December 27, 2025

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by Ann Powers

NPR's pop critic and correspondent considers what Heaven's Band might sound like today after a year of significant losses.

HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AFP via Getty Images

Hello candle lighters,

Every year, as the NPR Music team keeps busy discovering new artists, slinging opinions and chasing the news, my colleague Lars Gotrich takes on a quieter task that connects him to centuries of myth and ritual. From January to December, he gathers and tends to the names of the dead. The database cemetery he creates makes room for major monuments — this year, the names engraved on them include Sly Stone, Roberta Flack, Brian Wilson, and D’Angelo — but just as important are the spaces cleared for modest headstones honoring those who never found great fame, but were key players in their own communities. Lars’ database is inevitably incomplete; beyond the cult heroes who did reach wider-ranging audiences, it omits the choir directors, Tuesday night bluegrass jam leaders, library story-hour balladeers, buskers and family singalong organizers who cultivate the musical aspects of people’s daily lives. Yet Lars’ dedication to understanding music as fundamentally collaborative and (despite the pull of pop’s starmaking machinery) resistant to hierarchical thinking means that our In Memoriam digital funerary ground is a meadow, not a pyramid. A reader can roam among its markers and think about how legends’ lives connected to those of support players and to the folks who nurture music scenes in roles that rarely, if ever, took them from the background to the stage.

Read our In Memoriam list

The In Memoriam feature got me thinking about what’s perhaps the most enduring metaphor helping music lovers cope with grief when they lose their favorite artists: Heaven’s Band. Whether or not you're an afterlife aficionado, I bet you have engaged in this rhetorical exercise, imagining reunions and new collaborations as a way of fighting off the silence death imposes. In the recording age, of course, the work of lost creators remains accessible; Billie Holiday came alive for me twenty years after her death in 1959, when I first put her classic Columbia greatest hits album on my turntable as a baby connoisseur of great voices. But even in the age of bedroom auteurs and digital wizards, collaboration in a live setting is still music’s beating heart. In the moment when a hot rhythm section pushes featured instrumentalists to new heights, or when one rapper in a crew responds to another with a flow that both supports and pushes them, music reinvents itself. Even highly choreographed pop extravaganzas often reach a climax when their singing star breaks away from her script, supported by her dancers, her backing vocalists, her band. Needless to say, the departed cannot participate in these spontaneous generative acts. So we dream of them doing so in another realm.

The Heaven’s Band idea is a sweet one because it privileges artists’ own pleasure in creation, even when fans could not possibly enjoy its fruits. When D’Angelo succumbed to pancreatic cancer in October, the scholar Fredara Mareva Hadley expressed sadness that the gospel quartet album he was rumored to have wanted to record would only be heard in Heaven; expressing this on social media, though, she offered a gift to the lost great, an imaginary chance to fulfill a dream. I love to think of D’Angelo all aglow, singing with Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones and Sam Cooke. Eddie Palmieri fan Pedro Baez extended a similar blessing on Facebook when the bandleader and pianist passed in August, writing, “The Duke is jamming with Tito today.” There’s no public record of a musical encounter between the salsa great and Duke Ellington, a bandleader who inspired him greatly; the thought of them sitting at twin pianos on a celestial cloud is a comforting way of making an important historical connection that honors them both.

My problem with Heaven’s Band, though, is that this daydreaming exercise almost always focuses on the biggest names we’ve lost without acknowledging that music is built on less flashy contributions. I was reminded of this too many times this year, as my hometown of Nashville lost key players whose status was grounded as much in the ways they cultivated others as in their own prodigious gifts. In August, the Grand Ole Opry lost Jeannie Seely, its first female host and the artist who’d appeared on the program more than any other; her name rang out countless times afterward as the Opry family expressed their gratitude. East Nashville musicians flooded the Internet to acknowledge singer-songwriterTodd Snider as a founding father when he died in November, recalling his mentorship and the presiding spirit typified by his COVID-era sessions at the Purple Building studio in the heart of the neighborhood. And The Mavericks leader Raul Malo was honored days before his December death by dozens of friends at the Ryman Auditorium, where peers like Jim Lauderdale and Rodney Crowell extolled him alongside younger beneficiaries of the Cuban-American country mainstay’s generosity. Nicole Atkins, who often toured with The Mavericks, later captured what made Malo special, not as an extraordinary performer (which he was), but as a warm and generous local mainstay. “We all know Raul Malo has a once-in-a-generation voice and The Mavericks are one of the greatest and most fun live bands on the planet, but my biggest take away from last night, something that helps with the heartbreak even just a little, is the greatness of his friendships,” she wrote. “I’m eternally grateful to be part of this singular world he and The Mavericks have created and know that these people will be in my life for a long time.”

