,” which included the global hit “Blinding Lights,” it may have seemed as if he had nowhere else to go — that he’d finally reached the summit of the mountain he’d spent the decade climbing, starting out as a freaky recalibrator of R&B and ending up making unifying 1980s-style hits that need no translation.His new album, “Dawn FM,” suggests at least one future direction: leaning in on specific sections and subgenres of that decade and exploring ways to supersize the niche.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about making big tent pop in an age of the micro, and just how few options truly remain for the biggest mainstream pop star’s next moves.Guest:Rob Harvilla, senior staff writer at The Ringer and host of the “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s” podcastConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Gunna Beats the Weeknd in a Close Race for No. 1

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      In a tale of two surprise albums with striking cover art, “deluxe” versions and retail discounts, the Atlanta rapper’s “DS4Ever” won by a nose.Last week, two new albums vied for No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, with similar marketing arsenals and big fan bases set to click away on streaming services.The Weeknd’s “Dawn FM” and Gunna’s “DS4Ever” were both surprise releases, announced just days before they came out.Each LP had cover artwork featuring a striking treatment of its artist’s face. And each was filled with celebrity guest spots. Gunna, a rapper from Atlanta, had Drake, Future and 21 Savage; the Weeknd had vocals by Lil Wayne and Tyler, the Creator, along with narration by Quincy Jones and the comedian Jim Carrey.Both albums came out in “deluxe” versions with extra tracks, a common tactic these days to stir fan demand and drive up streaming counts. Their download versions were also heavily discounted online. And as last week came to a close, industry prognosticators expected a photo finish.In the end, Gunna won by a nose — a surprise, perhaps, given the enormous success of the Weeknd’s last album, “After Hours” (2020). “DS4Ever” had the equivalent of 150,300 sales in the United States, and “Dawn FM” had 148,000, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.While “Dawn FM” sold more copies as a complete unit — 14,800, versus 4,700 for “DS4Ever” — streaming tipped the balance. Gunna ended the week with 193 million clicks, while the Weeknd had 173 million.The soundtrack to Disney’s “Encanto,” which topped the chart last week, falls to No. 3. Adele’s “30” is the No. 4 album — while her song “Easy on Me” marks its ninth week as the No. 1 single — and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5. More

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      Janis Ian Lets Her Music Speak Her Mind (One Last Time)

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      At 70, the singer-songwriter who has always been unafraid of difficult subjects is releasing a final album, “The Light at the End of the Line.”On a recent morning, Janis Ian spoke expansively from her work space in Florida about a 50-year career marked by literary lyrics, social activism and major hits. Just one subject brought her up short. When pondering younger artists who’ve publicly cited her as an inspiration, she paused and threw up her arms. “I can’t think of one. So many people say, ‘Joni Mitchell is my big influence,’” she said. “And I thought, wait a minute. Didn’t I influence anybody?”She might not get the loudest shout-outs, but there’s no denying that Ian has often served as a cultural clairvoyant.In 1967, she became one of the first fully self-determined female singer-songwriters in pop, having penned every track on her debut album, which was released one month before Laura Nyro’s, a year before Joni Mitchell’s and three before Carole King’s.The subjects she became most famous for writing about, outliers at the time, have since become ubiquitous. Her breakthrough hit, “Society’s Child,” written in 1965 when she was 14, was one of the first charting songs to center on an interracial romance. Her biggest score, “At Seventeen,” which reached No. 2 in 1975, confronted lookism and bullying with a candor that anticipated the work of contemporary artists including Billie Eilish, Demi Lovato and Lizzo. Ian was also one of the first gay pop stars to come out in the early ’90s, and she championed free downloads as a promotional device back when the industry did everything it could to shut them down.Ian had few role models for her self-determined path, citing only Nina Simone and Victoria Spivey, a blues singer and writer who made her first impact in the 1920s. Otherwise, she said, “everything was male-identified.”“Plenty of other artists have a gift for melody and vocals and great lyrics,” Ian said. “The only thing I think I do better is to talk about things that people have a hard time voicing. I give them a safe way to voice them.