DM frontman Gahan captured everyone’s attention at the packed TD Garden on Tuesday. The singer, in perfect impassioned and overwrought voice, moved around the stage like a flamenco dancer, a ballerina, a stripper, a devilish imp, and a kindly guide across the void and into a throbbing discotheque.

The band’s first Boston concert in more than half a decade had the makings of a goth prom  — Depeche Mode on Halloween, c’mon, sublime! But Depeche Mode’s art is both too monolithic and personal, too absolutely connected to the broken parts of the world, the broken parts in us, to have even a whiff of kitsch.

Gahan and Martin Gore started the show by chanting to the crowd, to the world, into that void: “No rain, no clouds, no pain, no shrouds, no final breaths, no senseless deaths.” A new song, “My Cosmos Is Mine” is a glitchy, eerie anthem, a song that — as much as any in the band’s catalog — speaks to being crushed (it also contains the lyric: “Don’t stare at my soul, I swear it is fine.”)

The boldness and genius of the band is its constant attention to the damaged, an investigation of the existential set to electric, melodic and industrial clicks and beeps (something drawn into harsh light since the sudden passing of founding member Andy Fletcher last year). Gore wrote “My Cosmos Is Mine” right after Russia invaded Ukraine, and while the song rages against war, it also speaks to the intimate, unrelenting relationship with death we carry around.

But in this darkness, despite the confrontational lyrics and moody sonics, Depeche Mode remained a flicking candle in gloom, and that played out song after shattered-and-sharp song.

The band spent a nice amount of time with new LP “Memento Mori,” and got intense (“Wagging Tongue,” “My Favourite Stranger”). And so poppy — new tune “Ghost Again,” a clear meditation on life and death, had such a bright, buoyant hook.

But the now duo (rounded out brilliantly by the amazing drummer Christian Eigner and multi-instrumentalist Peter Gordeno) also resurrected a ton of old existential — and sexual — jams, those hits goth kids and goth adults made rock standards in the ’80s and ’90s.

Gahan, intensity and playfulness positively oozing from him, took control of the audience over and over again. That big voice, those grandiose movements and his indomitable charisma, stomped and crept through the crowd for “Walking in My Shoes” and “I Feel You” and “Never Let Me Down Again” and “Personal Jesus” and…

Beside him, Gore was an ideal foil with his high harmonies, jagged guitar, vintage and modern synth pulses. And when alone — Gahan left the stage so Gore could front the band for “A Question of Lust” and a piano ballad version of “Strangelove” — he provided all the wounded tenderness and intimacy Gahan doesn’t have.

In the wake of Andy Fletcher’s death, the band may have not carried on. It would have been another loss. Without Gahan and Gore around, who will lead us into the heart of darkness and the heat of the discotheque? Who will ask big questions you can dance to do and shout along with?

DM frontman Gahan captured everyone’s attention at the packed TD Garden on Tuesday. The singer, in perfect impassioned and overwrought voice, moved around the stage like a flamenco dancer, a ballerina, a stripper, a devilish imp, and a kindly guide across the void and into a throbbing discotheque.

The band’s first Boston concert in more than half a decade had the makings of a goth prom  — Depeche Mode on Halloween, c’mon, sublime! But Depeche Mode’s art is both too monolithic and personal, too absolutely connected to the broken parts of the world, the broken parts in us, to have even a whiff of kitsch.

Gahan and Martin Gore started the show by chanting to the crowd, to the world, into that void: “No rain, no clouds, no pain, no shrouds, no final breaths, no senseless deaths.” A new song, “My Cosmos Is Mine” is a glitchy, eerie anthem, a song that — as much as any in the band’s catalog — speaks to being crushed (it also contains the lyric: “Don’t stare at my soul, I swear it is fine.”)

The boldness and genius of the band is its constant attention to the damaged, an investigation of the existential set to electric, melodic and industrial clicks and beeps (something drawn into harsh light since the sudden passing of founding member Andy Fletcher last year). Gore wrote “My Cosmos Is Mine” right after Russia invaded Ukraine, and while the song rages against war, it also speaks to the intimate, unrelenting relationship with death we carry around.

