song

When an author decides to tackle the story of a popular and important band like Talking Heads, the contours of which are familiar to many of its fans, the remit should be to illuminate the unexplored corners, the hidden details and anecdotes that provide a more full-bodied narrative and ultimately bring the band into sharper relief than ever before. Unfortunately, Jonathan Gould has almost completely ignored this directive in “Burning Down the House,” his new Talking Heads biography. This lumpy book, full of redundant stories and unnecessary detours that provide little illumination but plenty of needless bulk, lacks participation by the group’s members and is not the biography that this great and important band deserves.

As fans of the Heads already know, three of the four members met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-’70s, children of privilege with artsy aspirations and not much direction. David Byrne came from Baltimore by way of Scotland, a socially awkward dabbler in conceptualist experiments with photography and a veteran of various mediocre cover bands. It was drummer Chris Frantz who enlisted Byrne to join one such band; bassist Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s girlfriend and the daughter of a decorated Navy vice admiral, played bass. They were an anti-jam band and pro-avant; the first decent song they came up with was a shambolic version of what became “Psycho Killer,” with Weymouth contributing the French recitatif in the song’s bridge.

For the emergent Heads, timing was everything. When Frantz signed the lease on a spacious loft on Chrystie Street in East Village in October 1974, he had unwittingly found the practice space where the three musicians would hone their craft. The loft was also a short walk to CBGB, soon to become the proving ground of New York’s punk revolution and the Heads’ primary live performance venue at the start of their career.

In March 1975, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz attended a gig by Boston’s Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Kitchen, an arts collective space in Soho, and it showed them a new way to approach their music. Richman, “who dressed like a kid that everyone laughed at in high school,” influenced the band’s preppy visual template and Byrne’s clenched singing voice. Within a year of moving to the city, Talking Heads had found its look, sound and favored club. When Frantz bumped into Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks in a West Village Cafe, Frantz inquired about keyboardist Jerry Harrison; Brooks gave him Harrison’s number, Harrison joined the band and the classic Talking Heads lineup was complete.

What followed was a contract with Seymour Stein’s label Sire and the band’s collaboration with producer Brian Eno, beginning with its second album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” By the time the band released 1980’s groundbreaking “Remain in Light,” Eno’s role had expanded beyond his production duties. He was now writing songs with Byrne, which created friction within the band. When Byrne allegedly reneged on songwriting credits (the album listed “David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads,” rather than the individual band members), it created a rift that never healed, even as the band was selling millions of copies of its follow-up “Speaking in Tongues” and the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme concert film “Stop Making Sense.” The final act was recriminatory, as Byrne commanded an ever greater share of the spotlight while the other members quietly seethed. The band’s final album, “Naked,” was its weakest, and Talking Heads dissolved in 1991, after Byrne removed himself from the lineup to explore outside projects.

Author Jonathan Gould

(Richard Edelman)

Gould does a serviceable job of telling the Heads’ story in a book that arrives 50 years after the band’s first gig at CBGB. Curiously, for someone who has tasked himself with explaining Manhattan’s late ‘70s downtown renaissance, Gould regards many of the key players in that scene with derision bordering on contempt. Gould refers to Richard Hell, a prime architect of New York punk, as a mediocrity whose “singing, songwriting and bass playing remained as pedestrian as his poetry.” Patti Smith’s music “verged on a parody of beat poetry,” while the vastly influential Velvet Underground, a band that made New York punk possible, is hobbled by its “pretensions to hipness, irony and amorality.” Even Chris Frantz’s drumming is “exceptionally unimaginative.” Gould is also careless with his descriptors. Jonathan Richman’s band displays a “willful lack” of commercial instinct, the Heads assert a “willful conventionality” to their stage appearance, Johnny Ramone is a “willfully obnoxious” guitarist and so on.

It’s hard to fathom how a biographer intent on cracking the code of one of rock’s seminal bands can do so with so much contempt for the culture that spawned it. An inquiring fan might want to go to Will Hermes’ 2011 book “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” for a more nuanced and knowledgeable portrait of the creative ferment that made the Heads possible. As for a biography of Talking Heads, we are still left with a lacuna that Gould has unfortunately not filled.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

LONDON — Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters.

Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently.

The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated content” and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators.

Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an “industry-wide issue.”

It’s committed to “safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favor of training AI models,” CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release.

Deezer’s move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it.

According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview.

AI has many benefits but it also “creates a lot of questions” for the music industry, Lanternier told The Associated Press. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there’s an artist behind it but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said.

Music fraudsters “create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,” he said.

Musicians can’t upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can use a “self service” distribution company.

Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer. But the company said it’s “evident” that fraud is “the primary purpose” for these songs because it suspects that as many as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming “farms” or bots, instead of humans.

Any AI songs used for “stream manipulation” will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said.

AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its legality.

Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.

Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that are “confusingly similar” to original versions by artists it represents, including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Daddy Cool” by Boney M and Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”

Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month.

To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same generators used to create songs to analyze their output.

“We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex signal. There is lots of information in the song,” Lanternier said.

The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without subtle but recognizable patterns, which change constantly.

“So you have to update your tool every day,” Lanternier said. “So we keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we’re fighting AI with AI.”

Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the U.S., which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10 million.

Chan writes for the Associated Press.

Lou Christie, the singer and songwriter who set teen fans screaming in the 1960s with hits like “Lightnin’ Strikes” and “Two Faces Have I,” has died. He was 82.

Christie died at his home in Pittsburgh after a short illness, his family said Wednesday in an announcement on social media.

“He was cherished not only by his family and close friends, but also by countless fans whose lives he touched with his kindness and generosity, artistic and musical talent, humor and spirit. His absence leaves a profound void in all our hearts. He will be greatly missed, always remembered, and forever loved,” the statement read.

Christie was born Lugee Alfredo Giovanni Sacco on Feb. 19, 1943, in Glenwillard, Pa., and took on his stage name, courtesy of a local music producer, when he was a still a teen. Soon he would meet his decades-older songwriting collaborator Twyla Herbert, a classically trained but eccentric musician who died in 2009, and together they would write almost all of his songs and hundreds more for other artists.

In Pennsylvania, Christie recorded and released a single, “The Gypsy Cried,” that became a local hit in the Pittsburgh area. He moved to New York, got work as a backup singer and eventually wound up touring with Dick Clark’s Cavalcade of Stars, sitting on a bus with Diana Ross and other standouts.

“I was with Gene Pitney and Johnny Tillotson, the Supremes, Paul and Paula, Dick and Dee Dee, the Crystals, the Ronettes, Fabian, Frankie Avalon,” the singer told writer Gary James for ClassicBands.com. “To me, this was my graduating class and still is today.”

Christie’s fans screamed over his signature falsetto when “Two Faces Have I” made it to No. 6 on the Billboard 100 in 1963, the year he released his self-titled first album. He spent two years in the U.S. Army and upon his return released the single “Lightnin’ Strikes.” The song, off the 1965 album of the same name, hit No. 1 on that chart in 1966.

He stirred up a bit of scandal with the 1966 song “Rhapsody in Rain,” with lyrics that at the time were considered explicit: Baby the raindrops play for me / A lonely rhapsody ‘cause on our first date / We were makin’ out in the rain / And in this car our love went much too far / It was exciting as thunder / Tonight I wonder where you are” and “Baby, I’m parked outside your door / Remember makin’ love, makin’ love, we were makin’ love in the storm.” The tune topped out at No. 16 on the charts.

His array of album releases grew with “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” in 1969, “Paint America Love” in 1971, “Pledging My Love” in 1997 and more records over the years.

The life of a teen idol in the early 1960s was a mix of dismissal and adulation, according to peer Fabian Forte, who performed as Fabian and toured with Christie in rock ‘n’ roll revival shows in the 1980s.

“They laughed at us. They wouldn’t take us seriously as artists,” Forte told The Times in 1985, talking about music critics in the 1950s and early ‘60s. But, he added, “Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all bad. For a teen-age boy, you can imagine what it was like having all those girls drooling over you. That was heaven.”

The teen idols of that era faded with the British Invasion, but Christie didn’t fade with them.

“I hit the end of that whole era,” Christie told writer James for ClassicBands.com. “I’ve always been between the cracks of rock ‘n’ roll, I felt. The missing link. … We had the teenage idols. We had Frankie Avalon. We had Fabian. That thing was just about closing down when a lot of my records started hitting. … They all disappeared, but my records kept going through that English Invasion.”

In addition to releasing more music later in life, Christie would offer up his vocal talents to help raise money for causes including the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and a rock ‘n’ roll retirement home for artists from the ‘50s and ‘60s planned by the Starlight Starbright foundation.

And in those years after his No. 1 spotlight had dimmed, Christie still knew how to put smiles on fans’ faces, as evidenced after a performance at a festival at Magic Mountain in 1985.

The event began late on one of the hottest days of the year after its lineup and schedule had switched around repeatedly leading up to the concert and the promoter had gone missing. Some acts that concert-goers expected to see wound up not performing — but Christie was not one of them.

“I’m really glad the show turned out well,” Christie told The Times in 1985, lounging in his trailer after his set at the “Spirit of the ‘60s” festival. “I tell you, I was going crazy with this thing — on, off, on again, off again. I had to cancel some dates I had arranged for after this was canceled the first time. But” — and a big smile crossed his face — ”they got their show, all right. The baby boomers really dug it. Even people backstage enjoyed it.”

A representative for the singer did not immediately respond Thursday to The Times’ request for comment.

Sabrina Claudio is not the same person she was a year ago — much less eight years ago, when she first introduced herself with a shimmering neo-soul EP, titled “Confidently Lost.”

Now, having amassed millions of fans with sultry, golden-hour slow jams and trips down melancholy lane, she’s presenting her most earnest songwriting yet in her newest album, “Fall In Love With Her,” released June 9 on San Francisco indie label Empire.

“I think in the past couple years, people in my life that I love have helped me get out of my shell and shown me how important vulnerability is,” she says. “Now I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna tell y’all everything, how about that?”

For her fifth studio LP, Claudio steered her R&B sound into a less-traveled, alternative direction that showcases her deft pen and ethereal vocals in a novel guise. Her longtime producer, Ajay “Stint” Bhattacharyya, cited shoegaze bands like Cocteau Twins and Slowdive as influences that came up during recording sessions. For Claudio, wading into those uncharted waters became part of a larger shift in her career.

Until recently, the Cuban and Puerto Rican singer-songwriter — who in 2023, earned a Grammy for traditional R&B performance as a songwriter on Beyoncé’s slick “Renaissance” cut, “Plastic Off the Sofa” — preferred to toil in privacy, channeling her expression into songwriting more than social media. But this year, she’s inviting the outside world to experience her personality with a new interview series on YouTube titled “Fall In Love With…”

To hear her tell it, she’s eager for the effort to help fans and listeners see the person she is behind the music. “I hope that people can listen to [the album] knowing that, yes, [I’m singing about what] I experienced, but I just pray that they are able to interpret it and relate it to their own life however they possibly can,” she says.

Sabrina Claudio presents her most earnest songwriting yet in her newest album, released June 9.

(Baylee Kiesselbach)

Come July, she’ll embark on a U.S. tour with rappers Russ and Big Sean; soon after, she’ll make her acting debut in a short film directed by filmmaker and best friend Jazmin Garcia-Larracuente, who was inspired by early drafts of songs off “Fall In Love With Her” to write a script. “I’m very proud of myself,” Claudio says. “I think I killed it, and I’m excited for everybody to see it.”

In her latest interview with The Times, she spoke of the intimacy required in songwriting with others, the possibility of an all-Spanish EP and her approach to storytelling.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

After releasing your last album, 2022’s “Based on a Feeling,” you focused on writing for other artists. Is that usually how it goes between albums for you?
Typically [after] I finish an album, I always go through the phase [when] I need to take a break because creatively I’m worn out. I wouldn’t do anything, which actually only emphasized the lack of motivation to continue and make more music. But this time around, I wanted to remain creative, and the best way to do that was to get in rooms with other creatives to help them get into their world, rather than always having to focus on mine.

I thought it was going to be difficult for me, because I’m not a natural collaborator. Before I was very anti-having songwriters in my room. It was a whole ego thing for me … but I loved it so much that I ended up doing it for much longer than I was anticipating. I find so much inspiration being in rooms with artists for other projects.

