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      Morat, la banda colombiana que conquista el mundo al ritmo del banjo

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      Una de las bandas con mayor proyección de América Latina le habla a una generación con ansiedades y problemas que, a menudo, vive en un contexto de gran agitación social.El momento decisivo para una de las bandas de más rápido crecimiento en América Latina llegó gracias a un instrumento poco probable: un banjo robado.En 2014, la banda colombiana Morat tuvo una sesión de grabación en Bogotá. Sus cuatro miembros todavía estudiaban en la universidad, eran amigos de la infancia que tocaban en eventos informales y, algunas noches de la semana, se presentaban en bares. Mientras buscaba inspiración, el guitarrista Juan Pablo Villamil tomó un instrumento que no sabía exactamente cómo tocar.“En ese entonces todos sabíamos que queríamos sonar distinto, explorar cosas”, recordó Villamil en una reciente llamada de Zoom cuando sus compañeros de banda Juan Pablo Isaza, Simón Vargas y Martín Vargas se unieron para agregar sus propios aportes. Grabaron una guitarra de 12 cuerdas y una mandolina, luego alguien vio un banjo colgado en la pared. Lo tomaron prestado y nunca lo devolvieron.“En cuanto al proceso de aprendizaje, yo diría que fue principalmente en YouTube”, agregó Villamil. “Porque no hay muchos profesores de banjo en Colombia”.“Mi nuevo vicio”, la canción que estaban escribiendo en ese momento, terminó con un sencillo pero prominente riff de banjo y llamó la atención de Paulina Rubio, la estrella pop mexicana, quien rápidamente la grabó con la banda. El tema se convirtió en una sensación en España y llegó a las listas de éxitos en América Latina y Estados Unidos. Los músicos fueron invitados a Europa para que grabaran más música, y se llevaron el banjo.“No podíamos ser una banda de un solo hit, la canción con Paulina y eso es todo”, dijo Villamil. La canción que llevaban como su “as bajo la manga” era “Cómo te atreves”, que ahora tiene más de 200 millones de vistas en YouTube. Con su banjo acelerado, letras llenas de imágenes y un ambiente alegre de “road trip pop” que se ha convertido en el sonido de Morat, la canción marcó la llegada fulgurante del grupo a la escena de la música latina en 2015. Desde entonces, no han parado de crecer.En julio, el grupo lanzó su tercer álbum, ¿A dónde vamos?, y la semana pasada comenzó la etapa estadounidense de su gira que los llevará a teatros y estadios en California y Texas, con paradas en Chicago, Nueva York, Atlanta y Miami. Con canciones que abordan la angustia, la nostalgia y el enamoramiento, la banda ha forjado conexiones poderosas a través de fronteras y océanos al hablarle a una generación de jóvenes cuyas ansiedades y preocupaciones personales, grandes o pequeñas, a menudo se desarrollan en un contexto de agitación social.“Lo que intenta hacer Morat es usar palabras simples para explicar sentimientos complicados”, dijo Pedro Malaver, el manager de la banda. “No estamos tratando de ser Neruda. Solo tratamos de decirle a la gente: no estás solo”.Las características de lo que Villamil definió como la “firma sonora” de la banda incluyen letras dolidas y nostálgicas sobre el amor no correspondido que recuerdan a los boleros clásicos; coros cantados al unísono; y el uso de instrumentos (como el banjo, el piano eléctrico o la guitarra de acero) que rara vez se escuchan en el pop latino. Han lanzado poderosas baladas, melodías funky de R&B y canciones de rock que se inspiran en el country. “Podemos llegar hasta donde nos permitan los instrumentos”, dijo Martín Vargas, el baterista de la banda.Musicalmente, la banda es un poco atípica en un ambiente donde el reguetón recibe la mayor atención. Las influencias de Morat incluyen Coldplay, Bacilos, Mac Miller, el poeta y cantante español Joaquín Sabina, Dave Matthews Band, la banda de rock colombiana Ekhymosis y, por supuesto, los Beatles. Villamil e Isaza también son fanáticos del country (escriben y graban a menudo en Nashville), y los hermanos Vargas eran metaleros antes de incursionar en el folk-rock.“En 2021, no hay un sonido único que defina el pop en América Latina”, escribió Kevin Meenan, gerente de tendencias musicales de YouTube, en un correo electrónico. “En cierto modo, Morat es un microcosmos de esta tendencia que incorpora una amplia gama de sonidos y géneros en su música, y en su caso, suelen usar influencias distintas a la movida más popular del reguetón y el trap latino”.Leila Cobo, vicepresidenta y líder de la industria latina en Billboard, dijo: “Hay muchas suposiciones sobre lo que es la música latina en este momento, pero es un territorio muy amplio”.Y añadió: “Morat demuestra que la música latina no es necesariamente lo que ves en las listas de éxitos en un momento determinado. Escriben grandes canciones pop con buenas letras. Son fieles a sí mismos, y constantemente amplían su base de fans”.MORAT COMENZÓ cuando tocaban en la escuela primaria; sus miembros se conocen desde los cinco años. A medida que se acercaban al final de la escuela secundaria, Isaza, Villamil, Simón Vargas y Alejandro Posada, el baterista original del grupo, formaron una banda. Después del lanzamiento de su primer álbum en 2016, Posada se salió para concentrarse en sus estudios y el hermano menor de Vargas se incorporó.Al principio, los miembros de Morat (que en ese entonces se llamaba Malta) repartían sus discos en los bares de Bogotá hasta que lograron presentarse de manera regular en un local llamado La Tea, donde los fanáticos del grupo eran el personal de seguridad y los mismos músicos mezclaban y hacían los arreglos en las presentaciones en vivo. Pronto, comenzó a surgir su público. “Recuerdo que teníamos un juego: cada vez que tocábamos en La Tea tratábamos de adivinar cuánta gente iba a vernos”, dijo Simón Vargas. “Y, por lo general, llegaban más personas de las que esperábamos”.