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    Plant and Krauss Cover a Led Zeppelin Classic, and 12 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Soccer Mommy, Tems, Floating Points 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.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘When the Levee Breaks’No one is more entitled to cover Led Zeppelin than its singer, Robert Plant. His close-harmony duo with the singer and fiddler Alison Krauss excels at making songs sound far older than they are, and even in 1971, “When the Levee Breaks” harked back to a vintage blues by Memphis Minnie. This live recording is stark, resonant and rumbling, with a fiddle solo by Stuart Duncan that looks toward both Ireland and Morocco and a cranked-up guitar stomp that builds toward — alas! — a frustrating fade-out. JON PARELESCarly Pearce, ‘Truck on Fire’The spoiler is in the title of “Truck on Fire,” a swinging country revenge song from Carly Pearce’s new album, “Hummingbird.” Her voice seethes as she recalls “the way that you laughed it off when I was catching on/Said it was in my head,” and there’s a dark glee (and a product placement) while she watches the “flames rolling off of your Goodyear tires.” PARELESSabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’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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    Soccer Mommy Stretches Her Sound, and 12 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Phife Dawg, Omar Apollo, Zola Jesus and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Soccer Mommy, ‘Shotgun’Sophie Allison, who records as Soccer Mommy, continues to stretch beyond the sparse indie-rock of her early songs. “Shotgun” previews an album due in June — “Sometimes, Forever” — that is produced by Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), an auteur of big, blurry implications. “Shotgun” is a promise of devotion to someone who might be troubled. It places Allison’s breathy, dazed vocals above a hefty beat and a low, twangy riff; as the chorus vows “Whenever you want me I’ll be around,” new layers of echoey guitars and sudden drum blasts loom, suggesting that her path isn’t entirely clear. JON PARELESMaren Morris, ‘Humble Quest’“Humble Quest,” the title track of the new album by Maren Morris, carefully balances humility and a growing determination: “I was so nice till I woke up/I was polite till I spoke up,” she sings. The verses are dogged and subdued, with steady drums and descending piano chords; the chorus leaps upward, insisting, “Damn I do my best/Not gonna hold my breath.” But the song tapers off at the end, returning to the piano chords; the quest continues. PARELESKurt Vile, ‘Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone)’As usual, Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile is an ambling, amiable presence on “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone),” a gently psychedelic ditty in no particular hurry to get to where it’s going. “Standing on top of Mount Airy Hill … thinkin’ ’bout … flying,” he begins, sounding like a cross between Bill Callahan and John Prine, the kindred spirit he collaborated with on the 2020 EP “Speed, Sound, Lonely KV.” Beginning with that release, Vile has begun to embrace more directly the country inflections of his music and vocal delivery, and here they add to the song’s eccentric charm. “I’ve been around, but now I’m gone,” he vamps, letting that last word fly loose in an airy falsetto before adding a winking line that doubles as the title of his forthcoming album: “Watch my moves.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFlock of Dimes, ‘It Just Goes On’Under her solo moniker Flock of Dimes, Jenn Wasner tends to make knotty, intricate indie-rock, enlivened by unexpected chord changes and unusual time signatures. She’s described the hypnotic “It Just Goes On,” though, as “perhaps one of the most simple and direct songs I’ve ever made,” and the understated arrangement allows her dreamy vocals to shine. The first track on a B-side companion piece to her excellent 2021 album “Head of Roses,” “It Just Goes On” is a slow-motion reverie centered around a murky guitar riff that hangs, like Wasner’s evocative lyrics, in a state of suspended possibility: “If it never started, it doesn’t have to end, it just goes on.” ZOLADZJane Weaver, ‘Oblique Fantasy’The English songwriter, singer and guitarist Jane Weaver reaches back to the clockwork Minimalism of 1970s kraut-rock in “Oblique Fantasy,” a patiently evolving assemblage of guitar and synthesizer lines — picked, strummed, fluttering, blipping, peaking into feedback — over an unswerving, motoric beat, as