But in this darkness, despite the confrontational lyrics and moody sonics, Depeche Mode remained a flicking candle in gloom, and that played out song after shattered-and-sharp song.

The band spent a nice amount of time with new LP “Memento Mori,” and got intense (“Wagging Tongue,” “My Favourite Stranger”). And so poppy — new tune “Ghost Again,” a clear meditation on life and death, had such a bright, buoyant hook.

But the now duo (rounded out brilliantly by the amazing drummer Christian Eigner and multi-instrumentalist Peter Gordeno) also resurrected a ton of old existential — and sexual — jams, those hits goth kids and goth adults made rock standards in the ’80s and ’90s.

Gahan, intensity and playfulness positively oozing from him, took control of the audience over and over again. That big voice, those grandiose movements and his indomitable charisma, stomped and crept through the crowd for “Walking in My Shoes” and “I Feel You” and “Never Let Me Down Again” and “Personal Jesus” and…

Beside him, Gore was an ideal foil with his high harmonies, jagged guitar, vintage and modern synth pulses. And when alone — Gahan left the stage so Gore could front the band for “A Question of Lust” and a piano ballad version of “Strangelove” — he provided all the wounded tenderness and intimacy Gahan doesn’t have.

In the wake of Andy Fletcher’s death, the band may have not carried on. It would have been another loss. Without Gahan and Gore around, who will lead us into the heart of darkness and the heat of the discotheque? Who will ask big questions you can dance to do and shout along with?

“I am in a whole other part of the planet and they’re playing Common, and not only Common, but old school Common,” RED told the Herald. “It was the first time I had been to Africa, returned to the motherland so to speak, and hip hop followed me there.”

Since college, Jazzmyn RED has become one of Massachusetts’ smartest, sharpest, boldest MCs — listen to recent single “The Feminist” to hear her spell it out as she booms, “brain, beauty, and bars, that’s a deadly combination.” But she’s also an activist and educator who has spent years digging into the history of hip hop. Over the next few weeks, RED will present a series of workshops, “The Hip Hop Experience,” at Harvard Art Museums — the Sunday series begins Oct. 29 and wraps up Nov. 12.

“In the first one, Music of the Movement, we go through the backdrop of hip hop and talk about the Jim Crow era and the music that pertained to that part of history, the ’60s and Gil Scott-Heron and James Brown,” she said. “Then we identify socio-political issues in the ’80s and ’90s and listen to the songs that pertain to them. We get the history context behind how we got to here.”

“The second one, The Roots, we talk solely about hip hop, how it came to be, the founding fathers, the elements of hip hop, the principles of hip hop,” she continued. “The third, The Art of 16 Bars, is the MC portion, and that’s the part I can speak to the most.”

While RED is a stunning MC, she can speak to all of this with wisdom and passion.

This century, hip hop has become a global force. RED has seen that — in 2021, she participated in the U.S. State Department’s Next Level Program and taught the history of hip hop in the United Arab Emirates and how to be an MC at Berklee School of Music in Abu Dhabi. She also knows that the roots of hip hop shouldn’t get lost as it goes global.

“It used to be that you had to discover hip hop through cassette tapes passed around communities, and now breakdancing is about to be at the Olympics,” she said with a laugh.

RED has been rapping since she was 7. But it took her a few years to realize the enormity of hip hop.

“Incrementally, piece by piece, the more I got involved in the culture and not just the craft, the more I started to see, ‘Oh, I’m part of this culture, this culture inside of the American culture, that is mine,’” she said. “We have food that’s associated with this culture. We have clothing, we have artwork, we have dance, we have storytelling. We have all the things that create a culture and it’s looked at as a music genre.”

No other “genre” has hip hop’s reach, or history, or art. And RED is the ideal person to help the world understand why this is.

For details or to book Jazzmyn RED for a workshop, visit jazzmynred.com

“There is somebody called Lizzo that I hear about,” he said during a recent Zoom interview. “And she’s probably a much better flute player than I am, having been classically trained.”

