Featuring live shows from SZA, Lana Del Rey, Yaeji, Shygirl, Rauw Alejandro, Feist, and more

[Pitchfork]

Let’s get this out of the way first: You will not find Taylor Swift or Beyoncé on this list. Yes, many members of the Pitchfork staff attended the Eras Tour and the Renaissance Tour and had incredible, even life-changing, experiences there. But we covered those world-conquering phenomena extensively enough already this year. So for our final staff list of 2023, we thought we’d turn our attention to some other favorite concerts. Here, you’ll find everything from Sweeping Promises in a tiny venue in Minneapolis to SZA at Madison Square Garden, Water From Your Eyes on a boat to Floating Points and Shabaka Hutchings at the Hollywood Bowl. Let the FOMO begin…

Feist

Brooklyn Steel; Brooklyn, NYMay 14

Feist started her Multitudes show with a reassuring smile as she filmed the audience while walking among them; she ended it with her eyes closed, caught in a reverie, her silhouette repeated to dreamy infinity on a curtain behind her. In between, she reminded us why she remains one of the most arresting performers of the 2000s indie boom. It was part solo high-wire act, as she stood alone on a stage in the middle of the crowd, mixing her bittersweet acoustic songs with charming banter that made you feel like you were catching up with an old friend. It was part clattering rock show, as she led a full band and the audience through communal catharsis. It was part DIY multimedia experiment, adorned with abstract visuals that were created in-the-moment. There was some sleight-of-hand in the form of a mysterious journal filled with casually profound poetry. There were yelps for songs that soundtracked past lives. There were tears at this Mother’s Day show, too, when Feist talked about her young daughter and the ever-upward branches of family. The whole thing allowed onlookers to live in a limbo between raw emotion and premeditated performance for a couple of hours, a magical suspension of belief. –Ryan Dombal

WATCH HERE

Sweeping Promises

7th St Entry; Minneapolis, MNAugust 20

After a stellar and bittersweet last-ever set from local punks Green/Blue, Sweeping Promises’ show at 7th St Entry, the tiny venue attached to the historic First Avenue club, began inconspicuously. Lira Mondal quietly sang the opening lines of “Eraser,” the first track of their latest album, Good Living Is Coming for You, before belting at full volume. Good Living is an album with built-in lo-fi muffle, but with no distance at all between audience and band, everything became infinitely more powerful: the bass grooves, Caulfield Schnug’s guitar solos, and more than anything, Mondal’s extremely powerful voice. The show happened days after the mass shooting at the Minneapolis DIY venue Nudieland, and the band, which came up through a similar network of DIY scenes and punk house shows, paid a solemn tribute between songs. It was a great performance for a community that needed to experience loud, excellent music together in a small room. –Evan Minsker

WATCH HERE

Read full article here.

John Gourley and Zoe Manville, members of the hit band Portugal. The Man, open up about their 12-year-old daughter Frances’ battle with a rare genetic disorder called DHDDS. They detail her difficult journey and share how they’re using their platform to raise awareness about the illness.

WATCH HERE.

Contribute to the GoFundMe.

[Brooklyn Vegan]

Mitski – The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We (Dead Oceans)

Mitski’s never made the same album twice, and after returning from a hiatus last year with the dance pop-infused Laurel Hell, she’s changed direction again with The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. It’s full of grand gestures — an orchestra, a full choir of 17 vocalists — and even more satisfying payoff. Mitski is a master working at any scale, from the intimate to the epic, and she is at her absolute sharpest this time around. And like at her increasingly ambitious and choreographed live shows, she makes it look easy.

For all of its beautiful adornment, Mitski’s songwriting can be remarkably economical. She never belabors a point, trusting that the listener will get it and moving right on to the next idea. All of the songs on TLIIASAW clock in at under four minutes, and album highlight “When Memories Snow” is just one minute and 44 seconds of jazzy horns and piano that recall musical theater. Yet Mitski packs cinematic soundscapes into those small spaces. She also incorporates plenty of country twang this time around (after all, she’s Been The Cowboy), like on the cowboy ballad “My Love Mine All Mine,” which earned her her first Billboard Hot 100 entry (and TikTok virality). It’s just the latest stop on a years-long ascent that’s accelerated rapidly since the release of her 2014 breakthrough Bury Me at Makeout Creek. Nearly 10 years later it’s still impossible, and exciting, to imagine where she might go next.

boygenius, Feist, Joanna Sternberg, Ratboys, Model/Actriz, Slowdive and Sweeping Promises all also made the list!

Read full article here.

[Pitchfork]

The 30-year-old subgenre has found new life in the hands of indie rockers, digicore artists, TikToking teens, and reunited first-wavers.

By Philip Sherburne

A monkey in the zoo, defiantly staring down passersby. A woman trembling as she reveals her injuries from a horrific car accident. A lovelorn soul eating ice cream and crying. A masked and helmeted man smashing bottles in a rage room. What these otherwise unrelated moments share: They are all TikToks soundtracked by the forlorn guitars and funereal drums of Duster’s 1997 song “Stars Will Fall.” And they’re just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of TikToks to which Duster’s patient, ruminative music adds a sprinkle of the sublime. Clips tagged as #dusterband have garnered nearly 18 million views on the app, a level of visibility that has helped the onetime cult act rack up nearly four and a half million monthly listeners on Spotify—more, notes The Guardian, than Sonic Youth and Pavement combined. Not bad for a lo-fi band that broke up in 2001 without ever cracking the charts.

Duster’s newfound popularity is just one example of how—thanks in large part to social media and streaming—once-marginal ’90s subgenres have found a new generation of fans by swirling together into a vibes-first incarnation of indie rock. It’s all come together underneath the banner of shoegaze, a sound once synonymous with squalling guitars and blissed-out vocals that today has become a vehicle for young people to express uncontainable feelings. The #shoegaze tag totals more than 730 million views on TikTok, covering everything from the unbearably heartbreaking to the totally frivolous.

Shoegaze was everywhere this year, surging like a wave of crushed glass and soaring like a jetliner gleaming in the light of the setting sun. Always an underdog, it proved to be the year’s most resilient and adaptable genre, bringing together fifty-something rockers and TikToking teens to kneel before vintage distortion pedals (and their digital emulations). Shoegaze fueled several of the most exciting albums in indie rock, slipped seamlessly into disparate electronic subgenres, definitively shed its associations with white middle-class Brits, and glowed at the red-hot core of some of the year’s most thrillingly unclassifiable records.

Contradiction is baked into the genre’s very name. It was coined as a disparaging term for bands that supposedly spent more time staring down at their guitar pedals than making eye contact with fans. Yet the sound of shoegaze has always aimed skyward, reaching further toward the stars with every billowing, coruscating chord. And while it is most closely associated with My Bloody Valentine’s wall-of-sound aesthetic, shoegaze has been attached to output as diverse as Galaxie 500’s reverberant chimes, Windy & Carl’s spacey post-rock, and other outliers that have been retconned into the canon by Spotify and Rate Your Music. It is close kin (and sometimes used interchangeably) with dream pop, another genre with an amorphous outline and atmospheric vibe. So it’s only natural that the return of shoegaze would be anything but pro forma.

For fans of the genre’s ’90s golden age, the big news was just how many first-wave artists returned with new material this year. Chief among them were Slowdive. One of the original core shoegaze bands, Slowdive were the scene’s most famous flameout, derided by critics and dropped by their label just a week after the release of 1995’s Pygmalion. They’ve enjoyed a phoenix-like rise from the ashes in recent years, beginning with a 2014 comeback tour and a self-titled 2017 album. (Nearly a decade into Slowdive’s second run, it’s clear the music is hitting among a younger generation: On Spotify, they have nearly twice as many monthly listeners as My Bloody Valentine; on TikTok, the hashtag #slowdive has a staggering 235 million views, thanks to zoomer fans connecting with the bittersweet ecstasy of songs like “When the Sun Hits.”) This year’s everything is alive was a softer and more contemplative take on their brooding sound that confirmed that their longevity is anything but a fluke—they’ve never sounded more comfortable in their own skins.

