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    How Grace Potter Lost (and Found) a Solo Album, and a New Life

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    In May 2009, Hollywood Records announced that T Bone Burnett — the producer of the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss LP “Raising Sand,” which dominated the Grammys earlier that year — had recently entered the studio with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to produce the band’s new album. The LP, which would be the Vermont-based bluesy roots-rock group’s third, was slated to come out that fall.The label didn’t mention that the album was in fact a solo vehicle for Potter, then 25, that she recorded with a team of renowned session musicians: the drummer Jim Keltner, the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Dennis Crouch and the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. “She was like a ball of fire,” Keltner recalled of Potter in a phone call, “and she was really fun to follow.”During an interview in March at her eclectically decorated villa in Topanga, Calif., Potter — a multi-instrumentalist whose soulful voice has earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and “a grittier Patty Griffin” — recounted her sense of anticipation over the release of the LP, “Medicine.”“It really felt like something exciting on the horizon,” Potter said, sitting on the couch in her living room dressed in a stylish forest-green jumpsuit. “It was like the secret that we got to keep until it all came out.” Sixteen years earlier, she had described the record as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing” than her earlier output.Then Hollywood shelved the album. The label wanted Potter and the Nocturnals to rerecord the songs with the producer Mark Batson, known for his work with Alicia Keys, the Dave Matthews Band and Dr. Dre. Potter blamed an A&R executive, whom she declined to name, for the decision.She also said that Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group, which distributes the Hollywood label, was “concerned that the record would age me.” She added, “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’” (In a phone interview, Cavallo, now 85 and retired, couldn’t recall the particulars of the label’s move, but expressed regret that he couldn’t help Potter “get a giant career, because I thought she deserved one.”)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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      Trump Targets Harris Campaign’s Links to Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen

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      The president claimed without evidence on Monday that Kamala Harris had violated campaign-finance law, essentially by paying superstars for endorsements “under the guise of paying for entertainment.”President Trump is calling for a “major investigation” into the celebrities Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bono, bringing his retribution campaign to the music industry.Mr. Trump, in a pair of posts on Truth Social on Monday, argued that Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee was violating campaign-finance law, essentially by paying those figures for endorsements “under the guise of paying for entertainment.”There is no evidence that Ms. Harris paid for the endorsements, although details on celebrity engagements can be somewhat murky. Under campaign finance law, campaigns are required to pay the fair-market value for the costs of events so as to make sure that a company or individual is not donating in excess of federal contribution limits.Ms. Harris paid $1 million to Ms. Winfrey’s production company for a live-streamed town hall in Detroit, according to campaign-finance records. Ms. Winfrey has said the money paid for costs and salaries related to the event and was not a personal fee.Beyoncé headlined a rally for Ms. Harris in her hometown of Houston for an abortion-rights event, and Ms. Harris’s campaign paid the singer’s company $165,000 in November for “campaign event production,” according to campaign-finance records. Mr. Trump falsely claimed on Monday that her payment was $11 million, citing unspecified “news reports.” The artist’s mother has called that figure a “lie.”Mr. Trump’s angry posts come as his ire has been raised against Mr. Springsteen, who sharply criticized Mr. Trump during a concert in Manchester, England, last week. Mr. Trump responded with a social media post calling him a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.” Mr. Springsteen performed at a rally in Atlanta in the final weeks of the presidential race, though no records available yet show any payment from Ms. Harris’s campaign.It was not clear why Mr. Trump named Bono, the Irish singer-songwriter who fronts the band U2. While he is a friend of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and received from him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award, he did not appear at any campaign events with Ms. Harris, nor did he endorse her. More

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      How Much Does It Cost to See Beyoncé? It Depends.