On this album you worked on some of the tracks with a songwriter, Nasri Atweh. I’m curious if there was hesitation to share your own process with someone else?
There was a time in my life when I [felt] obligated to have writers in my room. My guard was up. It’s not because I don’t think that these songwriters were amazing, because they were. Some of my favorite songs I wrote with another person, like “Problem With You” off [my album] “Truth Is.” But for some reason, my brain would say if I didn’t do it 100%, then it’s not mine. And that’s so not the reality of making art.

With Nasri, he’s my manager’s brother. I met Nasri 10 years ago. I’m glad that it happened when it did. Being the songwriter in the room for other people put things into perspective, because I realized how important collaboration was. Nasri was able to eject things from me that I didn’t even know existed. I’m on a different wavelength now.

Working with a songwriter is like an intimate therapy session.
I’m an extremely private person. I think the past couple years, people in my life have helped me to get out of my shell and have shown me how important vulnerability is. I didn’t even want to expose myself, which is why I tend to write from experiences that I technically didn’t experience, or from conversations with others, or movies. It was a protective layer. But now I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna tell y’all everything, how about that? [laughs] And it’s worked out!

You’ve said that when it comes to songwriting, you usually let yourself be led by the music, then the lyrics. Can you tell me more about “One Word” and how that track came to be? It’s one of the most powerful songs on the album.
I wrote that during a heartbreak. I wanted to talk about an experience I had with a person I felt very deeply for, [who] essentially didn’t fight for me to stay. But it was the biggest act of love that he could have done for me.

I worked with my producer Stint, [who] I work with all the time, and Heavy Mellow. He was heavy on this project, no pun intended. I was venting,; I was really heartbroken. I was finding comfort in these men that I’ve known and trying to get their perspective on things.

Another song is “Worse Than Me,” which sounds completely different from the rest of the tracks. It’s a little more assertive and seductive, with trip-hop-inspired drums. How did that come to be?
Before I discovered the new sound [of] the album, I still was gravitating towards my typical R&B, neo-soul-type vibes. I was just trying to get back in the groove of Sabrina Claudio, quote-unquote, because I was just coming out of writing for everybody else. I was trying to tap back into my own world.

And I think I needed one sassy song. [laughs] That’s kind of what I’m known for: the sass, the crying, or the sexy. And I just felt like if I didn’t have the sexy, I at least needed to have the sassy.

This is the first time you’ve really worked with a more alternative sound — did you find yourself accessing parts of yourself that the traditional R&B sound didn’t?
Oh, absolutely! I love working with Stint and all of my producers because they have such a wide palette when it comes to music. Genres I never grew up listening to — all these sounds are new. It pulls different things out of me that I wouldn’t be able to get if it was my traditional R&B sound. And naturally, I’m always going to do that because that’s just how I am, but it was interesting to hear where my R&B and soul brain goes over these more alternative rock/indie vibes.

“My fans are able to see who I am as a person and how deeply I love, how loyal I am,” Claudio said of her interview series, “Fall in Love With…”

(Baylee Kiesselbach)

For example, “Detoxing” — I wrote that song with Nasri, but we didn’t have the outro. So I took it to Stint, and he pulled up all these references of bands [like Radiohead], and he was teaching me so much. And then he [said], “You know what, at the end I want to do something really big and really rock. I want to break it down. But then I want people to be shocked. I want you to belt, and I want you to say something, and I want you to purge, and I want you to take the concept of the song and really just yell it like you’re just trying to get rid of something.” I listened back, and I’m even shocked at some of the things that I was able to tap into. I don’t belt! [laughs] I didn’t even know I could do that!

You have the song “Mi Luz” on the album, which is the first time you’ve included a Spanish song in an LP. What made you feel this was the right time to finally do that?
First of all, I don’t understand why I’ve never added a Spanish record to any of my albums. I listen to a lot of Spanish music in my daily life, a lot of reggaetón. You’d be surprised, my music is so calm and emotional … and then I’m twerking in my car listening to reggaetón. [laughs] So I felt in the sense of wanting to evolve, I feel now’s the time. And the process is really interesting, because my brain doesn’t actually think in Spanish, especially when it comes to songwriting.

Any Spanish record [of mine] you’ve heard, I’ve done with Alejandra Alberti, who is also Cuban. She’s from Miami, she’s a Virgo, so we connected on all those things. I tell her what I want to say, and she just computes it in her brain and she translates it in a way that has taught me. “Mi Luz” [was] the first time I contributed lyrically in Spanish. And it was always something that I was afraid of doing, because I’m always afraid of sounding dumb. I don’t know why, but I have that fear. But I felt very comfortable, very safe with Ale.

Would you release an EP of Spanish tracks?
I think I would! If I have Ale, I think we could probably knock out an EP very quickly. I’d be down.

You said in your recent Genius video that you really want reciprocal love because there’s only so much self-love you can give yourself. Is there any difference in your work depending on how your personal life is going, or do you manage to block out the noise?
I get very consumed by whatever I’m most passionate about in the moment. When I’m talking to somebody or I’m dating somebody, I do have the tendency to revolve my world around whatever we’re building. So when I’m dealing with that, I do find that I put my career second. Because I crave love very badly — which is toxic for me — I’m willing to nurture.

I’m pretty confident in my career. It’s the one thing I have control over. Everything’s amazing, and I get to make music whenever I want. But I don’t necessarily have control over the relationship that I’m trying to build, so I get very consumed and I put that first. But I’m hoping that if I get into something else that’s much healthier and not destroying our mental health, then I can do both at the same time! I just have to find that person first.

You’ve acknowledged that you’re a private artist, but I really like what I’ve seen so far from your new interview series, “Fall In Love With…” Can you tell me how the idea of doing that came about?
I have to say I was anti-miniseries, but my manager, Alyce, told me in the beginning stages of [making] this album, “The music, as vulnerable as it is — nobody’s going to relate to it or feel the depth of it if they don’t know who you are as a human.” She said, “Nobody knows that you’re funny; nobody knows that you’re outgoing. You’re not this mysterious person that you think you are, and you need to show people that.”

So at first, it annoyed me, because I was like, ugh, not me having to do things online. [laughs] I think doing this type of content was uncomfortable for me. I said, “If you guys want me to do this, I don’t want to be doing 20 episodes. I want four episodes, and I want it to be with people I know and I love and I will be comfortable with.”

And it turned into “Fall In Love With…” and I just thought it was special. I love to give credit to the people who have loved me through every stage of my life. And in the midst of it, my fans are able to see who I am as a person and how deeply I love, how loyal I am. And that opened the door to just so many other things. I just became so much more open-minded.

On Saturday night, singer Nezza sang a Spanish version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” also known as “El Pendón Estrellado,” at Dodger Stadium, despite being told by an unnamed representative of the baseball organization that she sing it in English.

The 30-year-old pop singer, whose real name is Vanessa Hernández, uploaded the interaction on TikTok, where she proceeded to sing the Spanish version anyway. She captioned the video, “para mi gente [heart] I stand with you.”

In a tearful follow up TikTok video, she clarified that her decision to follow through with singing “El Pendón Estrellado” was in response to the ongoing immigration sweeps throughout Los Angeles

“I’ve sang the national anthem many times in my life but today out of all days, I could not,” Nezza said in the TikTok video.

The Dodgers did not issue a public comment on Nezza’s social media posts, but a team official said there were no consequences from the club regarding the performance and that Nezza would be welcome back at the stadium in the future.

“I just don’t understand how anyone can watch the videos that have been surfacing and still be on the wrong side of history,” Nezza told The Times.

Nezza’s performance has also sparked conversations about the origins of “El Pendón Estrellado,” resurfacing the legacy of a trailblazing Latina composer, Clotilde Arias.

“The lyrics and the story are the same,” said Nezza. “We’re still saying we’re proud to be American.”

In 1945, the U.S. State Department looked to commission a Spanish version of the national anthem, per the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who looked to strengthen political and business partnerships with Latin American countries amid World War II. His cultural efforts aligned with his 1933 Good Neighbor Policy, a Pan-Americanism objective that he implemented at the start of his first term to distance the U.S. from earlier decades of armed intervention.

Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” had already been translated to various languages by the time that President Roosevelt entered office, including two Spanish versions, no versions of the anthem were considered singable. In 1945, the Division of Cultural Cooperation within the Department of State, in collaboration with the Music Educators National Conference, invited submissions for the song in Spanish and Portuguese to promote American patriotism throughout Latin America.

Composer and musician Arias — who immigrated to New York in 1923 at the age of 22 from Iquitos, Peru — answered the call.

At the time, Arias had already established herself as a formidable copywriter for ad agencies, translating jingles and songs in Spanish for companies like Alka-Seltzer, Campbell Soup, Ford Motor Co., Coca-Cola (including the translation version of Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca-Cola”) and others.

She submitted “El Pendón Estrellado,” which included singable lyrics that conveyed the original patriotic essence of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was accepted as the only official translation of the national anthem allowed to be sung, according to the National Museum of American History.

However, Arias would die in 1959 at age 58, leaving the song’s existence publicly unknown until 2006, when Roger Arias II, her grandson, dug out drafts of the sheet music and drafts hidden in the garage.

The unexpected find caught the attention of Marvette Pérez, the late curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History who at the time was programming Latino exhibits like “!Azúcar!: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz.”

To honor Arias’ legacy, Pérez organized an exhibit in 2012 titled “Not Lost in Translation: The Life of Clotilde Arias,” featuring real documents and photographs of the songwriter. The exhibit also commissioned the first-ever recording of “El Pendón Estrellado,” sung by the a cappella ensemble Coral Cantigas under the musical direction of Diana Sáez. The DC-chamber choir also performed during the exhibit’s opening day, which Arias’ son, Roger Arias, age 82 at the time, came to see.

“I was there when she was writing it,” Roger Arias told NPR at the time. “She’d sing it in her own way to see if it fits, and she would say, ‘How does that sound, sonny?’ And I would say anything she did sounded good to me. So, yes, she struggled through it, but she made it work.”

For Nezza, Arias’ “El Pendón Estrellado” is not only a symbol of American pride, but also a living piece of forgotten Latino history.

“Latino people are a huge part of building this nation,” said Nezza. “I think [the song] shows how we are such an important piece to the story of America.”

Brian Wilson, the musical savant who scripted a defining Southern California soundtrack with the Beach Boys before being pulled down by despair and depression in full public view, has died. He was 82.

Wilson’s family announced his death Wednesday morning on Facebook. “We are at a loss for words right now,” the post said.

“Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize we are sharing our grief with the world,” said the statement, which was also shared on Instagram and the musician’s website.

The statement didn’t reveal a cause of death. Wilson died more than a year after it was revealed he was diagnosed with dementia and placed under a conservatorship in May 2024. For decades, Wilson battled mental health issues and drug addiction.

“The world mourns a genius today, and we grieve for the loss of our cousin, our friend, and our partner in a great musical adventure,” the Beach Boys said in a statement on Wednesday. “Brian Wilson wasn’t just the heart of The Beach Boys — he was the soul of our sound. The melodies he dreamed up and the emotions he poured into every note changed the course of music forever. “

The group added: “Together, we gave the world the American dream of optimism, joy, and a sense of freedom — music that made people feel good, made them believe in summer and endless possibilities. We are heartbroken by his passing.”

Elton John, the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, Mick Fleetwood and Nancy Sinatra were among the artists who remembered Wilson on social media. Universal Music Group chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge and California Gov. Gavin Newsom also paid tribute to Wilson and his contributions to music.

“Wilson fundamentally changed modern music, helping make the Beach Boys not only the defining American band of their era, but also the California band to this day,” Newsom said in a statement. “He captured the mystique and magic of California, carrying it around the world and across generations.”

Roundly regarded as a genius in the music studio, Wilson wrote more than three dozen Top 40 hits, bright summertime singalongs that were radio candy in the early 1960s, anthems to the surf, sun and souped-up cars.

In an era when rock groups were typically force-fed material written by established musicians and seasoned songwriters, Wilson broke the mold by writing, arranging and producing a stream of hits that seemed to flow effortlessly from the studio.