They’ve gone in and out of style too many times to count, but Tull remains as individual as ever. Their latest album “RokFlote” is the best – and probably only – concept album about Norse mythology you’ll hear this year. But then, not many people were making albums about organized religion in 1971, when Tull released the now-classic ”Aqualung.” Both albums will likely be represented when the band hits the MGM Grand on Saturday.

“Norse mythology originally struck me as a very bad jumping off point for a Jethro Tull record,” he says. “The challenge was to find a way to do it. I had to adopt a light touch in the writing and not give the connotations of a master race, since the poor old Vikings died out several hundred years ago. I tried to give each song a couple stanzas of descriptive writing, followed by a couple that find parallels with human characters that I might know from my associations over the years. What’s interesting about the characters of Norse gods is that they’re not depicted as spiritual magical beings, but as superior humans.”

The most popular Tull albums are usually his own favorites, he says. “I’d say that ‘Stand Up” was one of the best, the ‘Aqualung’ album had some important songs on it, then up to the ‘80s with ‘Crest of a Knave’. A lot of people don’t go beyond the ‘80s, since they stopped listening to Jethro Tull when it became less fashionable. When you do a new album you don’t want to do something that just sounds the same as a previous one, but you don’t want to have it sound radically different either. People are at this point in their aging lives, looking for some familiarity. They know what they like to have for Sunday lunch, and they know what they like to listen to.”

The Tull lineup has changed since they last toured pre-Covid, and he says he’s gotten some energy from the fresh blood. “When I write for a new project I think of the personalities of the musicians involved. And since we couldn’t play in a room together during the Covid years, it was exhilarating to do that. We’ve still got a musical style that keeps us from sounding like a bunch of other people. And keeps them from sounding like us, since it’s quite difficult to play.”

The past decade has brought deluxe reissues of every Jethro Tull album in order; 1982’s synth-heavy “The Broadsword & the Beast” was the latest to appear last summer. This has required Anderson to go back and listen to every song the band ever recorded, including the ones that got rejected at the time. “I expected a lot of disappointing surprises when I started work on it. But I was relatively relaxed after listening to the music two or three times. Even the songs that didn’t meet the standard, when you put them in the context of the era and my age at the time, nothing was too dreadful.  Maybe a half dozen were just a little dreadful.”

Again.

Hey — some people don’t get it right the first time.

So, these masked men of rock ‘n’ roll mayhem have hit the road with their second farewell trek, dubbed the End of the Road World Tour.

It’s a mammoth road show that has already stretched more than four years (minus the COVID shutdown, of course) and looks to finish up in December.

Along the way, the band is set to play Acrisure Arena at Greater Palm Springs on Nov. 1 and the Hollywood Bowl on Nov. 3, which will be the final KISS shows ever played in California.

Well, at least until the band adds more dates or announces a third farewell tour.

After all, pretty much nothing is off the table when it comes to KISS and making money.

To commemorate these closing shows of this long goodbye, we decided to take a look back in KISStory at some of the big moments in the band’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career.

Since the band is (allegedly) wrapping up its storied, groundbreaking career in 2023, here are 23 KISS milestones, ranging from landmark album releases to a performance witnessed by billions.

1. First KISS

Bassist Gene Simmons, vocalist-guitarist Paul Stanley, guitarist Ace Frehley and drummer Peter Criss perform the first-ever KISS show on Jan. 30, 1973. A crowd of roughly 10 people witness the gig at a small club called Popcorn in Queens.

2. Debut album

The band’s eponymous debut hits shelves on Feb. 18, 1974, offering up such key cuts as “Strutter,” “Deuce” and “Black Diamond.” It didn’t make much of a mark out of the gate, initially selling only 75,000 copies, but was finally certified gold a little over 3 years later.

3. “All Nite” long

KISS finds its signature song with the release of “Rock and Roll All Nite” from their third album, 1975’s “Dressed to Kill.” The hit is released as a single on April 2, 1975. Nearly a half century later, it’s still a tune that KISS turns to for nearly every  encore.

