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      The Beatles, Taylor Swift and More Pop Stars Mess With the Past

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      Who says hindsight is 20/20?Musicians keep getting tempted to revisit recordings they made long ago, and in 2023, flashbacks from the Beatles and Taylor Swift drew worldwide attention. Some temptations are technological; others have business imperatives. Wielding the latest digital tools, some powered by artificial intelligence, musicians and labels have been busily exploring their vaults and hard drives, many of them thoroughly convinced that they now have a better idea of how their older music is supposed to sound. Do they?Recorded music is many things: an expression, a structure, a physical performance, a series of decisions large and small, an artifact of memory and emotion, a souvenir of a particular time. But all of those aspects end up as a waveform, which can then be treated like any other information. The digital era and its computer-engineering paradigms have made that information infinitely malleable: just a starting point for version 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. A.I. is only going to make things more complicated as it reconfigures all the information available online.But with music, an update isn’t necessarily an improvement. It might be an anachronism or a betrayal instead.One of the hardest decisions for any artist is knowing when something is finished. That choice might be made after endless deliberation, on a deadline, on a whim, under the influence — who knows? In the vinyl era, that decision was usually final, give or take alternate mixes for singles, radio and clubs. Listeners reacted to, and bonded with, the music in its fixed form.Digital loosened things up — at first out of necessity, as vast analog catalogs were transferred to new formats, and then more innovatively, as musicians reveled in the possibilities of vastly expanded multitracking, sampling, editing and even glitching. Remixes, remasters, mash-ups, ghost duets — all kinds of second-guessing ensued, including among musicians themselves who were older but not necessarily wiser as artists. In the streaming era, even an official release date doesn’t make things final; Kanye West, now Ye, kept revising his 2016 LP “The Life of Pablo” — making previous iterations vanish online — well after its initial release.There are obvious commercial incentives for looking back. For many artists, as well as their marketers, it’s easier creative work to revisit sure things than to forge brand-new material. And there’s hardly a more time-tested selling point than claiming that a well-loved product is new and improved.Pop has been busily plumbing its archives since the dawn of the digital era, but 2023 brought some high-profile time-warping. The Beatles empire heralded the release of “Now and Then,” which is billed as the last song that all four members worked on, even asynchronously. It’s built from a John Lennon demo from the late 1970s that the other three Beatles started rearranging in the 1990s. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr did recording sessions to complete the track in 2022, using recent software that could cleanly separate out Lennon’s vocal.The surviving Beatles tidied up the song, strengthening the beat and jettisoning some of Lennon’s more self-doubting lyrics and lacing it with elements (like vocal harmonies) lifted from other Beatles songs. They were deliberately looking back where the Beatles of the 1960s had determinedly pushed ahead. It’s a 21st-century song, as much “now” as “then.”“Now and Then” arrived as part of the latest Beatles reissues: new, expanded, remixed versions of the anthologies known as the Red and Blue albums, “The Beatles/1962-1966” and “The Beatles/1966-1970” (now also designated “The 2023 Edition”). They are the continuation of the Beatles’ longtime efforts to wring every possible product out of their catalog: concept compilations (“Love Songs,” No. 1 hits on “1”), expanded — and illuminating — reissues that include unreleased session tapes, a “naked” mix of “Let It Be,” a megamix for Cirque du Soleil (“Love”).The Red and Blue albums, originally released in 1973, were many young listeners’ primers on the Beatles: a whirlwind career ruthlessly pared down to what two LPs could hold. The 2023 editions have more songs; they’re now three-LP sets, diluting the canon established by the original compilations. And as with the other painstakingly reworked 21st-century Beatles releases, they fidget with countless sonic details: panning instruments to different places or moving them into the center, separating parts that had been blurred or blended, bringing out new details, crisping things up.The new mixes offer a contemporary mixture of analytical clarity and arbitrary tweaks. But they don’t entirely trust that the groundbreaking 1960s Beatles already knew what they were doing in the first place — and that their artistic achievement was shaped by how the Beatles dealt with the era’s studio technology, limitations and all. People encountering the songs on streaming services may not notice which version they’re getting: the ones all the Beatles chose to release, or the new ones.A different kind of reclamation project continued when Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” her remake and expansion of her breakthrough pop album from 2014: nearly note-for-note reconstructions of the previously released songs, plus five other songs “from the vault” that she has said didn’t fit the original album. Swift has impeccable personal reasons for the do-over; she does not own the master recordings she made for the Big Machine label, even though the songs are hers. Meanwhile, her latest fans get a chance to experience a “new” Swift album as though it were being released for the first time.Yet an unimpeachable business statement is different from an artistic one. On “1989” — with the Swedish pop master Max Martin as executive producer — Swift was boldly and indelibly redefining herself. She left behind the country radio format, cranked up the beats and loops and honed her pop concision. The album has a spirit of both discipline and discovery, of kicking old expectations to the curb while flexing new skills.And that’s something the remake can’t recapture. Instead of a breakthrough, it’s more like an assignment or an exercise, diligently revisiting every instrumental layer and vocal inflection. It’s thoroughly, unblinkingly professional, but the stakes are lower. Time-warp paradoxes start with the first track, “Welcome to New York.” Swift sings, “Everybody here wanted something more/Searching for a sound they hadn’t heard before” — as she rebuilds a sound the entire world has now heard before.Of course, there’s an outlier and counterexample — as always in music — to leaving the past alone. In 2023, the Replacements released “Tim: Let It Bleed Edition,” a boxed set including a full-length remix of the band’s 1985 album “Tim” by the longtime producer and engineer Ed Stasium.