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      in Music

      Esperanza Spalding’s Latest Surprise, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear the jazz musician’s team-up with the Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento, plus tracks from Saweetie, Omar Apollo 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.Milton Nascimento and Esperanza Spalding, ‘Outubro’The ever-surprising bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding persuaded the mystical and ingeniously tuneful Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento, 81, to collaborate on a full album that was recorded in 2023 and is due in August. Its preview single is “Outubro” (“October”), a song that Nascimento originally wrote and recorded in the 1960s. Its asymmetrical melody carries lyrics that reflect on solitude, mortality and the possibility of joy. Nascimento no longer has the pure, otherworldly vocal tone of his youth, but Spalding bolsters him, singing in Portuguese alongside him and probing the harmonies with springy bass lines. Near the end, she comes up with a leaping, scat-singing line that he eventually joins, still enjoying what his composition can inspire. JON PARELESCassandra Jenkins, ‘Delphinium Blue’The Brooklyn singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins delivers “Delphinium Blue,” the second single from her upcoming third album, “My Light, My Destroyer,” with a slow, cleareyed poise. Among glacially paced synthesizers and gentle percussion, she describes the sensory overload of working in a flower shop, and daydreaming about someone special when business is light. “I see your eyes in the delphinium, too,” she sings, as beauty blooms all around her. “I’ve become a servant to their blue.” LINDSAY ZOLADZOmar Apollo, ‘Dispose of Me’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

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Billie Eilish Dares to Write (Twisted) Love Songs on ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’

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      “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third album, is both concise and far-reaching.“Twenty-one took a lifetime,” Billie Eilish, 22, sings in “Skinny,” the song that opens her third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”Any woman her age could say that; it’s just math. But even before she was old enough to vote, Eilish had packed a lifetime of accomplishments into a career that she began in 2015 as a teenager uploading songs to SoundCloud. Since then, Eilish has racked up billions of streams, an armload of Grammy Awards, two Oscars and a full-length documentary. On “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” she deliberately tamps down some pop expectations while she warily embraces others.Eilish has both the time-honored musicianship that awards shows admire and the metanarrative savvy of her digital-era generation. Countless imitators have learned from — and been emboldened by — her blend of raw revelations, graceful melodies and wily productions, abetted by her brother and songwriting partner, Finneas.Their historically grounded pop recombines musical theater, parlor songs, punk, folk, electronica, soundtracks, bossa nova, industrial rock and more. Eilish brings to all of them the poise of a vintage crooner: the capacity to float above beats and jolts, to treat a microphone as a confidant. Her voice can be breathy and intimate or eye-rolling and sardonic; at very strategic moments, she reveals her power to belt.Eilish’s 2019 debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” mapped gothic nightmares, adolescent obsessions and lingering traumas along with an occasional giggle. Her second, “Happier Than Ever” in 2021, reacted directly to the attention, shock, exploitation, stalking, exhaustion and newfound power that success brought her.“Skinny” is a hushed update on Eilish’s superstardom. “Am I acting my age now?/Am I already on the way out?,” she sings, along with thoughts on her body shape, finding nontoxic love, her sense of isolation and a resigned reaction to social media: “The internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny/and somebody’s gotta feed it.”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

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Are We in a New Golden Age for the Movie Soundtrack?

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      Between “Barbie,” “Across the Spider-Verse” and now “I Saw the TV Glow,” directors are making the case for the film album experience.After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” the new film from the director Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: I need this soundtrack.The genre-defying movie is a surreal story about two high schoolers in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that draws on horror, ’90s television and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender. But it also boasts some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by the artist yeule and performances from King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear onscreen as musicians at a club the characters visit.The full soundtrack has more to love: The swelling emotion of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” and the throwback rock of Proper’s “The 90s,” with lyrics about the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Listening, I felt like a kid again.That was just Schoenbrun’s intention. The director thought the film needed a “great teen angst soundtrack.” But they were also nostalgic for the idea of soundtracks in general. They remembered thinking, “‘Wait, where did those go?’ You know, because the soundtracks of my youth were such a huge part of what brought me to movies,’” they said in a video call.Citing soundtrack “canon picks” like “Donnie Darko,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Garden State,” which turns 20 this year, they admit these are “pretty obvious slash perhaps a little embarrassing” choices. I relate. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s filled with soundtracks, and one of the most frequently played was “Garden State.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s indie breakout — about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis who goes home for his mother’s funeral — was as much a cultural moment as the actual film, going platinum and elevating bands like Frou Frou and the Shins.Indeed, the beginning of the aughts felt like the last great heyday for the soundtrack. Think of the indie vibes of “Garden State,” the bluegrass foot-stompers of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or even the pop rock of “Shrek.” (If you want embarrassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      John Barbata, Turtles and C.S.N.Y. Drummer, Dies at 79