4. KISS comes ‘Alive!’

Although KISS’ studio albums continue to struggle on the charts, the band’s fortunes change dramatically with the release of “Alive!” on Sept. 10, 1975. The live double album proves to be the breakthrough hit that sets the band up for everything to come.

5. Slowing it down

It’s a bit ironic that a band that loves to “Rock and Roll All Nite” and “Shout It Loud” scores its biggest hit with the ballad “Beth,” released on the “Destroyer” album on March 15, 1976.

6. A different fantastic four

The band gets its own comic when A Marvel Comics Super Special!: KISS is released on June 30, 1977. The four musicians do more than just star in the comic — they also add their own blood to the ink at the printing press.

7. Alive, too

The band returns to the well that has served them so nicely and releases arguably its most powerful album — “Alive II” — on Oct. 14, 1977, a two-LP offering recorded mainly during a run of shows earlier in the year at the Forum in Inglewood.

8. Going solo (kinda)

All four members release eponymous solo albums on Sept. 18, 1978. None of the four reach the top 20 on the album charts, yet all of them still go platinum.

9. ‘Phantom’ menace

The feature-length TV film, “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park,” is aired by NBC on Oct. 28, 1978. The movie — filmed mainly at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia — is widely panned, especially by the band. Simmons reportedly once compared it to Ed Wood’s cult classic, “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

10. Disco inferno

Hard-rocking KISS fans cringe a bit when the disco-happy “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” is released on the “Dynasty” album on May 23, 1979. Everybody else just dances and sings along to what is surely one of the best KISS songs of all time.

11. Criss to Carr

Original drummer Criss leaves the band not long after “Unmasked” is released on May 20, 1980. Eric Carr quickly takes over on the kit, making his concert debut with the band on July 25, 1980.

12. The big reveal

Known at least as much for their makeup as their music, the KISS guys finally show their faces on MTV on Sept. 18, 1983. Once the novelty fades, basically everyone agrees that they like the band better in makeup.

13. Wait .. who?

Released as a single on Jan. 5, 1990, the power ballad “Forever” becomes the band’s second top 10 hit (after “Beth”). Stanley co-wrote the song with — get ready for this — Michael Bolton.

14. R.I.P. Carr

The amazingly talented drummer dies from heart cancer at age 41 on Nov. 24, 1991.

15. The big four

The original members of KISS embark on a reunion tour on June 28, 1996 in Detroit. (And, equally important, they are all back in makeup!) The trek — which marks the first tour with Frehley and Criss since 1979’s Dynasty Tour — is a massive success.

16. Goodbye (take 1)

The group launches its first farewell tour on March 11, 2000 in Phoenix. By late 2002, however, KISS announces that the retirement is, um, well, not really happening. (Sorry about that!)

17. Gold medal performance

In a move that probably only Gene and Paul would have predicted, KISS is chosen to perform during the closing ceremony of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games on Feb. 24, 2002. The band’s high-octane take on “Rock and Roll All Nite” is seen by some three billion TV viewers.

18. Thayer on guitar

Guitarist Tommy Thayer fills in for Frehley and makes his live KISS debut during a private concert in Jamaica on March 6, 2002. Not long after, he officially gets the gig as the band’s lead guitarist.

19. Super ‘Sonic’

After more than a decade without putting out a new studio album, KISS finally releases No. 10 — “Sonic Boom” — on Oct. 6, 2009. The album reaches No. 2 on the Billboard 200, making it the highest charting effort of the band’s career.

20. Rock Hall

After years of eligibility and countless cries from KISS Army, the band’s original lineup — Simmons, Stanley, Criss and Frehley — is finally (and rightfully) inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony on April 10, 2014 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

21. It’s a long Road

The band launches its mammoth End of the Road World Tour on Jan. 31, 2019 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, Canada. More than four years later, it’s still going.

22. Going to California

Fans from around the Golden State and beyond will gather at the legendary Hollywood Bowl on Nov. 3 for what is increasingly looking like the final KISS show in California.