“Tim” was the Replacements’ fourth album but its first on a major label, at a time when “indie credibility” seemed to matter. That identity crisis was central to the songs Paul Westerberg wrote: “God what a mess/On the ladder of success,” he sang in “Bastards of Young.”“Tim” was produced by Tom Erdelyi of the Ramones, who made it unfriendly to radio play; it’s distant, muted and unnecessarily murky, perhaps to resist any accusations that the Replacements were selling out. Stasium’s remix brings out all kinds of things that were recorded but downplayed in the original production: snappy but untamed drumming, guitars that wrangle and cackle, Westerberg’s heartfelt and rowdy vocals.Even with this mix, “Tim” probably wouldn’t have been an album-radio hit; the band was still too scrappy for mid-1980s gatekeepers. But the remixed “Tim” is the rare case where second thoughts can change things for the better. On streaming services and in the box, the Replacements don’t hide their earlier choices; the past and present versions of the album are both included. At least we can still know which is which.Digital possibilities are only going to scramble things further, untethering artistic products from their original inspirations and proportions. Oil paintings are being remarketed as environments. Albums are getting a new round of spatialized Dolby Atmos remixes. A.I. will be generating countless variations, pastiches and fakes. But amid the flood of new versions, let’s not forget to identify, recognize and celebrate the originals. More

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      ‘Priscilla,’ Olivia Rodrigo and the Year of Girlhood and Longing

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      When she was just 14, Priscilla Beaulieu, an Air Force brat stationed with her family in Germany, met one of the planet’s biggest pop stars. The pair formed a connection, and when it was time to temporarily part ways, he left her with a keepsake.That gift, an Army issue jacket from Elvis Presley, is an important symbol in the movie “Priscilla,” hanging from her bedroom wall like a poster ripped from a magazine. The film’s director, Sofia Coppola, seems to be making a point about the gaping age gap between teenager and heartthrob (24 and a year-plus into military service), but also about the universality of a girl’s crush — relatable, all-consuming.In class soon after, in a scene that reminded me of Britney Spears anxiously counting down the seconds until the bell in the “ … Baby One More Time” video, a daydreaming Priscilla fidgets at her desk. You can almost see the cartoon hearts floating above her head as Coppola offers this unsettling portrait of an adolescent drawn into an age-inappropriate relationship. But her knowing depiction of girlhood longing stayed with me, too. Because whether you were a teenage girl in 1959 or in 2023, that specific ache — in love, or what you think is love — will probably feel familiar.I noticed that pang — the kind that comes from badly wanting something seemingly just out of reach — surfacing in our entertainments this year: full-throated and kicking down doors on “Guts,” Olivia Rodrigo’s hilarious, if wrenching, relationship album; simmering to a boil in “Swarm,” the series about an obsessed fan with a gnawing hunger; and yearning for validation in “Don’t Think, Dear,” a dancer’s devastating memoir of a ballet career that stalled at the barre. Girls giving voice to their pain even when they couldn’t fully make sense of it. Girls spilling their guts.The Cruel Tutelage of Alice Robb“Ballet had given me a way to be girl,” a “specific template,” Alice Robb writes in “Don’t Think, Dear.”To middle school, she wears her hair scraped into a bun, a leotard instead of a bra. She trains at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious school. At 12, though, struggling to keep up, she’s expelled after three years of study. The rejection is unshakable, and the sting goes on for decades. Desperate for a do-over that never comes, she enrolls in less prominent dance academies, where she’s heartbroken to encounter girls with flat feet and messy buns. She stalks old classmates on social media, and for 15 years, keeps up a dutiful stretching routine that she hopes will maintain the outlines of a ballet body, one that telegraphs her as “special.”“The dream of being a ballerina begins with the dream of being beautiful,” Robb writes. Anyone who has ever pulled on a tutu, this pink puff of fabric imbued with something indescribably feminine, is probably nodding at this assessment of ballet’s initial pull. American girlhood is practically wrapped in blush tones, with ballet as a kind of shared rite. It’s there at every stage: in the aspirant of the popular “Angelina Ballerina” children’s books and in the nostalgic young enthusiasts who’ve recently given the art form’s aesthetics a name, balletcore, playing dress-up with the uniform. But for those like Robb who see ballet not as a phase, but a pursuit, letting go is hard. To fail at ballet is to fail at being a girl.That’s not true, of course. But wounds sustained in girlhood, when you’re not yet emotionally equipped to mend them, tend to linger. With each page, I rooted for Robb, now a journalist in her 30s, to find the position that would let her plant her feet back on the ground.Alice Robb at Steps in Manhattan.Laurel Golio for The New York TimesAnd I thought of an Olivia Rodrigo lyric: “I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy/I chased some dumb ideal my whole [expletive] life.” That’s how Rodrigo, the 20-year-old pop supernova, deals with the anguish of rejection on her sophomore album, “Guts”: She thrashes.Rodrigo realizes that, in its first throes, “Love Is Embarrassing.” (It is.) On that throbbing track, she admits the hold “some weird second-string loser” has on her. On another, “Get Him Back,” she jokingly lays out a conflicted revenge plot as the bridge drops to a whisper: “I wanna kiss his face, with an uppercut,” she confesses. “I wanna meet his mom — just to tell her her son sucks.” She’s cataloging her humiliations, but she’s laughing at them, too.She refuses to wallow for long, and I’m convinced this is partly what gives the album its buoyancy. (It’s an approach that, in hindsight, would have given me more relief than the semester I spent writing love-stricken poetry on tiny notecards at my university’s performing arts library after a brutal breakup.)Headfirst Into HeartbreakGirlhood, strictly marked in years, comes to a close in the waning years of adolescence. But for some, I think this period calls for a less tidy metric, one that makes room for a soft transition into late girlhood, or adolescence — with all of its intensifying feeling — and then post-girlhood, with its own round of heartbreaks. Lauryn Hill was 23 in 1998 when she released a relationship album for the ages. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” multiplatinum and Grammy-winning, tracked her recovery from a series of rumored breaks: with her hip-hop trio, the Fugees, and one of her bandmates, Wyclef Jean, with whom she was said to have shared a stormy romance. For a generation of us, it was as if she’d found our own love letters and read each one out loud.This fall, reunited with her bandmates, the girl from South Orange, N.J., returned to the stage to breathe new life into that indelible collection. On opening night of a short-lived tour, I watched from the Prudential Center in nearby Newark as Hill wailed the exasperated plea from “Ex-Factor”: “No matter how I think we grow, you always seem to let me know it ain’t working.” It had been 25 years since Hill’s “Miseducation”; a quarter-century for perspective, love and motherhood to right-size once outsize feelings. She sang the words she’d written all those years ago, but this time her voice was tinged with unmistakable joy.Lauryn Hill on the 25th anniversary of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” tour.Mathew Tsang/Getty ImagesThere is longing in the fictional world of “Swarm,” but little joy. Dre (Dominique Fishback), a socially awkward 20-something, spends her days posting online tributes dedicated to her favorite artist, a Beyoncé stand-in named Ni’Jah.“I think the second she sees me, she’d know how we’re connected,” Dre tells her roommate.Dre is a “Killer Bee,” one of a hive of obsessive fans, and she will live up to the name: She soon sets off on a violent cross-country spree, picking off Ni’Jah’s unsuspecting online critics. After each kill, famished, Dre devours anything she can get her hands on — a leftover apple pie, a sandwich. It becomes clear that she’s not hungry at all; what she’s starved for — longing for — is connection. In that sense, she’s not so different from the scores of women and girls who packed concert stadiums this past summer, adorned in sparkling silver or baring arms stacked with friendship bracelets.A Girl Walks Into Her KitchenWhile I contemplated girlhood and longing this year, I was also cheered by how girls have prioritized their own delight. My favorite entry in that category was Girl Dinner, a TikTok trend that transformed a simple meal, meant to be enjoyed solo, into a satisfying feast — “a bag of popcorn, a glass of wine, some bread, some cheese and a hunk of chocolate,” as Jessica Roy put it in The New York Times this summer.The idea was to put convenience first, ostensibly leaving more time and space for the pleasures that elaborate meal prep and cleanup might not. The concept of Girl Dinner, which also embraces the internet appetite for giving ordinary things a fresh polish by renaming them, felt like an antidote to longing. A reminder that sometimes being full, all on your own, can be just as fulfilling. More

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      Tom Smothers and the John Lennon Connection

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      He was close with John Lennon, and had a sophisticated understanding of wine, politics and literature. He only played the bumpkin onstage.I read the news today, oh boy.John Lennon’s lyric popped into my head Tuesday as soon as I read the texts from my friend Marcy Carriker Smothers. The first was a photo of a guitar next to a fire and Christmas poinsettia. The second included the news. “Beautiful and peaceful passing today at 1:40P. We had a lovely Christmas.”Tom Smothers had been in hospice for months so word of his passing induced a sigh not a gasp. I thought of the “Day in the Life” lyric not because of the circumstances of his death — Tom was 86 and died of lung cancer — but because Lennon and Tom were close. At the 1969 Montreal recording of “Give Peace a Chance,” only two acoustic guitars strum along. One is held by Lennon; the other by Tom.Tom came to the antiwar movement with sad bona fides. His father was a West Pointer who said goodbye to his namesake son in 1940, before heading to the Pacific to defend liberty. He never returned.Nothing funny about that origin story. Still, through music, Tom and his younger brother, Dick, found their way to comedy and created an act that instantly impressed Jack Paar, the “Tonight” show host, who remarked in 1961, “I don’t know what you guys have but no one’s going to steal it.”Six years later, the brothers debuted “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” their seminal variety show that used comedy to satirize issues like the Vietnam War, racial politics and drugs.Despite the heavy topics, Tom came across as lighthearted and simple. During an audience question-and-answer session, a woman once asked, “Are you both married?”“No, ma’am. We’re just brothers,” Tom said.Smothers was close with John Lennon and played guitar on “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 in Montreal. In real life, Tom thought and felt deeply. He cared about social justice and the creative process. He labored over details. The biggest contradiction was Tom’s onstage persona. A classic Smothers Brothers sketch would begin with the two singing a song until Tom interrupted or screwed up the words so badly that Dick pulled the plug. This would lead to wry observations or an argument that built to a punchline. The brothers would then return to the song, providing the sketch with a natural and satisfying finish. At heart, this was character comedy with Dick playing the bass and the straight man and Tom playing the guitar and the fool.In an early episode, the brothers came out singing the Maurice Chevalier hit “Louise” while sporting boater hats. They paused to discuss the French and romance, and Tom instantly claimed familiarity. “You really know about those French wines and women?” Dick challenged Tom.“Oh I know all about that stuff.”The audience laughed, doubting his claim.Dick was not about to let Tom off the hook. “French wine — what do you know about it?” he pressed.