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      Joan Armatrading Is Still Searching for the Perfect Song

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      At 70, the influential English songwriter is still writing and recording solo, remaining as private as she can and “trying to get really good.”The pandemic arrived while Joan Armatrading was making her new album, “Consequences.” Yet unlike countless musicians whose work was completely upended by quarantines and separations, Armatrading barely had to adjust. Since 2003, she has been recording her albums on her own: writing, arranging, playing and engineering entire songs by herself.“I actually don’t physically need one other person in the room with me,” she said via video interview from her home in London, sitting in front of a blank white wall. “I just did what I do.”What Armatrading has been doing, beginning with her 1972 debut album, “Whatever’s for Us,” has been writing and singing, with insight and empathy, about a broad panorama of human relationships. She sings about romance, friendship, family and community; she sings about longing, infatuation, discord, heartache and healing. The songs on “Consequences” celebrate love at first sight (“Already There”) and delirious obsession (“Glorious Madness”); they also recognize romantic turmoil (“Consequences”) and aching loneliness (“To Anyone Who Will Listen”).Through decades of performing, Armatrading has determinedly kept the focus on her songs rather than herself. “I’m really introverted. I don’t need people to know about me,” she said. “But I’m desperate for people to know about my songs. And I’m an extrovert about my songs. I’m actually quite bigheaded about my songs.”Armatrading, 70, was born in St. Kitts, and settled in England with her family when she was 7 years old. She liked writing jokes and limericks; then, when she was 14, her mother bought a piano “as a piece of furniture,” Armatrading recalled.“Literally, as soon as it arrived, I started writing songs,” she said. “I think I was born to do what I’m doing. I always say I can’t take credit for it because I did nothing for it. All I did was be born, then was given this gift.”Armatrading in 1977. “People have said to me, I couldn’t find the words to express what I was thinking or feeling at that moment to this person. And your song has helped me to do that.”Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis and VCG, via Getty ImagesShe began her recording career in an era of singer-songwriters alongside Joni Mitchell, Elton John and Carole King, three musicians she was compared to early on. But Armatrading quickly forged her own style, juxtaposing layers of crisp riffs and rhythms while wielding a voice that can dive into a hearty contralto or leap upward to radiate fragility and tenderness.Armatrading is insistently modest about her singing. “I don’t know that I’ve got a voice. I sing because I write songs,” she said. “I know that some people love my voice, but that’s the last thing I’m thinking of. I’m just thinking about the structure of it, the arrangement of it. Does it sound good? Is it working? Is the emotional part of it working?”On her first albums, Armatrading worked with leading producers: Gus Dudgeon (Elton John), Glyn Johns (the Rolling Stones, the Who), Steve Lillywhite (XTC, U2), Richard Gottehrer (Blondie, the Go-Go’s). But by the mid-1980s, she was ready to produce herself. And in the 21st century, she dispensed with studio musicians; she now plays all the keyboards, electronics and guitars, and she programs the drumming.Even as a teenager, Armatrading said, she heard her songs as full-blown arrangements. “I’ve always gone in with a complete song,” she said. “I’m the writer, so I need to know how every aspect of the song goes. I can hear the bass and the drums and the keyboards. That’s how I go into the studio. It has a verse, a chorus, a middle eight, a solo, an end. If it’s going to fade, if it’s going to end, whatever — I need to know exactly what that is.”Armatrading had American and British hits in the 1970s and ’80s and a trove of FM radio staples, including “Love and Affection” and “Drop the Pilot,” and she has never stopped making albums and performing. She has earned loyal, long-haul fans, and is still being discovered by younger generations of songwriters, among them the widely acclaimed Laura Mvula — whose mother, like Armatrading, came from St. Kitts.“I remember being transfixed,” Mvula said in an interview. “It was similar to the first time I heard Nina Simone and really listened.” She recalled watching a performance on YouTube: “I do remember being like, ‘This is a Black woman from St. Kitts. She’s wearing no makeup. That seems to be her thing. She is as she appears.’ And that’s how the music is. It speaks very deeply to who I am. And it fills me with this unknowable pride that without even being able to give myself props, this is my heritage.”For decades, Armatrading’s songs have moved listeners. “People have said to me, I couldn’t find the words to express what I was thinking or feeling at that moment to this person. And your song has helped me to do that,” said Armatrading. “And these three-minute songs that we’re doing, because it’s in this really short, squashed-in, compressed form, have to be quite precise. It has to be succinct. It’s got to say exactly what you’re trying to say. And that’s what’s helpful to people.”Armatrading in Regents Park, London, this month. “I’m trying to write the song where I say, that’s it. I’ve done it. I found the secret of life and that’s it.”Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesFor all the seeming intimacy of her lyrics, Armatrading has steadfastly insisted that the vast majority of her songs are not confessional. “If you hear a song like ‘Blessed,” or ‘I’m Lucky,’ or anything that’s got this feeling of, ‘I’m so thankful for where I am,’ that’s me,” she said. “But in general I’m just working from observation. If you’re going to write all those songs and all of those songs are going to be about you, that’s not healthy. I try and be as private as I can and as quiet as I can.”But she has offered a few glimpses of autobiography. “Mama and Papa,” from her 2007 album “Into the Blues,” offers memories of her childhood after moving to Birmingham, England, mixing fondness and struggle: “Seven people in one room/No heat, one wage and bills to pay.” Back in 1979, Armatrading released an angular new wave song, “How Cruel,” which noted, “I had somebody say once I was way too Black/And someone answers she’s not Black enough for me.”Armatrading says now that she didn’t intend “How Cruel” as a broad indictment. “It was just thinking about some of the things that people say,” she said. “I absolutely have not been plagued with racism at all, and I feel quite lucky in that respect. It’s not that I don’t know that I’m Black. Of course I do. But I didn’t grow up with a lot of that, and I think it was probably because I was a songwriter and people are interested in the songs.”Armatrading’s recent albums have started with concepts and strategies. She made a trilogy concentrating on genre: blues (“Into the Blues,” 2007), guitar-driven rock (“This Charming Life,” 2010) and jazz (“Starlight,” 2012). For “Not Far Away,” she decided to write all the lyrics first, then add music, a method she repeated on “Consequences.” That choice apparently encouraged Armatrading to make her music splash and change around the words.