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    PinkPantheress Has 1 Million Fans on TikTok

    Her songs “Just for Me” and “Break It Off” were breakout summer hits.Name: PinkPantheressAge: 20Hometown: Bath, EnglandCurrently Lives: In London, with a group of childhood friends.Claim to Fame: PinkPantheress is a singer, songwriter and producer whose melancholic yet upbeat track “Just for Me” has been featured in more than 2.1 million TikTok videos, becoming a kind of soundtrack for Gen Z angst and longing. Sample lyric: “My diary’s full of your name on every page.” Her music stitches elements from drum and bass, as well as garage. “A lot of my beats are literally from the early 2000s and late ’90s,” she said. “I think a lot of people probably have heard them before without realizing.”Big Break: PinkPantheress has been creating music since she was 14, when she joined a rock band. On Christmas Day last year, she posted a snippet of her song “Just a Waste,” which samples Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” to TikTok. The following day, she said, she was flooded with requests for the full-length version and the song has been featured in more than 216,000 TikTok videos. “My first TikTok was just to gauge if I should put out a song,” she said. “This is a great way to assess if music is good enough to put out or not.’”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesLatest Project: On Oct. 15, PinkPantheress released “To Hell With It,” her debut mixtape of 10 songs, which Jon Caramanica, pop music critic for The New York Times, calls “warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy.” “I think a lot of my music doesn’t come from a place of pain or whatever,” she said. “It doesn’t come from a place of me. A lot of it just comes because I really like storytelling.”Next Thing: With most pandemic restrictions lifted in London, she plans to perform at a few shows this month, including the Cause. She also hopes to explore a wider array of music. “Music-wise, I do want to flesh it out a bit,” she said. “I definitely want to do more genres, or try at least.”Mum’s the Word: Despite, or maybe because of, her large social media following (one million on TikTok), PinkPantheress has tried to keep her legal name secret, though some music fan sites say that they have identified her. “I always was private, not because I’m standoffish or I don’t want to have that intimacy with people — it’s just more because it’s hassle free,” she said. “I really enjoy leaving things up to people’s imagination.” More

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    Marília Mendonça, Brazilian Pop Singer, Dies in Plane Crash at 26

    Ms. Mendonça, who was a social media sensation with millions of followers, was iconic in a type of Brazilian country music called sertanejo.Marília Mendonça, one of the most popular Brazilian pop singers who was known as “The Queen of Suffering” for her angst-filled ballads, was killed on Friday in a small plane crash in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. She was 26.The singer’s press office confirmed Ms. Mendonça’s death and said her producer, Henrique Ribeiro; her uncle who was also her assistant, Abicieli Silveira Dias Filho; and the pilot and co-pilot of the plane were also killed.The plane had been headed from the city of Goiania to Caratinga, where Ms. Mendonça was to have performed in a concert on Friday night. There was no immediate word on the circumstances leading up to the crash. The authorities said they were investigating.Ms. Mendonça was iconic in a type of Brazilian country music called sertanejo, a popular genre in Brazil. Her legions of fans found power in her song lyrics, which implored women to reject bad and abusive relationships, and told the stories of flawed characters.Ms. Mendonça was a social media sensation, with 7.8 million followers on Twitter, 22 million on YouTube and more than 38 million on Instagram.The plane had been headed to Caratinga, where Ms. Mendonça was to have performed on Friday night. Minas Gerais Civil Police, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBrazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, said on Twitter, “The whole country receives in shock the news of the death of the young country singer Marília Mendonça, one of the greatest artists of her generation, whom, with her unique voice, charisma and music won the affection and admiration of all of us.”Anitta, a funk singer popular in Brazil, said on Twitter: “I just found out. I can’t believe it.”Some in Brazil’s cosmopolitan circles had scorned Ms. Mendonça’s country ballads as “‘brega,’ or corny music,” NPR reported in 2019.“Sentimental or not, her songs offer a woman’s perspective that hasn’t been heard much in sertanejo’s machismo culture, and it’s made Mendonça the leading voice of a new subgenre called ‘feminejo’ — music by and for women,” NPR said.Ana Ionova contributed reporting. More

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    Post Malone and the Weeknd’s Emo Synth-Pop, and 12 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Jenny Lewis, TNGHT, Dawn Richard 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.Post Malone and the Weeknd, ‘One Right Now’Oh, the fragile male ego. “Don’t call me baby when you did me so wrong” is one of the milder jibes hurled at a straying girlfriend by Post Malone as he trades verses with the Weeknd. She may want to get together, but the guys have already moved on, with “one coming over and one right now.” A very 1980s track — springy synthesizer bass line and hook, programmed beat — carries pure, focused resentment about how much damage she’s done to “my feelings.” JON PARELESCharli XCX featuring Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek, ‘New Shapes’“What you want/I ain’t got it,” Charli XCX snarls over a blast of ’80s