Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Vangelis, Composer Best Known for ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 79

      by

      A master of the synthesizer, he won an Oscar for that film’s score, and his memorable theme song became a No. 1 pop hit.Vangelis, the Greek film composer and synthesizer virtuoso whose soaring music for “Chariots of Fire,” the 1981 movie about two British runners in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, won the Academy Award for best original score, died on Tuesday in Paris. He was 79.The cause was heart failure, said Lefteris Zermas, a frequent collaborator.A self-taught musician, Vangelis (pronounced vang-GHELL-iss), who was born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, recorded solo albums and wrote music for television and for films including “Blade Runner” (1982), “Missing” (1982) and “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (1992). But he remains best known for scoring “Chariots of Fire.”The most familiar part of that score — modern electronic music composed for a period film — was heard during the opening credits: a blend of acoustic piano and synthesizer that provided lush, pulsating accompaniment to the sight of about two dozen young men running in slow motion on a nearly empty beach, mud splattering their white shirts and shorts, pain and exhilaration creasing their faces.Vangelis’s music became as popular as the film itself, directed by Hugh Hudson, which won four Oscars, including best picture.The opening song, also called “Chariots of Fire,” was released as a single and spent 28 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including a week at No. 1. The soundtrack album remained on the Billboard 200 chart for 30 weeks and spent four weeks in the top spot.Vangelis said the score immediately came to him as he watched the film in partly edited form.“I try to put myself in the situation and feel it,” he told The Washington Post in 1981. “I’m a runner at the time, or in the stadium, or alone in the dressing room … and then I compose … and the moment is fruitful and honest, I think.”Vangelis recorded a track with 25 children from the Orleans Infant School in Twickenham, England, for a 1979 single, “The Long March.”Fred Mott/Getty ImagesHe was working at the time in his London studio with a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer.“It’s the most important synthesizer in my career and the best analog synthesizer design there has ever been,” he told Prog, an alternative music website, in 2016, adding, “It’s the only synthesizer I could describe as being a real instrument.”For “Blade Runner,” a science-fiction film noir set in a futuristic Los Angeles, Vangelis created a score to match the director Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision. He augmented the CS-80 synthesizer, which produced the sounds of horns and bass, with an electric piano and a second synthesizer that emulated strings.“What interested me the most for this film was the atmosphere and the general feeling, rather than the distinct themes,” he said on a fan site, Nemo Studios, named for the studio in London that he built and for many years worked out of. “The visual atmosphere of the film is unique, and it is that I tried to enhance as much as I could.”The “Blade Runner” soundtrack album was not released until 1994, but it was well received. Zac Johnson of Allmusic wrote that “the listener can almost hear the indifferent winds blowing through the neon and metal landscapes of Los Angeles in 2019.”Vangelis at the French Culture Ministry in Paris in 1992.Georges Bendrihem/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesVangelis was born on March 29, 1943, in Agria, Greece, and grew up in Athens. He started playing piano at 4 and gave his first public performance two years later. He did not have much training and never learned to read music.“Music goes through me,” he told The Associated Press in 1982. “It’s not by me.”In the 1960s, he played organ with the Forminx, a Greek rock band. He left Greece for Paris in 1967 after the military coup there.Vangelis was a founder of Aphrodite’s Child, a progressive rock band that had hit singles in Europe and enjoyed some success on FM radio in the United States. The band released a few albums, including “666,” which was inspired by the Book of Revelations. When Aphrodite’s Child broke up, he moved to London in 1974.In the 1970s he began composing music for television shows like the French documentary series “L’Apocalypse des Animaux” (1973), as well as working on solo albums and film projects. Music from his album “China” was used by Mr. Scott in the memorable 1979 “Share the Fantasy” commercial for Chanel No. 5.He also became friendly with Jon Anderson, the lead vocalist of the British prog-rock band Yes. Vangelis was invited to replace the keyboardist Rick Wakeman when he left the band, but he turned down the offer. He and Mr. Anderson subsequently collaborated, as Jon and Vangelis, on four albums, including “The Friends of Mr. Cairo,” between 1980 and 1991.Vangelis’s music was also heard on the scientist Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series, “Cosmos.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Among the films Vangelis scored after “Chariots of Fire” were “Antarctica” (1983), a Japanese movie about scientists on an expedition; “The Bounty” (1984), with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson; Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” (2004), about the Macedonian king; and “El Greco” (2007), a Greek film about the artist.He also composed music for spectacles like the 2000 and 2004 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup. And in 2001 he recorded a choral symphony, “Mythodea,” which he had adapted from earlier work, at the Temple of Zeus in Athens to commemorate NASA’s Odyssey mission to Mars.“I made up the name Mythodea from the words myth and ode,” Vangelis said in an interview for NASA’s website in 2001. “And I felt in it a kind of shared or common path with NASA’s current exploration of the planet. Whatever we use as a key — music, mythology, science, mathematics, astronomy — we are all working to decode the mystery of creation, searching for our deepest roots.”Vangelis performed in concert with a choir in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1991.Rob Verhorst/Redferns) More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘Pistol’ Mini-Series Captures the Anarchy in the Sex Pistols

      by