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      Barbata belonged to marquee bands of the late ’60s and ’70s, drumming on smash hits such as “Happy Together,” the first song he recorded with the Turtles.John Barbata, the drummer for the Turtles, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who walked away from rock music at the height of his career, has died. He was 79.His death was announced in a social media post by Jefferson Airplane on Monday. A cause of death was not given and a list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Barbata joined the Turtles after leaving his high school band and enjoyed success almost immediately, drumming on the band’s best-known track, “Happy Together,” released in 1967.“I heard that the Turtles were looking for a drummer, they called me down to the studio to try me out on some session work, the first song we recorded was ‘Happy Together,’” Mr. Barbata wrote on his now defunct website, archived by web.archive.org.“We got it in one take,” he said.The song spent three weeks at No. 1 and became a pop classic. It’s been performed by acts as varied as Mel Tormé, Weezer, Miley Cyrus and the punk band Simple Plan.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

    • 63 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      The Best of Cass Elliot

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      Hear her extraordinary range in 10 tracks.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesDear listeners,First of all, I’d like to thank the guest playlisters who filled in for me last week, Caryn Ganz and Ben Sisario. Caryn paid tribute to Madonna’s Celebration Tour (she’s seen it live seven times, which officially makes her an expert) and Ben supplemented his great profile of Mdou Moctar with a thorough primer on African guitar greats. That’s what I call something for everyone.I’m especially grateful to Caryn and Ben for taking over last week because it allowed me to finish a longer piece I’ve been wanting to write for some time: an essay about the life, legacy and music of Cass Elliot. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Elliot’s untimely death, which thwarted a brilliant career that could have branched out in so many directions. But it also spawned a frustratingly persistent and cruel myth about a certain ham sandwich, which Elliot’s daughter hopes to squash once and for all in her lovely new memoir, “My Mama, Cass.” I wanted to contribute to dispelling it, too, and bring the focus back to her charismatic artistry.Though Elliot died at 32, she left behind a robust and eclectic body of work that is ripe for rediscovery. And since I did not have time to delve too deeply into her discography in my article, I figured an Amplifier playlist was in order.Elliot has one of those voices that just puts a smile on my face, plain and simple. But there’s also nothing plain or simple about the particular type of joy her voice conveys. Hers is a hard-won happiness, as heard on perhaps her most beloved solo single, “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” a song of self that stays true in the face of opposition.An endlessly adaptable vocalist, Elliot could sing in a staggering number of styles, and I tried to highlight her range on this playlist. It pulls from pop (her indelible work with the Mamas & the Papas, the group that made her famous), rock (her collaboration with Traffic’s Dave Mason) and even some cabaret. Like watching old interview clips of her on YouTube (an activity I highly recommend; she was an uncommonly sharp talk-show guest), listening to Elliot’s music is a bittersweet experience, because it gets you imagining all the possible futures that could have been.Might she have become a star on Broadway or fronted a hard rock band? Anything seems possible. But there’s also plenty of enjoyment to be found in the bounty of music she left us. So clear your throat, throw on your most colorful caftan and get ready to sing along.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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Daniel Kramer, Who Photographed Bob Dylan’s Rise, Dies at 91

