Even Rodrigo’s mighty voice, amplified by a million watts, can’t overpower the thousands who shout along to every word — “I thought I was so smart/But you’ve made me look so naive/The way you sold me for parts/As you sunk your teeth into me/Bloodsucker, fame-(expletive), bleeding me dry, like a goddamn vampire.”

“Vampire” is an intensely personal song. It’s Rodrigo’s story of being used and manipulated by an older man. But at TD Garden on Monday, the song belonged to everyone. The singer wouldn’t have it any other way.

The best mainstream pop songwriter of her generation, Rodrigo is a rock artist. She writes clever and visceral punk hooks complete with rumbling electric guitar parts and enormous crescendos. And she ran through those hooks with volume, force, fury, volume, intensity, electricity, volume (oh, and volume).

Rodrigo, with her ace seven-piece all-female-identifying band, kicked off the show with scream-along favorite “Bad Idea, Right?” and crashed right into her most relentless rocker “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.” (Later, she’d be joined by a troupe of dancers on a half dozen songs — from band to dancers to Rodrigo riding a crescent moon around the arena, the spectacle matched the art.) Near the close of the show, she circled back to her grunge vibes with “Brutal,” “Jealousy, Jealousy,” and “All-American Bitch” — a righteous, raw rant that triangulates “Bad Reputation,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Just a Girl” to absolute ragged perfection.

But her magic trick is giving her heartbreaking ballads the same gravity as the loud songs. Oh, those slow-burn-to-towering-crescendo-four-minutes-of-mainlining-catharsis ballads, those downtempo gems about plain old breakups and the relentless burden America asks teenage girls to walk around with, those delicate-and-sinewy songs that reach into fans’ chests and pump blood to their guts, seeing their pain, angst, conflicts and truths.

As they did during “Vampire,” the frenzied crowd knew and screamed every word. On “Drivers License,” they wailed, “God, I’m so blue, know we’re through/But I still (expletive) love you, babe.” On “Teenage Dream,” they yelled, projecting their emotions forward a half decade, “Got your whole life ahead of you, you’re only 19/But I fear that they already got all the best parts of me/And I’m sorry that I couldn’t always be your teenage dream.” They did this song after song after song.

Rodrigo didn’t need to make it clear, but she did anyway when she told everyone, “I want you to feel all your (expletive) feelings.”

Rodrigo can do rockers and ballads with equal energy and engagement. She can do them both at once (see “Deja Vu”). Expect her to be in football stadiums next summer because she can do anything. Well, anything except outsing 20,000 of her fans.

Chappell Roan opened the show. Not everybody, but hundreds maybe thousands knew Roan’s wonderful campy, disco pop and sang along with her too. Odds are she’ll take Olivia’s headlining spot at Garden in 2024.

Based on the title track of the group’s 2008 album of the same name, the book is “a call to arms to stand strong and persevere during trying times … (and) follows the path of a humble armadillo who discovers along the way how music can pull together a disparate cast of characters,” according to a press release.

“Stay Positive” was illustrated by Mexican cartoonist and comic book author David “El Dee” Espinosa.

Said lead singer Craig Finn: “‘Stay Positive’ has a line that says, ‘The kids at the shows will have kids of their own’ and it’s true. Each year more Hold Steady fans become parents or grandparents. So, I’m thrilled that we’re offering the children’s book version of ‘Stay Positive,’ which brings THS joy to the whole family.”

The book follows last year’s publication of “The Gospel of the Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels,” an oral history written by Michael Hann and the band.

Autographed copies of “Stay Positive,” and a package that includes a custom water bottle and stickers, are available for preorder at akashicbooks.com.

“Your anonymity goes out the window, so suddenly you’re not able to go down to the local store and buy a pint of milk — but you know, there are worse things in life than that. I think people on the whole were very gracious and nice to me, and 99 percent of the time they’d come up to me and say how much they enjoyed the music. Maybe you’d be a store and go through the record racks, then you’d turn around and see people moving toward you, so you’d need to sneak out the back. But you work for years and years to get that kind of notice, so you’re not going to knock it when you get it.”

Adam will revisit the glory days of Antmusic at the Wilbur April 1, with the venerable English Beat opening. He promises a show that will include the Ants-era hits and a taste of everything he’s done since. “We’re trying to keep it as close to the records as we can. And that’s not always easy, since there were 30 vocal parts on some of those songs.”

With their glammy flamboyance and campy sense of humor, Adam & the Ants hit in the early ‘80s as an alternative to the seriousness of punk—an Ant-idote, if you will.

“We were all pretty much from a punk background and we were all loyal to our influences — Iggy, Roxy Music, early Bowie and the Alice Coopers of this world. That was all precious stuff to us, it was part of our DNA and we took it with us. But the whole punk rock thing got very ugly with the spitting and the violence. It wasn’t something I wanted to be associated with, it wasn’t beautiful anymore So we wanted to move it forward a bit. Something like ’Antmusic’ was an anthem, a ‘here we are’ type of song. And it helped to put a sense of humor into it, since that was something people checked at the door in those days.”

Adam was already an established UK star before he hit the US charts; it was his first post-Ants single “Goody Two Shoes” that did the trick. And it didn’t hurt that a new channel called MTV was starting up at that time. “The brass section gave it a sound that the American audience seemed to adopt. I’d been to art school, so I was able to storyboard the video and get my ideas across visually. Then the whole MTV generation kicked in at the same moment. I remember being invited to go to a studio in London, pick a phone up and say ‘I want my MTV.’ I had no idea that Mick Jagger and other luminaries had been in the studio the same morning. So I thought, ‘If Mick’s having some of it, it must be worth doing.’

“It didn’t feel like any kind of important moment that was going to change everything. I was glad I was able to be a part of something that was new. But at the same time, my attitude was quite traditional. I’d always come from playing live, and I liked to get out and play for people, look in their eyes, get the response. Nothing much has changed there.”

As for the song, “It was true that I didn’t smoke, drink or take drugs. So that put me outside the standards of rock and roll bad boy. And I thought I’d wind up the journalists who always asked about it.” But now it can be told: When journalists posed that question — “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” — What did he actually answer?  “I’d say, That’s for me to know and you to think about — and watch the videos.”

For more than four decades, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Rumble has introduced Boston to its new favorite rock band. This year’s April 4 to May 4 run at the Middle East and Sonia will be no different. To get a head start on this world series of local rock, here are five songs from five contenders that take a rumbling definition of rock, an interpretation that winners from the Neighborhoods to the Dresden Dolls to One Fall can get behind.

“Locals,” Roser

Sounding like a clattering mess and a sweet indie pop outfit all at once is a great Massachusetts tradition (see Pixies, Belly, Speedy Ortiz). Lowell quintet Roser follows that template so well so often while also making it its own. “Locals” is the band’s most bewitching piece of magic. The 2023 tune crashes with waves of scratchy guitars and drum thumps, intertwining vocal harmonies that cry above the din, towering crescendos and clever breakdowns. Live, this could be a killer set closer.

“Maybe It’s Time,” Ruby Grove

OK, so maybe this one is a little Sade-ish. Ruby Grove matches the silky smooth with glitchy beats, creaks, and guitar growls. And “Maybe It’s Time” is a wonderful reminder that rock can absorb so much and keep on rolling. This hypnotic track synthesizes trip hop, electro, lounge jazz, neo-soul, goth, and more into a fabulous fever dream. All of it made more trippy, catchy, witchy by Melissa Nilles’ call of, “Maybe it’s time/Get rid of those nightmares/Takin’ up your time/Everything is within reach…Everything.”

“Ana,” JATK

Here’s a great idea: Take a Beach Boys’ style song and violently throw it forward a half century, rev it up, redline the guitars, overdrive everything while keeping the hook. That’s what JATK do on “Ana.” This Arlington power-pop outfit and brainchild of songwriter Matt Jatkola has had a big few years culminating with 2023 nominations at both the Boston Music Awards and New England Music Awards. Firing up “Ana” at the Rumble could lead to another year of winning.

“A Series of Chemicals,” The Magic City

A 2024 contender with a real Rumble pedigree, The Magic City’s members come from Rumble alums Reverse (’03), the Daily Pravda (’13), the Daylilies (’19), and Graveyard of the Atlantic (’23). But The Magic City doesn’t sound much like any of those acts. The band’s second single, “A Series of Chemicals” is tight, bright, sharp and poppy. It’s British Invasion and Brit Pop, Boston in the early ’90s and New York in the early ’00s, yesterday and tomorrow, immortal and fresh.

“Today,” Lovina Falls

Ex-Mistle Thrush singer/songwriter Valerie Forgione has taken two (three? five? a hundred?) steps forward with Lovina Falls. To call Forgione’s new project a rock band is right and totally wrong. First, she wrote, arranged and recorded debut album “Calculating the Angle of Our Descent” as a one-person show. Second, it sounds like the soundtrack to a wonderland where the Bohemians, goths, punks, and dreamers took over.

For tickets and a full schedule, visit rockandrollrumble.com

That single of course was “Right Here, Right Now” and yes, Jesus Jones will be playing it at the City Winery on Tuesday. But no, it won’t be the only good song in the set. “We’ve always been thankful for it, but it doesn’t dominate our thinking. We don’t look at the set list and say, ‘There has to be the moment when we unveil the song’ — It’s just another song when we play it. The fact that people may make more noise when they hear it, that’s up to them. If they want to choose one song above all others, that’s their prerogative. As an artist, that decision is taken out of your hands, and I quite like that. Once you do something and you send it out to people, it’s quite right that artists have no further control.”

From the start, Jesus Jones combined a traditional guitar-band sound with heavy use of dance beats and electronics, never going all the way in either direction. “I think we explore a spectrum that goes from dance to rock, and back again. Maybe there was a time when we fired up a guitar and a sampler and said, ‘Hey, these sound really cool together, and nobody else is doing it’.”

After many years without recording, Jesus Jones have released a new single, “Still Smiling” — and in terms of both sound and attitude, it could have been done six months after the hit. “I think it’s genuinely one of the best things we’ve done for quite some time — but here’s the caveat, every band is going to say that. But I do feel that we’ve managed to find again the spirit of what we had back then. It’s quite unapologetic in its determination to be optimistic.”

The band playing the Winery this week is the exact same one that formed in 1988; all five original members (with frontman Mike Edwards, guitarist Jerry DeBorg, bassist Al Doughty and drummer Gen Matthews) are still aboard. They haven’t worked together continuously — Baker had a radio career, and Edwards became a physical trainer — but the band never broke up either.

“It’s quite incredible,” Baker says. “When I look at other bands, they may have members that have passed away, or musical differences may have shot them to pieces. It’s not like we never had our arguments or our disagreements. But one of the advantages of having the success we did very early, is that arguments that we did have, all happened within a year’s time. We had all those fights that would have split most bands apart. But because we were thrown right into the belly of the beast, it all happened in our first year. It was like a fast storm, and we all came out the other side. We’re so close and so used to each other by now, that there’s nothing we can do that would tear us apart again.”

“We got pretty insecure about (writing) while we were making the album,” Jack told the Herald. “Our fans have certain expectations of us and our sound.”

But instead of burying their emotions, the brothers laid everything out on “The Maybe Man.” The album has loads of that bubbly, bright pop stuff and plenty of dark, introspective moments (it’s no coincidence the guys love the Beach Boys). Six months after the album’s release, AJR are set to play its biggest tour ever, which includes April 4 and Aug. 3 stops at TD Garden.

“Now we’re writing songs about death and the loss of family,” Jack said. “That stuff is not as fun to jump around to. But at the end of the day, the lesson we keep learning is that our fans are growing with us. They’re not the same people they were five years ago when we made ‘Weak.’ They’re much more emotionally mature now. So, when we realized that we are growing at the same time as our fans, anything that feels genuine to us will feel genuine to them too.”

All this growth — artistic, emotional, professional — has come at a natural pace, which is very unnatural in the music business. As elementary and middle school kids, the three brothers started by busking (and tap dancing!) in New York City parks. Eventually, their talent for writing catchy originals in their Manhattan living room and the internet took over, pushing AJR to level up every year or two.

“Social media really helped us,” Ryan told the Herald. “But a lot of our social media success has come from being lucky. ‘World’s Smallest Violin’ is our biggest TikTok song. We did nothing to make that song a hit. That was the anime community that embraced it and then it blew up and became a number one song on Instagram. We just watched it happen. We just wrote the song, that’s all we did.”

Of course, writing the song is 99% of the work.

