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      Their Songs Blew Up on TikTok, So These Musicians Tweaked Their Sets

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      Social media platforms and streaming services are leading younger listeners to new (and old) music. Artists are making sure they feel at home at live shows.DJ Paul, a founder of the Oscar-winning Memphis hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia, was enjoying some tequila at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills two years ago when a friend shoved a cellphone in front of him. The rapper was surprised to see TikTok videos uploaded by “young white girls” dancing and rhyming along to one of the coarser moments from “Half on a Sack,” a slightly menacing song the group released 17 years earlier. The lyrics described sex and drug use on a tour bus.“I’m like, ‘Whoa,’” he remembered in an interview, laughing. “And when I do my concerts, you see the same kind of girls out there singing that line. They go crazy.”Paul said that “Half on a Sack” had long been a staple of the group’s live set lists, but the crowd response has been more uproarious in the wake of its viral moment.The rapper Project Pat, who has been touring with Three 6 Mafia this year, said he regularly performed “Life We Live,” his 23-year-old song that’s been used in almost three million TikTok videos. It’s seen a 130 percent increase in Spotify streams, as well.Project Pat has seen “Life We Live,” a song he released in 2001, gain a new life on TikTok.Aaron J. Thornton/FilmMagic, via Getty Images“I always looked at the rap game as a business,” Pat said. “I didn’t never look at it like I’m putting my pain and all that” into the art. “If you gon’ pay for this, I’m gonna tell you what you want to hear,” he added in his distinctive Memphis accent.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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      Shawn Mendes Walked Away From Stardom. He’s Ready to Talk About It.

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      On a rainy summer night, on a club stage in Woodstock, N.Y., Shawn Mendes was ready for tears. Happy tears, overwhelmed tears. Just some processing-everything-as-it-happens mistiness. “There’s probably a high chance I cry a lot,” he told the small crowd, pressing the backs of his hands to his eyes, and emerging with a grin.It was the first time in over two years that Mendes, the 26-year-old Canadian pop star, had performed in front of an audience, after he abruptly pulled the plug on his career at its pinnacle. In 2022, amid what he called a mental health “breaking point,” he canceled a multimillion-dollar, two-year international tour — over 80 scheduled arena dates — acknowledging that, in that moment, he couldn’t handle it. It was a startling admission, especially for a multiplatinum male artist with a hugely devoted young fan base. If their attention was fickle, he would be gone.In the time since, Mendes — a social media phenom with model looks and a penchant for bare-chestedness, who found immediate chart-topping success as a teenager — stepped almost completely away from music, seeking stability and a life away from the road. Then he slowly winched his way back to songwriting, through the wilds of adulthood. Over rootsy guitar and strings, his struggles are laid bare on his fifth album, “Shawn,” due Nov. 15. “I don’t understand who I am right now,” he whispers on the anguished opening track.“I felt super, super lost,” Shawn Mendes said of the moment two years ago when he called off his tour. “Healing takes time.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesHe’s not the type to mask anything. And it took him a long while to feel strong enough to make the record. “I felt super, super lost,” he told me. In Woodstock, he talked of spiraling anxiety, the walls closing in.But in the few months since that gig, Mendes’s stages have been growing exponentially: He blasted through “Nobody Knows,” a new, lovelorn ballad, at the MTV Video Music Awards, ending it in ecstatic guitar peals; and then sang to 100,000 people — in Portuguese — at a festival in Rio de Janeiro. When we met for an interview, at his favorite recording studio in bucolic Rhinebeck, N.Y., where he worked on the new album, he seemed as if he had regained the muscle memory of what it means to be a star. But he wore it lightly.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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      13 Scary Good Halloween Songs