“Consequences” itself, a lovers’ quarrel, begins with burbling, aquatic synthesizers, introduces a funky beat and bass line, tosses in jazzy piano clusters and, at one point, deploys Queen-like multitracked guitar. Meanwhile, Armatrading layers on vocals that wrangle and interweave with warnings, accusations, apologies and overtures: “Let’s try hard to work things out.”Pandemic isolation didn’t curtail Armatrading’s songwriting by observation. “We have television,” she said. “And when I watch films, I watch very closely. I like looking to see what the extras are doing. I’m concentrating on the film, but I’m looking to see what’s different back there, what I’m not supposed to see.”The album ends with “To Anyone Who Will Listen,” a plea for sympathetic attention. It could be a songwriter’s cri de coeur, but it was one of Armatrading’s observations; she read about a man in deep depression who was desperate for someone to talk to. “He wasn’t asking them to cure him or make his life necessarily better. He just wanted them to let him tell what he had to say,” she said. “I don’t know him. He was just a person in an article. But I really felt for what he was saying.”While “Consequences” is Armatrading’s 20th studio album, she insists she’s in no danger of running out of ideas. “I’ve never suffered with writer’s block. I can always write a song,” she said. “I’m just trying to get really good at what I do. I’m trying to write the song where I say, that’s it. I’ve done it. I found the secret of life, and that’s it. I want to get to where that song is.“I’m doing this till I die,” she added, smiling, “My last act will be writing a song.” More

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      Lucy Dacus Prefers Weepy Stories, Poet Dogs and Food With Attitude

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      The singer-songwriter details her cultural must-haves as she prepares to release “Home Video,” an album that looks back at her past.Lucy Dacus said she became “a more reminiscent person” five years ago when she began touring regularly. “I feel better when I’m thinking about the past,” the singer-songwriter said. “The past is stable. The future doesn’t exist.”The songs on her third album, “Home Video” (due June 25), draw on her adolescent experiences growing up Baptist (now lapsed) in Richmond, Va. Her lyrics ache with the specificity of a longtime diarist: an ex’s awful poetry, a bad man’s alcoholic beverage of choice.“I’ve tried to talk about heavy stuff with a general core of warmth so that I’m not alienating anybody,” Dacus, 26, said from her house in Philadelphia, where she lives with six roommates. She was speaking on the eve of the release of “Brando,” a single based on a pretentious high school friend. “I’m really nervous about that person reaching out to me,” she added.In 2018, Dacus teamed up with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, like-minded songwriters to whom she was often compared, and released a critically lauded EP as boygenius. “That was healthy and meaningful,” she said. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Your job is selfish, because it’s all about you.’ Joining forces reminded me that we’re participating in the act of musicmaking, not self-aggrandizement.” Baker and Bridgers reconvened to offer backing vocals on several songs on the new album. “Having their support, even sonically, felt like being held.”From her office, decorated with photos of Patti Smith and prints by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, Dacus sifted through a long list of her cultural essentials. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Fox and the Hound”This is maybe the first movie that ever made me cry as a child. I remember so distinctly watching over and over again the final scene where they’re not allowed to be friends anymore and crying “No!” I wanted them to be friends forever. But maybe it’s a good lesson for kids. There are circumstances that make people come into and out of your life, and even if it’s sad, you have to get used to it.2. “Tuck Everlasting”I used to read this book by Natalie Babbitt every year between ages 8 and 12. A couple falls in love and one of them [the boy] is immortal and wants the girl to become immortal, too. But she makes the decision not to, and in the final scene the boy goes and visits her grave. How hard-core is that? I liked the idea that even if you had the chance to live forever, you wouldn’t take it. Life is so precious, and the things that would change fundamentally if you were immortal would make it less brilliant.3. Beret Girl From “An Extremely Goofy Movie”Goofy loses his job in a scary scene at the beginning of the movie, which was an entry into understanding workers’ rights, but I bring this up because of the poet dog, Beret Girl. My dad covered my eyes when she came onscreen. I was like, “Why?” Later, I figured out he had a habit of covering my eyes whenever any sexy person was on the screen. She’s wearing a turtleneck and a beret and she’s reading poetry, but even though she was clearly a fully clothed animated dog, I was like, wow, she must be really sexy. That always stuck with me. That type of human woman is very appealing to me.4. “Gilmore Girls”Every third line of that show is a pop culture reference, and I used to write them down and go to Wikipedia after every episode. It gave me a road map. I watched “Casablanca” for the first time because of “Gilmore Girls.” There’s an episode where Sonic Youth stars and Yo La Tengo play live. Now I’m a huge Yo La Tengo fan and I’m on [the record label] Matador because of them.And I think it helped my mom and I be friends. I was rewatching some of it recently and I was like, “Wow, they really didn’t have boundaries, and Lorelei puts a lot of emotional processing on Rory.” They’re not perfect, but they wanted to spend time together, and it gave us an example of that relationship.5. Brittany HowardThe first time I heard Alabama Shakes, I was like, “This is for me. This is what I love.” It was the summer of 2012 in Richmond. At the time, I wanted music that felt southern without being pop country. I associate their first record [“Boys & Girls] with heat and fireworks and eating outside with my friends. My first record was inspired by it, in terms of being roots-y but with a lot of rock elements. Everything Brittany makes is raising the bar for everybody else.6. “You! Me! Dancing!” by Los Campesinos!It became an anthem with my group of friends who did theater in high school. I could take or leave the plays, but the cast parties were the social event of the season. People