With “The Maybe Man,” that work has taken on a more dynamic and nuanced nature. At times, the LP is painfully, heartbreakingly autobiographical. Single “God is Really Real,” released on the day their dad died last July, begins with the lyrics: “My dad can’t get out of bed/There’s something in his lungs/I think that’s what the doctor said.” It’s unflinching and totally un-SpongeBob.

“We made a really difficult vow that we would write a lot of immediate songs,” Ryan said. “On past albums, if we went through a breakup or something, we would write a song about it two years later with hindsight. This was, our dad got sick and we wrote ‘God is Really Real’ the next day.”

“We said to each other, ‘This is what we have to do right now. This is the album we have to make,’” Ryan concluded.

AJR will make more happy songs for happy moments. But as the group prepares to play the biggest stages it’s ever played, as it rehearses for a tour with lasers and CGI and spectacle, AJR will take the full catalog of human emotions on the road, from songs about fans dancing until they’re dumb to mourning your biggest fan.

For tickets and details, visit ajrbrothers.com

“I had a playlist of my favorite Aretha Franklin songs, and she’d often start singing along — the only artist I’ve ever worked with who did that,” says Smith, 60, who’s just published “Aretha Cool: The Intimate Portraits,” a collection of his Franklin photos named after that playlist.

“I remember the first time I used (the playlist), the one song comes on and she starts humming along to it, then she starts singing to the song — ‘You’re All I Need to Get By,’ one of my all-time favorite ones. I’m 4, 5 feet in front of her and I kinda forgot where I was and I started singing along with her.

“She stops me — ‘Jordan, baby, don’t sing.’ She said it firmly, actually, but the whole room burst out laughing. Then she starts laughing and the whole time I’m shooting everything. I love the pictures of her laughing that day, full-on, the whole room letting loose. Every time I hear that song, I think of that day.”

Those photos are among the dozens of images, and memories, that populate “Aretha Cool.” It’s a book Smith — who previously published “Sepia Dreams: A Celebration of Black Achievement Through Words and Images” — says he felt a call to create, the impetus coming from the death of Franklin’s longtime companion, Willie Wilkerson, from COVID-19 in April 2020.

“He’s the first person I know who passed from COVID, and I started thinking about how much things had changed, people we lost and the importance of legacy,” explains Smith, who remained close with Franklin until her death in 2018. “I thought: ‘OK. This book must be done. People have got to know about this side of her, from a photographer’s point of view and how it was for me working with her …’ cause there was nobody like her, and nobody’s really talked about or covered this last stage of her life.”

Smith — born in Brooklyn and raised in South Carolina, where his father exposed him to photography — was already a well-established high-end fashion and celebrity shooter when he met Franklin, whose work had appeared in international magazines and advertisements. When the Queen of Soul was looking for a new photographer in 2005, her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn, recommended Smith, who had just published “Sepia Dreams.”

“I did my research,” he notes, and upon discovering that Franklin favored yellow roses, he sent her some with a note: “Looking forward to a great shoot. Looking forward to meeting you.”

“Then, before I got out there — we were shooting in Detroit — she called me on her phone, from her private number,” Smith recalls. “I’m like, ‘Who is this calling me,’ and then, ‘Oh, snap, it’s Aretha calling me!’ We talked about life, food. She said, ‘No photographer ever sent me yellow roses before.’

“Then we met and had a great shoot in Detroit, and we just kept going from there.”

Smith did make one minor faux pas during that first session, however. “The playlist — this was before I made the Aretha playlist — had Mariah Carey on it, and it looked like (Franklin) wasn’t into it,” Smith remembers. “I asked her who her favorite new artist was, and she said, ‘Me!’ And then I asked her again — new artist — and she said, ‘Me!’ Then it hit me. … Put some of her music on! Of course!”

He went on to photograph Franklin on several occasions, in Detroit and New York — including a hat-oriented shoot following her performance of “My Country Tis of Thee” at Barack Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009. The images over the years were used for promotional and personal use and in a variety of publications and media outlets. They spoke on the phone frequently as well — even after Smith moved to Japan, where his wife is from, eight years ago, which initially made Franklin mad until he promised her “it’s only a flight.”

“A lot of stars are not comfortable being in the camera,” says Smith, who last photographed Franklin in 2014, though subsequent sessions were scheduled but canceled due to her deteriorating health. “There’s a facade that comes up. That’s normal, but she was not that way. She was very real from the jump and you could feel that, and you don’t get that every day with a lot of people, especially in Hollywood.

“She just had this very real feeling about her from the first moment I met her — no pretension, nothing, and I loved that. That made me feel more comfortable and made me feel like being myself. I think that’s what made us get along so well.”

Smith still has the iPod with the Aretha Cool playlist and has posted it on Spotify. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about Franklin, he says, and he’s hoping the book gives readers some sense of how special he found her to be.

“I want people to see the other side, the real side of her that I fell in love with,” Smith explains. “She was like an aunt that everybody knows. Everybody has an Aretha in their family. In Black America, we all have an Aretha in our family. I’ve shot so many people, but never felt the connection like I had with her. I’ll always miss her.”

ATLANTA — Michael Mauldin, one of the forefathers of Atlanta’s hip-hop scene and father of Jermaine Dupri, is suing one of Dupri’s proteges over the use of the phrase “Scream Tour.”

In a 45-page lawsuit filed last week in the Northern District of Georgia’s United States District Court, Mauldin is accusing Shad Gregory Moss, better known as Bow Wow, for copyright infringement.

In the lawsuit, Mauldin claims that Moss, “willfully infringed on Mauldin Brand’s common-law trademark rights in the SCREAM TOUR Trademark in connection with goods and services similar to Mauldin Brand’s, without Mauldin Brand’s consent, despite being aware of Mauldin Brand’s prior rights.”

Mauldin claims that under “common law,” he’s used the name for tours since 2001. He had previously sent Moss a cease-and-desist letter that Mauldin said the rapper ignored.

“(Moss’) actions are likely to cause confusion among the trade and consuming public, thereby causing irreparable harm to Mauldin Brand,” the lawsuit reads.

When reached on Friday, Mauldin, a record executive and the chairman of the Black American Music Association, said he was not available then to talk about the lawsuit.

Mauldin’s musical career dates back to the 1970s when he worked with Atlanta’s foundational soul band, Brick. He went on to work with Sister Sledge, Cameo and the SOS Band before turning his attention to the burgeoning rap scene. In 1984, he was the producer of the New York Fresh Fest, the monumental first-ever major rap tour that featured Run DMC, the Fat Boys and Whodini, as well as preteen dancer Dupri.

Dupri went on to start So So Def Records and launch or assist in the careers of Kris Kross, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson.

Bow Wow is an Atlanta-based rapper and actor who was a child superstar in the early aughts as a signee to Dupri’s So So Def Records. He’s starred in cult classics like “Roll Bounce” and “Like Mike.” Bow Wow’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last fall, Dupri and Bow Wow performed together during the BET Hip-Hop Awards for a tribute to So So Def.

Mauldin said in the lawsuit that since 2001, Scream Tours “have been highly successful in attracting, cultivating, and promoting teenage and young adult music performers in the music industry.”

He listed several performers who have commanded his stages, including T-Pain, Ne-Yo, T.I., Chris Brown and Moss, who performed at the age of 14 at the first Scream Tour in 2001.

In 2022, the lawsuit claims that Moss helped produce what was called the Millennium Tour and subsequently started using Mauldlin’s phrase to promote it across his social media platforms. The lawsuit also states that Moss sold items marked as “Scream Tour.”

“Moss is not currently affiliated with, sponsored, or licensed by Mauldin Brand to use the SCREAM TOUR Trademark in connection with products and services identical or similar to the Mauldin Brand Services,” the lawsuit states. “Moss has not obtained permission to use or license the SCREAM TOUR Trademark, or any other marks or designs confusingly similar thereto, for use on or in connection with any goods or services, including the Infringing Goods and Services.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer DeAsia Paige contributed to this story.

©2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The beat drops. The pride of Willard, Missouri sings, “Hit it like rom-pom-pom-pom/Get it hot like Papa John/Make a bitch go on and on/It’s a femininomenon.” The song is Top 40 and arty, Gaga and “Leader of the Pack,” dark and bright, authentic and calculated from the cooing to club thump. It’s pop at its most expansive.

“Pop music is the most freeing sound I can think of,” Roan told the Herald ahead of her shows with Olivia Rodrigo at the TD Garden April 1 & 2. “It’s spiritual. The connection I have to pop, I don’t know, it feels like a best friend who is always down to go out and get crazy.”

On occasion, Roan has ignored this bestie. Atlantic Records signed the singer-songwriter when she was just a teenager and released a 2017 EP with a few stunning ballads on it. But the EP wasn’t her. Or it wasn’t her completely — “I’ve done tours where I’ve just sang a lot of sad songs and it wasn’t sustainable.”

Atlantic dropped her. She embraced pop, and camp, and her queerness. She embraced her whole self — “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” still has stunning torch songs, but it also booms with bangers, boogies, and weirdo jams. She signed to Island Records (after years of hustling like crazy to build a following).

“I do a lot of things that are campy,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know what camp means, they think it’s automatically garbage, which is fine, they’re allowed to think that. But the campy aspect of pop has to be there for me… Pop doesn’t have to be serious. Jesus, it’s not an emergency room. It’s a song.”

Again, some of those slow tunes are serious. And some of the topics she writes on upbeat cuts are serious. Her breakout hit “Pink Pony Club” captures her attitude. Another Roan tune that begins as a ballad, this one explodes into a disco rock epic when the narrator escapes a repressive Ozark life through the freedom offered at an LA gay club. It’s not not serious, but it’s fun as hell.

“Pink Pony Club” reintroduced Roan to the music world in 2020 and set the template for so much of what makes her unique. But it took a while to catch fire — one magazine called the Song of the Summer in 2021, a full year after it came out. While the blaze around the song was starting, Roan and producer Dan Nigro, who also works closely with Rodridgo, spent years crafting the debut LP.

“I just took time, and I really believed in it, and good art rises,” she said. “It was the catalyst for a new era of my artistry. It really opened a lot of doors for me. It just took like three years to settle in.”

So, to sum up, yes, she still does brooding, piano-driven slow songs. But, dude, can she ever play a song with a (expletive) beat.

For tickets and tour dates, visit iamchappellroan.com

It would’ve been weird enough for Justin Timberlake, of all people, to open his new album with a sob story about the high price of fame. But one in which he frames the pain he’s endured as a byproduct of his devotion to his Tennessee hometown? That’s truly unhinged.

Yet it’s just what Timberlake does with “Memphis,” the first song on “Everything I Thought It Was,” which came out Friday, more than half a decade after the release of his previous LP. Over a bleary, slow-mo trap beat, the singer and former boy-band star, now 43, laments the isolation he experienced and the sacrifices he made on his way up — a wild choice given the critique that’s coalesced in recent years of Timberlake as a man long permitted to glide by troubles that damaged the women around him (including his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears and his onetime Super Bowl halftime partner Janet Jackson).

It’s also a baffling aesthetic approach: By rooting his struggles in his connection to an African American cultural capital — “I was way too far out in the world, but I still put on for my city,” he insists in his well-practiced blaccent — Timberlake is flaunting his proximity to Blackness at a moment when pop seems to have little of the use it once did for white guys doing R&B. Consider the disappearance of Robin Thicke; consider Justin Bieber’s apparent reluctance to jump back into the game.

Or consider that much of the discourse surrounding this year’s Super Bowl halftime performance, by Usher, had to do with the sorry fact that it took this Black superstar as long as it did to reach pop’s biggest stage while Timberlake was invited to headline six years ago — and after having taken part in the 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” that derailed Jackson’s career.

None of this is to doubt Timberlake’s genuine love of R&B nor to diminish his undeniable skill for making it: Though it’s larded with glib disco-funk tracks and morose, One Republic-style pop-rock tunes, “Everything I Thought It Was” contains a handful of gems in “Love & War,” a Prince-ish ballad with his prettiest falsetto singing, and the spacey slow jam “What Lovers Do”; “Selfish,” the album’s coolly received lead single, is another highlight, this one with echoes of Bieber’s underrated “Changes” from 2020.

Timberlake’s enthusiasms were also on display last week at the Wiltern, where he played an intimate free concert meant to drum up attention for the new music and for a world tour he’ll launch next month. His 2006 ballad “Until the End of Time” was soulful and unhurried — watch him do it with similar finesse in a just-released NPR Tiny Desk Concert — and he seemed sincerely amped to bring out Coco Jones, the up-and-coming R&B singer, for a duet on her slinky “ICU,” which he called one of his favorite songs of the last five years.

