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      Judith Hill Sang With Pop Royalty. Now She Is Composing Her Own Story.

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      The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist was close to Michael Jackson and Prince. After their deaths, her world crumbled and she had to rebuild on her own.The first time the musician Judith Hill performed her anguished requiem “Black Widow” for an audience, she wept, right onstage.The song’s title is an epithet that has been directed at her for years by tabloids and trolls because as a vocalist and artist, she had been close with two of pop’s biggest stars shortly before their deaths. She was Michael Jackson’s duet partner and performed at his televised memorial in 2009. And for two years before Prince’s fatal overdose in April 2016, she was his protégée, collaborator and more. They shared what she has called “an intense relationship”; he told her he loved her.Prince’s sudden, accidental death derailed her promising career — which he had been guiding — and she spiraled into deep grief, depression and self-doubt as online cruelty rained down. It took years before she was able to face what happened, personally or musically.“It was a deep wound,” she said onstage at a recent showcase at Mercury Lounge in Lower Manhattan, after the soulful, fierce “Black Widow.” Then she brushed her tears away — “enough of that” — and soon started another number, “Dame De La Lumière,” a detailed tribute to her mother and grandmother, with a rippling, urgent chorus that has become her anthem: “Bad times make strong women.”Both songs are on “Letters From a Black Widow,” her new record, due Friday. It is a concept album that reckons forcefully with her past — not just the boldfaced part, but also the myriad woes and distortions that conspired to make her feel fearful and less-than. The dozen tracks that finally tumbled out chart her path of self-reflection and forgiveness, with achingly personal lyrics paired with muscular funk, soul and blues, and backed by her shredding, soaring guitar. It’s a new reach for an artist known mostly for her acrobatic and emotional vocals; she wanted her determined message to resonate, too.“I felt unmuted,” she said, “like I was free to say something now, because I felt like I had really put a muzzle on myself for so long, and was just afraid. And it was very, very liberating to do that.”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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      Taylor Swift and Post Malone’s Regretful Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Arooj Aftab, Cigarettes After Sex, Claire Rousay 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.Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone, ‘Fortnight’“I love you, it’s ruining my life,” Taylor Swift and a subdued Post Malone sing to each other, full of breathy regret, in “Fortnight,” the song that opens Swift’s new double album, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” They’re both obsessing over a brief but unforgettable affair, even though both of the song’s narrators are now married — and, to make things worse, neighbors. “Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her,” Swift notes. The music is a measured march with vocal harmonies wafting through electronic spaces where the recriminations can smolder.Cigarettes After Sex, ‘Dark Vacay’Greg Gonzalez, the songwriter behind Cigarettes After Sex, sets decadent, morbid, sex-and-drugs scenarios to plush, slow-motion retro-rock that David Lynch might appreciate. In “Dark Vacay” he’s taking pills, “sipping Château Lafite Rothschild” and listening “to the last message that you left/Then the voice from the suicide hotline.” He’s calm, even a little self-satisfied, as he invites someone to “Feel it all around you/Crash and fall.”Arooj Aftab, ‘Raat Ki Rani’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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      Taylor Swift Lyrics: Who’s Mentioned on ‘Tortured Poets Department?

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      Ex-boyfriends may be alluded to. Travis Kelce, too, fans believe. And some actual poets.When Taylor Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department,” on Friday at midnight, her fan base quickly got to work decoding the album, looking for layers of meaning and insight into Ms. Swift’s life. Of course, that includes the pop singer’s romantic history.Like many of her past works, the songs on this album — which features over a dozen additional tracks as part of an extended album called “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology” — are laden with names and references, many of which appear to be to real people from Ms. Swift’s universe and the literary canon. At least two poets, Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith, are mentioned.Here’s a look at some of those characters.Matty HealyMarcelo Hernandez/Getty ImagesPlenty of lines from “Tortured Poets” have fans guessing that certain songs — including “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” “The Black Dog” and “Down Bad” — may be about Matty Healy, the frontman for the 1975 who was spotted out and about with Taylor on several occasions last spring. One clue Swifties are latching on to: On the “The Black Dog,” Ms. Swift refers to the band the Starting Line. Mr. Healy covered one of the band’s songs while he was touring last spring. And then there is the much-discussed reference to a person Ms. Swift describes as a “tattooed golden retriever” on the album’s title track. Mr. Healy seems to fit the bill, according to her fans.Travis KelceFrank Franklin II/Associated PressMs. Swift’s fans have been floating the notion that the many sports references in the track “The Alchemy” allude to the football player Travis Kelce, the singer’s current boyfriend. “So when I / Touch down, call the amateurs and cut ’em from the team / Ditch the clowns, get the crown, baby, I’m the one to beat,” she sings in the chorus. “Where’s the trophy? / He just comes running over to me,” she adds in the bridge. But there is some debate, with some fans noting that her use of the term “blokes” would seem to imply the song is not about an American. (A winking line about “heroin but this time with an E” has some guessing the song is about Mr. Healy, who has previously spoken about his drug use.)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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      Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholars Have Thoughts on ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

