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    Barbra Streisand’s Silky Duet With Hozier, and 9 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by Summer Walker, Nilüfer Yanya, Ed Sheeran 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.Barbra Streisand with Hozier, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’At 83, Barbra Streisand still commands a voice of dewy-eyed purity, long-breathed grace and tremulous anticipation. She has announced “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2” — an album of duets with Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Sting, Laufey and more — with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” A deferential, un-gritty Hozier joins her in a slow, string-laden arrangement that changes key to accommodate him. This duet definitely won’t eclipse Robert Flack’s eternally radiant version, but it has an earnest charm.Ed Sheeran, ‘Old Phone’Fireside folk-rock contends with digital technology in “Old Phone.” It’s a guitar-strumming, foot-tapping ditty about realizing, too late, that cellphone storage can hold a Pandora’s box of regrets: lost friends, misjudgments, arguments, “messages from all my exes.” Better to wipe it next time.Summer Walker, ‘Spend It’The sound is plush and sensual, a silky, spacious R&B ballad with glimmering vocal harmonies sharing the chorus. But the message is coldly mercenary: “Give me the last four of your credit card / Buy back my love, you can keep your heart.” Instead of refuting the hip-hop cliché of women as gold-diggers, Summer Walker leans into it.Nilüfer Yanya, ‘Cold Heart’With her new single, “Cold Heart,” Nilüfer Yanya sets aside her trusty fuzz-toned guitar. Amid undulating keyboard chords and programmed beats, she sings about desire, separation, resentment and heartache: “I don’t wanna bear this burden ’cause it hurts like hell,” she sings. Many of her previous songs have built toward grungy catharsis, but in “Cold Heart,” the chords keep cycling around her; she’s still enmeshed.Bambii featuring Jessy Lanza and Yaeji, ‘Mirror’Bambii, a Jamaican-Canadian D.J. turned producer and songwriter who’s based in Toronto, keeps reconfiguring a sparse, syncopated bass riff and twitchy, flickering breakbeats in “Mirror.” Jessy Lanza sings in English and Yaeji sings and raps in English and Korean, pondering connection and identity — “I look in the mirror / I see your eyes” — as the rhythms ricochet.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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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Path From Harlem to Stardom, and Now Federal Court

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      Jason Swain was on his way home to the Bronx when friends told him that something had happened to his brother at a charity basketball game in Harlem. Nine young people at a City College of New York gymnasium were crushed to death in an overcrowded stairwell. Dirk Swain, 21, was lying on the gym floor with a sheet draped over his body.The promoter of the December 1991 event was a 22-year-old novice music producer named Sean Combs.For more than six years, the Swains and other families pursued wrongful death suits, saying Mr. Combs had oversold the game, and that bad planning and inadequate security had led to the tragedy. By the time their cases were settled, Mr. Combs had skyrocketed from a junior record label employee to global superstardom; the $750,000 that he contributed to the $3.8 million in settlements represented a fraction of his wealth as hip-hop’s newest, flashiest mogul.Mr. Combs never accepted full responsibility for the deaths and, for many people, the stampede faded into history. But not for the families who lost their loved ones.“Every one of those nine people was doing something positive in their life,” Mr. Swain said in an interview.The City College incident was Mr. Combs’s first moment of notoriety, but far from his last. In the ensuing three decades, he has repeatedly faced allegations of violence or serious misconduct. The beating of a rival music executive. Gunshots fired in a nightclub. The threatening of a reality-TV cast member. An assault of a college football coach.If found guilty of all charges, Sean Combs, who has spent the last seven months in a Brooklyn jail, could spend the rest of his life in prison.Willy Sanjuan/Invision, via Associated PressWe 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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      Beyoncé Cowboy Carter Tour Review; The Star Remixes American History, and Her Own

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      The last time Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons,” the stomping, biting number from her 2016 album, “Lemonade,” was at that year’s C.M.A. Awards, in a blistering rendition alongside the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks).Not everyone in country music embraced Beyoncé’s experimentation. “I did not feel welcomed,” she wrote in album notes leading up to the release last year of “Cowboy Carter,” her eighth solo album, an exploration of the many tendrils of American roots music and their connections to Black music of all stripes and generations.So it was meaningful, and pointed, that at the opening night of the Cowboy Carter Tour at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Monday, Beyoncé played “Daddy Lessons” for the first time since that rejection. It came right after she sang her renovated version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” — approved by the country royal herself — while soaring over the rapturous crowd in a flying horseshoe.At almost three hours long, her seventh solo headlining concert tour was a characteristic Beyoncé epic.The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show featured the debut of many of the album’s songs, but also brought back tracks from across her catalog.The New York TimesFull-circle moments don’t just happen — they are the products of intention and diligence and allergy to loose threads. Throughout this roisterous and clever show, there were suggestions that loop-closing has been very much on Beyoncé’s mind, along with culmination.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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      David Briggs, a Music Force in Alabama and Nashville, Dies at 82