Jones wasn’t Timberlake’s only guest at the Wiltern: Near the end of the show, he reunited the members of ’N Sync to perform a medley of several of the band’s vintage hits, including “Gone,” probably its most impressive downtempo moment, and “Girlfriend,” which the group did as a raunchy mash-up with Too Short’s classic “Blow the Whistle.” (Less happily, the members also perched on five carefully arranged stools to offer the live debut of “Paradise,” a maudlin new ’N Sync song featured on “Everything I Thought It Was.”)

For most of the nearly two decades since ’N Sync’s initial breakup, Timberlake has appeared ambivalent about a comeback, even sitting out a much-hyped cameo by the group during Ariana Grande’s performance at Coachella in 2019. Here, though, he looked gratified to have his old pals by his side — and eager, perhaps, to revisit a time when his privilege promised unlimited mileage.

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©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

He certainly was practicing what he was preaching in this recent phone interview, as he opened up about the emotions and circumstances behind the songs on his current studio album, “I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1).” Swims delivered an impressive performance, opening the KIIS 102.7/FM Jingle Ball at Kia Forum in Inglewood back in December, and returns to the area to headline Yaamava’ Theater in Highland on Saturday, March 23.

Swims’ debut album, which arrived on Sept. 15, 2023, came after the Atlanta area native (real name Jaten Dimsdale) had already become an artist to watch thanks to his considerable notoriety and success online, where in 2019 he launched his music career by posting videos of his versions of cover songs. His selections ran the gamut — from R&B/soul (Mario’s “Let Me Love You”) to pop (Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You”) to rock (Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”) and country (Shania Twain’s “You’re Still The One”) — showcasing his supple, slightly sandy voice while racking up hundreds of millions of views along the way. By the end of 2020, he had a major label deal with Warner Records.

As he maintained his online presence, Swims began to write original material, and in rapid succession, released three EPs, “Unlearning” (2021), “Tough Love” (2022) and “Sleep Is Exhausting” (also 2022).

By the time he was ready to record “I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1),” he had written or co-written more than 400 songs.

“You don’t always write good ones, so there are a lot of them that aren’t contenders and never will be,” Swims said in a recent interview. “But I think some of those also informed some of the best songs I did write. Like a lot of the songs we wrote at this camp in Palm Springs that was like the last (time) I wrote before we put the record together. A lot of the album came from that one five-day stint, which was quite nuts. I think maybe we just had this energy there and by that time I knew what I wanted the album to kind of say and be and shape up to be. So, I think we kind of just laid more into what to write around that feeling.”

Swims said one song in particular, “Some Things I’ll Never Know,” with its key lines “When did your heart let me go/Guess some things I’ll never know,” set the tone for “I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy.”

“When it fell into my lap, it just moved me so much. I’ll never forget recording it. It took me so long to record it because I was just crying and crying as I was doing it,” Swims said. “I felt like it really healed me, and it’s a song about not getting closure. And you don’t get closure from people when they leave your life a lot of times. I think to some degree, closure is something that doesn’t exist, with relationships ending and you don’t know why people do the things they do and why people hurt you and it’s not about you when they hurt you, either.

“That’s really, I guess, what I’ve always been having a hard time with was closure in past relationships and relationships I’m currently in,” Swims said. “So I think once that song came in, I was certain that I wanted to talk about that and I wanted to discuss that as much as possible and make this album about healing and about asking for help and knowing that I’m not crazy for feeling the way I’m feeling. It’s OK to feel this way. So I think that song informed everything I wanted to say, and everything else just started falling into place right behind it.”

In a larger sense, Swims said the new album reflects his efforts to reach a healthier place mentally with his life.

“I want to be more open and honest with the people who listen to me and with myself,” he said. “I just wanted to be more vulnerable than I have been in the past because I feel like as much as I have the opportunity to do music for a living and people hear my feelings, there’s always been a difference between Teddy Swims and Jaten Dimsdale. I want to marry those two and I want to be myself and fully myself and vulnerable and kind of a glass house for people that are looking in and want to know.

“I want to use my platform to ask for help and to tell people it’s OK to ask for help and tell people it’s OK to be vulnerable and to hurt, and if there’s not an answer that I have for you, there’s at least someone who’s also going through the same thing and you’re not crazy for feeling that way,” Swims elaborated. “I hope that this album is some sort of a relief, or just a friend that’s there feeling the same way for them, you know.”

Swims said he feels he’s made considerable progress in getting to a healthier place as a person.

“I think I’ve learned a lot about self love and liking myself and feeling like I deserve love and feeling like I deserve to be loved and I am lovable,” he said. “I think I was struggling with that for a really long time. And I still struggle a lot with that, but I’ve had a lot of help and a lot of mentorship over the years and a lot of friends who are here reaffirming me and giving me reassurance constantly that I deserve what I have and I deserve to be here and I am lovable and I’m beautiful person. I try to do more things to tell myself that as much as possible.

“So I definitely learned a lot about self love and self worth and self work and unlearning some things and re-learning some things and just doing a lot of work on myself,” Swims said. “I think it’s made the biggest difference in my life.”

Musically, the consistently enjoyable “I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1)” finds Swims growing more focused stylistically. While it still touches on several genres, the album overall leans toward classic soul with a modern sound. The songs “Goodbye’s Been Good to You,” “The Door,” “Lose Control” (a multi-genre Top 5 single) and “What More Can I Say” have strong grooves, a good bit of energy and highly melodic vocal lines. The other songs are ballads, and they are a strong suit for Swims and the palpable emotion he brings to his songs.

“I think you can safely say this is a soul record, and even if it bleeds into other worlds and other genres, I think the thing you can always say about anything I do is it will be soul music, for sure,” Swims said.

Cooke is an icon and underrated. Beyond his voice (gold!) and his songwriting chops (think of how tight but different “Cupid,” “Bring It On Home to Me,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come” are), he had an amazing ear. Available on vinyl for the first time, “SAR Records Story” gathers the best songs from Sam Cooke’s record label.

Based on what’s collected here, SAR Records was on track to be another Motown before Cooke’s death in 1964. For the most part, Cooke recruited the acts on his label and wrote and produced for them.

Cooke’s vision led him to discover a series of future greats.

Here we get Bobby Womack’s group The Valentines stomping to “It’s All Over Now” before the Rolling Stones made it a hit. And rising star Johnnie Taylor doing his best to be the next Cooke on “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day” And teenage prodigy Billy Preston doing soul-jazz instrumental “Greazee Part I & II” six years before the Beatles drafted him for session work.

After absorbing the old school pop craft on “SAR Records Story,” take “Bad Self Portraits” out for a spin (just reissued for its tenth anniversary in limited-edition and two bonus tracks, “Wedding Band” and “What I’m Doing Here”). Back in 2014, the then-quartet was stacked with songwriting aces — each of whom could have built a career as a staff writer at Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, or Motown. So while singer Rachel Price has a singular voice that unites the album, she gets to sing radically different tunes (well, radically different but all still fitting the “perfect pop” label).

Guitarist/trumpet player Mike Olson’s “You Go Down Smooth” could have come out of a Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin, and Freddie Mercury writing session  — it’s those tight-but-dynamic arrangements, those bold soul moments juxtaposed by catchy cooing, those big breakdowns, and towering vocal harmonies (note, Olson has since left and is missed). Drummer Mike Calabrese’s “Stop Your Crying” could have come out of a, well, Robinson, Franklin, and Mercury writing session. But bassist Bridget Kearney’s exceptional compositions come up nearly every other track.

Kearney can pen slow-burn soul that doubles as dark introspection (“Better Than”). She can pair wounded and witty lyrics with something that is both a blustery ballad and swinging pop romp (title track “Bad Self Portraits”). She can write like Robinson, Franklin, Mercury, Adele and Bruce Springsteen all at once (“Seventeen”).

Since Cooke and his contemporaries laid down the modern pop template, the idea of a catchy, complete world captured in three and half minutes, the formula has never gone out of style. Sometimes you just need to know where to look for fresh stuff. Let me suggest this SAR Records package and “Bad Self Portraits” (and every other Lake Street Dive album!).

Jazz depends on it. Blues depends on it. Rock ‘n’ roll found its way into its second and third waves via covers — see the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.

So as you look at the spring calendar and see a few cover bands, please think of them as part of a grand tradition. A grand tradition that a few acts this season will twist in strange and welcome ways.

Brit Floyd, March 24, Orpheum Theatre

You gotta have lasers – like, a lot of lasers – if you want to do Pink Floyd. Thankfully, Brit Floyd has a lot of lasers, a lot of lights, and a lot of musicians dedicated to getting it just right. About a decade ago, band leader Damian Darlington came out of The Australian Pink Floyd Show (already the world’s leading Floyd tribute act) thinking he could do the catalog even more justice. To do this, the group has nearly a dozen ace musicians plus a crew of tech wizards, cuz, you know, lasers! orpheumtheatremaboston.com

Grateful 4 Biggie, March 24, City Winery

Yes, this is exactly what you think it is: A Grateful Dead/Notorious B.I.G. mash up. If you’re wondering how this is even possible, go to YouTube and look up the group’s live hybrid of “China Cat Sunflower” and “Kick in the Door.” It’s madness and genius (and kinda the sound Red Hot Chili Peppers have been swinging at, and missing, for years). Turns out hip hop and hippie grooves are a delightful combination when done by an ensemble this open minded. instagram.com/grateful4biggie

Bearly Dead, April 6, the Sinclair, Cambridge

Bearly Dead got a head of steam going with a beloved Wednesday night residency at Somerville club Thunder Road. The band’s trick? The guys make the Dead come alive with wildly bold, bright, fast and freewheeling jams. When the club got bulldozed, the Boston band found other local venues to pack. But, frankly, these musicians are too talented to stay in one place. Bearly Dead came out of COVID as a nationally touring act (that doesn’t forget it needs to play Somerville and Cambridge a few times a year). bearlydeadmusic.com

Marc Martel & One Vision of Queen at the Boston Pops, May 15 & 16, Symphony Hall

Marc Martel is one of three guys ever that can keep pace with Freddie Mercury’s voice (George Michael and Adam Lambert being the other two). Martel is so remarkable, he lent his pipes to the biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Imagine, a guy with this voice – and the rest of the aces in the One Vision of Queen band – leaning to a set of classics with the Pops. Please, please, do a symphonic take on “Who Wants to Live Forever.” bso.org/pops

Former Weather Girls singer Martha Wash has heard it all. “That’s what they said but disco never went anywhere. It’s morphed into what you hear nowadays, which is EDM and that kind of music. I never did much of that, but to me that music is all from the disco era. I grew up singing gospel music and depending on which church you went to, the music was kind of fast tempo. So it was never that far from dance music.”

Wash is now the prime mover of the “First Ladies of Disco” tour which hits the Regent in Arlington March 16. It’s an elaborate show with a live band, three featured singers and guests at different stops. Along with Wash, the core singers are former Chic vocalist Norma Jean Wright and Linda Clifford, who did the unlikely disco version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Guests in Arlington will be Anita Ward of “Ring My Bell” fame, and comedian Marsha Warfield.

“We’re still very relevant artists, you just don’t hear us on the radio anymore,” she says. “We’ve all known each other from doing shows together over the years. The show is actually based on a book about the women of disco, my manager and I came up with the idea of expanding that, making it an interchangeable show with different artists. We’re getting a new generation of fans, they come with their parents. It’s a fun trip down memory lane.”

Wash was part of disco from the very beginning, singing backup for Sylvester of “Mighty Real” fame, a pioneer of gay identity in disco. It was Sylvester who gave Wash and her singing partner the unflattering name Two Tons o’ Fun. “That’s how we were perceived anyway. He was trying to break some ground, you didn’t often see a gay man with two large ladies singing backup for him. But it was nothing compared to the way groups name themselves today.”

They changed their name to the Weather Girls for the big hit “It’s Raining Men,” a big hit at the tail end of the disco era. Cowritten by future TV star Paul Shaffer, they only got the song after Donna Summer, Diana Ross and Cher passed on it. “We didn’t want to record the song, (Cowriter) Paul Jabara literally begged us to record it. Paul said that the song would be history and yeah, it was. It’s a classic that’s stood the test of time.”

