In This Edition

• How Women Made Music

• News of Note

I’m introducing a new section this month, News of Note (get it? note?) which will highlight some noteworthy music news from the past month or so. This handle table of contents means you can easily skip to whichever you’d like to read, or, of course, you can keep scrolling to read the whole thing. Next month will include a new section, Release Radar, where I share newly released or newly announced music I’m looking forward to.

How Women Made Music

In 2017, NPR launched Turning the Tables, a series dedicated to recognizing the crucial contributions women have made towards music. The culmination and continuation of that work is How Women Made Music, “the ultimate celebration of women in music,” a compilation of decades’ worth of NPR’s reporting on women in music, with interviews, essays, and more.

The introduction of How Women Made Music notes that time and time again, music lovers and writers have highlighted the work of women in the music industry, only for it to be eventually forgotten each time. Rather than being recognized for their talent, it notes, women in music are pretty much always pushed to the sidelines and credit and attention is given to men instead. We can see this playing out in real time — Taylor Swift, undoubtedly the biggest musician of our time, is consistently dismissed and still often discussed as though she’s still a teenager and not a 30-something woman with years of experience in the industry behind year. This makes the introduction one of the most interesting parts of How Women Made Music, as it goes through past attempts at permanently changing the record.

The book, as well as Turning the Tables before it, aims to change that view for good and make women’s contributions part of the narrative, not just a footnote. Rather than presenting a clear linear history, album by album, year by year, How Women Made Music tracks the history of American popular music through articles and essays about its most influential women, split into sections like “Tradition Bearers and Breakers,” focused on early blues and gospel singers, “Warriors,” focused on music as activism, and more. Among the most interesting is “Shredders,” which highlights, obviously, guitar players, but it also gives other female musicians their due, from the guitar skills of St. Vincent to the work of female drummers like Meg White of The White Stripes and Sheila E. 

Longer essays and articles are interspersed with excerpts from lists like The 500 Best Albums by Women, as well as interview excerpts. While the album blurbs serve as deserved praise for some of the most notable work by female musicians, it’s the interview excerpts that are the most interesting — they touch on not only the artists and their work, but often, the women featured speak about their experiences creating art in a space that has long been, and largely still is, male-dominated. To ignore this would be a glaring omission. But the interviews also address the vast spectrum of human experience and how that influences their work, from the universal experience of friendship to the unique , and at times isolating and lonely ,  experience of parenting, especially from the female perspective.

No genre is left untouched — while the book begins with the blues and makes a natural progression into rock, it also touches on the ways different genres were born of and influenced each other, as well as the women who helped shape them, from Dolly Parton in country to MC Sha-Rock in rap to Selena in Latin music and beyond. In recent years, Black female musicians in particular, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, have finally been getting their due, but How Women Made Music makes it a point to highlight other Black musicians who haven’t been vindicated in the same way. The crucial role Black women played in blues music and its trajectory into rock and beyond cannot be overstated, nor can the groundbreaking work of Black women in hip hop.

But the history isn’t the only wonderful thing about How Women Made Music. Of equal weight is the sheer passion with which its contributors write about the musicians — combined with their groundbreaking work and trailblazing attitudes, the way they are elevated by the writers who love them speaks volumes as to their impact and is a testament to how much they matter to their fans. There’s nothing like hearing someone gush about their favorite musicians and the work they’ve created, and that makes How Women Made Music more than an informational read. It makes it an enjoyable one, too. While you may not love some of these musicians with the same intensity, you can relate to how that feels.

How Women Made Music is a must-read for any music lover — women will love seeing beloved artists get their due, and music lovers in general will appreciate the history and analysis. Even those who consider themselves well-versed in music history will come away having learned something about a musician they’d never heard of before. The book could only be enhanced if it were a chronological history rather than a compilation, but it still stands as a brilliant testament to the crucial role women have played in American popular music.