23. If you can make it there

A little less than a month after the Hollywood date, KISS is set to bring its End of the Road World Tour to a conclusion with two shows (Dec. 1-2) at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Note: Sources include kissonline.com.

Britney Spears is angry. Very, very angry.

“The Woman in Me,” the singer’s new memoir, is about more than just venting, of course. She offers detailed, cogent accounts of indignities that would leave anyone seething. But Spears has clearly packed away a lot of frustration over the course of her 41 years — particularly toward the people who enabled her conservatorship, including much of her family, and toward the swarms of paparazzi who badgered her nonstop.

And don’t get her started on Justin Timberlake. Not right now. But soon.

The book tracks Spears’ life from childhood to the not-quite-present — it ends before her brief marriage to Sam Asghari did — and it kicks off with a litany of relatives who showed signs of mental illness or alcoholism. Spears’ past is full of givers and receivers of abuse, including her grandma Jean, who in 1966 fatally shot herself with a shotgun on the grave of the son she lost three days after he was born. Jean was only 31.

In short, Spears didn’t have a blueprint for a normal life, and a normal life is far from the one she has led since becoming a pop phenomenon.

It’s a lot for anyone to take on — or take in. Here are eight takeaways from “The Woman in Me,” which goes on sale Tuesday.

She once had power to burn

Spears became a star with the release of “… Baby, One More Time” when she was 16.

Four years later, she was playing the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show, which she calls “just one of the seemingly endless good things happening for me.”

“I landed the ‘most powerful woman’ spot on the Forbes list of most powerful celebrities — the following year I’d be number one overall,” Spears writes. She was getting offers that included Pepsi commercials and the movie “Crossroads,” though the latter put her off acting: She didn’t enjoy how she disappeared into her character.

“When I think back on that time, I was truly living the dream, living my dream. My tours took me all over the world,” she says, and she was having fun and “being 19.” She turned down a role in the movie version of “Chicago,” which she seems to regret. And she wishes she’d had even more fun.

“I had power back then; I wish I’d used it more thoughtfully,” she says, “been more rebellious.”

She says she never had a drinking problem. Adderall, however …

“I liked to drink, but it was never out of control,” Spears writes, even as she tells stories about drinking with her mother when she was 12 and later partying with the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. She did plan a trip to Las Vegas with some tour friends in 2003, and says, “I was this little girl who had worked so much, and then all of a sudden the schedule was blank for a few days, and so: Hello, alcohol!” That’s when — apparently wasted — she married childhood pal Jason Alexander for 55 whole hours.

“Do you want to know my drug of choice?,” Spears asks. “The only thing I really did except for drinking? Adderall, the amphetamine that’s given to kids for ADHD. Adderall made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed. It was the only thing that worked for me as an antidepressant, and I really felt like I needed one of those.”

Spears says she started taking Prozac in 2000 and had envelopes full of medicine handed to her while she was under the conservatorship, but never reveals what she is or isn’t taking at present.

But! She admits she smokes Virginia Slims. Smokes, present tense. Don’t tell the kids.

Justin Timberlake was a real jerk

J.T., whom Spears met when they were both on “The Mickey Mouse Club” as a child, was her first major love affair they reconnected years later. He also broke her heart badly while the two were living together. She says he cheated on her repeatedly; then he broke up with her via text message, went on an infamous PR tour bashing her and wrote songs that painted her as the bad guy in their relationship.

Sure, Britney cheated on Justin once too. She made out with choreographer Wade Robson, but that was it, she says.

“[A]s much as Justin hurt me, there was a huge foundation of love, and when he left me I was devastated,” Spears writes. “When I say devastated, I mean I could barely speak for months. Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I could do was cry. I don’t know if I was clinically in shock, but it felt that way.”

There was also the fact that she had once been pregnant with his child — a pregnancy she terminated after he insisted they were too young to have a baby. “I was told, ‘It might hurt a little,’” she said of her medically induced at-home miscarriage. Then she describes the cramping and agony she went through, lying on the bathroom floor as the medicine did its job. Timberlake, she writes, played guitar for her while she suffered.