Slowdive weren’t the only act from their era to assert an enduring relevance. Boston’s Drop Nineteens returned this year, 30 years after their final album, with Hard Light, whose wistfully swirling guitars and gun-crack snares sound like they could have been rescued from tapes laid down in the band’s heyday. Blonde Redhead, who have been mixing noise and shoegaze sounds since the mid ’90s, proved their atmospheric bona fides on their new album Sit Down for Dinner. Emma Anderson of shoegaze pioneers Lush resurfaced with a solo debut that confidently carried on her former group’s dream-pop legacy. Fellow 4AD signees Pale Saints belatedly released a 30th-anniversary reissue of their 1992 classic In Ribbons, while proto-shoegazers A.R. Kane put out a sprawling box set (and put their albums on streaming for the first time).

Duster’s return demonstrates the way that shoegaze has morphed over time. They may not have been considered a textbook shoegaze act in their time—their creeping tempos and plaintive harmonies had more in common with slowcore—but in 2023, even their label tags them as shoegaze on TikTok. It makes sense that Gen-Z listeners who have grown up thinking that genre is little more than a state of mind would be happy to lump all manner of woozy, moody, feels-first sounds under a single umbrella; why shouldn’t it be shoegaze, a made-up word both nonsensically vague and strangely resonant? (I’ve always suspected that the term caught on in part because it evokes the word “haze,” a concept central to the style’s gauziness.) On Duster’s 2023 album Remote Echoes—their third since regrouping in 2018—they leaned hard into the muted guitars and muttered vocals that give their music the feeling of a shared secret.

Historical memory having been corroded by the ceaseless churn of social media, you might not realize how often shoegaze revivals come around. The Kevin Shields-curated Lost in Translation soundtrack helped kick off its 21st-century era in 2003, along with electronic interpolations from M83 and Ulrich Schnauss. The Guardian proclaimed the genre’s official return in 2007, prompted by a fresh crop of acts bearing fuzzboxes; then, a decade later, The New York Times announced a new revival, this time sparked by the reunions of Slowdive and Ride, another of the genre’s pioneering bands. In their wake, countless groups have come crawling out of the woodwork, but much of the new-school shoegaze this year felt less focused on the past and more interested in the here and now.

The genre’s signature fuzz ran through a number of the year’s most vital indie-rock records. But if the original shoegaze was often understood as an ethereal soundtrack for turning on and blissing out, in the hands of a band like Wednesday, the style’s guitar treatments added heft and bite to singer Karly Hartzman’s ultra-vivid lyrics about fucked-up kids in broken-down places on Rat Saw God. Hotline TNT adopted a more melodic approach than Wednesday, but Will Anderson’s goes-to-11 volume knobs and voluminous sense of space on Cartwheel tapped into a similar sense of boundless emotion, a surfeit of feeling overflowing the circuits of his pedal boards. And yeule, nominally an electronic producer, frankensteined together a host of aggressive signifiers in the high-gloss blitz of ’90s alt rock that fueled their softscars.

Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse, meanwhile, channeled Boston shoegaze OGs Swirlies in the elastic whammy-bar glides, absurdist lyrics, and sugar-crusted melodies of their triumphant album Girl With Fish. Perhaps more than any other band this year, feeble little horse captured the essential sweetness that first manifested in blissed-out classics like My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow” or “To Here Knows When.” Unlike many other strains of ’90s alternative, vintage shoegaze tended to privilege women’s voices and even a certain sense of gender amorphousness, characteristics that help it feel suited to a rock landscape that over the years has been redefined, for the better, by its openness to a spectrum of voices and identities.

The influence of shoegaze traveled remarkably far this year. There was Seoul, Korea’s Parannoul, an anonymous bedroom producer whose introverted fusion of ambient and emo is just the most visible product of a scene that also includes Asian glow, Della Zyr, and BrokenTeeth. With their Vocaloid-infused noise pop, Hiroshima’s kinoue64 took up the baton from For Tracey Hyde, a Japanese shoegaze group that called it quits this year. In Toronto, Indigenous artist Daniel Monkman, aka Zoon, crafted a gorgeously ethereal take on shoegaze rooted in his Ojibway heritage, which he calls “moccasin-gaze.”

Shoegaze first arose at a time when rock was being pushed and prodded into radical new forms. Singers were taking a backseat to pedal-driven textures; the stage was less important than the studio. All this experimentation was part of a broader movement, dubbed post-rock, that in its original incarnation folded in elements from other genres—ambient, dub, dance music. Perhaps what the new generation of shoegaze-adjacent artists shares in common is this desire to remain free to roam. “We wanted to use guitars but we wouldn’t call it guitar music,” says Sam Fenton of his group Bar Italia, a UK trio whose enigmatic fuzz and shuffling drumbeats come straight from the shoegaze playbook, even as the rest of their music wanders in other directions.

The genre has even worked its way into the worlds of online rap and digicore. Florida rapper/beatmaker jaydes opened up his sound to blown-out guitars on “rose,” the opening track on this summer’s ghetto cupid, finding unexpected similarities between plugg and shoegaze in their mutual haze. Jane Remover went further: The former digicore artist may have dabbled in redlining guitars on 2021’s Frailty, a sui generis fusion of emo and Porter Robinson-style EDM, but with this year’s Census Designated she dove unreservedly into a sparkling melange of ’90s alt-rock signifiers—grunge, shoegaze, nu-metal—topped with opulent whorls of Auto-Tuned vocals.

Ironically, by pushing shoegaze into such an unmistakably digital realm, artists like Jane Remover revealed aspects of the sound that had gotten left out of its historical narrative. Though often discussed in terms of distortion, what distinguished much original shoegaze (at least as masterminded by My Bloody Valentine) was its precise mixture of fuzziness and detail, at once gauzy and crisp—just think of the way MBV’s rigid, rifle-report snares poke through the all-consuming haze. When I hear a song like MBV’s “Sometimes,” I imagine salted caramel—a creamy swirl, rich and cloying, punctuated by tiny little crystals, their edges sharp upon the tongue. Jane Remover and her DeadAir labelmate quannnic—a 19-year-old musician who comes from a similar background in Auto-Tune-soaked, post-everything bedroom beats—both restored some of shoegaze’s crystalline detail in their sparkling, digitally rendered high end.

Still, nobody took shoegaze further this year than Yves Tumor, whose astonishing Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) funneled the Prince-indebted funk of their 2020 album Heaven to a Tortured Mind into a rapturous churn of rope-like electric basslines, silica-dry snares, onionskin vocal harmonies, and guitars so volatile they seemed volcanic. It probably doesn’t hurt that Tumor had the iconic producer and mixing engineer Alan Moulder on hand to apply some of the magic potion he used back in the day for My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Curve, and Lush. Tumor’s vocals—hissing, purring, wailing, pleading—run far hotter than the original shoegazers’, but on standouts like “Meteora Blues” and “Echolalia,” they recall the first-gen bands’ method of threading their vocals into the very fabric of the music. Tumor’s voice slides in between the guitars and drums as though slipping beneath ultra-high thread count sheets. It feels like the singer is whispering right in your ear even when the music rages like a tornado.

What made Praise a Lord so exciting wasn’t the mere fact that it looked back to shoegaze for inspiration; it was that it took those ideas as a starting point for something entirely new and entirely personal, a magnetic expression of rock-star charisma. In Tumor’s hands, you caught a hint of where shoegaze (or its descendants, anyway) might go next; a glimpse of the vision and force of will that might help propel it forward another 30 years.

“I’ve lived my life in chapters…and one of those, had a big headline ‘The Pogues’. They were all-consuming, overwhelming, perplexing, honorable, musically unstoppable, with words worthy of any astonishing writer from any time I have known.

And the front of all of this, the fount from which that music and those words came, was Shane MacGowan. He lived his life far away from the judgement of mere mortals. He lived his life the way he chose, unapologetically, without boundaries, and fearlessly.

Inspiration comes in many different ways, and Shane was one for me.

Whenever I hear those words and that voice…it stops me in my tracks. I had a very small role, in a very big life…and for that I will always be grateful.

Bless you Shane, wherever you may be…because I know for sure that nothing can stop you, you have no limits, not even death.”

— Frank Riley

[New York Times]

Many of the LPs that made an impact this year, including SZA’s “SOS” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Guts,” came from looking inward.

By Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay Zoladz

The Personal Is Powerful

Personal reflections, not grand statements, filled my most memorable albums of 2023. It was a year when many of the best songs came from looking inward: at tricky relationships, at memories, at individual hopes and fears. Yet in the music, introspection led to exploration: expanding and toying with sonic possibilities, enjoying the way every note is now an infinitely flexible digital choice. For me, there was no overwhelming, year-defining album; this list could just as well be alphabetical. Instead, 2023 was a year of artists going in decidedly individual (and group) directions to grapple with their own questions, risks and rewards.