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      A first-call keyboardist, he worked with Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, helped make Muscle Shoals a recording hub, and had a key role in redefining the sound of country.David Briggs, a keyboardist and studio operator who played a pivotal role in establishing Muscle Shoals, Ala., as a recording hub in the 1960s before helping to revitalize mainstream country music, died on Tuesday in Nashville. He was 82.His brother, John, said his death, in a hospice facility, was caused by complications of renal cancer.Mr. Briggs contributed to not just one but two major developments in popular music. As a member of the original rhythm section at Fame Recording Studios, he helped put the northern Alabama hamlet of Muscle Shoals on the musical map. He played on landmark R&B recordings like Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” (1962), Jimmy Hughes’s “Steal Away” (1964) and the Tams’ “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)” (1963), all of which were Top 40 pop singles as well as R&B hits.The rhythm section at Fame, whose members also included Norbert Putnam on bass and Jerry Carrigan on drums, honed a down-home sound that, with its languid blend of country and soul, stood apart from the R&B coming out of Motown or Stax at the time. “You Better Move On” attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who released their version of the song in 1964. (The Beatles had previously performed Mr. Alexander’s “Soldier of Love” on the BBC.)Mr. Briggs’s other defining moment came when he, Mr. Putnam and Mr. Carrigan moved to Nashville in late 1964 and began infusing country recordings with the understated, groove-rich variant of the Nashville Sound that became known as “countrypolitan.”“We brought along a more blues and pop-rock thing than what Nashville was doing at the time,” Mr. Putnam said in an interview.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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      Mac Gayden, Stellar Nashville Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 83

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      Heard on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” among other albums, he also sang and was a writer of the perennial “Everlasting Love.”Mac Gayden, the co-writer of the pop evergreen “Everlasting Love” and an innovative guitarist who recorded with Bob Dylan and helped establish Nashville as a recording hub for artists working outside the bounds of country music, died on Wednesday at his home in Nashville. He was 83.His cousin Tommye Maddox Working said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Strangely enough, Mr. Gayden’s most illustrious achievement — his percussive electric guitar work on “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a track on Mr. Dylan’s 1966 opus, “Blonde on Blonde,” most of which was recorded in Nashville — went uncredited for decades. It was only recently, when a new generation of researchers discovered the omission, that he received his due.Mr. Gayden, who was self-taught, had a knack for inventing just the right rhythm or mood for an arrangement. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Nashville was just beginning to break out of its conventional country bubble, he had a particular affinity for collaborating with cultural outsiders, among them Linda Ronstadt and the Pointer Sisters.“Mac Gayden was a genius, genius, genius — the best guitar player I ever heard,” Bob Johnston, the producer of “Blonde on Blonde,” was quoted as saying in “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City,” a 2015 exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Mr. Gayden in 2015 at the opening of the exhibition “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Jason Davis/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumOn J.J. Cale’s 1971 Top 40 single “Crazy Mama,” Mr. Gayden played bluesy slide guitar with a wah-wah pedal, creating an uncanny sound later employed to droll effect on the Steve Miller Band’s chart-topping 1973 pop hit “The Joker.” Decades later, the steel guitarist Robert Randolph, a Pentecostal-bred star in jam-band circles, adopted the technique as well.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 Tax Day Jam Session

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      File your 1040 to tunes by Destiny’s Child, Dr. John, Big Tymers and more.Destiny’s Child onstage in 2005, giving a withering look to those bills in question.Rahav SegevDear listeners,Lindsay is still out, which means you’ve got me (an editor who focuses on pop culture) on a day where you may need a bit of good fortune: Tax Day.I don’t know what kind of anxiety April 15 provokes in you, but I’ve collected a playlist inspired by a bit of family lore. As the story goes, my newly married dad once griped to my grandfather about how quickly bills ate up a paycheck, down to the last dollar. Gramps’s response: “Be glad you had that dollar.”So in the spirit of celebrating having just enough, I’m sharing my Tax Day jams. Savvy reader, you do not need me to point out all the root-of-all-evil bangers, scrapin’ and scrappin’ classics or TV ad earworms that mention money, money, money. I am also not here to question the tax code. Instead, I’ve assembled a set of songs that bop in the face of financial constraints, because getting down is, for now, still free.I fly in any weather,ElenaListen along while you read.1. Ray Charles: “Busted”Harlan Howard’s lyrics are about as low as low gets (“my bills are all due and the baby needs shoes but I’m busted”) and suit the songwriter’s “three chords and the truth” approach to country classics. But under Ray Charles’s guidance, and with a blaring horn section, this 1963 single gains a “but who cares?” lilt that earned Charles the Grammy for best R&B recording.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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 Pack of April Fools