“Podemos llegar hasta donde nos permitan los instrumentos”, dijo Martín Vargas, el baterista de la banda.Gianfranco Tripodo para The New York TimesPero no todos veían el potencial del grupo. Villamil recuerda que en la primera reunión que tuvieron con Malaver, que en ese entonces empezaba su carrera como un joven representante artístico, los rechazó después de escuchar una de sus primeras canciones. “Nos dijo: ‘Creo que ustedes son talentosos, pero nunca tendrán una canción en la radio. Deberían haber nacido en Argentina a fines de los setenta, porque su música no es adecuada para lo que está sucediendo en este momento’”.Después de verlos actuar en vivo en La Tea unos días después, Malaver rápidamente cambió de opinión. “Fui con la peor actitud de la historia a ese concierto ¡Pero luego empezaron a tocar!”, recuerda. Esa misma noche decidió representar a la banda.Ya llevan casi una década trabajando juntos, y las colaboraciones de Morat se han extendido por todo el espectro de la música en español: han hecho canciones con la actriz mexicana Danna Paola, con el cantaor de flamenco Antonio Carmona, con el rockero Juanes y con estrellas del pop como Sebastián Yatra y Aitana, entre muchos otros.“El catálogo del grupo realmente habla del poder de la colaboración en la región”, dijo Meenan. “Este éxito no ha estado ligado a un solo país. En YouTube, hemos visto su música en más de 15 países, obteniendo lugares en el Top 40 en lugares como España, México, Bolivia, Argentina, Italia y Ecuador, además de su Colombia natal”. Dijo que Morat ha logrado tener más de 950 millones de visitas en YouTube, solo en los últimos 12 meses.MORAT ESTABA de gira por España cuando hablamos por Zoom, y el grupo se juntó en un sofá frente a la cámara como cuatro hermanos. Se movían cómodamente entre el inglés y el español cuando querían expresar más claramente un punto, hacían bromas y, a menudo, uno terminaba las oraciones del otro. Tampoco dudaron en debatir en voz alta algunas de las preguntas más complejas.Dos temas surgen a menudo en las letras de Morat: el amor y la guerra, que es un tema delicado en un país que ha soportado décadas de conflicto armado.“El contexto en el que hemos crecido y en el que vivimos, tiene esa imagen todos los días, todo el tiempo”, dijo Simón Vargas. “Y creo que, aunque no quieras, se nota y te influye”.Aunque la imagen global de Colombia se ha visto afectada por descripciones generales que la ubican como un lugar violento, la realidad, por supuesto, es mucho más compleja. “Bogotá tiene estas montañas enormes y el sol sale detrás de las montañas. Entonces durante gran parte de la mañana el sol no ha salido de las montañas, pero el cielo está azul”, agrega Simón Vargas. “Eso es muy colombiano, en cierto modo es como si estuvieras viviendo al límite. Puedes ver la oscuridad, pero también sabes que hay algo más allí. Y, al mismo tiempo, estás al lado de la luz y justo al lado de una cultura muy hermosa y de gente muy hermosa”.En 2020, Simón Vargas, quien también es escritor y actualmente está terminando su licenciatura en historia en la Universidad de Los Andes, publicó un libro de cuentos sobre Bogotá inspirado en el realismo mágico. “Tal vez fue una forma de tocar temas más intensos y oscuros que los que hablamos en nuestra música”. Lo tituló, apropiadamente, A la orilla de la luz.El último álbum de Morat se compuso casi en su totalidad durante la pandemia de COVID-19 en una de las regiones más afectadas del mundo. “No hay un solo ser humano en este planeta que no haya pensado, ¿a dónde vamos después de esto?”, dijo Simón Vargas. “Decidimos que se llamaría ¿A dónde vamos? literalmente porque pensamos que era una excelente manera de hablar sobre lo que está sucediendo en todos los aspectos. No sabíamos cuándo volveríamos a tener conciertos. No sabíamos cómo es que la pandemia iba a cambiar el panorama social”.Martín Vargas dijo que el título también se refiere al proceso creativo de la banda. “Con la exploración musical que tratamos de hacer, ¿a dónde vamos con nuestros instrumentos?”, añadió. “Es muy evidente durante el álbum: las canciones son diferentes. Hay mucho rock. Y también hay claras referencias a países. Baladas, boleros”.Ninguna de sus letras habla explícitamente sobre la pandemia, pero casi todas las canciones están marcadas por temas de angustia personal, incertidumbre e inquietud que contrastan con melodías optimistas y, a menudo, muy bailables. Juntas, las composiciones muestran la versatilidad de Morat: la eléctrica “En coma” trata sobre una relación atrapada en el limbo; la balada “Mi pesadilla”, con el cantante colombiano Andrés Cepeda, trata sobre la ansiosa espera por la llegada de la persona adecuada; la acústica “Date la vuelta” es una sentida carta a un amigo que vive una relación tóxica.Aunque las canciones representan una variedad de estados de ánimo, todas tienen la estética de la banda que continúa sumando nuevos oyentes. “Siento que lo que hemos hecho hasta ahora ha sido un milagro”, dijo Isaza. “No sé por qué a la gente le gusta un banjo con letra en español. Lo considero un milagro, y el hecho de que todavía lo estemos haciendo, es asombroso para mí”..Aunque el disco comienza con la pregunta “¿A dónde vamos?”, termina con el mensaje esperanzador de “Simplemente pasan”: “Ya quiero decirle que bailemos / Que lo peor que puede pasar es que nos gustemos”, dice la banda. Y remata: “Porque cuando las cosas buenas tienen que pasar / Simplemente pasan”. More

