Barry Walters

We asked music writers in the LGBTQ+ community to reflect on the relationship between celebration, protest, music and LGBTQ+ activism. Barry Walters writes about pandemics, privilege and disco.

The latest album from the dystopian cartoon band — whose lone consistent musical member is the British musician Damon Albarn — emphasizes real suffering and salvation in a contemporary setting.

The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir is, just as the title says, an autobiography of songwriter Stephin Merritt, with one song for each year of his life, and a tribute to finding salvation in music.

The teen idol and massively successful solo singer's tabloid life paled in comparison to his uncommonly soulful work.

Pop stars Abel Tesfaye and Ebba Nilsson court our shadow sides with songs about sex, drugs, sex on drugs, and — crucially — sex as drugs.

Looking back on teenage musical education, lines in the sand and the birth of punk, a.k.a. the moment in 1976 when Ramones bopped its way onto a scene that wasn't ready and into musical history.

On Freetown Sound, his latest album as Blood Orange, the producer and singer Devonté Hynes has crafted an artistic persona that knits together the complications of an uncommon star.

This vivid, unabashed protest album pairs Anohni's unmistakable voice with contemporary synthetic sounds by Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, yet finds ways to be truly unnerving.

It could've gone so terribly wrong.

According to Tony Visconti, David Bowie's longtime producer and mouthpiece for the final few years of his life, the English expat wanted to embrace manifold styles for his 25th album, ★, aka Blackstar, released last Friday. Pop's original chameleon had of course ...

As anyone who's seen her in concert can attest, Adele Adkins is one of the most self-aware pop acts ever. Nearly every time she sings, the 27-year-old Londoner accesses the kind of acutely tangible pain that sometimes claims the lives of superstars who attain her astronomical level of ...

His name is synonymous with a sound defiled in the mainstream almost as much as it's been celebrated, and only once has he reached the U.S. Top 40 with a record released under that moniker. But few have exerted more influence over today's music than the Italian producer/songwriter who put ...

Scottish quartet Franz Ferdinand have helped steer rock in a dapper direction since 2004, when their taut and punning second single "Take Me Out" first charmed both indie and dance fans. For five decades, Sparks – band name for Los Angeles brothers Ron and Russell Mael – have ...

Dressed in black and greeted by Barry and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, former ABBA members Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson took their 2010 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seriously and sincerely. While Lyngstad definitively dismissed reunion rumors, Andersson spoke of ...

The artiest bards of 1970s London punk, Wire's members never scored a hit single — unless you count Elastica's 1994 Britpop anthem "Connection," which lifts its central riff and deadpan sass from Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba" far more blatantly than "Blurred Lines" evokes Marvin Gaye.

As Wire's latest ...

Media correspondent David Folkenflik talks to NPR's Arun Rath about the now-retracted November 2014 article, and the report exploring the errors behind it.

It's been 10 years since the release and success of the film Garden State. That film and its soundtrack of collected songs propelled the filmmaker, Zach Braff, and the band The Shins into popular culture. Now, Braff is back with a Kickstarter-funded film called Wish I ...

"I don't want to break the covenant of what it is to be a little girl and the kind of things you want to keep from your parents and everyone else in the world, but I will say this: There are things about being female that at that age, ...

Frankie Knuckles made house music. The sound he created, named after the Chicago club, The Warehouse, where he played during the late '70s and early '80s, was copied by literally thousands of DJs and producers over the next 40 years. And yet, an ear trained to the nuances of club ...

"Loudly and wildly the music played, always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism, and to the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived."

This lovingly worded leitmotif of English pop singer ...

Offsetting unsettling lyrics about depression, self-hate, toxic relationships, religion-fueled ignorance and societal cruelty with utterly gorgeous melodies is one of the oldest tricks in the songwriter's handbook. But most excel at half of that combo while falling far short in the other. John Grant excels on both counts, plus he ...