she lives up to her promise: “I will get under your skin.” PARELESKilo Kish featuring Miguel, ‘Death Fantasy’The avant-pop singer Kilo Kish has a pipe dream: the demise and undoing of all frameworks, definitions and limits that might constrain her. On “Death Fantasy,” from her new album “American Gurl,” Kish raps in a breathless staccato about her ambition: “I have a death fantasy/Death of my aesthetics, this falsing fiction carved in my way,” she chants. On Instagram, Kish referred to the song as a “manifesto” and a “declaration of freedom.” But with lurching drums, neon-drenched synths, Miguel’s sky-high, looping vocalizations and a jarring flatline, “Death Fantasy” is less anthemic — it’s more a trance-like spell, conjured to convince you of the promise of starting anew. ISABELIA HERRERAPhife Dawg, ‘Forever’Well-earned 1990s nostalgia and grown-up regrets fill Phife Dawg’s “Forever,” the title track from a new album, released six years after his death, that blends his last raps with tribute verses from guests. Phife Dawg had reunited with A Tribe Called Quest, but he died before their final album together was released in 2016. In “Forever,” he rhymes through the group’s history as “four brothers with a mic and a dream.” A plush soul string section, a lurching beat and old-school turntable scratching accompany him as he recalls the group’s ascent. Suddenly he silences the track and, a cappella, he admits, “Lack of communication killed my tribe/Bad vibes.” But bygones are bygones, he declares: “Despite trials, tribe-ulations, no doubt we were built to survive.” PARELESOmar Apollo, ‘Tamagotchi’The 24-year-old singer Omar Apollo has a knack for jagged, irreverent pop songs. On “Tamagotchi,” he conscripts the Neptunes to mastermind his latest vision: there’s Pharrell’s signature four-count start, a muted Spanish guitar loop coiling under bilingual bars about Apollo’s ascendant celebrity. But the best part of “Tamagotchi” is that Apollo doesn’t take himself too seriously: “I’m making bread (Bread)/Sound like Pavarotti,” he snickers at one point. By the honey-soaked R&B bridge, you’ll be drenched in his charisma. HERRERAFrya, ‘Changes’Frya, from Zimbabwe, has clearly listened to Adele: where she applies vibrato, her approach to syncopation and sustain, and where she makes her voice build and break. But she has a songwriter’s gift: how to turn words and sounds into an emotional connection. “Say my name please in that tone again,” she begs in “Changes,” as it climbs from piano ballad to orchestral plea, perfectly strategized and emotionally telling. PARELESSon Lux and Moses Sumney, ‘Fence’The magnificently eerie “Fences,” from the soundtrack to the metaverse movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” deals in falsetto reassurances and gaping abysses. Over sustained electronic tones, tolling bass notes and orchestral swells, Moses Sumney sings an apologetic, waltzing refrain — “Only meant to give you my all/never meant to build you a wall” — that multiplies its vocal harmonies but sounds ever more bereft. PARELESZola Jesus, ‘Lost’“Everyone I know is lost,” Nika Roza Danilova, who records as Zola Jesus, wails on the doomy, kinetic new single from her forthcoming album, “Arkhon.” The track begins with a decidedly post-apocalyptic vibe: earthy, guttural rumbles, synthesizers that toll like air-raid sirens, and a percussive series of sharp breaths, spliced together to create the song’s beat. But Danilova’s powerful vocal soon provides a stirring counterpoint and a defiant sign of life, like a signal flare shot up through an icy landscape. ZOLADZMarvin Sewell, ‘A Hero’s Journey’The guitarist Marvin Sewell, who’s usually heard injecting soul and scruff into other people’s bands, takes a moment to ruminate alone on “A Hero’s Journey.” He plays the acoustic guitar with a shivering slide, returning frequently to a mournful motif on the higher strings. Though understated, the track is a standout on “Black Lives,” a two-disc compilation of new music performed by a wide stylistic range of contemporary jazz artists. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMark Turner, ‘Waste Land’At first, the occasional clatter from Jonathan Pinson’s drums seems like the main source of agitation on an otherwise low-key track: The interplay between Mark Turner’s tenor saxophone and Jason Palmer’s trumpet — both of them doused in reverb, played with crystal clarity and zero hurry — is almost placid. But there is a worried tension in the space between their horns, one that doesn’t get totally exposed until near the end. Finally, we’re left without resolution, as the band rises toward a landing that never fully comes. RUSSONELLO More