would be completely unhinged. Somebody with a giant house would let everybody sleep over and, for some reason, parents let this happen. I would have the aux cable and I would D.J., and there was always the point of the night where we would play “You! Me! Dancing!” as a signal that the dance party had begun. I remember literally throwing my body against the walls.7. Alexander McQueenI was interested in fashion when I was really young. My dad really liked to shop and we used to go to Kohl’s and buy a bunch of clothes and do a fashion show and then return all of them. And then in 8th grade, I got into my monk-era of Christianity. Like, having no connection to material possessions is key to a divine faith. If anything new came into my life, it had be a gift.But when the Alexander McQueen exhibit went up at the Met in 2011 I went twice and cried both times. My brain was like, “I could have never thought of this and I’m so glad that somebody had this mind.” I still have this weird, useless guilt around shopping, but it helped me get over the ascetic period of my life and realize there’s room everywhere for beauty. It doesn’t have to be rooted in capitalism or consumerism. It can be rooted in creativity.8. A Bushel of CrabsI really like foods that play hard to get. Growing up in Virginia, I learned at a really young age how to properly get meat out of a crab. It takes a lot of work to get a very little amount, but it makes me feel like I earned it, and it’s fun to teach people. For my last few birthdays, we’ve gotten a bushel of crabs and I’ve invited many people over and we’ve devoured the entire bushel together at a really long table covered in newspaper. It’s a nice tradition.9. Miranda JulyShe’s one of the first people whose entire body of work I became familiar with. She has something essential at her core fueling everything that she makes, and it’s a message that I agree with: telling people that they belong and freaks don’t have to be lonely. I love that she wrote “It Chooses You” while she was procrastinating making her movie “The Future,” and even in her avoidance she made something really good. And now that I’m a fan of Agnès Varda, I can see how Agnès inspired Miranda, so it’s fun to go back another layer.10. “Veneno”I think it might be the best TV show I’ve ever seen. I watched it with my housemates and I was covered in tears after every single episode. It’s about La Veneno, the first very famous transgender woman in Spain. There are cast members who were her actual friends in real life. I’m so sad it’s over. The really nuanced depictions and all the trans joy was extremely moving. I followed a bunch of the actors on social media. I would simply bow to them if I saw them. More

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      Lil Baby and Lil Durk Share No. 1 With ‘The Voice of the Heroes’

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      The collaborative album by the two Atlanta-based rappers relied on streaming to top the Billboard chart.Last week’s top album may have hit No. 1 thanks to vinyl, but this week it’s back to the future: clicks.“The Voice of the Heroes,” an album pairing the Atlanta rapper Lil Baby with the like-minded Chicago rapper Lil Durk (now Atlanta-based, as well), was streamed 198 million times in its first week out — enough to open atop the Billboard 200 album chart.Digital plays of the duo’s 18 collaborative tracks made up the great majority of consumption for the release, which sold about 4,000 copies as a complete package and another 1,000 song downloads. All told including streams, “The Voice of the Heroes” earned 150,000 equivalent album units, according to the formulas of MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.That path to the top of the chart represents the inverse of the one used last week by Taylor Swift, whose “Evermore” returned to No. 1 from No. 74 thanks to the sale of 102,000 vinyl LPs, 69,000 CDs and just 12 million streams. (About six months of pre-orders for the vinyl were counted in full once the LP shipped to customers.) This week, “Evermore” falls to No. 8, down 85 percent in equivalent sales.“The Voice of the Heroes” marks Lil Durk’s first No. 1 album, with his last two releases, “Just Cause Y’all Waited 2” and “The Voice,” having topped out at No. 2. According to Billboard, he is the sixth act to reach No. 1 for the first time this year, after Olivia Rodrigo, Moneybagg Yo, Rod Wave, Morgan Wallen and Playboi Carti. Lil Baby earned his first chart-topper last year with “My Turn,” which was No. 1 for five weeks.“Sour” by Rodrigo, which debuted at No. 1 last month, holds steady at No. 2 in its third week out, earning another 143,000 units sold. Two other former No. 1’s follow: Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 3 with 50,000 units, while J. Cole’s “The Off-Season” falls one spot this week to No. 4. “The Chaos Chapter: Freeze,” by the K-pop group Tomorrow x Together, debuts at No. 5 with 43,000 units. More

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      Overlooked No More: Jobriath, Openly Gay Glam Rocker in the ’70s

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      His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character. But American audiences seemed unwilling to accept his sexuality.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.On March 8, 1974, American TV viewers got their first glimpse of the American glam rocker Jobriath on the popular NBC music program “The Midnight Special.” Jobriath, who was introduced by the singer Gladys Knight as “the act of tomorrow,” made a striking debut, wearing a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume and singing a baroque-sounding number titled “I’maman.”For his second song, the electrifying “Rock of Ages,” he wore a tightfitting, one-piece purplish suit and a large, bubble helmet that, with the touch of his fingers, broke apart into petals that surrounded his head. His space alien persona and theatrical rock music drew comparisons to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, and his swaggering sound was likened to that of Mick Jagger. Onstage he moved like a ballet dancer.“We were so excited,” the actress Ann Magnuson, then a teenager, said in a phone interview. “‘Oh, did you see that helmet?’ You would talk about that in school the next day.”But Billy Cross, who played the guitar alongside Jobriath, remembered the performance, and the audience, differently. “It was horrible,” he said in a phone interview. “They hated us, and that wasn’t fun.”Such was the complicated existence of Jobriath, who is generally regarded as the first openly gay rock star. His image came with risks: He released just two albums, and both were poorly received by an audience that was largely unwilling to accept his effeminate persona. His short-lived career became a footnote to rock ’n’ roll history, and he ultimately died alone, his body discovered by the police some time later.Jobriath performing on NBC’s “The Midnight Special” in 1974. He emerged onstage in a futuristic silver-gray, hoop-shaped costume.