3. boygenius, ‘The Record’

Synergy reigns in boygenius, the alliance of the singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. On “The Record,” they seem to dare one another to rev up the music and sing candidly, or at least believably, about the many ways relationships — romances, friendships, mentorships — can go sideways. Meanwhile, their harmonies promise to carry them through all the setbacks together.

6. Feist, ‘Multitudes’

Feist explores sorrow, longing, solace, new motherhood and the future of the Earth on “Multitudes.” Her latest songs are mostly quiet, but not always. They can take startling dynamic leaps: between unadorned acoustic close-ups and forays into orchestration or electronics, between lullaby and clatter, between intimacy and mystery, always seeking a compassionate path.

7. Everything but the Girl, ‘Fuse’

Despite a 24-year gap between albums by Everything but the Girl, “Fuse” isn’t exactly a reunion. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have been married the whole time. But “Fuse” reawakens and revises what they created together on their 1990s albums: a melancholy wee-hours ambience, with electronics pulsing behind Thorne’s contralto, where yearning meets experience and there’s always a chance at an epiphany.

Another 20 worthwhile albums, alphabetically:

• 100 gecs, “10,000 gecs”
• André 3000, “New Blue Sun”
• Corinne Bailey Rae, “Black Rainbows”
• Geese, “3D Country”
• Margaret Glaspy, “Echo the Diamond”
• Irreversible Entanglements, “Protect Your Light”
• Hannah Jadagu, “Aperture”
• Kelela, “Raven”
• Mitski, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”
• Janelle Monáe, “The Age of Pleasure”
• L’Rain, “I Killed Your Dog”
• Nkosazana Daughter, “Uthingo Le Nkosazana”
• Noname, “Sundial”
• Peso Pluma, “Génesis”
• Raye, “My 21st Century Blues”
• The Rolling Stones, “Hackney Diamonds”
• Allison Russell, “The Returner”
• Jorja Smith, “Falling or Flying”
• Kali Uchis, “Red Moon in Venus”
• Water From Your Eyes, “Everyone’s Crushed”

READ FULL LIST & FULL ARTICLE HERE.

[New York Times]

By David Marchese

I wonder if any of the many literary greats represented by Andrew Wylie ever considered using his story. The raw material is certainly worthy: Wylie, whose father was a high-level editor at Houghton Mifflin, grew up a privileged young scalawag, attending St. Paul’s School, from which he was dismissed, and Harvard, where he insulted one of his thesis advisers, and eventually moved to New York in the 1970s to become a poet and interviewer. Once there, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s crowd, behaved in various ways like a wild man and then, in 1980 and in need of steadier work, began transforming himself into a hugely successful literary agent. Over the years, the Wylie Agency’s clients have included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and John Updike. (All of whose estates, along with those of other luminaries like Borges and Calvino, are now represented by the agency.) Wylie’s roster of contemporary authors includes Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its blue-chip multitude. (Several New York Times journalists are also represented by Wylie.) Such voracious acquisition of clients at one point led to Wylie’s being called the Jackal, presumably for his ruthless pursuit of other agents’ authors. That fearsome reputation, along with actual paradigm-shifting changes in his approach to agenting (namely his focus on exploiting the value of authors’ backlists and his determination that publishers pay fat advances for work of high literary quality — even if it might not sell in the short term), have also been factors in making Wylie, who is 76 and a famously forthright speaker, a legendary figure in the publishing world. “I thought, Well, I wonder if you can build a business based exclusively on what you want to read,” he says, understatedly. “That led me to understand, I think correctly, that best sellers were overvalued and works that endured forever were undervalued.”

You were thinking about the financial value of various literary rights at times when other agents weren’t.¹ It seems that rights related to artificial intelligence — Oh, God, let’s not talk about artificial intelligence.I am so sick of hearing about it, and I don’t think anything that we represent is in danger of being replicated on the back of or through the mechanisms of artificial intelligence.

You don’t think that a sufficiently advanced A.I., which is not that far away, trained on, say, Elmore Leonard’s² work couldn’t create a salable facsimile of his novels? No way. But take the best-seller list. That’s a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression. Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence. I was talking to Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt, and he told me that someone had instructed ChatGPT to write a page of Rushdie. He said it was hilariously inept.³

I’ve had a couple of anxious emails from authors saying should I be concerned about artificial intelligence. It’s out there, and no one knows quite how to deal with it, but it’s not relevant to the people that we represent. It is relevant to other people who tend to be very popular.

How do you understand the contradiction that the crappy books that sell so well are what allows for the publishers to pay big advances to your writers? You need the crappy stuff to do well, right? That is the publishers’ view.

What’s your view? Different.

Explain the difference. One, the goal of the people we represent is not to be Beyoncé. It’s not directly connected to popularity. Let’s say you’re inviting some people to your house for dinner. Do you want everyone to arrive? Or do you want a select number of intelligent people who are amusing and understand what you’re talking about? The latter, I think. There are some people I don’t want to have join the dinner. They deserve to live, but they don’t need to come to my house for supper.

You have a reputation as a — what would the word be? — choleric figure in the industry. There’s even an undercurrent of fear. Why do you think people were scared of you? In the old days when we had no clients, and therefore no revenue, and therefore no food, we were like people who have had no food for a few weeks: They get a little aggressive about capturing a hamburger. When you have nothing, your expression of that condition is aggressive: “Give me something to eat. Please .”⁴ 

That was the early period, and people found that aggressive. The other aspect was — and this is serious and true — when I started there was an agency which will go unnamed. A leading agency that had a lot of clients. Many of those clients came up the street to this agency. I thought: Why is this happening? It’s not about personal charm, which I don’t have. I thought: It’s because of the course of the money. The money goes publisher to agent to writer. The big agencies, because they get money from the publishers, think I’m employing the writers, and treat writers condescendingly. The attitude is: “You don’t know the business, I do. I have 300 clients. I make $750,000 a year. You don’t, and so you should listen to me.” I thought, That’s strange: The course of the money has given the agent the misperception of the true nature of the business, which is that they are employees working for the writer. If you have that other attitude, not only is it inaccurate, it deprives you of truly understanding the writer’s project. You say: “No, you silly person. You know nothing, You’re a writer. I’m an agent.” It’s the wrong way to see things.

Are there ever instances in your work where advocating for the writer is at cross purposes with things that might lead to their books being more widely read? An example might be, I don’t know, the writer wants a particular cover or title, but the publisher says other ones would be better for sales. No disrespect intended for my brilliant colleagues in the business, but usually what happens is the publisher puts forward a ghastly and inappropriate cover design. Then you say: “Thank you, that’s ghastly and inappropriate. Could you either hire someone with a brain or attempt to redesign?” The response in every single case for 40 years has been, We’ve shown it all around the house, and everybody loves it. The number of times I’ve heard that is obscene. They always love the measly result of their ineffectual aspirations. The author sometimes will say, “Jesus, Andrew, what do you think of this?” And I say, “It’s transparently ugly, it has nothing to do with the book, so I think we should ask them to try again.”

What’s an example of when a publisher or someone else in the business disagreed with you and they turned out to be right? I don’t think that’s ever happened.

There must be something. That’s what living a charmed life is all about.

Denial? Selective memory? Having things happen the way you intended to have them happen.

You can’t think of one thing? I can’t, but my memory is not absolutely perfect.⁵

My sense is that the publishing world used to be run and populated largely by people who liked books and were interested in literature, and now there’s a cohort of people who work in publishing who might be interested in data analytics, and they’re paying attention to spreadsheets and online search terms. Do you find yourself having to communicate differently with those people? I think that a number of publishing companies have brought in businesspeople to help them in a futile effort to become more distinctly profitable. But it’s comical, because frequently these people don’t understand the difference between selling a widget and selling a good novel. The advantage that they bring to the publishing company is counteracted by the hilarious errors of judgment they make because they don’t know what they’re selling. It tends to be true that the best publishers are people who read books and whose primary understanding of the business comes from what they’ve read rather than from Harvard Business School.

Do you have an example of those comical errors? The answer is yes, I do, but I’m not talking about them.