pop gloss. The British pop provocateur unleashes her ultrapop persona, brooding over cinematic new wave synths. “New Shapes” leverages the kind of vulnerability and insecurity that defines some of Charli’s best work, thanks to pointed verses from her guests (and previous collaborators), the sad girl supergroup of Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek. The whole thing doesn’t quite measure up to the irresistible drama of the beloved 2019 anthem “Gone,” but hey, the girls will take it. ISABELIA HERRERATerrace Martin featuring Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Ty Dolla Sign and James Fauntleroy, ‘Drones’The polymathic musician and producer Terrace Martin is widely known for helping Kendrick Lamar sculpt his jazz-tinted masterpiece, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” but he’d been an asset in Los Angeles studios since the mid-2000s, when he first fell in with Snoop Dogg. The title track from Martin’s new solo album, “Drones,” is something like a reading of his résumé, with features from four resounding names in L.A. hip-hop. The dapper, G-funk beat is a braid of plunky guitar, pulsing electric piano and 808 percussion; the lyrics — sung partly by Lamar, in a sly shrug — describe a booty-call relationship that’s exactly as shallow as it looks to the outside world, and maybe not much more satisfying. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODawn Richard, ‘Loose Your Mind’Following her eclectic album “The Second Line,” released earlier this year, Dawn Richard’s new track for the Adult Swim Singles series is all bass-heavy, aqueous funk. Her voice shape-shifts throughout “Loose Your Mind,” so at times it almost feels like she’s duetting with different sides of her prismatic personality. “Ain’t really nothing wrong when the feeling is golden,” she spits at the beginning, before a melodic chorus of Dawns responds in agreement: “Solid gold.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTNGHT, ‘Tums’Few songs defined the hypermaximalist sound of the 2010s as succinctly as the electronic duo TNGHT’s “Higher Ground,” that brassy, ever-escalating EDM anthem that was sampled by Kanye West on “Yeezus” and — I will die on this hill — has to be the inspiration behind the “Arby’s: We Have the Meats” jingle, right? After a long hiatus, the producers Hudson Mohawke and Lunice reunited as TNGHT in 2019, and have now released a new track called “Tums,” which Lunice says was created according to the duo’s guiding principles: “Keep it really fun. Dumb. Hard-hitting. Don’t overwork it.” Sampled giggles and slide whistles keep things fizzy on the surface, while the track’s booming low end guides it through a series of roller-coaster drops. “Tums” might not be as innovative as the pair’s earlier work, but maybe that’s because everything else has been sounding like them for years now. ZOLADZSimi, ‘Woman’With “Woman,” the Nigerian singer and songwriter Simi offers a tribute, corrective and update to Fela Anikalupo Kuti, who invented Afrobeat in the 1970s in songs including “Lady,” which scoffed at European feminism. “Woman” mixes current electronic Afrobeats with the funk of Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat, while quoting Kuti songs between her own assertions about women’s strengths: “She won’t pay attention to the intimidation.” The rhetoric is tricky; the beat is unstoppable. PARELESGregory Porter featuring Cherise, ‘Love Runs Deeper’The standard elements of Gregory Porter’s style run through “Love Runs Deeper”: lyrics that linger on the difficulties — and the bounties — of care and connection; twinkling orchestral strings; a gradual build that allows his burly, baritone voice to unfurl itself with just enough tension and release. But this is more of a direct-delivery power ballad than most of Porter’s tunes: The melody wouldn’t feel out of place on an Adele or Halsey record, and it’s liable to get lodged in your head quickly and stay there. With supporting vocals from the young British singer Cherise, “Love Runs Deeper” serves as the soundtrack to Disney’s annual holiday-season advertisement, which this year is a short film (full of self-referential touches, like a Buzz Lightyear cameo) titled “The Stepdad.” The song is also included on a new Porter compilation, “Still Rising,” which features a mix of his greatest hits, B-sides and new songs. RUSSONELLOJenny Lewis, ‘Puppy and a Truck’“My 40s are kicking my ass, and handing them to me in a margarita glass” — how’s that for an opening line? Something about the gentle country strum and laid-back croon of Jenny Lewis’s new stand-alone single recalls her old band Rilo Kiley’s great 2004 album “More Adventurous,” though her perspective has been updated with the unglamorous realities and hard-won wisdom of middle age. After chronicling the wreckage of a few recent relationships, the eternally witty Lewis arrives at a mantra of tough-talking self-reliance: “If you feel like giving up, shut up — get a puppy and a truck.” ZOLADZChastity Belt, ‘Fear’Lydia Lund spends much of the Washington indie-rock band Chastity Belt’s new song “Fear” hollering until she’s hoarse, “It’s just the fear, it’s just the fear.” Apparently she recorded the vocals while she was staying at her parents’ house, and her commitment to the song was so intense that her mother knocked on the door to make sure she was OK because she “thought I was doing some kind of primal scream therapy,” Lund said. “And I guess in a way I am.” Lund’s impassioned delivery and the song’s soaring guitars turn “Fear” into a cathartic response to overwhelming anxiety, and provide a powerful soundtrack for slaying that dreaded mind killer. ZOLADZRadiohead, ‘Follow Me Around’“Kid A Mnesia,” the new, expansive compilation of Radiohead songs from their paradigm-shifting sessions in 1999-2000, has unearthed studio versions