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      Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Avoided a Collision on the Charts. (Again.)

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      Pop’s two reigning queens are often cast as rivals, but they have continually supported each other — and spaced out their album releases.In February, Taylor Swift took the stage at the Grammy Awards to accept the prize for best pop vocal album. After dutifully thanking the Recording Academy and her fans, she got down to business: “My brand-new album comes out April 19,” she said, in a surprise announcement revealing “The Tortured Poets Department.” It was a heads up for her loyal followers, as well as anyone else in the business with a spring release on the radar: If you want your new album to debut at No. 1, don’t release it on April 19. Or April 26. Or May 3, for that matter.A week later, following a teaser during a Super Bowl commercial, Beyoncé also dropped news of a new album: “Cowboy Carter” would arrive earlier than “Poets,” with breathing room, on March 29. Another pop powerhouse in the Grammy audience made her own announcement in early April: Billie Eilish will unveil her forthcoming third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” a month after Swift’s release, on May 17.Beyoncé and Swift, the 21st century’s pre-eminent pop stars, have often been cast as competitors if not rivals, a story line partly rooted in misogyny and amplified by dueling fan armies filled with stans, or superfans.For their part, the two artists have regularly dispelled the notion over the years. They were first linked, through no fault of their own, at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye West interrupted a Swift acceptance speech to advocate for her fellow nominee Beyoncé; later that night, Beyoncé brought Swift onstage to finish her remarks. In 2021, Swift shared on Instagram that Beyoncé had sent her congratulatory flowers after Swift won the album of the year Grammy for “Folklore,” calling Beyoncé “the queen of grace & greatness.” And last year, following their blockbuster stadium tours, they appeared at each other’s concert film premieres, a pointed rebuke to message-board zealots looking to sow discord.“Clearly, it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when the two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion,” Swift told Time magazine. (Representatives for Swift and Beyoncé declined to comment.)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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      The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Film Will Stream After 54 Years on Disney+

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      Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unloved — or misinterpreted? — 1970 documentary, the source for Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” will stream on Disney+.In 2021, the director Peter Jackson’s sprawling and vibrant Beatles docuseries, “The Beatles: Get Back,” streamed on Disney+ to nearly universal acclaim. The three-part epic, which ran nearly eight hours, captured the drama and frenzy as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr recorded, over the pressure-filled month of January 1969, what would become the last album that the Beatles released, “Let It Be.”As fans were well aware, Jackson’s series was culled from nearly 60 hours of behind-the-scenes footage originally shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for “Let It Be,” his little-seen, though often dismissed, 1970 documentary about those recording sessions.After its initial theatrical run, Lindsay-Hogg’s film largely disappeared for more than a half-century with the exception of low-quality VHS versions and bootlegs. Fans tend to remember it as an intriguing historical document capturing the late-stage creative flights of a seismic musical force, but also as a divorce proceeding of sorts, with stark moments of internal discord as the band hurtled toward a nasty split.By that view, “Get Back,” with its abundant moments of jokey banter and on-set clowning, was seen by some as an overdue corrective to “Let It Be.”Little surprise but Lindsay-Hogg, 83, has a very different view. The acclaimed director had a hand in inventing the music video, with his promotional films for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, and went on to win plaudits for the 1980s British mini-series “Brideshead Revisited.” He has fought for a half-century for “Let It Be” to get a second look and, in his mind, a fair shake.On May 8, he will get his wish, when “Let It Be,” meticulously restored by Jackson’s production team, begins streaming on Disney+ in collaboration with Apple Corps, the company that oversees the Beatles creative and business interests. Lindsay-Hogg spoke to The New York Times about the culmination of a long crusade. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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      Thursday Ends a 13-Year Break From New Music With a Pointed Song