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesFor his second number on “The Midnight Special,” Jobriath wore a tight-fitting one-piece purplish suit.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesHe was born Bruce Wayne Campbell on Dec. 14, 1946, in Pennsylvania (accounts differ on precisely where), the second of three children of James and Marion (Salisbury) Campbell. His father came from a military background, and his mother was a homemaker who later worked as an insurance secretary. (The full name he used, Jobriath Salisbury, was “an amalgam of his teenage obsession with religion and his mother’s maiden name,” Robert Cochrane wrote in the liner notes of a 2004 Jobriath compilation.)Bruce Campbell was a musical prodigy who could sight-read any composition at the piano, said Peter Batchelder, who met him in 1964 when they were music students at Temple University.“He could play pretty much the whole first movement of the Prokofiev second piano concerto,” he said by phone. “He could handle musical data like nobody I ever met before or since.”Finding Temple’s music courses elementary, Bruce dropped out after one semester and joined the military. “He wanted to impress his father,” said his half brother, Willie Fogle. “Of course he hated it, so he ran away.”Relocating to California under the name of Jobriath Salisbury, he agreed to play the piano accompaniment for a friend who was auditioning for the 1968 Los Angeles production of “Hair.” The musical’s director, seeing Jobriath as a good fit for a production celebrating the counterculture, gave him a role. “We were all dumbfounded,” said Oatis Stephens, a friend who also acted in “Hair.” “It was like, ‘Why aren’t you playing concerts with the Philharmonic?’”Jobriath later joined the New York City company of “Hair” but was fired, by his account, for upstaging the other actors. He then found himself lost and binging on alcohol. “I was floating down in the gutter,” he told Interview magazine in 1973.He was rescued, however, by the music entrepreneur and club owner Jerry Brandt, who heard a demo tape that Jobriath had sent to CBS Records. Brandt asked to become his manager.“He could write, he could sing, he could dance,” Brandt said in the 2012 documentary “Jobriath A.D.” “I bought it. I mean, he seduced me, period.” (Brandt died in January.)At Brandt’s direction, Jobriath transformed himself from a 1960s hippie to a glittering rock star, and in interviews he took aim at musicians like Bowie and Marc Bolan, the frontman for the band T. Rex, whose personas only hinted at sexual ambiguity.“I’m a true fairy,” he would say. He told NBC Los Angeles: “There’s a lot of people running around, putting makeup on and stuff, just because it’s chic. I just want to say that I’m no pretender.”Brandt brought Jobriath to the attention of Elektra Records, which signed him for a reported $500,000, a huge sum at the time for an unknown musician, equal to almost $3 million today. (In Mick Houghton’s 2010 book “Becoming Elektra,” Jac Holzman, the label’s founder, said that the actual figure was closer to $50,000.)Jobriath in May 1983 when he performed as a cabaret musician. He was found dead that summer, from AIDS, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel.Hopkins, NYC, via the Bruce Campbell estateJobriath’s debut album, titled simply “Jobriath” and released in October 1973, was a mix of glam rock, cabaret and funk, all given sophisticated arrangements at the Electric Lady recording studios in Manhattan. His lyrics could be risqué (“I’d do anything for you or to you,” he sang in “Take Me I’m Yours”), tender (“I know the child that I am has hurt you/And I was a woman when I made you cry,” in “Be Still”) or witty (“With you on my arm Betty Grable lost her charm,” in “Movie Queen”).“The material just impressed me by its complexity, sensitivity, breadth and quirkiness,” Eddie Kramer, who co-produced the record with Jobriath, said in a phone interview. “He was a genius.”Before the album was released, Brandt mounted a heavy promotional campaign, including full-page advertisements in Rolling Stone and Vogue, posters on the sides of buses and a gigantic billboard in Times Square depicting Jobriath as a nude statue. Coinciding with the album’s release, Jobriath had planned to make his live performance debut with three shows at the Paris Opera House, where he would emerge in a King Kong costume climbing a mini replica of the Empire State Building. The production cost was estimated at an exorbitant $200,000.The ad campaign is one reason Jobriath is considered to this day to have been among the music industry’s most overhyped acts.With the gay liberation movement growing in the early 1970s, Brandt assumed that Jobriath would be readily embraced. “The kids will emulate Jobriath,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973, “because he cares about his body, his mind, his responsibility to the public as a leader, as a force, as a manipulator of beauty and art.”The album earned some positive reviews, including one from Rolling Stone, which said it “exhibits honest, personal magnetism and talent to burn.” Other publications were more mixed. In his review for The New York Times, Henry Edwards made the inevitable comparison to Bowie. “Jobriath, too, writes about ‘space clowns,’ ‘earthlings’ and ‘morning starships,’” he wrote. “The results can only be described as dismal.”Sales of the album were poor, and the Paris Opera House shows were scrapped.“When it started out,” said Cross, Jobriath’s guitarist, “it was all about the music. After Jerry Brandt got involved, it was all about the career. Then after that started to take hold, it was all about Jobriath’s sexuality. America was not ready for that.”Jobriath put out a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” in 1974 and embarked on a national tour, only to encounter homophobic slurs during a performance at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. By the next year, even after his appearance on “The Midnight Special,” Elektra had dropped Jobriath from its roster, and he and Brandt had parted ways.“He didn’t sell any records,” Brandt said in “Jobriath A.D.,” the documentary film. “What gets a record company going is the smell of money. And there was no money. He didn’t generate 50 cents.”From the late 1970s onward, Jobriath performed pop standards as a cabaret musician, calling himself Cole Berlin, and lived at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. In a 1979 interview, he spoke of his former alter ego in the past tense: “Jobriath committed suicide in a drug, alcohol and publicity overdose.” He was found dead at the Chelsea Hotel in the summer of 1983. He was 36. AIDS, which had reached epidemic dimensions by then, was given as the cause.In the decades since his death, Jobriath’s music has been reissued, and a number of musicians have expressed admiration for him, including Morrissey, Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott.Jobriath’s impact on L.G.B.T.Q. music history also went through a reappraisal. “He was a sexual hero,” the British singer Marc Almond wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “For all the derision and marginalization he faced, Jobriath did touch lives.”Today, those who knew Jobriath in his various guises — classical music wunderkind, glam rocker, interpreter of the Great American Songbook — remember his talent. “Whether he was composing epic symphonic music of searing intensity (and orchestrating it at 16) or brazenly appropriating the Rolling Stones’s idiom,” Batchelder, his former classmate, said in an email, “there was always beauty in his work.” More