      ‘Pistol,’ a new mini-series directed by Danny Boyle, is based on a memoir by the punk band’s bassist and founder, Steve Jones.LONDON — “Are we doing any spitting?” asked a man in the crowd at the 100 Club, a small, red-walled underground space, redolent of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and a thousand lost nights, just off London’s Oxford Street.Yes, there would be spitting. The club was the setting for an early Sex Pistols gig, which last June was being recreated for “Pistol,” a six-part series about the British band, directed by Danny Boyle and streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in other territories, starting May 31.The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code” of the punk revolution, said Boyle, who seemed to be everywhere on set, talking to the extras about crowd behavior, checking cameras and peering intently at monitors as the actors performed the song “Bodies” and the audience went wild.“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” Boyle said in a recent interview. That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to do.”Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, with virtuosic panache, said Boyle’s approach was unlike anything he had previously experienced on a set. “You felt, this could go wrong, but you could trust in Danny and dive in and experiment — very Sex Pistols!”Before filming began, the actors playing the members of the Sex Pistols spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Miya Mizuno/FXThe result is a charged, visceral, Cubist portrait of the flamboyant rise and explosive fall of the Sex Pistols, whose brief existence from 1975 to 1978 made punk rock a worldwide phenomenon and whose anarchic songs (“God Save the Queen,” “Pretty Vacant”) became anthems for the disaffected.The series, written by Craig Pearce, is based on the memoir “Tales of a Lonely Boy” by Steve Jones, the band’s guitarist. But Boyle said that although Jones’s story was “a wonderful way in,” he and Pearce had tried to paint a composite picture of the entire group, and the ’70s world from which it emerged. (The band originally comprised Jones, the singer John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten, the drummer Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock on bass, replaced in 1977 by Sid Vicious.)The first episode opens with a montage of archival footage: The Queen waving politely to the crowd; a scene from the slapstick “Carry On” movies; David Bowie performing; striking workers and garbage piled in the streets. When we meet Steve (Toby Wallace), he is busy stealing sound equipment from a Bowie gig. (The singer’s lipstick is still on the microphone.)Steve and his bandmates are angry, bored, and “trying to scrape enough together for another pint,” he tells them as they discuss what their group should wear. “So, no suits?” asks the hapless Wally, who soon gets booted from the band.“It’s hard to overestimate how class-ridden and moribund British society was for these guys,” said Pearce, who met Jones, Cook and other figures close to the band before writing most of the script in his native Australia during the first months of the pandemic.“The promise of the Swinging Sixties didn’t deliver; rock ’n’ roll freedom didn’t happen for most kids,” Pearce said. “There was a feeling that if you were born into a certain class, you couldn’t escape. You had to accept what had been handed to you.”Then, he said, came “this group of kids who said, you are sleepwalking through life.”“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” said Danny Boyle, who directed “Pistol.”Miya Mizuno/FXBoyle, he added, was always his “dream director” for the series. “We couldn’t believe it when he immediately said he wanted to do it.”It turned out that Boyle couldn’t quite believe it either. “I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.” But after reading Pearce’s script, Boyle immediately said yes.“Which was ridiculous,” he said with a laugh, “since I didn’t even know if we would have the music, the most important thing.”Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and the series itself, but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.Boyle said that while he did extensive reading and research, talking to everyone he could find who had been involved with the band, he ultimately trusted his intuition in formulating an approach to the series.“I grew up in a similar working-class environment to Steve and these guys,” he said. “We are exactly the same age and I am a music obsessive. I had to explain to the actors what the 1970s were like; they just don’t recognize how little stimulation there was, how you waited all week for the lifeline of the New Musical Express to appear on a Thursday!”Before filming began, the actors playing the band members spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Sometimes Boyle would talk to them about the ’70s and show them footage. Then, led by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from the British electronic music group Underworld, they would spend hours playing together.Boyle said he had mostly avoided casting trained musicians. “I didn’t want anyone locked into an expertise,” he said, adding that Jacob Slater, who plays Cook, was an excellent guitarist, but had to learn drumming.Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), left, and Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) are two of the memorable female characters in the series. Miya Mizuno/FXHe also decided not to do any postproduction work on the music. “Like the Pistols, we just had to get up and, however imperfect we were, go for it,” said Sydney Chandler, who plays the American singer Chrissie Hynde. Chandler’s character is one of several memorable women in the series, alongside the designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton) and the punk icon Jordan (Maisie Williams).When it came to the band members, “we didn’t want to be tributes or caricatures,” said Anson Boon, who plays Lydon and, like his character, had never sung before. “The Pistols produced a raw, angry wall of sound and we wanted to capture that essence without trying to do an impression.”Playing a character who is also a real person was intimidating but fascinating, said Wallace, who spent time with Jones before filming began. “We talked a lot about his family, then he gave me the first guitar lesson I really had.”The series shows Steve’s unhappy childhood, which Wallace saw as central to Jones’s “anger and frustration,” he said, and led him to create “a band that represents the unrepresented.Working on the series, Boyle said, had made him aware of the Pistols’ importance beyond music. “They were a bunch of working class guys who broke the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he said. “It was especially resonant in the U.K., where the way you were expected to behave was so entrenched.”The Pistols, he added, gave their fans permission to do whatever they wanted, to waste their time however they wanted, to shape their own lives in a singular way.“They gave a sense of purpose to purposelessness,” he said. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Rina Sawayama Flips Damnation Into a Dance Party, and 15 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Burna Boy, Metric, Sudan Archives 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.Rina Sawayama, ‘This Hell’Ever the pop maximalist, Rina Sawayama’s first single from her upcoming album, “Hold the Girl,” has it all: a fiery chorus, cheeky humor, devil puns for days and even a gloriously cheesy hair-metal guitar solo. “This hell is better with you, we’re burning up together/Baby that makes two,” she sings on the towering hook, making eternal damnation sound like an exclusive VIP party. Both the glammy intensity and be-yourself messaging feel like a throwback to “Born This Way”-era Lady Gaga, but it’s all remixed through Rina’s signature, neo-Y2K-pop sensibility. LINDSAY ZOLADZmxmtoon, ‘Frown’If the California singer-songwriter mxmtoon has a mission statement, it’s something like catchy, smiley self-help. “Frown” is from her new album, “Rising,” and it presents itself as an antidote to being “stuck in a loop overthinking all our pain.” She musters four-chord pop optimism, multitracked vocals and a pop-reggae backbeat to insist, “It’s OK to frown/smile upside-down.” JON PARELESDiana Ross and Tame Impala, ‘Turn Up the Sunshine’Nothing screams “Minions” like a collaboration between … Tame Impala and Diana Ross? Yet their styles blend surprisingly well on “Turn Up the Sunshine,” the first single from the Jack Antonoff-produced soundtrack for the animated summer movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” (Yes, the man is so ubiquitous, he’s even producing for the Minions now.) A sleek, seamless and lovingly conjured disco throwback, “Turn Up the Sunshine” allows Kevin Parker an opportunity to go fully retro in his arrangement and saves Ross ample space for ecstatic vocals and some groovy spoken-word vamping. ZOLADZCarrie Underwood, ‘She Don’t Know’Infidelity gets a fierce retaliation in “She Don’t Know,” a canny country revenge song from Carrie Underwood and her collaborators, David Garcia and Hillary Lindsay. A foot-tapping beat and country instruments like mandolin and fiddle back her as she sings, with the vindictive glee of someone escaping a very bad situation, “What she don’t know is she can have him.” PARELESKatzù Oso, ‘Conchitas’A good dream-pop song sparkles, like sunlight refracting through water. On the lustrous “Conchitas,” from Katzù Oso’s debut album, “Tmí,” the Los Angeles-based artist Paul Hernandez bathes in ’90s nostalgia, soaking in shimmering synths, buzzing guitar riffs and a breathy falsetto. The result harnesses Cocteau Twins’ most tender, romantic qualities, but Hernandez glazes the track in his own special gloss, too: Much of “Tmí” was written in Boyle Heights, and as sweet as the pan dulce treats of its namesake, “Conchitas” embraces the spirit of that neighborhood, casting it into the soundtrack for a saccharine, lovesick daydream. ISABELIA HERRERASudan Archives, ‘Selfish Soul’It might not seem like the impish charm of a playground rhyme and a jagged violin hook would seamlessly coalesce, but Sudan Archives has always taken risks. On her new single “Selfish Soul,” the artist born Brittney Parks reprises her irreverent boho whimsy, crashing together reverbed vocals, a rapped verse and wild visuals with a razor-sharp message: a promise to love and embrace every kind of Black hair texture. “If I wear it straight will they like me more?/Like those girls on front covers,” Parks sings. The video oozes euphoria, too; Parks climbs a chrome stripper pole, plays the violin upside down and twerks in a mud pit with her girlfriends. What did you ever do? HERRERAMetric, ‘Doomscroller’Over 10 minutes long, Metric’s “Doomscroller” is a minisuite that proceeds from electronic dystopia to a plea for empathy to an offer of reassurance that’s cradled by physical instruments. The dystopia is convincing: a tireless mechanical thump and throbbing, blipping tones — racing like a gathering troll mob — behind Emily Haines’s calmly caustic observations about internet rabbit holes and entrenched inequality. “Salt of the earth underpaid to serve you,” she notes, and, “Scum of the earth overpaid to rob you.” The reassurance, though it builds up to a full-bodied rock-band march, is shakier; as the song ends, electronic blips reappear. PARELESSylvan Esso, ‘Sunburn’Sylvan Esso celebrates self-indulgence and rues its aftermath in “Sunburn”: “Sunburn blistering, the heat under your skin,” Amelia Meath sings. “Oh, but it felt so good.” The electronic backup is bouncy and pointillistic — nearly all staccato single notes, rarely a chord — and punctuated with the cheeriest of samples: a bicycle bell. PARELESBurna Boy, ‘Last Last’Burna Boy juggles heartache, accusations, self-medication and reminders of his success in “Last Last,” a post-breakup song about a roller coaster of feelings: “I put my life into my job and I know I’m in trouble/She manipulate my love,” he sulks. “Why you say I did nothing for you/When I for do anything you want me to do.” The video shows him surrounded by friends, possessions and awards, smoking and drinking. The title of the sample that provides the track’s nervous strummed rhythm and vocal hook suggests a very different scenario: It’s from Toni Braxton’s 2009 single “He Wasn’t Man Enough.” PARELESMeridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento, ‘Metamorfosis’Meridian Brothers, a high-concept Colombian band formed in 1998 by Eblis Álvarez, delights in twisting and time-warping the roots of salsa and other Latin American styles. “Metamorfosis” — from an album due Aug. 5 — borrows Kafka’s title for a song about a man waking up transformed into a robot, facing a futuristic world of drones and screens; he summons Yoruba deities to battle transhumanism. Blending brisk guaracha and montuno rhythms with eruptions of psychedelic reverb and jazzy piano, it’s a percussive romp. PARELESCalypso Rose featuring Carlos Santana and the Garifuna Collective, ‘Watina’The Garifuna people, an Afro-Caribbean culture that has maintained its own language and traditions primarily in Belize and Honduras, are descendants of Indigenous Arawaks and of West Africans who survived a 17th-century shipwreck to escape slavery. The Garifuna Collective, founded by Andy Palacio, revived and updated old Garifuna songs and “Watina” (“I Called Out”) was the title song of its 2007 album. This remake adds a horn section — pushing the arrangement a bit closer to ska — and has lead vocals from the Trinidadian icon Calypso Rose, 82, who has been an honorary citizen of Belize since 1982, along with stinging guitar from Carlos Santana and some lyrics translated into English: “Lord please help me, even if I’m alone.” PARELESOneida, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand’The long-running Brooklyn band Oneida loves repetition, layering and noise, and its catalog includes plenty of arty, elaborate structures. But “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand,” previewing an album due in August, recalls foundational punk-rock songs like “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers. It uses just two chords nearly all the way through (with one more for a bridge), a hurtling beat and terse lyrics: “So sure of ourselves/Who needs a plan?” But those two chords support a welter of guitar parts and drum salvos that just keeps getting more euphoric. PARELESFKJ featuring Toro y Moi, ‘A Moment of Mystery’Vincent Fenton, the French producer who bills himself as FKJ (for French Kiwi Juice), collaborated with Chaz Bundick, who records as Toro y Moi, and Toro’s keyboardist, Anthony Ferraro, on a track from FKJ’s album due in June, “Vincent.” It’s three minutes of lush, wistful uncertainty: serenely blurred vocals, hovering keyboard tones, ambiguous chords that stay unresolved. “I love the drama because I never know what the ending’s like,” Bundick sings, matching the music. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Formwela 12’“Our bodies are Music/You cannot play/Music/Without the body/Dancing.” The 91-year-old dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, a former Alvin Ailey star, opens Esperanza Spalding’s latest with those lines of poetry; in the ensuing 13 minutes, she brings them to life. She glides and tilts across the floor of an open studio, surrounded by four dancers and four musicians — including Spalding, who uses her upright bass and a quiet, cooing voice to coax and support de Lavallade. Early in the performance, de Lavallade sits down beside her, laying an ear and a hand on the bass while Spalding plays. As the piece carries on, the band’s lush flourishes and pointillism are clearly coming in response to the dancers, as much as their steps are responding to the music. Mostly, everyone is focused on the guidance and the unhurried elegance of de Lavallade. The audio of this piece is a bonus track on the newly released vinyl version of Spalding’s “Songwrights Apothecary Lab.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOShabaka, ‘Explore Inner Space’Shabaka Hutchings begins this track improvising on a lone wood flute, against a backdrop of silence. Soon analog synthesizers and loops are pooling around him, and an electric guitar adds dewy, flickering plucks. The music never fully crescendos, but its mysterious serenity might invite to take up the charge of the track’s title. The tune comes from “Afrikan Culture,” the first solo EP released by this famed U.K.-based saxophonist, who has begun performing simply under the name Shabaka. RUSSONELLOMary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena, ‘Hundred Dollar Hoagie’The harpist Mary Lattimore and the guitarist Paul Sukeena, two experimental musicians and Philly-area expats who occasionally collaborate, have teamed up to release the stirring ambient album “West Kensington,” out Friday on the indie label Three Lobed recordings. The opener “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” announces itself humbly, with its playful title nodding to the all-time greatest regional slang word for a submarine sandwich, which does not quite prepare you for the seven-and-a-half minutes of otherworldly sublimity that it contains. Lattimore’s synthesizer chords and Sukeena’s warping, weeping guitar lines layer to create an almost lunar soundscape, pleasantly reminiscent of Brian Eno’s awe-struck 1983 masterwork “Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.” ZOLADZ More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      A Neil Diamond Musical Is Coming to Broadway, After a Stop in Boston

      by

      “A Beautiful Noise” will start at Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston next month and transfer to Broadway’s Broadhurst Theater in November.A new musical about the life and career of Neil Diamond is coming to Broadway late this year.“A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical” will start previews on Nov. 2 and open on Dec. 4 at the Broadhurst Theater, the show’s producers said Wednesday. The Broadway production will be preceded by a six-week run starting June 21 at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston.Diamond, an 81-year-old Brooklyn native who was one of the most successful songwriters of the rock era, retired from touring in 2018, citing a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and this year he sold his catalog to Universal Music Group. He wrote and performed “Sweet Caroline,” which has become a sports stadium favorite, especially at Fenway Park; won a Grammy for best original film score (“Jonathan Livingston Seagull”); and in 2011 was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.The stage musical will feature a score made up of Diamond’s songs, with a book by Anthony McCarten, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind “The Two Popes” and “The Theory of Everything.” The show is being directed by Michael Mayer, the Tony-winning director of “Spring Awakening” and a veteran of several adventurous jukebox musicals, including “Swept Away” (featuring songs from the Avett Brothers), “Head Over Heels” (the Go-Go’s) and “American Idiot” (Green Day). Steven Hoggett (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) will choreograph.The lead producers are Ken Davenport, a Broadway veteran (his credits include the Tony-winning revival of “Once on This Island”) and Bob Gaudio, a musician who was the producer of several of Diamond’s albums. The musical is being capitalized for up to $20 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; a spokesman said the producers are hoping to keep the budget to $19 million.The actor Will Swenson will star as Diamond in the Boston run of the show. Casting for Broadway has not yet been announced. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Britney Spears Revealed on Instagram That She Had a Miscarriage

      by

      The pop singer, recently released from a conservatorship that had prevented her from becoming pregnant, revealed on Instagram that she has had a miscarriage.A month after announcing on Instagram that she was pregnant, the pop star Britney Spears has posted an update saying that she suffered a miscarriage, writing: “We have lost our miracle baby.”“Perhaps we should have waited to announce until we were further along,” said the message, which was posted to Ms. Spears’s Instagram account on Saturday afternoon and attributed to her and her partner, Sam Asghari. “However we were overly excited to share the good news.”When Ms. Spears, 40, let it be known that she was pregnant, her announcement was seen by many not only as glad tidings, but also as a declaration of agency after being freed from a conservatorship that had governed her life since she was in her 20s.That arrangement began in 2008, amid concerns over her mental health and potential substance abuse, when a judge in California granted oversight of her personal life and finances to her father, James P. Spears.During court proceedings last summer that stemmed from her request that the conservatorship be dissolved, Ms. Spears testified during a 23-minute speech that the arrangement had been “abusive,” adding that she had not been allowed to remove an IUD.“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Ms. Spears said then. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.”The statement about not being allowed to become pregnant was particularly stunning, even in a speech in which Ms. Spears also told the court that she had been placed on Lithium and forced to work against her will.Some reproductive rights advocates said that forced birth control was legally questionable, a violation of Ms. Spears’s autonomy and of her basic human rights.Late last year, a judge in Los Angeles ended the conservatorship, saying it was “no longer required.” By that time Ms. Spears had announced her engagement to her longtime boyfriend, Mr. Asghari, an actor and fitness trainer who told Men’s Health in 2018 that he had met Ms. Spears two years earlier while working on a music video for her song “Slumber Party.”Ms. Spears announced that she was pregnant on April 11, posting a photograph of pink flowers on Instagram and writing: “So I got a pregnancy test … and uhhhhh well … I am having a baby.”She described having experienced depression during a previous pregnancy, and said that this time she would be staying in more and doing yoga each day. She ended her message by writing: “Spreading lots of joy and love,” followed by heart emojis and exclamation points.The message posted on Ms. Spears’s Instagram on Saturday expressed gratitude for fans’ support. “Our love for each other is our strength,” it added. “We will continue trying to expand our beautiful family.