Have publishers gotten any better over time at selling your writers’ books? I’m not so sure. The sequence, as I see it, is this: In the old days — ’80s, ’90s — there was always a discussion about the quantity of print advertising that would be attached to the publication of the book. Then publishers began to declare, and then decisively declared, that print advertising doesn’t sell books. There’s no logic to it. Why should movies, television shows be advertised in print if that didn’t produce a favorable result? What they should have been saying, if they were telling the truth, which sometimes publishers avoid, is that the cost of, say, a full-page ad in The New York Times is not directly recoverable from the number of copies of books sold from that specific ad. What that means is, it’s disadvantageous to the publisher’s balance sheet. Though without question it is advantageous to the author’s balance sheet, because the author doesn’t have to pay for the ad. Now publishers have declared, in their opinion sincerely, that the only way to sell books is through social media and stuff like that. I have gone to a number of meetings with astute groups of people employed in the publishing business who have talked like someone from a very remote island speaking 50 years in the future — it’s like science fiction. They say, we do this, we do that, but it’s not directly measurable. I find myself taking exception to their estimation of their social media skills and the effect those skills have on the sale of a book. I don’t buy it.

Has the size of the audience for the kind of books that you’re interested in representing changed? Not particularly. Because of the dominance of the delivery systems⁶ 

I’ll ask in a different way: Has the status of serious writers changed in the country? I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

What’s the right way? What are your goals?

To matter in the culture? No. Absolutely not. Who gives a [expletive]? You want to matter in this culture? Not me.

So what should a writer’s goals be? Just on the quality of the work. The kind of ineffable beauty of something extremely well expressed.

Doesn’t the real or perceived commercial status of quality literature have bearing on the deals that you’re able to negotiate for your writers? Well, we try to apply excessive charm in the course of negotiation.

Says “the Jackal.” Some people read our attempts at charm as being disingenuous, but they’re wrong.

I don’t know if you read a book by Harriet Wasserman, Saul Bellow’s old agent.⁷ .Oh, god.

There’s an anecdote in there where somebody calls her and says, would you like to meet with Andrew Wylie? She says she’d rather clean the men’s room toilet at the 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue subway with her tongue than meet with you. And there’s a Roger Straus⁸ quote where he says Andrew Wylie is a [expletive]. How were you a [expletive]? I don’t know. That’s all just gossip from Harriet and Roger, and these are perfectly nice people. Harriet was disappointed because Saul left her and moved to us. Roger was annoyed because Philip Roth⁹didn’t appreciate being on the receiving end of Roger’s condescension.¹⁰

I have seen you refer to yourself as a hollow person.¹¹ 

Yeah. A number of people I know have objected to that. But it’s fundamentally, to me, true. I actually see it as not just a lack of personality. I used to interview people because I didn’t know what to do with my life.¹²

I thought: I’ll talk to Mick Jagger. I’ll talk to Andy Warhol, and I’ll try to figure out what to do.

I understand the impulse. If you’re a good interviewer, as you are, you have to take yourself out of it and insert yourself in the person you are conversing with so what they have to say becomes powerfully significant in the course of the conversation. What if your entire life is based on entering the other person’s perspective? We represent about 1,500 writers. It’s a field of dreams. You’ve abandoned yourself, which is of no interest, it’s tedious, and you enter into their perspective and it’s totally enriching.

I find that line of thinking bothintriguing and hard to understand. Well, it could be logically seen as a deficiency. You got nothing to offer, so you crawl inside the other guy’s suit.

Is that how you feel? Yeah. It’s not a bad feeling, I’d hasten to add. It’s a good feeling. If you interact with people in a way that implies that you know everything and they know nothing, relatively nothing changes. Every day is the same. You know the whole picture all the time. That’s less interesting to me than being on an intellectual rotating belt in which today you have this person’s perspective, tomorrow you have that person’s perspective, and you don’t have them remotely. You’ve actually entered that person’s perspective. The image I had: Susan Sontag.¹³ 

We would have supper, always at a restaurant that she found suitable — I didn’t know about restaurants — and my impression after supper was when we walked out on the street, you couldn’t tell the difference between Susan Sontag and the other. I was accompanying Susan Sontag? I was Susan Sontag.

Probably you would agree that by and large literature doesn’t tend to depict hollow people as fulfilled or even positively. Well, isn’t “Don Quixote” all about that? There are plenty of hollow figures.

Is that hollowness there when you interact with your family? My family tends to think that I’m somewhat overbearing. But that’s certainly their problem, not mine.

Have you ever thought about writing an autobiography? No, no, no. First of all, it wouldn’t be very interesting, and second of all, our relationship to the people we work for is like a psychiatrist’s. You do not spill the beans. If I spilled the beans, many people would have diarrhea.

For a yutz like me, a business rube, what’s some advice about how to win a negotiation? If you believe in what you’re selling, to a certain extent that belief is infectious. If you’re just trying to make money, that’s not very convincing. But if you really think you have in your hands a work of genius, that’s quite persuasive. Especially if you also represent a number of people who have been generally accepted to be geniuses. If you represent no one of any quality and you come forward saying this is a work of genius, perhaps the reception of that observation is tempered. But if you represent Orhan Pamuk and Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie and Saul Bellow, Italo Calvino and Borges and Naipaul and Nabokov, and you say this is a work of genius, the reaction is, well, they might know what they’re talking about, because look at the context. The stronger the context, the more persuasive the offer.about:blank

Is there anything, in a longer-term, strategic way, that you find yourself puzzling over in the way that maybe 15 years ago you were thinking about authors’ digital rights? Not really. The battles have remained quite the same for a number of years. It’s all about the exaggerated favor that accrues to the distribution piece. I mean, they’re just a bunch of messengers. You don’t have to kowtow to Amazon. You don’t. And yet, “Well, how do we not?”

What’s the answer to that? It’s like your dinner party: You want everyone to come? The room is going to be packed. Or do you want to just have fewer but better people?about:blank

But publishers do want everyone to come, right? Yeah. They’re greedy. The best-seller list is an example of success and achieving the broadest possible readership. But who’s reading you? A bunch of people with three heads and no schooling. You want to spend the day with these people? Not me, thank you.about:blank

We’re not supposed to look down our noses at pop culture anymore. Do you think that’s a phony attitude? Is there some defense of cultural elitism that you want to make? Not particularly. I suppose to a great extent I’m just guided by my taste, and that’s probably idiosyncratic and narcissistic of me. I’m not a person who would ever go to Disney World. There are a lot of people who do. I don’t necessarily think that they’re ridiculous. I just don’t share that taste.about:blank

Can you leave me with lines from a poem?¹⁴ 14
I’d been told, by someone who should know, that Wiley had a knack for reciting poetry.I was reading a novel, and I’m not going to tell you which one, but I was having so much fun reading this novel, and it was sophisticated and very interesting. That brought me to think about James Joyce and what made what he had achieved interesting. And thatbrought to mind a quote that I had wrong. I thought it was “perfume of senses,” but then I looked it up, and it was “perfume of embraces.” But if you take the common reader, your best-selling books reader, and you say, look, here’s a really interesting sentence composed by a master: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore”¹⁵15
This is from Joyce’s “Ulysses.”— most of them say, “What are you talking about, man?” But that’s where all the pleasure lies: on a construction like that and the care of it and the accuracy of it and the delicacy of it and the power of it.about:blank

I asked you to leave me with a poem and you slipped in a dig. You can’t help yourself! [Laughs.] God, that’s terrible. Apologies. I love broad humanity — just not Disney World.

[Paste Magazine]

Congratulations to the following artists for making the list!

boygenius
Jess Williamson
L’Rain
McKinley Dixon
Mitski
Ratboys
Squirrel Flower
Sweeping Promises
The Lemon Twigs
Yo La Tengo

Read full article here.

[Brooklyn Vegan]

By Bill Pearis

Fresh off their six Grammy nominations, Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus brought boygenius to Saturday Night Live to perform “Satanist” and “Not Strong Enough” off this year’s full-length debut. Phoebe did not smash her guitar this time, but Julien did throw hers. In addition to the two songs, Phoebe, Julien and Lucy joined host Timothée Chalamet in a sketch where they all played multiple versions of Troye Sivan who are haunting Sarah Sherman‘s dreams.