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      Lorde’s Sunburst, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ava Max, Clairo, PmBata 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.Lorde, ‘Solar Power’About the last thing to be expected from a songwriter as moody and intense as Lorde was a carefree ditty about fun in the summer sun. “Solar Power,” the title song from an impending album, is just that, riding three chords and brisk acoustic rhythm guitar (and glancing back at George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”) to celebrate hitting the beach, getting sun-tanned cheeks and tossing away her “cellular device”: “Can you reach me? No! You can’t,” she sings, and giggles. She has an offhand but attention-getting boast — “I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus” — and an invitation completely free of ambivalence: “Come on and let the bliss begin.” JON PARELESAva Max, ‘EveryTime I Cry’Just to be certain, I have Googled and confirmed that no one has yet referred to Ava Max as Una Lipa. There’s still time. (This is a compliment.) JON CARAMANICASaint Jhn and SZA, ‘Just for Me’A beat ticks along behind slow-pulsing synthesizer chords as Saint Jhn appears, claiming lovelorn angst but safely distancing it with Auto-Tune. But when SZA arrives, a minute and a half in, her voice leaps out. Like him, she proclaims a desperate, dangerous infatuation. Unlike him, she sounds like she means it. PARELESPmBata, ‘Favorite Song’Endlessly cheerful lite-pop-soul, “Favorite Song” is a bopping strut from PmBata, toggling between singing and rapping, though less hip-hop-influenced than his earlier singles like “Down for Real.” The come-ons are a little frisky, but the attitude is never less than sweet. CARAMANICAJomoro featuring Sharon Van Etten, ‘Nest’Jomoro is the alliance of two percussionists turned songwriters: Joey Waronker, Beck’s longtime drummer, and Mauro Refosco, a David Byrne mainstay. Of course they need singers, and they have assorted guests on Jomoro’s album, “Blue Marble Sky.” Sharon Van Etten provides sustain and suspense on “Nest,” singing about “the darkest corner, the back of the mind” over a steadfast march of synthesizer tones textured with bells, shakers and hand drums: physical percussion to orchestrate a mental journey inward. PARELESClairo, ‘Blouse’It was inevitable that current bedroom-pop songwriters would discover the hushed intricacies of predecessors like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. Clairo embraces both, recalling Smith’s whispery vocal harmonies immediately and Drake’s elegant string arrangements soon afterward. She’s singing about a kitchen-table lovers’ quarrel and a situation neither man would think to portray: “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down my blouse?” PARELESEsperanza Spalding featuring Corey King, ‘Formwela 4’Over an eddying sequence of arpeggios plucked by Corey King on acoustic guitar, surrounded by the sounds of springtime, Esperanza Spalding sings in patient and gentle tones about long-term trauma, and about reaching out for support. “Wanna be grown and let it go/really didn’t let it go though,” she begins. When Spalding gets to the chorus, it mostly consists of one repeated line: “Dare to say it.” This track, released Friday, comes as part of Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an evolving project that imagines musical collaboration as a pathway toward healing. (It already yielded a suite of three powerful tracks, created with other prominent musicians and released earlier this year.) She and King wrote “Formwela 4” in response to a simple challenge: “Say what is most difficult to say between loved ones.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHypnotic Brass Ensemble featuring Perfume Genius: ‘A Fullness of Light in Your Soul’The Minimalism-loving Hypnotic Brass Ensemble has rediscovered “Sapphie,” an EP that was released in 1998 by the prolific English musician Richard Youngs and rereleased in 2006 by the Jagjaguwar label, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary with left-field, interdisciplinary collaborations. Youngs’s original version was a stark acoustic meditation, just quiet fingerpicking behind Youngs’s high, breaking voice, with musings like “Sometimes it’s better never than late/and there’s a spareness of days” and “Happiness leaves everything as it is/and the future isn’t anything.” Hypnotic Brass Ensemble adds inner harmonies and orchestrates them with Philip Glass-like motifs for brass and woodwinds and surreal reverberations as Perfume Genius sings in a rapt falsetto, trading Youngs’s solitude for immersive depths. The video — perhaps taking a hint from the song’s first line, “working around museums,” shows the visual artist Lonnie Holley creating images with spray paint, twigs and wire. PARELESJulian Lage, ‘Squint’The gangly, big-boned drum style on this track might be recognizable — particularly to fans of the Bad Plus — as the sound of Dave King when he’s having fun. The drummer is heard here in a newish trio, led by the virtuoso guitarist Julian Lage, and featuring Jorge Roeder on bass. “Squint,” the title track from Lage’s Blue Note debut, begins with the guitarist alone, causally demonstrating why he’s one of the most dazzling improvisers around; then King comes in and things cohere into that lumbering swing feel, held together by Roeder’s steady gait on the bass. RUSSONELLOPoo Bear, ‘The Day You Left’Poo Bear (Jason Boyd), a songwriter and producer with Justin Bieber, Usher, Jill Scott and many others, shows his own achingly mournful voice in “The Day You Left.” He’s a desperately long-suffering lover who knows he’s been betrayed for years, but still wants his partner back. The production, by a team that includes Skrillex, keeps opening new electronic spaces around him, with celestial keyboards in some, shadowy whispers in others. PARELESNoCap, ‘Time Speed’More glorious yelps from the Alabama sing-rapper NoCap, who, over light blues-country guitar, is enduring some push and pull with a partner. “I might be gone for a while, just write,” he urges, but confesses he’s not in the driver’s seat. If she feels compelled to stray, he says, “just don’t hold him tight.” CARAMANICA More

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      In the ’80s, Post-Punk Filled New York Clubs. Their Videos Captured It.

