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      Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Is Becoming a Musical

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is lined up to write the book, and Lileana Blain-Cruz will direct.“Purple Rain,” Prince’s breakout rise-of-a-rock-star film, is being adapted into a stage musical featuring some of the pop musician’s best-loved songs.Orin Wolf, the producer who previously shepherded the Tony-winning adaptation of “The Band’s Visit” to the stage, and who is currently backing the theatrical adaptation of another music industry movie, “Buena Vista Social Club,” announced on Monday that he is developing the musical, based on the 1984 film.The stage adaptation will feature a book by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner whose family drama, “Appropriate,” is now running on Broadway. The director is Lileana Blain-Cruz, whose revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (with new material contributed by Jacobs-Jenkins) had a short run on Broadway in 2022.“Purple Rain” is about an ambitious musician, called the Kid, facing strife with his parents, his love interest, and his fellow musicians. The film won an Academy Award for best original song score.Wolf did not announce any other details, including when or where there might be an initial production (most musicals have runs either Off Broadway or outside New York before braving the high costs and intense glare of Broadway). Prince died in 2016; representatives of the rightsholders to his music were quoted in a news release describing themselves as supportive of the production. More

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      How ‘Insomniac’ Became an a Cappella Sensation

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      Few people were aware of the 1994 single “Insomniac” by the rock duo Billy Pilgrim, and it quickly sank into obscurity. But a cappella groups can’t stop singing it. We set out to find an explanation.In high school, I joined Rebel Yell, an a cappella group named after the Billy Idol song. I mostly beatboxed or sang background vocals. But one year, my chorus teacher gave me a lead vocal.It was on a song called “Insomniac,” by a folk rock duo called Billy Pilgrim. Our audiences didn’t know the song before we sang it. None of us did, which made it an odd choice for contemporary a cappella, where most of the songs performed are big hits. I didn’t realize until years later that groups all across the country were singing this song, without knowing anything about the original version.But why?Billy Pilgrim performing in the early 1990s. Two students at Emory University, Kristian Bush and Andrew Hyra, formed Billy Pilgrim in the early 1990s, and their self-titled major record label debut came in 1994. “Insomniac” was released as a single, but never charted. The band, named for the lead character in the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” didn’t collect much acclaim either.The duo stopped playing together in 2000. Bush formed Sugarland with Jennifer Nettles, and his music career took off. Hyra became a carpenter.However, the strangest thing happened with “Insomniac.”It took on a life of its own. For almost three decades, the song has been a staple of a cappella groups all over the country at all levels, whether high school, colleges, professional groups or otherwise.Go on YouTube, and you’ll find countless performances of the song through the years. A sampling: The professional group Straight No Chaser. Ow! at Glenbrook North High School. Section 8 at Ohio University.Amid the roster of popular songs typically selected by a cappella groups, “Insomniac” stands out as an unusual favorite. Alex Kaplan, a 20-year-old junior at Wesleyan University, said he performed the song with his group, the Wesleyan Spirits, “a couple days ago.”“It’s not uncommon for the occasional song to sort of gain a foothold in the a cappella community if it’s got particular qualities that lend themselves well to performance,” Kaplan said. “‘Insomniac’ is a weird one because it’s, with maybe one or two exceptions, just about the most unknown song that I’ve seen multiple a cappella groups do.”It is a melancholy, guitar-driven love song, with lines like, “I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor/I don’t have to have these dreams no more.”The recording begins with a wailing Hammond organ and the middle of the song has a musical interlude, which extends into a jam of sorts. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls sings background vocals on the Billy Pilgrim version.“I was looking for a girlfriend,” Bush, the song’s writer, said.The path for “Insomniac” becoming ubiquitous in the a cappella world began before the record was even released.Sheet music for “Insomniac.”Billy PilgrimIn the early 1990s, a cappella — singing without instrumental accompaniment, with the sheer power of the human voice — was changing.Groups like Rockapella and The Nylons were ushering in a new mainstream approach, different from the traditional barbershop quartet style of many predominantly white male groups of the time. This newer style of performance meant that every instrument on a given song was accounted for. Drums would be represented by beatboxing, guitar strums and piano chords represented by rhythmic vocal approximations.Deke Sharon, an a cappella-obsessed student at Tufts University, also helped pioneer the shift, particularly on college campuses. As musical director for the Beelzebubs, the Tufts group, he encouraged previously unperformed arrangements of pop songs. After graduating in 1991, Sharon aimed to make a career spreading the gospel of a cappella.“Everybody laughed,” he said. They said, “You can’t make a career out of a cappella,’” but he said he told them: “It’s so wonderful. If people only knew, they would literally fall in love.”Deke Sharon was part of a shift to a new style of a cappella where every instrument was accounted for. He started compiling the best performances from college campuses.