Wash made some headlines a few decades ago when she sued to get credited on a couple of hits she sang on, including C&C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” where the lead vocal was hers. “I used them because they used my voice but not my likeness, my appearance, my picture. So I sued because it was deceptive. And I won both suits, so then I could move on.”

NEW YORK — Kacey Musgraves pulls her iPhone from the pocket of her black puffer vest and starts tapping her way to a recent exchange with a friend.

“We were literally just talking about this last night,” she says. “Hold on — I want to see how I phrased it.”

The 35-year-old country star is an enthusiastic user of Apple’s audio message feature, which she says offers two advantages over regular texting: “less time staring at a god— screen,” as she puts it, and the valuable emotional data contained in a person’s voice. “I can read a note from someone and think they’re mad at me,” she says. “But then I’ll hear it, and I’m like, Oh, they’re not!”

Musgraves finds the previous evening’s monologue and zeroes in on a section where she’s musing about how “there’s so much encoded in us from childhood — past trauma, past experiences — and all that goes into falling in love with someone.” She looks up and sighs. “It honestly freaks me out to think about just how much of chemistry with another person is beyond our control.”

The precarity of romance is on Musgraves’ mind because … well, really, the idea is never not on her mind. “I’m always making something a little more sad than it needs to be,” she says with a laugh of her music, including on her breakthrough 2018 LP “Golden Hour,” which documented her whirlwind marriage to a fellow Nashville, Tennessee-based singer-songwriter, Ruston Kelly. Blissed-out yet laced with a stoner-ish melancholy, “Golden Hour” won the coveted album of the year prize at the Grammy Awards, vaulting Musgraves from insider-y critics’ darling to pop-crossover fashion plate; three years later, she followed it up with “Star-Crossed,” which presented the tale of her and Kelly’s divorce as a Shakespearean tragedy.

Now she’s on the cusp of releasing “Deeper Well,” a gorgeous new LP inspired in part by the act of welcoming love back into her life.

“Please don’t make me regret/ Opening up that part of myself/ That I’ve been scared to give again,” she sings in “Too Good to Be True,” her close-miked vocal swaddled by finger-picked acoustic guitar. Later, in the Celtic-accented “Heaven Is,” she defines that place as “lying in your arms so safe and warm.”

Yet “Deeper Well,” due Friday, is also about cultivating one’s own strength through the rituals of therapy and self-care. In the title track she sings about setting aside her gravity bong and learning the lessons of her Saturn return — a trendy astrological reference similarly deployed lately by SZA and Ariana Grande. “Saturn can be a bitch of a planet,” Musgraves acknowledges, “but it’s having a moment.” In another track, “Sway,” she describes her determination to go with the flow like “a palm tree in the wind.”

“Kacey just wants to grow,” says Shane McAnally, the prolific Nashville songwriter who’s counted Musgraves as a friend and collaborator for more than a decade. “And this record feels like roots — like something you put down with your feet solidly on the ground.”

That goes for the album’s sound as well as its outlook. After toying with the sleek textures of Y2K-era pop and R&B for “Star-Crossed,” Musgraves returns on “Deeper Well” to the kind of rootsy, hand-played arrangements that defined her early work — and just as country music has become a go-to style for acts such as Beyoncé, Post Malone and Lana Del Rey, all of whom have country (or perhaps country-adjacent) projects on the way.

“Deeper Well” opens with the strummy “Cardinal,” in which she recounts being visited by that bird — a favorite of her mentor John Prine — not long after Prine’s death in 2020. Then there’s the waltz-time “The Architect,” a classic bit of down-home philosophizing she co-wrote with McAnally and Josh Osborne: “Even something as small as an apple/ It’s simple and somehow complex/ Sweet and divine, the perfect design/ Can I speak to the architect?”

“‘Star-Crossed’ was more hard-edged and acidic than all my other music,” she says today. “It was more affected in terms of production. And that was fun to play with. But I was definitely craving something different for this.” What she landed on feels both cozy and exploratory — a homecoming disguised as a vision quest.

Says Reese Witherspoon, who teamed with Musgraves last year to create the Apple TV+ series “My Kind of Country”: “I think it’s her most ethereal and introspective work.”

It’s a few days before Musgraves is set to perform this month on “Saturday Night Live,” and the singer is seated at a corner table in a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Dressed in black athleisure wear, her long hair tucked beneath a Polo ball cap, she speaks wistfully about New York City, where she and her two producers, Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, decamped from Nashville last year to make “Deeper Well” amid a motivating change of scenery.

“There’s always something weird to see here,” Musgraves says. “Last night we got stuck behind this trash truck that for some reason had bouquets of flowers tied to it.” She fondly recalls a late night singing karaoke and another one downing Guinness at an Irish dive bar; she describes the smell of weed in Washington Square Park as though it were a cherished childhood memory.

Tashian identifies one benefit to their immersion in New York’s much-ness. “I think for someone who has maybe slight ADHD tendencies — I don’t know if Kacey’s copped to that, but I can tell you from experience that she most certainly has a little of that going on — sometimes you need to be overwhelmed by the world to focus,” the producer says.

Indeed, there’s an almost Zen-like quality to the sparsely arranged “Deeper Well” that makes even the tasteful “Golden Hour” sound busy by comparison. “The small details define everything,” says John Janick, chairman and chief executive of Musgraves’ record company, Interscope Capitol Labels Group. “Each song is a delicate expression of self.” With echoes of Jim Croce and Simon & Garfunkel in their heads, Musgraves, Fitchuk and Tashian set up in the same warmly appointed attic space that Jack Antonoff favors at the historic Electric Lady Studios in the Village; for “Heaven Is” they moved out onto the building’s roof to catch a vibe.

Musgraves compares the album to “a walk through nature,” which she knows registers as an irony in light of the urban setting. But there’s something to that in the way the stripped-down music showcases the essentials of her astute songwriting and her high, clear voice.

“Kacey sings just like she talks,” says Chris Thile, whose band Nickel Creek will open for Musgraves on the road this fall. “The honesty of it disarms you at every turn.” Adds singer Madi Diaz, who recruited Musgraves to appear on her 2023 single “Don’t Do Me Good“: “She delivers the complexities of life the way we actually go through it.”

Does she ever regret writing so nakedly about relationships given that they’ve all eventually ended? (Some of the tenderest songs on “Deeper Well” refer to her romance with poet Cole Schafer, with whom she broke up last year.) Musgraves shakes her head.

“I think if you’re lucky you’re able to experience love several times,” she says. “Some people just have one. Look at my sister, who met her husband when they were 14 and 16, and now they’ve got a kid. Or my grandparents, who met in second and third grade — they’ve literally lived their entire lives together. I’m just different in that way. I’ve experienced many loves, and I just gather more information about myself with each one.” She smiles. “And then I write about it.”

Musgraves grew up in tiny Golden, Texas, and started singing (and yodeling) as a precocious kid in an oversize cowgirl hat. At 18 she flamed out on the televised singing competition “Nashville Star” but used the springboard to land work as a pro songwriter on Music Row; in 2011 she co-wrote “Mama’s Broken Heart” with McAnally and their pal Brandy Clark then watched as Miranda Lambert turned the song into a No. 2 country hit.

Her success behind the scenes led to a major-label record deal of her own. Yet right away Musgraves was scraping against country orthodoxy: “Follow Your Arrow,” from her 2013 debut, advised listeners to “roll up a joint” and to “kiss lots of boys — or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into.”

“From Day 1, I feel like people have known exactly what I’m about,” she says. “Still one of the greatest compliments anyone’s ever paid me has been people in the LGBTQ community saying, ‘I’ve always loved country music but I never felt like I was invited to that party until I heard your music.'”

Nashville is more inclusive these days than it was a decade ago thanks in part to Musgraves, who’s maintained her efforts to diversify the industry, as with “My Kind of Country,” a competition show meant to spotlight talent from underrepresented backgrounds. (Asked what she makes of the broader political climate in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee recently signed a law restricting drag performances, she says, “Pretty bleak,” and adds, “I don’t think it’s the drag queens that are desecrating society.”)

Still, she says, “I don’t feel like I need to be the spokesperson for country music.” In 2018, genre purists debated what it meant that “Golden Hour” contained a disco song in the shimmering “High Horse“; in 2021, the Recording Academy ruled that “Star-Crossed” wasn’t eligible for the Grammys’ country album category. Musgraves finds all the gatekeeping a bit boring. “I just do my own thing,” she says with a shrug — including cutting “I Remember Everything,” her hit duet with Zach Bryan that won the country duo/group performance award at this year’s Grammys ceremony.

Six months after it debuted atop Billboard’s Hot 100, “I Remember Everything” is still hanging around inside the chart’s top 10, which you can take as proof that the much-discussed country boom is real. But if Musgraves is always eager to reach new listeners — see her collaborations with Troye Sivan and Camila Cabello and her stint as Harry Styles’ warm-up act — she’s also wary of what she calls the “trap” of modern pop stardom, in which “people want you to be extremely authentic until your authenticity doesn’t align with whatever they want.”

There’s a song on “Deeper Well” called “Lonely Millionaire” that suggests she’s encountered fame’s illusory comforts. “Look, I’m not saying money doesn’t make things easier,” she says. “But the deeper I get into my career, the more I find refuge in the real, tangible, irreplaceable stuff.”

Next month Musgraves is due to launch a world tour behind “Deeper Well,” and she’s been trying to figure out how to bring the album’s intimate truths into an arena. She’s also considering covering SZA’s “Nobody Gets Me” — “It’d be sick, right?” she asks — and Sivan’s “One of Your Girls.” “So sweet, that little boy,” she says of Sivan. “I just want to put him in my pocket.”

A couple of years ago, Musgraves would’ve viewed a tour as a welcome opportunity to leave home. She’d bought a big fancy place in Nashville after her divorce — you can watch her give a tour to Architectural Digest on YouTube — but discovered before long that she didn’t feel comfortable there by herself.

“I was kind of scared of alone time — not scared, but trepidatious,” she says. “I’d get anxiety about being alone and not having anything on my schedule.” One night in 2022 she started perusing Zillow; she found a spot in the woods she liked and decided to live there instead.

Now she’s “gotten really good at being alone,” she says. “I actually feel recharged by it, which is the opposite of how I used to be.” She laughs. “When I’m home now, I could not see anyone for days and not give a s—.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“I had this idea for a duet project floating around for a while,” Fish told the Herald. “But I didn’t know who the partner in the project would be. (Recently) I saw Jesse play and I said, ‘This guy is fearless. He’d be so into this.’”

So Fish pitched Dayton and they got to work. Or they tried to.

“We met up and we were supposed to have this incredibly productive weekend,” she said. “We were supposed to walk out of the weekend with several songs in hand. We walked out with nothing.”

It took a while for Fish and Dayton to work up to their 2023 debut album, “Death Wish Blues.” After the failed weekend, still determined there could be magic between them, the two knocked out a covers EP — “The Stardust Sessions” featured takes on old blues and alt country standards.

“‘The Stardust Sessions’ let us get comfortable,” Fish said ahead of the duo’s March 14 Wilbur gig. “We agreed to be completely honest with each other and not be afraid to send each other everything. The first song I remember that was an ‘ah ha’ moment for me was when I sent him the riff to ‘Death Wish.’”

Fish had a killer hook and great line — “Your kiss is like a death wish, baby.” Dayton built a whole narrative around it. The pair repeated the process over and over, trading riffs and hooks, lines and lyrics, until they had a whole album.

Back in the 2000s, Fish was a blues phenom, but she always had her ears open to other sounds. She came up jamming at Kansas City club Knuckleheads, where Dayton would often come through on tour. Despite the fact that Dayton began his career two decades earlier palling around with icons such as Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, he found a kindred spirit in Fish.

To make a dirty, overdriven album, the duo needed one more like-minded soul. They found it in producer Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

“Jesse and I wanted the album to be rooted in the blues, but it also needed to be raw rock ‘n’ roll with a punk vibe to it,” Fish said. “Jon Spencer brought so much feeling to what we were trying to do… We really leaned on him to help us find a balanced approach between our styles, to help us get so much character out of our vocals to tell these stories.”

Like much of Fish’s past work (and Dayton’s and Spencer’s), “Death Wish Blues” is packed with barnburners: stomping guitars, growling vocals, honky tonk swagger. But Fish made sure to add some dynamism. One example, her ballad “No Apology,” has a Motown sweetness and the soul of Stax gem.

“Jon is like a ball of energy and his albums go 90 miles per hour,” Fish said. “But I’m always going to fight for a few good ballads. A lot of the record is seething. . .it’s rock ‘n’ roll. But ‘No Apology’ and ‘Know My Heart’ are something a little more tender, and you need those moments.”

