Ann Powers

Many musicians can craft about one-third of an excellent pop song. Some write beautiful bare melodies that drip into your head like honey into cake. Others are masters of tone, using genius arrangements and technical wizardry to craft a sound that transports, no matter the shape of the tune. Still ...

The nominees for the 2015 Americana Honors and Awards were announced today at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. This year's slate shows how the definition of Americana is gently expanding to include more generationally, racially and stylistically diverse stars, while remaining grounded in its country-leaning, ...

Maybe poetry will save us. It's a thought that occurs to many people who've fallen in love with the ancient form, in all its mysteriousness and immediacy. It doesn't matter whether the road into poems was a childhood encounter with "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost or a college ...

Despite being grounded in images of wild hills and empty hollers, bluegrass has always been a sound of the city — a way for showmen and innovators to incorporate jazz and other new sounds into the songs their country daddies and mamas had taught them. Gangstagrass, the Brooklyn ensemble led ...

In a sly way, Prince has always been a political artist. Like Marcel Duchamp upending the art world with his readymades, he stormed the pop scene courting controversy, but always with a wink. Like Bob Dylan throwing down signs in the video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues," he sent ...

The book above which Ashley Monroe's big eyes peep in the first few seconds of this video is a volume of This Fabulous Century, a Time-Life book series published in 1969, organized around decades and celebrating pop-cultural fun from Charlie Chaplin movies to the Andrews Sisters to the ...

"Confessional" is a term often tossed around in discussions of singer-songwriters, but it's also one of the most misunderstood. In a recent interview, Mackenzie Scott, who makes music under the name Torres, called it "a four-letter word," common and pejorative, and overapplied to women in particular. But what does ...

Will the circle be unbroken? The question is a fundamental one in the gospel music world. Taken from a hymn that's more than a century old, it helped grant an aura of holiness to country music when that genre's first family, the Carters, posed it in their own version and ...

In the six years I've lived in the region, I've developed a mantra: Southern freaks are the best freaks. For me, the word "freak" can be both positive and downright spiritual. It describes serious individualists who are tolerant of others whose own paths may diverge from their own; people whose ...

The very last scene of the slyly spiritual new horror movie It Follows offers a resonant metaphor for the way people learn to live with the presence of mortality. I won't say more because doing so would raise cries of SPOILER, but in a very different way, the ...

Often when young singers connect with soul or blues legacies, they don angels' wings — reaching for transcendent big notes within arrangements as clean and full of echo as a megachurch. Not Anderson East. The Athens, Alabama, native, who's lived in Nashville since his days at Middle Tennessee State University, ...

Villagers began as a lush one-man band with 2010's Becoming A Jackal, then morphed into an even more complex collaborative effort in time for 2013's {Awayland}, as Dublin singer-songwriter Conor O'Brien learned to work with a team he'd assembled. A natural progression would involve Villagers exploring that full-band dynamic ...

When I was a kid, I loved Paul McCartney to distraction. He was my first crush, my doe-eyed androgynous masculine ideal — goofy in Beatles movies, unabashedly feelingful in their songs, sexy in that innocent, what-is-sex-anyhow fashion that a twelve-year-old craves. But I hated the song ...

In his formal, disarmingly humble way, Sufjan Stevens accomplishes something remarkable in the first notes of his new album, Carrie & Lowell. After a Bach-like interlude plucked on a ukulele, Stevens opens this confessional meditation on mourning and reconciliation with a characteristic whisper. "Spirit of my silence, I ...

Walk America's motor-mown playing fields on a Sunday afternoon, past baseball diamonds that look like half-hewn crop circles and running tracks cut in dirt or clay. See the swarms of children neatening themselves into game formations, each one trying to tamp down nervous energy and make her talent behave. Skinny ...

Sometimes the simplest declarations echo most forcefully through time. Repeated, growing and shifting to fit different contexts, phrases like I am somebody or give peace a chance or fight the power define and support the core experience of being human. So much can be communicated in just three or four ...

The guitar-wielding kids of the American South are in the midst of a full-fledged roots revival. What started amongst a few friends in towns throughout the region has blossomed into a community connecting New Orleans to Nashville to the rest of a nation eager to hear classic music reimagined by ...

On the cover of its soon-to-be released Bloodshot Records debut album, the rock and roll marauders in Banditos are relaxing on an American flag. The huge banner makes up the floor and walls of a makeshift living room, where the group lounges in voluminous hair, hats and, on drummer Randy ...

It's been five years since Kanye West raised his glass to "the a--holes" in the song "Runaway," a poetic taxonomy of bad behavior that formed the emotional center of his masterwork My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's a sad song about romantic failure, but also a ...