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      Taylor Swift Is No. 1 Again, With Little Competition on the Way

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      “The Tortured Poets Department” earns a sixth week atop the Billboard 200, while the latest from Twenty One Pilots opens at No. 3 with big numbers for a rock album.How much longer can Taylor Swift hold at No. 1 with “The Tortured Poets Department”?This week she is atop the Billboard 200 album chart for a sixth consecutive time, after a monster debut in April and a series of challenges — each handily fended off — from Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and the rapper Gunna. The numbers for “Tortured Poets” are now cooling slightly, but don’t count on it slipping down the chart anytime soon. Swift’s momentum remains strong, she has plenty of tricks up her sleeve and doesn’t face much superstar competition in the near future, pending any surprise drops. (On next week’s chart, Swift will compete with the K-pop group Ateez, whose last album, opened at No. 1.)The last album to spend at least its first six weeks at No. 1 was Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” which held the top for its first 12 weeks last year, then returned to notch a total of 19. Before that, it was Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” with 10 in 2021. Can Swift reach those same heights with “Tortured Poets”? (Back in 2020, her “Folklore” was No. 1 for its first six weeks, before logging two further times at the top.)In its latest week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 175,000 sales in the United States, which included 174 million streams and 41,000 sales as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total is down 54 percent from the week before, when Swift went head-to-head with Eilish’s new “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” But it is still performing well at a time when most other new albums aren’t; so far this year, average opening-week sales for a non-Taylor Swift No. 1 album are about 131,000.Swift has also demonstrated a highly effective strategy in releasing successive “versions” of her albums. In the days before last week’s chart, when she was competing with Eilish, Swift released six limited digital editions with bonus tracks. Over the weekend, she announced two CDs, each with an exclusive acoustic track. Week after week, fans keep buying them, helping Swift stay strong on the chart.Also this week, Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” holds at No. 2 for a second week, while the alternative duo Twenty One Pilots’ new “Clancy” opens at No. 3 with what Billboard said are the biggest numbers for any rock album so far this year: the equivalent of 143,000 sales, including 113,000 copies sold as a complete package.Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4, and his three-and-a-half-year-old “Dangerous” is No. 6. RM, from the K-pop supergroup BTS, opens at No. 5 with his second studio album, “Right Place, Wrong Person.” More

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      Doug Ingle, the Voice of Iron Butterfly, Is Dead at 78

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      His biggest hit, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” was a 17-minute psychedelic journey that epitomized 1960s rock indulgence. But after just a few years in the limelight, he walked away.Doug Ingle, the lead singer and organist of Iron Butterfly, the band that turned a purportedly misheard lyric into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” the 17-minute magnum opus that propelled acid rock into the outer reaches of excess in the late 1960s, died on May 24. He was 78.His death was confirmed in a social media post by his son Doug Ingle Jr. The post did not say where he died or specify a cause.Mr. Ingle was the last surviving member of the classic lineup of Iron Butterfly, the pioneering hard rock act he helped found in 1966. The band released its first three albums within a year, starting with “Heavy” in early 1968, and, after a lineup shuffle, cemented its place in rock lore with its second album, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” released that July.“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” spent 140 weeks on the Billboard album chart, peaking at No. 4, and was said to have sold some 30 million copies worldwide. A radio version of the title song, whittled to under three minutes, made it to No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.But it was the full-length album version — taking up the entire second side of the LP in all of its messy glory — that became a signature song of the tie-dye era. With its truncheonlike guitar riff and haunting aura that called to mind a rock ’n’ roll “Dies Irae,” the song is considered a progenitor of heavy metal and encapsulated Mr. Ingle’s ambition at the time:“I want us to become known as leaders of hard rock music,” Mr. Ingle, then 22, said in a 1968 interview with The Globe and Mail newspaper of Canada. “Trend setters and creators, rather than imitators.”A psychedelic dirge but also a love song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” captured a 1960s spirit of yin-yang duality — much like the band’s name itself. There have been varying origin stories regarding its mysterious title, with its overtones of Eastern mysticism; the band’s drummer, Ron Bushy, said in a 2020 interview with the magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby that it grew out of an inebriated garble.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Revisiting the Women Who Defined Lilith Fair’s Sound