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      Joy Crookes’s Introspective Soul Digs Deep Beneath Her ‘Skin’

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      The 22-year-old British-Irish-Bangladeshi musician is releasing a debut album that makes a strong statement about her identity.LONDON — Joy Crookes knew she was making a statement by naming her debut album “Skin.”“It’s one of the strongest parts of our bodies,” the 22-year-old singer-songwriter said. But “in every other sense, socially and externally, it is used against us,” she added in a recent interview at her London apartment, nestled on the sofa with the Kama Sutra and a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri visible on a sparsely filled nearby shelf.“Skin,” due Oct. 15, makes an impassioned statement about her British-Irish-Bangladeshi heritage. “The thing about being mixed race is there’s so much projection,” she said. “My identity is solely my responsibility, and my choice, and I don’t need anyone’s permission.”In her music, Crookes offers listeners a nuanced and candid exploration of her multiracial identity. At a time when many conversations about race in the arts and calls for change have only recently begun, Crookes’s commitment to vulnerability in her storytelling has helped her connect with a growing — and loyal — fan base.Listening to Crookes’s soulful, intimate music can feel like intruding on a private conversation or cracking open a diary, placing her alongside introspective British artists like Arlo Parks and Cleo Sol. “Don’t you know the skin that you’re given is made to be lived in?” she sings, with a plea in her voice on the album’s bare-bones title track, quoting words she spoke to a suicidal friend over simple piano and strings. Other songs explore her experiences with sexual assault, and speak directly to Britain’s Conservative government: “No such thing as a kingdom when tomorrow’s done for the children,” she sings on the sharp-tongued, retro-tinged “Kingdom.”Crookes said she uses her music to learn about herself, as well as for catharsis.  “I think it’s a building block into me as a human being, and learning about myself.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesGrowing up, Crookes — who turns 23 on Oct. 9 — bought CDs by Marvin Gaye and Kate Nash, and taught herself to play the guitar and piano, and later, to produce. She was first contacted at 15 by a music manager who saw a YouTube video of her and a friend covering “Hit The Road Jack.” At 19 she signed with an imprint of Sony Music.In the last four years, she has released three EPs and several singles, featured in a Beats campaign and landed on the 2020 shortlist for the BRIT Rising Star Award, which is given to the British act tipped to make it big in the coming year.“Every now and then you get someone who’s phenomenally talented, incredibly grounded in their emotions and how they process the world around them,” said Blue May, a producer who worked on “Skin” and believes Crookes has the potential to be “a voice for her generation.”The process of writing “Skin” excavated powerful feelings about her family’s history. Crookes’s Irish father and Bangladeshi mother split, turbulently, when she was two. Navigating their different cultures, she felt she couldn’t “be a byproduct of one or the other” given “how much war that would have caused,” she said.Some traumas left even deeper generational wounds. “All the men in my family were killed in front of my great-grandmother,” Crookes said, referring to Bangladesh’s bloody fight for independence from what was then West Pakistan. “The ramifications of that war live on today.”On the album, Crookes leans into her Bangladeshi roots, singing the colloquial Bangla phrase “Theek Ache” — translated as “it’s OK” — to brush off nightly escapades of drinking and hookups. She also carefully probes her family’s experiences as immigrants living in London. “I’ve seen the things you’ve seen/you don’t speak, you leave the traces,” she sings to her Bangladeshi relatives on the dramatic, soulful “19th floor,” named for her grandmother’s apartment in public housing building in south London, where Crookes spent much of her childhood.The process of writing “Skin” excavated powerful feelings about Crookes’s family’s history. Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesIn her music videos, Crookes also immortalizes her family’s history. The clip for “Since I Left You” is based on a photograph taken in her family’s village in Bangladesh, and features the musician singing tearfully in front of a corrugated metal shelter with clotheslines blowing in the breeze.For the cinematographer Deepa Keshvala, working with Crookes on the video was the first time in her then seven years in the music industry she had seen someone proudly putting their South Asian heritage on display.“She was 19 when we did that,” she said in a phone interview. At that age, “to have a strong sense of who you are is pretty amazing.”Crookes said her music is therapy that keeps paying dividends. “It’s the way that I let things out, and it just so happens to be my job,” she said. “I think it’s a building block into me as a human being, and learning about myself.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Justin Bieber: Our World’ Review: A Pop Star Enshrouded