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      An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York documents a brief moment when rogue videographers shot an influential sliver of the music scene.In the summer of 1975, Pat Ivers filmed a legendary festival of unsigned rock bands at CBGB, which included Talking Heads, Blondie and Ramones. Ivers had unauthorized but easy access to equipment, thanks to her day job in the Public Access Department at Manhattan Cable TV, and other members of her video collective, Metropolis Video, helped out.“I was the only girl,” Ivers said in a recent interview. “And all the guys said, ‘You’re crazy. We’re not making money at this.’ They wouldn’t do it anymore, so for about a year, I sulked at the end of the bar at CBGB. Then I met Emily.”Emily Armstrong was a sociology major at the City University of New York who’d also taken a job in Public Access at Manhattan Cable, and shared with Ivers determination and a love of punk rock. The pair shot dozens of concerts, and hosted a weekly cable show, “Nightclubbing,” that showed their videos. The hulking Ikegami camera they used was “like a Buick on my shoulder,” Ivers said. They’d shoot bands until nearly sunrise, hurry back to Manhattan Cable’s offices and return the equipment before anyone noticed it was gone.Pat Ivers, left, and Emily Armstrong teamed up to shoot shows throughout the city using borrowed equipment from their day jobs at Manhattan Cable TV.Sean Corcoran, a curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, graduated from college in 1996 and was in kindergarten when Ivers and Armstrong were amassing their archive. But he’s fascinated with the flowering of new music that took place in New York starting in the late ’70s. When a colleague proposed an exhibition timed to the 40th anniversary of MTV’s August 1, 1981 arrival, Corcoran pounced on the opportunity to build a showcase for the music that emerged in the wake of New York City’s 1975 near-bankruptcy, subsequent economic distress and AIDS and crack epidemics.When Corcoran began curating “New York, New Music: 1980-1986,” which opens Friday, he knew most of the photographers who’d documented the era, including Janette Beckman, Laura Levine and Blondie’s zealous guitarist, Chris Stein. While searching the copious Downtown Collection of NYU’s Fales Library, he saw a listing of Ivers and Armstrong’s archive, which the library acquired in 2010, and was thrilled. Material from that duo, plus footage from Merrill Aldighieri, and the team of Charles Libin and Paul Cameron, provided Corcoran with a vast but rarely seen video catalog.“New York, New Music” chronicles a variety of genres, including rap, jazz, salsa and dance music, but the videos in the exhibition emphasize post-punk, the gnarled, joyously uncommercial cousin of new wave that happens to be having a moment. (An inescapable Apple ad campaign uses the Delta 5’s spiky 1979 song “Mind Your Own Business,” which was considered so uncommercial it wasn’t even released as a single in the United States.) The sound of this era, Corcoran said, “never gets the attention that disco and punk get.”“New York, New Music: 1980-1986” opens at the Museum of the City of New York on Friday.Museum of the City of New YorkThanks to the advent of portable (if Buick-size) video cameras, these five dogged videographers documented this fertile music, which was politically progressive and inclusive of races and genders. All were DIY self-starters, flush with moxie, who made the best of borrowed equipment and Gothic lighting. Aldighieri even shot with videotapes she’d scavenged from dumpsters outside the Time & Life Building. This grimy, seat-of-their-pants aesthetic was the dominant language of music video until MTV spread throughout the country and turned videos into gleaming advertisements for stardom.Like Ivers and Armstrong, Libin and Cameron plunged themselves into the scene. The pair met as SUNY Purchase film students who bonded over their love of Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese. In 1979, they drove down to the 62nd Street nightclub Hurrah in Manhattan, and shot a 16 mm film of a colorful new band from Georgia, the B-52’s, playing a jittery surf-rock song called “Rock Lobster.” They edited it using university equipment, then showed it at Hurrah by projecting it onto a white bedsheet. Music videos were still a novel idea, and “people went ballistic,” Cameron said.The head of their film department went ballistic for different reasons, and expelled the duo for using equipment without permission. Free of academic distractions, they moved to New York, bartended at Hurrah and shot dozens of the era’s best bands; they contributed videos of the jagged funk bands Defunkt and James White and the Blacks to the museum show. After a few years, their video work led to flourishing careers as cinematographers, leaving no more time for late nights in the clubs.James White in 1980 at Hurrah.Charles Libin and Paul CameronDefunkt at Hurrah in 1980.Charles Libin and Paul CameronFilming this scene was stressful and sometimes risky. While working at Danceteria, an unlicensed club near Penn Station, Ivers and Armstrong were arrested along with other employees; they also had a significant portion of their archive stolen. “It made us bitter,” Ivers said. In April 1980, after shooting Public Image Ltd., they ended “Nightclubbing.”“The scene we loved was over. A new scene was coming. I didn’t like Duran Duran,” Armstrong added. More than a dozen of their videos, including footage of the punk bands the Dead Boys and the Cramps, and the louche, chaotic jazz-rock of the Lounge Lizards, are displayed at the Museum of the City of New York show.Aldighieri, an intrepid Massachusetts College of Art and Design grad who’d worked as a news camerawoman and an animator, was hired by Hurrah to play videos between sets, and used the house camera to shoot bands. She filmed more than 100 different bands there, some more than once: “I was there five to seven days a week,” she said. But in May 1981, Hurrah closed, and a subsequent late-night mugging scared her into nightclub retirement. Aldighieri created a short-lived series of VHS video compilations for Sony Home Video, worked in production and postproduction, then moved to France. From her archive, the curator Corcoran used four clips, including the jazz avant-gardist Sun Ra and the South Bronx sister group ESG, which played minimalist funk.The footage from the five filmmakers forms “the core of the video content” in “New York, New Music: 1980-1986,” Corcoran said. It’s just a happy coincidence that the show is arriving at a time when post-punk music is finally in the limelight.Sun Ra onstage at Hurrah.Merrill AldighieriSonny Sharrock of Material performing at Hurrah.Merrill AldighieriThe acerbic British band Gang of Four released a boxed set in March; Beth B’s documentary of the No Wave warrior Lydia Lunch opens in New York this month; and Delta 5, heard constantly in that Apple commercial, has been cited as an influence by emerging groups from the United Kingdom (Shopping), Boston (Guerilla Toss) and Los Angeles (Automatic).