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      Know How the Beatles Ended? Peter Jackson May Change Your Mind.

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      The director’s three-part documentary “Get Back” explores the most contested period in the band’s history and reveals there’s still plenty to debate.It is a cold January morning in 1969, and three of the four Beatles are assembled in a cavernous film studio in London, with cameras rolling and microphones everywhere. “Lennon’s late again,” Paul McCartney says matter of factly, as he plugs in his bass guitar.With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting groggily before him, a tray of toast and jam by their side, McCartney starts to strum and sing, searching for inspiration. Within minutes, a mid-tempo groove takes shape and a familiar vocal melody emerges. “Get back,” he sings in a faint howl. “Get back to where you once belonged.” Almost like magic, a Beatles classic begins to form out of nothing.Later that same day, after John Lennon arrives, the four rock deities gather in a circle and bicker. They have loose plans for a concert TV special featuring brand-new songs, but most of the men appear to be dreading it — and may be dreading each other, too. Lennon, who seems to space out for much of the meeting, declares vaguely that “communication” with an audience is his only aim, while an impatient McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or abandon it.Harrison blurts out what they may all be thinking: “Maybe we should have a divorce?”Those back-to-back scenes in Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” a seven-hour-plus project that will be shown in three parts on Disney Plus from Nov. 25 to 27, encapsulate the twin sides of the most contested period in Beatles history — the glory of artistic creation by the world’s most beloved and influential rock band, and the grueling conflicts that led to its breakup, announced a year later.For Beatles fans, or any student of 20th-century pop culture, these are astonishing glimpses into the band’s working life and the tensions that surrounded them.“It’s sort of that one impossible fan dream,” Jackson said in a video interview from Wellington, New Zealand, where he has spent much of the last four years in a darkened editing suite surrounded by Beatles memorabilia. “‘I wish I could go in a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they were working,’” he said, describing a lifelong dream like a child praying for the ultimate Christmas present. “‘Just for one day, just watch them, and I’ll be really quiet and sit there.’”“Well, guess what?” he continued. “The time machine’s here now.”Peter Jackson pored over nearly 60 hours of footage for his documentary “Get Back.”Nicola Dove/DisneyJackson’s film is also a volley in one of the longest-running debates in Beatles scholarship. The band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the band’s majesty, spontaneity and wit. “I hope we passed the audition,” Lennon quips at the show’s end.That period was already the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 vérité film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the Beatles’ final studio LP. In time, that film took on a reputation as a joyless document of the band’s collapse, and later testimony from members of the Beatles seemed to buttress that view. Lennon described the sessions as “hell,” and Harrison called them the group’s “winter of discontent.”Yet that narrative has long been challenged by some Beatles aficionados. Lindsay-Hogg’s film, they argue, was selectively edited for maximum dreariness, perhaps to retroactively explain the breakup — “Abbey Road,” the Beatles’ true swan song, was made after “Let It Be” but released first — while evidence from bootlegged tapes suggests a mixture of pleasure and frustration familiar to any musician struggling through Take 24 on a deadline.The mere existence of “Get Back” is a sign that, more than half a century after the Beatles disbanded, their history is still unsettled, and remains endlessly ripe for deep-dive research and partisan counternarratives.Jackson’s film, arriving with the authority of a lightning bolt hurled from a mountaintop in Middle-earth, may become the final word in the argument over this period, though the story it tells is far from simple. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — and an avowed Beatles nut — was given access to nearly 60 hours of previously unseen footage by Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, with no brief, Jackson said, but to restore the film and tell the full story.From left: Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the studio.Apple CorpsThe Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Jackson’s retelling, and a preview of the film highlighted moments of brotherly silliness, like the band dancing and clowning in the studio. At a music industry event last year, Jeff Jones, Apple Corps’ chief executive, promised that the new film would “bust the myth” that these sessions were “the final nail in the Beatles’ coffin.” Yet Jackson said the band has had no influence over his work.“Everyone sort of thinks it’s a whitewash” because the Beatles have authorized the film, Jackson said with a laugh. “But actually it’s almost the exact opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg could not show in 1970. It’s a very unflinching look at what goes on.”For fans who remember Lindsay-Hogg’s film, or have read dismal anecdotes in any of dozens of Beatles books, Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. We see the Beatles cracking each other up at the mic, mimicking posh accents and performing absurdist slapstick as if in a “Monty Python” skit.“You see these four great friends, great musicians, who just lock in and develop these songs, and you see it all onscreen,” Jackson said.Day after day, new material takes shape. Polishing the lyrics to the song “Get Back,” McCartney and Lennon test out names for a character who departs his Arizona home: Jojo Jackson, Jojo Carter, Jojo Daphne. Shaving off the last name gives McCartney enough syllables for some more specificity in the story: “Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona …”Lennon, chewing gum, glances up to ask: “Is Tucson in Arizona?”The original “Let It Be” was shot on 16 millimeter film and blown up to grainy 35 millimeter. Generations of fans, if they’ve seen it at all, have had access to the movie only in crummy bootlegs transferred from videotape. It has never been officially released on DVD or in online formats.I told Jackson that when I finally saw “Let It Be,” 20-odd years ago, my local video rental shop required a $100 cash deposit. Jackson grabbed a vintage VHS copy and said he had long regretted not buying it when visiting the United States in the early 1980s, but the format was unplayable on his machine in New Zealand. While making “Get Back,” he tracked down an original on eBay for $200.