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      Fill up your holiday playlist with spooky and satisfying tracks from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Sonics, Geto Boys and more.Karen O and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (being watched … closely).Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,Hello from your guest playlister for the day — I’m Dave Renard, an editor on the Culture desk who writes about music occasionally and tries to keep his record collection from outgrowing its allotted shelf space (currently failing).Let’s just get this out of the way first: Halloween has the best music of any holiday and it’s not even close. Christmas may be the sales leader, but its canon is too tied to a tight list of classics and standards, and if you have the bad fortune to encounter a repetitive earworm like “The Little Drummer Boy” or (shudder) “The 12 Days of Christmas,” there goes your whole day. Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to throw on some soul music while you mash potatoes, but like most other holidays, it doesn’t have much of a musical tradition of its own. Fourth of July, we’ve got Galaxie 500 and what, Katy Perry? (My editor offers a star-spangled dissent, but I think the point stands.)Halloween, on the other hand, has a huge range of spooky sounds to draw from. (If you know the old joke about hell having all the good bands, it’s kind of like that.) My playlist strategy is to surround the typical novelty favorites like “Monster Mash” or “Ghostbusters” with a critical mass of songs that are, you know, actually good. I can only listen to DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince do “A Nightmare on My Street” so many times before I start to lose it. If you think “Saw” is terrifying, try revealing to your teen daughter which songs drive you nuts and then — jump scare! — remembering she can control the sound system from her phone.A bigger pool of shared Halloween favorites makes that prospect less hair-raising. I lean heavily on black-clad ’80s punks, goths and post-punks, like the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with ’60s garage rockers and their descendants. But really any song with a creepy edge to it, or lyrics name-checking a wide range of October signifiers, will do the trick. Here are an unholy 13 selections to soundtrack All Hallows’ Eve.I’m a human fly and I don’t know why,DaveListen along while you read.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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      Part-Time Farmers, Part-Time Rock Stars: A Chinese Band’s Unlikely Rise

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      The band, Varihnaz, has gained fans by offering an alternative to China’s hyper-polished, fast-paced modern life, with songs about pesticides and poultry raising.Before setting out on his band’s first national tour, before recording another album and before appearing on a major television network, Ba Nong had one task: finishing the summer harvest.Standing in a field edged by rolling hills, two days before the first tour date in late September, Ba Nong, the frontman of the Chinese band Varihnaz, looked over the yellowed remnants of the rice stalks he had spent the past few months tending.“The land gets to rest, and I get to go play,” he said.Planning around the harvest may be an unconventional way to manage an ascendant music career, but Varihnaz is an unconventional band.For its members — two farmers and a former bricklayer from rural Guangxi in southwestern China — the land and their music are inseparable. Rather than the usual staples of love and longing, their lyrics dwell on pesticides and poultry rearing.Varihnaz means “fields filled with fragrant rice flowers,” in the language of Guangxi’s Zhuang ethnic minority. To fans, the group offers a refreshing break from China’s hyper-commercialized popular entertainers, with music about a simpler, slower way of life, an alternative to the intense competition of modern Chinese life.Ba Nong hopes his music helps people consider shrugging off mainstream expectations themselves. “The more tolerant and developed a society is, the more diverse its lifestyles should be, too,” said the musician, who is 44.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 Music Industry Is Hoping Halloween Can Be the New Christmas

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      Eyeing the big business of holiday music, a few of pop’s major players are trying to expand the market for Halloween hits.When Ashnikko was growing up in North Carolina, their family told them that Halloween was satanic. But for each of the last six years, the alt-pop rapper and singer (who uses she/they pronouns) has observed what remains a fairly unusual tradition: releasing a single tied to a day better known for costumes and candy.This year’s track is the final entry in a seasonal series of gleefully lewd songs now packaged as an EP, “Halloweenie I-VI,” and available on “oxblood red” vinyl. Although perhaps not especially appropriate for a trick-or-treat night with the kids, the set reflects its creator’s idea of the holiday as a space for freedom through the grotesque.“I feel very passionately about Halloween music,” Ashnikko said, noting the day’s roots in the Celtic harvest festival Samhain as well as its prominence in L.G.B.T.Q. history. “It’s camp. It’s carnal. It’s macabre. It’s, like, silly. It’s the only holiday where all of those get to exist at once.”It’s also an $11.6 billion business, one that pop’s major players are increasingly tapping into. Ashnikko’s six “Halloweenie” songs have racked up a combined 100.3 million on-demand streams in the United States as of Oct. 17, according to the tracking service Luminate.The Weeknd, who hosted a haunted house at Universal Studios Hollywood two years ago, has returned with “Nightmare Trilogy,” a maze with a soundtrack from the singer. It opened eight days earlier than in 2019.“Monster Mash,” Bobby Pickett’s enduring Halloween anthem from 1962, has returned to the Billboard Hot 100 the last three years ahead of the holiday. And Billboard estimated last year that the hit could generate $1 million in annual combined revenue.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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      A Lesson From John Lennon