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      My Chemical Romance’s Prog-Emo Surprise, and 12 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by the Smile, Julia Jacklin, black midi 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.My Chemical Romance, ‘The Foundations of Decay’My Chemical Romance — the New Jersey band that fused the momentum of pop-punk, the crunch of hard rock and the opulent productions of glam — announced its breakup in 2013 and released its last new song in 2014. Although the band reunited to tour in 2019, “The Foundations of Decay” is its first new material since then. There’s no punk sarcasm for now; as the music builds from measured dirge to pummeling anthem, the lyrics both recognize and rail against the ravages of time, even on the verge of a new tour. JON PARELESThe Smile, ‘The Opposite’On its debut album, “A Light for Attracting Attention,” the Smile is Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead joined by a different drummer: Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet. The new band’s ingredients add up largely as expected: a leaner take on Radiohead’s longstanding thoughts of alienation and malaise, pushing rhythm into the foreground. Skinner starts “The Opposite” by himself, with a sputtering, shifty funk beat that’s soon topped by an accumulation of overlapping, stop-start guitar riffs, each one adding a new bit of disorientation. Yorke might be describing the track itself when he sings, “It goes back and forth followed by a question mark.” PARELESblack midi, ‘Welcome to Hell’“Welcome to Hell” announces the third album by black midi, “Hellfire,” due July 15. It’s a jagged, funky, speed-shifting mini-suite, by turns brutal and sardonic, with lyrics about the dehumanization of a soldier. “To die for your country does not win a war/To kill for your country is what wins a war,” Geordie Greep sings. The music is exhilarating; the aftertaste is bleak. PARELESKendrick Lamar, ‘The Heart Part 5’Kendrick Lamar has made a series of songs called “The Heart” to preface his albums. “The Heart Part 5” arrived a few days before his new one, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” As always, Lamar’s work is multilayered, self-questioning, thoughtful, rhythmic and bold. The track’s jumpy, insistent conga drums, bass line and backup vocals come from Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You,” a title that Lamar repurposes to address his fans. On the sonic level, Lamar’s fast-talking vocals challenge the congas for syllable-by-syllable momentum. His mission is to “Sacrifice personal gain over everything/Just to see the next generation better than ours.” The song’s video clip uses deep-fake technology to make Lamar look like charged cultural figures including O.J. Simpson, Kanye West and Nipsey Hussle. This is hip-hop working through its own implications, contradictions and repercussions. PARELESFlores, ‘Brown’Flores’s voice has luster, but she can also envelop messages of pain and pride into moments of gentle acuity. On “Brown,” from her debut EP “The Lives They Left,” she meditates on her upbringing on the El Paso-Juárez border: the violence of government agencies like ICE and C.B.P., as well as the small joys of quotidian life, what she calls “brown trust” and “brown love.” A lonely saxophone resounds under the production, as Flores reflects on the resilience of the Indigenous ancestors that preceded her: “When they ask you where you people come from/16,000 years we here/Valleys stained of blood and tears/Mexica let ’em know/ This the land we’ve sown/Laid the seeds that grow.” ISABELIA HERRERARemi Wolf, ‘Michael’“Michael” is a relatively subdued song for an artist as antic and kaleidoscopic as Remi Wolf, but she puts her stamp on it nonetheless. Written with the Porches mastermind Aaron Maine — their first time working together — and Wolf’s touring guitarist Jack DeMeo, the track is a sing-songy depiction of romantic desperation, with Wolf singing from the perspective of someone clinging to an obsessive relationship she knows is doomed. “Michael, hold my hand and spin me round until I’m dizzy,” she begs atop a murky electric guitar progression. “Loosen up my chemicals.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘Lydia Wears a Cross’The Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin’s music is a gradual accumulation of small, sharp lyrical details, and “Lydia Wears a Cross,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Pre Pleasure,” is full of them: Two young girls “listening to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ soundtrack”; a child “singing every single word wrong” on a parade float; a catechism teacher instructing her pupils to pray for Princess Diana. Such snapshots create a larger atmosphere of religious indoctrination and Jacklin’s youthful questioning: “I felt pretty in the shoes and the dress/Confused by the rest, could he hear me?” The arrangement is sparse — drum machine, echoing stabs of piano — to spotlight Jacklin’s storytelling, but a subtle unease creeps in when she gets to the haunting chorus: “I’d be a believer, if it was all just song and dance/I’d be a believer, if I thought we had a chance.” ZOLADZDeath Cab for Cutie, ‘Roman Candles’Ben Gibbard sings about numbness and detachment, claiming “I am learning to let go/of everything I tried to hold,” in “Roman Candles,” the preview of an album due in September. But the music belies any claim to serenity. Drums, bass and guitars all overload and distort, pounding away in a relentless two-minute surge. PARELESThe Black Keys, ‘How Long’There’s usually some angst tucked between the brawny classic-rock riffs on a Black Keys album. The duo’s new one, “Dropout Boogie,” includes “How Long,” a betrayed lover’s confession of desperate devotion. Just two descending chords, a cycle of disappointment, carry most of the song, with layers of guitar piling on like heartaches. “Even in our final hour/See the beauty in the dying flower,” Dan Auerbach sings in the bridge, but the obsession isn’t over; the song ends with the narrator still wondering, “How long?” PARELESJoy Oladokun, ‘Purple Haze’It’s not the Jimi Hendrix song. “You and I know that love is all we need to survive,” Joy Oladokun insists in her own “Purple Haze,” preaching togetherness in the face of dire possibilities. A syncopated acoustic guitar and Oladokun’s determined voice hint at Tracy Chapman as the song begins; more vocals and guitars join her, insisting on optimism