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      Hear songs by Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, Meredith Brooks and more.Sarah McLachlan onstage at Lilith Fair.Susan Farley for The New York TimesDear listeners,Every once in a while, it’s good to be reminded that Sarah McLachlan is more than just the voice behind that depressing pet commercial that makes me look away from my TV. (You know the one, for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I’m getting a lump in my throat just thinking about it.) The writer Grayson Haver Currin provided just such a reminder, in an incisive profile of McLachlan published by The New York Times this week.McLachlan is also, among other things, the leader of a school that provides free musical education to children, an avid surfer (which I learned from the article!) and, of course, one of the founders of Lilith Fair, a highly successful if unjustly stereotyped late-90s concert tour that celebrated female artists.Lilith Fair came during a period of critical and commercial prosperity for female artists in a number of traditionally male-dominated genres like rock, folk and that wide-ranging radio format called “alternative.” But as often happens when women gain power and visibility in a certain space, it also provoked a backlash. Even as it was raking in millions, Lilith Fair was the butt of many a late-night TV joke. As the critic Rob Sheffield put it in a 2019 oral history of Lilith Fair for Vanity Fair, “Certainly nobody on late-night TV comedy in 1997 felt obligated or encouraged to make jokes about Ozzfest or the Horde tour.”Lilith Fair wasn’t perfect and is not beyond scrutiny. Most of the performers booked in its first year were white, though the bills in its second and third years became more diverse. And I’m not here to argue that every act who played Lilith Fair has stood the test of time.Still, many have: Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris … I could go on and on. But instead, I made a playlist.For brevity’s sake, I limited myself to artists who played on Lilith Fair’s inaugural 1997 tour. That still gave me plenty of great songs to choose from, as you’ll hear. I’ve included some obvious choices (did you really think I would leave off a certain karaoke classic by Meredith Brooks?) and some deeper cuts you may have forgotten about (that Tracy Bonham song still rips). Although an attempt to revive the tour in 2010 didn’t quite work, I do hear the influence of Lilith Fair artists in this current generation of pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Haim and, yes, even Taylor Swift, which means it’s an especially interesting time to look back at the artists who defined the so-called Lilith Fair sound.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eminem Loses the Magic, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Clairo, Nathy Peluso, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Eminem, ‘Houdini’Eminem attempts to recapture past glories on his exhausting new song “Houdini,” the first single from his upcoming 12th album, “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce).” Atop a garish, carnivalesque beat that interpolates a sample of the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra,” the M.C.’s crass alter ego Slim Shady surveys the current cultural moment and strings together some stiltedly rapped jokes, desperate to offend at every turn. Oldest trick in the book. LINDSAY ZOLADZTwenty One Pilots, ‘Navigating’“Clancy,” the new album by the two-man band Twenty One Pilots, is the fourth installment in a series of concept albums. But “Navigating” doesn’t necessarily need a back story. It’s a psychological crisis, as Tyler Joseph sings about feeling dazed and disassociated, unable to speak but desperate for connection: “Pardon my delay — I’m navigating my head” is his closest explanation. The track is a buzzing, galloping, pumping merger of punk-pop and electro, opening with an arena-sized “Hey-oh” chant and trying to get through the crisis on sheer momentum. JON PARELESGirl Scout, ‘I Just Needed You to Know’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Going Behind the Scenes of ‘Popcast (Deluxe)’

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      The weekly culture roundup show, hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, celebrates its first anniversary on May 31.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.When you walk into the “Popcast (Deluxe)” recording studio on the second floor of the New York Times office in Manhattan, the first thing you notice is two colorful chairs in the center of the room with black microphones perched on the seat backs.“We were thinking ‘elevated basement,’” said Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times and a host of the show, a weekly culture review on YouTube. “It’s a little ‘Wayne’s World.’”Mr. Caramanica and his co-host, the Times pop music reporter Joe Coscarelli, picked out the furniture for their studio at Horseman Antiques on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The chairs are among many quirky personal touches they’ve added to the space — books, photography from their work at The Times, lots of junk food — that, like the show, blend a highbrow and lowbrow aesthetic.Both Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli were treading new ground when they began hosting “Popcast (Deluxe),” The Times’s first video podcast, together one year ago. The show is a spinoff of “Popcast,” a weekly pop music podcast that Mr. Caramanica has hosted since 2016. For the “deluxe” version with a broader view of pop culture, the idea was to take something that was already working — the easy and playful rapport between Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli, a frequent “Popcast” guest — and adapt it for YouTube, a video platform that podcasts were increasingly moving into.“We want to go where smart, curious, pop-culture-interested people are living,” Mr. Coscarelli said. “YouTube was the obvious next place.”The pair records on Mondays and releases segments of the conversation throughout the week on YouTube, as well as a full audio episode on Wednesdays. For the week of May 13, Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli had decided to cover the feud between the hip-hop giants and rivals Drake and Kendrick Lamar, as well as Zendaya’s star turn in the tennis film “Challengers,” and they allowed a Times Insider reporter to observe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Lennon’s Guitar From ‘Help!’ Is Sold for $2.9 Million at Auction

