Ann Powers

The last thing anyone would say about South By Southwest is that it's an avenue for self-improvement. The annual mega gathering, which began last week for film and interactive-technology mavens and turns into a music conference and festival tomorrow, fulfills many needs for the culture nerd. Communal bonding? Yes – ...

The most romantic scene from any of this year's Oscar-nominated films begins with a deliciously idiosyncratic pickup line. At a swinger's pool party in 1978, a flabby yet still somehow alluring Christian Bale gently grabs the arm of Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams at her most wide-eyed and guileful. ...

I have a new streaming music service in my life. Let's call him Beatsy. It's an open relationship — I'm still accessing other music streams, and Beatsy's positively promiscuous, winning the hearts of the music press and thousands of trial subscribers. But I don't mind. When I'm with Beatsy I ...

At the beginning of the 2014 Grammy Awards show, it seemed that one story would dominate the night. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, the Seattle duo whose highly accessible take on hip-hop became last year's indie-to-mainstream success story, took home three awards during the ceremony's pre-telecast portion. This predictable ...

The quality of mystery is undervalued in music these days. It's often mimicked via indecipherable lyrics, mumbled vocals or spooky sound effects, but that's not the real stuff. Rarely does anyone touch upon that delicate, open-ended state of unknowing that can descend on any given day, whether you're locked in ...

How many choruses does it take to turn a party song into an engine causing social change? Is it possible to honor American cultural traditions while dismantling the traps and habits that make them restrictive? Every so often a new voice engages these basic questions in subtle, exciting new ways. ...

"I'm under city lights, and it's all right," Laura Cantrell sings in one of the 12 deceptively lovely songs on No Way There From Here — her first album, besides a 2011 Kitty Wells tribute, in nine years. The line is about a love that thrives in spite ...

Bruce Springsteen walked into SIR Studios in Manhattan with the shearling collar on his chocolate-brown bomber jacket popped up. He cracked a joke about the traffic he encountered on the way from New Jersey, tacitly hinting at the Chris Christie-eviscerating skit he and Jimmy Fallon would ...

We're one week into 2014, and I'll bet everyone reading this has a list of must-hear new releases. We're waiting for biggies like U2, Beck, Tori Amos and possibly Adele; zeitgeist-y visionaries from art queen St. Vincent to ...

It's tempting — and, really, accurate — to describe Rosanne Cash's new album as a literary effort. The singer-songwriter is also a published author, and her last album, 2009's The List, was a writer's game: Its 12 tracks abridged her famous father Johnny's 100-song lexicon of essentials, which ...

The Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson released their self-titled debut album as The Knife in 2001, and in the dozen years since then, have upended expectations on a regular basis. Their second album, Deep Cuts, included the song "Heartbeats," a perfect, if slightly corroded, pop ...

2013 was the year that showed the door to the idea that mainstream pop is inconsequential junk. The intense debates that raged about many of the year's most widely heard songs — "Royals," "We Can't Stop," "Cruise," "Blurred Lines," "Thrift Shop" — proved that ...

Last spring I started having a daydream. What if instead of going through the agony of compiling a year-end Top 10, I did something much more fun — like host a girls' night out? My fantasy involved a night of convivial chatter and music-making across genres and generations: a country ...

NPR Music's Ann Powers, and Jessica Hopper, music editor for RookieMag and author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking, share some favorite books about or by women in music.

How much are lost sounds worth? That's a complicated question. Record collectors have been jacking up the value of rare music since at least the swing era, when the writer Leonard Feather popularized the term "moldy fig" to describe jazz fans who only liked the old ...

The best dance music is the kind that reminds you to move through life with your body rocking. It's one thing, a necessary thing, to get on the dance floor; but it's also supremely beneficial to carry that funky sway onto the streets and into daily routine. Luscious Jackson, the ...

Lou Reed was the first rock star to truly mess up my mind. It was the end of the '70s; I was in high school. With no older siblings and few friends to guide me — my sweet boyfriend was a classical cellist — I was stumbling around ...

NPR Music’s Ann Powers calls Ray of Light Madonna's “mid-life enlightenment” record — and she walks us through this interesting chapter in the star’s career.