of songs that the band performed but never committed to albums, notably “Follow Me Around,” a guitar-strumming crescendo of paranoia. The video, apparently made with a small but persistent camera drone, nicely multiplies the dread. PARELESLorde, ‘Hold No Grudge’Lorde whisper-sings through the first half of “Hold No Grudge,” a bonus track added to her album “Solar Power.” It’s a memory of an early love that ended without a resolution; later messages went unanswered. Midway through, she’s still bouncing syllables off guitar strums, but the sound of the song comes into focus and Lorde realizes, “We both might have done some growing up.” She’s ready to let the passage of time offer solace. PARELESOmar Apollo featuring Kali Uchis, ‘Bad Life’Omar Apollo is known for combining cool funk grooves, slick charisma and sensual falsettos. But on “Bad Life,” his new single featuring Kali Uchis, the young singer-songwriter peels back the layers and puts his armor aside for a bare-bones exercise in vulnerability. “Bad Life” revels in contempt, burning slow and low alongside a soft-focus electric guitar. Apollo opens the track with a heart-piercer: “You give me nothing/But I still change it to something.” Ouch. The singer’s voice curls into anguished melismas, and when the orchestral strings soar in halfway through, the resentment cuts crystal clear. HERRERAAlt-J, ‘Get Better’Alt-J created a serene and almost unbearably mournful song with “Get Better,” a fingerpicked chronicle about the profundity and mundanity of a loved one’s slow death like Paul Simon’s “Darling Lorraine” and Mount Eerie’s “Real Death.” It’s profoundly self-conscious, citing the similarly acoustic arrangement of Elliott Smith; it offers personal moments, stray events, reminiscences, belongings, thoughts of “front line workers,” admissions that “I still pretend you’re only out of sight in another room/smiling at your phone.” The loss is only personal, but shattering. PARELES More

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    After 14 Years, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Finally Reunite

    The duo worked with T Bone Burnett on the million-selling triumph “Raising Sand,” in 2007. Its sequel is once again an alternative to nearly all of its pop contemporaries.“Raising Sand,” the 2007 duet album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, started as an experiment, a modest side project for two longtime bandleaders to revisit old and recent songs. It was a hushed, long-breathed album with a haunted twang, yet it turned into a blockbuster — selling more than a million copies and winning six Grammy Awards including album of the year.A follow-up would have seemed like an obvious next step. Yet it has taken 14 years for the arrival of that sequel: “Raise the Roof,” due Nov. 19.“Raise the Roof” almost magically reclaims the spectral tone of “Raising Sand,” then finds ways to expand on it, delving further into both quiet subtleties and wailing intensity. “It’s a little bit more smoky, a little bit more lustrous than the first record,” Plant, 73, said by phone from his home in western England.“It’s definitely different, even though it might be coming out of the same sort of crevasse, the same fork in the landscape of our musical lives. It has a mood to it, which is laced with time and with the actual age and maturity of the songs themselves.”But the musicians needed a decade of reflection between albums. “If we had thought we knew what we were doing in the first place, we could probably have repeated it,” T Bone Burnett, 73, the producer and linchpin of both albums, said by telephone from Nashville. “But we didn’t. At the time, we were just kind of goofing off, having fun. And that’s what we were up against. We’ve been waiting for it to get to that point where we could just have fun doing it again.”Plant and Krauss were an unlikely pairing from the start. “We were from two radically different worlds,” Plant said. He was the world-conquering, musically restless rock singer who had fronted Led Zeppelin. Krauss was already a luminary in the more close-knit world of bluegrass and Americana, leading the string band Union Station.They were also strikingly disparate singers, with contrasting musical instincts. Krauss, 50, grew up harmonizing in bluegrass groups, figuring out and delivering restrained, precise, locked-in ensemble parts. “I’m a regimented-type singer,” she said. “Bluegrass people sing things very consistently, because there’s three parts going on most times. And if someone pulls around and goes and does something different, now the other two want to run you over with their car.”Plant was used to a lead singer’s free rein; he would improvise with every take. “I try to sing across the beat quite a bit,” he said. “If it’s a straightforward groove, I like to bounce across the left and right of the groove. I did it in Zeppelin. I kind of scuttle it, accelerate it, slow it down.” He chuckled. “It drives them mad.”Krauss grew to appreciate their differences. “It makes you feel like you’re hanging off the edge of a cliff,” she said by telephone from her home in Nashville. “It is so exciting and so magnificent.” Plant and Krauss first sang together as part of a 2004 tribute to Lead Belly, and Plant proposed that they try recording together when their schedules aligned; that took more than a year. Plant initially suggested trying just three days in the studio to see if anything worked out.Krauss and Plant onstage in 2008. “We have a kind of languid, sometimes pensive sound, with the pathos of the original song taken into another place,” Plant said.Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage via GettyThey enlisted Burnett, who had recently reimagined old-timey Appalachian music for the soundtrack to “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” which featured Union Station. For “Raising Sand,” the three gathered songs — mostly about tragic lost loves — and transfigured them with close harmonies and an aura of suspended time. Burnett’s studio band let tempos hover and undulate; Plant and Krauss discovered how uncannily their voices could fit together.“A funny thing happens with them,” Burnett said. “When the two of them sing, it creates a third voice, a third part in their harmonies when there are only two parts. You know, one plus one equals two unless you’re counting, say, drops of rain. Then one plus one could equal one, or one plus one could equal a fine mist. Their voices are in that relative space where they sing together and it creates a fine mist.”“Raising Sand” was an otherworldly alternative to virtually all of its pop contemporaries (its competition at the Grammys included Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” and Ne-Yo’s “Year of the Gentleman”), and although it was released on the folky independent label Rounder, eager listeners sought it out. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart.Plant already had another project underway in 2007: the arena-sized last hurrah of Led Zeppelin that December. But the Led Zeppelin performance was an endpoint, while “Raising Sand” was a new beginning. Plant and Krauss toured for much of the next year, with concert sets that included some revamped Led Zeppelin songs. They plan to tour again in 2022.“We’ve got a kind of a personality which we could pursue as two singers, a neat place that we made for ourselves,” Plant said. “I just liked the idea of actually singing together throughout an entire show, more or less with somebody. Concentrating, listening, being free-form at times. Letting it rip, then being pretty controlled and organized and following instructions from her. And then, sometimes, letting go so she can’t catch me.”Yet having a hit album also brought self-consciousness and pressure. Plant and Krauss tried recording new duets with their touring band just after their Grammy sweep in 2009, but scrapped those sessions. “Nothing happened that was really horrible,” Krauss said. “We just felt like it was too much at once.”They then returned to their own bands and projects: Krauss with Union Station; Plant leading his Americana-rooted Band of Joy and then, for much of the 2010s, the psychedelia-, trip-hop- and world-music-infused Sensational Space Shifters. “We really enjoyed the fact that we have no idea about our corresponding alternative lives,” Plant said.Still, the “Raising Sand” collaborators stayed in touch. “We’ve been sending songs back and forth for almost 14 years, trying to figure out how to continue,” Burnett said.Finally, in 2019, they regrouped. A decade of other work had made the sequel less fraught although “there was a little bit of trepidation on my part,” Plant said. “I wasn’t sure whether we could reinvoke what we had. But it was very short-lived, that question of whether or not it was real. It was like, I bow to her, and she curtsies to me, and we see what we can do.”They went back to the venerable Nashville studio, Sound Emporium, where they had recorded “Raising Sand,” and where Burnett and Krauss have frequently recorded since. (Plant returned there this year, he said, for sessions with the 1950s guitar titans Duane Eddy and James Burton.)Plant and Krauss’s first album won five Grammys in 2009, including album of the year.Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesThe core rhythm section from “Raising Sand,” Jay Bellerose on drums and Dennis Crouch on bass, had continued to work with Burnett and returned for the new album. They were joined by an expanded assortment of guitarists including Marc Ribot; Bill Frisell; David Hidalgo from Los Lobos; and Buddy Miller, a Nashville stalwart who was in Plant’s Band of Joy. A few songs added collectors’ item string instruments like a Marxophone and a dolceola, both zithers played with keyboards: tinkling, evocative, echoey, unexpected timbres. Plant and Krauss finished recording in February 2020, just before the pandemic lockdowns.“Raise the Roof” opens with a song from the Arizona band Calexico, “Quattro (World Drifts In),” which is filled with images of desolation, escape and war, perhaps conjuring Afghanistan: “No choice but to run to the mountains where no poppies grow/You have to hit the ground running.”While most of the other songs on “Raise the Roof” ponder love, separation and longing, the album has a discreet through line. “As we were going through the material,” Burnett said, “it was clear that a story was being told concerning a man, a woman and war. And it became clear which songs fit and the sequence they went in.”The collaborators returned to some of the songwriters from “Raising Sand,” picking up the Everly Brothers’ “The Price of Love” and the Allen Toussaint song “Trouble With My Lover,” which was recorded by Betty Harris. And as on “Raising Sand,” they remade tracks that started as blues, old-timey, soul, country, gospel and rock.Their versions are far removed from the originals, often close to inside-out. Most often, Plant said, “We have a kind of languid, sometimes pensive sound, with the pathos of the original song taken into another place.”They stripped songs down to just lyrics and melodies, and rebuilt them intuitively in the studio, often around sparse, subtle beats from Bellerose. They shifted “Trouble With My Lover” from a major to a minor key, and Krauss trades Harris’s New Orleans soul resilience for a neo-Appalachian plaint, lingering over the song’s loneliness and hints of betrayal.Krauss chose “Going Where the Lonely Go,” a doleful ballad that Merle Haggard released in the 1980s. Plant seized the chance to record a soul song he had been singing since his teens: “Searching for My Love,” by Bobby Moore & the Rhythm Aces. He also brought material