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    How Moses Sumney Found Himself in Maximalism

    For his final shows before the pandemic, Bill Frisell was touring U.S. jazz clubs with his new quartet, HARMONY: Frisell on electric guitar, along with the great, dramatic singer Petra Haden, Hank Roberts on cello and Luke Bergman on baritone guitar. When I saw them in Baltimore, on the first night of March 2020, they seemed to be in a set-long mind-meld. HARMONY is a quiet group, and though each musician is masterly, their goal is to honor the concept the project is named after. Nothing is high-pitched, no instrument overwhelms the others; they play to blend. Bergman and Roberts added their own background vocals at times, and Frisell glided around all their melodies with his electric guitar, sometimes doubling Haden’s vocal parts, sometimes building drama on his own. At moments — especially when they played old songs like “Red River Valley” or “Hard Times Come Again No More” — they sounded like a chamber group gathered around a prairie campfire.

    Frisell turns 70 this month, and at this point, innovation and exploration are so fundamental to his musical identity that even a small, unflashy band where everyone sings except him still beams with his sensibility. HARMONY’s self-titled debut album — released in 2019, the guitarist’s first record as a leader for Blue Note in his 40-year career — contained the same genre-indeterminate mix of music that’s typical of Frisell: jazz standards, show tunes, old folk songs and haunting, melodic originals.
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    In Baltimore, HARMONY closed with a song the group hasn’t recorded but Frisell has played often over the past few years. It’s an uncomplicated tune with a very deep history. Musicologists have traced its origin to an 18th-century hymn, and a version of it was likely sung by enslaved laborers. It was a union song too, sung by striking workers in the ’40s, around the time Pete Seeger first heard it and helped spread it to the folk-festival audiences of the ’60s. The civil rights movement, starting with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, adopted it as an unofficial anthem, making it famous enough that President Johnson quoted its title in his 1965 call for the Voting Rights Act. In all of these cases — and also in Tiananmen Square, Soweto and the many other sites of protest where it has been heard — “We Shall Overcome” has been more a statement of collective hope than a call to arms. It is a proclamation of faith.

    Frisell told me that, musically speaking, he likes the song because of how deeply he has internalized it. “Like when you’re walking and humming or whistling, almost unconscious that you’re doing it — that’s what you want,” he says. “That’s what ‘We Shall Overcome’ is. It’s in us, the melody and the words. When I play it, the song is like a jungle gym you can play around in. The song is there, and you can take off anywhere.”

    In Baltimore, Frisell and his bandmates moved through “We Shall Overcome” with joyful purpose, Frisell improvising while all three vocalists joined together. I didn’t know it then, but this would be my last ticketed concert before venues across the country went dark. The last thing I experienced in a full club was Petra Haden raising her hands high and compelling us all — Frisell now included — to sing together for our deliverance.

    Had things gone as planned, Frisell’s next move would have been to focus on a new group, this one nominally a jazz trio, with the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Rudy Royston. Things, of course, did not go as planned. Frisell’s datebook was soon filled with canceled gigs. “It’s been kind of traumatic,” he told me via Zoom, though his ever-present smile never quite wavered. But the new trio’s debut album did eventually come out, in August 2020. It closes with its own version of “We Shall Overcome” — this one instrumental, pastoral in its feeling, a soul ballad at the end of a record spent rambling around the outskirts of high-​lonesome country and spacious modern jazz.