Timberlake has since apologized for his behavior, albeit before the abortion story went public this week. But he cemented for Spears the idea that the world was run by and for men, while women wound up taking the heat for their misdeeds.

She would have been fine on her own, guys

And then, there was the conservatorship, which came after her messy divorce from Kevin Federline and the loss of custody over their children. “If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” Spears writes. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.”

She compares herself to male musical artists who have gone through substance abuse or lost all their money without ever losing their freedom. “I didn’t deserve what my family did to me,” she concludes.

Saying ‘no’ got her held against her will and drugged

Spears goes into some detail about the months she spent in a “luxury” rehab facility in Beverly Hills, California, after her father told her over-the-counter “energy supplements” had been found in her purse. This happened just after she refused to do a dance move she considered too dangerous for her second Las Vegas residency — an engagement that was ultimately canceled.

“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed. He said, ‘We will make you look like a f— idiot, and trust me, you will not win. It’s better me telling you to go versus a judge in court telling you.’

“I felt like it was a form of blackmail and I was being gaslit,” she writes. “I honestly felt they were trying to kill me.”

In rehab she was taken off Prozac abruptly and put on lithium — a strong medication that her grandma Jean had been on — and forced to go through extensive therapy. She spent two months solo and then a month in a building with other patients.

“Three months into my confinement, I started to believe that my little heart, whatever made me Britney, was no longer inside my body anymore.”

And then there is Dad

These days Spears is done with her family, it appears — especially her father, Jamie. Mom Lynne, brother Bryan and sister Jamie Lynn are targets of disdain (mixed with a few brief moments of appreciation), but dear ol’ dad gets nothing but rage.

She blames Jamie’s alcoholism for “making us so poor” during her childhood, depicting a man who she says regularly drank himself beyond coherence. Jamie made millions off her while keeping her under his tight control for the 13 years of conservatorship, she alleges. And she says he berated her throughout — from her earliest years to the end of her conservatorship.

“You are a disgrace,” she quotes her father saying after she lost custody of her kids.

And when he became her conservator, he allegedly told her, “I’m Britney Spears now.”

P.S.: About Sam Asghari

Hasem, as Spears refers to her now-separated husband, Sam Asghari, seems to be her touchstone in mentions that are woven throughout the nearly 300-page book.

“Now my husband, Hesam, tells me that it’s a whole thing for beautiful girls to shave their heads,” she writes after giving her side of the story on that infamous head-shaving incident and her subsequent umbrella attack on a paparazzi’s car. “It’s a vibe, he says — a choice not to play into ideas of conventional beauty. He tries to make me feel better about it, because he feels bad about how much it still pains me.”

After dating for five years, the pair got married in June 2022, about a half a year after she undid her conservatorship. But in August, after the book was finished, Asghari filed for divorce from Spears.

And finally …

In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, she addresses her fans: “If you follow me on Instagram, you thought this book was going to be written in emojis, didn’t you?” She caps that comment with a string of single-rose emojis — and sincere thanks to her “collaborators,” who apparently know who they are.

©2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Frenship partners Sunderland and Brett Hite began as two actual friends who worked in a Lululemon store in Los Angeles together, bonding over their mutual love of synthesizer pop. Success came to them in a hurry when their 2016 single “Capsize”– a collaboration with singer Emily Warren, and only the fourth song Frenship ever released — became an online sensation, racking up 505 million Spotify streams.

“It changed our lives, but probably not as much as you’d imagine,” Hite says. “Had we known the ins and outs of the music industry we’d have done it differently — like we would own our houses now, and be driving nicer cars. Spotify is a weird measure of success, because it’s so much passive listening. It’s not like the old days where you went to a record store, held the disc in hand and consumed the whole branding of a band. So that felt strange to us.”

Adds Sunderland, “I’ll always gag when I hear an A&R guy say, ‘That’s a hit.’ I would say that the cocky young part of me wanted ‘Capsize’ to get to a large level and thought it had the accessibility to do really well. I knew it had the goal to be liked by a lot of people. But I wouldn’t have placed a platinum record on it.”