from Britain’s 1960s folk revival: Bert Jansch’s stoically intransigent “It Don’t Bother Me,” which brings out Krauss’s defiant streak; and Anne Briggs’s “Go Your Way,” a wife’s troubled farewell song to a soldier she may never see again.At one of the album’s extremes, Plant unleashes his Led Zeppelin wail and echoes of “Kashmir” in “High and Lonesome,” a song that grew out of a studio jam session. Burnett and the rhythm section were toying with a Bo Diddley beat. Plant happened to have his book of potential lyrics with him. The title is a tongue-in-cheek country cliché; the song is not. It is equally biblical and bluesy, wondering, “If I should lose my soul, would you still care for me?”At the other end of the dynamic scale is “The Price of Love.” The Everly Brothers’ own version is an exuberant two-minute, harmonica-topped stomp, though they’re singing about a cheater’s bitter regrets. Plant, Krauss and Burnett took the song down to half-speed and removed any distractions. The track opens with half a minute of near-ambience as instruments quietly drop in: a bowed bass drone, shakers, a distant fiddle, eventually a few guitar notes before the beat and chords solidify and Krauss arrives like an accusatory wraith: “You won’t forget her,” she warns. By taking their time, they concentrate the essence of the song. And as they did with “Raising Sand,” they calmly defy the impatience of 21st-century pop.The song “kind of forms before your ears,” Plant said. “When people stick stuff on the radio now, I think you’re allowed like 16 seconds or even less before you’re actually hitting a chorus. But then again, we’re fishing in a different pool. In fact, we’re not even fishing. We’re just trying to swim.” More

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    Popcast Mailbag! Halsey, Nicki, TikTok and, of Course, Taylor

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherYou ask, we answer. Or prevaricate. It depends!On this week’s Popcast, part of our semiregular mailbag series, the team takes questions on a range of topics:the year in Taylor Swiftthe quality of Halsey’s new musicthe state of the music videothe ways TikTok can be a lifeline for a legacy actthe direction Drake’s career should head inthe increasingly idiosyncratic vocal styles of young female pop starswhether we still buy physical mediaAnd much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect 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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    To Go Big, Sloppy Jane Went Underground

    Four years ago, Haley Dahl dreamed of taking her band and an orchestra into a cave to record an album. The result, “Madison,” is out Friday.LEWISBURG, W. Va. — On a Friday afternoon in October 2019, Haley Dahl, the leader of the bicoastal punk rock orchestra Sloppy Jane, sat at a small upright piano in the belly of Lost World Caverns here, recording tracks for the band’s second full-length album, “Madison,” out Friday.Her head bent forward in concentration, Dahl struck the keys, loosing a mesmerizing cascade of notes. The piano tuner, Maria Caputo, sat on a rock nearby to tweak the instrument when needed, which was often because of the cold and damp. After a round of takes, Jack Wetmore, a producer and musician on the album, reached into the piano’s innards to mute the strings.“It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole,” he said.“I don’t think the idea was for this to be easy,” Caputo said. “The idea was for this to be awesome.”This awesome thing started the way most do — in the wake of heartbreak. In 2017, Dahl attempted to distract herself from unrequited love by spelunking the internet. Her searches led her to discover Leland Sprinkle, who built the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia’s Luray Caverns in the 1950s. She wanted to play it, but when the powers that be said no, she chose the next best thing: dragging her own piano, along with her band and a backing orchestra, into another cave and making an album there.From left, Dahl, Bailey Wollowitz and Al Nardo at Lost World Caverns in West Virginia during a recording session.Walter Wlodarczyk“The decision early on that no matter what, this is a project that is happening fueled everything else,” Dahl said a few months after recording “Madison.” She was at one of her favorite spots in Brooklyn, Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg, and surrounded by a handful of people who contributed to this moonshot of hers: a few of Sloppy Jane’s core collaborators — the filmmaker Mika Lungulov-Klotz and the multi-instrumentalists Al Nardo, Bailey Wollowitz and Lily Rothman — and the album’s engineer, Ryan Howe.Besides involving a cave and a piano, the project needed to be “giant” and “beautiful,” Lungulov-Klotz said. “Everything else was becoming a bigger person and learning how to compromise or learning how to record in a place that is super humid and doesn’t want you to touch it at all.”Subterraneous settings can lend music a beautiful, ethereal resonance. But recordings are rare, for good reason. At Lost World, the cave dripped, echoed and randomly hummed. Because of the humidity, the recording equipment was relocated to a car parked at a nearby grate aboveground. Five band members needed a day to get the piano into position and another one to get it out. Each workday started at around 3 p.m. and ended anywhere from 6 or 8 a.m. Over two weeks, Dahl, 21 musicians and a film crew endured a constant temperature of 53 degrees Fahrenheit and numerous round trips through a long, sloped tunnel.Having done her homework on caves, which included trips to more than 30 scattered across the country over a year and a half, Dahl was aware that the conditions would be grueling. Additionally, the project was funded not by a record label, but by credit cards, a GoFundMe campaign