You need all the Fish and Dayton moments. And thankfully, the pair fought through to realize they could write songs this catchy and compelling, blustery and intimate.

For tickets and details, visit samanthafish.com

There should be no lack of volume when the modern version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive hits the Chevalier March 9. Bachman put the band back together last year, though without the other original members: His brothers Tim and Robbie both passed during the pandemic, and co-frontman Fred Turner has retired. (Son Tal Bachman of “She’s So High” fame has joined on guitar). For Bachman it’s all about playing the vintage songs again, including a handful of hits that he wrote with his previous band, the Guess Who.

“I’ve written fifteen classic songs that everyone recognizes,” he said. “And you know how you do that? You write fifteen hundred. You think everything is the greatest song in the world when you’re writing it, or else you wouldn’t finish it. Then you put it out and nobody likes it but your girlfriend and your mother, so you move on to the next one. Then you’re bewildered and befuddled when one of them gets on the radio.”

His most famous song, “Takin’ Care of Business” actually took years; it began as a Guess Who song called “White Collar Worker” that just wasn’t working. “It was terrible. People were gagging on the chorus, it sounded like ‘Paperback Writer’ and I said Lennon and McCartney would sue us if we ever put it out. So you flash forward a few years, I’m driving to a BTO show, and I hear my favorite DJ on the radio say, ‘We’re taking care of business!’ So that night I tell the band to go into ‘White Collar Worker’ and I start singing those words. Suddenly the audience is singing it back to us and I’m shouting back, ‘Every day! Every way!’ So I guess the angels of song felt sorry for me: I work on the thing for six years, then I write  it in three minutes onstage.”

He remembers one particular honor associated with that song: “It wound up becoming a pretty big karaoke song, and I remember getting my first check from Karaoke, Ltd — a check for 81 cents. I had that check framed and it’s still on my wall.”

Recently he and former Guess Who frontman Burton Cummings made headlines by suing the current version of the band, which includes neither of them. “It’s gotten to the point of false advertising, they’re using pictures of us and the old records to promote the shows, so the fans don’t know we aren’t there. They lease out the name to a bunch of heavy metal guys who couldn’t make it with their own bands, guys who weren’t even alive when we did ‘American Woman’.”

But Bachman is still having the time of his life playing the classic rock circuit. “When I play one of those cruises and see my old buddies like Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top, it feels like we were all on the same hockey team. We’re giving people several decades of music, and it’s an ongoing celebration.”

The now global band started at long-gone Kenmore Square club the Rat just a stone’s throw from Lansdowne. Then the Dropkicks dominated venues on the street: first Avalon, then the new House of Blues, and even Fenway Park. This year the Dropkicks continue the St. Patrick’s Week Lansdowne takedown with a return to the new MGM Music Hall for three shows plus one at the House of Blues.

“The St. Patrick’s Day run of shows started at Avalon and I remember when we did the final show at the club,” band leader Ken Casey told the Herald. “We made a t-shirt that had a wrecking ball on the front and it was like a tour shirt on the back with every show we had played at Avalon. And there were so, so many shows. Being a bit smaller of a cap, we would sometimes do seven shows in a week there.”

The band eventually outgrew even the House of Blues and its 2,600 capacity. For a while, Casey and crew got creative, augmenting the House of Blues shows with gig at Agganis Arena or Lowell’s Tsongas Arena.

“We did it out of necessity, and it was fun to experiment, fun to play in a city like Lowell where the mayor and chief of police show up,” Casey said. “But we like being back on Lansdowne.”

The St. Pat’s run always seems to represent the band’s past and present. Yes, MGM is huge (5,000 and change) but it’s a general admission venue — “I have to be able to see everyone (in the audience) so I know everyone can see me,” Casey said. The setlists will run from “Skinhead on the MBTA” to “The State of Massachusetts” to songs from their recent records built out of old Woody Guthrie lyrics and new Dropkicks music (refresher: “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” was written this way).

“We spend this whole (February and March) tour getting to the point where we can play almost our entire catalog by the time we get to Boston, which is, well, a lot of songs,” Casey said with a laugh. “We pride ourselves on the four different shows being completely different.”

Somehow the tradition has become for the fans to expect unexpected setlists. And the Dropkicks are all about honoring tradition.

From their punk rock elders to their protest music heroes, the Dropkicks feel a responsibility to carry the past into today. The Woody Guthrie LPs are perfect examples of this. One of the albums is named, “This Machine Still Kills Fascists,” after a slogan Woody emblazoned on his guitar. Not surprisingly, a band with punk and Celtic roots and anti-fascist, pro-union views had no problem finding connections to Woody’s old lyrics.

“Woody’s daughter Nora, who runs his archives, put this incredible trust in us and she gets almost spiritual about it (saying) ‘You have this kinship with what my father was all about,’” Casey said.

“And these songs seem to fit seamlessly into what we do,” Casey added, thinking of how the songs mix into the band’s setlists.

After the St. Pat’s run, the Dropkicks will tour a lot. Sorry, that’s vague again. The band will go to Europe once again and spread the gospel of punk and protest once again, connecting Woody Guthrie to Joe Strummer, Irish folk to Stiff Little Fingers.

For tickets and details, visit dropkickmurphys.com

Timony is a longtime treasure of the indie rock world, fronting the Boston band Helium in the ‘90s and then moving on to the bands Wild Flag and Ex Hex. But she was in a more introspective mood when she wrote the songs for “Untame the Tiger,” which became her first official solo album in 19 years. She’ll be playing that music, plus a few Helium nuggets, at the Crystal Ballroom on Saturday.

“It came about at a pretty hard time,” she said this week. “Both of my parents were sick when the pandemic was going on and I was taking care of them (Both have since passed away). And my partner of 12 years left suddenly. So everything changed and my life was crazy and stressful; the music gave me something to focus on and really helped me through that time. The primary reason I do art is that it’s self-soothing; that and connecting with people are the main reasons to do it.”

Though her lyrics have usually been personal, you couldn’t always tell. “It was hard this time because I actually had to get vulnerable. The songs have always been about my emotions but I came up with a lot of ways to hide, using a lot of metaphors. And I still have that tendency to hide, but as I get older I challenge myself to be more brave with the lyrics. It can still be coded, though. Like ‘Summer’ on the album is just about liking someone, but it doesn’t come out and say it’s about having a crush.”

Her musical tastes at the time were also running toward folkier sounds. “A lot of my go-to music is ‘70s prog and weird psychedelic music, but I go through phases. I’ve always loved English folk music — things like Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson  and Steeleye Span.” She wound up recording with Dave Mattacks, the legendary UK drummer (now locally based) who’s played with all the above. “That was one of the great experiences of my life. I also started realizing that a lot of my favorite music had acoustic instruments in it, and I don’t play acoustic guitar very much. I probably dialed back a notch on the distortion, which made it more pleasing to the ear and less jarring. And what’s crazy is that before I started recording, I got my grandmother’s old Gibson that was in her house in South Dakota all these years. So that was fortuitous – I had just bought a new one and it didn’t sound as good.”

Guitars always played a big role in Timony’s life, and one of her guitar students is in the current live band. Last month she made Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 250 top guitar players — She’s at #95, right between Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and metal shredder Joe Satriani. “That was a nice surprise. .I’ve never been one of those super shredders, so it was nice to see them acknowledge some inventiveness.”

With his arms wide open — and that radiant smile — Tony Bennett welcomes you to San Francisco.

The larger-than-life statue of the late, legendary crooner — microphone in hand, smile as warm as California sunshine — basks outside the posh Fairmont hotel, on a block named Tony Bennett Way.

Bennett famously left his heart in San Francisco — and left his mark on the Fairmont. In the lobby, a large heart sculpture by Bennett beckons, finished with his painted expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge. In the hotel’s Heritage Hall, there’s the unofficial Tony Bennett Corner, featuring old photos, a huge plaque for the million-selling “Duets II” and signed sheet music for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

This display is around the corner from the ornate Venetian Room, where Bennett first performed his signature song in 1961.

The Fairmont and Bennett are inextricably linked, from a photo portrait of the singer made up of hundreds of tiny album covers to the Tony Bennett Suite, all 1,125 square feet on the 22nd floor. Rates start at $3,000 per night.

On this year’s Valentine’s Day, there was a heartfelt tribute to Bennett as a San Francisco cable car was named for him, the first time this has happened for a person. He died in July 2023.

Since the proud native New Yorker is so closely identified with the City by the Bay, we wanted to know his favorite places there. His widow, Susan Benedetto, sent us a list.

Restaurants

Benedetto would always call ahead to make sure Sotto Mare, an Italian seafood bistro in the North Beach neighborhood, was featuring her husband’s favorite dish, crab diavolo.

It’s a long, narrow trattoria with a 20-seat counter and a handful of tables inside and outside (with heat lamps for those wimpy Californians). The cluttered decor is nautical, with giant mounted fish, antique angler gear and pictures of previous diners smothering the walls. Tony Bennett merits three photos, including one with the restaurant’s owners.

The crooner had his favorite table, a four-top near the front. He didn’t have to get on a waiting list, owner Rich Azzolino told me. C’mon, he’s Tony Bennett! People recognized him, always dapper in a suit or sports jacket, but Azzolino wouldn’t let people bother him.

The main attraction at Sotto Mare is the “best damn crab cioppino,” for $54.95 and enough for two people. Azzolino and his wife, Laura, will provide a special bib if you order it. They offer clam chowder with bacon, as well as many kinds of seafood — from lobster ravioli to salmon in lemon caper sauce — plus wine and beer but no dessert or coffee. There are plenty of options for those in North Beach.

Also on Bennett’s list is the oldest restaurant in San Francisco, the 175-year-old Tadich Grill. It’s an old-school steak and seafood joint with white-jacket waitstaff. The Tadich evokes Murray’s in downtown Minneapolis except it has a staggering 75-plus entrees, ranging from filet mignon to halibut in soy ginger broth.

A few times a year, Bennett would sit in one of the secluded booths, perfect for a romantic, autograph-free lunch or dinner. The singer favored the petrale sole filet, according to general manager Jose Maxmilian Paredes.

For breakfast, the Bennetts frequented Sears Fine Food, a few blocks downhill from the Fairmont. It’s a comfy old-fashioned place, decorated with photos and posters from other eras, reminiscent of the long-shuttered Becky’s Cafeteria in Minneapolis. Order the 18 Swedish pancakes, the house specialty.

Places

An exhibited painter who traveled with his tools, Bennett had two favorite San Francisco spots to inspire his artwork — the Japanese Tea Garden and the Palace of Fine Arts.

Located in spacious Golden Gate Park, the Japanese Tea Garden was established in 1894 for the California Midwinter International Exposition, aka the World’s Fair. Since remodeled, it features a series of paths, ponds and plants as well as a five-story pagoda, a moon bridge and, of course, a tea house. The oldest Japanese garden in the United States is serene and relaxing even when it’s overrun with tourists.

What’s a Roman-like ruin doing in the middle of a San Francisco neighborhood? The Palace of Fine Arts was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. What’s left after renovations is an open-air rotunda around a lagoon. Designed as a restful place between the expo’s exhibits, it remains tranquil and picturesque, a spot where locals take photos to commemorate graduation or quinceañera.

Bennett also recommended visiting:

— Coit Tower, which affords a 360-degree view of the city as well as historic social realism murals along the climb (the elevator hasn’t worked since 2022 so you have to negotiate 234 steps).

— Alcatraz, the former federal prison that is a considerable time commitment (no pun intended) because it’s on an island accessible by ferry.

— Oracle Park, the baseball stadium by San Francisco Bay where, after the Giants win, a recording of Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is proudly played.

No visit to Bennett’s San Francisco would be complete, his widow says, without having a drink in the Tonga Room, the anomaly in the opulent Fairmont hotel. Opened in 1945 to welcome World War II servicemen back from the Pacific, this basement tiki bar is hopelessly kitschy, from its thatched roofs over tables to a live band playing on a boat floating in a swimming-pool-turned-lagoon. It thunders and rains into the pool while the band in un-matching Hawaiian shirts plays “Uptown Funk,” “Friends in Low Places” and other hits, Wednesday through Saturday.

The vibe is festive, whether it’s 20-somethings celebrating a birthday or a wedding party doing a conga line. The crowd is lots of locals and tourists willing to pop $20 for fruity cocktails garnished with flowers.

