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      Erykah Badu’s Woozy Flirtation, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kehlani, Benson Boone, Witch 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.Erykah Badu and the Alchemist, ‘Next to You’Erykah Badu floats some companionable requests — “I wanna take walks with you,” “I wanna just talk with you,” “I can’t wait to see you after school” — in this leisurely, woozy, increasingly hypnotic track. The Alchemist’s production gathers countless layers of Badu’s vocals, with and without lyrics, but places most of them at a distance, for a happy tangle of inner voices.Brittany Davis, ‘Sun and Moon’Brittany Davis, a blind, nonbinary pianist, singer and songwriter based in Seattle, recorded their second album, “Black Thunder,” leading a classic jazz piano-bass-drums trio. “Sun and Moon” reaches back to Nina Simone for its husky, organic, bare-bones dynamics. This six-minute song rises ever so gradually, affirming everyday pleasures; “In the sun, my heart is full of joy and light,” Davis sings. “In the moonlight, I’m thankful for the blessings of the night.” The track has a jammy, improvisational feel, with serious purpose behind it.Billie Marten, ‘Clover’The English songwriter Billie Marten calmly savors tensions and contradictions in “Clover”: “You’re raining heavy, I’m almost dry / I’m only learning to love you right.” The tempo is relaxed; keyboards plink and twinkle through mild dissonances. It’s affectionate but watchful: “Don’t push me over, I’m half your size,” she admonishes.Kehlani, ‘Folded’Kehlani dramatizes the most reluctant of breakups in “Folded.” Yes, she’s waiting for her ex to “come pick up your clothes,” neatly folded. But this isn’t the door-closing scenario from Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” Kehlani urges, “Meet me at my door while it’s still open” and notes, “It’s getting cold out but it’s not frozen.” Descending chords, a string section, little guitar licks and Kehlani’s voice all convey a world of regret and a chance to reunite.Cari, ‘Luvhiii’Cari Stewart-Josephs, an English songwriter, surrenders to infatuation in “Luvhiii,” from an EP due July 10. “You hit me like a truck,” she sings, “And I never will get enough.” A loping bass line, jazzy piano chords and a faraway but insistent tambourine arrive, enfolding Cari’s multilayered vocals in a trip-hop haze as she succumbs.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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      Barbra Streisand on the Duets That Define Her: ‘I Like Drama’

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      With a new album due next week that pairs her with Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Laufey, Sam Smith and more, the singer looks back at her prized collaborations.To Barbra Streisand, a duet isn’t just a song. “It’s a dramatic process,” she said. “It’s wondering who is this guy in the song? Who is this girl? What’s happening with them?”Figuring that out plays straight into Streisand’s core identity as an artist. “I’m an actress first,” she added. “I like drama.”Small wonder she has performed character-driven duets so often, so creatively and with such commercial success. In October 1963, following the release of Streisand’s debut album, Judy Garland invited her to appear in an episode of her TV show; their joint performance all but anointed the younger as her vocal heir.In the decades since, many of her highest-charting songs have been duets, starting in 1978 with Neil Diamond on their death-of-a-love ballad, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” followed the next year by her diva-off with Donna Summer on “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” Both shot straight to No. 1. In the early 1980s, she scored two Top 10 Billboard hits with Barry Gibb, chased by a dalliance with Bryan AdamsIn 2014, Streisand issued an entire album of double billings titled “Partners,” which teamed her with stars from the quick (John Mayer on “Come Rain or Come Shine”) to the dead (Elvis Presley via a vocal sample from the singer’s 1956 recording of “Love Me Tender”). Both that album, and its follow-up, “Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway,” scaled Billboard’s peak.Next week, Streisand, 83, will release a sequel, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two,” featuring contemporaries of different musical sensibilities, like Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, as well as younger voices including Hozier and Sam Smith.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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      Bruce Springsteen on ‘Tracks II,’ His Box of Seven ‘Lost Albums’

