Music

Dear listeners,Happy August. It’s the month of out-of-office auto replies, finally breaking heat waves, and — if the songs about August are to believed, anyway — waning summer romances.After an especially brutal...

After the enormous risk of its beginning, the Bayreuth Festival in Germany was for a long time a place where the stagings of Richard Wagner’s operas were encased in amber.When his four-opera...

I’m mobbing through Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the back of a cab, listening to Lady Wray’s “Piece of Me” for the 12th time in a row, and I’m crying — very, very hard...

As a child growing up in rural Canada, the trombonist Hillary Simms did not realize that women were scarce among players of brass instruments — the tuba, the French horn, the trumpet...

A lot of “Deadheads,” as the Grateful Dead fans affectionately call themselves, either gravitated toward DMB or Phish when the band’s lead songwriter, Jerry Garcia, died in 1995, said Jeff Travitz, 61,...

Sinead O’Connor and Prince, passionate singer-songwriters who both died in their mid-50s, were tied together by the plaintive song “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which catapulted O’Connor to fame when she recorded it...

“I shake it off, I shake it off,” Taylor Swift sang. And boy did her fans deliver.A Taylor Swift concert in downtown Seattle last weekend shook the ground so hard, it registered...

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWhen the country superstar Jason Aldean released his new single “Try That in a Small Town,” it was met largely with a...

9. Roc Marciano: “Wheat 40’s” (2020)A cascade of sly punchlines, wordplay and unlikely juxtaposition (“I need therapy and a speedboat”), this song from the 2020 album “Mt. Marci” demonstrates Marciano’s economy of...

Julius Eastman, Vol. 3: ‘If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?’Wild Up; Devonté Hynes and Adam Tendler, piano (New Amsterdam)This is the third in Wild Up’s series of recordings of works...