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      Alternating like clockwork between live numbers and soft insight dulls this documentary’s rhythm.Justin Bieber’s life beyond pop stardom — namely his personal post-teen transformation — is almost completely obscured in “Justin Bieber: Our World.” The film opens with his supportive wife Hailey in bed with him just before he plays a New Year’s Eve gig in 2020, his first full concert in three years.But this show is different because it has to be: It takes place on the rooftop of the Beverly Hilton Hotel as Covid-19 cases were surging in Los Angeles. The doc encapsulates the shared exhilaration of watching Bieber perform during this socially distanced concert spectacle, but it’s only for the biggest Beliebers. And even they, too, may wish it didn’t play out in such tedious mechanical fashion. Alternating like clockwork between live numbers and soft insight dulls the film’s rhythm, diminishing the excitement it’s going for as it counts down the days to showtime.The director Michael D. Ratner only grazes the surface of a newly grounded and grateful Bieber; the star’s heartthrob-to-husband evolution is safely teased out in self-captured vlogs and calculated crew member testimonials. Mostly, Ratner stays fixed on pandemic-era concert planning, from daily swab tests to an infected crew member.Another obstacle comes in the form of bad weather just before the show — anything, it seems, to avoid a deeper, more personal look at Bieber (though we do learn he was a fan of the mustache, just not in certain pictures). If “Our World” has anything to say, it’s that the chaos caused by a global health crisis can be a guarded pop star’s greatest diversion.Justin Bieber: Our WorldRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      Cimafunk’s Quest to Create One Nación Under a Groove

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      The Cuban musician’s new album, “El Alimento,” is a fresh take on funk that blends Afro-Cuban and African American rhythms using a cast of international collaborators.A few months ago in a Tallahassee, Fla., recording studio, the Cuban vocalist and composer Cimafunk was engaged in a climactic meeting of the minds with the Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton when they stumbled on a fascinating connection between African American and Afro-Cuban music.Cimafunk, born Erik Iglesias Rodríguez, was scatting out the 1950s smash “Los Marcianos,” which instantly delighted Clinton, who had loved the melody of the song so much that he recorded an anthemic cover of it called “Groovealliegiance” for Funkadelic’s 1978 classic “One Nation Under a Groove.” But Clinton, who had created an Afrofuturist cottage industry with his band’s elaborate costuming and stage props, had no idea that the song was about Martians landing in Havana to dance cha cha cha.“I was saying, brother, you wrote that song talking about the Mothership and that whole connection and you didn’t know that?” Cimafunk, 32, recalled in a video interview last week, standing in front of a South Florida building surrounded by palm trees and lush grass. “All those people like Pérez Prado, Chano Pozo, all that craziness made a mark,” he added, referring to the Cuban musical innovators. “It not only penetrated the instruments, but also the vocal rhythms.”Afro-Cuban rhythms have mingled with African American ones going all the way back to late-19th-century New Orleans — distant siblings that intersected at key moments, like the gestation of jazz, the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie era of Birdland bebop, and the stunning performance of Ray Barretto’s band in Questlove’s recent documentary “Summer of Soul.” But for Cimafunk, whose new album “El Alimento,” out Friday, is filled with star-studded collaborations with Clinton, Lupe Fiasco, CeeLo Green and the pianist Chucho Valdés, the time for fresh Cuban funk is now.“What Erik has done is unite the two tendencies — Afro-Cuban and African American,” Valdés, the founder of the influential 1970s jazz/funk group Irakere, said in an interview. “He has converted this into a new school that until now I haven’t heard done.”“El Alimento” is a frenetic joy ride of freewheeling blasts of percussive funk intercut with pumped-up versions of classic Cuban riffs called tumbaos, and even a nod to Michael Jackson’s famous quoting of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.” Yet Cimafunk also explores his compositional abilities and impressive vocal range on the blues ballad “Salvaje” and the Spanish-guitar-tinged “No Me Alcanzas,” featuring the classic Cuban percussionists Los Papines. While he wants to his voice to carry the entire lineage of Cuban music, he reminds me most of Benny Moré, who was also a self-taught vocalist that highly trained musicians pushed themselves to keep up with.“What Cima is doing is like a brand-new funk,” Clinton said in a phone interview. “Tito Puente and that kind of stuff, Tito Rodríguez, all of that was my favorite music back in New York. The mambo and the cha-cha was the same as disco in the ’70s.”Dressed in an African-inspired print shirt, and peering through a pair of oversize sunglasses, Cimafunk showed flashes of amused wonderment, as if he was both surprised by and belonging to the moment. When explaining details about writing and composing, he broke into song, and the birds in the surrounding trees joined him, seemingly inspired.The title “El Alimento” means “The Nourishment.” Cimafunk said he chose it “because making the album was what nourished me spiritually during the whole process of the pandemic.”Akilah Townsend for The New York TimesBorn and raised in Pinar del Río, a town west of Havana, Cimafunk grew up listening to giants like Moré, Bola de Nieve, and Los Van Van and its charismatic singer Mayito Rivera. But he also encountered music from beyond the island, especially on TV programs like “De La Gran