Ann Powers

Fascination was the first emotion I felt when I heard Jenny Hval's music. The second was relief. That might be an unusual response to Hval's work, which is highly intimate, sexually explicit and abounding with startling images that reflect both her feminist view of the world and her ability to ...

Last week, a story about The Runaways' Jackie Fuchs, centered around her account of being raped by the late music entrepreneur Kim Fowley in a motel room full of people on New Year's Eve in 1975, challenged the very idea that rock and roll is something worth loving. ...

Not every reverie is a happy one. A title like "She Takes Me There" suggests the floating bliss of a new love, but in this new taste of what the rising Nashville band Promised Land Sound is up to on its second album, the dream is a haunting.

"Well I ...

A word for artists striving to make something timeless: Stop. People live within history. It provides particular tools, collaborators and ideas that even the most blinkered hermit can't really avoid. But if you want to make art that feels timeless, integrating its sources so well that they seem to arise ...

For anyone more interested in Amy Winehouse's music than in her martyrdom, the most shocking images in Asif Kapadia's new documentary Amy may not be the ones showing her strung out and terrifyingly thin at the end of her short life, nor those capturing her turn ...

The witty musician sits in a sweet spot where her charm and humor attract traditional country die-hards and pop fans alike. Ann Powers explores other women in country who paved the path.

If they're lucky, talented and charismatic, young musical men in Nashville can find themselves playing a game of musical Let's Make A Deal. Behind Door No. 1 is a truck, a beer cooler and a lady in snug jeans; the challenge is to make anything out of these party-anthem ingredients ...

The romance of artistic collaboration is as potent and mysterious as the draw of sex. But pop music tends to obsess on the latter while keeping the former process in the background. "Nothing But The Silence," the title track from the T-Bone Burnett-produced debut album by the Nashville duo

There's a beautiful metaphor for the good matrimony can do in the middle of "Mary Ann & One Eyed Dan," a rollicking two-step from South Carolina's hitched and hoppin' duo Shovels & Rope, released on last year's Swimmin' Time. In the song's fantastic, earthy story, maimed war veteran Dan ...

Donnie Fritts knows what it's like to be held in the silver shimmer of celluloid, and he's had years of experience playing wingman to a heartthrob. That's why "Errol Flynn," a song written by the cabaret raconteur Amanda McBroom for her actor father, David Bruce, works perfectly as the lead ...

How does a song move from a notebook to your headphones? This behind-the-scenes video of Jason Isbell perfecting the song "24 Frames" — the first single from the new album Something More Than Free, and a song we at NPR Music loved the minute we heard it ...

"I'm gonna stand here in the ache," Joy Williams wails in "Until The Levee," a song that comes just past the middle of the arc her new solo album, VENUS, creates. She seems to nearly strain her warm, urgent voice, which many came to love in Williams' early Christian-music ...

The obscenity of the crime that took nine lives in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday night is made all the more unbearable by its setting: one of the nation's landmark black churches, a holy space of resistance, resilience and hope. "Mother Emanuel" AME Church was also a site of music-making, with ...

Sometimes it takes a lot of freeway rambling to wind up back where you started. Ben Nichols and his bandmates in Lucero have been touring the indie rock circuit since 1998, when the band was just a bunch of Replacements-loving kids getting out of Memphis and ...

When Leon Bridges sings, he often raises his arms in a chest-opening gesture that might resolve in a benediction or a finger snap. Like the music the 25-year-old Fort Worth soul sensation has carefully crafted for his debut, his signature move seems simple, but hold many meanings. It recalls the ...

Gill Landry's quietly affecting video for "Funeral In My Heart," the unsentimental elegy that opens his third, self-titled solo album (out now on ATO Records), shows the Old Crow Medicine Show member traversing faded landscapes he's discovered while driving through his home state of Louisiana on U.S. Route 65. ...

Where do music historians go to find the sounds that shape the stories they tell? There are some obvious places, like the Library of Congress, whose National Jukebox offers more than ten thousand songs from the dawn of the modern age, or the Internet Archive, which ...

The music sharing platform imeem thrived from 2004 until its shuttering in 2009 as a safe haven in the wilds of the semi-legal Internet. It was Napster without the piracy, a legal space for music makers and fans to share bedroom composition, videos of their latest dance moves, and the ...

Love your old uncles while you have them. Mine used to hang around near the drinks table at family gatherings, comparing the weird bumps growing on their ears, sharing jokes they'd learned in the Army, and blowing the kids away with stories culled from decades' worth of interesting exploits. Most ...

Rickie Lee Jones needs no introduction. Seriously. The singer-songwriter is so elementally articulate, so gifted at grasping both the rawest and the most complicatedly cooked emotions in her compositions, that critical framing best comes after the experience of listening to her. But for anyone who is unaware: Jones ...