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThere wasn’t much recorded a cappella before that, except for occasional exceptions like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” or the Huey Lewis and the News cover of “It’s Alright.”Sharon formed a nonprofit called the Contemporary A Cappella Society, with the aim of popularizing this new, more modern form of vocalizing through a cappella festivals, awards shows and networking events for enthusiasts.He also had an idea. Back then, college groups had no way of spreading their music beyond campuses. There was no YouTube or Spotify. The web had yet to arrive, and even email was uncommon.Using a meticulously crafted database of groups that he had compiled in his dorm room, Sharon started taking submissions for “Best Of College A Cappella” compilation albums. Groups that made the cut would be on a compact disc that they could sell at shows. They could buy them from for $5 and sell them at shows for $15. Suddenly, a performance from, say, Rutgers University, could be available at Boston College.It was around this time that John Craig Fennell, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, joined the Virginia Gentlemen, an all-male offshoot of the Virginia Glee Club. Working at a summer camp in New Jersey, a co-worker handed him the newly released Billy Pilgrim debut.“You hear those first few squeezebox notes on the Billy Pilgrim track,” Fennell said. “I love it. it was immediately compelling.”An arrangement made by John Craig Fennell for the Virginia Gentlemen at the University of Virginia assigned vocal parts to all singers.John FennellHe saw an opportunity to take advantage of the shift in a cappella and stretch the abilities of the Virginia Gentlemen. He painstakingly transcribed the arrangement by hand — how most arranging was done back then — with voices emulating the sounds of the guitar and organ: “JUM-BUH-DUH, JUM-BUH-DUH.”The arrangement marked one the first times that all 14 members of the Virginia Gentlemen had their own vocal part on a song, he said.They submitted their recording to Sharon, who liked it enough to put it on one of the first “Best Of College A Cappella” albums in the mid-1990s.From there, the record hit campuses and the arrangement began to spread the old-fashioned way: word of mouth.Other groups copied the arrangement by ear. A member of the Wesleyan Spirits who had performed a version in high school brought it to the Spirits. That arrangement made its way to the Vineyard Sound, a group based on Martha’s Vineyard. Similar arrangements were performed at the University of Rochester and Plymouth State.“This song is what made me fall in love with my group,” Michelle Shankar, who was part of the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics from 2008 to 2012, said. “They open almost every show with this piece. It’s high energy, super upbeat, at least the a cappella version of it is. And it just starts with this wall of sound — that really high belt that’s like, ‘Whoaaa!’, and that just became an iconic line.”Many of the singers interviewed about the song could not help but sing a few bars, unprompted.Straight No Chaser during a performance. Its members have been singing “Insomniac” since it was a college group at Indiana University in the 1990s.Ashley White“It’s a perfect storm that is specific to ‘Insomniac,’” Walter Chase, a founding member of Straight No Chaser, said.Chase arranged a version after hearing it off the compilation album for the group in the mid-1990s, when it was still a college group at Indiana University: “When you’re a college student and one of the main purposes you do a cappella for is to sing for girls, to get attention and to be able to croon, the soloists’ material is this very heady love song.”On an annual retreat in New Orleans around 2000, the Wesleyan Spirits performed the song at a bar during the day. The bartender informed the group that it just so happened that Bush, the song’s writer, happened to be performing that same night. The Spirits returned that evening and Bush invited the group onstage to sing his song.“I remember trying to play it, and it was very square,” Bush said, laughing. “You can’t really play guitar to it.”Kristian Bush of Billy Pilgrim wrote the song “Insomniac” and performed it for the first time in 1994 with Andrew Hyra. The song became a staple for a cappella groups, despite it not being a hit itself.Elliot Liss for The New York TimesStill, Bush and Hyra had little awareness of the niche hit they had created. Hyra first realized it about a decade ago when he was sitting at a hotel in Martha’s Vineyard with his family, including his sister, the actress Meg Ryan.The Vineyard Sound were nearby and began to sing “Insomniac.”“I was like, ‘Holy cow!’” Hyra said.Ryan, who still calls herself Billy Pilgrim’s No. 1 fan, said she couldn’t believe her ears.“I’m not a singer, but I can always sing along with that song,” the actress said. “They always seem to write these songs that kind of give poetry to something very universal.”With the help of movies like “Pitch Perfect” and the former NBC show “The Sing-Off,” a cappella has gone more mainstream. Production values are higher, and transcription is easier using software. But the Virginia Gentlemen’s arrangement of “Insomniac” remains a constant.Billy Pilgrim reunited during the pandemic. The band has never made any money off the covers, but the song’s spread has left them elated. At concerts, “Insomniac” is their most requested song, Bush said. They even perform a new version.“Maybe that song should have been a big hit,” Hyra says.Bush finds the whole phenomenon delightful.“The music business is a whole series of ‘You’re already failing,’” he said, adding, “Every once in a while, something shows up and it ties a little balloon to your belt loop and suddenly you’re a little lighter, you know? And I think that’s what this does for me.” More

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      Klee Benally, Navajo Activist and Artist, Dies at 48