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      “Application for Release From the Dream,” which the band released Friday, marks the beginning of a fresh era for a group that helped bring emo to the mainstream.Thursday, the band once described as the “great screamo hope” for helping break the shouty punk subgenre into the mainstream with its 2001 album “Full Collapse,” has returned with its first new song in 13 years on Friday, “Application for Release From the Dream.” The title alone underscores just how drastically things have changed for Thursday and its peers over the past two decades: Emo has evolved from a niche concern to a form of classic rock, and the artists who put it on the map are now in their late 40s, navigating a very different kind of life.Geoff Rickly, the band’s gregarious, garrulous frontman, spent the past decade as a multitasker in Brooklyn’s art scenes before documenting his path to sobriety with his 2023 literary debut, “Someone Who Isn’t Me.” In the past, the band’s songwriting process might start with “a Times Square hotel and a bag of coke,” he said, and would likely end with the lifelong friends barely on speaking terms.“When we write, we fight,” Rickly, 45, explained in a video interview last week. But the band has enjoyed a détente since a 2016 reunion spurred by Atlanta’s Wrecking Ball Festival, a short-lived celebration of hardcore music. “I’ve been getting along so well with my brothers, I don’t want to fight any more.”Thursday — Rickly, the guitarist Steven Pedulla, 49, and the drummer Tucker Rule, 45 — got its start in the New Jersey hardcore D.I.Y. scene, playing basements and VFW halls, and rose to become one of the leaders of a movement where melodies were often secondary to raw poetics. Though the genre quickly devolved into often-unintentional self-parody, over the past 15 years, emo has been undergoing both a re-examination and a resurgence. A new generation has been drawn into its emotional eruptions while purposefully pushing back on its Warped Tour stereotype of white men writing vengefully about exes — reflecting the post-#MeToo climate by holding even the biggest bands accountable for their past offenses and elevating more diverse viewpoints.When Thursday posted a goodbye note on its website on Nov. 22, 2011, the band didn’t rule out live performances. “At the height of our thing where things are tense and there’s all this pressure, you go, ‘What would it be like to have a normal life?’” Pedulla explained. “And now all these years later, man, I’m really miserable when I’m not doing the band.”“Application for Release From the Dream” has been a work in progress over the past year, with Rickly shuttling back and forth between New York and the band’s New Jersey studio. The track builds from moody to explosive, striking a happy medium between Thursday’s strident early work and its final full-length, “No Devolución,” which presaged a pivot of former hardcore artists to shoegaze and dream-pop. But Thursday has no plans to make a true follow-up to “No Devolución,” describing its new model as recording and releasing singles as it writes them.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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      The Ultimate Judee Sill Primer

