Ann Powers

One of the central musical relationships in soul music is between a band's lead shouter and the other voices supporting her or him. In her glory years, Aretha Franklin musically conversed with her family of backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations; Otis Redding upped his own unbeatable energy in dialogue with ...

A certain musical and spiritual condition defines Wynonna Judd's first album with her band The Big Noise — not to mention the first album of original material in 13 years from one of country music's supreme redheads. That quality is joy. It dominates, not just because Judd is performing with ...

I am a Bowie girl. Not literally: I'm a little too young to have swiped my face with glitter and run out in lime-green platforms to see David Bowie storming through America in 1972 and 1973 with the Spiders from Mars, when he sent queer and alien dispatches across a ...

Adele's new album 25 had record sales in its first week — selling more than 2.4 million copies. We get a check on more pop music news from 2015.

"Lyrics drove me to country music," said the producer Dave Cobb in an interview we published yesterday about his path from the L.A. rock scene to producing a handful of albums that signal a return of traditional country to Nashville's main stage, including ones by Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson and ...

If Dave Cobb gets excited while you're talking to him about music, he'll grab a guitar from the bank of them he keeps in the chill-out room in his Green Hills home studio and play a riff. It could be from an Elvis song, or one by Led Zeppelin, or ...

I guess my favorite spiritually generated cliché is: Life is change. It's a noble tenet of Buddhism and a tenet of existentialism that no matter how much we cling to a comfortable belief about reality, a turn of events can quickly demolish it. More commonly, circumstances and habits reshape reality ...

Revivalism in music often seems to be no more than a matter of style: a perfectly greased pompadour, a well-pressed rack of vintage dresses, some vintage equipment and the careful mimicry of a particular "hi-de-ho" or drawl. It's the rare living musician who does the extra work to comprehend the ...

Childbirth is a Seattle rock supergroup, but it's also an ongoing consciousness-raising session. Okay, it's really a comedy act. No, it's a punk band. Wait, it's a feminist direct-action project deflating sexism with joke-arrows hurled at ubiquitous oppressions like male microaggression, fertility anxiety, and tyrannical beauty standards. Actually, Childbirth — ...

In East Nashville, right at the center of the neighborhood's musically-driven hubbub, a Victorian-style corner building houses a popular gathering place. Fanny's House of Music is homey, with a hand-painted sign out front and a porch for lounging. Inside, one alcove contains vintage clothing, local artists' paintings and kitschy knickknacks, ...

These days, for many people in country music's mainstream — and beyond it — the genre's version of "sexy" is corny. Rump-shaking dudes in man buns beckoning women who frankly feel a little harassed into their flatbed Fords ... At their worst, country's 21st-century dreamboats operate on the principles of ...

The album You and I, due in March, is made up of songs recorded in Buckley's very first studio sessions after signing to Columbia Records, and displays the singer's wide range of influences.

No space is quite as rife with liminal magic as a Louisiana cemetery. Peter Fonda took his famous Easy Rider acid trip in the famous St. Louis cemetery in New Orleans, where tour guides now lead tourists in search of the grave of 19th-century voudou practitioner Marie Laveau. Sally ...

Chris Isaak's voice is a bit like the Tardis in Dr. Who. Sturdy but nimble, always recognizable, it moves through pop's time-space continuum, transporting listeners to different vantage points while in pursuit of certain eternal questions. Though most haunted by and profiting from an association with Roy Orbison's ...

What kind of musician makes a concept album? The stereotype might be that this is the domain of a prog rocker or George Clinton-style funk master in a satin cape; but in fact, long-players with unified themes have always been popular in country music. Willie Nelson's Western noir ...

So many road anthems pave the history of popular music. Some make poetry of the white lines on the freeway; others floridly celebrate rock and roll fugitives riding the arena circuit on their steel mounts. "Pardon Me," one of the loveliest tracks on the inexhaustibly fun, Americana ...

There's a point in most published interviews with Joanna Newsom where the harpist, singer and songwriter genially pulls the switch on her interlocutor's train of thought. She'll gently say that interpretation belongs to her fans: They have the right to unpack them, to argue endlessly in chat rooms ...

It's tough, in 2015, for a singer-songwriter to be an all-around talent. Artists make their mark on distracted fans with a signature sound, a look, or maybe even a mood. But the journeyman's knowledge of how to move from a gut-wrenching story to a zinger of a joke, how to ...

Charlie Rich called them life's little ups and downs, but the details that animate country music are often more ambiguous twists and turns. What happens in the most memorable songs is not always tragic, and not always out of the teller's control. This is especially true when it comes to ...

Life would have no dimension if everyone occupied the center of the frame. We need those folks on the side and in the background; the ones who hold up the proceedings while adding clever and often profound asides. For more than 50 years, Donnie Fritts has moved freely in ...