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      Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted, Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82

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      Sly Stone, the influential, eccentric and preternaturally rhythmic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose run of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his band the Family Stone could be dance anthems, political documents or both, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 82. The cause was “a prolonged battle with C.O.P.D.,” or lung disease, “and other underlying health issues,” according to a statement from his representatives.“Sly was a monumental figure, a groundbreaking innovator, and a true pioneer who redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” the statement said.As the colorful maestro and mastermind of a multiracial, mixed-gender band, Mr. Stone experimented with the R&B, soul and gospel music he was raised on in the San Francisco area, mixing classic ingredients of Black music with progressive funk and the burgeoning freedoms of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll.The band’s most recognizable songs, many of which would be sampled by hip-hop artists, include “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”Mr. Stone, second from left, with the other members of Sly and the Family Stone in 1970.GAB Archive/RedfernsWe 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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      Roger Nichols, Songwriter Behind Carpenters Hits, Dies at 84

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      With Paul Williams, he wrote enduring 1970s soft-rock classics like “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.”Roger Nichols, a California songwriter and musician who, with his pop-alchemist partner Paul Williams, wrote an advertising jingle for a bank that turned into “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a milestone hit for the Carpenters and a timeless wedding weeper, died on May 17 at his home in Bend, Ore. He was 84.His death, from pneumonia, was confirmed by his daughter Caroline Nichols.Mr. Nichols was best known for his collaborations with Paul Williams, the songwriter, lyricist and all-around celebrity known for songs like “Rainbow Connection,” Kermit the Frog’s forlorn anthem from “The Muppet Movie” (1979).With Mr. Nichols focusing on the music and Mr. Williams conjuring up the words, the duo churned out silky pop nuggets like Three Dog Night’s “Out in the Country” (1970), which rose to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100; “Traveling Boy,” which Art Garfunkel released in 1973; and “I Never Had It So Good,” recorded by Barbra Streisand in 1975.But it was with their work for the Carpenters, the hit-machine sibling duo Karen and Richard Carpenter, that Mr. Nichols and Mr. Williams scaled the heights of pop success.“We’ve Only Just Begun” peaked at No. 2 in 1970, sold more than a million copies of sheet music and served as a timeless showcase for Ms. Carpenter’s spellbinding contralto vocal stylings.The single “We’ve Only Just Begun,” by Mr. Nichols and Paul Williams, rose to No. 2 on he music charts and became a staple of weddings. A&M RecordsWe 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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      Andy Bell of Erasure’s Magical Mystery World

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      The frontman, whose first solo album in 15 years recently arrived, explains why he’s a fan of gems, psychics and snails.For years, Andy Bell of Erasure has been drawn to women of a certain age. “Women like Catherine Deneuve or Deborah Harry have this innate royalness about them, this sense of fully being,” he said. “I’ve always admired that.”Imagine his joy, then, when, upon turning 60 last year, he began to feel that way about himself. “It’s almost like seeing yourself from the outside and appreciating who you are,” Bell said by video call from his vacation home in Majorca, Spain. “How lovely to feel that way!”The feeling gave Bell so much confidence, it helped inspire him to release his first solo album outside of his hit band in 15 years. Titled “Ten Crowns,” after the Tarot card that signifies finding balance in your life, the album extends Bell’s legacy of making effervescent dance music, but with a twist. Instead of working with Vince Clarke, his usual partner in Erasure, he paired with the songwriter, producer and remixer Dave Audé. “It did feel a bit like cheating,” Bell said with a laugh.The prime subject of the songs — love — echoes the theme of Erasure’s classic synth-pop hits of the ’80s like “Oh, L’Amour” and “Chains of Love.” (The band will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year.) As usual, the new songs sharply contrast ecstatic music with yearning lyrics. “For me, love is an unreachable destination,” Bell said. “To love someone unconditionally is almost an impossible task.”It’s far easier, he finds, to love the things that make up his list of 10 essential inspirations. Interestingly, none have anything to do with music. Instead, they show a heightened sense of the visual world though, to Bell, they’re intimately related. “I definitely see things as sounds,” he said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Anything 3-DI love that illusion. It brings you to a place where reality meets fantasy. I think my interest stems from when I first saw Andy Warhol’s “Flesh for Frankenstein” with Joe Dallesandro. What’s not to like?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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      Lil Wayne Gets Earnest With Bono, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Sabrina Carpenter, Ethel Cain, Sudan Archives 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.Lil Wayne featuring Bono, ‘The Days’“I ain’t gettin’ younger, but I’m gettin’ better,” Lil Wayne declares in “The Days,” a rock anthem about survival and seizing the moment: “If my days are numbered, treat every day like Day One.” None other than Bono shares the song, starting and ending it and singing about “the days that tell you what life is for,” while the production emulates U2’s grand marches. Elsewhere on his new album, “Tha Carter VI,” Lil Wayne offers his usual punchlines and free associations; here, he’s unabashedly earnest.Water From Your Eyes, ‘Life Signs’The Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes revels in musical jump cuts and not-quite-sequiturs. “I am coming apart / I’m becoming together, true to form,” Rachel Brown sings in “Life Signs” from an album due in August. Nate Amos’s guitars leap from wiry, hopscotching math-rock lines to brute-force distortion and back; Brown deadpans through monotone verses, but offers a wistful melody in the chorus. By the end of the song, somehow it all makes sense.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Manchild’Sabrina Carpenter lightheartedly and brutally dissects what might be called a himbo in “Manchild.” In a track that starts as synth-pop and ends up as country-rock, she mock-appreciates how “your brain just ain’t there” with a guy who can’t charge a phone, much less satisfy her. “I like my men all incompetent,” she claims, barely suppressing a giggle.Addison Rae, ‘Fame Is a Gun’Who could be better than Addison Rae, the TikTok sensation turned pop songwriter, to sing about craving attention, achieving the “glamorous life” and dealing with all the parasocial fallout? “I live for the appeal,” she sings, adding, “It never was enough / I always wanted more.” Yet she also realizes, “I’m your dream girl, but you’re not my type.” The production cycles through its three chords with an insistent pulse that hints at the pressure to keep generating more content.Sudan Archives, ‘Dead’Sudan Archives — the songwriter, violinist and producer Brittney Parks — powers through an identity crisis with the shape-shifting, maximalist, ultimately unstoppable track “Dead.” She asks “Where my old self at?” and “Where my new self at?” and teases “Did you miss me?” and “Do you miss me?” In four minutes, the song morphs among quasi-orchestral string arrangements, spacey electronics and walloping dance beats, then merges them all in a triumphant closing stomp.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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      Everything Millennial Is Cool Again