Escena,” where he saw Tom Jones, Phil Collins and Sting. On one of the new album’s signature tracks, “Esto Es Cuba,” he describes grooving residents of Guantánamo who were able to see live broadcasts of “Soul Train” because of the U.S. naval base’s antenna nearby.Cimafunk’s conservative family pushed him to study medicine but supported him when he decided to move to Havana and pursue his musical ambitions. “At first I got into reggaeton because of the girls, and the fact that anybody with a sound card and microphone can do it,” he said. “Then I discovered the trova,” referring to an older genre centered on the ballad. “That where I started to write my songs with more structure — very odd songs that no one understood — the stranger songs you wrote, the more exotic you were.”Cimafunk’s first album, “Terapia,” arrived in 2017 stocked with neo-trova exoticism like “Parar El Tiempo” and “Me Voy,” a danceable live favorite inspired by Nigerian Afropop and pilón, an Afro-Cuban carnaval rhythm. “Terapia” contained the seeds of the new album, and a mellower, ’70s soul groove. “El Alimento” (“The Nourishment”) has thoroughly transformed him into an international funk champion.“I called it ‘El Alimento’ because making the album was what nourished me spiritually during the whole process of the pandemic,” Cimafunk said. He said he intends the album as a kind of descarga, a word that in Cuba means both a musical jam and a release of accumulated emotional baggage.“It’s about the connection between the spirit and the body and the importance of release, and loving yourself,” he explained.The album’s producer, Jack Splash (Alicia Keys, Kendrick Lamar, Solange), has fronted his own indie funk band Plant Life, and moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Miami, giving him a unique perspective on the Afro-Cuban/African American overlap.“It’s two different sensibilities — even if you’re listening to the same funk, your swing might be a little different,” he said in a video interview. He said Shakira once asked him to add more syncopation to his standard beatbox rhythm track; on the new song “Estoy pa’ eso,” Splash and Cimafunk retool the “Shakira beatbox” to put a new spin on a sample from the American funk band Zapp, with mind-bending results.While some of Cimafunk’s strongest supporters, like Splash, believe his sense of style — tightfitting clothing, Bootsy Collins-esque sunglasses — evokes Fela Kuti, comparisons to the Nigerian Afrobeat king go beyond appearance: Rodríguez is an Africanist who often begins concerts with an a cappella rendition of a poem called “Faustino Congo,” which Cimafunk said is inspired by Miguel Barnet’s “Biography of a Runaway Slave.” The “cima” part of Cimafunk is a reference to cimarrones, runaway slaves whose defiance paralleled that of Jamaican Maroons, an inspiration for Bob Marley’s Rastafarian beliefs.“At first I got into reggaeton because of the girls, and the fact that anybody with a sound card and microphone can do it,” Cimafunk said. He soon moved on to other genres.Akilah Townsend for The New York Times“At first I grew up unaware — my family was Black and educated and felt they had to work twice as hard,” Cimafunk said. “African culture arrived in Cuba and changed everything! It’s the flow, the visuality, the concept, everything, and when I started to connect with that identity it was a relief because I arrived at a place of truth.”Splash noted that funk was more than a sonic touchstone. “People were scared when James Brown said ‘I’m Black and I’m proud,’” he said. “They thought, ‘Does that mean James Brown does not like white people?’ No, that’s not what he means. ‘Let’s lift my people up.’” They found a similar moment in the party anthem “La Noche” from the new album, which features the dancehall rapper Stylo G and the Colombian Afro-funk band ChocQuibTown, whose lead singer Goyo shouts at song’s end, “Afro-Latin power!”While he showcases the power of blending African American and Afro-Cuban music, Cimafunk is also engaging in a cultural mixing that celebrates a kind of Latin American hybridity, on his terms. He sees himself as part of a new generation that is destined to bring change.“Now that we have the internet, you can know what’s happening in the world, and have a million different opinions, and choose the one you want,” Cimafunk said. “We started analog,” he added, “now we’re in a pot that’s boiling.” More

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      Brandi Carlile, Larger Than Life and Achingly Human

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      The singer and songwriter’s seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” realizes and polishes her ambitions.The quarantine and isolation of 2020 didn’t subdue Brandi Carlile. Just the opposite. Her seventh album, “In These Silent Days,” braves the extremes of Carlile’s songwriting. She empathizes, apologizes and lays out accusations. She’s righteous and she’s self-doubting. She proffers fond lullabies and she unleashes full-throated screams. The album reaffirms her ambitions and polishes them, too. The music Carlile makes with her songwriting partners and bandmates, Tim and Phil Hanseroth (on bass and guitar), harks back to the handmade sounds of 1970s rock. Songs on “In These Silent Days” pay clear tribute to Joni Mitchell (“You and Me on the Rock”) and the Who (“Broken Horses”). Yet Carlile is unmistakably a 21st-century figure: a gay married mother of two daughters who bypassed the country-music establishment to reach her own fervent audience.From the beginning — Carlile released her debut album, “Brandi Carlile,” in 2005 — her gifts have been obvious. She writes melodies that gather drama as they unfold, carrying lyrics filled with compassion, close observation and sometimes heroic metaphors. Her voice can be limpid and confiding or fiercely torn as she strategically reveals its startling range. As early as 2007, with the title song of her second album, “The Story,” Carlile proved she could sound confessional while belting to the rafters. There was no denying her emotional power, even though at times, on her early albums, it shaded into melodrama.