and the kindness of others, including the owner of Lost World, Steve Silverberg, who allowed the band to use the cave free as long as they recorded outside of business hours.Accordingly, Dahl tapped the group’s cellist, Sean Brennan, to recruit additional orchestra members, most of whom were students from his alma mater, the Berklee College of Music. But utmost, Dahl knew she would need to enlist people who would fully commit. “Everybody needed to be really, really gung-ho, and that was going to be the only thing that was going to carry it,” she said.Realizing big ambitions and singular visions in a D.I.Y. fashion seems to be a criterion for Dahl, 26, who started Sloppy Jane 11 years ago as a high school student in Los Angeles. A boyfriend back then gave her a Roy Orbison CD that was so well loved it became scratched to the point where a peak in “Only the Lonely” fell into distortion. It was anguishing yet inspiring: “I was like, ‘That’s what I want to make musically,’ something that has the highest high and the lowest low, that goes in and out of lucidity, where it’s like this beautiful thing that just unravels,” she said a few weeks ago during another interview in Williamsburg, this time at Bar Blondeau.Rather than seeking formal training, Dahl opted for self-direction. “Ideas are the things that are important,” she said. “You just need to walk around and trust yourself.” So she did her time on the Los Angeles punk scene, and in 2015 released Sloppy Jane’s first EP, “Sure-Tuff,” six songs of rock ’n’ roll high jinks that feature Phoebe Bridgers, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who has been Dahl’s friend since high school, on bass.Following the EP’s release, Dahl started work on the band’s first full-length album, “Willow.” She wanted to not only base it around a narrative theme but also expand beyond the bass-drum-guitar sound when performing the songs live. Dahl recalled that Bridgers told her, “Go get your orchestra.” So after recording “Willow” in Los Angeles with Sara Cath, Dahl headed to New York in 2017 and found Nardo, Wollowitz, Rothman, Brennan and others. Once she had the band she desired in place, she released “Willow” in March 2018.The opening musical passage of “Madison” references the final piano outro of “Willow,” beginning where the other ends, but the two albums differ. Musically, where “Willow” is more of an alt-rock opera, “Madison” is a wall of sound with poppier leanings that key in a spectrum of emotions — the uplift of “Party Anthem,” the delightful weirdness of the wordless “Bianca Castafiore,” the wistfulness of “Wilt.” And thematically, where “Willow” is about “numbness” and “touching but not being able to feel,” “Madison” is about “loneliness” and wanting someone who is just out of reach, Dahl said. “It’s like you figured out how to have these feelings, but you have nowhere to put them.”The desire to make “Madison” happen was intense enough that nothing could stop it. Not even a mugging a month before the cave sessions, during which Dahl was slashed in the face, hand and back. After the incident, the band talked of delaying the recording to spring 2020 but decided to push ahead. Even after it was done, Dahl was concerned she had irrevocably harmed herself mentally. “But then the pandemic happened,” she said. “And I was like, ‘No, good call, because now I have a lot of time to recover.’”At the start of last year’s lockdown, Dahl left the closetlike space she had called home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, first spending a few months in Wisconsin and then returning to Los Angeles. She spent the pandemic working on other people’s projects, both visual and musical; doing more cave recordings; putting the final touches on “Madison”; and finding it a label, Bridgers’s Saddest Factory Records.Dahl hopes someday to do a third album that picks up where “Madison” leaves off and uses the piano she played in the cave, then she wants to perform all three as one piece in concert. For now, more traditional shows are on the horizon, including an appearance at Pitchfork’s festival in Paris this month. But perhaps the cherry on the cake is that she is verging on the sound she has wanted to achieve since she was a teenager.“I think that I got close with this record,” she said. “I think that it sounds like a scratched Roy Orbison CD.” More

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    Ronnie Tutt, 83, Dies; Powerful Drummer Backed Rock and Pop Stars

    He was a force in Elvis Presley’s TCB band and accompanied other big names like Jerry Garcia, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello.NASHVILLE — Ronnie Tutt, the prolific and versatile drummer who accompanied both Elvises, Presley and Costello, as well as other major figures in rock and pop like Jerry Garcia and Neil Diamond, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his wife, Donna, who said he had lived with chronic heart problems.Mr. Tutt was singing jingles and drumming in local bands in Dallas when, in his early 30s, he was hired to play drums in Presley’s TCB (Taking Care of Business) band for a series of historic engagements at the International Hotel outside Las Vegas in 1969.Presley’s four-week residency there marked his triumphant return to the stage after an eight-year hiatus, reviving a career hampered by uninspired movie roles and an image that had lost relevance in the face of the ’60s counterculture.The comeback — a transformation that also invigorated Las Vegas’s nightclub scene — was due in no small part to the strength of Presley’s rhythm section, a dozen of whose performances were documented on the live portion of the 1969 album “From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis.” Foremost among them was a racing take, nearly eight minutes long, of “Suspicious Minds” featuring Mr. Tutt’s hyperkinetic, barely controlled drumming.Mr. Tutt’s powerful yet nuanced style enlivened many of Presley’s studio recordings from this period as well, including “Burning Love,” a Top 10 pop hit in 1972 that lives up to its incendiary title. Admired for his use of cymbals, Mr. Tutt was known for his ability to anticipate Presley’s moves onstage and accentuate them on the drums.