The artist’s second surprise album of the year arrives at a time when we are starved for companionship and peace.

A lot of us who write about music talk about how a song or album saved our lives at one point or another. Eric Vogel understood the idea literally, as a debt he’d spend the rest of his life repaying.

The singer-songwriter believes that we are deeply flawed, impermanent creatures who can sometimes do extraordinary things.

“Morning Glory on the Vine”—a collection of drawings and watercolors that are paired with handwritten lyrics and bits of poetry—feels like an extension of Mitchell’s already considerable reach.

For two decades, the band has written music about the kind of sadness that feels quotidian and incremental—the slow accumulation of ordinary losses.

Her new album, “Punisher,” was crafted with foresight and intention, but the absurdity of the world in which it’s being released requires a certain amount of disengagement.

Background music was once relegated to elevators and waiting rooms. Now the groundless consumption of music has become omnipresent.

A conversation about music, politics, the songwriter’s new memoir, and what you learn about America from being on the road.

The writer and farmer on local knowledge, embracing limits, and the exploitation of rural America.

The allegations of Adams’s abusive behavior are a reminder that the music industry must reckon not only with the alpha abusers but also with the odious web of enablers that surrounds them.

Twenty-six years into his career, the musician visits the Los Angeles of his youth and says goodbye to the past.

The singer-songwriter talks about growing up in the South, trusting your teen-age self, getting divorced and getting exhausted, and the search for a home.

The singer-songwriter understood the richness and cruelty of the modern world.

The singer-songwriter talks about getting older, reaching into the past for her new record, and her home town of Chicago.

“The Anthology of American Folk Music” is probably the most significant example of how a particular collector’s preferences can shape a canon.

An inventor of punk rock on his long career, the future, and swimming in Miami.

“The Tortured Poets Department” has moments of tenderness. But it suffers from being too long and too familiar.

“It’s a Shame About Ray,” which is being reissued this month, may be a perfect record—an exquisitely self-contained work of idleness, hunger, and pathos.

The two artists talk about overlooked recordings, their new album of cover songs, and paying tribute to their late friend David Berman.

It’s a gruesome, crowded, marauding album that feels unusually attuned to its moment, Amanda Petrusich writes.

Smith’s performance of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” to orchestral accompaniment, moved some audience members to tears.

I like to think that Walker, who was perhaps our most prescient artist, was just making a series of increasingly absurd jokes about the hellishness of existence.

For decades, he flung himself around as though he were made of rubber. He was beloved and admired for his songwriting, his rotten teeth, and his tendency toward insubordination.

“Both Directions at Once” offered both new music from a true American visionary—who was also a gentle, elegant, and searching man—and a much-needed summer lift.

As record stores close and streaming algorithms dominate, the identities that music fandom supplies are in flux.

The singer, who died on Monday, was tuned in to the blank spaces between our catastrophes and triumphs, when we are desperately trying to sort out what comes next.

Swift was an early adopter of the faux-intimacy afforded by social media, and she has mastered, if not pioneered, its weird, chummy cadences—even when performing a stadium show.

The singer and songwriter, who died on Tuesday of complications from COVID-19, sang so often and so generously about death that it almost feels as if he were preëmptively reassuring his fans.

On “Sleep Well Beast,” the band seems to be reckoning with how inert and immovable feelings of regret and longing are.

Blaine, who passed away this week, is so peerless, so unquestionably essential to the past half century of American popular music, that it almost feels as though his face should be on currency.

After my husband died unexpectedly this summer, I found comfort in Cooper’s podcast about death and loss, “All There Is.”

The idea that any media organization could be effectively bullied into shifting its mission from journalistic to promotional is unnerving.

From 2020: At eighty-seven, the musician knows what it’s like to lose a partner, your house, all your money, those big dreams.

Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records.

On the road with the band in its forty-first year.

The singer-songwriter discusses his new album with the theme of climate change, his friendship with Rick Rubin, and recording melodies on his flip phone.

The singer-songwriter discusses her new album “I Inside the Old Year Dying,” the beauty of Elvis Presley’s voice, and the connections between poetry and lyrics.