“It gets you drunk,” Tom replied, nailing the punchline with exquisite timing.In real life, Tom knew everything about wine. For decades, he owned and operated a vineyard in Sonoma that produced award-winning merlot and cabernet sauvignon. At first, he lived in a barn on the property, then later designed a main house with a huge stone fireplace and views in every direction so that you could follow the sun throughout the day. If the hot tub could talk, it would tell spicy stories about parties in the 1960s and ’70s and probably be the only one that could remember what happened.By the time I visited Smothers-Remick Ridge Ranch, the hot tub was a place for kids to splash around. I’d first met Tom in 1988, when I was hired as a writer for the variety show’s second life. While working on the reboot, I roomed with the associate producer, Marcy Carriker, who married Tom in 1990. Their two children — Bo and Riley Rose — would play with my own two kids. Marcy co-hosted a food and wine radio show with Guy Fieri, so dinner was always delicious. After the meal, Tom would sit by the fire, reading a thick novel.Smothers played the guitar and the fool; his brother played the bass and the straight man.Mark Junge/Getty ImagesIt was a picture of domesticity that didn’t last. Soaking in wine country meant a lot of drinking, and the more Tom drank, the less fun he became. Knowing how brilliant and generous he could be, I found it painful to watch his behavior shift. If this seems harsh, I mention it because the truth mattered to Tom. Marcy and I would go on long walks to discuss the situation. We came up with a phrase that summed things up: “It’s tomplicated.”Tom and Marcy separated 15 years ago but never divorced. And when Tom grew ill, she was there for him along with their children. “They have been rocks,” Marcy texted me hours after he died. She told me that over the last few months, Tom had never had a stranger care for him. She, Bo, Riley Rose and Marty Tryon, Tom’s former road manager, watched over him.And so Tom spent a lovely Christmas Eve and Day surrounded by his family. He slipped away the next afternoon. As always, exquisite timing.I hope Tom will be remembered. He was last on TV three decades ago, so except for comedy nerds, no one under 40 would have reason to recognize him. If you’re curious, there’s a smart 2002 documentary, “Smothered,” about the brothers’ getting fired from CBS, and an excellent book by David Bianculli, “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Both the film and book reiterate what history has made clear: Tom was absolutely right about war being stupid and civil rights being worth fighting for. In his own way, he, too, defended liberty.Or try sliding down a YouTube rabbit hole where you’ll stumble over early routines from Steve Martin, whom Tom hired as a writer before encouraging him to perform. I never met an entertainer who was more respectful of other people’s talents than Tom. He adored so many fellow artists, including Harry Belafonte, Harry Nilsson, Martin Mull, and (Mama) Cass Elliot, who lights up one of my favorite sketches from the 1968-69 season.The concept is simply Elliot singing her hit “Dream a Little Dream” to Tom as he tries to fall asleep in a big brass bed. Tom doesn’t say a word but gets plenty of laughs. The bit is sweet, original, musical and funny. When you strip away the tomplications, Tom was all those things. More

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      12 Key Music Collections, From Future to the Who

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      Whitney Houston’s gospel music, Future’s prolific mixtape run, a chunk of Joni Mitchell’s archives and a soundtrack of Brooklyn’s early discos arrived in new packages this year.Artists were eager to revisit the past in 2023 — some tweaking recent albums (like Taylor Swift), others revisiting long-dormant work in the vaults (like the two surviving Beatles). Boxed sets and reissue collections serve a different purpose, helping put catalogs and musicians into context, and bringing fresh revelations to light. Here are a dozen of the best our critics encountered this year.Julee Cruise, ‘Floating Into the Night’(Sacred Bones; one LP, $22)The absorbing, unconventional debut album from the deep-exhale vocalist Julee Cruise, who died in 2022, was produced by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch; the three had previously collaborated on music for Lynch’s 1986 alt-noir film “Blue Velvet.” This batch of songs, released in 1989, plays as an extension of that fun-house mirror, lightly terrifying universe, with twisted 1950s melodies meeting destabilizing, plangent guitars meeting Dali-esque shimmers. “Falling” became the theme song for “Twin Peaks” in instrumental form, but its full vocal version is the essential one. Songs like that, “The Nightingale” and “Into the Night” feel, even now, sui generis — not exactly dream-pop or new age, but something utterly amniotic. And lightly harrowing, too. JON CARAMANICADeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’(Jagjaguwar; five LPs, four CDs, 120-page book, $130)Anna Powell Denton/JagjaguwarBon Iver didn’t come out of nowhere. Before he started that project, Justin Vernon was in DeYarmond Edison, a pensive, folky but exploratory band that made two albums before splitting up; other members formed Megafaun. DeYarmond Edison — Vernon’s middle names — delved into folk, rock, Minimalism and bluegrass, learning traditional songs but also experimenting with phase patterns. It made two studio albums and left behind other songs, including “Epoch.” This extensively annotated boxed set includes songs from Mount Vernon, DeYarmond Edison’s jammy predecessor, along with DeYarmond Edison’s full second studio album (though only part of its first), unreleased demos, intimate concerts, collaborations outside the band and Vernon’s 2006 solo recordings. It’s a chronicle that opens up the sources of a style getting forged. JON PARELESWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Best Arts Photos of 2023

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      Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More

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      boygenius Is Having All the Fun