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      He helped found a punk-rock band when he was 14. That led to a long career as an advocate for Native American and environmental causes.Klee Benally, a dynamic Navajo activist, artist and punk-rock musician who championed Native American and environmental causes, died on Dec. 30 in Phoenix. He was 48.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his sister, Jeneda Benally. She did not specify the cause.For decades, Mr. Benally, who lived in Flagstaff, Ariz., fought the expansion of the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort on one of the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range just north of Flagstaff that 13 tribes consider sacred. He also fought the resort’s use of treated wastewater to make snow, a practice that Native Americans and environmental groups said was poisoning the ecosystem. He protested against a pumice mine on those same peaks, and against uranium mining and transport in the area.He campaigned for the rights and care of Indigenous homeless people and against racial profiling. He made films and art about his activism.He was a community organizer and a youth counselor; he taught media literacy and film to Indigenous teenagers; and he marched against the celebration of Thanksgiving. Late last year he published a book, “No Spiritual Surrender,” about his efforts practicing what he called Indigenous anarchy, and he created a board game, “Burn the Fort,” in which Native American warriors fight off colonizers (and learn some history while doing so).He chained himself to an excavator, was charged with trespassing and joined numerous legal complaints.But his first foray into activism was through music, in 1989. He was 14 when he and his siblings, Jeneda and Clayson, formed Blackfire, a high-velocity punk band that mixed traditional Navajo chants and music with protest songs about the oppression of Indigenous people.Mr. Benally embraced the middle-finger-to-the-world punk ethos — he loved the Ramones, whose music he introduced to his mother, a folk singer — and he could really shred a guitar. The Ramones loved Blackfire back: C.J. Ramone produced the band’s first EP, “Spirit in Action” (1994), and Joey Ramone sang on two of the songs on “One Nation Under” (2002), its first full-length album.Critics were admiring, too. In 2007, David Fricke of Rolling Stone touted Blackfire’s fourth album, “[Silence] Is a Weapon,” as “pure ire, CBGB-hardcore-matinee protest with jolts of ancient chorale.”The band played at South by Southwest and other music festivals but declined to play in bars, at least at first. Mr. Benally thought it would be hypocritical, given that alcohol abuse was an issue on reservations. In addition, at the time the Benally siblings were all under 21.“Some people watch too many movies and think John Wayne killed all the Indians or they’re out dancing with wolves,” he told The Albuquerque Journal in 2003, explaining Blackfire’s mission to educate audiences. “But in reality there are over 500 nations throughout the U.S. carrying on their cultures, their own individual ways of life, their own languages and their own ceremonies.”Mr. Benally in 2005. He spent decades protesting the expansion of a ski resort on a mountain range that 13 tribes consider sacred.Jill Torrance/Arizona Daily Sun, via Associated PressKlee Jones Benally was born on Oct. 6, 1975, in Black Mesa, Ariz., on the Navajo reservation near Flagstaff. Music and activism ran in the family. Klee’s father, Jones Benally, is a traditional Diné (as the Navajo call themselves) medicine man; his mother, Berta Benally, is an activist and folk musician of Russian-Polish Jewish heritage who grew up in the folk scene of Greenwich Village. The couple met in Los Angeles, where she was working with Hopi elders.Klee and his siblings were brought up with their father’s Diné traditions, and they grew up performing traditional dances. Their mother introduced them to the folk canon; Blackfire would later set some of Woody Guthrie’s poems to music. The area where they lived was part of a land dispute that forced the relocation of thousands of Navajo people, and attending protests became a family affair.In addition to his sister and his parents, Mr. Benally is survived by his wife, Princess Benally, and his brother.Blackfire went on hiatus after two decades, mostly so the Benally siblings could concentrate more directly on advocacy and activism.Mr. Benally often framed his environmental work in terms of religious freedom. “As Indigenous people in the so-called United States, we don’t have guarantees for our religious freedoms like the rest of you,” he told The Arizona Republic in 2013. “This is a struggle for cultural survival — the struggle to protect sacred spaces.”Mr. Benally was a local hero in Flagstaff, where he founded a number of community organizations and aid groups. He was both angry and pragmatic; he liked to say that everyone was indigenous to somewhere.“He was a powerhouse of anticolonial thought and action — ever ready to protect the land,” Dallas Goldtooth, a Native American activist and actor, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Benally explained his worldview in a 2020 interview with Spirituality Health magazine: “As an artist, there’s no dichotomy between art and life with our traditional teachings as Diné people. There’s no separation; our life is creation. So our creative expression comes in many different ways. What I look at is: What are the issues facing our communities, and what strategies can be most effective? Is it going to be through song? Is it going to be through prayer or action? Or can it be all of them?” More

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      Overlooked No More: Cordell Jackson, Elder Stateswoman of Rock ’n’ Roll

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up to 10.Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ’n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, Miss., a small city once known as a hide-out for Jesse James’s gang of outlaws in the 19th century. She took an early interest in music-making, learning to play banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.By age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’” she later recalled. “I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”Jackson moved through a variety of jobs, including interior decorator and D.J. on an all-female radio station, while waiting for her music career to take off.Jackson always claimed that she had been rocking out well before the men who would make rock ‘n’ roll famous. “If what I’m doing now is rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly or whatever,” she told the newspaper The Tulsa World in 1992, “then I was doing it when Elvis was a 1-year-old. That’s just a fact.”Or, as she told Cornfed magazine: “Whatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I have always gyrated it up.”In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to scratch her way into the male-dominated music scene. She eventually befriended and recorded demos with the producer Sam Phillips, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and created Moon Records, becoming one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say the first) and securing her place in history.