Riding the crest of peppy, radio-friendly songs like “Surfer Girl,” “California Girls” and “Don’t Worry Baby,” Capital Records gave Wilson almost unchecked control over the group’s output. The label came to hold Wilson in such high regard that it even allowed him to record where he wished rather than use the cavernous Capitol studios in Hollywood that the Beach Boy leader felt were suitable only for orchestras.

“There are points where he did 37 takes of the same song,” said William McKeen, who taught a rock ‘n’ roll history course at the University of Florida. “One track will be someone singing ‘doo, doo, doo’ and the next will be ‘da, da, da.’ Then you hear them all together and, my God, it’s a complex piece of music.

“And he heard it all along.”

In many ways, the studio became Wilson’s primary instrument, just as it had been Phil Spector’s. As his confidence grew, Wilson’s compositions became more majestic and complex as he pieced together a far-reaching catalog of music while his bandmates toured the world without him — just as he preferred.

When the group returned from a tour in Asia in 1966, they discovered that Wilson had created an entire album during their absence. He had written the songs — many with guest lyricist Tony Asher, used the highly regarded Wrecking Crew session musicians to record with him and regarded the product as essentially a solo album. All his bandmates needed to do, he explained, was add their voices.

Brian Wilson, second to right, performs with the Beach Boys in California circa 1964.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

The songs on “Pet Sounds” were achingly beautiful and introspective. Some were melancholy, wistful, and brimming with nostalgia. Gone were the waves, the sunshine and the blond-haired girls that populated his earlier work. They were replaced with interlocking songs that seemed to form a single piece of music.

His bandmates were dumbstruck. Mike Love, his cousin and lead singer of the group, told him the album would have been better had he had a bigger hand in its creation. “Stop f— with the formula,” he reportedly snapped. Other band members agreed that the songs seemed foreign compared with surefire crowd pleasers like “Surfin’ U.S.A” and “Dance, Dance, Dance.” But they relented, and the album was released.

Love, in a lengthy 2012 L.A. Times op-ed about his brittle relationship with Wilson, told the story far differently, however. He said he was an early champion of the album, wrote some of the songs, came up with the title and helped convince Capitol to get behind the record when the label dragged its feet.

Though “Pet Sounds” was the first Beach Boys recording not to go gold — at least not immediately — it was a virtual narcotic to critics and admirers. Paul McCartney said it was “the classic of the century” and, as the story goes, rallied the rest of the Beatles to record “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in response. Classical composer Leonard Bernstein declared Wilson a genius and one of America’s “most important musicians.”

As the years passed, the album became a treasured gem, saluted as one of the finest of the rock era and preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. Fifty years after it was released, it was still ranked as the second-best album of all time by both Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, topped only by “Sgt. Pepper’s.”

“Part of Brian Wilson’s genius was his ability to express great complexity within the frame of great simplicity,” wrote Anthony DeCurtis, an author and former Rolling Stone editor.

Then things fell apart.

For months, Wilson tinkered in the studio on an album with the working title “Smile” as anticipation built for what it might be and in what direction it might take rock, already shifting quickly in the dawn of the psychedelic era — music, drugs, lifestyle and all. Wilson said the album would be a “teenage symphony to God,” a piece of music so audacious it would unlock the straitjacket he felt was keeping pop music bland and predictable.

The first window into the album was “Good Vibrations,” a 3-minute, 35-second song that featured dramatic shifts in tone and mood with Wilson’s distinctive falsetto soaring above it all. It was an immediate commercial and critical success.

But it was also a disturbing sign of the madcap world Wilson now inhabited. Recordings for “Good Vibrations” stretched over seven months, the sonic blips and beeps he was trying to stitch together consumed 90 hours of tape and costs soared to nearly $75,000 — roughly $740,000 in 2025 valuation. All the while, musicians — some bandmates, others hired guns — filed in and out of four different studios as he searched for perfection.

Not everyone thought it was worth the effort for a single song.

“You had to play it about 90 bloody times to even hear what they were singing about,” complained Pete Townshend, the guitarist and songwriter for the Who. Spector — Wilson’s idol — said it felt “overproduced.” McCartney said it lacked the magic of “Pet Sounds.”

Wilson felt otherwise. When he finished the final mix on “Good Vibrations,” he said it left him with a feeling he’d never experienced.

“It was a feeling of exaltation. Artistic beauty. It was everything.”

The band toured again as Wilson continued work on “Smile,” an increasingly troubled project. He ordered members of a studio orchestra to wear fire gear and reportedly built a fire in the studio during a recording of “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” which was to be the album’s opening number. He turned to veteran recording artist Van Dyke Parks for help with the lyrics rather than wait for his bandmates to return.

When Love listened to the still-under-construction album, he dismissed it as “a whole album of Brian’s madness,” according to the Guardian. Parks, an admired lyricist with his own career to worry about, eventually walked away from the project, spooked by Wilson’s erratic behavior and what he saw as Love’s uncomfortable tendency to bully his cousin.

David Marks, from left, Al Jardine, Brian Wilson, Blondie Chaplin, Mike Love and Bruce Johnston at the 2024 world premiere of the Disney+ documentary “The Beach Boys” in Hollywood.

(Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images)

Whether it was the hostile reaction from his bandmates or the hopelessness of navigating the maze of half-finished songs and sonic fragments he’d created, Wilson put the whole thing aside. It would be decades before he revisited it.

“When we didn’t finish the album, a part of me was unfinished also, you know?” Wilson wrote in his 2016 memoir “I am Brian Wilson.” “Can you imagine leaving your masterpiece locked up in a drawer for almost 40 years?”

Love, who sued Wilson repeatedly through the years to get songwriting credit for dozens of songs he claimed he helped write, bristled at the suggestion that he had upended his cousin’s masterwork.

“What did I do? Why am I the villain?” Love wondered aloud in a lengthy 2016 profile in Rolling Stone. “How did it get to this?

Wilson’s psyche had been fragile for years. He was reclusive at times, spending days alone in a bedroom at his Malibu mansion, where he had a baby grand piano installed in a sandbox and a teepee erected in the living room. He admitted that he suffered from auditory hallucinations, which caused him to hear voices.

And he took drugs by the bucketful.

He was public about his demons. He was mentally ill, he said, consumed with such depression that he couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time. He smoked pot, experimented with LSD and got through the day with a steady lineup of amphetamines, cocaine and sometimes heroin. A tall man, Wilson’s weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds, and when he did surface in public, he seemed withdrawn and distracted.

“I lost interest in writing songs,” he told The Times in a 1988 interview. “I lost the inspiration. I was too concerned with getting drugs to write songs.”

It all started in Hawthorne, where Wilson was born on June 20, 1942. The eldest of three boys, he grew up in suburban comfort not far from the beaches that would inspire so many of his early songs.

His father, Murry, was a musician and a machinist; his mother, Audree, a homemaker. Wilson went to Hawthorne High, where he played football and baseball. He earned an F for a composition he submitted in his music class, though decades later the school changed his grade to an A when administrators discovered the composition had become the Beach Boys’ first hit song, “Surfing.” School officials invited him to campus to accept their apology.

At home, he played the piano obsessively. He recalled hearing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” when he was 4, lying on the floor of his grandmother’s house, mesmerized that the composer had captured both a city and an entire era in a single piece of music. He took accordion lessons but set the instrument aside after six weeks. His father, though, noticed his son had the ability to quickly repeat melodies on the piano.

“He was very clever and quick. I just fell in love with him,” Murry Wilson says in Peter Carlin’s “Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.”

In 1961, with his parents on vacation, Wilson, his brothers, Love and their friend Al Jardine rented guitars, a bass, drums and an amplifier with the food money their parents had left behind and staged a concert for their friends. When Murry Wilson returned home, he was more pleased than angered and encouraged the fledgling musicians to continue. Armed with a handful of songs, the Pendletones — named for the then-popular flannel shirts — began to play at school dances and parties. When they went into the studio to record, a producer changed the group’s name to the Beach Boys and never bothered to tell them.

If it all sounded sunny and carefree, Wilson didn’t remember it that way. He said his father was abusive and seemed to delight in humiliating him, typically in public. It was possible, he said, that his hearing problems stemmed from one of the times his father smacked him in the head.

“I was constantly afraid,” he told The Times in 2002. “That’s what I remember most: being nervous and afraid.”

When the Beach Boys became successful, Murry took over as their manager and increasingly took charge of their business affairs. When money was needed, he overrode his sons’ objections and sold off the band’s publishing company, believing the group had peaked. When the group went on the road, he went with them and fined his sons if they broke his rules — no booze, no profanity, no fraternizing with women. Finally, in 1964, Wilson and his brothers essentially fired their father. Never fully reconciled with his sons, Murry died of a heart attack in 1973.

To some observers, the riddle of Brian Wilson could not be fully explained by the drugs he took, the voices he heard or the depression that smothered him like a blanket. It was more than that.

“My own theory is that he was never able, never quite allowed, to become an adult — and that this, more than anything else, has been the story of his life, and of his band,” wrote Andrew Romano in a lengthy 2012 Newsweek article.

An abusive father, a cousin he regarded as a bully and ultimately a psychologist who sought to control his every move, his every thought — all appeared to have a hand in making Wilson who he was.

And then there was Eugene Landy, a colorful character by any measurement. He wore orange sunglasses, drove a Maserati with a license plate reading “HEADDOC,” sported a Rod Stewart-style haircut and practiced a brand of pop psychology that was regarded by some as revolutionary. Others, though, saw Landy as a Svengali-like figure, a man who could make Wilson appear to be on the road to recovery while bleeding him of every resource he had.

Hired by Wilson’s first wife, Marilyn, in 1976, Landy had his first meeting with his new client in Wilson’s bedroom closet, the only place where the musician said he felt safe. Landy gradually won Wilson’s trust and, believing in 24-hour therapy, moved in with the musician.

The results were immediate. Wilson shed weight, quit taking street drugs and rejoined the Beach Boys on stage for the group’s 15th anniversary. For a man who was so paranoid that he reportedly refused to brush his teeth or shower for fear that blood would gush from the faucet, it was a night-and-day change.

But it was short-lived, and Landy was fired when the Beach Boys’ management balked at his fees, which hovered around $35,000 a month — around $345,000 in 2025 valuation.

Without Landy, Wilson quickly regressed — back on drugs, overeating, retreating to his bedroom. He separated from his wife and grew apart from his daughters, Carnie and Wendy. Then with a flourish, Landy returned and — armed with a full team of nutritionists, assistants and caregivers — doubled down on his around-the-clock therapy.

Landy concluded Wilson suffered from a schizoid personality with manic depressive features — introverted, painfully shy, unable to show emotion. Left untreated, Landy said, Wilson would inevitably swing freely between delusional highs and nearly suicidal lows. He loaded Wilson up on medications — lithium, Xanax, Halcion, among others.

So involved was Landy in Wilson’s every move that in 1988 when the musician released “Brian Wilson” — his first solo album and his best effort in years — Landy was listed as the executive producer and given co-writing credit on five of the 11 songs. Landy’s girlfriend was given co-writing credit on three other songs. Landy became Wilson’s manager, formed a business interest with the musician to share in any profits from recordings, films and books and tried to become executor of Wilson’s estate.

Landy was ousted for good when the state attorney general’s office opened an investigation into his relationship with Wilson, probing accusations that he had prescribed drugs without a medical license and had financially exploited his famous client.

Gary Usher, a songwriter who worked with Landy, told state investigators that Wilson was a virtual captive, manipulated by a man who frightened and intimidated him.

In 1989, Landy pleaded guilty to a single charge of unlawfully prescribing drugs, surrendered his license and moved to Hawaii, where he died of lung cancer in 2006.

Wilson, who rarely said anything negative about anyone, could find little kind to say about Landy in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone. “I thought he was my friend, but he was a very f— up man.”

Despite the tumult, Wilson kept recording and performing, sometimes showing glimpses of his former self, yet always doomed to comparisons with his earlier work.

In 2017, Times rock critic Randy Lewis observed that Wilson seemed chipper and content during a leg of the “Pet Sounds Live” tour at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. His voice, once shriveled by years of smoking and other abuses, was “assertive and confident,” Lewis wrote.