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      Some fans who paid top dollar for the star’s Cowboy Carter Tour are feeling miffed as prices drop. Other procrastinators are reaping the benefits.Tanaka Paschal, 43, was thrilled to be taking her son to Beyoncé’s final Southern California show on her Cowboy Carter Tour this month. They had missed the Renaissance World Tour two summers ago; tickets had sold out so fast, some fans ventured overseas to catch a gig.“I thought I was not going to be able to see her, so I jumped on it,” she said.Paschal bought a pair of floor seats for about $900 total, but like many others, she soon had a bit of buyers’ remorse. In the weeks that followed, she saw the price for similar seats drop by hundreds of dollars, then increase, then drop again.“It’s frustrating,” she said. “The next time, I’m going to wait until the day of.”When tickets for big summer tours by acts like Lady Gaga, the Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar and SZA go on sale, the prevailing wisdom is you have to move fast during one of the presales offered by artists and credit card companies or you’ll be shut out.Most, if not all, tickets are usually snatched up immediately, with prime seats popping up on resale platforms like StubHub or Ticketmaster’s own secondary market at inflated prices. (Fans hoping to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour famously didn’t even get a shot at the general on-sale: All the tickets were long gone.)Kendrick Lamar is also on a stadium tour this year, supporting his recent album, “GNX” and a big year.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesBut things have been different for Beyoncé’s tour this time supporting her Grammy album of the year-winning “Cowboy Carter”; tickets moved during the presales, but a glance at the seat maps on Ticketmaster’s pages later revealed not only a lot of pink dots indicating resale tickets, but plenty of blue dots representing available seats that had gone unpurchased, too. And those prices were notably changing.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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      What Comes After Trauma and a TikTok Hit? Gigi Perez Is Finding Out.

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      The artist, 25, struck platinum with “Sailor Song.” Her debut album is a tribute to her lost sister, and an attempt to make sense of a few rudderless years.Gigi Perez walked into a Brooklyn restaurant last week with a toothpick wedged in her mouth, stood up after dinner and slid in another one. She had glanced at a clear box of them sitting on the table periodically, like she was seeking comfort or reinforcement. But for two hours, she mostly kept her gaze fixed to the side, avoiding eye contact while she spoke — as she often finds herself doing — about death.“Getting older, watching the people in your family get older — I feel like I’m on a conveyor belt that’s going to this inevitable end,” she said.At 25, Perez speaks with a weariness of someone at least twice her age. She was at one of her favorite Japanese spots in Williamsburg, not too far from where she used to live; she was days away from releasing her debut album and 10 hours from a brutally early wake-up call for “The Today Show.”Like many young musicians, Perez is figuring out what comes next after virality. Her lilting, guitar-powered anthems have blazed through TikTok, amassing millions of streams and a fervent fan base. “Sailor Song,” a ballad about lusting after a girl who looks like Anne Hathaway (yes, it was based on a real woman), went platinum and has been planted on Spotify’s most-streamed songs in the United States for months; it became a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom last fall. But Perez’s career hasn’t been built on celebration. She is carving a catalog out of grief.“When you’re a kid, music is verbalizing things you don’t know how to say — you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. You’re discovering how you feel in real time,” Perez said. OK McCausland for The New York TimesOne of her first songs to garner attention on SoundCloud, “Sometimes (Backwood),” took off six months after her older sister, Celene, died suddenly in 2020. Perez’s LP, “At the Beach, in Every Life,” released less than a week ago, is largely a tribute to her. It is also an attempt to shape and sharpen the last, often rudderless years of her own life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé Cowboy Carter Tour Review; The Star Remixes American History, and Her Own

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

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      Joe Cocker, Cyndi Lauper, Bad Company and Soundgarden — but not Oasis or Phish — are also part of the 40th anniversary class.Chubby Checker is finally joining the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 65 years after “The Twist” became a No. 1 hit and an international dance craze.Checker, 83, who has campaigned for decades to be admitted to the pantheon — at one point taking out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine that said “I want my flowers while I’m alive” — is part of the 40th annual crop of performer inductees. He is joined by Joe Cocker, the White Stripes, Outkast, Cyndi Lauper, Bad Company and Soundgarden, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation announced on Sunday evening, after a Rock Hall-themed segment on ABC’s “American Idol.”Those artists — a lineup that mixes classic rock, hip-hop, 1990s-vintage alternative rock and a female pop icon — will formally join the hall on Nov. 8 in a ceremony at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles that will stream live in Disney+.Checker, Cocker, Outkast and Bad Company were all accepted on their first nomination.The induction of the White Stripes, the stylish garage-rock minimalists whose “Seven Nation Army” has become a stadium-rousing standard, could lend some anticipatory drama to this year’s ceremony. Since the band broke up in 2011, Meg White, its drummer, has become one the great recluses of 21st-century pop, rarely seen in public and declining all interview requests — which would make any possible appearance by her a major coup for the Rock Hall.Among the other honors this year, Salt-N-Pepa, the pioneering female rap group, and the singer-songwriter Warren Zevon will receive the musical influence award. The musical excellence citation will go to the keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, the studio bassist Carol Kaye and the producer Thom Bell, a key figure in Philadelphia soul. Lenny Waronker, a producer and longtime executive at Warner Bros. Records, will receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award.Among the nominees who failed to make the final cut this year are Oasis, the Britpop standard-bearers who have reunited for perhaps this year’s most in-demand world tour, and Phish, the veteran Vermont jam band. Phish won the hall’s fan ballot — a single vote, entered alongside those submitted from the hall’s voting body of more than 1,000 music historians, industry professionals and previously inducted artists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Thomas, Leader of the Band Pere Ubu, Dies at 71