“In These Silent Days” follows through on the long-deserved recognition that Carlile found with her 2018 album, “By the Way, I Forgive You,” and its flagship single, “The Joke,” a grandly crescendoing ballad that tells sensitive misfits that their time will come. It was nominated for the Grammy for song of the year in 2019, and Carlile’s showstopping prime-time performance introduced her to a new swath of fans.Carlile chose to share the added attention. She collaborated on writing and producing a Grammy-winning comeback album, “While I’m Livin’,” for the country singer Tanya Tucker, and she formed an Americana alliance, the Highwomen, with Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires. She also performed the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” in Los Angeles, a concert she’ll bring to Carnegie Hall on Nov. 6.When the pandemic curtailed her years of touring in 2020, Carlile completed her memoir, “Broken Horses,” and wrote songs with her band members in the compound they share in Washington state. They recorded the new album in Nashville with Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, who had also produced “By the Way, I Forgive You.”“In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political. It opens with her latest ballad showpiece, “Right on Time,” which pleads for a reunion and a second chance: “You might be angry now — of course you are,” Carlile admits with breathy hesitation at the beginning, before the song starts its big climb in the chorus. “It wasn’t right, but it was right on time,” Carlile declares, rising to an operatic peak and, in the final iteration, leaping up from there, perfectly poised between personal heartache and stagy flamboyance. In a few seconds of sound, she makes herself both larger than life and achingly human.“Broken Horses” doesn’t wait for its buildup. It’s an imagistic, nonlinear song full of defiance — “I’m a tried and weathered woman but I won’t be tried again,” Carlile vows — and from the start, Carlile’s voice is on the verge of breaking into a shriek, riding hard-strummed guitars and rumbling drums directly out of “Who’s Next.” There are moments of respite in paused, sustained harmonies, but Carlile is all scars and fury, as elemental as she has ever been.She makes a more measured ascent in “Sinners, Saints and Fools,” with electric guitars and orchestral strings mustering behind her for a final surge. The song is a parable about legalism, fundamentalism and immigration; a “God-fearing man” declares “You can’t break the law” and turns away “desperate souls who washed up on the sand” undocumented, only to find himself turned away from heaven.Carlile is equally telling in quieter songs. She sings to her children in “Stay Gentle,” a lilting compendium of advice — “To find joy in the darkness is wise/Although they will think you are naïve” — and, more moodily, in “Mama Werewolf,” which calls on them to hold her to account if she turns destructive: “Be the one, my silver bullet in the gun.”She neatly twists a knife in “Throwing Good After Bad,” a stately, pensive but resentful piano ballad about being left behind by someone who would always be “Addicted to the rush, the chase, the new.” And in “When You’re Wrong,” she sings to an aging friend — “The creases on your forehead run like treads on a tire” — who’s trapped in a relationship that “pulls you down while you slowly waste your days.” In Carlile’s songs, she sees human flaws clearly and unsparingly, including her own. More often than not, her music finds ways to forgive.Brandi Carlile“In These Silent Days”(Low Country Sound/Elektra) More

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      Why I Keep Listening to Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’

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      Sometimes you need an overwrought antidote to the overwhelming events of daily life.When I receive disappointing news, I allow myself to wallow for exactly four minutes and 22 seconds: the length of the 2004 Green Day hit “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” I focus on nothing but my feelings for the duration of the song, which expresses emotion in such cartoonish terms that, listening to it, I can indulge in maudlin self-pity.Green Day was my world’s soundtrack in the early aughts, providing pop-punk angst at mall food courts, graduations and birthday parties. “Boulevard,” from the album “American Idiot,” is an emo power ballad, full of mixed metaphors expressing the privileged blah of being bored and misunderstood in the suburbs of a morally compromised nation. Conceived of as a sort of rock opera, “American Idiot” follows the ups and downs of its protagonist, “Jesus of Suburbia.” As the character’s name might suggest, the entire album operates at a melodramatic pitch, with Jesus encountering adversaries and feeling misunderstood everywhere he turns. “Boulevard” narrates a low point in the hero’s journey. The singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, resembles a musical-theater protagonist when he sings lines like “I’m walking down the line/That divides me somewhere in my mind/On the borderline/Of the