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      For 366 days, he captured intimate images of the singer-songwriter as he changed the look and sound of the 1960s.Daniel Kramer, a photojournalist who captured Bob Dylan’s era-tilting transformation from acoustic guitar-strumming folky to electric prince of rock in the mid-1960s, and who shot the covers for his landmark albums “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited,” died on April 29 in Melville, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 91.His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his nephew Brian Bereck.Rolling Stone magazine once described Mr. Kramer as “the photographer most closely associated with Bob Dylan.” But that designation seemed highly improbable at the outset.Although Mr. Dylan had already begun his rise to global fame — he released his third album, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” in early 1964 — Mr. Kramer knew little about him.That changed in February 1964, when he watched the 22-year-old Mr. Dylan perform his rueful ballad “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” on “The Steve Allen Show.” The song details a real event in which a Black woman died after being struck with a cane by a wealthy white man at a white-tie Baltimore party.“I hadn’t heard or seen him,” Mr. Kramer said in a 2012 interview with Time magazine. “I didn’t know his name, but I was riveted by the power of the song’s message of social outrage and to see Dylan reporting like a journalist through his music and lyrics.”As a young Brooklynite trying to carve out a career as a freelance photographer, Mr. Kramer decided he had to arrange a photo shoot with the budding legend. He spent six months dialing the office of Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. “The office always said no,” Mr. Kramer said in a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. Finally, six months later, Mr. Grossman himself took his call. “He just said, ‘O.K., come up to Woodstock next Thursday.’”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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Daniel Kramer’s Year With Bob Dylan

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      For six months in 1964, the photojournalist Daniel Kramer, who died at 91 on April 29, dialed the office of Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, to ask if he could photograph Mr. Dylan, a rising star at the time. Finally, Mr. Grossman said yes.What was meant to be a one-hour shoot turned into a five-hour shoot, which turned into a 366-day photographic odyssey in which Mr. Kramer was granted unrivaled access to Mr. Dylan. He captured rare behind-the-scenes images of the artist at home, on tour and at recording sessions.Mr. Kramer’s images were soon popping up in publications around the world. He also shot cover photos for two of Mr. Dylan’s best-known albums.Here is a look at some of those images.Mr. Kramer’s original photograph for the cover of Mr. Dylan’s 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.” (The woman in the photo is Sally Grossman, the wife of Mr. Dylan’s manager at the time. She died in 2021.)Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkMr. Dylan was surrounded by fans after a concert in Philadelphia in October 1964.Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyMr. Dylan at the time of the Philadelphia concert.Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyMr. Dylan with the singer Joan Baez in Woodstock in 1964.Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyAway from the stage, Mr. Kramer managed to capture Mr. Dylan in rare moments of downtime. Rolling Stone magazine once described him as “the photographer most closely associated with Bob Dylan.”Mr. Dylan in 1964. Although he had already begun his rise to global fame, Mr. Kramer knew little about him until he saw him perform on television that February.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkMr. Dylan during the recording of his album “Bringing It All Back Home.”Daniel Kramer, via Kramer familyMr. Dylan in performance at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkAt a Greenwich Village cafe in 1965.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkBefore his photo shoot with Mr. Dylan, Mr. Kramer was a young Brooklynite trying to carve out a career as a freelance photographer. He went on to shoot portraits of luminaries, always maintaining his ability to connect with them on an intimate level.Mr. Kramer said that the historic significance of what was unfolding before his lens was not always apparent to him at the time. Daniel Kramer, via Kramer family“Bob didn’t really want to be Woody Guthrie,” Mr. Kramer said. “He wanted to be Elvis Presley.”Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkOut for a stroll in Philadelphia.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New YorkMr. Kramer took the cover image for “Highway 61 Revisited” in 1965, in front of the Manhattan building where Mr. Dylan’s manager lived.Daniel Kramer, via Staley-Wise Gallery, New York More

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      in Music

      The Legacy of Steve Albini, Rock’s Uncompromising Force

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicSteve Albini, who died last week at 61, was one of the most admired, and most divisive, figures in rock. He was an expert audio engineer who recorded ultra-classics by Nirvana, PJ Harvey and Pixies, along with key underground releases by the Jesus Lizard, Slint, Low, Neurosis and many, many others. For decades, he also relished his role as a brutally insulting critic — sometimes of the bands he worked with — and a gadfly who pushed uncomfortable buttons about race, politics and sex. He came to regret that, owning up to his history of provocation for its own sake.On this week’s Popcast, guest hosted by the music reporter Ben Sisario, we delve into Albini’s musical legacy and his singular role as a moral scourge in rock and of the music business overall.Guests:Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who interviewed Albini last year in The GuardianJoe Gross, freelance writer and former critic at The Austin American-StatesmanConnect 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