O’Riordan, who died on Monday, helped further the once-iffy-seeming idea that a woman could be both beautiful and ferocious.

Cornell was an instrumental figure in the grunge community of the early nineties, which has since been virtually annihilated by suicide and drug addiction.

To attend a Phish show is to be subsumed by a community and to carry that experience forth, indefinitely.

This weekend, the city of Takoma Park, Maryland, will host a festival dedicated to the idiosyncratic genre developed by Fahey.

By condensing Germany’s history into a parade of horrors, the hardcore band is lampooning the country’s delicate and complex relationship with its own past.

The seventeen-year-old is one of the first pop stars of a new epoch, in which the oft-repeated challenge of staying alive can only be counterbalanced by an interest in the absurd.

On her new album, “Little Oblivions,” it is sometimes hard to tell whether Baker is singing about drug use or love.

Six months after Prince’s death, his estate opened to the public. But without its owner it feels like a husk.

A company that once seemed untenable, if not immoral—all of this music, for free, and it’s legal?—is now mainstream. On Tuesday, it will go public.

Spence didn’t seem to think about his work in terms of genre, yet his playing refers to a number of musical conventions a listener can sense but not quite explicate.

On March 1st, Belafonte turns ninety. The release of a new anthology reiterates his standing as one of America’s most vital and insurrectionary folk singers.

Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who died recently, wrote pieces that were elegiac, but suffused with a sense of survival: we are broken, we are wounded, we carry on.

Erickson, of the 13th Floor Elevators, occupied strange air as a guitarist and lyricist, a kind of wild innocence that eschewed predictability and clichés.

At eighty-two, the folksinger has a new book of drawings and sleeps on a mattress in a tree.

Smith’s photographic work reflects her deep reverence for ordinary objects and the poetry they contain.

The band’s first album since 2013 is a handy summation of how daily life in New York has changed since the start of the year.

Berman sang with a chatty, knowing baritone, a deadpan intonation that always made you feel as if you were in on the joke.

In the film, Crosby presents himself as a complicated, intelligent figure certain of his attributes and shortcomings, making him a strikingly clear-eyed narrator of his own life.

His new double album is a powerful meditation on home and its comforts, a collection of stirring songs that suggest that family can be a kind of salvation.

One of the city’s finest poets played the last show of his farewell tour in the extraordinary neighborhood that bred and nurtured him, reminding us that our country has endured threats before, and...

Though 2018’s popular music felt, at times, like an apt reflection of a year in which communication turned fraught and unsteady, the charts proffered some moments of extraordinary ingenuity and verve.

The books we read as teen-agers—the ones that get inside us and rearrange things—are sacred, even when they’re plainly imperfect.

On her new album, “Big Time,” the musician transfigures harrowing grief—and an unexpected new love—into songs of survival.

“Remind Me Tomorrow” isn’t a redemption narrative, exactly, but it’s the first of the songwriter’s records to linger more on contentedness than on pain.

On her new album, the singer drolly assesses the inanities and the ecstasies of life on earth.

On her way to becoming a solo artist, the lead singer of Alabama Shakes experimented with genre and figured out living without shame.

Is the grimness of these places—in stark contrast to the idyllic pastures of more venerated and competitive programs—simply funny, or is it a reflection of how America esteems its artists?

Fess didn’t live to see his musical inventions fully revered and canonized. The restoration of the documentary “Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together” is a small boon against that sorrow.

Swift has turned inward, coming up with a record that feels right for the moment.

The legendary pianist, who recorded what’s widely considered one of the first rock-and-roll records, died this week, at the age of eighty-nine.

An inventor of punk rock on his long career, the future, and swimming in Miami.

Watching Peart play the drums gave a sense that he might possess several phantom limbs.

Campbell appeared courteous in an old-fashioned way, yet still vaguely mischievous, as if he might call you ma’am but would wink at you as you left the room.

Synchronizing his work to traffic and footsteps, the musician and composer translated the clamor of street life into song.

Smith’s performance of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” to orchestral accompaniment, moved some audience members to tears.

Embracing the work of the photographer, who died on Monday, at age ninety-four, meant that you, too, could abide a certain amount of ambiguity.