“This place is a cross between the Rainforest Cafe and Disneyland,” Natalie Dameron, 24, a local movie production assistant, told me on her first visit. “It’s an experience.”

The music stops at 10:45 p.m. on weekends, and the Tonga Room shuts down 15 minutes later. It’s out of respect for hotel guests, who, like Tony Bennett, might prefer a more sedate lifestyle.

________

©2024 StarTribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The rotating cast of amazing talents who are set to perform on the road show include, of course, headliners Willie Nelson & Family as well as Bob Dylan, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, John Mellencamp with Brittney Spencer, Celisse, Southern Avenue and Billy Strings.

Wow.

Tickets go on sale to the general public at 10 a.m. March 1, OutlawMusicFestival.com. There is also a Citi cardmember presale that runs 10 a.m. Feb. 27 to 10 p.m. Feb. 29, citientertainment.com.

“This year’s Outlaw Music Festival Tour promises to be the biggest and best yet with this lineup of legendary artists. I am thrilled to get back on the road again with my family and friends playing the music we love for the fans we love,” Willie Nelson said in a news release.

The inaugural Outlaw Music Festival took place in 2016 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Over the years, the festival has featured such acts as Chris Stapleton, Neil Young, Luke Combs, Van Morrison, ZZ Top, Eric Church, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson and the Avett Brothers.

2024 OUTLAW MUSIC FESTIVAL TOUR DATES & LINEUPS:

Friday, June 21, 2024

Ameris Bank Amphitheatre, Alpharetta, GA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Saturday, June 22, 2024

PNC Music Pavilion, Charlotte, NC

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh, NC

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater at Virginia Beach, Virginia Beach, VA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Friday, June 28, 2024

Empower Federal Credit Union Amphitheater at Lakeview, Syracuse, NY

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Saturday, June 29, 2024

Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Sunday, June 30, 2024

PNC Bank Arts Center, Holmdel, NJ

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Xfinity Center, Mansfield, MA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Saturday, July 6, 2024

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, Bethel, NY

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Sunday, July 7, 2024

Hersheypark Stadium, Hershey, PA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

Celisse

Monday, July 29, 2024

North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, Chula Vista, CA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Brittney Spencer

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Brittney Spencer

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Brittney Spencer

Sunday, August 4, 2024

Toyota Amphitheatre, Wheatland, CA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Brittney Spencer

Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater, Boise, ID

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Brittney Spencer

Friday, August 9, 2024

ONE Spokane Stadium, Spokane, WA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Brittney Spencer

Saturday, August 10, 2024

The Gorge Amphitheatre, George, WA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Billy Strings

Brittney Spencer

Friday, September 6, 2024

Somerset Amphitheater, Somerset, WI

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Saturday, September 7, 2024

Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, IL

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Sunday, September 8, 2024

Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, St. Louis, MO

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Riverbend Music Center, Cincinnati, OH

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Thursday, September 12, 2024

Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, OH

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Saturday, September 14, 2024

The Pavilion at Star Lake, Burgettstown, PA

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Sunday, September 15, 2024

Pine Knob Music Theatre, Clarkston, MI

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Darien Lake Amphitheater, Buffalo, NY

Willie Nelson & Family

Bob Dylan

John Mellencamp

Southern Avenue

Live Nation Entertainment revealed Friday that concert attendance jumped by 20% in 2023 — the year global pop sensations Beyoncé and Taylor Swift launched their blockbuster greatest-hits tours.

The Beverly Hills-based ticket vendor and concert promoter also noted in its latest earnings report that ticket sales were up 30%, with more than 620 million tickets sold by Ticketmaster bringing in nearly $36 billion. In 2023 alone, more than 145 million people attended upwards of 50,000 live events, the company reported.

All of this has led to the live music behemoth increasing its revenue by 36% in 2023 to $22.7 billion, and growing its operating income by 46% to $1.07 billion.

“The live music industry reached new heights in 2023, and demand for live music continues to build,” Michael Rapino, chief executive of Live Nation, said Friday in a statement.

“Our digital world empowers artists to develop global followings, while inspiring fans to crave in-person experiences more than ever. At the same time, the industry is delivering a wider variety of concerts which draws in new audiences, and developing more venues to support a larger show pipeline,” the statement continued.

Much of that success is thanks to two of music’s biggest stars, Beyoncé and Swift. The former’s Renaissance tour racked up more than $575 million in ticket sales, while the latter’s ongoing Eras tour is estimated to have amassed more than $700 million.

Both artists further capitalized on their tours’ popularity by releasing concert movies via AMC Theatres; they have grossed a combined total of $305.7 million worldwide.

In early 2023, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Ticketmaster, Live Nation and the United States ticketing market after colossal demand for Swift’s Eras tour resulted in a Ticketmaster meltdown — spurring a class action lawsuit filed by disgruntled Swifties against Ticketmaster.

The hearing scrutinized alleged anticompetitive practices by Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which control an estimated 80% of the ticketing market. The Department of Justice also has launched an investigation into the ticket vendors’ practices.

“Ticketmaster comes under a lot of criticism,” Joe Berchtold, president and chief financial officer of Live Nation Entertainment, said during the Senate hearing in January 2023.

“But I can say with great confidence that technologically Ticketmaster is a much better ticketing system today than it was in 2010. Its performance in large on-sales is the best in the industry, it has the best marketing capabilities of any ticketing system, and it is far and away the leader in preventing fraud and getting tickets into the hands of real fans.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Since then, she’s gone on to win multiple Grammy Awards and perform on various late night television shows and even “Saturday Night Live.” She also dropped the follow-up to her top-selling debut album, “Sour,” releasing “Guts” on Sept. 8, 2023, which was led by the building ballad, “Vampire.”

ALSO SEE: Olivia Rodrigo’s setlist: All the songs played night one of the Guts World Tour

To support the album, Rodrigo graduated from 3,000-7,000-capacity theaters to 10,000-seat arenas on the Guts World Tour in 2024. She kicked off the jaunt with a sold-out show at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert on Friday, Feb. 23, not far from where she grew up in Temecula and Murrieta. She even shouted out her “Riverside County sisters!”

“Welcome to the first (expletive) night of the Guts Tour,” Rodrigo told the crowd. “I want you to jump, I want you to scream, I want you to cry if you feel like crying. I’m so happy you’re here.”

She started the night with “Bad Idea Right?” off the latest record, pumping up her loyal devotees and letting them pose the question “It’s a bad idea, right?” as she pointed the mic out to the audience.

It’s been less than two years since Rodrigo’s impressive Sour Tour run, but a lot has changed for her stage show. Of course, things have gotten bigger. She now has a strong brood of backup dancers, continues to surround herself with a badass live band and the production has increased substantially.

ALSO SEE: Fans snap up Olivia Rodrigo cookies in Palm Desert before singer’s tour-opening show

The visuals on a giant screen behind the band played well into set, offering some fun moments that included a scrapbook-style montage of live footage of Rodrigo and the band during “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.” She also rode around the arena on a giant crescent moon for the live debut of the song “Logical” and “Enough for You,” giving the fans at the back of the venue a closer peek at one of her sweet, high waisted sparkly briefs and matching bra top outfits. She’s also added numerous wardrobe changes into this tour.

The stage has grown, too, and Rodrigo knows how to use it with confidence.

She ran up and down every inch of the split catwalk that ran alongside both sides of the venue, leaving room for a smaller v-shaped pit that was filled with fans who never stopped jumping and screaming throughout the entire show. She rocked out through “Jealousy, Jealousy” and made her way down to the barrier where she spent just a few moments with fans who were cheering and grabbing at her as she inched closer.

She brought out her guitarist, Daisy Spencer, to sit down on the opposite side of the stage with her to sing two acoustic songs: “Happier” and “Favorite Crime,” allowing her vocals to soar and they floated through the arena beautifully.

Rodrigo also live debuted a “Guts” hidden track, “Obsessed,” which absolutely ripped live. She jammed it out and rolled around atop a see-through portion of the stage that had a camera fixed underneath it. The footage was cast upon the giant screen behind the band and it was a lot of fun to watch that footage along with the chaos of the song and the band thrashing through it.

She closed the show with an old song and a new song. The encore hit hard with her single “Good 4 U,” which had just about everyone on their feet, singing along. She wrapped up the first night of the Guts World Tour with “Get Him Back!” A cleverly written tune that’s not so much about taking back a loser lover, but seeking sweet, sweet revenge.

The Guts World Tour concludes with four sold-out nights at Kia Forum in Inglewood on Aug.13-14 and 16-17.

Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour

Tickets: Available on secondary seller sites starting at $249 at StubHub.com and $207 at VividSeats.com.

“In magazines, it became a trend to figure out the worst things ever, the worst songs ever, the worst guitar solos ever, or whatever,” Starship frontman Mickey Thomas told the Herald with a laugh. “(The Blender magazine swipe) kind of had a snowball effect. But we’re well past that now. As far as the audience goes, nobody ever hears us play the song and says, ‘Oh, no, not this song again.’”

Starship’s signature song was cool — actually super cool, a No. 1 smash — then uncool, then cool, then uncool, and so on. Like so much in our culture (Hall & Oates, fanny packs, Barbie), “We Built This City” has cycled through blowback and renaissance over and over again. But, as Starship will prove on March 1 at Lynn Memorial Auditorium, thousands of fans don’t care about following cultural whiplash, they just want to enjoy great pop songs and huge rock anthems.

In the 40 plus years, since he joined Jefferson Starship in 1979 and busted out the gate with the glorious groove of “Jane,” Thomas has never tired of singing the hits.

“Sometimes bands of our ilk, get a little bit slow, a little bit less enthusiastic,” he said with another laugh. “I think people are surprised with the high energy level, the vibrancy, that Starship brings to the stage.”

Thomas has no problem loading the set with favorites from every radically different incarnation of the band, even lineups that predate his involvement — you can expect to hear “Sara” and “Jane,” “Miracles” and “White Rabbit.” He seems to have a reverence for each version of the band. He also acknowledges that making hard artistic turns — despite how these 180s make some fans feel — was a necessity to survival.

“It was very intentional to try to completely redefine the sound of the band (with 1985 album “Knee Deep in the Hoopla),” he said. “We thought, if we are going to survive, we’ve got to have a presence on the radio and a presence on MTV… So we took the risk, rolled the dice, and I think we accomplished what we set out to accomplish. But because of the long history of the band going all the way back to the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, the stakes were higher for Starship.”

Fade out holding on to your old sound or reinvent yourself and face cries of sellout — “It’s a double edged sword,” he said.

Of course, if you last long enough you can eventually stop worrying about reinvention. Eventually, the haters move on to hating something else (or go up in smoke like Blender magazine) and a core fanbase will pass your catchy catalog to the kids.

“We see the grandma, the mom, and the daughter all at the show and enjoying it,” Thomas said. “It’s a cool thing in rock these days. There used to be this generation gap in music and I don’t think that exists anymore, and that’s a good thing.”

For tickets, tour dates and details, visit starshipcontrol.com

“It’s the most ambitious program I have ever put together,” Zander told the Herald. “It would be a challenge for any orchestra because the sounds of those four pieces are totally different so you have to train an orchestra to switch from (piece to piece).”

The maestro has put together a lot of programs, hundreds probably, but maybe nothing tops the Britten-into-Tchaikovsky-into-Ives-into-Ravel line up of March 3. Oh, and he’ll bring to life these epic and intimate masterworks with scores of teenagers — the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra runs in age from 21 to 12 (amazingly, there are three 12-year-olds in the group).

Zander has been educating musicians (and audiences) for decades. He founded the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978 and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in 2012. He has no plans to stop, or even slow down.

“My dream is to die at 100 while conducting,” he said with a big laugh.

After decades working with players of all ages and a range of abilities, he has a unique vantage point of a few generations of classical music enthusiasts. He’s as impressed with the young talent as he ever was.

“The first trumpet of the youth orchestra has said that he’s listened to about a hundred different performances of the Mahler’s fifth symphony,” Zander said. “It’s incredible. It’s an example of how (this generation) is so passionate. There is certainly no diminishment and it may be that there’s an increase in attendance of the mind and heart and their engagement with the music. Classical music is more important to them than ever.”

Part of programming such a challenging concert is to showcase these kids’ skills and fire. Part of it is just that it’s good fun for Zander, who is restless in his quest to bring new ears to great works from across the centuries.

“Britten is the quintessential English clear sound of nature,” he said. “Tchaikovsky is the ultimate romantic, the ultimate heart on sleeve and there is no more intense, passionate music in the world than Tchaikovsky and particularly that concerto.”