“Elvis always bragged how you intuitively could keep up with his stage moves, even when he tried to trick you,” Presley’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, wrote in a tribute addressed to Mr. Tutt on Instagram.Mr. Tutt did studio work for other artists while in Presley’s employ. He provided empathetic support to Billy Joel’s 1974 Top 40 hit “Piano Man.” He contributed propulsive cymbal and snare rhythms to Gram Parsons’s “Ooh Las Vegas,” a 1974 recording that featured Emmylou Harris on vocals. In the 1970s, Mr. Tutt played in both Ms. Harris’s Hot Band and the Jerry Garcia Band.Working concurrently with Presley and Garcia, the Grateful Dead founder and lead guitarist, proved a study in contrasts, Mr. Tutt said: His work with Presley was meticulously rehearsed, his sessions with Garcia more impromptu and improvisational, akin to jazz.“Elvis’s music was a lot more in your face; you could never play enough,” he recalled in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “With Jerry we never talked about it, but I just knew that my role with that band, no matter what configuration it was, was to help keep it together. We weren’t there to do flashy solos.”Ronald Ellis Tutt was born on March 12, 1938, in Dallas, the only child of Frank and Gladys Tutt. His father owned a dry-cleaning business; his mother was a homemaker.Young Ronnie took dance lessons at an early age. His first instrument was ukulele, followed by guitar, violin and trumpet. He did not begin playing the drums until his senior year in high school.“When I was 3, I started dancing, so the rhythm of everything was more important to me than the melodic,” Mr. Tutt said, discussing his affinity for the drums in a 2016 interview with the website Elvis Australia. “I was frustrated with playing trumpet and guitar because I wanted to express myself rhythmically. It was a very easy transition.”He worked as a drummer with Presley until Presley’s death in 1977. He then played on recordings by the Carpenters, Mink DeVille and others before joining Mr. Diamond’s band, as a drummer and background singer, in 1981. Onstage, Mr. Tutt routinely drew ovations for his drum crescendos during performances of Mr. Diamond’s 1969 pop hit “Holly Holy.”He remained with Mr. Diamond until 2018, while continuing to do studio work on projects like Mr. Costello’s “King of America” (1986) and Los Lobos’ “By the Light of the Moon” (1987). From 1997 to the mid-2010s he also appeared in “Elvis: The Concert,” a touring extravaganza that featured video footage of Presley performing, with new live backing by members of the TCB band and other musicians.In addition to his wife, Mr. Tutt is survived by seven daughters, Cindy Rutter, Tina Dempsey, Christine Edson, Terie Tutt, Rhonda Henderson, Elisia Notermann and Rachael Dodson; two sons, Ron Jr. and Jared; 16 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Nathan, died 10 years ago.Though he was not known as a producer, Mr. Tutt served in that role, albeit uncredited, on “Burning Love” while Felton Jarvis, Presley’s regular producer, was recovering from a kidney transplant.“He was lying on his back in the control room at RCA,” Mr. Tutt said of Mr. Jarvis in his interview with Elvis Australia. “Emery Gordy came up with the bass line, and I produced the record for Felton — you know, the whole session.”“It more described the kind of music that we were trying to get Elvis to do at the time,” he said of “Burning Love” and the aspirations that he and other members of Presley’s Nashville rhythm section had for the session. “So I take a little pride in that.” More

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    Jay-Z, Foo Fighters and Carole King Join the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

    Barack Obama (via video), Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift spoke on behalf of the inductees at a ceremony that also honored Tina Turner, the Go-Go’s and Todd Rundgren.CLEVELAND — Like many awards shows during the pandemic, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame hosted a virtual induction ceremony in 2020. On Saturday night at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland, where the organization’s museum is based, the event returned with a powerful lineup to laud its 36th annual class: a former United States president, Taylor Swift and a Beatle.A video introduction for Jay-Z that flaunted the New York City rapper’s wide reach opened with a tribute from Barack Obama. “I’ve turned to Jay-Z’s words at different points in my life, whether I was brushing dirt off my shoulder on the campaign trail, or sampling his lyrics on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march to Montgomery,” said Obama, who spoke in the package alongside Beyoncé, Chris Rock and LeBron James.The comedian Dave Chappelle, who delivered Jay-Z’s formal induction in the arena, opened with, “I would like to apologize …” — an apparent reference to the controversy surrounding his recent Netflix special, “The Closer” — before sticking to the subject at hand: Jay-Z’s eternal sense of calm and how he has stayed true to his community through the decades.