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      A survey of the many fools who have been immortalized in song, featuring Aretha Franklin, Bow Wow Wow, the Stone Roses and more.Aretha Franklin, who was not known to suffer fools.Richard Perry/The New York TimesDear listeners,Happy April Fools’ Day, when you can’t believe anything you read on the internet! Trust that this playlist is a prank-free space, though: We’re just gathering up some of the many fools who have been immortalized in song over the years, by soul singers (Aretha Franklin), blues legends (Bobby “Blue” Bland) and new wavers (Bow Wow Wow). Country and classic rock are in the mix, too — there’s a little something for everyone who’s ever fooled around and fell in love. So hit play, give those dubious corporate social media posts a miss and we’ll try to ride this out together.Everybody plays the fool sometime,DaveListen along while you read.1. Aretha Franklin: “April Fools”Dionne Warwick sang this Burt Bacharach-Hal David theme song for a 1969 romantic comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve before Aretha Franklin covered it on her “Young, Gifted and Black” LP three years later. The intro to the Queen of Soul’s arrangement is giving “Jingle Bells,” but it quickly settles into a soulful boogie with a soaring chorus where new love is trailed by doubt: “Are we just April fools / who can’t see all the danger around?”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube2. The Doobie Brothers: “What a Fool Believes”What a chorus on this one: Michael McDonald’s blue-eyed soul swoops upward into a falsetto that’s almost Bee Gees-level. Does it matter that absolutely no one can tell what they’re singing on the high part? It does not. (For the record, it’s “No wise man has the power to reason away.”)▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube3. Led Zeppelin: “Fool in the Rain”My interest in Led Zeppelin has waxed and waned; I needed an extended post-high school detox after years of hearing the St. Louis classic rock station “get the Led out” every afternoon at quitting time. But listening with fresh ears — and digging deeper than what you’d find in a Cadillac commercial — it’s undeniable that Led Zep has dozens of slappers, like this cut from “In Through the Out Door” (1979). Maybe I need to catch that “Becoming Led Zeppelin” movie after all.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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      Jensen McRae and 10 More Artists to Watch

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      Every week, our critics spotlight notable new songs on the Playlist. Here’s more about 11 artists behind them, selected by the pop music critics Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz; a culture reporter, Joe Coscarelli; and Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor for The New York Times. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)an interview withJensen McRaeJensen McRae writes constantly: journals, poems, fiction, screenplays and, most publicly, songs. “I’ve always wanted to do a million things with regard to writing and telling stories,” she said. “But music was always the first choice.”Born in Santa Monica, Calif., and still based in Los Angeles, McRae, 27, joins a long history of California folk-pop songwriters — the legacy of the Laurel Canyon era — who draw on the diaristic specifics of their lives for songs that listeners take to heart. Her second album, “I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!,” is due April 25, with a tour that starts in May.As a child, “I was usually one of the only Black kids in a class,” McRae recalled in a video interview. “When you’re put into the observer, outsider position early on, it makes it pretty easy to figure out who you really are and what you really want, because conformity isn’t a choice. I started to develop this identity of being a narrator and a collector of details about my life, about other people’s lives.”McRae has old-school inclinations. Her music relies on hand-played, organic instruments and the power of her unadorned voice. Her 2022 debut album, “Are You Happy Now?,” included stark songs like “Wolves,” about sexual predators, accompanied only by her guitar.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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      An ‘In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb’ Playlist

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      Prepare for spring with songs from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Lion Babe, Buddy Guy and others.Karen O of the Yeah Yeah YeahsJack Plunkett/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,Early March is such a tease, occasionally giving us a fleeting preview of desperately desired springtime — only to snatch it away with yet another dreary, blustery, 30-something-degree day. You know the saying: “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” Since we’ve finally almost reached that fabled calendrical turning point in the middle of the month, I thought I’d put together a playlist that goes in like a lion and out like a lamb.Given their potent and evocative symbolism, there is no shortage of music that references lions or lambs. Lions connote strength, fire and even potential danger; lambs, in keeping with their biblical association, often represent purity, gentleness and self-sacrifice. In today’s selections, you’ll hear these themes explored by artists like Genesis, Neko Case and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among others.May these songs bring warmer afternoons, longer days and much lighter jackets.Momentum for the sake of momentum,LindsayListen along while you read.1. The Tokens: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh)”Let’s begin with the most famous version of this oft-covered classic about a lion in peaceful repose. Most elements of what would eventually become “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” were written by the South African musician Solomon Linda, whose 1939 version of the song was titled “Mbube,” the Zulu word for “lion.” Pete Seeger’s folk group the Weavers released an influential version in 1951 (as Seeger, Edward Norton plays it onstage in “A Complete Unknown”), but the doo-wop group the Tokens took the song to new heights of popularity in 1961, with this rendition that featured English-language lyrics by the songwriter George David Weiss.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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