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      JNCO Jeans, big hair, “Sex and the City” and recession pop: Peak Millennial is back and the era’s trends are taking on a new life.They trolled us for being old when we hit our 30s, old-fashioned for remembering a time before email and for being “cringe” as we kept wearing our skinny jeans and ankle socks.Oh, how the tables have turned.Gen Z and younger generations are picking up where we, their (slightly) older counterparts, left off in the 2000s.The Gen Z girlies are watching “Sex and the City” and living their best Carrie Bradshaw lifestyles. Those Facebook albums of blurry photos of a night out? They’re back, repackaged as an Instagram “photo dump.” Ditto for big hair and wired headphones.“I do like seeing how a younger generation interprets an older trend when it comes back around,” said Erin Miller, 35, a TikTok creator and self-proclaimed 1990s and 2000s historian. She wasn’t surprised that many trends loved by millennials were making a comeback. “Does it remind me of my age? Yes.”But that’s not to say everything is the same. Millennials (typically those born from the early 1980s to the late ’90s) had infomercials and mail-order. Gen Z and Alpha have TikTok makeup tutorials and fast fashion. Bradshaw’s cosmopolitan has been exchanged for an Aperol spritz.Members of generations Z and Alpha are putting their own mark on once-ubiquitous phenomena, and according to Ms. Miller, they’re the winners: “I think they are doing it better.”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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      Billy Joel Documentary ‘And So It Goes’ Traces His Early Days

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      The first half of the HBO documentary premiered at the Tribeca Festival on Wednesday night. Joel, who is fighting a brain disorder, sent a message via its directors.The Tribeca Festival’s opening-night premiere of the upcoming HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” was marked, in part, by the absence of Billy Joel himself. Late last month, the musician announced that he was canceling all of his upcoming concerts because of a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which has led to problems with his hearing, vision and balance.After Robert De Niro called Joel “the poet laureate of New York” and helped introduce the film with a dramatic reading of some of his lyrics (“He works at Mr. Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street,” he intoned), one of the film’s co-directors, Susan Lacy, told the Beacon Theater audience that Joel sent his greetings — with typical wry humor: “In fact, he said, ‘Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated.’” The audience roared with laughter. On a note of encouragement, Lacy said Joel “will be back.”The crowd broke out into applause throughout the screening, which included just the first part of the two-part film. It still ran nearly two and a half hours as it covered Joel’s childhood and rise to fame through his infamous 1982 motorcycle accident. (To put that in perspective: It doesn’t get to the writing of “Uptown Girl.” No Christie Brinkley yet.)There are pictures and footage of early Joel performances and stories about the surprisingly robust Long Island rock scene of the 1960s. But “Part One” is largely an intimate portrait of Joel’s relationship with his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, who would eventually become his manager, and it elevates her to a starring role in his life. It also features a host of stories about the making of some of his best-known songs, and tidbits about his Long Island obstinance. Here’s some of what we learned.As Joel’s relationship with Weber first foundered, he attempted suicide twice.Joel and Weber’s relationship began in dramatic fashion: She was married to Jon Small, Joel’s early bandmate, and had a son with him. Joel and Small first played together in a group named the Hassles, then broke off to start a Led Zeppelin-inspired metal outfit called Attila. (An album cover shoot featuring a longhaired Joel standing amid sides of raw beef, wearing fur, is something to behold.) Eventually, Joel fell in love with Weber, but when a guilt-ridden Joel shared his feelings with Small, he got punched in the nose and Weber left.Despondent, Joel overdosed on pills and was in a coma for days. His sister, Judy Molinari, who had provided the pills to help him sleep, recounts her guilt onscreen. “I felt that I killed him,” she says. Joel drank a bottle of furniture polish in another attempt on his life. After moving back into his mother’s house, he checked into an observation ward where his own struggles were put into perspective. From there he started to channel his feelings into music, and the songs that he wrote as a result of the experience would become his first solo album, “Cold Spring Harbor.” After about a year, Weber re-entered his life.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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      They Led the 2000s Indie-Rock Boom. Now They’re Vying for Oscars.