edge, and where I walk alone.”When “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” came out, I was 9. It made me feel like a kid from “School of Rock.” I appreciated its intelligibility and, from where I stood, its edge. I was not really into cool music back then. My prized album, which I listened to on my red CD Walkman from Radio Shack, was the soundtrack to the movie “Holes.” I was too cautious to participate when my classmates passed around burned copies of Green Day CDs on the playground at school. One weekend, though, I was delighted to be invited to a slumber party by classmates who did things like get pink streaks in their hair and wear little mesh gloves from Hot Topic. (I myself stuck to a uniform of “Life Is Good” shirts with black stretchy pants in this period; I sometimes wore foam earrings shaped like wedges of cheese to school.) But that night, I felt transgressive. We sang karaoke. We looked at pictures of Pink on the computer. We screamed the lyrics to “Sk8er Boi.” And, ecstatically, we listened to Green Day and Good Charlotte. High on rocking out and being included, I let another girl write the name of one of those two pop-punk bands — I can’t remember which — in huge letters on my arms in black Sharpie. It comforts me to face an operatic version of emotional reality, then to just shake it off and move on.Then I came crashing down. The party was over. I hid my arms in my hoodie when my mom came over to get me. I was embarrassed to reveal that, for a few minutes, I had escaped into a high-velocity version of reality. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” mimicked the intensity I felt in my angstiest moments; it mirrored a heightened version of my emotional reality back to me. Now, years later, I look back with amusement and even jealousy at the purity of those feelings. So recently, I have found myself drawn anew to the earnest drama of this song. The central premise of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is that the character is walking around feeling isolated and bummed for reasons the band leaves vague — the better for the listener to insert her own experience. “I walk alone,” Armstrong sings in overwrought fashion. “My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me.” The lyrics are repetitive, as if trying to blow up the character’s suffering to widescreen proportions. At points, Armstrong sounds so swollen with emotion that he cuts himself off in the middle of a line. The dour F minor key and abrasive strumming give the gift of broad, atmospheric ennui to those who want to stew. Such dramatic displays of emotion are, of course, frowned upon in daily life. But overwhelming events continue apace even as the range of acceptable ways to react shrinks. In that context, it is validating to access and embrace high drama, even if only for a few minutes, in response to even minor provocations. I am not walking along the song’s proverbial boulevard of broken dreams, I realize. No — someone just failed to text me back. It comforts me to face an operatic version of emotional reality, then to just shake it off and move on. Listening to the song, I enter a world where people scream what they mean and am transported back to the simpler emotional state of my stretchy-pants days. This summer, I was standing on a subway platform heading uptown when I received an expected but still deflating rejection email from an editor. I had worked hard on my pitch and secretly nursed the fantasy that my story idea would be accepted. So when she very kindly told me it could not be, I felt my face get hot and my stomach sink in disappointment. But instead of bursting into tears, I popped in my AirPods and played “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” When the train pulled up, I sat down. I tapped into the childhood bluntness of feeling misunderstood, and by the time the fourth minute rolled around, I laughed. When I got to 96th Street, I felt fine. I met my parents for dinner.Much of my youthful angst has dissolved as I’ve aged, and that has been on the whole a positive and appropriate development. But in times when I feel swells of disquietude, I don’t try to suppress them. I honor them, ever so briefly. For just over four minutes, I walk alone on a lonely road. Then when it’s over, I remember the people around me and move on. More

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      Richard H. Kirk, Post-Punk Pioneer of Industrial Music, Dies at 65

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      Cabaret Voltaire, of which he was a founder, began as a band of experimental provocateurs and later moved to the dance floor.Richard H. Kirk, a founding member of the English group Cabaret Voltaire and a major figure in the creation of the post-punk style known as industrial music, has died. He was 65.His death was confirmed by his former record label, Mute, in an Instagram post on Sept. 21. The post did not say when or where he died or cite the cause.Mr. Kirk formed Cabaret Voltaire in 1973 in Sheffield, England, with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson. They borrowed the name from the Zurich nightclub where Dada, an art movement that responded to society’s ills with irrationality, was born in the early years of the 20th century.