Two years later, though, Wilson postponed a leg of his “Greatest Hits” tour to focus on his mental health.

“It is no secret that I have been living with mental illness for many decades,” he wrote in a tender apology to ticketholders. “I’ve been struggling with stuff in my head and saying things I don’t mean, and I don’t know why.”

Through it all, the unfinished concept album he had put aside hung like a cloud.

A few snippets of the album had been used on “Smiley Smile,” a hurry-up recording in 1967 that the Beach Boys recorded to meet contractual demands, and “Surf’s Up,” a 1971 album built around a song of the same name that Wilson wrote for “Smile.”

Nearly 30 years later, an L.A. musician named Darian Sahanaja asked Wilson whether he’d be interested in revisiting “Smile.” The two had come to know each other on the road when Wilson sat in with Sahanaja’s group, the Wondermints.

The master tapes were unlocked, and Sahanaja said he downloaded the tracks and unconnected song fragments, aware that he was handling the very material that had nearly driven its author mad.

As the two worked on a laptop, the harmonies and unwritten connective tissue seemed to return to Wilson, Sahanaja said. They smoothed out transitions, changed tempos to help connect songs and phoned Parks when they were unable to make out lyrics. If he couldn’t remember a passage, Parks came up with substitute language.

In February 2004, Wilson’s version of “Smile” finally premiered at London’s Royal Festival Hall. With Wilson on stage, seated at a piano, and Parks in the audience, the crowd roared thunderously as a song cycle that had become nearly mythical in its absence was finally unveiled.

“I’m at peace with it,” Wilson said later, smiling.

Wilson is survived by six children, including daughters Carnie and Wendy, who made up two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated pop vocal group Wilson Philips. He is preceded in death by his wife, Melinda, who died in January 2024. His brother Dennis drowned in 1983 while diving in Marina Del Rey, and Carl, his other brother, died of lung cancer in 1998.

Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.

Singer and social media personality Nezza sang the national anthem in Spanish at Dodger Stadium on Saturday night.

And, according to a video the performer later posted to social media, she did so against the wishes of the Dodgers organization.

In a video Nezza, whose full name is Vanessa Hernández, posted to TikTok, an unidentified Dodgers employee is heard telling her before Saturday’s performance that “we are going to do the song in English today, so I’m not sure if that wasn’t relayed.”

Then, the video cuts to Nezza — who was wearing a Dominican Republic shirt — signing a Spanish version of the Star-Spangled Banner on the field ahead of the Dodgers’ win against the San Francisco Giants.

The video’s caption: “So I did it anyway.”

In a separate video, Nezza said the version of the song she sang was commissioned in 1945 by the U.S. State Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that she wanted to sing it amid the recent unrest in Los Angeles stemming from raids by ICE agents.

“I didn’t think I would be met with any sort of no, especially because we’re in LA and with everything happening,” she said. “But today out of all days, I just could not believe when she [the Dodgers employee] walked in and told me ‘no.’ But I just felt like I needed to do it. Para mi gente.”

The Dodgers did not respond to a request for comment.

Nezza reacts after singing the national anthem prior to a game between the Dodgers and Giants in at Dodger Stadium on Saturday.

(Jessie Alcheh / Associated Press)

In general, the Dodgers have largely been quiet about the raids and resulting protests in the city over the last week.

Manager Dave Roberts has been asked about the situation twice. On Monday, he said that, “I just hope that we can be a positive distraction for what people are going through in Los Angeles right now.”

On Friday, he offered little further comment: “I know that when you’re having to bring people in and deport people, all the unrest, it’s certainly unsettling for everyone,” he said, “But I haven’t dug enough and can’t speak intelligently on it.”

Veteran Kiké Hernández spoke out on Instagram on Saturday, writing that “I cannot stand to see our community being violated, profiled, abused and ripped apart. ALL people deserve to be treated with respect, dignity and human rights.”

The Dodgers, however, have not issued any team-level statement, and a club executive told The Times’ Dylan Hernández on Friday that they did not plan to make any comment.

The death of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson is an immeasurable loss for music and for California, both the place and the dream of it that Wilson conjured with his regal and tender compositions.

Wilson was the visionary of the defining American rock band, one who competed with the Beatles to move pop music into new realms of sophistication and invention, while writing songs capturing the longing of an ascendant youth culture.

His death leaves only two surviving members of the original lineup — Mike Love and Al Jardine, Wilson’s high school friend who sang lead on early hits like “Help Me Rhonda” and wrote songs for beloved later-period albums like “Surf’s Up” and “Sunflower.”

On the day the world learned of Wilson’s death, Jardine briefly spoke to The Times to remember his lifelong friend and bandmate. The guitarist, vocalist and songwriter — now on tour with his Pet Sounds Band playing Beach Boys hits with a focus on their 1970s output — looked back on six decades of writing and performing with one of the greatest minds of popular music.

Jardine’s conversation was edited for length and clarity.

I just lost my best friend and mentor. It’s not a good feeling, but I’m going to carry on and continue to play our music and perform with the Pet Sounds Band.

Brian was a great friend. We grew up together, we went to high school together. We were both dropouts, which is not a bad thing as long as you have a vision of the future. His and mine was to make music.

We were very good friends and very successful in part because of his great talent. He had an amazing ability to compose, very simple things and very complex things, all at the same time. He was a visionary.

We all grew up together musically, but he grew exponentially. He became a leader, and formed new ways of chord construction, things no one had heard before, and we rose to the challenge with him.

It’s been said that Brian invented the state of California, the state of mind. That’s a cute way of saying it, but he really invented a new form of music in the ’60s and ’70s. It was very sophisticated, but went way beyond that. He was a humble giant, a great American composer.

I don’t think anyone else could walk in his shoes, given all that he went through. I did write some songs he liked, and did help him get through treacherous times. It must be so frightening to be left in the wilderness by yourself and not know how to get home. He said one song I wrote helped him get through that, which is quite a compliment from the great Brian Wilson, who had his own demons to deal with.

Brian Wilson’s band was a reawakening of his professional life. He never enjoyed touring, so this band was a whole new life for him, to experience his own music and an adulation that he never had before.

The Beach Boys — Dennis Wilson, left, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love — perform circa 1964 in California.

(Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

His legacy is of course in the music, and any interpreter of that legacy has to be sharp and devoted to it. We have the most devoted people that could be there to do that, so many original members of his band. My son Matthew, he’s Brian’s voice, and the DNA is there. With his arranger, Darian, arranging all vocals, we have all the muscle and genius to pull it off.

When Carl Wilson and I were singing those parts back then, we’d abbreviate things — you can’t do everything you did in the studio with only five of us. Now we’ve got 10 people onstage and I just heard some background parts yesterday that sounded just like we used to — you can hear Carl and Dennis in there.

When we take the band out, I have a little white piano onstage, like the one he played in the past. It’s a symbolic moment, the empty piano.

While the Beach Boys tour was a hit-based performance, with this iteration, we’re more introspective, deeper cuts, performing much of the 1970s catalog. There’s quite a few numbers the public hasn’t heard, exploring the heart and soul of those albums. I was hoping Brian would have been able to join us.

But it’s wonderful, we’re hoping this music should last forever, and be felt at the deep levels that Brian experienced it.

It sure is a great responsibility to play it, but it just feels natural to me. I’ve been doing it for so long, It doesn’t feel weighty. I’m confident, especially with this band being so remarkable. I’m still learning from Brian after all these years.

Fans of Talking Heads and David Byrne can rejoice, as the 73-year-old singer announced his first new album in seven years and tour.

The album “Who Is the Sky?” will hit streaming services and shelves on Sept. 5. Soon after, Byrne will kick off the North American leg of his tour, which features two shows in November at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. In 2026, he’ll touch down in New Zealand before moving on to Australia and Europe.

The 12-song album is led by the single “Everybody Laughs,” released Tuesday alongside a music video directed by multimedia artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo.

“Someone I know said, ‘David, you use the word “everybody” a lot.’ I suppose I do that to give an anthropological view of life in New York as we know it,” Byrne said in a press release.

“Everybody lives, dies, laughs, cries, sleeps and stares at the ceiling. Everybody’s wearing everybody else’s shoes, which not everybody does, but I have done. I tried to sing about these things that could be seen as negative in a way balanced by an uplifting feeling from the groove and the melody, especially at the end, when St. Vincent and I are doing a lot of hollering and singing together,” he added. “Music can do that — hold opposites simultaneously.”

New York-based ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra arranged the album. It also includes collaborations with the aforementioned St. Vincent, Hayley Williams, and the Smile drummer Tom Skinner. Byrne’s last album was 2018’s “American Utopia,” which eventually took the Broadway stage and in 2020 became a concert film directed by Spike Lee.

But it wasn’t a Byrne tour that fans were expecting.

Talking Heads, for which Byrne served as lead singer between 1975 and 1991, released a teaser on June 2, including their song “Psycho Killer.” Some even noticed that the date included in the short clip, June 5, is an important one in the band’s history.

“The band played their first gig as Talking Heads — opening for the Ramones at the CBGB club — on June 5, 1975,” one fan commented.

Instead of a tour announcement, fans received a music video for the song, highlighted by the appearance of Irish actor Saoirse Ronan.

“They waited until Saoirse Ronan was born to make the video,” another fan joked. “Very professional.”

Sly Stone, a funk pioneer whose influence and impact as leader of the musical group Sly and the Family Stone was as enduring as his career was brief, has died. He was 82.

An agent of change before he vanished from the public eye, Stone died “after a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues,” according to a statement from his family, which didn’t specify when or where he died.

From his beginnings in a family gospel group and his time as a lively San Francisco DJ, Stone became one of the major innovators in R&B, rock and pop music. There was a keen curiosity, even a restlessness, in the way he kept changing his group’s sound during its short, spectacular stint at the top.

Stone had a capacity for summing up the zeitgeist of an America in social transition, from collective joy (“Dance to the Music”) to racial harmony (“Everyday People”), and from the search for transcendence (“I Want To Take You Higher”) to the broken idealism in which the 1960s ended (“Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”), a timeline in which he created a template for future generations of funk-rock hybrids.

After a musical peak that lasted six years, Stone released a few inconsequential records, spent decades mired in addictions to cocaine and sedatives, was arrested for possession of crack and lived in a camper van, a husk of his younger, vibrant self.

But several recent documentaries and Stone’s 2023 memoir “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” made a renewed case for the relevance of his bountiful vision, even amidst a tragic life.

“When Sly comes on stage, you see older people looking like, ‘What’s this?,’ and younger people losing their minds,” said Questlove, the director of “Summer of Soul” and “Sly Lives! (Aka The Burden Of Black Genius),” in an interview with the Times in 2021. “It’s an absolute lesson in how transformative they were.”

Stone formed Sly and the Family Stone in 1966, bringing in his brother Freddie (guitar) and sister Rose (piano). Stone played keyboards, guitar, bass and drums and wrote, arranged and produced all of the group’s music. The great funk bassist Bootsy Collins once called Stone “the most talented musician I know.”

Sly conceived of the Family Stone as a rainbow coalition of soul, with male and female, white and Black members. Traditional R&B was entering an expansive, transformative phase, which Stone accelerated with his innovations in funk, rock and psychedelia, not to mention fashion: He came to one interview, a reporter noted, in “knee-high fox fur boots, cut velvet knickers and a red satin shirt with 20-inch fringe on the sleeves.”

Between 1967 and 1973, Sly and the Family Stone had nine singles in the Top 40. “Dance to the Music,” the exuberant title song to their second album, hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The hits that followed included three No. 1 songs — “Everyday People,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” and “Family Affair” — as well as a No. 2, “Hot Fun in the Summertime.”

The mass of musicians he influenced ranges from Miles Davis to Janet Jackson, Herbie Hancock to Ice-T. “Everyday People” alone was covered by Aretha Franklin, Joan Jett, the Staples Singers, the Supremes and Pearl Jam, and it was interpolated by Arrested Development on the 1992 hit “People Everyday.” John Legend won a Grammy in 2007 for his cover of “Family Affair.” Prince, who was lavish in his praise of Stone, hired the Family Stone’s horn section to tour with him in 1997.

The group achieved perhaps their greatest renown in August 1969, when they landed a prestigious second-day gig at the Woodstock music festival, playing after Janis Joplin and before the Who.