There was also a sketch about a Museum of Hip Hop featuring Mary J Blige (Punkie Johnson), Rick Rubin (James Austin Johnson), Dr Cornel West (Kenan Thompson) and Chalamet reprising his Soundcloud artist and “technically the most successful hip hop artist of all time” character, $mokecheddathaassgetta. There was also a sketch about celebrities auditioning to read the audiobook version of Britney Spears memoir, featuring Bowen Yang as B-52’s’ Fred Schneider, Punkie Johnson as Ice Spice, Chalamet as Martin Scorsese (who just directed Chalamet in a Chanel perfume commercial), Sarah Sherman as John Mulaney, and more, with Chloe Fineman playing Britney, Natasha Lyonne, and Chalamet.

Watch those and more sketches from this week’s SNL below.

Next weekend (11/18) Jason Momoa hosts with Tate McRae as musical guest.

View full article.

Album of the Year

boygenius – The Record

Record of the Year 

boygenius – Not Strong Enough 

Best Alternative Jazz Album 

Cory Henry – Live at the Piano 

Best R&B Album 

Emily King – Special Occasion 

Best Alternative Music Album 

boygenius – The Record 

Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album

Rickie Lee Jones – Pieces of Treasure

Best Alternative Music Performance

boygenius – Cool About It 

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance 

SZA Feat. Phoebe Bridgers – Ghost in the Machine 

Best Recording Package

Caroline Rose – The Art of Forgetting

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

boygenius – The Record

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

Feist – Multitudes

Best Global Music Performance

Ibrahim Maalouf Featuring Cimafunk & Tank and the Bangas – Todo Colores

See full list of nominees here.

[Variety]

By Chris Willman

“Baby, it’s Halloween / And we can be anything,” Phoebe Bridgers once promised, in a song named after the high holy day of Oct. 31. Bridgers did not sing that particular seasonal number as part of Boygenius‘ Halloween show at the Hollywood Bowl Tuesday night, but the band took the sentiment to heart, at least. If you were a member of Boygenius and thought you could be anything, what or who would you be? We got the answer: They would be each other, naturally.

And so in the climactic stretch of the trio’s triumphant tour finale, to end a show that had already involved some dress-up, they dressed as each other. They sang as each other, too. In the place of the part of the tour set where each of them has been doing one selection each from their solo careers every night, the three members instead took the lead on one of the other boys’ trademark tunes, while also switching the custom-made, monogrammed, Flying Burrito Brothers-style jackets they’d designed for themselves. Wearing Lucy Dacus‘ coat (emblazoned with such totems as an extracted tooth and a state of Idaho emblem), Bridgers performed Dacus’ “Night Shift.” Dacus, in a jacket clearly labeled “JB,” sang Julien Baker‘s “Good News.” And the wonderfully unsettling game of round-robin was made complete with Baker taking on the role of Bridgers for “Motion Sickness.”

It was a goofy lark, on a Halloween night that benefitted from a serious case of the sillies at many junctures along the way… starting with the point in Sloppy Jane’s opening set when Bridgers came out to sing a duet of “Claw Machine” with her high school friend Haley Dahl while dressed as a ghost, in full cheap-sheet-with-eyeholes-cut-out mode. But, if you wanted to take it a bit more seriously, you could see it as a more-than-tacit acknowledgement of how friends’ identities can cross lines and blur a little, in the best possible way, when bonds have become as tight as they apparently have during Boygenius’ celebrated second chapter as a supergroup in 2023.

This was not even the major costuming choice of Boygenius’ night, though. For the trio’s main garb, they seemed to take a cue from their most insanely commercial-sounding song, “Strong Enough,” which has as its bridge a recurring chant of “Always an angel, never a god.” If just for a night, they took on all the divinity they could muster: Baker was dressed as a robed Christ, with a crown of thorns, white robe and crimson sash, and a painted, tear-streaked face. Bridgers was (if we have our iconography correct) Mary, with a semi-circular, pearl-like headdress, and a shiny cross across her chest under a sheer gown. Dacus looked less specific in her godliness, simply affixing a halo to the back of her head, otherwise looking more contemporary with a sharp white jacket that revealed a bit more open chest than most deistic figures would.

It didn’t end there. “Behold the lamb of God,” said Bridgers, welcoming her well-known dog, Maxine, onto the stage mid-set (and instructing the audience to snap fingers, not clap, so as not to terrify the sheep).

Maxine’s appearance may have counted as the most cherished cameo of the night. Coming in a close second, though, was Dave Grohl, who arrived in zombie makeup to thrash his way as guest drummer through one of the trio’s most agreeably hard-rocking numbers, “Satanist.” Grohl’s great spot — the only cameo of the night from a human — was the sort of obvious climax that a less secure band might have shifted toward the end of a setlist, not kept in place where it always sits near the beginning. But Boygenius is not the kind of band to upend its regular set just for a fellow star, regardless of his status as an undead among immortals (and the only male musician to appear on stage at all during their almost two-hour performance). It was swell, but its early placement belied a confidence: Actually, we can follow that.

But that’s been the ethos of the set structure that Boygenius has pretty much stuck with since the band did its first show of this particular era in Pomona back in April… before Coachella, before Madison Square Garden, before all the other festival or headlining gigs. After a backstage a cappella opening number (“Without You Without Them”) that the audience sees projected live on the big screen, the three member charge out and truly kick things off with two of the great electric-guitar anthems of this or any recent year, “$20” and the aforementioned “Satanist”… and then settle right in to a stretch of some of the most gorgeous numbers from this spring’s “The Record”: “Emily I’m Sorry,” “True Blue” and “Cool About It.” The show starts with tonight-we’re-gonna-rock-you-tonight energy, then boldly follow that with an extended bout of sheer beauty that rocks your spine-chill center. When the show recaptures some of that early intensity at the end, with something like a “Salt in the Wound,” it’s at more of a medium boil.

With a band that has three such perfectly well-matched, equally gifted frontwomen (sorry, frontboys), is it any wonder that they have found a way to end their 2023 touring show with such a sense of equilibrium?

One reason “The Record” feels like the best album of the year — and that Boygenius feels like the greatest American rock band of the moment — is their gift of keeping all things in balance, unholy trinity that they are. The tender moments that abound, maybe most frequently in some of the Dacus-fronted numbers, are set off by the cheeky or emotionally dangerous ones that lay in wait, like Bridgers softly singing that she’d like to kick a tormentor’s teeth in (in “Revolution 0”) or didn’t mind watching a narcissist accidentally injure himself (in “Letter to an Old Poet”). They aren’t afraid to contradict themselves in mid-song, like Bridgers instantly correcting herself about a fear of death (also “Revolution 0”) or Dacus interrupting a pure song of love and devotion like “True Blue” to make an aside about something that pissed her off that will otherwise go unmentioned. Baker, at center stage in the concerts, brings fire and sometimes snark and also settles into the most gorgeous two- and three-part harmonies this side of Laurel Canyon.

There have been notable additions to the set since the tour’s April beginning. They include those three solo numbers — as subverted on this particular night in the manner described earlier. But happily, the value-added bits include all four numbers from the just-released EP “The Rest.” For that quiet mini-set of fresher material, they took their rest upon a B-stage about halfway up the Bowl’s famous rake, playing the new stuff to the bench seats and beyond.

All four songs are terrific, with a lot of mentions of spacecraft and physics and the cosmos that seem fairly appropriate for a night under the stars with the gods. But it’s hard not to pick out an earthbound favorite: the Dacus-sung “Afraid of Heights,” in which she responds to a cocky, risk-taking friend or lover with some pride in the fear she’s being urged to be ashamed of, singing, “”I don’t wanna live forever / But I don’t wanna die tonight” and “Not everybody gets the chance to live a life that isn’t dangerous.” Maybe it’s the sense of real danger in the world right now that made that rebuttal of needless risk feel a little more pungent.

But nobody will exactly accuse anyone in Boygenius of real timidity, even if they write smart songs about refusing to jump off bridges. There’s real valor, if not derring-do, in their songwriting, which never lands on anything resembling treacle. The most memorable Bowl moment for many attendees will be the one when Bridgers asked the audience to put their phones away for just one song — a request that has been a nightly ritual on the tour — so that she could sing what she apparently considers the most vulnerable song off this year’s album, “Letter to an Old Poet,” up close to the audience without seeing a sea of screen filters. Bridgers sang it while walking around the ramp that separates the Bowl’s pool and garden seating areas, lit by nothing but the best goddess lighting the Bowl could provide, and it paid off with a memory that the sold-out crowd will be happy to re-experience as just that.