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      There’s a scene in the movie “Help!” where the Beatles roll up to a row of terraced houses and approach their adjacent front doors — four separate entrances, one for each Beatle. Then the camera cuts inside, and we see that all four doors lead into one immense mid-1960s playhouse, where the Beatles live together. This was and is the fantasy of a rock band: boys, together, reveling in a world of their own making. Beastie Boys. Beach Boys. Backstreet Boys. They are cute. They are straight. They are inseparable and nearly indistinguishable, like sitcom characters. They seem to travel with their own center of gravity. All for one and one for all. “The boys” is how the three members of the band boygenius refer to themselves. Over the past year, they have emerged as a fresh incarnation of that classic fantasy: the right band with the right synergy at exactly the right moment, with the most exhilarating record and the most emotional shows and the most exultant fans. Each boy even inhabits a classic boy-band archetype. Lucy Dacus, 28, is the thoughtful dreamy poet boy; Julien Baker, 28, the tattooed rocker heartthrob boy; and Phoebe Bridgers, 29, the wry, preternaturally charismatic boy. The music press often calls them a supergroup — which is technically correct, because all three are successful indie solo artists with fan bases of their own. But “supergroup” conjures images of ego-mad 1970s dudes in their cocaine phase, capturing a little magic on record before discovering that they hate one another. And this particular supergroup is made up of women who actually like one another, and who get off on reimagining what a rock band looks like and what it feels like to be in one. “There’s a very specific framework of the history of dudes and rock,” Dacus says. “People just know it, so it’s easy to play with.” I first met the boys at the conclusion of a stuff-of-dreams tour, the day before a final Halloween concert at the Hollywood Bowl. They had spent nearly a year crisscrossing the United States and Europe, selling out Madison Square Garden, headlining festivals, racking up critical acclaim. It had just been announced that in less than two weeks boygenius would be the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live,” with Timothée Chalamet hosting; they would be in New York, trying on clothes for the show, when they learned that their debut LP, “The Record,” had been nominated for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year. Over oak-milk lattes and breakfast tacos in Studio City, Baker joked that the end-of-tour energy felt like “the Macy’s one-day sale” — an event that, despite its name, seems to exist in perpetuity.The boys were discussing Bridgers’s Halloween party, which went down over the weekend. Baker dressed as the pop star Ariana Grande, based on a much-memed paparazzi photo from when Grande was dating Pete Davidson: Disney-princess ponytail, a thigh-skimming sweatshirt worn as a dress, winged eyeliner, signature lollipop. Dacus, who is tall and ethereally elegant, went as Davidson, in a giant flannel hoodie. Just that morning, she had posted pictures on Instagram — she and Baker in their costumes, side by side with the original — driving fans crazy with even a mock suggestion that these two might be dating. (The boys’ potential romantic involvement is something they seem to enjoy neither confirming nor denying.) “This has completely obliterated an entire dimension of my mind,” one comment read.The band’s fans, a passionate and highly amped population, love it when the boys do stuff together: play guitar, make out onstage, dress up. Then the fans do those things, too. There’s “a lot of gay kissing” at boygenius shows, Dacus noted happily. The band identifies, individually and collectively, as queer, and they’re proud of the freedom fans feel to use boygenius as an avenue for exploring gender and sexual identity. “Safety and sexuality can inhabit the same space,” Bridgers said. “It’s tight that it’s both — it’s tight that there are friends just hooking up for fun and also people who actually [expletive] each other.” She paused and smiled. “It is hot and also safe.” The others laughed. “The hottest safest band of all time!” Dacus joked.Even when it’s not Halloween, fans like to come to boygenius shows dressed as highly specific iterations of the boys. The three of them in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone (itself a nod to Nirvana in suits on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1994) or Bridgers, in boxers, standing in the middle of a monster-truck arena, in the Kristen Stewart-directed music video for the dreamy, twisted “Emily I’m Sorry.” “When I see the crowd dressing up like boygenius, I think it is so wonderful that these kids have people in rock music to dress ‘like’ instead of people to dress ‘for,’” says Haley Dahl, frontwoman of the avant-pop band Sloppy Jane and a friend of Bridgers’s from high school. One fan recently dressed as a teenage Baker in 1990s skater regalia, based on a photo of the guitarist as a pouty Tennessee high schooler. “The ‘Rocky Horror’ element of it was never — like, we can’t make that happen,” Bridgers said. “Yeah, I didn’t anticipate that,” Baker added. “I thought kids would just come in their normal clothes.”This year’s boygenius shows have felt like art-school prom: sincere, theatrical, joyfully subversive. As decidedly rock as the group’s sound is — full of loud-quiet-loud guitar jams — it’s also welcoming and interior, the songs little pockets of sometimes-soft, sometimes-hard beauty that offer fans a place to land in an often bereft-feeling world. The intimacy boygenius projects tempts fans to imitate them, to try to replicate the aspects of their friendship that seem rare and magical. It’s a sensation the band members can relate to, because they feel the magic, too. As Bridgers once put it, “I like myself better around them.”This is what sits at the core of what the boys sometimes call the “project” that is boygenius: creating a container for self-expression and exploration, a permission structure for identity, and then watching in wonder as that very private process winds up introducing you to your best friends, as well as to yourself. “In this band I get a license to live into parts of myself I’m curious about,” Baker said, as Dacus and Bridgers nodded in agreement. “We choose our most ideal versions of ourselves. And then the kids are dressing up as the persona that we’ve constructed — because they recognize something of their own in that.”The band performing at the Hollywood Bowl on Halloween.