Like many groups that weekend, they had equipment problems during the set, but resolved them with a bang-up 20-minute medley of “Everyday People” and “Dance to the Music.” “The delirium peaked during Sly & the Family Stone’s set,” journalist Ellen Sander wrote in the liner notes of the 2019 box set “Woodstock — Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive.”

In his occasional interviews, Stone made it clear that he was what, at the time, was called a race man. “Everybody in our group is neutral about race,” he told the New York Times in 1970. “Everybody in the group knows that Blacks have been screwed over by whites — that most whites are prejudiced.”

The band moved to L.A. not long after Woodstock, and quickly found trouble. The Black Panthers lobbied Stone to replace the two white band members with Black musicians. Some band members were doing cocaine and PCP. “It was havoc. It was very gangsterish, dangerous. The vibes were very dark at that point,” Family Stone saxophonist Jerry Martini told author Joel Selvin. Their concerts routinely started hours late, or never started at all.

When the group returned in 1971 with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (the title was a reply to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”), the exuberance of their music had curdled. The songs had a flinty exterior and a troubled tone. Stone wove drum machines into the dense thickets of sound. The cover showed a red, white and black American flag; “Africa Talks to You” was torpid — funk without any swing. The tone is bleak, dissonant, even static.

Years later, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” was recognized as a prophetic record, one of only a few that described the end of the 1960s’ idealism. It was the last significant music Stone released.

Sylvester Stewart was born March 15, 1944, in Denton, Texas. When he was 3 months old, his parents, K.C. and Alpha Stewart, moved the family to Vallejo, in the Bay Area. The family sang gospel music and were active in the Church of God in Christ, where K.C. was a deacon. “I thought everybody in the world played music,” Stone later said.

While still a youth, Stone cut his first record, a gospel 78 RPM disc with brother Freddie and sisters Rose and Vaetta, as the Stewart Four. A fifth-grade classmate misspelled Sylvester’s name on the school chalkboard, and the mistake turned into a prophetic nickname: Sly.

Before he reached puberty, Stone had mastered several musical instruments. In his teens, he recorded sporadically with various doo-wop and R&B groups. He studied music theory at Vallejo Junior College, then attended the Chris Borden School of Modern Broadcasting. In 1964, he got a job at the R&B station KSOL, where he brought the Beatles and Rolling Stones into the station’s playlist and showed off his slick patter. The station christened him Sly Sloan, but he hated the name, so he introduced himself to listeners as Sly Stone — a taste of stubbornness to come.

By 1966, after playing music in fits and starts, Stone had formed a new band by plucking the best musicians from his band, Sly and the Stoners, and his brother Freddie’s band, which included drummer Gregg Errico and saxophonist Jerry Martini. The brothers Stone enlisted bass guitar wonder Larry Graham, who’d been playing in a local jazz duo with his mother.

Their first album, “A Whole New Thing,” didn’t chart. Clive Davis, the president of CBS Records, who oversaw Epic, advised Stone to try for a more commercial sound. His first attempt was a bull’s-eye: “Dance to the Music,” a shared-vocal funk workout on which Graham begins to introduce his influential “thumping and plucking” style of bass, and trumpeter Cynthia Robinson warns, “All the squares, go home!”

The group’s third album, “Life,” was another dud, though it included top tracks “Life” and “M’Lady.” Soon after it disappeared, Stone recorded “Everyday People,” a jolly song about tolerance that featured an unusual one-note bassline by Graham, and popularized the phrase “different strokes for different folks.” In addition to “Everyday People,” 1969’s “Stand!” included the title track, “Sing a Simple Song,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “You Can Make It If You Try.” and the playful but pointed six-minute track “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” which used a vocoder, delay and distortion to create a menacing artificiality that caught on quickly with Parliament-Funkadelic and was revived by T-Pain.

Stone described the band’s fifth album, 1971’s ominous “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” as “a very truthful album, made and then released at a very truthful moment in time. That’s what it was all about, because I know the truth always prevails. And that’s exactly what my music is all about.”

But there were other truths, particularly about drug addiction that Stone tried to keep hidden. Band members quit: first Errico, then Graham (who founded the funk act Graham Central Station), and later, Freddie Stone and Martini.

“Fresh,” in 1973, included the band’s final top-20 chart song, “If You Want Me to Stay.” Producer Brian Eno cited “Fresh” as the pivotal and irreversible production moment when “the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly become the important instruments in the mix.” `”Small Talk,” the following year, had a minor hit, “Time for Livin’,” and a cover photo of Sly, wife Kathy Silva (a Hawaiian actress whom he married onstage at Madison Square Garden) and their young son, Sylvester Jr.

The smiling family photo was deceptive, however. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Silva later told People magazine. “I didn’t want that world of drugs and weirdness.” She left him in 1976 when his pit bull mauled Sylvester Jr., who was 2 at the time. Stone also had a daughter, Sylvette Phunne Robinson, with Family Stone trumpeter Robinson, and a second daughter, Novena Carmel, now a host for KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” program.

Sly and the Family Stone’s next two albums, “High on You” and “Heard You Missed Me, Well I’m Back,” sold poorly. “Back on the Right Track,” in 1979, defied its hopeful title. There was another album in 1983. The adjective “reclusive” became permanently attached to his name.

Rumors persistently popped up, fostered by his absence: He’d recorded new songs, he’d worked with Prince, he had 100 new songs — no, 200 — he was on the verge of a comeback, always on the verge of it. He was convicted on charges of possessing cocaine in 1987. Two years later, he was arrested by FBI agents on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution on the charges. He was arrested again for cocaine possession in 2011, after which he claimed he’d been to rehab seven times.

When Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, Stone stepped to the microphone, said, “See you soon,” and split. It was years before the public saw him again.

The Grammys paid tribute to Stone in 2006. After a medley of his hits, sung by John Legend, will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, among others, Stone came onstage in a white mohawk, sunglasses and a metallic duster, with a cast on his right hand. He hunched over a keyboard, sang a bit of “I Want to Take You Higher” in a distracted manner, seemed to miss a few cues and walked off before the song was over.

He was booked to play Coachella in 2010, shortly after he was reported to be homeless, but he played “an abysmal, confused set,” the Guardian said. Stone came on stage 3½ hours late, and when he talked, he either mumbled or stopped in the middle of sentences. He said he’d been kidnapped and cheated by managers. He started songs, held on for a few bars, then drifted away. “To say that he seemed high was an understatement,” a New Yorker writer observed. The L.A. Weekly called it a “sad spectacle.”

Rarely had a great music artist suffered such a severe, rapid and irreversible downfall. People struggled to explain it.

“He’s had problems because he hasn’t been able to grow up,” Sylvester Stewart Jr., his son, said in 1996, after Stone finished a 45-day stay in rehab. “He’s meant no harm to anyone.”

“Sly never grew out of drugs,” his ex-wife, Silva, said. “He lost his backbone and destroyed his future.”

Still, the story of his musical exuberance and deep personal pain continued to inspire – and haunt – the inheritors of his vision. With his pair of documentaries, director and musicians Questlove used Stone’s life story to probe weighty questions about Black genius and how it’s embraced, exploited and neglected by the culture. The power of Stone’s music is bound up in his private pain.

“Soul music is releasing a demon that turns into a beautiful, cathartic exercise,” Questlove told the Times in 2025. “We never just see it as ‘I’m watching someone go through therapy.’

“Only time will tell,” he said, “if I had to make the Sly story to save my own life.”

His 2023 memoir, largely a study of his early life and craft, alluded to the toll that his drug use took on his output. “I should have stopped sooner,” he wrote. “Much sooner: less dust and powder, fewer rocks and pipes, enough days given back that might have added up to years.”

In the last years of his life, Stone worked on sobriety and lived quietly in the San Fernando Valley. His family, including brother Freddie, were left to speak up for Sly.

“When people ask me questions about what was going on behind the scenes and how did you make such great music, I tell them it was Sly writing what was coming out of his heart and soul,” he told the website Wax Poetics. “He is a true genius.”

There is no containing a star of Belinda’s caliber.

In the making of her fifth studio album “Indómita,” the Mexican singer and actor began to understand that what made her hard to contain — in life, in love and in her career — was worth writing an album about.

“I was reading a book and all of a sudden the word ‘indómita’ appeared,” says Belinda in an audio call from her home in Mexico City. “For two days, I kept dreaming of that word. ‘Indómita, Indómita,’” says Belinda during a recent audio call from her home in Mexico City.

Out on June 5, “Indómita” is an assortment of corridos tumbados, reggaeton, rock and pop ballads with exciting collaborations — ranging from the American rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars to Latin stars like Tokischa and Tito Double P.

“This album is very special, not just for women but for everyone who feels untameable, who feels strong, who feels like a warrior,” she explains.

The title directly translates to indomitable, or untameable, a term that seems to perfectly suit the 35-year-old artist, whose long and prosperous career made her an international household name.

Born in Madrid, Spain, as Belinda Peregrín Schüll, but known widely by her mononym, Belinda began her legacy in Mexican television, taking on lead roles in early 2000’s childhood telenovelas like “Amigos x siempre,” “Aventuras en el tiempo,” and “Cómplices Al Rescate,” where she played a set of twins who has been separated at birth. She also broke through the Disney sphere, appearing in the popular 2006 sequel of “The Cheetah Girls 2” as Marisol, a Spanish pop star and competitor of the titular girl band.

Belinda’s music career has been equally as fruitful, including a stint as a singing coach on the TV competition “La Voz” and dozens of hit singles, such as the popular “Amor a Primera Vista,” a 2020 collaboration with Los Ángeles Azules and Lalo Ebratt. Her previous studio albums, 2003’s “Belinda,” 2006’s “Utopía,” 2010’s “Carpe Diem” and 2013’s “Catarsis” have all graced Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart.

Her new LP marks a personal artistic triumph for the artist, given its unique regional Mexican edge. “300 Noches,” her 2024 corrido track with Natanael Cano, made No. 4 on the Mexican Billboard pop chart and appeared on the Billboard Global 200, making it Belinda’s first appearance on the chart. Other corridos tumbados, like the rugged “La Cuadrada” featuring Tito Double P and the blistering “Mírame Feliz” with Xavi, unleash a new alter ego of the famed singer known as “Beli bélica,” the latter of which means “warrior” in Spanish.

“With this album, I’d like to open up the door to more women to sing corridos tumbados of heartache,” says Belinda.

The record is already scorching hot, with songs like “Cactus” making a subtle, prickly nod to her past relationship with Mexican crooner Christian Nodal, who famously tattooed her eyes on his chest. There’s also the reggaeton-corrido fusion called “La Mala,” which coyly addresses the rumors that Belinda is a cold, calculated lover — which heightened in the wake of her high-profile relationship.

Still, her notoriety as a heartbreaker has simultaneously granted her sainthood status from fans, who created fake prayer cards of the enchanting star to bolster their own love life.

“This album was made up of things that we live every day,” says Belinda. “Someone breaks our heart, we feel better, we fall in love, they break our heart again and so forth. Life is like that.”

But “Indómita” is much more than Belinda’s foray into regional Mexican music; there’s also “Jackpot,” a dazzling club alongside Kenia Os, a tribute to lightning-fast cars in “Rayo McQueen” — and even her love of anime in “Death Note.”

“I’m a versatile artist and this record reflects that,” says Belinda.

This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

What motivated you to release this album over a decade after your last one, “Catarsis”?
I know it might seem like it’s been a long time, but I never left. I’ve always been involved in music. I’ve done collaborations with Los Ángeles Azules, “Amor a Primera Vista,” that was super popular, with Ana Mena in “Las 12,” Lola Indigo and Tiny in “La Niña de la Escuela,” with Juan Magán and Lapiz Conciente in “Si No Te Quisiera.”

I’ve made a lot of music, but obviously this record means so much to me. It’s not the same to work on collaborations and music for other artists as it is to do it for myself. The album is full of collaborations with Thirty Seconds to Mars, who are one of my favorite bands of all time. It also has Kenia Os, Tito Double P, Neton Vega, who’s a hard-hitting act in the world of reggaeton and corridos tumbados, and Natanael Cano, who I can’t forget either. It’s a complete album, with lots of different styles.