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      The students taking Harvard University’s class on the singer are studying up. Their final papers are due at the end of the month.Fans of Taylor Swift often study up for a new album, revisiting the singer’s older works to prepare to analyze lyrics and song titles for secret messages and meanings.“The Tortured Poets Department” is getting much the same treatment, and perhaps no group of listeners was better prepared than the students at Harvard University currently studying Ms. Swift’s works in an English class devoted entirely to the artist. The undergraduate course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” is taught by Stephanie Burt, who has her students comparing Ms. Swift’s songs to works by poets and writers including Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.On Thursday night, about 50 students from the class gathered in a lecture hall on campus to listen to Ms. Swift’s new album. Mary Pankowski, a 22-year-old senior studying history of art and architecture, wore a cream sweatshirt she bought at Ms. Swift’s Eras tour last year. The group made beaded friendship bracelets to celebrate the new album, she said.When the clock struck midnight, the classroom erupted into applause, and the analysis began. First, the group listened through the album once without discussing, just taking it all in.Certain lines, however, immediately caused a stir, said Samantha Wilhoit, a junior studying government — like a reference to the singer Charlie Puth and the scathing lyrics to the song “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Ms. Wilhoit, 21, said.A line from the song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” in which Ms. Swift sings, “I cry a lot but I am so productive,” also seemed to resonate, Ms. Wilhoit said, laughing.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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      7 Songs That Reference Tortured Poets

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      Taylor Swift said she channeled them; Patti Smith, Lana Del Rey, the Smiths and others cited them.Patti Smith.Charlie Steiner — Highway 67/Getty ImagesDear listeners,Perhaps you have heard that Taylor Swift has a new album out today — just a wild guess! — and that it is called “The Tortured Poets Department.” That title alone generated chatter before anyone had heard a note, and it got me thinking about some of my favorite songs that reference poets. And so I filled my inkwell, put a quill pen to my chin and cried, “A playlist is in order!”Though there are no Swift songs on this mix, it does feature the two poets she name-checks on her latest album: Dylan Thomas (in a shaggy ode written by Better Oblivion Community Center) and that most poetic of rock stars, Patti Smith. It is also significantly shorter than “The Tortured Poets Department” and its 15-song companion piece (known together as “The Anthology”), which, as I suggest in my review of Swift’s album, is not necessarily a bad thing. And no, my friends, this playlist does not contain any Charlie Puth.It does, however, highlight songs by the Smiths, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey and more. Grab your favorite notebook, find a particularly pastoral patch of grass to lie in, and press play.Keats and Yeats are on your side,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Better Oblivion Community Center: “Dylan Thomas”There are plenty of quotable lines on this jangly, stomping highlight from the sole album released by Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers’s side project, Better Oblivion Community Center, but I am partial to this one: “I’m getting used to these dizzy spells/I’m takin’ a shower at the Bates Motel.”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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 New Album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Could Use an Editor: Review

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      Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth?! — is strangely humanizing.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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      Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ Arrives

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      The pop superstar’s latest album was preceded by a satellite radio channel, a word game, a return to TikTok and an actual library. For her fans, more is always welcome.Taylor Swift was already the most ubiquitous pop star in the galaxy, her presence dominating the music charts, the concert calendar, the Super Bowl, the Grammys.Then it came time for her to promote a new album.In the days leading up to the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, Swift became all but inescapable, online and seemingly everywhere else. Her lyrics were the basis for an Apple Music word game. A Spotify-sponsored, Swift-branded “library installation,” in muted pink and gray, popped up in a shopping complex in Los Angeles. In Chicago, a QR code painted on a brick wall directed fans to another Easter egg on YouTube. Videos on Swift’s social media accounts, showing antique typewriters and globes with pins, were dissected for clues about her music. SiriusXM added a Swift radio station; of course it’s called Channel 13 (Taylor’s Version).About the only thing Swift didn’t do was an interview with a journalist.At this stage in Swift’s career, an album release is more than just a moment to sell music; it’s all but a given that “The Tortured Poets Department” will open with gigantic sales numbers, many of them for “ghost white,” “phantom clear” and other collector-ready vinyl variants. More than that, the album’s arrival is a test of the celebrity-industrial complex overall, with tech platforms and media outlets racing to capture whatever piece of the fan frenzy they can get.Threads, the newish social media platform from Meta, primed Swifties for their idol’s arrival there, and offered fans who shared Swift’s first Threads post a custom badge. Swift stunned the music industry last week by breaking ranks with her record label, Universal, and returning her music to TikTok, which Universal and other industry groups have said pays far too little in royalties. Overnight, TikTok unveiled “The Ultimate Taylor Swift In-App Experience,” offering fans digital goodies like a “Tortured Poets-inspired animation” on their feed.Before the album’s release on Friday, Swift revealed that a music video — for “Fortnight,” the first single, featuring Post Malone — would arrive on Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern time. At 2 a.m., she had another surprise: 15 more songs. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you,” she wrote in a social media post, bringing “The Anthology” edition of the album to 31 tracks.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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      Dickey Betts, Fiery Guitarist With Allman Brothers Band, Dies at 80

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      He traded licks with Duane Allman and proved to be a worthy sparring partner. He also wrote, and sang, the band’s biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man.”Dickey Betts, a honky-tonk hell raiser who, as a guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band, traded fiery licks with Duane Allman in the band’s early-1970s heyday, and who went on to write some of the band’s most indelible songs, including its biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” died on Thursday at his home in Osprey, Fla. He was 80.His death was announced on social media by his family. His manager David Spero said in a statement to Rolling Stone magazine that the cause was cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Despite not being an actual Allman brother — the band, founded in 1969, was led by Duane Allman, who achieved guitar-god status before he died in a motorcycle accident at 24, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who got an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding force in the group for decades and central to the sound that, along with the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, came to define Southern rock.Although pigeonholed by some fans in the band’s early days as its “other” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos seemed at times to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, proved a worthy sparring partner to Duane Allman, serving more as a co-lead guitarist than as a sidekick.Mr. Betts in 1977. His solos at times seemed to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWith his chiseled features, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts certainly looked the part of the star. And he played like one. Nowhere was that more apparent than on the band’s landmark 1971 live double album, “At Fillmore East,” which was filled with expansive jams and showcased the intricate interplay between Mr. Betts and Mr. Allman. It sold more than a million copies.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