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      The ecstasy and agony of an original Beatles fan.It started in April 1963, when friends of my parents returned to New Jersey from a trip abroad with a present for me. It was something a record shop clerk in London had recommended as the perfect thing for a 13-year-old girl.I prepared myself to act surprised and grateful, even if I didn’t like it. But when I opened it, I gasped. The four young men on the album cover were the cutest guys I had ever seen.This album, “Please Please Me,” was not available in the United States. And the group, the Beatles, was unknown here. I loved them immediately.My classmates thought my new obsession was weird, except for one girl, Sharon, who was open to new things. In the months before the first stirrings of Beatlemania in America, Sharon and I spent the after-school hours listening to the album and gazing at the cover. We could never decide which Beatle was our favorite, because our opinions changed by the day.One afternoon I noticed a sticker on the inside of the cardboard sleeve with the address for the Beatles Fan Club. I mailed a letter to 13 Monmouth Street, London, and began waiting.That summer I spent eight homesick weeks at a sleep-away camp in Maine. With every letter home, I asked if I had gotten a reply from the Beatles. With every letter back, there was a no.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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      Bryan Ferry Enjoys the Kansas City Chiefs’ ‘Outfits’

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      As the Roxy Music frontman readies a boxed set of his solo work, he reflects on the cultural inspirations that keep him fueled with glamour and drama.While Bryan Ferry was picking songs for “Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023,” — a new boxed set recapping his long solo career apart from Roxy Music, the pioneering British art-rock band he led — the singer noticed a recurring theme. “There’s a lot of love songs, a lot of romantic songs,” he said, speaking by video from his London recording studio.Ferry’s love songs, though, tend to be fraught with anxiety and blue with longing. The boy doesn’t get the girl; instead, the boy pines for the girl and can’t get her out of his mind. “But those are always the best love songs, aren’t they?” he asked with a chuckle. “I do like music that’s introspective, and a bit on the sad side.”The set begins with material from “These Foolish Things” (1973), on which Ferry brashly covered a broad array of songs, including one of Bob Dylan’s prolix metaphorical rambles and “It’s My Party,” Lesley Gore’s campy teen heartbreak lament. Ferry had studied at art school with the British Pop Art provocateur Richard Hamilton, who believed there was no hierarchical distinction between high and low culture, an idea the singer has sustained throughout his work.Last month, Ferry turned 79, and he’ll have a new album next year, but indicated that his touring days might be over: “As you get older, the travel is a bit tiring.” The singer grew up working class outside Newcastle — his father tended to horses that worked in local coal mines — but as Roxy Music gained popularity and cultural cachet in the 1970s, he developed appreciations for all things luxe. His list of 10 essential inspirations mixes the urban and the rural, the modern and the old-fashioned, with a consistent eye for glamour and drama. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1His own recording studioI’ve worked in a lot of studios and it’s great to finally have this place. Prince used this studio for an album he did with a girl band [“Plectrumelectrum,” by Prince and 3rdEyeGirl], and they were really good. I like to think some of it might’ve rubbed off.2His gardenOn weekends, I get out of London and go to the country for fresh air. If you’re a musician, you can be trapped indoors for days on end and it’s nice to have some respite from that. I’ve got a beautiful garden with an apple orchard, and at this time of the year, the fruit is getting ready to pick.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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      Phil Lesh Didn’t Hold Songs Down. He Lifted Them Higher.

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      Some rock bassists make it their job to hold down the bottom of a song: to hone parts that crisply but unobtrusively stake out a harmonic and rhythmic foundation, that are felt as much as heard. Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who died on Friday at 84, wasn’t one of them. Instead, Lesh’s playing carried songs aloft.In the telepathic tangle of the Grateful Dead’s arrangements — never played the same way twice — Lesh’s bass lines hopped and bubbled and constantly conversed with the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. His tone was rounded and unassertive while he eased his way into the counterpoint, almost as if he were thinking aloud. Lesh’s playing was essential to the Dead’s particular gravity-defying lilt, sharing a collective mode of rock momentum that was teasing and probing, never bluntly coercive.Jerry Garcia, left, and Phil Lesh rehearse with the Grateful Dead in San Francisco in the 1970s.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesLesh wasn’t a rock-and-roller by training or inclination. His 2005 memoir, “Searching for the Sound,” notes that his first instruments were violin and trumpet, that he soaked up classical music and big-band jazz, that he studied music theory and composition and drew life-changing inspirations from John Coltrane and Charles Ives. He and Tom Constanten, the Dead’s early keyboardist, were the band’s avant-garde contingent, a key aspect of the Dead’s ever-evolving improvisational fusion.For all their free-form interludes, the Dead’s songs had clear landmarks and structures — some of them far trickier than the band’s nimble performances would let on. Lesh could stick to a riff, as he dutifully did in the intro to “Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only Top 10 (and only Top 40) single. But when the verse arrived, he was footloose again: nudging, scurrying, syncopating from below. His bass lines held hints of Bach, jazz, bluegrass, blues, Latin music and far more, as he sought out new interstices each time through a song.Phil Lesh performing with the Dead at Woodstock in 1969. Archive Photos/Getty ImagesWe 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