“I don’t have a VHS machine,” he said, “so I still can’t play it.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” are strikingly clear, and help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside Fortress Beatle. Attendants pour glasses of wine as the musicians rehearse; Yoko Ono paints Japanese calligraphy while Lennon and McCartney, a few feet away, yuk their way through “Two of Us” in goofy accents.But the misery is never far away, and as the arguments grind on, it starts to seem miraculous that the Beatles can still come together at all. At one point, Harrison briefly quits the band, apparently fed up with his second-fiddle status. In the studio cafeteria, Lennon tells McCartney that the band’s rift with their lead guitarist has been “a festering wound.”After Harrison walks out, the remaining Beatles jam loudly and angrily. Starr tears through the drums. Ono, dressed all in black, stands at a microphone and wails to a wild climax — perhaps the most violent sound the Beatles ever created.A recurring theme is the band’s discomfort over the role of Ono, who sits by Lennon’s side constantly during the sessions and will come to be vilified by fans for her supposed role in the Beatles’ breakup. A companion book to the film, with further transcripts from the tapes, quotes Lennon telling McCartney: “I would sacrifice you all for her.”Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside the Beatles’ cloistered world.Apple CorpsYet it is never clear whether the Beatles’ conflicts are caused by the events of the day or by the accumulated stress of years in the spotlight. Peter Brown, who was a top executive at Apple during this time, said in an interview that the troubles began with the success of “Sgt. Pepper” in 1967.“They were doing things that they’d never done before, and they were very, very worried that it was going to take off,” Brown said. “And of course it took off like crazy. Then how do you follow that?”Some of the drama, of course, may be typical band stuff. Neil Finn, of the New Zealand group Crowded House, said that Jackson showed his band about four hours of footage earlier this year. “We all wept,” he wrote in an email.“So much of it struck a chord with me from my own rehearsals and recording experiences,” Finn added. “Paul asking John if he had any new songs, and John kind of blustering with his answer: Uh, maybe, not really. You can see the others staring in disbelief. I’ve seen that look before.”But the stakes were incredibly high for the Beatles, and the prospect of the band’s dissolution hangs like a cloud over almost the entire film. Early on, McCartney floats an idea for the still-undefined TV special. Their performance, he proposes, would be interspersed with news reports about earthquakes and other “red hot” events around the world. “And at the end,” McCartney says, “the final bulletin is: ‘The Beatles have broken up.’”To some extent, “Get Back” and the original “Let It Be” are exhibits in a study of truth. Does the footage actually show the endgame of the Beatles, or has history gotten it wrong all these years? Does the weight of the evidence point to the band being joyful and creatively fecund, or fed up with each other’s company? The answer may be: all of the above.In one of many moments of levity, Starr hoists a mug behind the drum kit.Apple CorpsIn a note included with a new reissue of the album “Let It Be,” McCartney writes that the original film “was pretty sad as it dealt with the breakup of our band, but the new film shows the camaraderie and love the four of us had between us.”Lindsay-Hogg believes that not only fans, but likely also members of the Beatles themselves, have been misreading “Let It Be” for years.“I think part of the rap that ‘Let It Be’ has had is no one has seen it for a very long time,” he said in an interview. “And it got very confused with the time it came out, which was just after they’d broken up.”Of course, the Beatles did not disband in January 1969. They went on to record “Abbey Road” later that year, with great care; most of the songs on that album, including “Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Carry That Weight” and “Something,” are heard in early stages during “Get Back.”But Jackson’s film makes clear that the end was nigh. If there is a true culprit in the breakup, it was the business conflicts that ensued during 1969, when the group tussled over its management, and Lennon and McCartney tried but failed to take control of the company that held their songwriting rights.Those problems are foreshadowed in “Get Back” with the utterance of a single name: Allen Klein, the American business manager who arrives a few days before the rooftop show to pitch his services for the band. Shortly after the events shown in “Get Back,” Lennon, Harrison and Starr all signed on with Klein; McCartney declined, and the schism was never repaired. Klein died in 2009.“Our movie doesn’t show the breaking up of the Beatles,” Jackson said, “but it shows the one singular moment in history that you could possibly say was the beginning of the end.”If Beatles’ scholarship and fandom has proved anything, it is that even a contradictory summation of the band and its influence can still hold true. The Beatles were a pop boy band that ended up pushing the creative boundaries of rock music further than anyone else; nearly every day of their existence together has been documented exhaustively, though a full accounting of their motivations is impossible.“Get Back” seems to contain all those multitudes — the delight, the tension, the fighting and the wonder of the Beatles simply playing music on the roof.“There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies,” Jackson said. “There’s no villains, there’s no heroes. It’s just a human story.”Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen. Apple Corps More

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      The Future Is Big. So Courtney Barnett Still Sings About Small Things.

