From Waxahatchee and Florry in the US to Brown Horse and Little Grandad in the UK, a wave of young songwriters are reinvigorating the subgenre’s earnest emotion and twang
‘It’s so important to talk about this before it’s gone,” says Francie Medosch, singer, guitarist and songwriter of the band Florry, “because it’s really a flash in the pan.” The flash she means is a brief moment where it feels as though on both sides of the Atlantic, scores of exciting indie bands are playing something that, without slavish copying, has plainly drawn inspiration from alt-country, the music that emerged in the US in the late 1980s and early 90s, when former punks such as Uncle Tupelo – featuring future Wilco co-founder Jeff Tweedy – and the Bottle Rockets picked up picked up fiddles, banjos and acoustic guitars.
In the UK, Brown Horse and Vegas Water Taxi have the weeping pedal steel, in the former case tied to something very heartland and in the latter paired with a very English indie sensibility. Westside Cowboy and Little Grandad both borrow from the spiky rootsiness of early Wilco, while Wyatt play slacker country rock. Over in the US, where there’s always going to be more of this sort of thing, you can point to the current indie-rock holy trinity of Waxahatchee, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, plus Florry, Ratboys, Thomas Dollbaum, Fust, SG Goodman, Lily Seabird, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band and more.
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© Photograph: Sonja Horsman/Sonja Horsman / The Guardian
© Photograph: Sonja Horsman/Sonja Horsman / The Guardian
© Photograph: Sonja Horsman/Sonja Horsman / The Guardian
He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond
There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.
“To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.
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© Photograph: Courtesy of Mary Austin
© Photograph: Courtesy of Mary Austin
© Photograph: Courtesy of Mary Austin
A Las Vegas jury on Monday found Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis guilty in the 1996 murder of the hip-hop icon
Thirty years after the killing of Tupac Shakur, conspiracy theories and rumors about the perpetrator’s identity, one man has now been held criminally responsible for the rap icon’s death.
A Las Vegas jury convicted Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a 63-year-old former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, of murder for his role in the drive-by shooting. During the two-week long trial, prosecutors argued Davis was the “on-the-ground, on-site commander of the effort to kill Tupac” and had sought revenge after the musician was involved in a fight with his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.
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© Photograph: Eli Reed/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Eli Reed/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Eli Reed/Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock
Las Vegas jury returns verdict against ex-South Side Compton Crips gang leader in killing of US rap legend
A Las Vegas jury has found former South Side Compton Crips gang leader Duane Keith Davis guilty of the murder of Tupac Shakur, bringing the case to a close nearly 30 years after the famous rapper was gunned down.
The jury took about three hours to reach a guilty verdict in a case that relied heavily on multiple confessions from Davis himself, including his description of the killing in the 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend.
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© Photograph: Caroline Brehman/Pool Reuters/AP
© Photograph: Caroline Brehman/Pool Reuters/AP
© Photograph: Caroline Brehman/Pool Reuters/AP
Parton was born 30 miles from college campus
The Tennessee Volunteers will be honoring Dolly Parton with a helmet sticker this season, the college football team’s head coach, Josh Heupel, announced on Monday.
Parton, a Tennessee native, died last week at the age of 80 from cancer.
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© Photograph: Wade Payne/AP
© Photograph: Wade Payne/AP
© Photograph: Wade Payne/AP
© Amanda Hakan for The New York Times
Parton was born 30 miles from college campus
The Tennessee Volunteers will be honoring Dolly Parton with a helmet sticker this season, the college football team’s head coach, Josh Heupel, announced on Monday.
Parton, a Tennessee native, died last week at the age of 80 from cancer.
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© Photograph: Wade Payne/AP
© Photograph: Wade Payne/AP
© Photograph: Wade Payne/AP
O2 Arena, London
The polymath rapper’s stage show, which also features SWAT teams and a warship, is truly bravura stuff – but you can’t help feeling this is an artist at a creative crossroads
A$AP Rocky dangles precariously from a helicopter, while beneath him black-clad SWAT officers brawl with his white-masked followers. This isn’t some cliffhanger setpiece from the rapper/actor’s latest film – it’s just how shows on his Don’t Be Dumb tour open. It’s a big production: there are further prop helicopters, including a smaller one up in the rafters from which he also raps (a reference to his single Helicopter), while the stage recreates the top deck of a naval warship, for reasons that never become clear.
The bizarre set underscores a sense of a man in career transition, unsure who he is any more. In the eight years since his last album, this survivor of homelessness and incarceration became a father, three times, with Rihanna; he’s pivoting towards movies – good ones – and co-chairs the Met Gala. His new record sought to redefine him as an artist, juggling more of his trademark pugilistic rap with ambitious stylistic experiments and unexpected collaborations (Damon Albarn! Danny Elfman!).