Painstaking as songwriters, they’ve released only one full album so far. They’re now touring behind a six-song EP, “Base Camp,” which includes a couple of previous singles (including the pandemic-themed “Lover or an Enemy”) and the politically slanted “Copenhagen,” about relocating there to escape the U.S. gun epidemic. “The ideas can come from anywhere,” says Hite. “We’ve gotten a little more patient with our songwriting, if something’s not working we don’t force it. It’s not like songwriting is some crazy skill we have — We can spend 16 hours in a room trying to come up with a verse.”

Though the EP includes an acoustic track. Sunderland still proclaims his love for the synthesizer. “Listening to Brian Eno was one thing that turned my head around, especially the [Eno produced] Coldplay album ‘Viva la Vida.’ That made me realize that a whole song can start out with just sound.”

Their current tour, which hits Brighton Music Hall Sunday,  had a shakeup just last week, when they opted to let their drummer go and continue as a duo. “It messed everything up, but in a good way,” Sunderand says. “Our regular drummer couldn’t make the tour so we got someone else in who was a good drummer, but after 22 hours we knew it wasn’t working. So that threw us into a figure-it-out mode, and we’re still reimagining the show as we speak. We were kind of desperate to burn it all down and do something we haven’t done before.”

Tina would go on to pack stadiums — she thrilled 180,000 fans at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium in Brazil in 1988 while setting the record for the largest ticketed concert by a solo artist. But look at the whole quote, she made it clear, she was a rock ‘n’ roll singer.

“She’s one of the few women of color who declared that and was able to carry that through their career,,” Kameelah Benjamin-Fuller told the Herald. “It was a pioneering move for her to really claim that. The songs that she covered, the artists that she worked with, her approach to songs, even if they weren’t written as rock songs, they definitely had a rock infusion.”

Paying honor to the icon, Benjamin-Fuller is co-producing “Simply the Best: A Tribute to Tina Turner” on Saturday at the Burren in Davis Square. The night will be co-produced by Christina Alexander, a fellow singer and Benjamin-Fuller’s co-founder of G-Rock Music, which hosts gender-inclusive rock experiences powered by women of color. Through hits and obscurities across four decades, the concert will be fueled by a band of local aces (including Red Sox organist Josh Kantor!) and benefit Roxbury’s Stone House — an organization that cares for and protects adult and child survivors of domestic abuse.

As a woman of color who also loves rock, Benjamin-Fuller found Tina Turner to be a role model.

“She’s someone who’s respected, revered, pioneering, and who did amazing things in that space,” she said.

Benjamin-Fuller might sing a song or two, but she’s letting Alexander take lead on the majority of tunes while singer Ananda Mitchell will tackle four or five songs.

“One, we wanted to get folks who could handle the material, but, two, we also wanted to showcase women of color in that lead role,” Benjamin-Fuller said.

After finding the leads, the band fell into place fast. It seems everybody asked was eager to take on Tina’s epic catalog. And the evening will dig into that catalog.

“There are songs that people expect to hear, ‘Proud Mary,’ ‘River Deep, Mountain High,’ obviously ‘Simply the Best,’ ‘Private Dancer,’” Benjamin-Fuller said. “But then we talked about the songs that we loved… I’m leaving most of the vocals to Christina and Ananda, who are amazing. (We picked) some deep cuts. We found it liberating to stretch a little bit.”

Maybe “I Might Have Been Queen” or “Bold Soul Sister” or “Be Tender with Me Baby.” There are so many possibilities with Tina.

“Unfortunately, it’s tied to the passing of an artist we revere,” Benjamin-Fuller said. “But seeing how easy it was to mobilize around Tina was touching because we have seen all these tribute shows (put on by local artists) but we haven’t really had any that have highlighted women of color in this way.”

“We still have work to do but we have seen more and more women push through these barriers,” she continued. “Hopefully the next phase of this will see more intersections of sexual orientations, race, ethnicity, diversity in our rock scene.”