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIf the boygenius boys come across like old friends who know deep secrets about one another, that’s because they are. Dacus and Baker first met in 2016, when both were 22. Baker was doing a small club tour in support of her debut album, “Sprained Ankle.” Dacus was an opening act. “I met Lucy in the greenroom of a venue called DC9,” Baker says. “Lucy was reading ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ maybe? Henry James.” Both were very green, very young musicians raised in religious homes in small Southern towns — Dacus outside Richmond, Va., in a neighborhood she proudly describes as “across from a cornfield and next to a goat farm,” and Baker in Bartlett, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis. They bonded.Bridgers was another opener on Baker’s tour. They met before a show at the Eagle Rock Recreation Center in Los Angeles. Because Bridgers was from the area, and because the songs she had put out at that point struck Baker as “less amateur” and “more developed” than Baker’s own, Baker was expecting someone sophisticated, someone “more cultured.” But Bridgers “was a little bit of a hesher — in a leather jacket and a NASCAR T-shirt.” Bridgers was savvy and urbane, yes, but what mostly came across was her “sweetness,” Baker says. “I was just like, Do you want to go get some pizza and doughnuts? And so we went and got late-night pizza and doughnuts and stayed up talking about bands. It was very pure.”There are friends you meet in your early 20s — a fragile, formative stage — who become foundational. They are the people who know you on the edge of adulthood but before you’ve decided on a grown-up persona. They are the people who know who you are before anyone else cares who you are, an especially precious perspective if you later become famous. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best, cutthroat at worst and full of shady, dubious people. “Especially at that time, when everything feels like it’s happening really quickly around you, to have somebody that just had time for you,” Baker says — somebody who gives you her number and says she wants to hang out the next time you’re in the same city, and she means it — that, Baker says, was kind of everything. “I was just like, OK, I really trust these guys.” Before boygenius officially became a band, they were a text group, talking often about what they were reading, inaugurating what still feels like one long book-club meeting from which they occasionally break to play music. (Current selection: Leslie Jamison’s addiction memoir, “The Recovering.”) In the two years after they first met, all three of their careers took off. Bridgers released her debut solo album, “Stranger in the Alps,” while Baker and Dacus each released their second (“Turn Out the Lights” and “Historian”). All three were touring like crazy, while keeping in touch throughout. In the fall of 2018, the boys found themselves booked on a short tour together and decided that they might as well record some music to promote it. Four days after they began, they had recorded the six songs that became the “boygenius” EP. On tour together, they would do a mix of solo songs and songs they’d written together. They had their share of fans, but nothing like the level of interest or personal fascination that boygenius inspires now.The arrival of that personal fascination has been predictably disorienting. Over coffee in Studio City, for instance, there was a moment when a scowl washed over Bridgers’s face. “Were we just being filmed?” Dacus asked, following her bandmate’s gaze to a young woman who was sitting stiffly, staring intensely into her coffee, her phone face up on the table. “Don’t like it, don’t like it,” Bridgers fumed. Dacus was recently followed while shopping at Target. Baker discovered someone filming her through a display of Halloween candy at a CVS. “It was like a comedy,” she said, chuckling, “because they were filming through a gap in the candy and then it all fell down and they went like, [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] [expletive].” Bridgers smiled tightly but did not laugh. She leaned into the recorder: “And I just want to say to that person: ‘Die. Die!’” Bridgers is particularly sensitive to being watched because she, more than the other boys, has experienced the grosser side of notoriety. In the years between the “boygenius” EP and “The Record,” Bridgers got pretty famous. There were many reasons for this, including her relationship with the Irish actor Paul Mescal, her association with Taylor Swift — she was one of the Eras Tour’s opening acts and a guest on Swift’s single “Nothing New” — and her general ubiquity as an in-demand collaborator for artists including the National, Lorde and Paul McCartney. But mostly it’s because Bridgers made an astonishing second record, “Punisher,” that came out early in 2020, when people were stuck home feeling anxious and dislocated and thus perfectly primed to receive Bridgers’s distinctive mix of austere beauty and rage. She played “S.N.L.” solo in 2021 and was criticized for smashing her guitar onstage. (David Crosby called the move “pathetic” on Twitter; Bridgers tartly replied, “little bitch.”) When the boys walk the Grammy red carpet in February, Bridgers will have been there before; “Punisher” earned her four nominations. The boys were with one another at the beginning of careers in a business that is uncertain at best and cutthroat at worst.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York TimesSo it’s notable that it was Bridgers who sent the text that got the boys back into the studio in 2020, and that she sent that text the same week “Punisher” came out. “Can we be a band again?” she wrote.As in so many great romances, everybody involved wanted to return to one another, but each was afraid the others might not feel the same way. What Bridgers understood was the difference between carrying success on your own and getting by with a little help from your friends. “The boys are really good at community,” she says. “I’m more insular. I mean, I have community for sure. But the boys have had, like, more roommates in their lives. So I learned a lot from them. Like how to come into the front lounge of the bus and be like, ‘[expletive], I got this really stressful text last night!’ And just talk it out. It’s the best.” The boys see a band therapist. They have only ever had, as Bridgers puts it, one “for-no-reason bitchy” day on the road. It was in England, while they were touring the Brontës’ house; perhaps, she says, it had to do with the repressed “ghost of Charlotte and Emily Brontë within us, the shared trauma.” Now, whenever the boys are spinning out, they call it Brontitis. Dacus declared, “We could never make music again, and boygenius is just the title of this friendship that we had.”The thing about catching lightning in a bottle is that the glow lasts only so long. Before the Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl, the boys were backstage, getting ready to play in front of nearly 18,000 people. The energy in the dressing rooms had the frenzied excitement of an extremely well-funded high school theater production, but also an underlying anticipatory mournfulness: This was the big end-of-year performance before everyone graduates and is sucked into the what-do-we-do-now abyss. “I’m OK — sad!” Dacus said outside the makeup room when her manager asked how she was doing. “Every song is going to be like, Oh, that’s the last time.”The band had been secretive about what they would wear for this final show of the tour. What could boygenius dress up as that would satisfy their and their fans’ taste for cheeky visual statements? Three rolling racks of clothes, neatly labeled with handmade signs, made plain the plan: They would be the Holy Trinity — Father (Dacus), Son (Baker) and Holy Ghost (Bridgers). A friend asked Baker, who was raised in a deeply Christian family, how her mother was going to feel about her dressing up as Jesus for Halloween. “I told her,” Baker said, amused — though Baker did wonder, “What if I get to heaven and they’re like, ‘We were cool with you being gay and all the lying, but why did you have to come for me so hard at the Hollywood Bowl?’”