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      A new documentary puts a spotlight on the ’70s musician. Listen to 10 of her essential songs.Greenwich EntertainmentDear listeners,I first encountered the music of Judee Sill a little over a decade ago, when, on a whim at a record store, I blind-bought a reissue of her 1973 album, “Heart Food.” It’s since become a favorite of mine — an LP that somehow marries the searching spirit of Laurel Canyon folk with the technical grandeur of Bach. Finding it impossible to settle on a single descriptor of her music, Sill once called it “occult holy Western baroque gospel.” In an interview featured in the new documentary “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill” (which is now playing in New York and available to rent on various streaming platforms), she says that what she aims to capture in her songs is “that moment of redemption, where the lowest thing and the highest thing meet.”Her life was full of those moments. By her early 20s, Sill had endured an abusive childhood and was struggling with a $150-a-day heroin addiction; one of the most succinctly characteristic facts of her youth was that she learned how to play gospel music when she was the church organist at her reform school. Following a stint in prison and the unexpected death of her only brother, she devoted herself with an almost religious fervor to becoming a great singer-songwriter.Sill is one of those artists who should have been more commercially successful than she was, and “Lost Angel” is filled with her marquee peers — Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt, David Crosby — praising her talents and speculating why it didn’t happen for her. Maybe she was too obstinate or self-destructive; maybe her vision was a tad too strange for middle-of-the-road record-buyers in the early ’70s. Or maybe her record company was too focused on promoting other musicians. Sill was the first new artist signed to David Geffen’s nascent Asylum Records, and when the two brilliant albums she made for the label failed to find a large audience, Geffen transformed, in her mind, from a savior to a scapegoat. It was probably some combination of all of these factors that kept her music in relative obscurity, and after a series of unfortunate accidents that once again triggered her drug habit, Sill succumbed to her addiction in 1979 and died at 35.The two dazzling studio albums she completed during her lifetime, her 1971 self-titled debut and the even more compositionally ambitious “Heart Food,” were out of print when she died but reissued by Rhino Records in 2003. (Jim O’Rourke also mixed some of the unfinished material that Sill intended for her third album on a collection released in 2005.) The documentary features impassioned interviews with younger artists — Weyes Blood; Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek of Big Thief — who have since discovered Sill’s music, making the case that she’s more popular and influential now than she’s ever been.Even so, Sill is hardly a household name, so I wanted to make today’s playlist an introduction to her bewitchingly beautiful music. You’ll hear highlights from both of her albums along with a transfixing demo and recordings of two other artists, the Turtles and Nash’s first band the Hollies, interpreting her songs.Sill believed deeply in music’s ability to comfort, transport and heal. So leave behind what ails you and, to paraphrase one of my favorite songs of hers, prepare to soar through mercury ripples of sky.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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      Sabrina Carpenter Drops a Perky Bop, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by girl in red, Margo Guryan, Phish 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.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Espresso’The rising pop artist Sabrina Carpenter scored a hit with the breathily sung disco throwback “Feather,” but she seems poised for an even bigger smash. Enter “Espresso,” a cheeky, summery tune that just might have the juice to propel her to the next level. Atop a mid-tempo beat that lightly recalls the muffled retro-funk of “Say So,” the song that made Doja Cat a star, Carpenter plays the unbothered temptress with winking humor: “Say you can’t sleep, baby I know, that’s that me, espresso.” Make it a double and get ready to hear this one everywhere. LINDSAY ZOLADZgirl in red, ‘I’m Back’In “I’m Back,” girl in red — the Norwegian songwriter Marie Ulven Ringheim — defies the cycles of depression. “It’s not like I wanna die,” she whisper-sings. “At least not now/I love being alive.” Quasi-Baroque keyboard arpeggios pace a track that holds back, recognizes that “Time doesn’t stop for a sad little girl” and surges as she decides, “This time I think I’m found.” One-syllable words; deep breakthroughs. JON PARELESWe 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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      Taylor Swift’s Music Returns to TikTok Despite Ongoing Dispute With UMG

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      Songs by the pop singer reappeared on TikTok despite the platform’s ongoing licensing dispute with Universal Music Group, which releases Swift’s music.When Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, went to war with TikTok earlier this year over licensing terms, songs by hundreds of its artists were removed from the platform, and have remained absent.But on Thursday, music by one very special Universal artist returned: Taylor Swift.A number of songs by Swift — whose new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out next week — have reappeared in TikTok’s official music library, where they are available for the service’s millions of users to place in the background of their own videos. Those videos have become one of the music industry’s most important promotional vehicles, with the potential to mint new hits or breathe new life into old tunes — even as many artists and labels complain about low royalties from the service.The available songs from Swift appear to be from the period since she signed with Universal in 2018, including hits like “Lover,” “Anti-Hero,” “Cruel Summer” and “Cardigan.” Also available are her “Taylor’s version” rerecordings of older hits like “Style,” “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” which were originally released by her first label, Big Machine. After Big Machine was sold in 2019 without her participation, Swift announced plans to rerecord her first six studio albums, and has already released four of those. Each went straight to No. 1.It was not immediately clear how Swift’s songs made it back to TikTok while Universal’s ban remains in place. When the company announced its plans to remove music earlier this year, it said its licensing contract with TikTok expired Jan. 31. By the early hours of Feb. 1, Universal’s music began to disappear from TikTok, and millions of videos that used the label’s music went silent.While Swift is part of Universal’s roster of artists, she owns the rights to her own recordings, as well as her songwriting rights, which are administered by the Universal Music Publishing Group, a division of the company.Representatives of Swift, Universal and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Universal, whose hundreds of artists include stars like Ariana Grande, Drake, Lady Gaga and U2, said it was withdrawing permissions for its music after it was unable to reach a new licensing deal with TikTok. The company accused TikTok of being unwilling to pay “fair value for the music,” despite its importance to the platform. Universal also voiced concerns that TikTok was “allowing the platform to be flooded with A.I.-generated recordings,” diluting the royalty pool for real, human artists.In response, TikTok accused Universal of putting “their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”The dispute has been one of the most dramatic clashes in years between the music industry and a tech platform, and it has drawn a mixed public response. While many music industry groups have supported Universal, artists have expressed worry about the loss of such a valuable promotional platform. More