Boygenius’ members are obviously big 100 Gecs fans; they’ve used that crew’s magnificently snotty “Dumbest Girl Alive” as their exit music for the entire tour. They didn’t give up that tradition Tuesday just because 100 Gecs was actually on the bill to perform it themselves, in the middle slot. There was a willful immaturity to the duo’s set (and an overdose of strobe effects) that might’ve made the Boygenius performance that followed seem even more grown-up than it otherwise might’ve, by contrast. But that’s nothing against how much rude fun 100 Gecs can be and are, even if they spend their whole set performing to tracks and distorting their voices for extra comic-Halloweeny effect. One exception to the tracks rule came when they brought out their own guest drummer, Josh Freese, arguably the other most beloved drummer of the modern era.

On a side note: Aside from Taylor Swift, you’d have trouble finding too many more acts that sell merch like Boygenius. The hours-long line for their merch table at the Re:SET festival in Pasadena in June looked to be rivaled by a line that threatened to stretch up from valet parking to the cheap seats at the Bowl. (Hope they weren’t all looking for the bespoke poster that sold out before Sloppy Jane ever took the stage.) It may seem trivial but the identification factor is serious here for a band that never does anything to be particularly cuddly or solicitous with its audience. The fortune they might be making off T-shirts aside, it’s nice to have a moment in culture where the thought that “everybody wants to be a boy” feels like a forward thing.

[Vogue]

BLONDE REDHEAD, SIT DOWN FOR DINNER

Circa 2000, I wore a groove in my CD of Blonde Redhead’s “Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons.” Now their new album Sit Down for Dinner is on high rotation on my Spotify account. Once a dream pop fan, always a dream pop fan. —Nicole Phelps

BOY GENIUS, THE RECORD

From the haunting opening harmonies of “Without You Without Them,” it’s clear that Boygenius’s sophomore record, the self-referential The Record, is a pure distillation of each of its three members’ strengths. Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker leave their DNA scattered across their first full-length album, from primal screams to hymnal overtones and smart lyricism, making the album an instant top pick of 2023. —Hannah Jackson

[Forbes]

By David Hochman

Rickie Lee Jones never made things easy for the casual listener. To truly plug into her iconic albums of the 1970s and 80s, you had to push past off-kilter rhythms and vocals that stretched to the edge of pitch and comprehensibility only to be cornered by misfit characters straight out of Skid Row: C**t-finger Louie, Johnny the King, Eddie (with one crazy eye), and the ever-elusive Chuck E. “in love with the little girl singing this song.”

Those who got her vibe got it big. I’m confident I was the only kid at Scranton Central High School driving around in the family station wagon bearing an “I ❤️ Rickie Lee Jones” bumper sticker. It was a freak flag I had to fly. The tantalizing bohemian vignettes conjured on Jones’s self-titled 1979 debut album and 1981’s Pirates were portals to a world of cool and boozy independence that somehow felt liberating and off-limits at the same time. I wasn’t getting that same depth listening to Phil Collins.

In 1982, as I was cruising with my cassettes, Jones played four shows at The Roxy on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles as part of her Pirates tour. Some of that music showed up the following year on Girl at Her Volcano, whose vinyl I practically wore to the treads during my senior year.

The Grammy-winning singer songwriter returned to The Roxy last night for the first time since those classic dates, and you can bet I was in line with the curious late-night crowd. Jones hasn’t had the smoothest run these past few decades. Financial setbacks, boyfriend trouble, circumlocutions of faith and fame—it’s all on the record.

Fortunately, the RLJ sparkle is still intact. From the opening piano chords of “We Belong Together” from Pirates, the sold-out room was back in a dark-magic world where“Johnny the King walks these streets without her in the rain, looking for a leather jacket, and a girl who wrote her name forever, with a promise that we belong together.”

Jones brought out her band in a way familiar to anyone who recently rewatched Stop Making Sense. Song by song, she added one more musician, starting with Ben Rosenblum on piano and accordion, John Leftwich on bass, Vilray Bolles on guitar and later a few guests, including guitarist Geoff Pearlman and vocalist Syd Straw.

At 68, Jones is no longer the bad-girl ingenue of thrift shop rock. Now she’s a torch singer by way of what a new generation of hipsters calls “lived experience.” After a story about finding true love on the eve of 70, Jones’s heartfelt version of the Sinatra standard “The Second Time Around” took on new resonance. Likewise, “One for My Baby (And One More For the Road)” was recast for women talking at the bar. Jones brought out Straw for a slowed-down, grown-up take on Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids” that suddenly felt like an indictment of TikTok stupidity (damn those “show business kids making movies of themselves!”). Jones ended the night with “the one truly great song” she says her late father, Richard, wrote—“and one great song is more than enough for anybody,” she said, launching into “The Moon is Made of Gold.”

The curtain came down around midnight but the audience didn’t want to leave. Jones doesn’t always make it easy but it’s hard to let her go.

Rickie Lee Jones’s latest album is Pieces of Treasure.

[LA Times]

BY ERIN OSMON

Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker grimaced as they thought about their time together ending. “I hate that,” Dacus, 28, declared. “That’s so dumb.”

On Oct. 31 at the Hollywood Bowl, the trio, who perform as Boygenius, will play the final show of a tour that began in April. For most, it would be a triumphant end to months of highs, but these three women would prefer lower stakes for their last hurrah. “If we were ending in Nowheresville, it could be more loose and we could emotionally connect with the last shows,” Bridgers, 29, explained. “But we’re going to black out from playing MSG [Madison Square Garden] and the Bowl for the first time.”

They’re gathered in the control room of Studio B at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, a historic setting where Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks recorded their “Buckingham Nicks” album in 1973 and joined Fleetwood Mac in the process.

Boygenius is also here to record music, presumably, but the band won’t confirm it. “It’s fair to say that we do inhabit the studio a lot,” Baker offered, a polite obfuscation. Dressed in varying combinations of black and white, with Bridgers’ Black pug, Maxine, snorting gently in her lap, the trio thought back on some of the major events of 2023.

The threesome’s debut album, “The Record,” released on March 31, reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Like its 2018 self-titled debut EP, the album garnered near-unanimous praise; Taylor Swift called it “genuinely a masterpiece” in an Instagram Story. On Friday, Boygenius will release a new EP, “The Rest,” described as an “expansion” of that full-length debut.

Hozier joined Boygenius onstage in Boston on Sept. 25 to sing the trio’s “Salt in the Wound,” a feelings-forward rock ballad that explodes in a cacophony of noise. In London, Billie Eilish brought Boygenius onstage to sing with her during an intimate gig in August. “There were fireworks!” Dacus said, gleefully, of the group’s own debut headlining show there, where 25,000 people, mostly women, gathered in a park in West London.

The three singer-songwriters, who all identify as queer, joined together in 2018 and quickly became best friends. Their band name is an inside joke about toxic male ego but also an implicit challenge to gender norms, patriarchy and what a rock band historically affords. Along with Swift and acts like Big Thief, Boygenius advocates the power of friendship with a verve that cues safe spaces for fans, an antidote to drunken bro aggression at concerts.

“I just want 16-year-olds from Memphis to see me and do the thing where they think I’m interchangeable with them, because I am,” Baker, 27, said, citing her hometown. “I want them to know they can be happy … They don’t have to be hardened or jaded or broken or tied up in addiction.”

During performances, the members of Boygenius make out with one another — kissing, hugging and otherwise canoodling — as if to normalize the singular intimacy of female bonding. Big sapphic energy reverberates from the stage to the crowd and back again in an infinite loop. “Sex, friends, rock ’n’ roll,” Bridgers said of their mission, prompting a fit of laughter among the trio.

The members of Boygenius use their platform for activism, but not because they think it’s an artist’s duty. “It’s every person’s job to recognize the resources that they have, and to be a channel through which good can pass,” Dacus explained. Bridgers often speaks out against anti-choice laws in America, using her medication abortion in 2021 as a fulcrum. The trio dressed in drag during a July concert in Nashville as Tennessee’s Gov. Bill Lee attempted to ban public drag shows through legislation that a U.S. district judge eventually struck down. They performed at Philip Glass’ annual Tibet House benefit concert and have helped raise money for causes in their hometowns, including the Downtown Women’s Center of Los Angeles, OUTMemphis and Mutual Aid Distribution Richmond.

In July, former President Barack Obama shared his 2023 summer playlist on Twitter, which included Boygenius’ “Not Strong Enough.” “War criminal,” Dacus tweeted in response.