Many of the songs on this album are corridos tumbados. Why did you dive into that style of music?
It’s a really stigmatized genre, and a genre that is specifically for men and for certain kinds of lyrics. I wanted to break that [idea] and say that instruments used — like the trombone, the alto horn, tololoche — aren’t just for men or for specific lyrics or a specific market. There can be more romantic lyrics, a mixing of sounds like pop with urban music. The challenge was also getting my collaborators to believe in this too, since they are used to other topics, but everyone trusted me and believed in the song[s] since the beginning and it was organic.

Tell me more about your collaborations. What did you learn from them and what did you teach them?
They’re so talented and play instruments very well, especially Natanael Cano — you can tell him to play any instrument. He’s very talented. We were in the studio and he started to play a Metallica song and I was like, “Wow!” Although we might pigeonhole them into this genre, they’re very versatile and talented. I admire them.

One of the singles of this album, “Cactus,” talks about your feelings toward an ex. How did it feel to release your emotions? And would you say that it helped you heal, as the song suggests?
I love healing through music. The first phrase of the song goes: “Therapy helps, but music heals more bad-ass.” Perhaps I couldn’t express with words what I can through music. As a composer we express our emotions through our lyrics. But it’s also important that people remember that not everything is based on experiences. It’s music so that people can identify themselves in love or heartache. I never mention anyone by name, but people can make their own conclusions or deductions. At the end of the day, I make music for people who can relate to the lyrics.

You’ve been in the spotlight for so many years. Do you believe there are two Belindas that exist? As in, one that is for the public and one that’s just for close family members?
Of course, I can guarantee it. There’s also a song where I express that idea that many times people have categorized me as a bad character, “La Mala.” At the end of the day, I know who I am and the people around me know the heart that I have — my feelings and intentions, my day-to-day. That’s what counts for me. If I paid attention to every comment [people made of me], my God, I’d be locked up in a room without an exit, which sometimes does happen to me.

How do you tune out those outside critics?
I try not to see these things. Sometimes it’s inevitable but I’m also not going deep into the web to find what people are saying. I do other more productive things that nourish me.

Obviously it hurts, because even if certain comments are not true, they still hurt because they carry negative energy. I don’t want to give into these comments as truth, but that energy of negativity or insult or humiliation or anything that comes from a negative side, obviously has a consequence. So one has to be careful about how they express themselves, because there’s so much negativity that exists, so it would be nice if we could just throw a bit more of love.

I heard you’re a big anime fan, and you show that in your song “Death Note.” Why was it important to include that?
I’m [an] otaku, even if people don’t believe it. I really like anime. I’m a fan of “One Piece,” “Death Note,” everything, “Attack on Titan,” but “Death Note” is my favorite. It’s pretty dark, but Ryuk is one of my favorite characters in life. I’ve always been a fan of terror, because within the darkness, there’s always some light.

You were born in Spain but were raised in Mexico. How have you navigated both identities?
I can’t pick one or the other, but I’ve always considered myself Mexican, because I was raised in Mexico and my accent is Mexican. I’m very, very much Latina.

What advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t take everything so personally and enjoy life. When I was little, I would think too much about what the world thought. I was always like, “do you like it? Oh you don’t, why?” and I would suffer. And now if I like it, OK, and if no one else likes it, then too bad, I like it!

There was something in the air at Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas last weekend.

No, it wasn’t the sound of distorted guitars, punk rockers puking or Nazis getting punched in the face. Though there was plenty of all of that.

It was the buzz surrounding FLAG, the most talked about band at the annual bowling tournament and music festival, now in its 25th year.

FLAG is the hardcore supergroup composed of four former members of Black Flag — Keith Morris, Chuck Dukowski, Dez Cadena, and Bill Stevenson — and Stephen Egerton, Stevenson’s longtime bandmate in the Descendents.

It had been six years since the last FLAG gig, which was also at Punk Rock Bowling. But this was more than a reunion show. It felt like history in the making.

It started Saturday with a panel discussion led by Fat Mike of NOFX at the Punk Rock Museum. Surrounded by photos of their younger selves taken by the late Naomi Petersen, all five members answered questions from Fat Mike, who introduced FLAG as “the best version of Black Flag I’ve ever seen.”

Fat Mike asked each participant to name their favorite album or song, which became something of a referendum on the band’s volatility on and off the stage, with musicians cycling in and out of the band. For instance, Henry Rollins, the band’s best-known vocalist, was Black Flag’s fourth singer.

“When people say, ‘Oh, Henry is my favorite. Ron [Reyes] was my favorite,’” Cadena said, “usually, that’s the first gig that they saw.”

“Why is it a contest?” Morris asked. “Each one of us contributed in the way we contributed. We each had our own personality.”

Keith Morris and Stephen Egerton of FLAG speaking about the band at the Punk Rock Museum.

(Rob Coons)

That those personalities frequently clashed with the band’s enigmatic guitarist and songwriter Greg Ginn is the story of Black Flag. Extreme music attracts extreme people. What’s unusual about these clashes is that they continued long after Ginn pulled the plug on his own band in 1986.

For instance, in June 2003, Rollins and Morris played Black Flag songs together — just not at the same time, Morris clarified during the panel — to raise money and awareness for the West Memphis 3.

It’s probably not a coincidence that later that summer, Ginn put together a Black Flag reunion of sorts at the Hollywood Palladium. The problem?

It featured musicians who’d never been in the band and they played along to prerecorded bass tracks. The shambolic set wasn’t well-received. These shows were also a benefit — for cats — launching a veritable cottage industry of CAT FLAG T-shirts.

Keith Morris, from left, Stephen Egerton, Bill Stevenson, Fat Mike, Dez Cadena and Chuck Dukowski gather to discuss FLAG’s reunion at the Punk Rock Museum over Memorial Day weekend prior to their set at the Punk Rock Bowling festival.

(Rob Coons)

In December 2011, Morris, Dukowski, Stevenson and Egerton played together for the first time at the Goldenvoice 30th anniversary show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where they were introduced as “Black Flag.”

The old friends had such a blast playing together, they decided to keep it going. Cadena was added to the mix and they played Black Flag songs under the banner of FLAG. The coming-out party for this lineup was an incendiary set at the Moose Lodge in Redondo Beach in April 2012.

Again, it’s probably not a coincidence that Ginn subsequently “reunited” Black Flag and initiated all kinds of legal activity against his former bandmates. At the heart of the issue was who could use the names FLAG and Black Flag. At the end of the day, the courts ruled that FLAG could continue.

Mike Magrann, vocalist and guitarist for L.A. punk band Channel 3, saw both bands play that year.

“It was puzzling,” Magrann said of Black Flag’s set, “because they weren’t honoring their legacy. When FLAG played, they played those songs the way they sounded back then. It brought back that feeling of being a kid on the side of the pit. The real threat of violence is right there. It was unbelievable!”

That ineffable feeling of danger is what drew so many people to FLAG’s Memorial Day performance. Fans came from all over the world just to see the show. Joey Cape of Lagwagon wrapped up a solo tour in Japan and flew directly to Punk Rock Bowling.

Like Cape and Magrann, some of the most hardcore fans were musicians who’d been inspired by Black Flag when they were young. David O. Jones of Carnage Asada drove in from L.A. with Martin Wong, who organized Save Music in Chinatown, and Martin’s daughter, Eloise Wong of the Linda Lindas. They returned to L.A. immediately after the show because Eloise, who is a junior in high school, had a physics test the following morning.

FLAG made it worth the trip. The band ripped through 22 songs, starting with “Revenge” and mixing crowd favorites like “My War” with deep cuts such as “Clocked-In.” Morris held the microphone with both hands like he was blowing on a bugle and urging the crowd to charge.

It was easily the rowdiest pit of the festival, and it swelled to nearly the length of the stage with a steady stream of crowd surfers being passed over the barricade: old men, young women and even small children. During songs like “Gimme Gimme Gimme,” “Wasted” and “Nervous Breakdown,” the roar from the crowd was almost as loud as the band.

There wasn’t any banter from the usually loquacious Morris. Toward the end of the show, he simply said, “Thank you for your participation,” and launched into the next song.

FLAG performs at the 25th Annual Punk Rock Bowling and Music Festival in Las Vegas on May 26, 2025.

(Courtney Ware)

After the obligatory performance of “Louie Louie” at the end of the set, the players took their instruments off the stage and were gone. Fans young and old looked at each other in disbelief, their lives changed, their DNA forever altered by punk rock.

FLAG had done it again. They played the songs the way they were meant to be played. They honored their legacy.

It will be a tough act for Black Flag to follow. In recent years, Black Flag has been much more active. Inevitably, that means more changes to the lineup. Earlier in May, Ginn announced Black Flag will be touring Europe this summer with three new members: all of them young musicians, including a young woman named Max Zanelly as the new vocalist.

Once again, the internet flooded with Black Flag memes keying on the considerable age gap between Ginn, who is 70, and his new bandmates who look many decades, if not generations, younger. Wong, who knows something about the power of young musicians to change the world, is hopeful.

“Everyone wins when there’s more good music in the world,” Wong said. “In a perfect world, the new Black Flag lineup will get Ginn stoked on music and push him forward. But if that doesn’t happen, we get FLAG, the best Black Flag lineup that never happened.”

While Black Flag prepares for its new chapter, is this the end of the road for FLAG?

“I don’t know,” Stevenson said after the panel at the Punk Rock Museum. “We always have fun when we get together. You can tell we love each other. I’m sure we’ll do more. At some point, one of us will be too old to do it, but so far that’s not the case.”

Jim Ruland is the author of the L.A. Times bestselling book “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records” and a weekly Substack about books, music, and books about music called Message from the Underworld.

Roger Nichols, the songwriter who penned “We’ve Only Just Begun” and other hits for folk-rock duo the Carpenters, has died. He was 84.

Nichols’ death on May 17 was confirmed in a social media post from Nichols’ longtime songwriting partner, Paul Williams. He did not list a cause of death.

“The first song Roger Nichols and I wrote was called ‘It’s hard to say goodbye …’ Sadly, we hit the nail on the head. Roger Nichols passed away peacefully four days ago, at home with his beautiful family,” Williams wrote. “His wife Terry and the daughters he was so proud of, Claire and Caitlin at his side.

“He was as disciplined as he was talented,” Williams continued. “The words were born of the beauty in his completed melodies. I wrote what I heard, note for note …word for word. The lyrics waiting in the emotion already in his music. He made it easy.”

Nichols, a Montana native, released his first solo LP, “Roger Nichols & the Small Circle of Friends,” on A&M Records in 1968. It’s now regarded as a cult classic in the California pop-rock canon, with guest credits from Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and Lenny Waronker. However, he earned his big break as a songwriter after he penned an unexpectedly poignant jingle for a Crocker-Citizens National Bank commercial.

Richard Carpenter, who formed the popular duo with his sister Karen, heard the tune on television and asked if Nichols and Williams had a full version of the song. They quickly extended it into a tune that became the duo’s 1970 smash “We’ve Only Just Begun.” The single was nominated for song of the year at the following Grammys.

With Williams (and other lyricists), Nichols co-wrote many of the Carpenters’ most beloved songs, including “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” “Let Me Be the One” and “I Kept on Loving You.” Beyond his hits for the Carpenters, Nichols co-wrote songs that were recorded by the Monkees, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Petula Clark and Art Garfunkel, among many others.

In a comment on Williams’ post, Nichols’ daughter Claire wrote, “My mom, Terri, and my sisters, Caroline and Caitlin, are all so proud of the man he was, and are in awe of the legacy he leaves.”

Throughout HBO’s post-apocalyptic series “The Last of Us,” music plays a role in setting the mood for moments big and small, heartfelt and heart-wrenching. It’s not unlike the video game, which was hailed for its original soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla (who is also a composer on the show), and for the pop music covers that helped to elevate the narrative.

In the most recent episode of Season 2 of “The Last of Us,” titled “The Price,” there’s a callback to a scene from the game that fans have been waiting for: Joel (Pedro Pascal) performs a stripped down version of Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” for Ellie (Bella Ramsey). The song captures the themes of loss and losing yourself, but also of moving forward together. And it’s not the only instance of a pop song showcasing characters’ emotions — in “Day One,” the fourth episode of Season 2, Ellie performs an acoustic cover of A-ha’s “Take on Me” as Dina (Isabela Merced) walks in and gently persuades her to continue playing the tender rendition. It’s another adaptation from the video game that signals the kindling of the relationship between Ellie and Dina.