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      Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.

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      For decades, recordings left at studios have languished in storage rooms and basements. Master Tape Rescue, a company of two industry vets, is coming to save them.In late 2020, Brian Kehew was working at the venerable Hollywood studio Sunset Sound when the owner asked him to help identify some tapes the Who had left behind. It was not an unusual request for Kehew, who has done tape transfers and mixes on hundreds of archival recording projects over the last 30 years, and serves as a tech and sometime backing musician for the band. He expected to find some overdubs or a safety copy of a master, nothing particularly important.When he got his hands on the reels, he was shocked: The studio was sitting on all the original two-inch multitracks of the group’s 1975 album, “The Who by Numbers,” as well as previously unreleased songs from those sessions.“I immediately contacted Pete Townshend, and we arranged to send the tapes back to England,” Kehew, a blond-haired Southern California native, said in a recent interview at his North Hollywood studio, which was lined with rare, vintage and obsolete tape machines. “The band had been looking for the tapes for years, but this was one place they hadn’t thought to check.”For Kehew, a producer of Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” and an expert on both the Beatles and Moog synthesizers, the recovery of the Who recordings underscored the fact that significant tapes “might be sitting in someone’s attic or barn or basement” and not where they belong, in a record company vault or an artist’s archive. “The obstacle to getting these tapes back in the right hands has always been the time and effort involved,” he said. “But what if there was a facile way to connect everyone that doesn’t involve a lot of hassle or red tape?”The answer may be Master Tape Rescue, a company recently started by Kehew and his partner, Danny White, a fellow music industry veteran. The company acts as an archival matchmaking service of sorts, cataloging recordings from studios or private collections and then vetting and connecting rights holders with tape holders.Shelves of recordings in an archive room above Sunset Sound, a studio in Los Angeles.Tag Christof for The New York TimesWe 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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      ‘It’s Only Life After All’ Review: Indigo Girls Documentary

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      The director Alexandria Bombach benefited from the musician Amy Ray’s archivist instincts in this warm, compelling new documentary.Indigo Girls have been going strong for over 40 years now, and maybe the key to their resilience is that they never were cool. Often, they got it worse: Even at their commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were routinely mocked for being too earnest, too poetic, too folky, too lesbian. Back then, being labeled a female, gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and commercial curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All,” a smart, compelling new documentary.The director, Alexandria Bombach, greatly benefited from Ray’s archivist instincts: The musician has held on to decades’ worth of artifacts and opened up her vault — 1981 rehearsals, recorded on cassette when Ray and Saliers were in their teens, are startlingly crisp documents of a budding chemistry, for example.From this clay Bombach has sculpted an affecting portrait of two women who have stuck to their beliefs and, just as important, their loyalty to each other. Existing fans will be mesmerized, but non-fans like me should also get a kick out of “It’s Only Life After All.” The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media — their dramatic, and very funny, reading of a withering 1989 review in The New York Times is a highlight — along with their personal struggles and steadfast political engagement for causes, including the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth.Now that the band is experiencing a cultural moment — its hit “Closer to Fine” was prominently featured in “Barbie,” and an indie jukebox musical movie set to their songs, “Glitter & Doom,” came out last month — it is delightful to see them have the last laugh.It’s Only Life After AllNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More