“Cordell was immune to being told ‘no.’ It was almost like that was her art,” the country singer and songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. “A lot of artists are told ‘no’ — that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical for a woman, especially in the South.”Recording sessions for Moon Records were held in Jackson’s living room, where she engineered, produced and released music by regional artists like Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Though Jackson initially hewed mostly to the production end of things, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958’s “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas.”In 1958, Jackson released her own performances of “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas” on her own label, Moon Records.But neither she nor her roster of artists hit the big time, and the 1960s and ’70s saw Jackson moving through a peripatetic series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior decorator with a real estate agency; as a D.J. on the all-female Memphis station WHER; running a junk shop. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with the musician, performance artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis, at a benefit for Don Ezell, the longtime gofer at Sun Records. “Every guitar player in Memphis was there,” Falco said in a video interview. That included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, the Panther Burns (featuring Alex Chilton), cover one of her originals, “Dateless Night.” The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band, and she accepted, despite the fact that, at almost 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.This marked the beginning of the startling second act of Jackson’s musical career, as she became — among a certain set — an elder stateswoman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on the WFMU radio show “The Hound,” Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip; the result sounds less like a performance than a wild animal turned loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show’s host, described Jackson’s playing as “some of the most vicious, nasty rock ’n’ roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.”Jackson in 1992 with the country singer Marty Brown, center, and the radio host Charlie Chase.Everett Collection, via ImagoJackson with members of the band the New Duncan Imperials in an undated photo.Ken CozzaShe headlined at colorful, now-vanished rock clubs in New York City, like CBGB, the Lone Star and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J. She mostly played solo, but occasionally local musicians backed her up, including the Brooklyn band the A-Bones. “There were no rehearsals,” Miriam Linna, the band’s drummer, recalled in an interview. “It was just, ‘Let’s go!’”Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: “I can’t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I’m surprised they didn’t have her committed.”Offstage, Jackson was down to earth but proper, and deeply religious. She did not curse, and she did not drink “anything but milk or water,” she told Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco recalled her saying that doctors had put her on “an all-meat diet,” and Kenn Goodman — whose Pravda Records released her album “Live in Chicago” in 1997 — said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac; she disliked planes), it was with “her own steak, her own milk, and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis,” because she didn’t trust any other kind.Nancy Apple, a close friend and acolyte, said that when Jackson went grocery shopping, “she would wear white old-lady gloves — not for fashion; she’d just always say, ‘I don’t want to touch all that money!’” When she got home, Jackson would take any bills she had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them from clothespins to dry.Eccentricities aside, it was what Jackson did onstage that was truly astonishing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a jolting experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as “anywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.”There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson’s playing, almost as though she were fighting with her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions — most of them instrumentals — may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically abrasive way, was. Jackson didn’t just break guitar strings when she played. She broke picks. Jackson at her home in Memphis in 1992, when her mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture.John Focht/Associated PressIntonation didn’t seem to matter a whit to her. Neither did keeping time: In one interview, she said, “I’ve found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.” Form and melody, too, seemed mostly beside the point. Instead, it was all attitude, attack, rhythm, speed and noise.She “was comfortable in her own skin,” said the bassist Marcus Natale of the A-Bones — she didn’t put on airs, made no concessions, and seems to have never been anything less (or more) than exactly who she was, her performances a testament to the exhilarating power of ragged, unmanicured music.“This is not a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it could be so bad you’ll like it.”Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2004, in Memphis. She was 81.In her music, and in everything she set her mind to, Jackson was nothing if not determined. “I’ve never been confused about what I was supposed to do while I was down here,” she said in 1999. “If I think of it, I do it.”Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      Ani DiFranco Learned (and Cried) a Lot During Her First Year in N.Y.C.