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe disparity between the world in which she carved her path and today has been on Ian’s mind lately because of a major decision she made in the last year. At 70, she will release her final album, “The Light at the End of the Line,” this Friday, followed by a valedictory tour. “I’m done,” she said, with a mixture of relief and anticipation. Ian said the wear and tear of serving as her own manager and song publisher, along with life as a touring musician, left little time for the thing she loves most.“I’m a writer first,” she said. “I care desperately about writing — any kind of writing.”That includes haiku, short stories and a novel she hopes to finish in her coming life. She’ll work on everything in a nearly completed addition to her home, on an island in Tampa Bay where she lives with her wife of 19 years, Patricia Snyder, a retired criminal defense lawyer.Her final songs have a summary mission. In the title track, an elegant acoustic ballad, she bids adieu to her fans. “Some of them have stuck with me for 56 years,” she said. “That’s longer than I’ve known most of my family.” In “I’m Still Standing,” the stalwart melody underscores lyrics that embrace the physical changes brought by time, which, Ian said, explains the white hair and lack of makeup she proudly sported in our interview. In the classically influenced piano piece “Nina,” she salutes one of the artists she most admires, her friend, Nina Simone, who cut a bracingly rueful version of Ian’s song “Stars” in 1976.“Nina was so complicated,” Ian said. “She could be the most astonishing friend and also the most horrible person. But, as a solo performer, she was the single best I’ve ever seen.”Some of the new songs are more expressly political. “Perfect Little Girl” extends the theme of “At 17,” while in “Resist” she repurposes the social protest of earlier songs with lyrics that, among other things, use raw language to capture the violence of female genital mutilation. As with “Society’s Child,” some radio stations have told her they won’t play it. “They said it’s too suggestive,” Ian said. “Is the song sexual in some way I’m not aware of?”Ian was reared to raise such questions. Her father, a music teacher, and her mother, a secretary at a college, ran a progressive summer camp in upstate New York. Because of her parents’ politics, the FBI tapped the family phone, tracked their activities and discouraged schools from hiring her father, which she wrote about on the 2000 album “God and the FBI.”Ian’s upbringing in the mainly Black area of East Orange, N.J., helped inspire her to write “Society’s Child” in 1965, one year after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Her producer, Shadow Morton, a key shaper of the girl group sound, had a deal with Atlantic Records that financed the recording, but the label declined to release it. Ian was never told why, though she said Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic president at the time, later apologized for the decision. Verve Records picked up the song and released it twice in 1966, without success.A major break came the next year when she was invited to appear on a CBS-TV special, “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,” for which the host Leonard Bernstein used his enormous cultural currency to lend legitimacy to the explosive new music of the ’60s. Ian said her song “wouldn’t have gone anywhere without the show.” Yet its focus on race scared off enough radio stations to halt its charge up the Billboard chart at No. 14.After “Society’s Child,” Verve released three more Ian albums that failed, but in 1973, Roberta Flack covered her song “Jesse” and scored a hit, which helped Ian get a contract with Columbia Records. “Janis Ian wrote songs that touch my heart,” Flack wrote in an email. “She tells stories in her songs that many of us can relate to — tender experiences that help us articulate what we feel about how the world treats us in so many ways.”Ian’s second album for the label, “Between the Lines,” featured “At Seventeen,” with lyrics capturing the naked shame Ian felt at being considered “an ugly duckling” with an honesty so brutal, it made some people uncomfortable — including its author. “That song was scary to write and scary to sing,” she said. “I would sing it with my eyes closed because I was so sure the audience would laugh at me. It was astonishing to me to realize, first, that they weren’t laughing. And, second, that it applied to boys too.”The song’s nuanced and erudite lyrics also accounted for the loss of self that can be suffered by women considered the most desirable — the very type who bullied Ian. “Their lives are an eternal beauty contest,” she said.Ian believes her willingness to write about uncomfortable subjects has become her métier. “Plenty of other artists have a gift for melody and vocals and great lyrics,” she said. “The only thing I think I do better is to talk about things that people have a hard time voicing. I give them a safe way to voice them.”Though Ian finds it distressing that the difficult subjects she has written about remain relevant decades later, as she prepares to leave the music business, she believes the world has changed considerably from when she started. “It’s too easy to fall down that rabbit hole of saying ‘nothing has improved,’” she said. “I can no longer be arrested in this country for being gay. That’s a huge difference. I firmly believe that things work out the way they’re supposed to. Whether that will be in my lifetime, I don’t know. But I do believe things will be better.” More