Bridgers, Dacus and Baker come from DIY origins. Each posted her early music in near anonymity online, and played house shows and tiny club gigs before eventually signing with bigger indie labels Dead Oceans (Bridgers) and Matador (Dacus and Baker).

For Boygenius, they wanted to honor those roots and the skills they’ve honed along the way — confessional lyrics sung in a tight-knit cadence, diaphanous vocals, textural guitar work — but remove the gatekeep-y coolness factor of indie-rock. “We made every effort to make this a f— rock band, but to sub out all of those superficial countercultural things,” Baker said. “It’s Guitar Center-core,” Dacus added.

Also antithetical to the rock-star archetype is that the trio prefers to live quiet, healthy lives. On this day, each sips on a drink from Erewhon. “We’re all eating adaptogens,” Baker said with a laugh. “Sex, longevity, rock ’n’ roll,” Bridgers added without skipping a beat.

When it comes to their feelings about the Grammys, they immediately point to MusiCares, the nonprofit arm of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences that provides emergency financial assistance, medical care and other services for any musician regardless of status. “I had therapy for years paid by MusiCares,” Bridgers said. “Them being connected is already a thumbs up because that’s a legitimately good charity,” Dacus added.

Bridgers was nominated for four Grammy Awards for “Punisher,” her 2020 breakout album: best new artist, alternative music album, rock performance and rock song. She says her part of the ceremony took place over Zoom that year, amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It sucked to not be [able to commiserate] with the other people who lost,” she explained. “I was just in a room with my managers.”

This time around, if nominated, Boygenius say they’ll walk the red carpet. Dacus is “kind of a bitch for spectacle,” she says. “It’s not the goal. But it seems like a fun glitzy way … to celebrate what we’re already proud of.”

Bridgers joked that it would be “kind of based for us to not get any. They didn’t give Bob Dylan one until 1998, I think.” (In fact, Dylan won the first Grammy for his solo work in 1979.) “I do wonder how the emperor’s clothes are made,” Baker said.

The women of Boygenius say they’d be glad to earn a nomination and win a Grammy on the strength of their artistry. The band cites female musicians they admire who, in their view, won in a similar way, like Fiona Apple and Brittany Howard.

And if they’re nominated and don’t win?

“If we lose,” Dacus said, “we’ll go on Instagram Live and pretend that we won.”

Photo credit ALEXA VISCIUS

Indie-rock singer-songwriter Ella Williams delivers her best LP yet

[Rolling Stone]

BY LEAH LU

About halfway into Tomorrow’s Fire, the third album Ella Williams has recorded as Squirrel Flower, the Chicago indie-rock artist sings about leaving quietly out the back of a party, disappearing without saying goodbye to anyone. “I’ve had my fun, I’m done,” she tell us on “Almost Pulled Away,” over a steady drumbeat and a dizzying, crunchy riff. She’s just told someone that they might’ve been the first person she’s ever loved, a treacherous confession that should leave her resigned and vulnerable. Yet Williams’ delivery feels impenetrably grounded. Fittingly for a singer-songwriter who seems to gather strength in dark, ambiguous moments, what could be an act of avoidance starts feeling like a firm epiphany. Maybe she’s crazy to be going it alone, but the more likely truth is that it’s the strongest thing she’s ever done.

Tomorrow’s Fire is Squirrel Flower’s most outwardly rocking record. While her 2020 indie-folk debut I Was Born Swimming explored the restless growing pains of early-in-life transformation, and 2021’s Planet (i) dealt with climate anxiety and natural disasters, Tomorrow’s Fire fuses the two, offering a hard, unflinching look at an amalgamation of those stressors. These days, Williams is learning to stand up for herself and cut her losses, all while toiling away endlessly and living in the midst of global catastrophe. She cites artists like Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen as inspirations for her storytelling, and their influence is clearest on tracks like “Canyon” and “Alley Light,” where Williams narrates travel tales over hypnotic, trance-like guitar swells that recall Springsteen super-fans, the War On Drugs. (WOD bassist Dave Hartley plays on this record.) 

The album opens with a tranquil reimagining of the first-ever Squirrel Flower song, “I Don’t Use A Trash Can,” with Williams singing in a low register, backed by cascading harmonies, as if she’s in conversation with her past selves. It’s a song about her resistance to getting clean just yet, an ode to lingering wide-eyed in the mess for a while longer: “I’m not gonna change my sheets,” she sings. “I will never wash my hands.” In the older recording, Williams’ voice is tinged with desperation. Here, it’s coded with defiance. Throughout Tomorrow’s Fire, Williams sounds strategically self-effacing while also cradling a quiet, growing inner certainty. The result feels like the sound of someone coming into their own, albeit not without some rough patches; she still gets good and angry, but where rage used to feel like a deadend in her previous songs, here it drives her forward.

Even on the record’s more upbeat moments, you can’t escape Williams’ cutting honesty. “Intheskatepark,” a bouncy snapshot of a sweltering summer crush, becomes a consideration of performed romantic nonchalance. “I thought if I told you slowly, you’d be feeling the same way,” she sings, highlighting how the intensity of our feelings can seep through whatever facade we put up. This also comes through pn the screeching “Stick,” in which Williams is self-aware enough to acknowledge the flimsiness of her convictions, singing “I laid down a stick and you crossed it…I had a light but you lost it.” We crash into people and systems and jobs with a sincere inability to be kind or careful with our hearts. We work ourselves down to the bone even though it “doesn’t pay the rent,” as Williams laments on “Full Time Job.”

As Tomorrow’s Fire winds down, Williams considers that control, and loosens her grip. “In this life, I cannot hold anything in my hands,” she sings over reverb-heavy pluckings on “What Kind of Dream is This?” Williams has noted that the album’s title cites a novel written by her great-grandfather, in which he quotes the Medieval French poet Rutebeuf: “Tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner/Tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight.” She describes her symbolic definition of fire as an antidote to nihilism, the hope we need to withstand the inevitably fleeting nature of life. This album burns with it.

[Relix]

By Mike Ayers

Before Parker Millsap set out to record what would become his sixth full-length LP, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter found himself deep in the jungles of Costa Rica. “I recorded bugs, water and monkeys—we were in all these different places,” he says of the field recordings he found himself making. “They all have their own sound.”

After returning home, Millsap found a way to naturally layer his findings into his latest set of sessions, allowing those raw sounds to mimic the instruments that he needed. He also grabbed some additional material from various tour stops, including machinery he once heard in Minneapolis. 

The collage approach is a signature of Wilderness Within You, Millsap’s most diverse set of material to date. And he incorporates much more than just the soulful twang you might expect from the Americana troubadour at this point—instead, Millsap explores a broader range of influences from throughout pop music’s long history. Songs like the rustic “Running On Time” and “So Far Apart,” a modern Wilco-esque tune with trumpets floating in the background, demonstrate a diversity in his voice and sound that didn’t seem to exist before. “Wilderness Within You” finds Millsap dueting with Gillian Welch—the two string up a gorgeous, simple folk nugget that ruminates on their own inner nature.

“It’s really holistic in a way that other records haven’t been,” Millsap says of Wilderness Within You. “The themes on this record are bigger than what I’ve touched on in the past. Reading all these books, when they go back hundreds of thousands or millions of years and talk about the geological formations and all that—it’s really stretched my brain in a way.” 

Born and raised in Purcell, Okla., Millsap has been releasing albums since 2012. He’s toured and recorded with Sarah Jarosz, and shared bills with Old Crow Medicine Show, Jason Isbell and Lake Street Dive. Elton John is even a professed fan. He recalls first trying to write a song at the tender age 4 and, later in high school, stringing a bunch of book titles together to make another original. He laughs at the idea now but, at the time, it was a move to get away from the cover band he was in, playing Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Red Hot Chili Peppers tunes. 

Now, with several albums under his belt, it’s clear he’s more interested in exploring much bigger ideas about his, and humanity’s, role in the world. 

“I’m way more aware of ecology and our place within natural systems and artificial systems,” he says. “Our human systems work against natural systems in many ways— ecosystem awareness, life awareness and awareness of the way we work against ourselves in the long run.”

[Pitchfork]

The New York artist’s first new song since releasing their album I’ve Got Me earlier this year

By Evan Minsker

Joanna Sternberg has shared their first new song since releasing I’ve Got Me earlier this year. “Neighbors” was recorded at Sternberg’s living room piano by Chris Miller. Listen below.