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      “The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city,” said the singer-songwriter, who will make her Broadway debut in “Hadestown.”Ani DiFranco calls herself the fairy godmother of “Hadestown,” the 2019 Tony winner for best musical. Anaïs Mitchell, its composer and librettist, calls her this too, as DiFranco discovered during a recent publicity event.“I said, ‘OK, it’s settled,’” DiFranco recalled. “Certainly many more people have put in much more time and contributed hugely along the way, but I sort of helped get it from zero to one.”DiFranco had already released a couple of Mitchell’s records on her label, Righteous Babe, when, some 15 years ago, Mitchell revealed that she had a play based on Greek mythology that she wanted to turn into an album. And so they did, with DiFranco singing the part of Persephone. Now DiFranco, 53, will make her Broadway debut in that same role in February.“I couldn’t say no,” she said in a discussion that touched on the importance of the acoustic guitar, punk and “gifts of nature.” “It was too thrilling at this point in my life and career, and at my age, to try something new and be out of my comfort zone and be challenged and grow and learn. I just knew it was a deep, resounding yes.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Abstract ExpressionismIn my late teens I was exposed to the genre of the painting culture known as Abstract Expressionism. It was so inspiring and validating because it was this form of visual representation which was not about meticulously reproducing reality. It was about having a canvas be a window into a moment, and you can feel the sweep of the arm and the energy behind it and the torque and the velocity and the ferocity and the emotion.2Acoustic GuitarHaving an instrument that I — over 10,000 hours and then some — became one with has been like having another limb. Sometimes when there’s nowhere else to turn and nobody, it’s there for me. Sometimes when my own voice is failing me, my guitar can say it for me.3New York CityI moved here when I was 18 or 19 from Buffalo. I cried my way through the first year for every reason that you can imagine. I had experiences that were terrifying, that were life-threatening but also just life-changing and beautiful and culturally mind-blowing. The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city.4PunkYou could be a performer without being a beauty queen. You didn’t have to be a buttoned-up, coordinated, put-together, choreographed, polished, perfected thing. There was something about the punk ethos that just really allowed that in me.5JazzMusic that has improvisation at its epicenter is so profound and essential because that’s what music-making is: watching somebody figure it out and solve the problems and face the adversities that exist on any given night, and inventing a new path to go with your fellow performers.6Feminist LiteratureIn the late ’80s and early ’90s, I started reading Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Judy Grahn and bell hooks and Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton. These poets and philosophers and writers seismically unlocked me to myself. I grew up in a man’s world, and I was taught everything through a man’s eyes in a man’s words. It wasn’t until I read these women that I realized, “Oh, there’s more.”7World MusicWhen I started getting legit gigs at folk and roots music festivals, they would throw you onstage with other performers. There might be a singer from Guam, some Tuvan throat singers, some African dudes with guitars and an Eastern European choir. We didn’t share a verbal language, but we could talk to each other through music and become friends in this way.8New OrleansThe first time I played Jazz Fest, I thought, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Every time I was not on tour, I would go to New Orleans, because I wanted to go where I felt inspired. Then I started renting an apartment, then I fell in love with a local, and he was my reason to stay and make a home. I’ve been there about 20 years, and the shine has not worn off one bit.9Marijuana and PsilocybinI’ve smoked a lot of pot in my day, and I know it to be a really instrumental element of my awakening. I haven’t engaged in mushrooms as much, but I feel like it is also fundamental to human evolution. Whole genres of music and artistic movements have evolved and moved forward hand in hand with these gifts of nature.10ReadingWhen I moved to New York, I was at the New School studying, and I found myself reading books and talking about them. It’s like, Oh my God, this is really important stuff. The format of a book, it’s a road deeply into another person’s mind and life, to a whole other way of being, to whole other worlds, that I don’t find paralleled in any other genre of art. More

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      David Soul, a Star of the Hit Cop Show ‘Starsky & Hutch,’ Dies at 80