‘To sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us.’Baker’s costume was simple, just a white robe, sandals and a crown of thorns, so she was able to dress quickly and wander the hallways, marveling at the comfort of Jesus’ footwear (“You’ve got to walk far in the desert!”) while her bandmates were still doing makeup (Dacus, in an Elvisesque bejeweled white suit) and hair (Bridgers, whose spectral halo and veil had to be carefully secured in her ice-blond mane). Then there was the matter of Dave Grohl’s neckwear. “Can you string up this cross?” Lindsey Hartman, the band’s costumer, asked her assistant. Grohl was the night’s special guest. “I’m putting the drummer of Nirvana in a priest costume,” Hartman said, grinning and shaking her head. “This is it.”Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus backstage before the band performed at the Halloween show where they dressed up as the Holy Trinity.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesPhoebe Bridgers backstage before the same performance at the Hollywood Bowl.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesThe 2017 “Wonder Woman” movie regularly brought female audience members to tears with scenes familiar from dozens of other action films — except that everyone onscreen was a woman. The tableau at the Hollywood Bowl stirred similar emotions in me. Boygenius has an all-female backing band (they were dressed as angels, in white Dickies jumpsuits and halos), and there were a lot of women around. It felt as if there were almost no men. When Bridgers’s boyfriend, the comedian and musician Bo Burnham, showed up with his plus-one — the actor Andrew Garfield, in a Cobra Kai karate uniform he sweetly described as “comfy” — you could feel the energy shift. “You do your thing, don’t worry about me,” Burnham said to Bridgers, ducking out just as Grohl appeared with two of his daughters. “I’ll text you when Mom gets here,” he told them, disappearing into his dressing room to change.A few minutes later, the band took the stage, to their standard walk-on music: Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Like everyone else, Grohl was there to serve the boygenius experience. He wanted to play drums on the propulsive “Satanist,” which meant coming on just a few songs into the show. The group sounded insane with Grohl behind them: big and bold, like a band that understood its power and was relaxed enough to fully enjoy it — but then it sounds that way without him too. “OK,” Bridgers said, shaking her body out and grinning. “I feel like the show is happening now. I feel like I just came online.” For the rest of the nearly two-hour performance, there was a sense of easy pleasure in the air, both onstage and in the crowd. Kristen Stewart could be seen in her box with her fiancée, Dylan Meyer, and a pack of fellow willowy motorcycle-jacket-clad Angelenos drinking Modelo with their feet up, singing along. “I’ve seen them twice now, and I tell myself every time to be cool, but I lose it,” Stewart says. “I don’t know why it’s so emotional. I think what it is, they are a real [expletive] band. There is something in the way they don’t negotiate. It’s embedded in a bond that feels like if you ‘get it,’ you’re allowed in. And allowed.” A few seats away, a lesbian couple in schoolgirl outfits smiled goofily amid bouts of making out. In between songs, Bridgers brought out Maxine, her famous-to-fans pug, dressed as a tiny sheep, and intoned, “Behold the lamb of God!” Just before the final encore, Dacus grabbed her microphone. “I have found it hard to figure out what to say to you this whole night,” she said, her voice full. “But to sum it up, we love you very much, and the fact that you love us is not lost on us. This is an absurd dream. Thank you.”Backstage after the show, Grohl and Billie Eilish and other assorted band insiders mingled in the greenroom. Elsewhere on the grounds, at the official after-party, Bridgers’s mother was milling around, beaming: “We have some friends from high school we need to check on, to make sure they’re not freaking out because they can’t get a drink.” (There’s no alcohol backstage on boygenius tours.) Bridgers eventually appeared with Burnham, a black hoodie pulled tight over her head, on guard once again.The night was still young, with lots of goodbyes to say, and then “S.N.L.” two weeks later, and then the Grammys early in 2024. What would come after that, however, was an open question. It’s unclear whether boygenius will make new music together anytime soon.The first thing the boys told me, on the first day we met, was that they were looking forward to their own obsolescence — a day, sometime in the future, when people would still be listening to their music, but without knowing or really caring about its makers.The boys said they were looking forward to their own obsolescence, when people would be listening to their music but not caring about its makers.Hobbes Ginsberg for The New York Times“People will be like, Oh, yeah, I liked this song — a couple of years ago,” Baker imagined. “We talk about this all the time, because. …” Here she turned and asked Dacus: “Didn’t Louise Glück just die?”Dacus nodded, affirming the recent death of the Nobel-laureate poet.“OK,” Baker said, “but when she died, weren’t we like, Wasn’t she already dead?”Dacus smiled and nodded again.“That’s the dream,” Baker said.“That is my goal,” Dacus concurred. “I want, basically, for everyone to be so satisfied with what I could offer that they already think I’m dead.”Lizzy Goodman is a journalist and the author of “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” an oral history of music in New York City from 2001-2011. Hobbes Ginsberg is a lesbian photographer based in Madrid, making vulnerable, hyper-saturated work exploring queer domesticity and the evolution of self. More