even if “maybe we’re running out of time.” PARELESAmbar Lucid, ‘Girl Ur So Pretty’Ambar Lucid may be known for her brassy, arena-sized voice, but on her new single, she ventures into new territory. “Girl Ur So Pretty” glitters like pixie dust: in an airy, gossamer falsetto, the 21-year-old artist serenades her crush over sparkling synths and ’00s girl group handclaps. It’s a welcome spin on the bubble gum pop of a bygone era, and she brings her tongue-in-cheek humor along, too: “Can’t tell if I’m in love or high,” she sings. “I’m not usually into Earth signs.” HERRERAChes Smith, ‘Interpret It Well’There’s a nervy, bated-breath feeling about the music that the drummer and vibraphonist Ches Smith is making with his new quartet featuring Mat Maneri on violin, Craig Taborn on piano and Bill Frisell on guitar. It’s not fully dread, but not simple anticipation either. For an LP led by a drummer, “Interpret It Well” is full of extended passages with no drumming; latent tension hangs where the percussion might have been. On the title track, Smith taps the vibraphone in a pattern of resonant octaves, and the rest of the quartet grows restless behind him. A bluesy aside from Frisell sends the band into silence, and Taborn plays a long cadenza. By the end of the nearly 14-minute track, the four are charging ahead together. This is the peak, but the stench of expectation still lingers, as if something else even louder — or completely peaceful — waits just ahead. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJacob Garchik, ‘Fanfare’The trombonist and composer Jacob Garchik treated his new album, “Assembly,” as a canvas for some impressive formal experiments, and there’s rarely a dull moment. Its tracks include spontaneous improvisations reframed via overdubs; complex compositions mixing two different tempos; and dissections of pieces of the jazz canon. On the fast-charging “Fanfare,” as Garchik and the soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome harmonize on a series of descending and ascending patterns, the rhythm section’s off-track backing gives the illusion that things are speeding up. Then suddenly a long, cooled-out passage begins, just trombone and piano, with Garchik sounding as buttery as Tricky Sam Nanton over changes borrowed from Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” RUSSONELLO More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Martha Wainwright Tells a Few Stories She Might Regret

      by

      With a new memoir, the singer-songwriter from a famous musical family says she is happy to be “letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”When Martha Wainwright was 14 years old, she moved to New York from her home in Montreal to live with her father, the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Her mother, the Canadian folk star Kate McGarrigle, was busy with a new album and a concert tour, and so it was decided that Loudon would watch over Martha for a year. The New York experiment turned out to be something of a failure, though, according to Ms. Wainwright; she did poorly in school and stayed out late, as if in competition with a father who was sometimes out even later. But the year definitely had its upsides: “I became more like my father, as if the DNA in me that came from him started to wake up,” she writes in a new memoir, “Stories I Might Regret Telling You.”A few years later, she went with him on a tour of Britain, serving as his warm-up act and joining him onstage for father-daughter duets. One night she heard him introducing “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” a song she had figured was about an old girlfriend. So she was surprised when he told the audience it was about the year he had spent living with his teenage daughter. As Ms. Wainwright listened to him sing the key lines — “You’re still living here with me / I’d rather be lonely” — she began to cry.“A part of me wanted to jump to my death from my tiny seat,” she writes in the memoir. “Or, better yet, take off into the night, leaving him standing there waiting for me. But the show must go on, so I dried my tears and went down the stairs and on to the stage.”The new book, cigarette and all.HachetteConfessional art always comes at a cost, for its creators and subjects alike, as people in the Wainwright-McGarrigle family know all too well. Loudon, who rose to sudden success with the novelty hit “Dead Skunk,” has included songs about his family on a majority of his more than 25 albums, many of them devastatingly personal. Ms. McGarrigle, who made 10 albums as part of a duo with her sister Anna before her death in 2010, also wrote a number of autobiographical songs that touched on her marriage to Loudon, which ended in divorce, and their children.When Martha and her older brother, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, came of age, they joined what was by then an established family tradition. The first song Ms. Wainwright wrote was about the birth of a new half sibling, a wry welcome to her singular family; and a song on her brother’s 1998 debut album delved into his relationship with his mother.As children, Martha and Rufus sang for paying audiences at folk festivals. Later, when he had a deal with the DreamWorks record label and started touring the world, she was often his backup singer, an arrangement that eventually came to an end. “He needed to cut the fat and I needed to get out of his shadow,” she writes.Rufus and Martha Wainwright sing their father’s hit “Dead Skunk” at a show in London, circa 1984.Martha Wainwright Collection In New York, Ms. Wainwright performed in dive bars while putting herself through a series of crushes on unavailable men. She was by turns ambitious and self-destructive. On nights when she knew a label scout or producer was in the crowd, she would go onstage drunk or high. “I created an impossible situation for myself,” she writes. “I was afraid to fail but I kept setting myself up to fail.”As her brother’s fame grew, she struggled with her status as the least famous member of her nuclear family. And while her parents provided inspiration, she says in the book that they could have been more helpful. “I don’t know if you’re wondering where my dad was during those New York years,” she writes, “but at the time, I was wondering, too.”For a while Rufus was running around as part of a “sons of” club, a group that included Sean Lennon, Chris Stills and Harper Simon. “They were all getting signed and written about and had publicists and photo shoots and beautiful girlfriends,” Ms. Wainwright says in the memoir. “Were their songs better than mine?” The chip on her shoulder led her to write a grand statement song, its title a vulgar epithet. Contrary to what she has told journalists in the past, the song isn’t about her father — or, rather, it isn’t exclusively about him.In addition to the attention-grabbing title, the song had perhaps the closest thing to a pop hook to be found in her oeuvre up till then. Whereas the typical Martha Wainwright melody meanders as it showcases her acrobatic whisper-to-scream vocal range, this one was different: a folky strum-and-shout with straightforward lines like “Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I was born a man.”The Guardian called the song a “masterpiece” when it appeared in 2005 as the centerpiece of “Martha Wainwright,” her first album. Critics admired her debut but couldn’t resist comparing her with the rest of her family. A Pitchfork reviewer praised her voice and her songs, only to add the caveat that her ability to write about personal matters with such candor “would be more remarkable if it weren’t a genetic trait.”Her next album, “I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too,” was partly produced by Brad Albetta, a bass player who, by the time of its 2008 release, was also her husband. Their relationship had always been tumultuous, but she had pushed for marriage anyway, partly because she wanted to “grow up” before losing her mother, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.Martha Wainwright with her mother, Kate McGarrigle, in London, 2009.Martha Wainwright Collection Her memoir goes deep into her mother’s illness and death, which coincided with the premature birth of Ms. Wainwright’s first child. In less capable hands, such material could come across as maudlin, but Ms. Wainwright has a light touch and an eye for telling detail. She describes wanting to put her mother’s cancer-ridden body in the same kind of incubator that was keeping her son alive, as well as the moment when she and Ms. McGarrigle compared their damaged bodies — her own fresh C-section incision, the chevron scar from chemo that covered her mother’s torso.Ms. Wainwright’s marriage limped along after her mother’s death. She clung to Mr. Albetta as a source of stability (not to mention bass playing). “I really like the makeup sex / It’s the only kind I ever get,” she sang from the stage while on tour for the album “Come Home to Mama,” with her husband close behind onstage.An early draft of “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” that contained more details about those years was used as an exhibit in their divorce proceedings in 2018. That version — “the whole enchilada,” as Ms. Wainwright described it in an interview — was pared down considerably before publication.Rather than zeroing in on the father of her children (a second son was born in 2014), Ms. Wainwright, 46, concludes the memoir by focusing on her creative and personal renaissance of recent years. She describes the aftermath of a show she gave in Los Angeles, when she emerged rumpled from the house of “someone everyone in the world wants to sleep with” full of joie de vivre and “glad to know that rock ’n’ roll was still alive and I was still a part of it.”The extended musical family in New York, 2012, from left to right: Martha Wainwright, the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III, and the singer-songwriter Lucy Wainwright Roche.David Corio for The New York TimesOn a recent Zoom call, she looked and sounded exactly as she does onstage: beautifully unvarnished, full of open-mouthed laughter. In the past few weeks she has been preparing to go on tour with a show that combines readings from the memoir and performances of songs on her fourth album, “Love Will Be Reborn.” She said a documentary filmmaker has been following her around, adding that she sometimes wished she had a larger-than-life persona to hide behind, like Tom Waits’s or Laurie Anderson’s.Lately, she added, she has been in the mood to do some serious spring cleaning in her building in Montreal, which she inherited from her mother. “There’s a back room that’s filled with the Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle archive and crap,” she said, gesturing toward a door behind her desk. “I feel like I’m almost about to light the whole thing on fire. I’m not going to do it literally, but I’m like, ‘OK, let’s call a museum and have them take it away.’ And I think that I’m kind of excited about it. And maybe I’m excited about letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”She said that when she thinks about her earlier albums, filled with so many songs referring to her marriage, she wonders whether she had created the situation in order to mine it for material. Now she’s in a relationship that inspires lyrics like “I got naked right away when I saw you / And my love was like the rain when I saw you.”If her contentment threatens her creative output, she’s fine with that. “I’ll keep the love and forgo the material, if need be,” she said.But later in our conversation, she revised that assessment, after mentioning her plan to pick up her guitar later in the day and try to write some new songs: “I haven’t in a while, so I’ll see if I’m too happy and I made a terrible mistake.”Ms. Wainwright said she has been wondering if she’s too happy to write songs.Alexi Hobbs for The New York TimesEven her relationship with her father seems in a good place. “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” begins with the story of her own birth, or, rather, the story of how she almost wasn’t born. Her father, she writes, tried to persuade her mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her, which is something he confessed to Ms. Wainwright when she was a teenager. “It hurt my feelings,” she writes with an understatement that makes the story sort of hilarious. “I had always felt a little out of place in the world, and knowing that I’d only just barely made the cut didn’t help matters any.”Three days before our interview, her father called her to say he loved the book.“I mean, his voice was a little tight when he said it,” Ms. Wainwright said. “He told me he didn’t see things exactly the same way, and I asked him if he could accept my version, and he said that he could accept it. And so that was a really nice moment for us.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Kevin Morby Chases Ghosts, and a New Album, in Memphis

      by

      Since he was an anxious teen, Morby, a Kansas City singer-songwriter, has been fixated on death. By facing his fears in a mythical city, he found a way to reckon with it.MEMPHIS — Kevin Morby bounded into the lobby of the Peabody hotel on a Tuesday night in late April in a long red coat and twirled twice, stretching his arms toward the travertine columns of the century-old Southern institution. The songwriter, best known for solemn folk rock often fixated on death, beamed.An hour earlier and blocks away, he’d watched as the Memphis Grizzlies overcame a 13-point deficit to win a pivotal N.B.A. playoff game. The spoils of victory spilled into the hotel’s palatial entry — toasts, high-fives, the occasional whoop. A player piano dashed out a Scott Joplin rag, its pep perfectly scoring the electric scene. “That thing was so eerie when I was here writing,” Morby said, pointing as he passed, his grin briefly sagging. “I was so alone.”Just 18 months earlier, in October 2020, Morby escaped the impending pandemic winter in his hometown, Kansas City, Kan., by booking a three-week stay in Memphis. Since visiting the Peabody two years earlier with his girlfriend, Katie Crutchfield, the singer who performs as Waxahatchee, the city’s complicated history had become a muse.The sprawling hotel was so empty, the staff upgraded Morby to Room 409, a suite, where he focused on new songs with an intensity and patience that had always eluded him. He became a regular at some of the city’s morbid landmarks, too — the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; the spot on the Mississippi River where Jeff Buckley drowned; the haunted stretch of Highway 61 that leads into the Delta.