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      An actor and singer, he rose to fame in the 1970s as one half of the popular television crime-fighting duo. He also notched a No. 1 hit single in the U.S.David Soul, the doleful-eyed blond actor and singer who rose to fame portraying half of a cagey crime-fighting duo on the hit 1970s television show “Starsky & Hutch,” and who also scored a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with “Don’t Give Up on Us,” died on Thursday. He was 80.His death was confirmed in a statement by his wife, Helen Snell, who did not specify a cause or say where he died. He had been living in Britain since 1995 and became a British citizen in 2004.A Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister, Mr. Soul had spent nearly a decade appearing on television shows like “Star Trek” and “I Dream of Jeannie”; he also had a regular role on the ABC western comedy series “Here Come the Brides,” before he won his career-defining role of Detective Ken Hutchinson, known as Hutch, also on ABC. The part would make him a regular presence in American living rooms, as well as a recognized heartthrob, from 1975 to 1979.As Hutch, Mr. Soul played the coolheaded Midwestern sidekick to Detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), a savvy Brooklynite given to wearing chunky cardigan sweaters. The two tooled around the fictional Southern California burgh of Bay City in a red Ford Gran Torino emblazoned with a giant Nike-esque swoosh running down each side as they cracked open cases with the help of their streetwise informant, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).Mr. Soul had first caught the eye of the show’s creators with an icy performance as a vigilante motorcycle cop in “Magnum Force” (1973), the first of several sequels to the hit 1971 Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry.” But he initially had misgivings about the Hutch character, seeing him as nothing more than “bland white-bread,” as he said in the 2004 television documentary “He’s Starsky, I’m Hutch.”“I didn’t like him,” he said. “I wanted to play Starsky.”Even as old-school tough guys with badges, the characters stood out on the 1970s cop-show landscape by sharing an onscreen emotional intimacy that was striking for its day.While being interviewed by the talk show host Merv Griffin, who pointed out that TV Guide had singled out “Starsky & Hutch” as television’s most violent show, Mr. Soul responded: “My opinion of the show is that it’s a love story. It’s a love story between two men who happen to be cops.”In an interview for The New York Post’s Page Six feature in 2021, Mr. Glaser said that he and Mr. Soul had kidded about the show’s homoerotic undertones “all the time.”With his place in the pop-culture firmament cemented, Mr. Soul was able to make good on his long-simmering ambitions to be a pop star.In 1977, the year after releasing his debut album, he shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with the lachrymose ballad “Don’t Give Up on Us.” Many years later, Owen Wilson, as Hutch, parodied the song in none-too-loving fashion in a 2004 feature-film comedy version of the show, which also starred Ben Stiller as Starsky and Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear.Mr. Soul, who often said that music was his priority over acting, released five albums in his career and notched four Top 10 hits in Britain in the 1970s, including “Don’t Give Up on Us,” which climbed to No. 1; “Silver Lady,” which also went to No. 1 although it reached only No. 52 in the United States; and “Going In With My Eyes Open” — No. 2 in Britain and No. 54 on the American chart.He became enough of a singing sensation that, in reviewing a 1977 concert of his at Radio City Music Hall, Robert Palmer of The New York Times described “camera-wielding teenage girls charging the stage, the flicker of hundreds of exploding flash cubes and a continual squealing.”Mr. Soul was born David Richard Solberg on Aug. 28, 1943, to Richard Solberg, a professor of political science and history as well as a theologian, and June (Nelson) Solberg, a teacher.In David’s youth, the family lived in Cold War-era Berlin as well as in South Dakota. He aspired to be a diplomat or a minister before turning his sights on a show business career. In his late teens, he learned that his girlfriend, Mim, was pregnant; under parental pressure, they married.Later, when he was 22, he found his wife another man, a friend of his, and left her and their young son, Christopher, to chase his dreams of stardom in New York.Once there, he whittled his surname down to Soul and, looking for a gimmick to boost his singing career, bought a $1 ski mask and rebranded himself as a mystery-shrouded pop crooner who never showed his face. After appearances on Merv Griffin’s show, he secured a deal with MGM Records and released a single, “The Covered Man,” in 1966.Once he tried to make it without the mask, however, his career faltered. Broke, Mr. Soul started selling himself sexually. “I was green,” he said in the documentary. “I was a kind of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” a reference to the Oscar-winning 1969 film starring Jon Voight as a Texas dreamer turned Times Square hustler.Discouraged by the fizzling of his music career, Mr. Soul shifted to acting, breaking into Hollywood with an appearance on “Flipper,” the series centered on a pet dolphin.Once he made it big with “Starsky & Hutch,” he said, he spiraled into alcoholism before rediscovering religion in the 1980s. He met Ms. Snell, a public relations executive, in 2002, and they married in 2010.It was his fifth marriage. He had five sons and a daughter. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.After leaving the United States, Mr. Soul appeared in theater productions in London’s West End. In the mid-2000s, he landed the lead role of the outrage-courting talk show host in “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”Although he missed out on a financial windfall by selling his stake in “Starsky & Hutch” years ago for $100,000, according to a 2019 interview with The Sunday Times of London, he expressed few regrets.“I’ve had it all,” he said. “I’ve been a No 1 [star] in the world for a while — not now. I’ve had No 1 records around the world — not now. I have six wonderful children. I’m married to a wonderful woman. I’m happy. I’ve explored, I’ve seen, I’ve done.” More

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      Former Mr. Bungle Saxophonist, Theo Lengyel, Charged With Girlfriend’s Murder