“Then ‘Three Places in New England’ is one of the absolute most characteristically American pieces,” he continued. “Then we go from that immediately into ‘Daphnis et Chloé,’ the most garishly colorful music that has ever been made for a gigantic orchestra. And they know it, they love it.”

And Zander thinks everyone will love it too.

Whether he’s leading concerts or giving his wildly popular talks (his Ted Talk has tens of millions of views), he’s teaching generation after generation to discover classical music.

“I always say, ‘Everybody loves classical music, they just haven’t found out about it yet,’” he said with a warm smile in his voice.

For tickets and details to both Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra concerts, visit bostonphil.org

As Jessica Malerman was enjoying a meal on board a Royal Caribbean cruise in October, another passenger noticed her T-shirt from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. The two struck up a conversation, and Malerman says they connected immediately.

“That’s when it hit me,” Malerman says. “This is the perfect avenue to get a group of like-minded people — on board a cruise ship.”

Malerman, who works as a travel advisor for Marvelous Mouse Travels, will co-host a fan-led, four-night group cruise called “In My Cruise Era” with Royal Caribbean this fall. The cruise is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Taylor Swift, but it’s set to be a celebration of the pop superstar. Malerman and her colleagues have Taylor Swift events planned for every night of the sailing, including a friendship bracelet swap, a themed dance party, karaoke, trivia and Eras outfit nights.

Not only do Swift’s actual concerts drive enormous demand for travel, but the hype surrounding them has created a market for trips like these, too.

The growing impact of Swift mania

Set to depart from the Port of Miami Oct. 21, the “In My Cruise Era” sailing is aligned with Swift’s final performance of her Miami tour stop. And while some cruisers also have concert tickets, Malerman says that the majority are coming to Miami just for the cruise itself.

That’s in part because Taylor Swift concert tickets have been notoriously difficult and expensive for fans to get their hands on. Ticketmaster sold more than 2 million Eras Tour tickets the day the presale launched in November 2022 for the first leg of the tour — the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day. And from there, it’s tough to forget the Ticketmaster fiasco that led to a class-action lawsuit and has been a key focus of a congressional investigation.

Last year, tickets could easily cost thousands of dollars on the resale market. This year, tickets still cost in the hundreds. Given that, Taylor Swift-themed activities and vacations can provide a cheaper alternative to buying concert tickets.

For example, the New York-based Circle Line Cruises threw a $25 Swift-themed dance party cruise when the artist’s stint at MetLife Stadium kicked off last May. Alexis Melendez, marketing director for the company, says that many guests who didn’t have concert tickets came on the cruise instead.

Vacations and tours like these have only added to the Taylor Swift hype. In fact, while the “In My Cruise Era” trip is still months away, the cruise is already sold out.

Swift-inspired pilgrimages

Another way to travel and honor the pop star is to curate your own itinerary. These self-planned trips include visits to the places that Swift has immortalized in her song lyrics and music videos, like Cornelia Street, which is both the title of a song on her 2019 album, “Lover,” and the name of a street where she once lived in New York.

In 2019, on a road trip out of Boston, she stopped in Kennebunkport, Maine, where Swift filmed her “Mine” music video.

“We stopped for several hours, scouted all the filming locations and took lots of pictures,” she says.

A few years later, she went to the Tennessee Renaissance Festival in the city of Arrington. It’s held on the grounds of Castle Gwynn, where Swift filmed her “Love Story” music video. The festival is the only time of the year that the castle is open to the public.

Jacobsmeyer, who is hardly a Renaissance fair enthusiast, said the line to get inside the castle during the festival was 90 minutes long.

“I think we were all there for the same reason,” she says.

Stopping in Eras tour cities

A Swift-inspired vacation could also include a visit to a tour stop. Many local businesses host Taylor Swift-themed events before or around the time of a show. Taylor Swift events have included pre-parties, silent discos, themed cocktails, pop-up shops, brunches and makeup experiences.

When Taylor Swift announced the Eras Tour was coming to Toronto last summer, a local water sports company hosted an event that entailed kayaking to a beach for a Swift-themed karaoke party. Around that time, the city’s Oishiii Sweets also hosted a themed afternoon tea.

A spokesperson for Destination Toronto said in an email that they expect local businesses to plan even more themed events leading up to Swift’s November arrival.

Swift’s magic touch on travel

Planning your themed vacation or finding fellow Swifties to travel with can lessen the sting of missing out on a live show.

The Eras Tour continues through December, with both international and U.S. stops, meaning the concerts will likely continue to drive demand — and cost — for travel.

Even Swifties have said they’re shocked at the Taylor travel mania.

“When we created this cruise group, we were hoping that a few people would like to join us on a cruise,” Malerman says. “That few turned into a few thousand.”

The article Vacations ‘Taylor’-Made for Swifties originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Tayla Parx is currently one of the most in-demand songwriters in pop and R&B, having cowritten big hits for Ariana Grande (“Thank U, Next”) and Panic! At the Disco (“High Hopes”), plus tracks by Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, and others. She’s also made three of her own albums with a fourth now in the works, but has to push for time when she wants to go on tour. She hits Brighton Feb. 23, opening for TKay Maizda.

“My life has a crazy schedule, but the first thing I prioritize is what’s inspiring me,” she said this week. “If I’m not inspired, I can’t write the best songs for other people, so I balance out the year and say ‘This portion is for me.’ It’s always easier to solve other peoples’ problems in their music and talk about their emotional vulnerability — or at least less scary. My own music is where I get to be vulnerable, it’s a time stamp of my life and it’s the moment for me to be fearless on that stage.”

Parx was already a successful teen actress before making it as a songwriter, doing a few TV shows and the movie ‘Hairspray’. “My background in acting has given me a tool that I use when I write for someone else — I can step in and say, ‘Okay, this is not about me.’ It can definitely be like therapy — A lot of artists tell me they’ve never discussed things with anybody else. And I think there are certain psychological factors that songwriters have to think of, even something as small as saying ‘me’ or ‘we’ in a lyric. And it’s a matter of saying what makes sense for this person. One question I like to ask artists is, what do you want from this song? Do you want the song to give you closure, or do you want it to go to Number One’?”

And if they choose the latter? “I would look at the artist and say, ‘What kind of fanbase do you have, and what would be the song that would be ideal for that kind of person? And how are you going to do that uniquely enough to surpass everybody that’s in the same lane as you?’ It needs to be broad enough to be worldwide Number One, but also specific enough that it is you. And those are hard conversations to have, but I think my strength as a writer is that I can have them.”

Different artists, she says, have different needs. .For instance, she was called in to work on Janelle Monae’s breakthrough album “Dirty Computer” when it was well underway. “The label thought that someone with a different opinion, who hadn’t heard the songs before, would be great. So we ended up going in and starting fresh. I was able to lean on her and say, ‘What story are you telling here?’ I knew that she was interested in exploring the boundaries of genre and sexual fluidity, expanding the boundary of feminism. I could get behind that.”

One of her most successful collaborations was with longtime friend Ariana Grande. “She saw me in ‘Hairspray’ and we’d seen each other on various Nickelodeon sets when she was 13. So it’s good that we were friends, because that helps to make the writing process a safe space. She’s working on a project now, doing most of the writing herself, and that’s fine. If you’ve done your job as a collaborator, you’ve made the other person better.”

They could ask James anything while the record played in the background. Through those conversations and repeated listens, James discovered a narrative arc to the album.

“I realized that the ‘Neighbor’ record, as it is sequenced, is a metaphor for life,” he told the Herald. “It starts with ‘Take Me Alive,’ which is this childish relationship where someone is saying, ‘If this doesn’t work out, I can’t go on anymore.’ Then there’s this maturity that grows throughout the record.”

The arc wasn’t intentional. It also wasn’t accidental. Throughout Neighbor’s rise on the jam band scene, the group has found magic between intentional and accidental — the space where improvisation, playfulness, spontaneity, and organic growth thrive.

James, guitar wizard Lyle Brewer, bassist Dan Kelly and drummer Dean Johnston invented, reinvented, and perfected Neighbor live on stage. Five years ago, during a weekly residency at Somerville’s now-shuttered Thunder Road, the group found its chemistry by debuting songs it had written sometimes only hours earlier — Neighbor returns to its roots with a five-week, Tuesday-night residency at Pembroke’s Soundcheck Studios starting Feb. 20.

“Those Tuesdays at Thunder Road were where we became a band,” Brewer told the Herald. “We honed our skills. We wrote original music. It was such a special time.”

“We weren’t even named Neighbor when the residency started,” James added. “But it became a very community based thing and we grew as it went along. We’d rehearse at the venue before the show and play maybe three new tunes that we wrote that week.”

When the pandemic shut live music down, Neighbor kept the freewheeling vibes going with a new kind of residency. The band live streamed shows from Soundcheck Studios. Somehow, the group came out of the pandemic with an even larger, now national fan base — the band’s current itinerary has them crisscrossing the country from New England to Colorado to Tennessee.

“At every show there are two or three musical moments that rise above the rest, and 99 percent of the time, the things that I think went over really well are the things that the fans think went over really well,” Brewer said. “I think we are really fortunate to have a fan base that cares as much as they do. Them treating the shows as important makes us treat the shows as important.”

Brewer and James highlight different things that make Neighbor unique — Brewer insists James’ lyrics help them stand out; James says Brewer’s ability to lead them through wild improvisations is their hallmark. But both agree the fans fuel so much of what they do whether that’s making in-person and virtual residencies work or hanging out in a van and exploring the arc of an LP.

For tickets and details, visit neighbortunes.com

“I’ve been telling that in many ways, I’ve been writing this book since I was 9 years old,” the University of Southern California professor says. “Before I knew I was writing it, I was writing it.”

Boyd turned 9 in 1973, the year generally accepted as the birth of rap, and that’s where “Rapper’s Deluxe” begins, at an apartment party in the Bronx, where a DJ named Kool Herc showed a new way of spinning records.

The book ends, neatly, if not entirely by intent, 50 years later, when hip-hop culture had reached a peak far from its underground origins, a handful of its biggest stars playing the halftime show at the Super Bowl, a sign of the music’s dominance of the culture.

“The fact that coincides with the anniversary is one thing,” says Boyd, the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture, and a professor at its School of Cinema and Media Studies. “But I think it’s a story that unfolded from the ’70s to the present. I needed all that time in order to tell the story.

“Ten years ago, 20 years ago, this book couldn’t have been written,” he says. “It could only have been written now. One of the main reasons is because you needed all that time for this to kind of fully unfold and reveal itself. And that’s where I came along.

“As I was watching that Super Bowl halftime performance that I ended the book with – at SoFi Stadium with Dr. Dre and Snoop and Kendrick Lamar and that group – I realized, you know, this is it,” Boyd says. “This is the most mainstream stage in American culture. And, you know, 30 years ago, there’s no way possible that Dre and Snoop would have been performing at the halftime show of the Super Bowl.

“When you get to that Super Bowl stage, it’s a strong indication that you’ve reached the sort of center of mainstream society. And you can talk about things happening afterward, but the sort of larger point has been made.”

‘Root to the fruit’

“Rapper’s Deluxe” traces the evolution of rap music and hip-hop culture with chapters organized by decades, each packed with photos around Boyd’s essays on artists, trends, history and pop culture.

Its name is a play on “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 Sugar Hill Gang track that’s credited as the first rap single. But Boyd makes clear that while its success put rap on the radio and exposed its new sounds to listeners far from its birthplace in New York City, there was a whole lot more going on that decade behind the music.

“The point I was trying to make in that ’70s chapter was we’ve had examples of, if not rap specifically, hop-hop culture for a long time before a lot of people even knew it,” he says. “The seeds for what we would later call rap music were being planted. And if you use that metaphor, you know, you plant seeds, they don’t grow right away. That takes time.

“So listening to Muhammad Ali rhyme before his fights to me is part of what would later be identified as hop-hop culture,” Boyd says. “Listening to Richard Pryor on his comedy albums. Watching blaxploitation movies.”

“Rapper’s Delight” is a historical marker, he says. But the groundwork was laid in communities where Ali and Pryor and “Super Fly” and “Shaft” were popular, neighborhoods where Black veterans came home changed by Vietnam and Black Panthers and activists such as Angela Davis had support.

“I like to say we go from the root to the fruit,” Boyd says. “The seeds were planted and eventually those seeds bore fruit. All of those things were happening in the ’70s. Later, they’re very visible in hip-hop.