“Always surprised that there’s still resonance after 40 years,” Ros Allen, who played bass in Delta 5 and is now an animator and senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland in England, said in an email. “‘Mind Your Own Business’ has got a catchy beat and bass lines and a cracking guitar break, and then there’s the ‘go [expletive] yourself’ lyrics.”The Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham, who is now an assistant professor of experiential learning at Endicott College in Massachusetts, said in an email, “There was so much interesting and lasting music made during that post-punk/pre-New Romantic time.” He added, “And maybe our own kids will be generous enough of spirit to click ‘like’ and allow us relevance, once again.”Bad Brains onstage at CBGB, as captured for “Nightclubbing.”via GoNightclubbingIn the course of the 1980s, Corcoran noted, New York changed from an unregulated city hospitable to artists to a tightly policed city hospitable to stockbrokers, which brought the era to a close. Much of the footage he chose has rarely been seen, and other important video documents of the era are frustratingly difficult or impossible to find.Chris Strouth, a composer and filmmaker, spent years searching for the videotapes of M-80, a groundbreaking 1979 two-day music marathon staged in Minneapolis. After he finally located it, he spent “four or five years,” he said, turning it into a feature length documentary. At the last minute, the singer of an obscure local band he declined to name pulled permission to use its footage, which Strouth described as “heartbreaking.”Some filmmakers didn’t get signed releases from the bands, which limits their commercial use. Some got releases that have gone missing or didn’t anticipate the rise of digital media. In lieu of a contract, videos can’t be licensed without facing a gantlet of opportunistic lawyers and moody band members. “It’s hell,” Strouth said with a bruised chuckle. “Music licensing is hell.”But it wasn’t always that way. Ivers was able to film nearly every act from the late ’70s, except Patti Smith and Television, who declined permission. Thanks to Ivers and others, an obscure era of music was thoroughly memorialized. “The shows we saw — my God,” she said. “It was lightning in a bottle. It was only going to happen once.” More

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      NYC Plans a Central Park Mega-Concert to Celebrate Reopening

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      The mayor’s office has asked the producer Clive Davis to sign up musical stars for an event on the Great Lawn in August.Brunch crowds are back. Rush-hour traffic is back. Tourists in horse-drawn carriages are back.But the best proof that New York City has returned to its full glory may be a mega-concert in the green expanse of Central Park.Seeking a grand symbol of New York’s revitalization after a brutal pandemic year, Mayor Bill de Blasio is planning a large-scale performance by multiple acts and has called on Clive Davis, the 89-year-old producer and music-industry eminence, to pull it together.The show, tentatively set for Aug. 21, is still coming together, with no artists confirmed, though Mr. Davis — whose five-decade career highlights have included working with Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Alicia Keys and Whitney Houston — said he is aiming for eight “iconic” stars to perform a three-hour show for 60,000 attendees and a worldwide television audience.Mr. de Blasio said in an interview that the concert was part of a “Homecoming Week” to show that New York City is coming back from the pandemic — a celebration for residents and those in the region who might not have visited in a while.“This concert is going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It’s going to be an amazing lineup. The whole week is going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen before in New York City.”The show would be the latest in a storied tradition of Central Park super-productions that tend to attract worldwide coverage and to paint New York as a peaceful, cosmopolitan haven for the arts. Many New Yorkers, especially the mayor, may welcome that view after the prevalence of pandemic-era images like a deserted Times Square and boarded-up storefronts amid last summer’s protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.Clive Davis, the producer, said he is aiming to recruit eight major stars to share the billing for the concert, set for Aug. 21.Bryan Derballa for The New York Times“I can’t think of a better place than the Great Lawn of Central Park to be the place where you say that New York is reopening,” Mr. Davis said in an interview.Mr. Davis said that Mr. de Blasio called him three weeks ago, around the time of Mr. Davis’s latest Grammy gala, which he has been hosting annually since 1976, and was divided into two parts this year. As Mr. Davis recalled, the mayor asked him to present a show in partnership with the city that would celebrate New York’s reopening and emphasize the need to vaccinate more young people. The event’s working title gives a sense of its intended gravity: “The Official NYC Homecoming Concert in Central Park.”