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      This Australian musician’s third album, “Things Take Time, Take Time,” rolls in a breakup, therapy and the pandemic as well as death and other certainties.MELBOURNE — Courtney Barnett has been spending a lot of time thinking about the future.The Grammy-nominated Australian songwriter built a reputation and an audience from spinning the minutiae of her everyday life into sprawling, clever songs. The title of her third, “Things Take Time, Take Time,” is both a reminder and new way of thinking for Barnett, 33. The album, due Friday, largely swaps her grungy guitars for soft, sweet drum machines and urges patience and reflection in its lyrics.Barnett seems both the deliverer and recipient of its gentle prodding. A contemplative and unhurried speaker, she projects an air of calm but writes songs that betray her inner turmoil, like the metaphorical duck paddling madly beneath the smooth pond surface. In 2014 she started to gather more international attention, boosted by a performance on “The Tonight Show,” where she played “Avant Gardener,” a song chronicling a mundane day set alight by an asthma attack that lands her in an ambulance.In a September interview, she described how she’d recently opened her copy of “Comfortable With Uncertainty” by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron to a chapter titled “Start Where You Are (Again and Again)” and was struck by its message: “Like: ‘Start, start right here, right now’ — as in, don’t focus on the future so much,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that in the last few years. There’s something really peaceful in being able to just be like, ‘OK, I’m just going to do that thing — right now, for now — that I want to do, instead of projecting it into the impossible future.”Barnett was chatting in a park near her home in Melbourne. It was the city’s 221st cumulative day under strict Covid-19 lockdown, and indoor interviews were out of the question, so she grabbed a weak soy latte and found a spot in the sun. Kids who had been stuck inside for months jockeyed for attention; a woman nearby gossiped with a friend in a shirt that said “Empathy Coach.”Observations of how people interact when they think no one is watching recur often in Barnett’s songs. “Rae Street,” where she lived when she wrote the song that opens her new record, is filled with them. Her apartment there provided her with solitude after years of alternating between tour vans and living with her former partner, Jen Cloher.The song pieces her glimpses of neighborhood life together with a sense of impermanence: “Next door the kids run amok/The mother screams, ‘Don’t you ever shut up?’/And there’s one thing I know/The sun will rise today and tomorrow.” That’s about as far into the future, it seems, that she’s comfortable focusing on.During a brief gap in lockdowns last year, Barnett’s struggle to grasp what she called “the unknown elements of an unknown future” culminated in a late-night panic attack. “I walked to the emergency room at 4 a.m. and then was too embarrassed to go inside,” she wrote in an email after our interview, “and then I realized I was half-hysterical and the sun was coming up. It really knocked me around for a while.”Overwhelmed and overstimulated, the next day she took two significant steps: She started seeing a therapist, and decided to begin watching “The Sopranos” for the first time — without knowing that the opening scene shows Tony Soprano in therapy after having a panic attack.Barnett, like that beloved Jersey crime boss, tends to keep things close to her chest. While she was promoting her 2018 record “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” interviewers would often take its title as an invitation, and Barnett became skillful at sidestepping their demands for deep introspection.It “sounds a bit morbid,” Barnett explained, but her new LP is about “how to look at life and death in an open way, not a scary way.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesMuch of this time was captured by the filmmaker Danny Cohen, whose camera rolled from March 2018 through February 2021 as Barnett experienced the often mundane, sometimes spectacular life of a working musician: She toured internationally with her band; moved her guitars, clothes and notebooks into different sublets in Melbourne (spending a brief period sleeping in the mezzanine of the warehouse where Milk! Records, the label she founded, operates); and became the first female solo artist to win best rock album at the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) awards. The result of the filming, a documentary called “Anonymous Club,” screened at the Sydney Film Festival this month.Aware of her reluctance to open up on demand, Cohen gave Barnett a Dictaphone and requested she speak into it when she had something to say, to expel the “thoughts that you just reserve for your head and you’re not saying out loud,” he said in an interview. She ended up recording around 20 hours of audio.In some clips Barnett tinkers away at seeds of new song ideas. She confesses early on that the conversation she’d hoped to have about her second record — one that centered “around fragility and depression and mental health” — was “swept to the side because I was too scared to talk about anything real or heavy.”The film bridges the gap between the Barnett who felt burdened by the rigors of touring, and the one who is emerging from the world’s longest lockdown with a record that is altogether more hopeful. “Things Take Time” is a study both of the simple certainties of life and the big thing that comes after it. But in Barnett’s hands, death is not something to fear; merely something else to ponder every now and again, no bigger or more important than love or nature or parenthood or faith.Before the pandemic, catastrophic wildfires overtook parts of Australia. Feeling like there was little to feel hopeful about, “I wrote ‘Write a List of Things to Look Forward To’ then,” Barnett said of the jangly, buoyant track on the new album that typifies her “survival technique”: being “annoyingly optimistic” in the face of a widespread extinction crisis and the deaths of her grandmother and an uncle.She added, “And then Covid was the next year. It’s like, well, this song is so appropriate.” She attempted a laugh. It “sounds a bit morbid,” she explained, but the LP is about “how to look at life and death in an open way, not a scary way. A lot of the album feels like that for me: like a weirdly optimistic study of death.”The filmmaker Danny Cohen filmed Barnett from March 2018 through February 2021 for a documentary called “Anonymous Club.”OK McCausland for The New York Times“Things Take Time” includes several generous and crushed out love songs, along with “Here’s the Thing,” a track that bottles up what it means to be so aware of every gesture that you feel self-conscious every time you say anything at all. When Barnett first sent the song to Stella Mozgawa, the drummer in the band Warpaint, who produced “Things Take Time,” she knew Barnett was ready to share more of herself than she had before.“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard you sing such a stark love song,’” Mozgawa said in an interview. “I remember being quite touched by that.”As a longtime admirer of Barnett’s work, Mozgawa compared hearing the new music to being in a cinema, watching the previews and not noticing the curtains that will eventually draw back to reveal even more of the picture you realized existed. “It’s kind of like a broadening or a widening of what she’s capable of doing,” she said. “So you can see a little more of the screen, a little more of the vision.”When a friend first suggested Barnett write a list of things to look forward to during that scary, sad summer, she thought about Joshua Tree, Calif., where she wrote several songs that appear on her new album. Soon after our interview, she returned to the desert and felt the last few years come full circle.I asked her, over email, what that list would look like if she were to write it now. She replied: “I just wrote one this week. 1. Sunrise & coffee tomorrow. 2. Turning 34. 3. Playing the new album. 4. Family xmas 2022. 5. Getting a dog one day.”“Maybe life is less linear and more of a celebration of small moments,” she wrote. “I don’t know, that probably sounds so naïve.” More