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      “The past always weighs heavy on me,” Bruce Springsteen said on an April afternoon, sitting in the anteroom attached to Thrill Hill, his home studio in New Jersey, where he can make music at any time. “Our pasts have a lot to do with shaping who we are now and the things we’re pursuing. So that is a theme that constantly recurs to me, and I’m always rewriting it, trying to get it right.”Next Friday, Springsteen will unveil a huge, almost entirely unknown trove of songs from his past on “Tracks II: The Lost Albums.” They reveal musical paths — mostly pensive, occasionally rowdy — that he briefly explored but chose to set aside. Unlike his 1998 collection “Tracks,” a set of demos, alternate versions and unreleased songs dating back to the 1970s, “Tracks II,” with 83 songs, 74 of them previously unreleased in any form, is organized as seven distinct albums.Springsteen grew up in the era of vinyl LPs, not playlists that can be shuffled. For him an album is “a cohesive group of songs, basically, that end up being greater than the sum of their parts,” he said. “They resonate off of one another, creating altered meanings and meanings in reflection with the other songs.”A record, he added, “is exactly what it says it is. It is a record of who you are and where you were at that moment in your life. These were actual albums that were of a piece, of a moment, of a genre — that fell together, often while working on other albums.”As he’s been preparing this extensive look back, the 75-year-old musician, well aware of his longtime role as a symbol of America, has also been confronting the political present.The seven unreleased LPs of “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” sat in Springsteen’s vault until now because he sensed the timing was not right.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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      Justin Bieber Is ‘Standing on Business’ in Paparazzi Video

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      A video of the singer’s heated discussion about privacy with a group of photographers has been widely shared, sometimes without the full context of the situation.Justin Bieber is making headlines again.In videos circulating across social media and news outlets, Mr. Bieber is shown having what appears to be a heated exchange with a photographer last Thursday outside Soho House in Malibu, Calif.In the days since, fans have been speculating about his well-being and whether his social media posts, many of which could be read as fairly aggressive, have been a reaction to the incident.So what happened outside Soho House?The most widely shared section of the lengthy video shows Mr. Bieber, in a blue hooded sweatshirt, holding a flashlight next to his face, asking the photographer, “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business, is it?”The phrase “standing on business,” which can mean taking responsibility, but can also mean not backing down, is part of a larger conversation the singer has with what appears to be a group of paparazzi. Over the course of the discussion, he repeatedly expresses concern about how clips of the interaction could be misrepresented.“You’re provoking me — you’re going to take this video out of context like you always do,” Mr. Bieber says, somewhat muffled by the voices of paparazzi assuring him they will not.After that exchange, which is kept at a fairly even tone, the interaction becomes more heated. Mr. Bieber, growing increasingly frustrated, fires off numerous expletives and repeatedly asks the paparazzi why they are “trying to provoke” him.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 Trip Through Trip-Hop’s Past and Future

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      Listen to songs from Portishead and Cibo Matto, plus inheritors like Fcukers and a.s.o.Beth Gibbons of Portishead onstage in 2008.Oliver Hartung for The New York TimesDear listeners,Over the past couple of years, it’s started to feel like every out-of-favor electronic music style from the 1990s is returning at once. PinkPantheress is singing pop songs over drum-and-bass beats. Oklou uses trance synths. Hyperpop has made “uncool” taste a creative virtue. (On the less-out-of-favor, more-commercially-successful end of things, there’s Beyoncé and Charli XCX’s love for “Show Me Love.”)Signs have been building that trip-hop, a genre that reached popularity in the mid-90s by mixing atmospheric hip-hop beats with moody pop vocals, was next up for a resurgence. In one sense, it’s a sound that never fully went away — step into any swanky hotel bar over the past few decades — but it was seen as a creative dead end. “Today, trip-hop is the most toothless of beats-based styles,” the critic Jody Rosen wrote in a 2003 article in The New York Times about Massive Attack, one of the genre’s standard-bearers. “It’s easy listening for hipsters in space-age sneakers.”Well, lace up my space-age sneakers, because this music is sounding good again. Confirmation that I wasn’t imagining things hit my inbox via a recent edition of the always perceptive Herb Sundays music newsletter, which found ample evidence that trip-hop is in the zeitgeist, like Logic1000’s new, low-B.P.M. mix for the long-running DJ-Kicks series. (They referred to the sound as “downtempo,” one of a few related labels, but let’s not get lost in the subgenre soup and just vibe, OK?)Here are six classics from trip-hop’s initial wave and four tracks from current artists who are picking up the torch.A woman in the moon is singing to the earth,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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      Paul Simon at the Beacon Theater: Quiet, Intricate, Masterly