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      Rosa Lee Hawkins, Youngest Member of the Dixie Cups, Dies at 76

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      The singing group’s debut single, “Chapel of Love,” rose to the top of the charts in 1964, displacing the Beatles’ “Love Me Do.”Rosa Lee Hawkins, the youngest member of the musical trio the Dixie Cups, whose hit single “Chapel of Love” reached No. 1 on the Billboard 100 in 1964, died on Tuesday in Tampa, Fla. She was 76.The cause was internal bleeding resulting from complications during surgery at Tampa General Hospital, said her sister Barbara Ann Hawkins, who was also a member of the group, along with Joan Marie Johnson, who died in 2016 at 72.The Dixie Cups epitomized the harmonizing sound of the 1960s girl group. “Chapel of Love,” their debut single and most well-known song, quickly replaced the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” as No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1964. It was later heard on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam War film, “Full Metal Jacket.”Rosa Lee Hawkins was born on Oct. 23, 1945, in New Orleans to Hartzell Hawkins, a self-employed carpenter, and Lucille (Merette) Hawkins, a state worker who registered voters.While in high school in 1963, Barbara brought Rosa along to sing with her and Joan Marie in a high school talent show. The trio initially called themselves the Meltones, only to discover later that the name had already been taken. Since they were from the land of Dixie, and “cups are cute,” Barbara said in an interview, they came up with the name Dixie Cups (playing on the name of the popular paper cup).Joan later discovered that the Hawkins sisters were actually her cousins.While they did not win the talent show, a talent scout in the audience, impressed by their rich harmonies, invited the group, along with other Louisiana musicians, to perform for Red Bird Records. The Dixie Cups sang “Iko Iko,” a song that was traditionally sung during Mardi Gras and that was a favorite of the Hawkins sisters’ grandmother. They signed a recording contract soon after.The Dixie Cups received two Gold Records, for “Chapel of Love” and another hit, “People Say.” They were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2007.The group recorded a total of four albums, their last in 2011. Ms. Johnson, ill with sickle-cell anemia and weary from touring, left the group and was replaced by a number of singers through the years. The Hawkins sisters remained, though, and kept singing just as they did in high school, with harmonies as vibrant as ever.“When the audience smiled and applauded, it made her happy because she knew she put a smile on their faces, if only for that time,” Barbara said of her younger sister.In addition to Barbara, Ms. Hawkins is survived by another sister, Shirley; a son, Eric Blanc; and two grandchildren. More

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      FKA twigs Seeks Angelic Intervention, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Maren Morris, Stromae, Robert Glasper 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.FKA twigs, ‘Meta Angel’FKA twigs’s new mixtape, “Caprisongs,” is woven through with snippets of conversations with friends, which she has said represents a kind of sonic antidote to the loneliness and self-doubt she was experiencing during the 2020 lockdown. The wrenching, shape-shifting “Meta Angel” is perhaps the purest distillation of this approach: After an introductory pep talk from a friend, twigs confesses her private vulnerabilities (“I’ve got voices in my head, telling me I won’t make it far”), before summoning all her defiance on an artfully Auto-Tuned, Charli XCX-esque chorus. “Throw it in the fire,” she belts, in a conflagration of emotion that sounds like the first step to healing. LINDSAY ZOLADZStromae, ‘L’enfer’“L’enfer” — the “Hell” that Stromae confesses to in this single — is thoughts of suicide. Stromae, whose father is from Rwanda, is a Belgian songwriter, musician, dancer and YouTube creator who has been making a return after releasing his last studio album in 2013. This song suggests the reason for his absence: dark, self-destructive impulses that he has averted. It begins with Bulgarian-style vocal harmonies and moves to four mournful piano chords as Stromae considers how “It’s crazy how many people have thought the same.” A choir, stuttering electronics and a looming beat answer him, but there’s nothing sanctimonious about the song; Stromae sounds like he’s still grappling with his troubles. JON PARELESAldous