“Bella is playing the guitar in the scene where Ellie plays the guitar and sings ‘Take on Me’ to Dina. That’s Bella. No tricks,” said Craig Mazin, co-creator of “The Last of Us,” in an interview earlier this year.

For Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the series and the video game franchise, he knew that when Ramsey was cast, the actor’s musical abilities would be an asset for future installments. “I remember seeing a video of them playing and singing and talking to Craig and being like, ‘Oh, they’re ready to go for if we get to Season 2,’” he said.

Ramsey, however, isn’t alone in their musical abilities. Over the course of the season in interviews with the cast and creators of the series, it became clear that music was a shared passion that bonded them on and off screen. Here, we collect some of their thoughts on music and performing together.

Mexican corrido singer Gabito Ballesteros has always been a hopeless romantic. His newest album, “Ya No Se Llevan Serenatas,” or “They No Longer Perform Serenades,” tugs at those delicate heartstrings.

Released Thursday, the album pays tribute to romance in the digital era of smartphones and social media. Invoking modern-day references, like sending Instagram DMs and going to Disneyland, he puts his own spin on the traditional serenade, a ballad one typically sings below the windowsill of their lover. It’s the kind of profound romance that regional Mexican acts such as Joan Sebastian, Vicente Fernandez and Juan Gabriel honed for decades.

“I like to sing to women, bring them roses, be romantic, and I want to convey this to my audience,” said Ballesteros in a statement to The Times.

Sprinkled across the 21 tracks is a roster of star-studded Mexican homegrown talents, including longtime collaborator Natanael Cano, Tito Doble P, Christian Nodal, Neton Vega, Carín León, Oscar Maydon and Luis R Conriquez.

Colombian reggaeton superstar J Balvin is also featured in the Latin-EDM fusion track, “La Troka.”

Ahead of its release, the rising star teased his sophomore album on Instagram with a clip of him driving a classic Ford Mustang filled with dozens of red roses. Once parked, Ballesteros pulls out his guitar from the trunk as his joint song with Carín León, “Regalo de Dios,” begins to unfold in the background — a sign that Ballesteros is ready to pour his heart out to whoever that fortunate soul might be.

The song is one of the few pre-released tracks of the album, alongside poetic singles like “Cleopatra,” which compares a woman’s beauty to that of the famed Egyptian queen, and the agonizing track “Perdido,” which looks to fill the void of true love lost with vice.

The already popular, anxiety-riddled “7 Diás,” featuring Tito Double P, is also included in the track list; Ballesteros also performs an acoustic rendition of this heartbreak song on YouTube.

“This is a very important album because it tells a very different story than what [I] have been doing],” said Ballesteros. “The audience will get to learn more about my love and heartbreak.”

Ballesteros, who is originally from Sonora, Mexico, first gained recognition in 2020 with his breakthrough conjunto song “El Rompecabezas.” After obtaining his degree in industrial engineering in 2023, he joined his longtime friend Natanael Cano and Peso Pluma on the chart-topping hit “AMG,” which debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 92, marking the trio’s first appearance on the chart. Ballesteros later appeared on the chart that same year with the megahit “Lady Gaga” with Peso Pluma and Junior H,” which remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 35.

The release of “Ya No Se Llevan Serenatas” comes a year after Ballesteros launched his critically-acclaimed debut album, “The GB,” which landed at No. 65 on the Billboard 200. The 25-year-old singer— who is under Natanael Cano’s record label Los CT and Peso Pluma’s Double P Management— has quickly become a force in the new wave of corridos tumbados, amassing more than 50 million monthly Spotify listeners.

“If you’re in love, I would like for you to dedicate a song to your lover [from this album]. If you’re going through a breakup, listen to it and heal with the music,” Ballesteros said. “Everything is guided by love.”

Who knows if Kendrick Lamar will sit for a formal deposition in Drake’s ongoing defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, after Lamar flambéed him on “Not Like Us.” But at SoFi Stadium on Wednesday, Lamar and his co-headliner SZA had a great recurring bit imagining what might happen.

In a fake video montage played between set changeovers, Lamar responded to mock-questioning like, “When you said you want the party to die, was that a metaphor or are you serious?” and “Don’t you think disappearing is a form of attention-seeking?” by blowing him off and phoning in a big order of takeout. SZA then lighted up an enormous joint in the lawyer’s office.

The pair’s Grand National Tour is a triumph of the unbothered. Wednesday’s set — the first of a three-night SoFi stand — was a bountiful, meticulous three-hour show that centered on the camaraderie between two of the most important acts in contemporary music. They had a wicked sense of humor about the performance too. At one point, SZA seduced a giant, slicked-up praying mantis dancer. If only we all had the same leeway when deposed.

Lamar, coming off a pair of Grammy wins for “Not Like Us” and a gleefully petty Super Bowl halftime show, is at perhaps the peak of his career. So it’s worth noting how inspiringly egalitarian this hometown show was — a hierarchy-free split with former TDE labelmate SZA, often fully meshing their sets together for their on-record collaborations. The format brought new energy and understanding into their catalogs, all while the pair gassed each other up as virtuoso live performers.

Kendrick Lamar and SZA at the 2016 Grammys.

(Lester Cohen / WireImage)

On Wednesday, SZA arguably made the most of the stadium-sized opportunity. SZA is a powerhouse vocalist and musical omnivore with a stoner’s comic timing (most recently seen in the charming comedy film “One of Them Days”). But she’s now honed her stagecraft to be on par with any pop royalty. Between “Snooze” and “Crybaby,” she was lifted on wires, revealing a gauze train in the shape of a chrysalis, to spellbinding effect. It took some real mettle to then perform her ballad “Nobody Gets Me” midair.

A surprise cameo from Lizzo paid alms to their long friendship, and a bawdy slice of her verse from Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” proved she can own even a nemesis’ material with her charisma. When she spun “Garden (Say It Like Dat)” into “Kitchen,” the dancers’ delightfully goopy, insectoid costumes and monolithic ant sculpture felt like H.R. Giger taking mushrooms on a warm afternoon in Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.

When she and Lamar shared the stage, as on the Oscar-nominated “All the Stars,” “30 for 30” and their respective solo cuts “Doves in the Wind” and “LOVE.,” there was an alchemy between two superfans, their physical presence across the diamond-shaped catwalks reinvigorating this long-beloved music.

At this point, Lamar’s case for being the best rapper alive is fully closed. Of course he is. Even if you thought the title was a little wobbly after the knotty, skeptical “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the acid-bath of “Not Like Us” and the L.A-embodying surprise release “GNX” slammed the debate shut as it spun off hit after hit. Who else could make a pitch-perfect indictment of the current American political climate onstage at the Super Bowl halftime show, while needling his most loathed enemy and spinning off memes with just a quick grin in bootcut jeans?

At SoFi, a few miles from his old Compton backyard, he drew from that monumental catalog and recontextualized it for this club-ready, venom-streaked era. The show’s format covered more than 50 songs between the two artists, so even when he only got to a verse or two, there was always something new or bracing. Here, “m.A.A.d. city,” one of his hardest and cruelest street cuts, became a meta-R&B number that made the song even more eerie. On “Humble.,” he was flanked by female dancers posing in vicious geometric forms, physically embodying the ego-check of the song’s chorus.

The Drake flame-war material was delicious fun, from the shots-fired kickoff verse on “Like That” to the relentless, merciless taunts on “Euphoria.” But the “GNX” segments, like the Tupac-conjuring “reincarnated” and the ice-cold “peekaboo” (and, obviously, the great Mustard-y howl of “tv off”) made the case for how this album will continue to reveal new textures and resonate in L.A. lore. There wasn’t room for a five-times-reprised “Not Like Us” like at his history-making 2024 “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends” set. But when he did play it, it was less about his archenemy than about L.A., a city with a new song in the canon, a definitive “Us” who were all alike in screaming it.

It felt poignant that Lamar and SZA reunited again for the set’s closers, the unexpectedly relentless Hot 100 fixture “luther” (now at 13 weeks at No. 1) and “gloria,” Lamar’s bait-and-switch about his complicated relationship to his own writing process. With SZA as his Greek chorus, he ended the night on a note about how all this relentless work was worth it to arrive at real self-understanding. An ally that will never fail, no matter who out there is deposing you.

For her seventh time hosting “Saturday Night Live” (the most times ever for a woman, NBC says), actor Scarlett Johansson closed the show’s historic 50th season.

It was a night that didn’t deliver any news on the rumors that Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost of “Weekend Update,” or his co-host Michael Che, would be leaving the show. Instead, the two engaged in their joke exchange ritual, and multiple guest stars showed up in sketches, including Mike Myers, Gina Gershon and Emily Ratajkowski in a video piece, and musical guest Bad Bunny.

Johansson did her usual ace job throughout the show, bringing her crisp delivery to sketches about a New York morning show where puns about hard-news stories land very badly, a Please Don’t Destroy video about a vacation flight to Newark Airport (it also lands badly), and a barroom sketch about two men (Marcello Hernández and Bad Bunny) who commiserate in Spanish about the terrible relationships they’re in with characters played by Johansson and Ego Nwodim.

The trio of sketches were followed by another video chapter in the “Bowen Yang’s Not Gay” series, in which Johansson has an affair with Yang before finding out how many other women he’s having sex with, including Gershon, Ratajkowski and cast members Nwodim and Heidi Gardner.

After a strong “Weekend Update” finale featuring Johansson in the joke exchange, the show took a hard dive with four sketches in a row that just didn’t work. There was a very dated and awkward elevator sketch about Mike Myers running into Kanye West (now Ye, played by Kenan Thompson), one about intimacy coordinators who don’t know how lesbians have sex, a TV interview panel in which female actors get asked more personal questions than their male co-star, and a gross-out season-ender about Victorian women eating disgusting foods including eels and BLTs (bunnies and little turtles).

On top of the bad run of sketches, Johansson was cut off while giving a tribute to Lorne Michaels as the show ended on broadcast and Peacock with no closing credits or cast hugs (the full goodnights were later posted online). That’s no fault of Johansson (who received a bouquet of roses and a kiss from her husband before that goodbye snafu), but it was a sloppy way to end an otherwise strong season of TV featuring a host who’s always proved solid.

Musical guest Bad Bunny, who appeared in the bar and Newark airport sketches, performed “NUEVAYoL” and “PERFuMITO NUEVO” with RaiNao.

The majority of Season 50’s cold opens have leaned on James Austin Johnson’s uncanny President Trump impression, and the finale followed suit. The president’s recent Middle East trip was the topic, with Trump having some friend time with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Emil Wakim). “We are vibing,” Trump said, “dipping our fingers into various goops and spreads,” although he says he ended up eating at a mobile McDonald’s set up for him nearby. Trump addressed the $400-million plane he wants to accept from Qatar (“It’s a pre-bribe”), saying he prefers it to flying an American plane. “No thanks, sonny. Have you seen what’s going on … screen is blank. Newark!” Trump narrated himself breaking the fourth wall by going out into the audience and commenting on the attractiveness of women in the front rows and promised audiences they wouldn’t forget him while “SNL” goes on summer hiatus. “I’m everywhere, even in your dreams, like the late, great Freddy Krueger. See you in the fall if we still have a country, right? It’s a coin toss.”

In her monologue, Johansson led the cast in a song with lyrics about the show set to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” “Sing us a song, it’s your monologue / sing us a song tonight. / ‘Cause we’ve made 50 years of great memories / every Saturday Night.” At one point it looked like Joel himself might join in when Johansson announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joel… wrote this song!” The host took audience questions while still singing and jokes were made about a surprised Sarah Sherman finding out she’s leaving the show (it was a joke). The cast (with Jost and Che absent) concluded the song with, “The 50th season is through / it lasted forever / we did it together / and we got to spend it with you.”