“I start the ’70s chapter with that story about the week that DJ Kool Herc threw the sort of legendary party,” he says. “The No. 1 movie at the box office that week is Pam Grier’s film ‘Coffy.’

“Twenty years later, there’s a rapper named Foxy Brown” – after the Pam Grier title role in the 1974 blaxploitation film of the same name – “and Quentin Tarantino is making ‘Jackie Brown’ starring Pam Grier,” Boyd says. “There’s a connection there that nobody anticipated in 1973, but you can see the influence of that by the time you get to the ’90s.”

‘Suburbs to the hood’

Rap, like many musical genres before it, experienced growing pains on its way to its worldwide popularity. But throughout the ’80s, Boyd writes that a combination of factors, including the rise of hip-hop-themed movies, fashion, and art, as well as rap’s appeal to celebrities and sports figures and their fans, helped it burst into the mainstream in unprecedented ways.

Unlike earlier Black American music such as blues and jazz, rap had freer access, and an unlikely ally, as it reached young listeners in every corner of the country, Boyd says. Rap emerged from the Black community, and soon spread far and wide.

“Historically, there were barriers to the expression of some of those older genres of music,” he says. “In spite of that, they still found loyal White fan bases who would be influenced by that music. But it didn’t have the same sort of free form of expression and access that would be available for rap music by the 1980s.

“Which is why I talk about the role of MTV,” Boyd says. “Which, of course, originally was hostile in terms of playing Black music, but by the late ’80s, ‘Yo MTV Raps,’ a hugely popular show, is what allows the music to spread throughout the country, whether or not the people listening to it had any direct connection to that experience or not.

“It didn’t matter,” he says. “Everybody was watching MTV whether you’re in an urban area, a suburban area, a rural area. If you had cable and you got MTV you could look at ‘Yo MTV Raps.’”

Rap music, like many genres before it, was a way for younger listeners to rebel against the tastes of their parents’ generation, he writes. Where early rock and roll saw White performers co-opt Black artists and find huge commercial success, rap was largely impervious to that kind of appropriation.

“When you get to rap music, so much of this is about lived experience,” Boyd says. “So as the music becomes more personal, a White person can’t come and claim that this is their own. They can listen to it and appreciate it and celebrate it. But it becomes kind of a minstrel show if you’re saying this is my life.”

A White rap star such as Eminem succeeded because he didn’t appropriate hip-hop culture as much as become part of it, something recognized by his early mentor Dr. Dre, which gave him credibility that a rapper like Vanilla Ice couldn’t touch.

“Eminem is the anti-Vanilla Ice,” Boyd says. “I think it speaks to just how things changed from, say, the time that Elvis was popular as someone appropriating Black music, and Eminem, who came along and said, ‘I want to be part of this culture. I want to be in it.’

“So when Jay-Z says we didn’t crossover, I think it’s important,” he says, referencing the line “I ain’t crossover I brought the suburbs to the hood’ in 1999’s “Come and Get Me.” “When you think about the ’80s, it’s the era of crossover, from Michael Jackson, Prince and Tina Turner. Whitney Houston.

“Hip-hop didn’t cross over. Instead, people outside the culture came to hip-hop.”

‘Evolution of the culture’

The latter chapters in “Rapper’s Deluxe” move through the ways in which rap and hip-hop sent deeper roots into every aspect of American and global culture.

The ’90s trace the rise of influential artists such as NWA, Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, and the Notorious B.I.G., as well as chapters on offshoots of rap such as the Dirty South and trap music. It looks at artists such as Outkast and Three 6 Mafia – the latter of whom became the first rappers to win an Oscar – T.I. and Lil Wayne.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the book doesn’t focus so much on artists as impacts: the election of President Barack Obama, the shift of rappers into other businesses such as fashion and art, and finally, that landmark Super Bowl halftime show, produced for the NFL by Jay-Z’s entertainment company.

“I was not trying to write hip-hop’s greatest hits,” Boyd says. “I was not trying to write, ‘These are the new important rappers.’ Honestly, to me, once Obama gets elected? I mean, you want to talk about cultural influence? What is a better demonstration of hip-hop’s influence than the election of a president?”

In the final chapter, Boyd says he was more interested in spotlighting the unexpected ways in which rap and hip-hop have fully joined the larger culture.

“So, you know, the National Symphony with Nas performing ‘Illmatic,’” he says. “Or Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize. Or Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’ art collection, the Dean Collection. Jay-Z’s connection to Basquiat and more broadly contemporary art. “Rappers talking about their art collection the way they used to talk about their cars and their sneakers? To me that’s major.

“People can decide for themselves who the hot new artists are; we’ve covered that,” Boyd says. “That’s almost not as significant. What is significant, however, we can talk about hip-hop going into these previously elite White cultural spaces, and dominating in those spaces, because it speaks to the full evolution of the culture in ways that maybe pointing out who the hot new rapper is doesn’t address as significantly.”

Todd Boyd in conversation with Chuck D

What: Author Todd Boyd will be in conversation with Chuck D of Public Enemy, as well as signing his new book, “Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made The World.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7

Where: Oculus Hall at The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

How much: Tickets are with reservation.

For more: See Thebroad.org/events for information and to reserve tickets

“I said I’d like to write about Miles Davis,” Troupe, 83, says on a recent phone call from his home in New York City. “Because he’s from East St. Louis, I’m from St. Louis. He played in my cousin’s band in St. Louis. So I would really like to write about him.”

Soon after, Troupe found himself on the legendary jazz trumpeter’s doorstep.

“When I walked in, he looked at me and he said in that voice he had, ‘You know, you’re a strange-looking (fellow). Boy, you’re weird,’” Troupe says in an excellent impression of Davis’s hoarse whisper.

“I said, ‘You’re weird-lookin’ yourself.’ I told him just like that.

“He said … ‘Man, you better shut up. I’ll hit you in your mouth,’” Troupe continues. “And I said, ‘Miles, you look at yourself recently? I’m 6’2″ I weigh 200 pounds. You’re 5’7″, 5’8” and you weigh 150 pounds. I’ll hurt you. I’ll hit you in your mouth; you’ll never play again.’

“I said, ‘Don’t threaten me, man. I’m from St. Louis, you’re from East St. Louis. You should know better.’”

(For the record, this is neither standard nor recommended interview practice in journalism.)

Once Davis learned that Troupe was the cousin of a former bandmate, all was well, Troupe says. “He kind of smiled and said, ‘Don’t sit there like a knot on a log. Ask me a question.’

“I had all these questions mapped out, including about his style and his clothes,” Troupe says. “He liked my shoes. I had these great shoes. He said, ‘Them’s some great shoes you got on.’ And that’s how it started, just like that.”

Troupe asked a lot of questions, first for an in-depth, two-part Spin article, and a few years later, as co-writer of “Miles: The Autobiography,” which won an American Book Award after its publication in 1989.

Now Troupe is taking a break from work on a memoir to return to Southern California as one of three 2024 recipients of the LA Review of Books – UCR Department of Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award.

“I’ve had many awards in the past, but this has made me really happy because it’s a lifetime achievement award,” Troupe says. “I used to live in California, so coming back out there, it’s very good.”

He and fellow honorees Dave Eggers and Rigoberto González will be honored during the 47th annual UCR Writers Week Festival, held Feb. 10 and Feb. 12-16 at the University of California, Riverside.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Troupe talked about how he embraced poetry while playing basketball in France, befriended Miles Davis, joined the Watts Writers Workshop in the ’60s, and more.

Q: I want to ask you about when you started taking your first steps toward becoming a writer.

A: My mother always had books around the house because she was a big reader. My father was a great baseball player, so I wasn’t thinking about being a writer at first because I was an athlete. I went to Grambling College on an athletic scholarship, a baseball and basketball scholarship. Then I went into the Army and played basketball in Europe on the Army team until I wrecked my knee.

I started writing poems. I went to France and I met this young woman over there. She was at the Sorbonne. Then I started to write these poems. I don’t know why I started, because I never thought about writing poetry. It just happened. It’s hard to explain.

Q: What kinds of poems were they? Do you remember the first poems you wrote?

A: Somehow when I was over there I got a book by Pablo Neruda and (also Federico) Garcia Lorca. They really, really influenced me a lot. I didn’t know anything about Chile and I had been to Spain when I was playing basketball. I just loved the way the Latin poets wrote, and so I started to imitate them when I was over there. And T.S. Eliot because I found out he was from St. Louis.

Q: Talk about the influence of music, jazz and Miles Davis in particular, had on you as a writer.

A: My mother really liked jazz. She was married to a musician and she always had music around the house. And so I started listening to Miles Davis’s music, and I really loved the music. I had no idea he was going to influence me as a poet. I also didn’t know I was ever going to meet him. I just loved his music,

At one time, I wanted to learn how to play trumpet. My brother was a drummer, played drums for Lou Rawls. So I was in kind of a musical situation, being with my brother and listening to music all the time.

Q: Let’s jump ahead to the late ’80s: How did the Spin magazine articles lead you to writing ‘Miles: The Autobiography’?

A: You know, he picked me. Everybody thought he’s gonna pick Leonard Feather or some other jazz writer he knew. So when they asked him who he wanted to write his book, he said, ‘I want Quincy Troupe.’ They said, ‘But he’s a poet.’ He said, ‘You didn’t ask me what he was. You asked me who I wanted to write my book,’ and the guy says, ‘Oh, yeah, OK, OK.

I was sitting in my apartment, phone call came in. I can’t think of his name now, because I’m getting older and I’m forgetting names. He said, ‘Miles Davis just gave you first’ – he was from Simon & Schuster, the editor – ‘first right of refusal to write his life story.’

I said, ‘Are you kidding? He asked for me to write his life story?’ and they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Of course, I’d like to write his life story. How much money is it, man? I have kids.’ And he laughed, he laughed. He said, ‘That’s funny.’ I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’

Q: That must have taken a lot of conversations to get all the stories for the autobiography.

A: At the time, Miles was living in Malibu. So I flew out there, got a car, and drove out to his house. He was sitting – I’ll never forget it – he was sitting on his veranda, and his house was looking right at the ocean. His butler let me in and I walked out there. I remember when I walked in, he looked at me, and he says, ‘Yeah, yeah, I got you a gig, (mister). A real good gig.’

I said, ‘Yeah, well, thanks, man; thank you very much. He said, ‘Sit down, sit down. What you wanna know? I had all these questions ready. He said, ‘Why’d you ask me that?’ I said, ‘Because you picked me to write the book. I gotta know all this stuff.’ And he just laughed.

And so we just hit off. I guess it was that I was from St. Louis and he was from East St. Louis and he trusted me. He liked the way I wrote, and I didn’t take anything off of him. As much as I loved him, I wasn’t gonna let him mess me over. He knew that I was gonna tell him the truth about everything.

Q: I want to ask about the Watts Writers Workshop, which must have been a fertile creative community of writers in L.A. in the ’60s. 

A: Well, it was a remarkable thing. When I moved to California, I was with this lady from St. Louis. We broke up at a certain point and I joined the Watts Writers Workshop because I wanted to get in with a group of writers. And they all lived out there in this house called the House of Respect. When I went out there, there was Ojenke, Cleveland Sims, and this woman I was going with at the time, Pamela Donegan.

So I asked Ojenke, ‘You think I can move out here,’ and they said, ‘Yeah.’ I lived in this one room, right behind the driveway. Cleveland Sims had the biggest room. Ojenke had a room, but he also stayed with his parents. Leumas Sirrah came by, whose name was Samuel Harris spelled backwards. He would sit up on the roof and write poems and I just thought he was the weirdest person I had ever seen.

It was really interesting to walk around Watts and run into everybody there and just hang out. Then we would have these conversations at night, and everybody would critique everybody’s poetry. My friend Cleveland Sims, I read this poem, and he said, ‘Let me see it.’ So I gave it to him, and Cleveland – he was a tall, dark guy, crazy as hell – he threw my poem out the window.

I said, ‘What? What did you do?’ He said, ‘This is a ridiculous poem.’ And I jumped up. I said, ‘Man, hey, don’t mess me with like that.’ He said, ‘What are you gonna do?’ I said, ‘We can go down, I don’t be taking no stupid stuff of nobody, man.’ He just laughed. He said, ‘Aw, sit down, man, we don’t have to fight over the thing.’ I said, “I wasn’t thinking about fighting. I was thinking about hurting you, man.’

He just laughed. Ojenke started laughing, everybody was laughing.