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      Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and the Sphere: The Year in Live Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThree years after the pandemic brought live music to a halt, the touring business is thriving: 2023 brought in record revenue — over $9 billion — thanks in part to major outings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, and in part to increased prices across the board. Live shows are also becoming more ambitious in scale and filigree, underscoring how big concerts are becoming experiential luxury goods.But even though the live music space is thriving, there is still persistent growling about Ticketmaster and its fee structure, and also about rising prices in general. Social media amplified both the thrills of some live events, and also confusion over cratering ticket process for others, like some recent dates on Travis Scott’s tour.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about why this year was such an impressive one for the touring business, what lessons established acts are learning from younger arena and stadium stars, and whether the continued pressure on ticket price is sustainable in the long run.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Essra Mohawk, Self-Described Flower Child Singer-Songwriter, Dies at 75

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      She missed a shot at Woodstock glory. But she recorded well-received albums under her own name and worked with Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia and others.Essra Mohawk, a prolific singer-songwriter and self-described flower child whose soulful, dreamlike songs captured the sunny optimism of the Woodstock era, and whose varied career included performing with Frank Zappa and Jerry Garcia and seeing one of her songs turned into a hit single by Cyndi Lauper, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Nashville. She was 75.The cause was cancer, her cousin Jeff Hurvitz said.Over the course of a career that lasted more than a half century, Ms. Mohawk never achieved the fame of contemporaries like Joni Mitchell, Carole King or Laura Nyro (to whom she was often compared). And she missed a chance at hippie immortality when her driver took a wrong turn on the way to the Woodstock festival in 1969.“We got there in time to see the last verse of the last song of the last act of the first night, and then the stage went dark before we got to it from the parking lot,” she recalled in a 2009 video interview.Still, Ms. Mohawk made her mark. Her album “Primordial Lovers,” produced by her husband, Frazier Mohawk, and released shortly after Woodstock, was met with critical praise. In 1977, the rock critic Paul Williams wrote in Rolling Stone that it was “firmly on my list of the top 25 all-time best albums.”While still in her teens, Ms. Mohawk was briefly a member of Frank Zappa’s anarchic band, the Mothers of Invention.via YouTubeShe recorded more than a dozen albums over the years, and, early in her career, served a stint as a member of Frank Zappa’s iconoclastic band, the Mothers of Invention.In the 1970s, Ms. Mohawk sang memorable songs like “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” and “Interjections!,” for “Schoolhouse Rock!,” the series of animated educational shorts that was a Saturday morning television staple for the children of Generation X.In the early 1980s, she carved out a small place in Grateful Dead lore by touring with one Dead side project, the Jerry Garcia Band, and helping write a song, “Haze,” for another, Bob Weir’s Bobby & the Midnites.Ms. Lauper’s exuberant rendition of her song “Change of Heart” shot to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. Two years later, Tina Turner released a version of Ms. Mohawk’s “Stronger Than the Wind.”Ever dogged about finding an audience for her work, Ms. Mohawk even appeared in 1977 on “The Gong Show,” the campy showcase of amateur talent hosted by the colorful Chuck Barris, in which acts deemed flops were dispatched with the strike of a large gong.Some audience members jeered during Ms. Mohawk’s performance of her “Appointment With a Dream,” which involved her own ethereal take on scat singing. Still, she received two scores of 8 (out of 10) and one of 7 from the panel of three celebrity judges.“No, I wasn’t gonged, thank goodness,” Ms. Mohawk wrote in a 2016 post on the blog Rockasteria. “In fact, I scored a 23, my lucky number, but I came in second to a guy who played two saxophones at once.”Essra Mohawk was born Sandra Elayne Hurvitz on April 23, 1948, in Philadelphia, the younger of two children of Henry Hurvitz, a taxi driver, and Anne (Sosnow) Hurvitz, who worked at a beauty shop. She later adopted the name Essra, a twist on Essie, a nickname she picked up early in her career.Ms. Mohawk was married three times. No immediate family members survive. Her brother, Gary, died this year.By her early teens, she was already playing piano and filling notebooks with her songs. After graduating from George Washington High School in Philadelphia in 1966, she briefly attended the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts before moving to New York to start a music career.That career got a jump start when she was 19 and she and a couple of friends were strolling down Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and met Mr. Zappa. “Frank invited us all in to see his show for free,” she said in a 2003 interview. “We became friends, and it wasn’t long before he had an opportunity to hear me play my music. He asked me join the Mothers right on the spot.”Being a satellite in the Zappa orbit came with its Zappaesque quirks. The band’s lead singer, Ray Collins, “came up with the name ‘Uncle Meat’ at one of our rehearsals, telling Frank that he thought it was a great name for a rock star,” she recalled in an interview with the British site Zappanews. “Frank immediately spun around and, pointing at me, proclaimed, ‘You’re Uncle Meat!’”Displeased with the name, Ms. Mohawk wriggled out of it a few months later, so Mr. Zappa appropriated it as the title for a Mothers album in 1969.Mr. Zappa signed her to his label, Bizarre Records, and, under the name Sandy Hurvitz, she released her first album, “Sandy’s Album Is Here at Last!”She released her last, “The One and Only,” in 2019. But she never forgot the invaluable career boost she missed out on with that wrong turn on the way to Woodstock.“Had I played Woodstock, we all know how that would have changed my life,” she said in 2009. But, she acknowledged, perhaps that was a blessing: “Knowing me, being the feral child that I was, I would have had no restraint, and I would have been long dead.” More