Harding, ‘Lawn’“Doors are the way you leave/Open it up to me,” sings the ever-enigmatic Aldous Harding in “Lawn,” from an album due in March. The track is a wispy-voiced homage to Stereolab, serenely cycling through two-chord piano patterns over breezy syncopated drums, as Harding airily ponders “losing you” and the obligations of songwriting: “Time flies when you’re writing B-sides,” she observes. The video, co-directed by Harding, features human-lizard hybrids and actual reptiles, but she never sounds entirely coldblooded. PARELESMaren Morris, ‘Circles Around This Town’The first single from Maren Morris’s forthcoming album, “Humble Quest,” vividly conjures her earliest days in Nashville, hustling around town in a “Montero with the A/C busted” shopping “a couple bad demos on a burned CD.” Those details may feel lived-in and time-stamped, but Morris knows she’s operating within a long lineage — she was certainly not the first aspiring songwriter to drive circles around Music City in hopes of catching her big break, nor will she be the last. The song’s direct appeal to this country tradition makes it feel like a throwback to the days before Morris’s pop crossover, but she and the producer Greg Kurstin prove twang is no obstacle to a soaring, universally inviting chorus. “Thought that when I hit it, it’d all look different, but I still got the pedal down,” Morris sings from the other side of success, still hungry but now with a mature confidence in her talent. ZOLADZPavement, ‘Be the Hook’An infamous lore hangs over “Terror Twilight,” Pavement’s fifth and final album, from 1999. The alt-rock super-producer Nigel Godrich was hired in an attempt to make the band’s slacker-rock sound slightly more palatable to the mainstream, but his methods ended up hastening the already-fraying group’s demise — or so the story goes. On April 8, though, Matador Records will finally release a comprehensive deluxe edition of “Terror Twilight,” and perhaps enough time has passed since the LP’s polarizing release that it can finally be appreciated on its own terms. The first taste of the unreleased material, the loose and bluesy jam “Be the Hook,” already complicates the received wisdom that “Terror Twilight” was all streamlined melodies and smoothed-over edges, as Stephen Malkmus meta-vamps charismatically atop a crunchy riff: “Everybody get your hands together and cheer for this rock ’n’ roll band!” ZOLADZKing Princess featuring Fousheé, ‘Little Bother’King Princess, a songwriter from Brooklyn, uses a programmed punk-pop beat, U2-style guitar chords, cascading vocal harmonies and the endorsement of a co-writer, Fousheé, to confront an ex who ended up being indifferent, treating her like a “little bother.” Pointedly, she asks, “Do you feel like you should-could have tried a little harder?” PARELESRobert Glasper featuring Killer Mike, Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid, ‘Black Superhero’Robert Glasper, a jazz pianist who maintains a close connection with hip-hop, works through three thick chords and enlists choir-like backup vocals behind Killer Mike (from Run the Jewels), Big K.R.I.T. and BJ the Chicago Kid to call for a “Black Superhero.” The song invokes 1960s activism and current unrest to call for ways to save “every block, every hood, every city, every ghetto.” PARELESDJ Python, ‘Angel’The Brooklyn-based producer Brian Piñeyro (a.k.a. DJ Python) has a reputation for tenderness. Consider the title of his website, a painfully veracious observation on contemporary texting behavior: “sayingsomethingsincerelyandendingitwith.lol.” That kind of soft-focus sentimentality also appears on “Angel,” the latest track from his upcoming full-length “Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2.” Over the course of the 10-minute production, Piñeyro collages oneiric, crystalline synths and drums into a suspended state of astral bliss. The song arrives alongside a custom perfume, whose description — a “gender-spectral” scent that draws on rave culture — only plunges the release further into the universe of daydreams. ISABELIA HERRERAJacques Greene, ‘Taurus’Jacques Greene has always been interested in weaving the textures of all kinds of club music, but on “Taurus,” he takes a more meditative path, perhaps inspired by the film scores he recently composed. Hard-edge drum breaks propel the production, recalling the rush of a distant dance floor, but a softness remains at the center. The vaporous whispers and echoes of the vocalist Leanne Macomber float on and over each other, curling into a small misty cloud, like visible breath on a frigid day. The effect is cold and cavernous, but it offers an unexpected sense of comfort. HERRERAGonora Sounds, ‘Kusaziva Kufa’Gonora Sounds, from Zimbabwe, is led by a blind guitarist, Daniel Gonora, who had been a member of a top Zimbabwean group, Jairos Jiri Band. For years, he made a living performing on the streets of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. A documentary, “You Can’t Hide from the Truth,” revived his reputation, and on Feb. 4 he releases an