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      Subtlety reigned as the musician played his post-farewell tour in New York, which included a full performance of his 33-minute LP, “Seven Psalms.”Paul Simon, 83, has simply changed his mind about a farewell to touring that he announced in 2018, with a valedictory arena tour that ended with a park concert in Queens. He had more to say and sing.He’s back on the road with a relatively intimate, scaled-down postscript: his A Quiet Celebration tour. It’s booked into theaters selected for their acoustics, and it’s made possible by an advanced monitoring system that helps him cope with his recent severe hearing loss.Simon played to a reverently attentive audience on Monday night at his hometown sanctuary, the Beacon Theater. When the refurbished, regilded venue reopened in 2009, Simon was its first performer. And on Monday, he stepped onstage smiling broadly and announced, “I love playing in this room.”Simon has been making poetic, tuneful pop hits — songs that found mass audiences with lapidary craftsmanship and terse, enigmatic insights — since the 1960s. He had less commercial success with larger formats: his 1980 movie about a songwriter, “One-Trick Pony,” and his 1998 musical, “The Capeman.” But he has still been thinking bigger than individual songs.After performing the entirety of his album “Seven Psalms,” Simon returned with a set of hits and deeper cuts.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn 2023, Simon released “Seven Psalms,” a continuous 33-minute suite of songs about the brevity, fragility and preciousness of life — “Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” — and the unknowability of God. “The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor,” he sang, but also, “The Lord is the ocean rising / The Lord is a terrible swift sword.”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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      Arthur Hamilton, Who Wrote the Enduring ‘Cry Me a River,’ Dies at 98

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      A hit for Julie London in 1955, it was later recorded by — among many others — Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand and Michael Bublé, who praised it for its “darkness.”Arthur Hamilton, a composer best known for the enduring torch song “Cry Me a River,” which has been recorded by hundreds of artists, died on May 20 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 98.His death was announced this month by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and the Society of Composers & LyricistsMr. Hamilton’s long career included an Oscar nomination for best original song. But his most famous composition by far was “Cry Me a River.”It was one of the three songs he wrote for the 1955 film “Pete Kelly’s Blues,” which starred Jack Webb as a jazz musician fighting mobsters in Prohibition-era Kansas City, Mo. At the time, Mr. Webb was also playing his most famous role, Sergeant Joe Friday, on the television series “Dragnet” (1951-59).Peggy Lee, who played an alcoholic performer in the film, sang Mr. Hamilton’s “Sing a Rainbow” and “He Needs Me.” Ella Fitzgerald, who was also in the film, sang “Cry Me a River,” but her rendition was cut by Mr. Webb, who was also the director and producer.“Arthur said to me that the irony was that when Ella recorded it” — years later, for her 1961 album “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!” — “he thought she made one of the greatest recordings of it ever,” Michael Feinstein, the singer and pianist, said in an interview. “But Jack felt she didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to do it justice.”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 Musical Mysteries Brian Wilson Left Behind

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      The Beach Boys mastermind has been the subject of pop scholarship and major boxed sets, but some corners of his oeuvre remain unreleased.Though Brian Wilson was one of pop’s most studied artists, he largely remained an enigma. The Beach Boys leader, whose death at 82 was announced this week, made music for the masses with an artisan’s eye for detail. While his biography was well known, questions about what drove him to the top of the charts — and ultimately deep into darkness — could never definitively be answered.Since the start of the CD era, Wilson’s legacy has been burnished by a series of deep-dive archival efforts, including the 1993 “Good Vibrations” boxed set, the revelatory “Pet Sounds Sessions” collection from 1996, a series of early 2000s reissues focused on the band’s Brother label years, and ultimately the holy grail: the release of his abandoned mid-60s masterwork, “Smile,” in 2011.“Everything Brian created is worth hearing and it all has a kind of historical value in terms of understanding his life,” said David Leaf, the Beach Boys historian who published “Smile: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of Brian Wilson” this spring.In more recent years, that effort has continued with sets focused on the Beach Boys’ overlooked and often deceptively strange 1970s work. “These projects continue to come out with all this new and unheard material,” said the author Peter Ames Carlin, who wrote a 2006 biography of Wilson, “Catch a Wave.” “It’s a testament to just how creative and prolific Brian was — despite the many ups and downs of his life.”Even with the consistent release of music from the vaults, there are fascinating corners of Wilson’s oeuvre that have yet to see the light of day. Here’s a rundown.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