“When lockdown was happening, I wanted to go to the darkest place possible,” he said. Memphis was almost shattered by pandemic more than a century ago.During that stint, Morby wrote the bulk of “This Is a Photograph,” his seventh solo album, due Friday. It is a confident 45-minute sashay through vulnerable devotionals and existential reflections, tuneful folk and handclap soul. Using Memphis as a lens for understanding the frailty of bodies and the dreams they harbor, the album reckons with survival as much as death.“There was zero urgency for Kevin to make an album, and that is a beautiful place to be as a songwriter,” Crutchfield said, wryly laughing by phone. “He is always working so fast, but a year with nothing allowed him to dial in. The word here is density.”When Morby was only 17, his third (and last, until this year) therapist asked him why he was there. “I told him I was so afraid of dying,” Morby, now 34, remembered during an interview weeks before the basketball game. “There was this life-affirming moment where he was like, ‘Kevin, what’s so wrong with death?’ I guess nothing!”As his parents shuffled among various cities for work, Morby had morphed from a sports-loving kid into an especially anxious preteen. In Oklahoma City, he was terrified to learn friends had lost parents in the bombing there; later, in Kansas City, bullets on a playground convinced him his school was the next Columbine.“He might be sitting on the couch, and he would have these anxiety attacks,” his father, Jim, remembered. “He felt it coming, but it would happen anyway.”Dual odes to Jeff Buckley are at the center of “This Is a Photograph.” Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesThere were hospitals, therapists and an alternative school founded by a “Vietnam veteran and total hippie,” Morby said. Finally, after a particularly awful spell, his parents offered their son a compromise — he could drop out, granted he finish his G.E.D. and try a nearby junior college. “I felt like such a poor parent,” his mother, Sandy, said, “but I water up thinking about the relief on his face.”When Morby turned 18, he boarded an eastbound train with one goal: joining a band in New York. He started writing songs in seventh grade, lyrics-lined notebooks dotting the house. A Bob Dylan anthology led to the indie rock of the Mountain Goats and the Microphones, who placed less emphasis on production than poignancy. “You’re telling me I can just get a tape recorder and sing?” he said. “It felt like acceptance.” Morby joined the ascendant psych-folk band Woods and toured incessantly, then co-founded the scruffy pop-rock group the Babies. But double duty, plus jobs delivering food and babysitting, exhausted him. He bailed on both bands to take a chance alone. “There’s always something to lose,” he said, “but I thought maybe there was more to be gained.”Morby wrote and recorded at a feverish pace, releasing an album or EP every year since 2013 except one, even while moving from New York to Los Angeles and back to Kansas City. He recorded in a hurry, embracing mistakes and tossed-off lines while striving for productivity over perfection. “If I wasn’t not working,” he admitted, “I felt crazy.”This harried schedule stemmed in part from his fear it would all vanish. Soon after arriving in New York, Morby befriended Jamie Ewing, the dynamo leader of the punk band Bent Outta Shape — “this magical, hilarious guy, always ahead of the curve.” Morby loved Ewing and the artistic possibilities he represented. Ewing died in 2008 from a heroin overdose, which jump-started Morby’s drive.“I had this scarcity mentality,” Morby said, also referencing Jay Reatard, the Memphis garage-rocker who suggested that writing one’s best songs was really a race against death soon before he died. “I had to collect what I could while I could.”A medical scare in January 2020, though, prompted a change. Before a family dinner, Morby’s father accidentally doubled his dosage of heart medication and passed out at the table. He recovered, but Morby had worried he was watching his father die.That night, looking at old photos with his mother, he was struck by an image of his father — then 32, the same age Morby was about to be — posing shirtless in the Texas sun. He contemplated his family’s sudden frailty and began writing “This Is a Photograph,” a galloping track about death’s inevitability and the gratitude the fait accompli should inspire. “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” Morby howls, putting himself inside his father’s former frame. What had his father lost? What would he lose?Morby took those questions to Memphis. As he drove his blue Ford pickup down Highway 61 to the infamous Crossroads or across Mississippi to sit on Elvis’s boyhood porch, he pondered how big dreams crumbled there. He obsessed especially over Buckley, who had applied for a job as a butterfly keeper at the Memphis Zoo while waiting for his band to arrive in 1997. Passers-by soon spotted his body floating at the foot of Beale Street.“The dead can help shape the living,” Morby said. “I want to be open to that kind of magic.”Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesMorby visited the little bungalow where Buckley lived and even recorded the sound of the current where he waded into the water. “You’re Jeff Buckley — you’ve achieved versions of the dream, but there’s still something you’re trying to accomplish,” Morby said. “I relate.”Dual odes to Buckley shape the centerpiece of “This Is a Photograph.” Graced by gospel harmonies, “Disappearing” offers caveat emptor for the kind of tortured artists who might try dipping into the Mississippi. (“I really want to swim in it,” he confessed from its banks, adding he knew it was a bad idea.) “A Coat of Butterflies” slowly unspools like an empathetic eulogy for a musician who spent a lifetime defining himself in light of his father’s fame. Morby realized he’d finally nailed the track as he left Memphis after the album’s third and final session, which he repeatedly called “the best four days of my life.” He’d faced his fear of death and walked away.The morning before the triumphant basketball game, Morby went for a run along a concrete path that skirts the Mississippi, a hobby he took up soon after turning 30. The trail dumped him beneath towering overpasses and a small clearing that led to the river, where Buckley is believed to have entered. Just as he turned around, two butterflies fluttered beside him for several seconds. It was a sign, he thought, that he was moving in the right direction.“It’s like you’re a photographer. You know what you want to take a picture of, but I knew I couldn’t take a photo I could develop until I got here,” he said, his voice rising above the Peabody’s din. “The dead can help shape the living. I want to be open to that kind of magic.” More