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      As Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross continue to spotlight film music, members of Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Interpol and Animal Collective have been joining the field.When Daniel Blumberg ascended the stage at the Oscars this year to accept his best original score trophy for “The Brutalist,” the bald, mild-mannered Englishman in the all-black suit read nervously from notes. “I’ve been an artist for 20 years now, since I was a teenager,” he said, perhaps jogging some music fans’ memories: This was the once curly-mopped singer and guitarist from the 2010s indie-rock band Yuck.His Academy Award put him in good company. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails have won the category twice, while Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is a two-time nominee. And bubbling up beside Blumberg are a crop of artists from New York’s early 2000s indie boom, when idiosyncratic and ambitious bands made their careers on blog love, critically acclaimed albums, relentless touring schedules and the occasional lucrative sync deal.Two decades later, entering their midlife years, an increasing number of their members are turning to film scoring as a new creative outlet — one they can pursue from home studios — rather than rely on the millennial nostalgia industry.A scene from “Sister Midnight.” Paul Banks, the frontman of the band Interpol, recorded its propulsive score.MagnoliaDavid Longstreth, the central figure of Dirty Projectors, created the imaginative and sprawling score for the fantasy journey “The Legend of Ochi,” which A24 released in theaters this year. Paul Banks, Interpol’s frontman, recorded propulsive music for Magnolia Pictures’ deadpan satire “Sister Midnight,” which opened in New York in May and will soon expand nationally. Various permutations of Animal Collective have provided haunting sounds for small-budget projects, including the stripped-down sci-fi tale “Obex,” which Oscilloscope Laboratories will distribute later this year.“The creative conversations I find really interesting,” said Christopher Bear of Grizzly Bear, who is now a prolific film and TV composer. “You’re not necessarily talking about music references. Often it’s more interesting if you’re not, because then it’s about story and picture and just more aesthetic questions. I find myself doing creative things that I probably wouldn’t if I was just left to my own devices in my studio.”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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      Morten Harket, a-ha’s Lead Singer, Has Parkinson’s Disease

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      Harket, best known for his band’s infectious 1985 synth-pop hit “Take on Me,” revealed his illness in an interview on a-ha’s website.Morten Harket, the lead singer of the Norwegian synth-pop band a-ha, best known for its 1985 hit single “Take on Me,” said Wednesday that he had Parkinson’s disease.Harket, 65, revealed his illness in an interview with Jan Omdahl, a-ha’s biographer, on the band’s website. Harket did not say when he received the diagnosis.“I’ve got no problem accepting the diagnosis,” he said. “With time I’ve taken to heart my 94-year-old father’s attitude to the way the organism gradually surrenders: ‘I use whatever works.’”His announcement comes days after the 40th anniversary of the release of a-ha’s first album, “Hunting High and Low,” on June 1, 1985. The first single from the album, “Take on Me,” became a global hit that year, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States on the basis of the song’s infectious synthesizer hook and innovative video that mixed animation with live action.In the interview, Harket said he took medicine to manage his symptoms. Last June, he traveled to the United States, where surgeons at the Mayo Clinic implanted, inside the left side of his brain, electrodes that receive electrical impulses from a small pacemaker-like device in his upper chest. He underwent the same procedure in December for the right side of his brain.The treatment, known as deep brain simulation, is an established treatment for Parkinson’s. Omdahl writes that the treatment has helped keep Harket’s symptoms in check.Still, problems with his voice “are one of many grounds for uncertainty about my creative future,” he said. The dopamine supplements that he takes affect his voice, but his underlying symptoms become more pronounced if he doesn’t take them, he said.Parkinson’s is a progressive and incurable disease that affects the central nervous system and causes tremors, muscle stiffness, impaired balance and other symptoms. More than 10 million people worldwide are estimated to be living with Parkinson’s, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation.Harket, who has released six solo albums, said he has worked on songs in recent years.A-ha formed in Oslo in 1982. Harket and his two bandmates, Paul Waaktaar-Savoy and Magne Furuholmen, spent their early days playing in London before they eventually landed a contract with Warner Bros.Though a-ha is largely known as a one-hit wonder in the United States for “Take On Me,” its second single, “The Sun Always Shines on TV,” cracked the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1985. The band went on to sell millions of copies of its albums worldwide, and has performed before audiences in 38 countries. Its most recent studio album, “True North,” was issued in 2022. More