Ann Powers

It ain't easy being genteel. Refinement goes against the grain of both rock 'n' roll and Top 40 pop: The former's deliberately confrontational history and the latter's need to hook the masses make it hard to cultivate a sense of balance. Indie-rock fans tend to prefer a rough edge or ...

If you're a lover of songs well sung, you probably have a few voices you carry around to provide encouragement when things get rough and warm affirmation during moments of happiness. Chris Stapleton's voice is ideal for the journey. Perfectly imperfect, grounded in the taciturn expressiveness of his native Kentucky ...

As I sat down to write a few lines on the instantly arresting new song from Alabama Shakes, a swarm of blue-headed birds touched down on my front lawn, pressing right up against my window. Thanks, nature, for giving me a metaphor! That swarm is what this deep soul ...

In his rockabilly history Go Cat Go!, ethnomusicologist Craig Morrison describes the typical cradle of rock 'n' roll: a community hall reconfigured to serve as a nightclub for a night. "There might be Christmas lights strung across the back of the stage, tables and chairs around the perimeter of ...

"There was just nobody doing it," 25-year-old Fort Worth wonder Leon Bridges recently told a hometown reporter of his decision to pursue the sound of 1960 in his rhythm and blues. It seems like a strange comment, especially when you hear "Coming Home," one of two songs that ...

What does it take for a work of art to become an intervention? In music, any reinterpretation alters the original, if only because different fingerprints touch it. But certain lineages — folk music, for example — are built on the bones of those retellings. Whoever owns a song for a ...

Two stretched concepts made the rock 'n' roll coming out of Sun Studios in the 1950s unlike other music of its kind: time and space. In a shabby little room near downtown Memphis, Sam Phillips gave the men and kids he recorded all the room in the world. "Spontaneity" was ...

When Frank Ocean released his version of The Isley Brothers' Quiet Storm classic "At Your Best (You Are Love)" last week, it was both a flower left at a grave and an investment in the future. Posted on the boundary-blending singer-songwriter's Tumblr the day after what ...

For any young artist, an important leap happens when influences are absorbed and the act of mining the past transforms into something personal. That's what happens on All These Dreams, the second album from the singer-songwriter Andrew Combs, to be released in the U.S. in early March. Combs is an ...

In the 1970s, when Diana Krall was growing up, children and young adolescents regularly encountered very adult music on Top 40 radio. These songs were different from the sexually explicit playground rhymes so common in mainstream music today. They often centered on seduction, but were just as likely to ...

What the Icelandic art star Bjork has accomplished at the intersection of pop and the avant-garde cannot be summed up in one detail, but one thing to focus on is the way she sings the word "emotional." Climbing it like one of the cliffs she often evokes in her pastoral ...

What does it mean to be a wandering troubadour in 2014? Believe it or not, sometimes it means riding the rails, just like in the old days. Sam Doores spent a restless childhood traveling with his family between San Francisco, Washington and Texas; his mother's copy of Woody ...

The most beautiful thing about Ava DuVernay's film Selma -- the first major biographical film feature about Martin Luther King, Jr. — is its deep recognition of how private encounters inform and even shape historic events. The portrayal of public confrontation and violence on the Alabama town's Edmund Pettus Bridge ...

When Daisy Durham tells the skirt-chaser in her path to "Think about where you put that hand" in this tough-spirited, joyfully punchy musical kiss-off, she has a girl gang's worth of rock 'n' roll predecessors to back her up. Daisy's on-the-corner vocals, doubled by her sister Kitty, recall outer-borough demolition ...

If any message keeps asserting itself within the volatile atmosphere of popular music as we enter 2015, it's that anticipation is for suckers. Predictions, likewise. D'Angelo's late-game mic drop — the release of Black Messiah with only two weeks left to go in the year — redefined 2014 in retrospect, ...

As we wind our way toward the second half of the century's second decade, the American Top 40 is in radical flux. This isn't because pop is becoming any more or less innovative; rather, it's the counting, the data analysis that determines what stands as our most popular music that's ...

It's been common for a few years now to dismiss rock and roll as a shadow of its former self. Usurped by dance beats and hip-hop samples, lost amid the pop spectacle that dominates the Distraction Age, music centered around electric guitars and liberated voices can now seem staid. But ...

2014 was a divisive time in popular music, with no single album or song seeming to capture the year's mood and no trend pointing clearly toward the future. But most music lovers could agree on one thing: Beyoncé was flawless. The 33-year-old powerhouse set every standard by which ...

When Alynda Lee Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff wrote the song "The Body Electric," she knew it would make its way into the world, and hoped its effects would be palpable. Horrified by the rapes that have made tragic news from India to America's college campuses, ...

I have to be honest: Every time I've sat down to make a list of the year's best albums, I have walked away from my desk. Like many people I know, I've often felt lost during the final burning days of 2014 — overwhelmed by recent events, rendered inarticulate in ...