album, “Hard Times Never Kill,” backed by some of Zimbabwe’s top musicians. His style is called sungura, which meshes Zimbabwe’s own traditions — guitar picking that echoes the plinking patterns of thumb pianos — with styles from across Africa. “Kusaziva Kufa” (“Ignorance”) taunts anyone who doubted that his music would survive; between drums, vocals and guitars, it’s a syncopated marvel that shifts to an even higher gear halfway through. PARELESRokia Koné & Jacknife Lee, ‘Kurunba’The Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Koné smiles her way through the video for “Kurunba,” and the beat she and the Irish producer Jackknife Lee — whose collaborative album is due Feb. 18 — worked up meshes a four-on-the floor thump, electronic swoops, quick-strummed guitars and West African percussion, an unstoppable groove. Yet her lyrics, delivered with a tough rasp, are about the ways a patriarchal culture discards women after they have raised their children, protesting with unquestionable vitality. PARELES More

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      Elvis Costello & the Imposters Are Still Blasting Away

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      With his longtime bandmates, the English songwriter noisily demolishes illusions on “The Boy Named If.”During the pandemic, plenty of musicians have unveiled their quieter, scaled-down, more reflective sides. Elvis Costello, typically, had other ideas.His 2020 album, “Hey Clockface,” was a high-contrast miscellany: urbanely retro acoustic pop, bruising rockers, otherworldly electronics. For “Spanish Model” in 2021, he gathered Spanish-speaking rockers to translate lyrics and replace his own vocals on the tracks from “This Year’s Model,” his fierce, punky 1978 album with the Attractions. Apparently revisiting the Attractions at their most aggressive sparked something. On “The Boy Named If,” Costello is rejoined by his perennial band the Imposters — the original Attractions with a replacement bassist — for songs that kick hard and deep. It’s anything but quiet.“The Boy Named If” has an elaborate superstructure. Its deluxe version adds an 88-page book written and illustrated by Costello: “The Boy Named If and Other Children’s Tales.”It’s not made for children, though. Each song gets a prose vignette — sometimes fleshing out the lyrics, sometimes sketching alternate scenarios — alongside bright, blocky, big-eyed drawings. The vignettes, like the songs, are full of Costello’s jumpy wordplay, and they involve lust, infidelity, violence, predation, betrayal, deception, self-deception and other grown-up pastimes.The situations and wordplay are knotty; often, they crash youthful illusions into adult disillusion. The album’s stomping title track posits a lucky, seductive, elusive imaginary friend, “the boy named If,” who always escapes consequences. In “What if I Can’t Give You Anything But Love?,” over a swaggering beat, a cheating husband struggles to figure out where he actually stands with his paramour: “Don’t fix me with that deadly gaze/It’s a little close to pity,” he chokes out. And in “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” a duet with Nicole Atkins, a screenwriter in a diner tells the waitress about envisioning her in movie scenes; she’s skeptical. “I’ve seen your kind before,” she observes, “in courtroom sketches.”While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. Costello, on guitar, worked together with the drummer Pete Thomas; then he and the co-producer Sebastian Krys layered on parts by Davey Faragher on bass and Steve Nieve on keyboards.Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002. “Farewell, OK” opens the album with Costello shouting through a distorted rockabilly boogie. “Death of Magic Thinking” meshes a pummeling march with a Bo Diddley beat and multiple jabbing, scrabbling guitars, steamrollering through a skewed chord progression and a tale of adolescent bewilderment.“The Difference” — based, Costello has revealed, on the bleak love story in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2018 film “Cold War” — has Costello’s guitars and Nieve’s organ tossing bits of dissonance back and forth in the verses, then veers into a poppy major-key chorus that asks, “Do you by chance know wrong from right?”Over more than 30 studio albums, Costello has regularly tested himself against new genres and new collaborators: classical, country, R&B, hip-hop, jazz. But some of his strongest albums, like this one, have been his reunions with the Attractions/Imposters. Inevitably, there are echoes of Costello’s past on the new album.“Magnificent Hurt” harks back to the pounding garage-rock and nagging organ of old Costello songs like “Pump It Up.” But the guitar solos are untamed, and there’s a smart Costello twist in the chorus, using just a pause: “It’s the way you make me feel magnificent/Hurt.” With Costello and the Imposters, familiarity breeds audacity, not routine. Some youthful pleasures weren’t illusions at all.Elvis Costello & the Imposters“The Boy Named If”(Capitol) More