News of Note

• After taking notes while attending Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, Shakira has been accused of copying it for her own tour. The similarities are striking and hard to dismiss as coincidence—the similarity in the use of the tour name on screens is one thing, but Shakira also used a silver color scheme and a metallic wolf, similar to Bey’s silver horse. It’s an odd choice in an era where practically everything is documented online and nothing goes unnoticed.

• Ben Folds resigned from his position as artistic adviser for the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center—a position he held for eight years—after Trump took over as chairman. Shonda Rhimes, known for her hit Shondaland TV shows, also resigned from her position as board treasurer. Folds’ departure is a huge loss for the center, and although it would be nice to imagine him and others staying and doing what they can in protest, in reality, it’s likely he would’ve been fired by Trump. A number of artists have also canceled scheduled performances in protest, while other performances, most notably ones with LGBTQ representation and themes, have been canceled presumably by Trump himself.

• Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary with a concert. The highlights included Robyn performing her incredible “Dancing on My Own” with David Byrne, the two of them donning Byrne’s signature oversized suit. There’s a moment where the camera pans to a man with a shit-eating grin, and that’s before Byrne even gets onstage. He is me. I could watch the two of them dance together every day for the rest of my life. It feels like he’s a fan who got pulled up onstage, and I mean this in the best way possible. One of the best parts is the many cuts to SNL stars of past and present vibing and singing every word, a testament to how damn good that song is. Robyn is amazing live, and you should absolutely go see her if you get the chance. Another great performance was Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard performing Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” with The Roots. It was a fitting tribute to O’Connor, whose a cappella performance of Bob Marley's "War" ended with her tearing up a picture of the pope and saying, “Fight the real enemy,” as a way to call attention to the church’s coverup of sexual abuse, was hugely controversial and remains among the most infamous moments in the show’s history. One might say her career never recovered, but she felt differently: "A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope's photo derailed my career. That's not how I feel about it," she wrote in her memoir. "I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.” It’s tragic that O’Connor is no longer with us and could not appear as part of the special herself, but Cyrus and Howard’s performance, filled with attitude and a touch of reverence, is about as close as we’ll probably get to vindication for her. She was right, after all.

• The Grammy Awards also took place recently, and everyone’s new favorite, Chappell Roan, was nominated for six and won Best New Artist. She also had a great performance of “Pink Pony Club,” with a delightful rodeo-clown theme. And the moment where she yells, “Sing it!” and they cut to a bunch of celebrities, including Janelle Monae, singing every word? Incredible. I also loved Sabrina Carpenter’s medley of “Espresso” and “Please, Please, Please,” in which the idea she’s in the middle of a performance where everything goes wrong. The backup singers singing, “Someone’s getting fired,” was a great touch.

• This is a bit of old news, but I was reminded of it recently and wanted to talk about it. The Cure’s 2023 Shows of a Lost World Tour was their best-selling and highest-grossing tour to date, despite frontman Robert Smith’s insistence on ticket prices remaining affordable—he famously took Ticketmaster to task for their fees and scored fans partial refunds. There’s been a lot of discourse on ticket prices over the last couple years, and The Cure’s success despite the refunds and low cost should serve as an example and prove to artists, management, ticketing companies, etc. that a tour can still be lucrative with lower prices. It makes sense, too. Lower prices means more people can afford to go. Seems pretty obvious to me. And an interesting thing happened at the show I attended. I heard more than one person say they jumped on whatever tickets they could get, then kept a close eye on the resale market for better tickets and listed their original ones, and while I’m sure fans do this pretty regularly, I’ve never heard people talk about it so openly or being so willing to try it, and I can’t help but think cost was a factor. But on top of that, the day of the concert was almost a total washout. It was an outdoor arena that was partially covered and had lawn seating, and it rained almost all day. A thunderstorm even delayed the show by about a half-hour. When it became obvious that the lawn was going to be awful, some people looked for better pavilion seating while they were already in the arena and got it. I can’t think of very many other concerts where fans would be willing and able to afford better tickets after doors had already opened.