“When he said this is Jay everyday. When he told us he’d never change. You heard this and you probably said as a white person, ‘Well, maybe this guy should focus on his development,’” Chappelle said. “But what we heard is that he’ll never forget us. He will always remember us. And we are his point of reference. That he is going to show us how far we can go if we just get hold of the opportunity.”A tuxedo-clad Jay-Z, who did not perform, followed with a charming, sometimes meandering 10-minute speech in which he referred to the mentors and peers who guided him: LL Cool J (who received a musical excellence award on Saturday after he wasn’t voted in on his sixth nomination), KRS-One, Rakim and Chuck D, among others. “Growing up, we didn’t think we could be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Jay-Z said. “We were told that hip-hop was a fad. Much like punk rock, it gave us this anti-culture, this subgenre, and there were heroes in it.” Hopefully, he added at the end of his remarks, he is showing the “next generation that anything is possible.”The actress Angela Bassett inducted the singer Tina Turner, who did not attend the event.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesThe actress Drew Barrymore, center, with the Go-Go’s. David Richard/Associated PressJay-Z joined one of the more diverse recent Rock Hall classes: Carole King, the singer and songwriter who was honored by the organization in 1990 with her songwriting partner and former husband Gerry Goffin; the arena rockers Foo Fighters, whose frontman, Dave Grohl, traced the band’s longevity to the familial bond developed between the musicians; the indefatigable powerhouse singer Tina Turner, finally inducted as a solo performer after gaining entry as part of Ike and Tina Turner in 1991; the 1980s power-pop band the Go-Go’s, hailed as the sound of “pure possibility” in a big-hearted introduction by Drew Barrymore; and the classic rock auteur Todd Rundgren, who recently told TMZ that he “never cared much about the Hall of Fame” and stayed true to his word, skipping the event to perform a solo set in Cincinnati. HBO will present highlights from the ceremony on Nov. 20.Jay-Z’s speech, filled with asides and memories, well demonstrated how despite the multitude of big personalities packed into one of Cleveland’s biggest venues, the event often centered on more intimate moments.Swift helped set the more personal tone, recalling in her induction speech for King how at age 7 she used to dance throughout her house in socked feet while listening to the musician’s records. “I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know Carole King’s music,” said Swift, who went on to describe the seemingly magical way that King’s songs could be introduced by an outsider — a parent, a sibling, a lover — only to become an integral part of a person’s own internal world.“I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know Carole King’s music,” said the singer Taylor Swift, left, with King.Gaelen Morse/ReutersSwift embodied this idea in her show-opening performance, gliding through “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which Swift reinvented as a gently pulsating synth-pop ballad that wouldn’t feel out of place in her own discography. King, who could be seen onscreen in the venue wiping away tears as Swift finished the song, thanked the pop star for “carrying the torch forward” in her own speech.“I keep hearing it, so I guess I’m going to have to try to own it, that today’s female singers and songwriters stand on my shoulders,” said King, who was quick to extend the spotlight to her own forebears. “Let it not be forgotten that they also stand on the shoulders of the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. May she rest in power, Miss Aretha Franklin!”In his speech for the Foo Fighters, Paul McCartney joking pointed out how Dave Grohl followed in his own footsteps. Both were swept up by music at a young age, McCartney said, landing in popular groups that came to an untimely end. Both rebounded by making albums and playing all the musical parts (Grohl with Foo Fighters’ self-titled 1995 debut; McCartney with his 1970 solo album). “Do you think this guy’s stalking me?” the Beatle cracked.Onstage, Grohl, born roughly 60 miles east of the Rock Hall in Warren, Ohio, praised the influence of the Beatles and in particular McCartney, describing him as “my music teacher.” After the Foo Fighters muscled through a trio of battle-tested rock singalongs — “The Best of You,” “My Hero” and “Everlong” — McCartney repaid the favor, joining the band for a galloping cover of the Beatles’ “Get Back.”The singer Paul McCartney, right, inducted the Foo Fighters. He joined the band for a galloping cover of the Beatles’ “Get Back.”Michael Loccisano/Getty Images H.E.R. and Keith Urban paid tribute to Turner.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesIn other performances, H.E.R., Christina Aguilera, Mickey Guyton and Keith Urban combined to pay tribute to Tina Turner, who did not attend the event. During the in memoriam segment, Brandi Carlile joined her bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth for an understated take on the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” to honor Don Everly, who died in August.The Go-Go’s captured all of the sunny, sneering urgency of their 1981 debut “Beauty and the Beat,” the first and only album from an all-woman band to score the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s chart, opening with “Vacation,” pogo-ing into “Our Lips Are Sealed” and closing with a bounding, bass-heavy “We Got the Beat.”In Janet Jackson’s 2019 induction speech, she spoke of the Rock Hall’s well-documented gender imbalance, asking voters to “please induct more women.” The Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine echoed these comments during the band’s own time onstage.While Valentine credited the Rock Hall for making progress, she also prodded the organization to do more. “By honoring our historical contribution, the doors to this establishment have opened wider,” she said. “Because here is the thing, there would not be less of us if more of us were visible.” More