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© Photograph: Thepinkrosephotographyltd/Laura Rose
© Photograph: Thepinkrosephotographyltd/Laura Rose
© Photograph: Thepinkrosephotographyltd/Laura Rose
The queen of country was interred next to her late husband in an intimate ceremony attended by close family
Dolly Parton was laid to rest in a private ceremony in Nashville on Friday, her family has confirmed.
The queen of country music, who died aged 80 on 25 August “after bravely facing a brief battle with cancer”, was interred at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum alongside her husband of 60 years, Carl Thomas.
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© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
The queen of country was interred next to her late husband in an intimate ceremony attended by close family
Dolly Parton was laid to rest in a private ceremony in Nashville on Friday, her family has confirmed.
The queen of country music, who died aged 80 on 25 August “after bravely facing a brief battle with cancer”, was interred at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum alongside her husband of 60 years Carl Thomas.
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© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
The performances often gave me goose bumps, but I also got to observe the highs and lows of audience behaviour
Read more in this series here
I was 24, had just moved into a share house I couldn’t afford, and my job as a nanny was proving less than ideal. I’d graduated from my music degree a few years prior and was floating along, feeling a little lost.
A friend had told me to apply to become a front-of-house staff member at Australia’s busiest performing arts centre, Arts Centre Melbourne. It was a rare opportunity, as people rarely quit. To be surrounded by art again sounded like a dream.
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© Composite: Getty Images / Lauren David
© Composite: Getty Images / Lauren David
© Composite: Getty Images / Lauren David
Former gang leader Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, 63, is accused of ordering the killing of the hip-hop star in 1996
A Las Vegas jury is now deliberating after hearing closing arguments in the trial of the South Side Compton Crips gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is accused of ordering the murder of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur.
Davis, 63, is accused of leading a group of men to kill Shakur in retaliation for the beating of his nephew, though not of pulling the trigger himself. Davis has pleaded not guilty.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
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© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
AI company faces multibillion dollar lawsuit over misuse of copyrighted songs to train Claude models
All AI wants for Christmas is a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for it, according to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind the Claude chatbot.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, music publishers who manage the copyright of songs on behalf of songwriters and composers, are seeking damages for alleged misuse of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works by Anthropic.
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© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for MC
© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for MC
© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for MC
Beldina Odenyo alchemised the pain of exile, loss and racism into music as Heir of the Cursed before her death in 2021, as this attentive tribute explores
Instead of an artist in a booth, a lone amplifier plays the music of singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo for a cluster of microphones to pick up during the posthumous recording of her debut album. It is a haunting encapsulation of the absence and presence at the heart of Louise Lockwood’s documentary, which makes a commendably thorough exploration of the mental illness that led to Odenyo killing herself in November 2021, and its roots: exile, loss and racism.
Performing under the moniker Heir of the Cursed, a translation of the Tetela name of assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, Odenyo was on the verge of bigger recognition at the end of 2021 after a successful performance at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. But hemmed in by successive Covid lockdowns, the 31-year-old is clearly unwell in a discomfiting backstage interview. Squirming, monosyllabic, she seems to be regressing to the non-verbal state of shock in which she arrived in Dumfriesshire from Kenya as a young child.
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© Photograph: Euan Robertson
© Photograph: Euan Robertson
© Photograph: Euan Robertson
© Will Crooks for The New York Times
Quite a few music artists are in their flop era right now. Think about it: Drake hasn’t been the same since Kendrick Lamar knocked him out in their 2024 beef. Katy Perry once dominated the charts, but her recent releases haven’t been fireworks. And there was once a point where it felt impossible to step foot in a workout class without hearing Lizzo, but her latest album fizzled out.
Some examples, in other words, are obvious. But what does it really mean for a song to flop? According to Tom Breihan, executive editor at StereoGum and author of the book The Number Ones Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music, it’s all relative.
“There’s a million songs on Spotify that nobody will ever hear,” he told Vox. “Those songs are not necessarily flops because they did not necessarily come with expectations. When a major artist does not reach whatever benchmark they or their fans or their label expect for them, it can be embarrassing. People love to seize upon that embarrassment and take off running with it.”
Why do some songs flail while others succeed? And how does an artist bounce back from those unmet expectations? We find out that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Breihan, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Are the songs that flop bad? Is that why they’re flopping?
In some cases, yeah. You can definitely pick out a few and be like, “That wasn’t the one.”
A lot of it is just timing and luck. Sometimes an artist comes along at the exact right moment and builds up goodwill and puts out the right song for themselves. Sometimes they misread the room in sort of howlingly, clangingly obvious ways, and they end up not doing well.
It’s happened to plenty of great people. Plenty of stars have bounced back from having flops, but it does happen.
What are some really good songs that have flopped?