These artists were mentors, friends, collaborators, scene builders and promoters, people who endlessly extended a helping hand and, at other times, turned to others for help themselves. They were stars in a firmament. With them in mind, I’m looking at NPR Music’s In Memoriam feature as its own kind of firmament — a fantastic one, like Heaven’s Band, but one that doesn’t only feature familiar names. There are so many ways to make a difference within a music world, and Lars’ city of the dead honors many of them.

I’ll start, as so many ensembles do, with the bottom. We lost some extraordinary drummers and bassists this year. Clem Burke of Blondie was a titanic force in that band, keeping punk’s energy alive and bringing it to the mainstream. Louis Moholo-Moholo crossed different boundaries as he journeyed from South Africa to Europe in the 1960s and formed international, interracial bands that brought music’s rhythmic diaspora into focus. New York City native Anthony Jackson pioneered the contrabass guitar, or six-string bass, in studio sessions with myriad jazz legends and hitmakers from Chick Corea to the Temptations to N.W.A. Dave Allen helped the post-punk band Gang of Four hone the cutting edge of ‘80s rock with his funkified, floating lines. With anchors like these, a band could do anything.

I want to make sure keyboards have a place of honor in my made-up music scene, so I’m singling out the powerful Hammond B-3 player Akiko Tsuruga, who showed that a woman could expand that instrument’s range. I’m imagining her next to Soft Cell’s David Ball, the synth innovator who made it possible for Marc Almond to realize his vision of a queer, New Wave take on R&B. Let’s make this ensemble a trio by adding The Band’s Garth Hudson, the keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist whom bandmate Robbie Robertson called “the most advanced musician in rock ‘n’ roll.” I also think Hudson would have loved jamming with Hermeto Pascoal, the Brazilian multi-instrumentalists who was his equal as a musical adventurer and vibe conjurer.

As for singers, instead of up-front divas and divos, I’m thinking about duet partners, those receptive souls who devote their lives to harmonizing and responding to a partner. Melba Montgomery was a solo artist in her own right, but as a duet partner she really shone, especially in her perfectly matched exchanges with George Jones. Amadou Bagayoko met his perfect match, his wife and singing partner Mariam Doumbia, as a student at Mali’s School for the Young Blind. Their harmonies mirrored and amplified the twisting rhythms of his country’s native styles — he was also a great blues guitarist. Thinking of the driving interplay in Amadou and Mariam’s songs makes me want to welcome the doo-wop singers we lost this year into this fanciful group. Tommy Hunt helped The Flamingos create the classic “I Only Have Eyes For You”; Jerry Butler, also a major hitmaker as a solo artist, started out alongside Curtis Mayfield in The Impressions, building glittering edifices like “Your Precious Love.” How would these various voices blend? It’s a fun question to ponder.

But I said I was going to go beyond performers for my firmament. Musicians need producers, and Terry Manning was one of the most versatile, working with soul and rock greats as a staff engineer and producer at Stax Records and Ardent Studios in Memphis before leaving the U.S. to spend time at both London’s Abbey Road and Chris Blackwell’s Compass Studios in Jamaica. They also need people to help them put out their music, like Dan Storper, whose Putomayo label brought global sounds to new audiences in the 1990s (I learned a lot from its releases), and writers to tell the stories intertwined with their songs, like jazz critic Francis Davis and hip-hop bard and documentarian Sacha Jenkins. And no music world survives without its scene makers. like Soo Catwoman, one of the defining style mavens of English punk, or its inspirational figures, like Dolly Parton’s strictly behind-the-scenes husband Carl Dean, who inspired her greatest country hit, “Jolene.” Marianne Faithfull was also a muse — one who was too frequently uncredited during her relationship with Mick Jagger, whose personal style and cosmopolitan world view she greatly expanded; I loved most for her own recordings, especially the groundbreaking feminist testament Broken English, released in 1979.

I could go on building my firmament, but instead I encourage you to fully explore Lars’ curation of In Memoriam, using it as a launch pad for exploring the lives and legacies of music people whom you might not know. Like a beautifully tended and designed cemetery, where cultural history and personal remembrances mingle in the air, Lars’ gathering of names and legacies offers a wide view, spanning many musical lineages and moments. To quote an old blues song, let’s make sure these graves are kept clean.

Did a music person’s passing make an impact on you this year? I’d love to hear their story. Write me via the link at the bottom of this newsletter, and I’ll share your reminiscences next week. See you in the new year!

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