“When we started, we wanted to do something with sound, but none of us knew how to play an instrument,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview for a 1985 New York Times article about industrial music. “So we started using tape recorders and various pieces of junk and gradually learned to play instruments like guitars and bass.” Despite his claim, Mr. Kirk was initially a clarinetist, and he developed a scratching, slashing style as a guitarist.The members of Cabaret Voltaire created the template for what would become known as industrial music: hectoring vocals, mechanical rhythms, scraps of recorded speech snatched from mass media, conventional instruments rendered alien with electronic effects.On early-1980s recordings like “Three Mantras,” “The Voice of America” and “Red Mecca,” the group embraced the literary cutup techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the British author J.G. Ballard’s dystopian provocations and punk rock’s abrasive stance. Musical influences included Brian Eno, the German band Can and Jamaican dub.Mr. Watson left the group in 1981, and Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder pursued a more commercial direction that brought them to the cusp of mainstream success. Cabaret Voltaire disbanded in 1994, after which Mr. Kirk pursued a bewildering range of solo projects and collaborations. He revived Cabaret Voltaire as a solo effort in 2009, focusing exclusively on new material, and released three albums in 2020 and 2021.“Three Mantras,” released in 1980, was one of Cabaret Voltaire’s first albums.Mr. Kirk was born on March 21, 1956, and grew up in Sheffield, a steel town. “You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings,” he told the author and critic Simon Reynolds in an interview for his book “Rip It Up and Start Again” (2005), an authoritative post-punk history.Sheffield was a bastion for Labour Party and radical-left politics, and as a teenager Mr. Kirk was a member of the Young Communist League. “My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school,” he told Mr. Reynolds. “But I never took it really seriously.”Mr. Mallinder, in a 2006 interview on the Red Bull Music Academy website, said that he and Mr. Kirk had been drawn to Black American music from an early age. “We used to go to soul clubs from when we were about 13 or 14,” he said. “We were both working-class kids; we grew up with that. And anything else that was in our world at that moment, it didn’t really matter to us.”But local performances by Roxy Music, then an up-and-coming art-rock band that included Mr. Eno on primitive synthesizers and tape effects, suggested new possibilities.“People like Brian Eno were a massive influence on us, because he was actually integrating things that were nonmusical, and that appealed to us,” Mr. Mallinder said. “We didn’t really want to be musicians. The idea of being technically proficient or learning a traditional instrument was kind of anathema to us.”Mr. Kirk attended art school and completed a one-year program in sculpture. He joined Mr. Mallinder and Mr. Watson, a Dada-besotted telephone engineer, in Cabaret Voltaire, which was initially an amorphous, boundary-pushing workshop project based in Mr. Watson’s attic.“We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” Mr. Kirk told Mr. Reynolds. Less musicians than provocateurs at first, the members of Cabaret Voltaire were soon swept up in England’s punk-rock revolution. In 1978, the group established Western Works, a rehearsal and recording studio based in what had previously been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists.“Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted,” Mr. Kirk said. An advance from the independent label Rough Trade helped the band outfit the studio with a four-track recorder and mixing desk. Rough Trade proceeded to issue some of the band’s most influential and enduring work.After Mr. Watson left the group, Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder moved increasingly toward unambiguous dance-floor rhythms, drum machines and lush synthesizer sounds, scoring underground hits like “Sensoria,” “James Brown” and “I Want You.” A major-label contract with EMI resulted in a collaboration with the influential producer Adrian Sherwood on the group’s album “Code” (1987), and a 1990 collaboration with Chicago house-music producers, “Groovy, Laidback and Nasty.” But audience indifference and mounting debt led to the group’s dissolution four years later.Mr. Kirk plunged into an array of pseudonymous side projects and collaborations. Performing with Richard Barratt (a.k.a. DJ Parrot) in a duo called Sweet Exorcist, he was among the earliest artists documented by the fledgling Warp label. He had another potent collaboration, with the Sheffield recording engineer Robert Gordon, as the techno duo XON.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kirk rejected lucrative offers by festivals like Coachella to revive the original Cabaret Voltaire. “Some people might think I’m daft for not taking the money, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable within myself doing that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Fact magazine. “Cabaret Voltaire was always about breaking new ground and moving forward.”He bolstered that impression by declining to perform any older Cabaret Voltaire material. “I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits, then don’t come because you’re not,” he told Fact. “What you might get is the same spirit.” More

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      Meet the (Pop) Queens of Broadway’s ‘Six’

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      Meet the (Pop) Queens of Broadway’s ‘Six’Maya Phillips��Reporting from the Theater DistrictJane Seymour (Abby Mueller): Known as the only wife Henry truly loved, Jane is imagined as a wholesome mother and hopeless romantic, robbed of domestic bliss. (She died shortly after giving birth.) Simple Pleasures: Sundays on the couch, brunch, tea. More