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      David Thomas, the singer and songwriter who led Pere Ubu and other bands that stretched the parameters of punk and art-rock, died on Wednesday in Brighton and Hove, England. He was 71.Mr. Thomas had suffered from kidney disease, but the announcement of his death, on Pere Ubu’s Facebook and Instagram sites, did not specify a cause, citing only “a long illness.” He lived in Brighton and Hove, but the announcement did not say if he died at home.Through five decades of recordings and performances, Mr. Thomas maintained an audacious, unpredictable, ornery and ambitious spirit. He perpetually defied and upended structures and expectations, and he reveled in dissonance and unsprung sounds.In the mid-1970s, at the dawn of punk rock, Pere Ubu described itself as “avant-garage.” And as punk developed its own constraints and conventions, Mr. Thomas purposefully warped or ignored them. When late-’70s punk bands sported T-shirts, leather and ripped jeans, he performed in a suit and tie. And while much of his music stayed grounded in rock, he also delved into chamber music, cabaret, electronics and improvisation.Mr. Thomas in performance in 1979. Big-boned and overweight, he wielded his bulk proudly onstage. David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesHis voice was always distinctive: a liquid, androgynous tenor that he pushed to its limits and beyond — crooning, chanting, whooping, muttering, barking, burbling, yelling. His lyrics could be apocalyptic, free-associative, mocking, euphoric, cryptic or startlingly direct. Onstage, gesticulating vehemently, he veered between endearing and irascible.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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      Roy Thomas Baker, Who Helped Produce ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Dies at 78

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      Among the most successful music producers in the 1970s and ’80s, he helped churn out hits for acts like Queen, the Cars, Journey and Foreigner.Roy Thomas Baker, who was among the most successful music producers of the 1970s and 1980s and who helped produce Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most unconventional pop hits, died at his home in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on April 12. He was 78.His death was announced by Bob Merlis, a spokesman, who said in a statement that the cause was unclear.Besides Queen, Mr. Baker collaborated with other well-known bands like the Cars, Journey, Mötley Crüe and Foreigner while working as a producer and sound engineer at several recording studios over the course of his career.He is perhaps best known for helping to produce the nearly six-minute-long “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Mr. Baker said that the song was “ageless” because “it didn’t confine to any given genre of music.”“I thought it was going to be a hit,” said Mr. Baker, who produced the song with Queen. “We didn’t know it was going to be quite that big. I didn’t realize it was still going to be talked about 30 years later.”Roy Thomas Baker was born on Nov. 10, 1946, in Hampstead, England. He began his career at Decca Studios in London in 1963, working as a second engineer to Angus Boyd (Gus) Dudgeon, an English record producer who would later become known for his collaborations with Elton John; and Tony Visconti, an American producer who went on to work with artists like David Bowie and Marc Bolan.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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      Amadou Bagayoko, Half of Malian Duo Who Went Global, Dies at 70

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      As Amadou & Mariam, he and his wife were improbable pop stars on two counts. Their style was venturesome and eclectic, and they were blind virtuosos.Amadou Bagayoko, a Malian guitarist and composer who with his wife, the singer Mariam Doumbia, formed Amadou & Mariam, inventing a broadly accessible sound that made fans of people worldwide who otherwise knew little about music from Africa, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He was 70.His death was announced by the Malian government, which did not provide a cause. He and Ms. Doumbia lived in Bamako.In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Amadou & Mariam was regularly described as the new century’s most successful African musical act.Mr. Bagayoko, who grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, called their sound “Afro-rock,” and the group regularly combined his winding guitar solos with, for example, the pounding of a West African djembe drum.Yet the group’s music also consistently evolved. Their breakout hit, the 2005 album “Dimanche à Bamako,” had chatty spoken asides, sirens, the hubbub of crowds — city sounds turned into melodies. Their 2008 album “Welcome to Mali,” conversely, embraced an electronic style of funk, opening with a song, “Sabali,” featuring Damon Albarn of the arty hip-hop group Gorillaz.What was consistent was a sweet, graceful sound that still had the power to build to crescendos, with Ms. Doumbia’s alto achieving clear, pleasant resonance over a rich orchestration.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