“I was greatly honored,” said Mr. Davis, who grew up in Brooklyn.Mr. Davis said that he and his team, which includes his son Doug, a music industry lawyer, are still at work booking artists, and he declined to offer any names of those he has in mind. Sponsorship deals are also in the works, he said. The mayor’s office said it would announce a broadcast partner soon.But a number of details for the event have already been set. Live Nation, the global concert giant, is involved with the production, and the majority of tickets will be free, although there will be some V.I.P. seating, Mr. Davis said.The Great Lawn — a 13-acre oval in the center of the park near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Delacorte Theater and the reservoir — has long been the city’s most prestigious setting for outdoor concerts, telegraphing a sense of the very heart of New York.The Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park, has a reputation for being strict and judicious in doling out licenses for major performances there. The group’s website barely mentions concerts, noting that a renovation in 1997 “restored the lawn to balance both active sports use and quiet relaxation.” But the mayor’s office said the conservancy supports the idea.The Great Lawn has been the site of concerts and other major public events since the 1970s. Carole King serenaded 70,000 people there in 1973. Elton John played in 1980 — in a duck suit, among other outfits —  and the following year Simon & Garfunkel reunited for an estimated 400,000 people. Diana Ross performed in 1983, Luciano Pavarotti in 1993 and the Dave Matthews Band in 2003.The New York Philharmonic plays the Great Lawn as part of its tour of city parks each summer, and since 2012 the Global Citizen Festival has held regular events there with star-studded lineups including Beyoncé, Metallica, Neil Young and Coldplay. (Garth Brooks drew hundreds of thousands to the North Meadow, above 97th Street, in 1997.)But even as New York, dormant for a year, now races toward a reopening for entertainment venues — at a recent news conference with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, James L. Dolan, the chief executive of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, promised a “blockbuster summer” — the prospect of a large-scale public event may still pose complications for health and crowd control.While the state has promoted its vaccine passport Excelsior Pass as a way for restaurants, theater operators and others to confirm patrons’ vaccination status, the system is still new and has not been very widely adopted by either the public or many businesses. According to the state, about 1.1 million passes had been downloaded as of last week, representing only a fraction of the 9.1 million New Yorkers who have been vaccinated.The mayor’s office said there would be vaccinated and unvaccinated sections at the concert, and that about 70 percent of tickets would go to people who are vaccinated. The city has been working hard to vaccinate residents who are reluctant to get the shot.A successful event could be a political triumph for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his last year in office who has repeatedly clashed with Mr. Cuomo. Mr. de Blasio’s popularity sank after his failed presidential run in 2019, and many parents were frustrated over the chaotic reopening of schools during the pandemic.But Mr. de Blasio has recently embraced his role as New York City’s cheerleader as millions of people have been vaccinated and the city has started to reopen. Several of the candidates who are running to succeed him as mayor say they want to hold a major celebration, including Andrew Yang who proposed a five-borough party hosted by his friend Dave Chappelle, the comedian.Mr. de Blasio said he was excited to have Mr. Davis on board and compared the event to a homecoming at a college, where alumni gather to reconnect. He said he wants to show that the city is ready for September, when many more workers are expected to return to offices in Manhattan.Mr. de Blasio said he had been to concerts on the Great Lawn, including seeing Stevie Wonder at the Global Citizen Festival several years ago.“It’s an absolutely stunning place for the concert,” he said. “It makes you feel a deep connection to New York City.”It could also be a late-career feather in the cap of Mr. Davis, who has spent more than 50 years as one of the reigning dons of the music industry.Mr. Davis said he viewed the central message of the event as a simple and optimistic one.“There’s a mental attitude that I think we are all looking forward to,” he said. “That the future is bright and healthy for this country, for the world and for New York City.” More

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      Foo Fighters Will Play First Concert Back at Madison Square Garden

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      The first full-capacity arena concert in New York since March 2020 will feature rock ’n’ roll — but only for fans who are fully vaccinated — on June 20.For the first time in more than 15 months, Madison Square Garden is gearing up to host a rock ’n’ roll concert without social distancing, masks or capacity caps.Foo Fighters will perform on June 20 — but only for fans who are fully vaccinated. It will be the first full-capacity concert in a New York arena since March 2020.“We’ve been waiting for this day for over a year,” Dave Grohl, the band’s frontman, said in a statement on Tuesday, telling fans to prepare for a long night “of screaming our heads off together to 26 years of Foos.”Audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination along with their tickets to enter the venue, James L. Dolan, the executive chairman and chief executive of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, said in a statement. Tickets will go on sale on Friday at 10 a.m. at prices of $50 to $119.Full-capacity concerts represent the latest sign of a return to cultural life in Manhattan. On Monday, Bruce Springsteen announced that “Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, would come back for a limited run that begins performances at the St. James Theater on June 26.Although most Broadway theaters and producers are still holding off on opening until after Labor Day, a drop in coronavirus cases and increasing vaccination rate in the United States have encouraged many producers and performers to accelerate their plans.Fans have been able to attend N.B.A. playoff games at the Garden, where the New York Knicks play, with separate sections for fully vaccinated and unvaccinated fans. (The Knicks were eliminated last week, paving the way for concerts.)The June show is part of a Foo Fighters tour that was meant to celebrate the band’s 25th anniversary, but was postponed a year because of the pandemic. The group last performed at the Garden in July 2018, when it sold out two nights on its Concrete and Gold Tour. During 2020, the band released its 10th studio album, “Medicine at Midnight,” and Grohl engaged in a playful drum battle with the then 10-year-old prodigy Nandi Bushell that delighted fans on social media.Foo Fighters will also be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in October — an honor they earned in their first year of eligibility.Other concerts booked for Madison Square Garden include Eagles in August, as well as the Mexican group Banda MS and the country duo Dan + Shay in September. Harry Styles will perform for five nights in October, and Billy Joel will resume his monthly residency in November. Concerts will return to Barclays Center in Brooklyn in September with Marc Anthony. More