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      Theobald Lengyel, a saxophonist, helped form the experimental rock band in Northern California in the mid-1980s. His girlfriend had been missing since early December.A founding member of the experimental 1990s rock band Mr. Bungle, Theobald Lengyel, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with murder, after the police in Capitola, Calif., found human remains that they believed were his girlfriend’s in a wooded area of a regional park.Mr. Lengyel’s girlfriend, Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann, 61, who was known as Alyx, was last seen in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Dec. 3, according to the El Cerrito Police Department. After not hearing from her for more than a week, her family reported her missing on Dec. 12, the police said.Ms. Kamakaokalani had lived in Capitola, a small seaside town in Santa Cruz County. The police said in a statement that during their investigation they found her car, a red Toyota Highlander SUV, at Mr. Lengyel’s house in El Cerrito, about an hour and 40 minutes by car from Capitola. Investigators found remains, which are still being identified, in Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley, the police said.Mr. Lengyel’s girlfriend, Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann, had been missing since early December.El Cerrito Police Department“As the investigation progressed, it became clear that foul play was involved,” the Capitola Police Department said in a statement, “leading to the identification of Theobald Lengyel as a suspect.”Mr. Lengyel, 54, who has also released music under the name Mylo Stone, has not cooperated with the investigation, according to the El Cerrito Police Department, which said they believed Mr. Lengyel had left town and drove to Portland, Ore., after Ms. Kamakaokalani’s disappearance.Mr. Lengyel, who played the alto saxophone, was one of the founding members of Mr. Bungle, which formed in the mid-1980s in Northern California as a metal band before embarking on a more experimental, absurdist path. The band released its first album, also named “Mr. Bungle,” in 1991.The album, which included a mixture of progressive rock, punk and funk, featured song titles like “Squeeze Me Macaroni” and “The Girls of Porn.” Allmusic.com described it as “a difficult, not very accessible record,” but noted that “the band wouldn’t have it any other way.”Mr. Lengyel left the band in the late 1990s, before the release of the album “California.” The band reunited and performed in Los Angeles in 2020, without Mr. Lengyel. More

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      The Best Songs Our Readers Discovered in 2023

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      Songs by Labi Siffre, Bessie Banks, the Brat and more that became invested with fresh meaning.A Liz Phair song offered some unexpected parenting advice to one Amplifier reader.Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times Dear listeners,A few weeks ago, I asked readers to share the best older song they discovered — or rediscovered — in 2023. As usual, the Amplifier community did not disappoint.Today’s playlist is a compilation of some of the best submissions along with your (condensed and edited) explanations of why these songs resonated so deeply. The track list is an eclectic mix, featuring rock, soul, jazz, hip-hop, folk, punk and just about everything in between. Quite a few of you introduced me to artists I’d never heard before, like the British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, the Los Angeles punk band the Brat and the underrated North Carolina-born soul singer Bessie Banks. I’ll definitely be seeking out more music from all of them.I was especially struck by the stories about rediscovered songs. Sometimes a piece of music we’ve known for decades (or, in the case of one reader’s story about a Rosemary Clooney song, about as long as we can remember) boomerangs back into our lives with poetic and fortuitous timing. A classic Chiffons hit becomes an anthem for a freshly resumed relationship; a wry Liz Phair song becomes more earnest in the light of new parenthood. Some of these narratives are fun and playful, while others are powerful reminders of the ways that music can buoy us through our darkest times.Thanks to every one of you who submitted a song and a story. I wish I could have included hundreds of them, but I settled on these 13. Also, on a personal note, reading through them all provided a welcome distraction this week. Remember in Tuesday’s newsletter when I mentioned I was coming down with a cold? That “cold,” I learned shortly afterward, turned out to be Covid. So once again, like the earliest days of the pandemic, I spent my week in isolation — but at least I had all your submissions to keep me company.I hope today’s playlist helps you kick off 2024 right. Here’s to another year of music discovery!Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Badfinger: “No Matter What”While wandering the aisles in a supermarket this year, I heard this song and launched a mini investigation into why it had such a Beatle-esque sound (answer: recorded at Abbey Road and released on Apple Records). Recently, I was pleased to hear it included in Alexander Payne’s movie “The Holdovers.” The harmonies and hooks really evoke the ’70s for me, just like that film’s nostalgic rhythms and interiors. — Cathy Boeckmann, San Francisco (Listen on YouTube)2. Bessie Banks: “Go Now”When I read that Denny Laine of the Moody Blues died, I immediately thought of his greatest hit, “Go Now.” When I went online, I found out that an American woman, Bessie Banks, recorded it first. It’s fantastic — no disrespect to Mr. Laine, but it is tremendous. Should have been a hit. — Finn Kelly, Long Beach, Calif. (Listen on YouTube)3. Labi Siffre: “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying”It seems like a perfect encapsulation of the roller coaster that was 2023, pushing through a rainbow of emotions and holding close what matters most. It’s also just an excellent song from an artist that too few people know. — Jeremy Kotin, Milan, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)4. John Prine: “Souvenirs”At 69, I am starting to think more about mortality and memories. This song evokes both. It also evokes the memory of Steve Goodman, one of my favorites, who recorded it with Prine. — Dennis Walsh, Media, Pa. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Chiffons: “One Fine Day”This song, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, resonated this year because a former girlfriend and I got together after being apart for many years, and we are now so happy! — Nick Lange, Cambridge, Mass. (Listen on YouTube)6. Liz Phair: “Whip-Smart”My wife and I had our second child this year, our first boy. I am constantly thinking about how to raise both of my kids in this world and then I rediscovered this song, which flips the script on centuries of raising macho, stiff-upper-lip boys. — Ryan Humphries, Millersville, Pa. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Maybelle: “My Country Man”This song swings so hard and has an appreciation for proper farming technique. It is a welcome burst of elemental pleasure in a year with a lot of bleakness. No one can remain motionless with this on. — Brent Bliven, Austin (Listen on YouTube)8. Billy Bragg: “A New England”I like the lyric “I loved the words you wrote to me, but that was bloody yesterday/I can’t survive on what you send every time you need a friend.” It’s a short, cut-to-the-quick tune that I didn’t immediately take to, but now I’m always in the mood for it. — Kimberly Melinda Hogarty, Tucson, Ariz. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Brat: “The Wolf (and the Lamb)”The Brat were a Chicano punk band from Los Angeles that emerged in the early ’80s. As a fan of ’80s indie rock, I thought I knew all of the bands from that era, but this year I was astonished to hear this urgent, ferocious song for the first time. Had the Brat come around later, they likely would have been much bigger, but the music industry in 1980 was unwilling to accept a Chicano punk band with a female lead singer. Hearing this song, and this band, is a reminder of all that we’ve lost through the years when we ignore artists outside the mainstream. — Kelly Mullins, Seattle (Listen on YouTube)10. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: “Superrappin’”It’s such an influential track that has been name-checked, sampled and quoted by so many artists, yet I’d never heard it until hip-hop turned 50 this year. I think it does a great job of capturing the vibe of what I imagine hip-hop was like its first decade. It’s hype, it’s a party track, and when I listen to the song I can see Flash and the crew performing it live at a rec room party in the Bronx. — Jack Kershaw, New York City (Listen on YouTube)11. Doris Troy: “What’cha Gonna Do About It”Doris Troy was part of the original lineup of the greatest ensemble I had never heard of, the Sweet Inspirations, whose members included Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mother) and her nieces Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick. There’s something about the staccato piano combined with Troy’s elongated “I love you”s that reassures me that love isn’t fireworks — it’s the world they illuminate as they ascend and break up the darkness. — John Semlitsch, Austin (Listen on YouTube)12. Nina Simone: “Blues for Mama (Live at the Newport Jazz Festival)”This year has been a lot. War, rockets, drones: All that I could hear and see in Kyiv as a civilian resident. One might be amazed at how people can adjust. This is a song I discovered when I was riding my bike to the hospital in Kyiv where I work. It was a morning after some powerful explosions overnight. But there was also sunlight and spring, and the tune playing in my headphones, forcing me to smile. — Nazar, Kyiv, Ukraine (Listen on YouTube)13. Rosemary Clooney: “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”A young woman I know recently posted a photo of herself and her newborn baby girl on Instagram with Rosemary Clooney’s rendition of this Irving Berlin song in the background. When my mother passed away and I was only 4 years old, her older sister, my aunt Edie, sang this song to me often as she tucked me in for the night. It’s a bittersweet memory, but now, 71 years later, it still reminds me of how fortunate I am to have had so much love in my life. — Norman Reisman, New York City (Listen on YouTube)When they do the double Dutch, that’s them dancing,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Best Songs Our Readers Discovered in 2023” track listTrack 1: Badfinger, “No Matter What”Track 2: Bessie Banks, “Go Now”Track 3: Labi Siffre, “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying”Track 4: John Prine, “Souvenirs”Track 5: The Chiffons, “One Fine Day”Track 6: Liz Phair, “Whip-Smart”Track 7: Big Maybelle, “My Country Man”Track 8: Billy Bragg, “A New England”Track 9: The Brat, “The Wolf (and the Lamb)”Track 10: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “Superrappin’”Track 11: Doris Troy, “What’cha Gonna Do About It”Track 12: Nina Simone, “Blues for Mama (Live at the Newport Jazz Festival)”Track 13: Rosemary Clooney, “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”Bonus TracksWant to get an absurdly early head start on your Best Songs of 2024 list? Jon Pareles and I have compiled our first Friday Playlist of the year, featuring some notable new tracks from Béla Fleck, A.G. Cook, Mary Timony and more. More