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      After appearing in multiple albums by the Beatles, the instrument was forgotten for more than 50 years before it turned up in the attic of a British countryside home.A recently discovered guitar that John Lennon used to record multiple Beatles songs in the 1960s before it went missing for 50 years has sold at auction for $2.9 million, becoming one of the most valuable pieces of memorabilia from the band.The 12-string acoustic guitar, called the Hootenanny, was believed to be lost after Mr. Lennon and his bandmate George Harrison used it to record the 1965 Beatles albums “Rubber Soul” and “Help!” and the soundtrack to the band’s film of the same name, said Julien’s Auctions, the Los Angeles-based auction house that handled the sale on Wednesday.Later that year, Mr. Lennon gifted the 1964 guitar, made by the German instrument manufacturer Framus, to Gordon Waller, a member of the British pop duo Peter & Gordon. Mr. Waller passed it on to one of his road managers, who took the guitar to his home in the rural British countryside and tossed it in the attic, the auction house said.More than 50 years later, a man in Britain discovered the guitar in his parents’ attic as they were moving out of the house, Darren Julien, a co-founder of Julien Auctions, said in a video. After they found it — along with its original guitar case — they alerted the auction house in March, Mr. Julien said.“The son told us that he had always heard his dad talk about this guitar, but he’d believed that it was lost,” said Martin Nolan, another co-founder of Julien’s Auctions, in the video.The auction house consulted with Andy Babiuk, a Beatles expert who has authenticated the band’s memorabilia in the past, to verify the guitar. After comparing the instrument’s wood grain and the wear patterns to those in archival images, Mr. Babiuk determined that the guitar was the one played by Mr. Lennon, the auction house said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sarah McLachlan Is Resurfacing

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      Sarah McLachlan was just 30 hours from beginning her first full-band tour in a decade, and she could not sing.She was in the final heave of preparation for eight weeks of shows stretching through late November that commemorate “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” the sophisticated 1993 album that turned her into an avatar for the sensitive, mysterious singer-songwriters of ’90s radio. But three days into a string of seven-hour rehearsals, her voice collapsed, the high notes so long her hallmark dissolving into a pitchy wheeze.So onstage in a decommissioned Vancouver hockey arena, a day before a sold-out benefit for her three nonprofit music schools, McLachlan only mouthed along to her songs, shaking her head but smiling whenever she reached for a note and missed.“It only goes away when I project, push out,” she said backstage in a near-whisper following the first of the day’s mostly mute run-throughs. She slipped a badge that read “Vocal Rest” around her neck and winked. “Luckily, that’s only a third of what I do.”For the last two decades, McLachlan, 56, has contentedly receded from the spotlight and the music industry she helped reimagine with the women-led festival Lilith Fair. Since 2008, she has been a single mother to India and Taja, two daughters from her former marriage. With rippling muscles that suggest a lean triathlete, she is now a devoted surfer, hiker and skier who talks about pushing her body until it breaks. Though she writes every morning, waking up with a double espresso at the piano in her home outside Vancouver, she has focused on motherhood and the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, offering free instruction to thousands of Canadian children since 2002.A few years ago, she finished a set of songs about a pernicious breakup but reckoned the world didn’t need them; she hasn’t released an album of original material since 2014. “What do I want to talk about?” she said months earlier during a video interview from her home, swaying in a hammock chair. “I’m just another wealthy, middle-aged white woman.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bill Walton’s Long, Special Relationship With the Grateful Dead

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      “It wasn’t like he was a fan,” the drummer Mickey Hart said. “He was part of our family.”Bill Walton played 604 basketball games in college and the N.B.A. over the course of his Hall of Fame career. But Walton, who died Monday from cancer at 71, wrote in a 2016 autobiography that he had attended more than 869 concerts by his most beloved musical act, the Grateful Dead.“He loved the Grateful Dead I believe as much as we in the Grateful Dead have loved the Grateful Dead,” Mickey Hart, one of the band’s two drummers and a good friend of Walton’s, said in an interview.“It wasn’t like he was a fan,” added Hart, who is currently performing a residency with a successor act, Dead & Company, at the Sphere in Las Vegas. “He was part of our family.”Walton grew up in San Diego and first became famous for his basketball skills at U.C.L.A., where he won two national titles under the legendary coach John Wooden. Over a professional career attenuated by injuries, he earned a Most Valuable Player Award and championship titles with the Portland Trail Blazers and the Boston Celtics.Walton and the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart at a 2011 N.B.A. game in Sacramento. Rocky Widner/NBAE, via Getty ImagesHe stayed famous, including as a prolific television commentator, thanks to a winningly oddball style and crunchy interests, like cycling and left-leaning politics. And his personality seemed perfectly suited for — and summarized by — his lifelong love of his fellow California institution, the Grateful Dead.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More