September 6, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic listens to a trio of new releases that all point her in the same direction: toward the tightly-packed humanity of life in the city.

Daniel Arnold

Hello sky scrapers,

The other day a close friend called me the most indoorsy person she knows. She’s an ultra runner who’s been chased by panthers and avoided rattlesnakes on trails from Florida to Tennessee; I’m her patio-sitting pal more likely to stay up late watching avant-garde films than hitting the dirt at dawn.

Still, indoorsy? It’s true that I’ve spent the last decade mostly avoiding Tennessee’s admittedly beautiful woodland hills and hollers, mostly because I’m paranoid about ticks and unable to function in high humidity. But I wanted to take her back to my previous homes in Los Angeles and New York and Seattle, where I would traverse the circumference of my canyon neighborhood in Mt. Washington, mid-century modern masterworks nestled next to hippie huts; or drift from the far West Village across 80 blocks to Central Park, checking out all the storefront windows and street fashions; or through the Olympic Sculpture Park, where I’d sit on one of Louise Bourgeois’s Eye Benches and let them help me watch the weekend fishermen and skateboard kids go by.

I am outdoorsy! I just prefer a little pavement and a lot of friends and strangers in my vistas. I love what the great Vivian Gornick wrote about the Manhattan strolls that healed her anxiety in tough times: “To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human — the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques — was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.”

I was thinking about urban outdoorsiness (and yes, indoorsiness, because museums and old-fashioned department stores and even sometimes malls entice a walker with their own pleasures) when listening to several of this week’s new releases, all of which capture something magical about living and making art in cities. A few weeks ago I noted that indie rock, at least, has lately taken a semi-rural turn, with bands from smaller cities succeeding with music that evokes lazy river afternoons along routes marked with homemade car-crash shrines. (I’m excited about the upcoming Wednesday album!) I enjoy these latest stone-rubbings of country rock, more than mainstream country’s usual fare about hunting, bonfires and riding ATVs. But right now I think it’s time to turn back toward the city — that most amazing shared endeavor, uniting all kinds of people in daily toil, closely held hopes and the joy of play. Cities are miracles made and sustained by countless hands reaching toward each other across history. They generate the kind of hope that comes from ambition or desire taking a new turn and encountering something unexpected.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about cities as dangerous, unwelcoming places. This intrepid wanderer is here to tell you that while cities do hold risks, they are built to make it possible for people to thrive in close proximity. This spirit of random connections transforming into community is at the heart of what I call “city music.” It’s not the same as urban music, a confining marketing category that many have protested; instead, it’s music that leaps genres while cultivating unexpected juxtaposition and a naturally experimental bent. Jazz is, of course, city music. So are soul and hip-hop. Even country, in fact, is really very often city music — its lyrical and sonic touchstones may point toward small town and rural traditions, but it’s mostly crafted here in Nashville on Music Row, just blocks away from the neon chaos of Lower Broadway and miles away from the cosmopolitan diversity of immigrant enclave Nolensville Road. That song about hunting and pontoon partying that you love very well may have been co-written by someone living next to a Kurdish family in Woodbine and spending Friday nights drinking cocktails while house music plays at Night We Met, just across from the Whole Foods. Nashville has strong links to the country, but it isn’t the country. It’s Music City. It is a nexus embodying what really generates most popular music, a flow between the small town and the metropolis, an embodiment of the mobility that for centuries has been a(n incompletely realized) American dream.

Let’s turn back to the city music that inspired these thoughts. No one illustrates the interplay between country and city better in her writing than Joni Mitchell, Canada’s most famous prairie girl, who learned to be an artist in part by dreaming her way through summer running through Saskatchewan meadows, only to flee that isolated existence as fast as she could. Joni’s travels from Calgary to Toronto to New York to Los Angeles made her the writer so many treasure, and musically, she was formed by what she learned in cafés and bars in the Village and Hollywood. And by jazz, of course — the closest thing she had to a religion, whose myths she devoured and practices she strove to master. Joni’s jazz is where her soul resides; it embodies her curiosity, her love of collaboration, her ambition, and her love of dancing. So when I heard several months ago that the latest installment of her archival series would feature that side of her music, I rejoiced. Finally this aspect of her career, which precedes and extends far beyond the classic fusion albums she made in the mid-1970s, would be fully explored.

Joni’s Jazz, as always curated by the artist herself, is out this week. It doesn’t overflow with rarities — although serious followers will enjoy the handful of demos (there’s a deliciously spare version of “Moon at the Window” featuring just her guitar and John Guerin’s brushed drums) and curiosities (who remembered that she recorded a straight-ahead jazz take on “Trouble Man” with Clint Eastwood’s sax-playing son Kyle in 1998?). The great value of this set, though, is in the full picture it offers by connecting Mitchell’s most famous jazz tracks to ones that casual listeners might have overlooked. The track listing begins with “Blue,” which made me grin, since I’ve written about how that song from her “folk” album of the same name clearly demonstrates her indebtedness to Miles Davis. It then offers selections from throughout her career to establish the argument that jazz arises within chord changes and vocal phrasings as much as through particular instrumentation or clichés about swing. I’d never thought of “Marcie,” from Mitchell’s debut album Song to a Seagull, as anything but a Beatles-influenced folk idyll; included here, its reveals its connections to ones by Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley, jazz-rock pioneers whose right to inhabit the genre, unlike Joni’s, was never doubted.

“Marcie” is also a city song, and brings me back to Joni as a city girl. Relaying the story of a woman missing her man but hardly paralyzed by his absence, it follows her to a flower stand, in conversation with a postman, and to a show uptown. Sad, almost a dirge, “Marcie” shows us the city in “dusty grey.” It’s a counterpart to another song that Mitchell could have selected for this set, “Night in the City,” which describes a young woman in thrall to the lights and noise that envelops her, perhaps about to meet the man whose betrayal will bring the clouds that make her bright city days so monochromatic.