    Royston and Morgan are well established in their own careers, but they’re both younger than Frisell, and each came up in a wide-open jazz world that Frisell helped create. In the early 1980s, Frisell began incorporating digital loops and other effects into his live and recorded playing and wound up crafting an entirely new role for the electric guitar in a jazz setting: creating atmospheres full of sparkling reverb, echoing harmonics, undulating whispers that sneak in from outside the band. As he wove those patches of sound around a trio, with the drummer Paul Motian and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, he brought a new spaciousness and pensiveness to the instrument, completely resetting its dynamic range. His quietest playing was like a distant radio; his loudest was a heavy-metal scream that could sit neatly beside, for instance, the Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid on a 1985 duet album, “Smash & Scatteration.”

    Frisell’s approach to his repertoire was just as innovative. He knew his standards but gained an early reputation for openness to pop music and just about anything else — most famously on his 1992 record “Have a Little Faith,” which features everything from a small-group orchestration of an Aaron Copland ballet score to the same band’s searing instrumental version of Madonna’s “Live to Tell.” There was a similar adventurousness in his originals: Across the ’90s, he composed for violin and horns (on “Quartet”), for bluegrass musicians (on “Nashville”), for film scores and for installation soundtracks.

    This is Frisell’s great accomplishment: He makes a guitar sound so unique that it can fit with anything. This became fully clear around the turn of this century, when his records skipped from improvised bluegrass to “The Intercontinentals” — which featured a band of Greek, Malian, American and Brazilian musicians — and then through to “Unspeakable,” a sample-based record made with the producer Hal Willner, a friend since 1980. Willner also introduced Frisell to artists like Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello and Allen Ginsberg, three of many legends who have invited Frisell into the studio to add his signature to their recordings. Every year of this century, he has appeared on or led a new record, often several records, and yet it would be impossible for even the most obsessive fan to guess what the next one might sound like.

    Frisell has largely swapped his old dynamic range for a stylistic one: He doesn’t play as loud these days, but he plays everything, and with everyone. He is on the young side of jazz-elder-statesman status, but in the past four decades, no one else has taken the collaborative, improvisational spirit of that music to so many places.

    And now, like so many of us, he’s just at home. “I shouldn’t be complaining,” he told me, from the house in Brooklyn that he shares with his wife. “I’m healthy, I have my guitar. But my whole life has been about interacting musically with somebody else.” At one point he held up a stack of notebooks and staff-paper pads: “What am I gonna do with this stuff?” he asked. “Usually I’ll write enough, and I’ll get a group together and make a record. But that’s after like a week or two of writing. Now it’s a year or more of ideas.”

    He has played a few outdoor shows in front yards with his longtime collaborators Kenny Wollesen on drums and Tony Scherr on bass. He has played similar gigs with Morgan and Royston. He has performed streamed concerts, including a recent Tyshawn Sorey show, at the Village Vanguard, with Lovano. Frisell has mourned too: Hal Willner died from Covid-19 in April, right after the two were discussing their next collaboration. And he has practiced — as if he were back in high school, he says, working through songs from his favorite records in his bedroom. Often they’re the same ones he practiced in the mid-1960s, from Thelonious Monk to “Stardust.”

    But that is the extent of recent musical connection for a guy who describes playing guitar as his preferred method of “speech” — a guy who got a guitar in 1965 and, since joining his first garage band, has rarely gone a day without playing with somebody else.

    Frisell says he can’t remember when he first heard “We Shall Overcome,” but it would have been sometime during his school days in Denver. “I grew up in a time with a music program in public schools,” he told me. “I’m in seventh grade, and that song was coming around that time. And my English teacher, Mr. Newcomb, is playing us Bob Dylan records, because he said it was like poetry. This was 1963, ’64. On TV you see ‘Hootenanny’ along with Kennedy’s assassination. January 1964, I saw M.L.K. speak at our church. A couple weeks before that, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ came out. Then a couple weeks after that, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. It was in the air.”