“I wrote this song about my social anxiety and how it manifests in the context of the high-rise building I live in,” Sternberg said in a statement. “I often am unsure of so many social rules and social cues that I just wind up either shutting down completely, or acting like an over-friendly almost muppet-like version of a human. This song is definitely intended to be sort of tongue-in-cheek/silly (I am very inspired by Randy Newman!).”

Read the recent Rising feature “The Real World of Joanna Sternberg.”

[Spin]

We spoke with the 82-year-old musician about her new documentary, ’Joan Baez: I Am a Noise’

Written by Lily Moayeri 

Before Nina Simone, before Aretha Franklin, before Bob Dylan and the Beatles, there was Joan Baez. With a big voice and an even bigger presence, from the age of 18, Baez left a mark on the world through her music and her activism. Now, at 82, the definitive documentary, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise delves not only into Baez’s public persona and impact, but deep into her personal demons which range from mental health and intimacy issues to addiction and abuse.

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is told in cinéma vérité style and avoids chronological storytelling. It began as a concert film documenting Baez’s final tour in 2019. But once Baez let the filmmakers, including co-director Karen O’Connor—a close friend of Baez’s since 1989—into her storage space (read: the Baez family vault), Joan Baez: I Am a Noise took a different turn. O’Connor and her fellow directors Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle uncovered a treasure trove of archival images and footage, as well as audio tapes of Baez’s very private therapy sessions, plus answering machine and voicemail messages from her now departed family.

With this amount of singular content, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise bypasses the talking-heads style of documentary, with the exception of Baez herself. Instead, the narrative is weaved together from primary-source material that traces Baez, her two sisters and her parents from the nascence of their family. It shows Baez at her first sparsely-attended performance to her meteoric rise, literally the following week. Baez at the March on Washington. Baez with her then-boyfriend “Bobby” Dylan—a flirty, smirking version of him rarely seen before, his grin from ear-to-ear when he looks at her, Baez pregnant while her husband activist David Harris is in jail. Baez passed out on quaaludes on her tour bus.

The most jarring parts of Joan Baez: I Am a Noise are when Baez and her sisters’ abuse is revealed through firsthand accounts. Baez’s characterful illustrations outline the experience and her healing process.

More current footage shows sold-out gigs and a still-powerful on-stage presence. Backstage is filled with long-time fans and recognizable faces, among them, Bill and Hillary Clinton. At home, Baez keeps her body and voice in enviable shape with regular exercise. And she is at peace with herself and her demons—even if Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is pushing her to revisit some of the most painful aspects of her life. As she says when she speaks to SPIN, “I put a limit on what I’m going to talk about.”

What pushed you to share your experiences in such an intimate, revealing way?

I’ve known one of the directors, Karen O’Connor, for years. We’re good friends and I know her work. We’ve talked about it periodically for a decade. Then it was, “Okay, we’ll film the last tour. What does a 79-year-old woman do at the end of this extraordinary life touring and the music and so on.” That’s how we started.

In the middle of everything, I gave them a key to my storage unit. I had never been there. In the film when I walk in is the first time I’d ever been there. I had no idea the extent of the stuff that was in there. It’s a director’s dream. It’s also a nightmare, because there was so much stuff. From my father’s great pictures of us when we were two and three years old to my delving into the therapy that gave me a life as a whole person. They edited, literally, for years.

My family is all gone. I couldn’t have done the delicate parts of this if my parents or my sisters were still here. Some of the sister stuff I learned, I don’t know if they’d ever be able to tell me how they really felt. It’s too difficult. I learned a lot.

The storage unit—which looks extremely organized—was holding not just your belongings but that of your family. Were you aware of its contents?

All those therapy tapes I knew were there. I didn’t know they were put in order like that. Probably my assistant and then the film crew did that. I didn’t know about the letters and the early stuff and the letter from the doctor and the footage of us when we were little. Some of it I had never seen before. It was a lifelong journey. I just wanted it to be an honest legacy. And it was time. I don’t know how much time I have left. But I’ve got nothing to lose now.

Were the filmmakers showing you how the story was evolving and getting your permission to include very personal information?

We had a few fisticuffs. If it was something I really wasn’t going to be able to handle, we’d make adjustments. There are some things there I didn’t want in. But that doesn’t matter. That’s me still trying to protect something. When I look at it in the context of the film, I see what it means to the film. The film is totally unique. It’s brilliantly put together. I don’t have any gripes. There are parts of it that make me uncomfortable. I didn’t really have any say in it. Friendship and trust in them and knowing that they were doing a great job, once we were rolling, we were rolling.

One of the aspects of your career that the film talks about is your instant rise to fame. Were you prepared for that?

My idea of the future was the following Wednesday. I didn’t plan it and there wouldn’t have been time to plan it anyway. I just remember me standing at Newport [Folk Festival], at the foot of the stairs that went up to the stage, knowing I was going to be introduced, and I would sing two or three songs. My knees were knocking, and my legs were shaking, uncontrollably. I was so nervous. There was this massive response. The next day, it was press, and from there was TIME magazine and all that. I spent a lot of energy when I was young trying to do the right thing; not be commercial and not get horrible and not cut people off and all those things I’d heard about. That was my life. I loved that. I loved my own voice. I loved what came out. I loved the public—but that didn’t keep me from having horrendous stage fright. I just kept going. I knew I’d rather be called “the Madonna” than “the dumb Mexican.”

The Mexican side of your heritage is touched on only a little bit in the beginning of the film. Why is that?

My mom was from the British Isles so I did the early Scottish, Irish, and English folk songs. Late in the game, I thought, “Why didn’t I go to the Spanish stuff? That’s part of my heritage.” I’m sure it’s all tied to early childhood stuff. I don’t speak Spanish. I taught myself Spanish once and gave one press conference and then forgot all my Spanish. I did an album in Spanish [Gracias a la Vida], but I wasn’t immersed in being Latina.

You and Bob Dylan were together at the start of his career. In the film it looks like you were guiding him. We see a very different Dylan than we have before.

The period of time when Bob and I were traveling together, singing together, it was just wonderful. We knew it was a slam dunk every single night, that people were going to be ecstatic. And we’d be silly. I don’t know how long that lasted. But we were everything that you saw on screen. I’d never even seen that footage. Seeing him in this other light is just a real treat.

You performed at the March on Washington [including with Dylan]. What was the experience of hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak like for you?

There are times when you know what’s going on is exceptional. It was a hot day. There were 350,000 people. I’d never seen that many people in my life. I had worked with SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] and King’s people. I had already been in Grenada, Mississippi and walked the children to school. Then came this day. When King spoke and he put the notes down and gave that speech, I was never the same afterwards. That happened to a lot of us.

These days, artists have more power, more reach, more impact than ever before, yet it feels like they have less courage. As someone who is an activist and using your platform to be fearlessly outspoken about issues, what are your thoughts about that?

The key is in one’s ability to take risks. That’s the hardest thing. It was what I was willing to do, and the people around me were willing to do. Some people now are willing to do that, but it’s not an atmosphere that’s conducive to that. We’re living in the age of bullies, hatred, fear and fascism. In that context, how do you find the right group? We don’t have the glue we had in the ‘60s, either. It’s dispersed all over the place. I would really encourage people to find one of those places that they relate to and just be a part of it, whether you want to give money or volunteer or lick stamps or become active or finally take a risk. Without that risk, we’re not going to make any real social change.

In the film, you said you were “addicted to activism.” What does that mean to you?

It was awful to say, and it was awful to realize. Why am I going off to Cambodia when I could be spending time with my kid? I couldn’t. It was the early stuff that wrecked that for me. It was intimacy. I couldn’t be present when I needed to be present, even if I was standing there. I guess I felt safest when I was taking care of somebody else’s kids.

It doesn’t take away from the emotional part of why I wanted to be there, and being present when I was there, and doing the things that I did, which I think were good. I think they were well-guided and used me in the best possible way. Used me for the right thing and I’m fine with that.

Were your intimacy issues ever resolved?

It’s not clear in the film, but I resolved it by not going into it. The last few months with my therapist who took me through all that stuff was, “Now that we got all this under your belt and you’re right with yourself, it’s time to find a partner.” I thought, “I got this far. It feels wonderful. I feel whole. Why screw it up?” I live on a compound so I’m not all by myself by any means, that would be different if I were. But I am living with myself really quite well.