Joni’s Jazz deliberately takes on this wide range of emotions and scenes to defeat assumptions about what best fits its title — startlingly, Mitchell omits the obviously Swing Era-inspired “Raised on Robbery” but includes the traffic-jam lament “Sex Kills,” with its rock-ish bottom, and the hymn-like “Come In From the Cold.” What matters more, I think, within Mitchell’s definition of jazz is an expansiveness that serves her storytelling, and this is another way that it becomes city music. Mitchell never fully settled within the country-flavored, forcefully pastoral Laurel Canyon scene; jazz was her way out. It allowed her to paint broader scenes, explore different characters and imagine herself within scenarios that felt unlimited.

Imagining the city through many shifting scenes is a main technique of musicians trying to capture its multiplicity. One current master of this approach is Leon Michels, the producer and multi-instrumentalist whose crate-digging touch has been the key to projects by artists ranging from Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and the Menahan Street Band to rappers like Don Toliver. Michels makes his own records as the El Michels Affair, a loose configuration allowing its leader to roam widely, from tributes to the Wu-Tang Clan to concept albums inspired by Turkish pop and 1970s film scores. The new El Michels Affair album, 24 Hour Sports, features singers whose albums he’s recently produced — Norah Jones and Clairo — whose airy voices beckon in the way a voice does when you hear it from across a sunlit field. It takes inspiration from images in vintage sports magazines, among other things; it begins with “Drumline,” a raucous invocation of the ribaldry at a college football game. But this album doesn’t stay in the stadium. Like much of Michels’s work, it transports the listener throughout a landscape that’s vibrating with life, tantalizingly offering glimpses into scenes that remain mysterious.

In the past, he’s been a tour guide through imaginary car chases and mysterious alleyway exchanges in the cinematic Adult Themes and led a tour of a partly imagined Istanbul on Yeti Season. Now, Michels takes us to the places where people play: not just athletic fields, but street basketball courts, church picnics where somebody’s uncle always brought a football, parks where rollerbladers whiz by. The singers who appear on these tracks without ever dominating them add personality to the general mood of communal good feeling. With its sometimes fragmentary-feeling songs — that’s a Michels technique, he prefers to offer glimpses instead of fully fleshed-out narratives — keeping the vistas ever changing, 24 Hour Sports evokes late summer in place like Chicago or Washington, D.C., where people of all kinds run across each other in the public spaces where they gather to party, hang out with family, play games and revel in the goodwill that shared public spaces can generate.

The serendipity involved in public encounters is one common subject of city music, but its mandate of finding joy in multiplicity can play out in more private environments. That’s what happened when the beloved indie band Big Thief landed in the famous Hell’s Kitchen studio the Power Station after an aborted attempt to record its sixth album in “forest isolation,” as they’d done with the string of sui generis, horizon-scanning releases that had made them indie rock’s most esteemed roots-ish band. Needing to regroup after the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik, the now-trio couldn’t cohere without help. That’s how they ended up in the same rooms where city music classics like David Bowie’s Scary Monsters and Madonna’s Like a Virgin were made, alongside nine friends who played percussion, created tape loops and formed a small choir of backing vocalists, jamming for hours and finding an unexpected new groove.

“Groove” may seem like a weird term to apply to Big Thief — a jam band for sure, but one that has refined and redefined that term to mean something more internal and intense. On Double Infinity a more far-reaching feeling takes over, like the one that you feel when you’re on a rooftop gazing over a whole skyline. The carefully guarded privacy the band has always evoked gives way to an impulse that’s more anthemic and open-hearted. Adrianne Lenker’s voice is as poignant and piercing as ever, but she risks more here than in the past, pushing notes and mounting choruses that only could be realized with the stellar support provided by Hannah Cohen, June McDoom and Allena Spanger. “All Night All Day,” a rapturous ode to oral sex, obtains a sublime gospel feel when those voices combine. Other songs lean psychedelic. With experimental music elder Laraaji providing drones and ecstatic backing vocals, “Grandmother” opens up like a night sky painted on an observatory ceiling. Vast, but also mightily constructed — that’s the feeling here.

Listening to Double Infinity, I often thought of Lou Reed’s mid-to-late 1970s albums, when he applied the drone logic of the Velvet Underground and the noise of Metal Machine Music to the classic pop and rock frameworks of his youth, making music that was both transgressive and transcendent. Reed made an album at the Power Station once, though not until the 1980s. Still, maybe the spirit of that city saint was floating around, encouraging these folkish babies to allow all the beauty and the dirt around them sink in.

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I’m hitting the streets to celebrate these things this week

Oasis, Oasis, Oasis – whatever. I’m way more excited that there’s a new album from Suede this week! It’s called Antidepressants and it’s great. Brett Anderson talks all about it in this interview.
Congrats to Stereogum editor Chris DeVille on his new history of early 2000s indie rock, Such Great Heights. It’s a great trip through the era that gave us indie sleaze and stomp-clap.
On Bluesky, I recently had a fascinating exchange with some fellow music writers about poptimism, particularly about the origins of that much-maligned phase. It inspired some very clarifying responses from a bunch of people I admire, including critics Tom Ewing, who really seems to have pinpointed the origin of that benighted term, and Dave Moore, who has been writing a great series about global pop and American xenophobia in his newsletter. Here’s to arguing about music forever!
It’s a new month on the Criterion Channel and I can’t wait to dive into the new Jodie Foster collection. Time for a Bugsy Malone rewatch!
Chicken Biryani!

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