    The neighborhood he grew up in, he told me, was very “Leave It to Beaver” and overwhelmingly white. It was Denver East High School, and its band threw him together with a wider group of kids, including the future Earth, Wind & Fire members Andrew Woolfolk, Philip Bailey and Larry Dunn. “When Martin Luther King was killed, our high school concert band was performing and the principal came in and told everyone,” Frisell says. “It was horrible. I was in the band room, with Andrew Woolfolk, with my Japanese-American friend whose parents were in the internment camps, and we were comforting each other.” It gave him the sense that music transcended personal differences and that the camaraderie shared by collaborators was a model for other forms of strife. “From that time, I carry with me this idea that the music community is ahead of its time trying to work things out.”

    “We Shall Overcome” became a regular part of his repertoire in 2017. It’s not the first time he has gone through a phase of ruminating on a particular tune, working through it in different settings: Surely no one else has recorded so many versions of “Shenandoah,” and he played “A Change Is Gonna Come” a lot during the George W. Bush presidency. But as we moved through the past four years, he was drawn back to “We Shall Overcome,” this tune from his childhood. “I was just trying to make a small hopeful statement,” he says. He didn’t know that by the time his trio released the song on their debut, it would be the summer of the George Floyd protests and John Lewis’s death. They reminded him, he says, that “We Shall Overcome” is “one of those songs that is always relevant. That song kind of sums it up. Every time I think about giving up, there are these people like John Lewis — we owe it to them to keep going and trying.”

    Frisell appeared on at least nine albums in 2020, including his trio’s “Valentine,” records from Elvis Costello and Ron Miles and Laura Veirs, tributes to the music of T. Rex and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and “Americana,” a collaboration with the Swiss harmonica player Grégoire Maret and the French pianist Romain Collin. “Americana” is the closest to a “typical” Frisell album, meaning it features not just his languid, layered playing but also his heart-tugging sense of emotional drama. The tempos are slow, and the track list includes recognizable pop covers, such as “Wichita Lineman” and Bon Iver’s “Re: Stacks.”

    The album is improvisational, but it’s cozier and more melodic than most contemporary jazz. This is another mode that Frisell pioneered. If you watch solemn documentaries about heartland struggles or are familiar with public radio’s interstitial music, you’ve heard his influence. Younger guitarists in the cosmic-country realm, like William Tyler and Steve Gunn, also have a bit of Frisell’s unassuming lope. He’s one of the quietest guitar heroes in the instrument’s history.

    His only trick, as he explains it, is “trying to stay connected to this sense of wonder and amazement. That’s where it helps to have other people. Even just one other person. If I play by myself or write a melody, it’s one thing. But if I give it to someone else, they’re going to play it slower, faster, suddenly you’re off into the zone. Being off the edge of what you know, that’s the best place.”

    This attitude has earned him a lifetime spent on stages and records with artists that he revered and studied as a boy, jazz players like Ron Carter, Charles Lloyd and Jack DeJohnette. But now that this journey is on pause, for the first time in 55 years, it’s as though Frisell has no choice but to take stock of what he has learned from these artists and his relationship with their legacies. “It’s just overwhelming what we owe to Black people,” he said at one point in our conversation. “Our culture, we would be nothing. Nothing. But personally, too.” He recalled, again, his teenage years: “In Denver, I was always welcomed into it. It didn’t matter that I was white. I remember a great tenor player named Ron Washington. He was in a big band where you just read the charts, and I could do that and get through the gig. An agent set up those gigs, and he called me once, and I showed up, but it wasn’t the big band. It was just Ron, a drummer and me. I didn’t know any tunes at all.” He laughed again, then described something reminiscent of the second verse of “We Shall Overcome,” the one about walking hand in hand: “Ron was so cool. He just said, ‘Let’s play a blues.’ Then another. And another. He led me through.”

    John Lingan is the author of “Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk.” Celina Pereira is a Brazilian-American graphic designer and artist based in Los Angeles. More