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      Ed Sheeran, Streaming Star, Is No. 1 With Help From Album Sales

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      Sheeran’s “=” (pronounced “equals”) opens at the top of the Billboard 200 with modest streaming numbers for a star of his magnitude.Ed Sheeran may be one of the world’s most popular artists on music streaming services, but his latest turn at No. 1 owes a lot to old-fashioned album sales.Sheeran’s new album, “=” (pronounced “equals”), opens at the top of the Billboard chart with the equivalent of 118,000 sales in the United States, including nearly 62 million streams and 68,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.Those numbers are modest for a star of Sheeran’s magnitude. He draws 76.8 million listeners a month on Spotify, more than any other artist except Justin Bieber, and Sheeran’s 2017 song “Shape of You” is that service’s biggest hit ever, with 2.96 billion streams worldwide. (Its music video also has 5.5 billion views on YouTube.)Yet the 62 million clicks for “=” is the least number of streams for any new title at No. 1 this year, and streaming overall accounts for only about 39 percent of its total consumption in the United States. Of the 68,000 copies that were sold as complete packages, 33,000 were digital downloads, 26,000 were CDs and 9,000 were vinyl LPs, according to MRC.Also this week, Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” falls one spot to No. 2, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 3, and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” is No. 4. Megan Thee Stallion’s “Something for Thee Hotties,” a compilation of stray tracks, opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 39,000 sales.On the singles chart, Adele’s “Easy on Me” holds at No. 1 for a third week, while anticipation in the music industry builds for her new album, “30,” due Nov. 19. More

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      PinkPantheress Has 1 Million Fans on TikTok

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

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

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

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

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

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      After 14 Years, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Finally Reunite

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

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

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherYou ask, we answer. Or prevaricate. It depends!On this week’s Popcast, part of our semiregular mailbag series, the team takes questions on a range of topics:the year in Taylor Swiftthe quality of Halsey’s new musicthe state of the music videothe ways TikTok can be a lifeline for a legacy actthe direction Drake’s career should head inthe increasingly idiosyncratic vocal styles of young female pop starswhether we still buy physical mediaAnd much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More