Best sketch of the night: Let’s go home for some soup made from cow feet

Two men (Hernandez and Bad Bunny) on dates at a bar with women they don’t particularly want to be with (Nwodim and Johansson) get into a fight at their girlfriends’ urging, but instead they tell each other in Spanish about their problems and become friends. The two realize they’re both attracted to volatile relationships and will probably end up back in bed with the women they should break up with. The subtitles are on point and the attempts by the girlfriends to chime in with Spanish (“Nipple crazy cafeteria!”) also work nicely. For some reason, a couple of men (Andrew Dismukes and Johnson) sit at another table and serve as the sketch’s Greek chorus.

Also good: ‘Is something going on at Newark?’

The Please Don’t Destroy boys are visited by Johansson, who asks why they’re so down. “Are you sad the season’s over and you only did like two videos?” she asks. The actor invites them to fly first class with her and a Lonely Island-style rap video is interspersed with the reality of the situation: They’re on a very bad flight to Newark airport, which has been having some problems. There are some great visual jokes like a prayer symbol on the overhead panel and a Microsoft blue screen of death on the TV panels. But then Bad Bunny shows up as an air traffic controller who helps save the day all alone and on his first day at work. It might say something that the two best sketches this week featured Johansson as well as Bad Bunny; he didn’t get a chance to host this season but did a great job in 2023.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Did Lorne Michaels know about this?

Miss Eggy (Nwodim) returned with another fire monologue similar to the one from last month, but it was the traditional joke exchange, in which Jost and Che force each other to read racist and/or embarrassing material that is taken to new heights (lows?) each time. Jost was forced to tell the show’s producer, “Retire, bitch, let me run the show,” while Che was given the line, “I haven’t been that excited since I saw a white woman drinking unattended.” Jost had to ridicule rap feud master Kendrick Lamar and with Jost’s wife sitting next to him, Che was forced to apologize and say about his time on the show, “I’ve told thousands of jokes and gotten dozens of laughs,” and of Jost, “I love you.” But it was Jost who got the worst of it, getting tricked into saying the name Nick Kerr, son of Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, and applying lipstick to tell Michaels, “I’ll do anything to run this show.” If this is the last time we see Jost and Che as “Update” hosts, at least we’ll know they left no depths unplumbed.

THE SECRET ingredients to the perfect Eurovision song have been revealed and it might be bad news for the UK’s act. 

As various European countries go head-to-head tonight, a leading betting company has revealed that winning Eurovision songs always have three key traits.

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Sport Betting Online found that the first of the three factors relates to whether the song is written in a minor or a major key; minor keys often sound sadder, where major keys tend to sound happier and more joyful.

80 per cent of the winning songs, including Nemo’s The Code and Loreen’s thrilling Tattoo, are written in a minor key. 

Most winning songs also have an average tempo of 106 beats per minute (BPM), with Maneskin’s Zitte e Broni having 103 BPM and Kalush Orchestra’s Stefania having 105 BPM.

The final factor relates to language, as ten of the last 15 winning songs were written in English.

Despite that advantage, the UK act has the odds stacked against them – according to exclusive information from Sports Betting online.

Remember Monday’s track is written in a major key and has an average BPM rate of 136.

A spokesperson from the betting company said: “Remember Monday’s entry brings a vibrant and relatable energy to Eurovision 2025.

“Their harmonious vocals and genre-blending style align with several successful trends.

“However, the song’s major key and humorous theme might set it apart from the emotionally intense entries that have recently won.

“If audiences are ready for something fun and feel-good, the UK may have a dark horse on its hands.”

Despite the track bucking several winning trends, Remember Monday’s song was well-received when they took to the stage on Thursday.

Fans could be heard cheering throughout the trio’s performance, while singing along to What the Hell Just Happened’s catchy lyrics.

Brits loved the track too, with one writing on social media: “Remember Monday could WIN THIS WHOLE THING. INCREDIBLE. Perfection in the arena!”

UK fans can only hope that its broad appeal – with country aesthetics being on trend and English being the language of most winning songs – will take the trio to a win.

Sports Betting Online also analysed the frontrunners at this year’s singing competition, though, and one group is set to take the contest by storm. 

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Sweden’s Bara Badu Batsu – performed by KAJ – has an average BPM of 106 and is written in the minor key, specifically A Minor. 

The track is sung in Swedish with Finnish phrases, which does buck the trend of winning songs being in English.

However, experts think this may work in the trio’s favour – just a singing in Italian took Maneskin to a win.

Following close behind is Austria’s JJ who will be singing a track entitled Wasted Love. 

This track has 133 BPM, which is much faster than the average winning BPM, but is written in a minor key. 

It is also sung in English, which normally broadens a song’s appeal at the competition. 

The final frontrunner is France’s Louane, whose track was recorded at 88 BPM and is sung in the singer’s native language. 

Her heartbreaking song is entitled Maman – the French word for “mother”.

With all of the data considered, the competition is Sweden’s to lose. 

The contest will kick off on May 13, 2025, in Basel, Switzerland, before ending on May 17.

Last year’s winning artist Nemo will be performing their track – entitled The Code – at the finale.

However, not every country in Europe will be appearing at the competition.

Russia has been banned from competing due to controversies surrounding the invasion of Ukraine.

Other countries, including Bulgaria and Romania, have pulled out due to funding problems.

Israel has confirmed that it will be competing at Eurovision 2025, despite an open letter – signed by several former winners – urging judges to ban the country from the contest.

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On a spring afternoon in 2005, the members of OK Go dressed up in tacky suits, gathered in front of a video camera and awkwardly danced their way into history.

The band’s DIY single-shot clip for its song “A Million Ways” — in which the brainy rock quartet moves through three and a half minutes of intricate choreography on the patio behind singer Damian Kulash’s Los Angeles home — became one of music’s first viral videos, racking up millions of downloads (remember those?) and helping to establish a new way for acts to connect with fans as the internet began to supplant MTV and Top 40 radio.

OK Go doubled down on the approach in 2006 with its video for “Here It Goes Again,” another bare-bones production that had the musicians dancing on eight synchronized treadmills, then went on to make increasingly elaborate clips featuring a Rube Goldberg machine, a zero-gravity plane flight and a pack of adorable dogs.

“As soon as the treadmill thing happened, it was like: Holy s—, we’re pop culture now,” Kulash said the other day of “Here It Goes Again,” which won a Grammy Award for best music video and has been viewed more than 67 million times on YouTube.

Twenty years after “A Million Ways,” the mechanics of cultural connection have transformed again thanks to social media and TikTok, where what you encounter as you scroll is guided by the invisible hand of data analysis.

Said OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind with grinning understatement: “The algorithm has become a bit more powerful.”

“Not a big fan of the algorithm as an arbiter of art,” Kulash added. “It’s sad to see optimization in a space that was once the Wild West.”

Yet OK Go is still at it: Last month the group released its latest one-shot video for the song “Love,” for which Kulash and his co-directors installed dozens of mirrors on powerful robotic arms inside an old Budapest train station to create a kind of kaleidoscopic obstacle course.

The band’s methods have grown more sophisticated since “A Million Ways,” and these days it seeks out corporate sponsors to help bring Kulash’s visions to life. But an adventuresome — and touchingly personal — spirit remains key to its work.

“What I love about the ‘Love’ video is the humans in the room,” Kulash said as he and Nordwind sat outside a Burbank rehearsal studio where OK Go was preparing for a tour scheduled to stop Friday and Saturday at L.A.’s Bellwether. (The group’s other members are guitarist Andy Ross and drummer Dan Konopka.) “The robots are only there,” the singer added, “to move the mirrors so that we can experience that magical thing — so simple and beautiful — of two mirrors making infinity.”

A wistful psych-pop jam inspired by Kulash’s becoming a father to twins — his wife, author and filmmaker Kristin Gore, is a daughter of former Vice President Al Gore — “Love” comes from OK Go’s new album, “And the Adjacent Possible,” its first LP since 2014. It’s a characteristically eclectic set that also includes a strutting funk-rock tune featuring Ben Harper, a glammy rave-up co-written by Shudder to Think’s Craig Wedren and a woozy existentialist’s ballad about discovering there’s no “no deus ex machina working away in the wings.” (That last one’s called “This Is How It Ends.”)

“We’re old people who listen to sad ballads,” said Kulash, who’ll turn 50 in October. “That’s what happens when you become an old person, right?”

Wedren, who’s known Kulash since the latter was a teenage Shudder to Think fan in their shared hometown of Washington, D.C., said that “part of the beauty of OK Go is that they’re so musically omnivorous — that all these things that wouldn’t seem to go together always end up sounding like OK Go.” In Wedren’s view, the band “doesn’t get enough credit for how exploratory they are as musicians — maybe because of the genius of the videos.”

If that’s the case, Kulash doesn’t seem especially to mind. He knew nearly two decades ago that the viral success of the treadmill video — which the band recreated onstage at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards between performances by Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé — threatened to make OK Go “a one-hit wonder whose one hit was an exercise equipment stunt,” as the singer put it. “Or it could be the opening to an opportunity to do more and weirder things.”

Among the weird things the group ended up doing: the 2014 clip for “I Won’t Let You Down,” in which the members ride around a parking lot in Japan on personal mobility devices under the eye of a camera on a drone.

“I remember hearing that Radiohead didn’t play ‘Creep’ for 10 or 15 years because they were too cool for that,” he said. “Had we taken the path of being too cool for treadmills and homemade videos, I can look back and say —”

“We’d have had a much quieter career,” Nordwind chimed in.

There’s a way of looking at OK Go’s emphasis on visuals that depicts the band as a harbinger of an era when “musician” is just another word for “content creator.”

“It’s weird to think about a life in the vertical as opposed to the horizontal,” Nordwind said with a laugh, referring to the respective orientations of videos on TikTok and YouTube.

“What’s difficult about social media is the question of volume — the volume and quality balance is off to me,” Kulash said.

Creators, he means, are expected to churn out content like little one-person factories.

“Day after day,” Nordwind said. “We like to take our time.”

“Also: When I fall in love with a song, I want to hear that song over and over again,” Kulash said. “I will listen to ‘Purple Rain’ until I die. Do people go back and search someone’s feed to replay the TikTok they first fell in love with?

“The relationship that I think people have to their favorite YouTube star or TikToker,” he added, “feels much more like a relationship to celebrity than it does a relationship to art.”

OK Go at its rehearsal studio in Burbank.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

For Kulash, who made his feature debut as a director (alongside his wife) with 2023’s “The Beanie Bubble,” the pursuit of art is bound up in ideas of effort and limitation, which is why AI doesn’t interest him as a filmmaking tool.

“When everything is possible, nothing is special,” he said. “The reason we shoot our videos in a single shot is not purely for the filmmaking heroics. It’s because that’s the only way to prove to people: This is real — we did the thing.”

OK Go’s dedication to costly and time-consuming practical effects has led to partnerships with a number of deep-pocketed brands, beginning with State Farm, which spent a reported $150,000 to finance the band’s 2010 “This Too Shall Pass” video with the Rube Goldberg machine. (Meta sponsored the “Love” video and in return got a prominent spot in the clip for its Ray-Ban smart glasses.)

Kulash said that kind of product placement was “scary as s—” back in the late 2000s, when the fear of being perceived as sellouts haunted every rock band.

“Now, of course, it’s like a badge of honor,” he added, among influencers eager to flaunt their corporate ties.

To explain his position on the matter, the singer — whose band walked away from its deal with Capitol Records in 2010 to start its own label, Paracadute — tried out an extended metaphor: “On the other side of the planet, tectonic plates are moving and the hot magma of corporate money is coming out of the ground. That’s why the MTV Awards exist, that’s why the Grammys exist, that’s why everything you think of as a celebration of high art exists. It’s all advertising dollars, every last bit of it. You’re protected by these continents of middle-people, which let you feel like you’re marking art. But if you can manage to be one of those microbes at the bottom of the sea that gets its energy directly from the thermal vents of the hot magma money, then you get to make something other people don’t.” He laughed.

“There’s no record label in the world that would ever be like, ‘Hey, why don’t you go to Budapest for three weeks and spend a ridiculous amount of money to make this music video at a time when there’s not even a music video channel anymore?’

“But brands know that’s worthwhile, and we know that’s worthwhile,” he said. “You just have to make sure you don’t get burned by the magma.”