As an online indie music critic, my prototypical example is Emotion by Carly Rae Jepsen. She had had this gigantic global breakout smash with the song “Call Me Maybe.” The album that she put out after this is this brilliant, layered, excellent pop record that became, I would say, influential upon the idea that you could be a pop star who was a cult artist, like an indie rock band or an underground rapper. But it didn’t sell. It didn’t do numbers. So in its moment, it was a critically beloved flop.
How much of becoming a hit is about the music itself and how much of it is about virality and marketing?
Those things are so bound up with each other. A lot of the time, artists are making songs that are engineered to go viral, or they’re making songs that comment on their own public perceptions.
When someone like Lizzo comes along and puts out a record that doesn’t do well, it becomes a bigger story than just, “Oh, people weren’t feeling this song.” It becomes, “Oh, people don’t like this person,” or “This person has run out of goodwill.”
Like a Lizzo song: You hear her persona jumping through the speaker, whether the song does well or not. So the song and the artist become inextricable from each other. The song and the marketing become inextricable.
There is another example of an artist who has gone from really high highs to very low flops that I would love to get into, and that’s Katy Perry. I feel like we’ve come a long way from Left Shark at the Super Bowl. What happened there?
Katy Perry has had the career that pop stars used to have, where they have a crazy dominant stretch where they’re knocking out hit after hit after hit, and they’re unstoppable. Then everything kind of tails off over time. One album has five No. 1 hits. The next album has two No. 1 hits. The next album has no significant hits at all, but a couple top 10s.
She put out an album right at the beginning of the pandemic. You can say, “Well, that one didn’t do well, and that’s not her fault.” Then she spent a long time on American Idol as a judge; she spent a long time playing Las Vegas residencies. And then she was like, “That’s it. I’m quitting American Idol. I’m coming back. I’m being the pop star that you all want me to be.“
She made a bad album. She also reunited with Dr. Luke, who was the co-writer and producer of lots of her big hits but who, in the time since she stopped working with him, accusations were made. Kesha, who was friends with Katy Perry when she came up, was the person making those accusations. So there’s a lot for the internet to glom onto there.
“Especially now, a song can debut at No. 1 based on streams and conversation, and then it can disappear from the charts.”
That’s how a song goes from being a bad song to a notorious flop — when not only does the song not perform, it actually burns up a lot of the goodwill that this person has had.
What songs did everyone maybe expect to be huge, but then bombed?
It is possible for a song to be a No. 1 hit and still a flop. Especially now, a song can debut at No. 1 based on streams and conversation, and then it can disappear from the charts.
In 1996, Michael Jackson released “You Are Not Alone.” The song debuted at No. 1. It fell pretty quickly. The album didn’t do that well. The song ultimately is not remembered that well, and has really entered the notorious shadow zone over the years.
Are there examples of songs that critics hated initially, and then over time became classics?
So many. The songs that were hits and were universally regarded as irritating in their time have a great hit rate. People were annoyed by “MMMBop,” by Hansen, or “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls.
There were certainly critics who understood ABBA when they were popping off, but they were, I would say, widely regarded as a punchline. Now that is just an impeccable, beautiful, influential pop catalog.
A song like the Quad City DJ’s “”C’mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” was not a song the critics were really lining up to praise in the 1990s, but as a person who was a child then, I can tell you that song goes so hard and never stopped going hard.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about pop music success?
I think the biggest misconception is the idea that a label or a corporation can engineer a giant hit. They can observe trends. They can put their money into promotion. But you never know what people are going to actually grab onto and what they’re not.
There are things that they can do to create the impression that something is connecting, but you need to have real sustained success to have everybody be like, “Okay, no, this actually is huge.”
How do artists tend to respond if they’ve entered a flop era?
There’s a grand, beautiful history of artists who instead of trying the same thing over and over again, they become behind-the-scenes figures. They write songs for other people, or they produce, or they become managers.
Max Martin, who is now ahead of John Lennon, but behind Paul McCartney in terms of songwriters with No. 1 hits, he was the lead singer for a Swedish band in the ’80s that was trying to be Bon Jovi, and they never caught on. His band was called It’s Alive. You can look their songs up online. They’re not that great, but he wound up making all these incredible records with all these different people.
There’s a lot of that. That has happened many, many times throughout pop history. It’s certainly one way to deal with the flop problem.
© Will Crooks for The New York Times
The Black Bananas singer knows all the words to Rapper’s Delight and relates to AC/DC, but which song reminds her of a heartbreaking theft?
The first song I fell in love with
Van Halen’s Runnin’ With the Devil. I was five or six and I went to visit my cousin Tommy who was much older. He was on a hockey team and we went to see them practise before the game and they had Runnin’ With the Devil on really loud. I was like: “Wait, what’s this?!”
The song I do at karaoke
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC. Me and Brian Johnson – my voice has that thing, you know?
© Photograph: Bunny Biskit
© Photograph: Bunny Biskit
© Photograph: Bunny Biskit
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