For tickets and details, visit burren.com. To support Stone House, visit stonehouseinc.org

What’s the difference between a great cover song and a banal cover song that brings little or nothing to the table?

One is like tasting a delicious, unexpectedly creative version of your favorite dish — a new take on a tried-and-true treat that thrills with its skill, vision and ingenuity. The other is like being force-fed a bowl of pudding made out of lard and skim milk.

Sometimes, the most memorable cover songs remain reverent to the original version, at least in terms of their musical arrangements. What elevates them is a transcendent performance that brings new depth, drama or nuance to the work at hand.

For some young artists, a great cover song can ignite their careers and become their signature number — be it Sinead O’Connor’s version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” or Joan Jett’s version of The Arrows’ “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

In other instances, an imaginatively done cover song can simultaneously provide an unexpected hit for an established act — and shine a welcome new light on the artist who originally did it.

Pearl Jam’s 1999 version of Wayne Cochran’s previously little-heard “Last Kiss,” released in 1961, is a prime example. So is Amy Winehouse’s 2007 remake of The Zutons’ 2006 song “Valerie.” A more recent one came just this year with country-music star Luke Combs’ chart-topping version of Tracy Chapman’s plaintive 1998 gem, “Fast Car.”

Tracy Chapman, meet Luke Combs

Chapman’s understated original remains my favorite. But Combs’ earnest rendition underscores the broader resonance of Chapman’s lyrics while retaining the spare guitar figure she used to frame her song. With little fuss and minimal musical alterations, Combs turns “Fast Car’s” protagonist from a young woman — whose bleak circumstances leave her with few choices — into almost anyone hoping beyond hope to move, somehow, beyond a dead-end existence.

For me, the most memorable covers are by gifted artists who find and bring to life facets in a song that eluded — or never even occurred to — the original performer or songwriter. In the process, the cover version becomes the definitive version.

A few of my favorite examples include Cassandra Wilson’s splendid, slow-as-molasses 1993 reading of Van Morrison’s 1971 classic, “Tupelo Honey,” Lake Street Dive’s New Orleans-infused 2013 version of The Jackson 5’s propulsive 1969 hit “I Want You Back,” and Alison Krauss’ luminous 1999 rendition of the 1988 Keith Whitley hit “When You Say Nothing at All.” I could easily cite dozens more.

A number of artists have recorded multiple cover albums. They range from Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart’s respective mining of chestnuts from the Great American Songbook to indie-rock favorite Cat Power. She has thus far released three albums — 2000’s “The Covers Record,” 2008’s “Jukebox” and last year’s “Covers” — devoted to songs by other artists.

Of course, all of Ronstadt’s albums have in effect been cover albums. Like some of the other great singers of the 20th century — from Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston — the now-retired Ronstadt was a vocal artist, not a songwriter.

Their gift was their ability to put a distinctive stamp on whatever they sang — and to do it so effectively they made the words and music of other artists indelibly their own.

That was a trademark of the incomparable Ray Charles. After composing and singing such classics as “What’d I Say,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So” and “I Believe to My Soul,” he stopped writing songs by the late 1960s. But no matter.

His towering performances of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind,” Percy Mayfield’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” Bobby Sharp’s “Unchain My Heart,” Katharine Lee Bates and Silas G. Pratt’s “America, The Beautiful,” Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and many more have long been synonymous with Charles’ name.

‘What can I add to it?’

“The song (by another artist) already speaks for itself,” Charles told me in a 1985 San Diego Union interview. “If I’m going to do it, I think, ‘What can I add to it to make it mine?’ If I can’t do something (different) with it, what’s the point?”

One need only listen to the seemingly countless cover versions of The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” the Bing Crosby staple “White Christmas,” the Elvis Presley hit “Love Me Tender” or Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” to appreciate how many cover versions not only add nothing to the originals but fall far short of them.

That’s why some performers have opted to take songs by other artists in a completely unlikely direction, so much so that even devoted fans — or the original artists themselves — may not initially recognize what they are hearing.

Witness Tori Amos’ ruminative 2001 piano-ballad twist on Slayer’s 1986 thrash-metal anthem, “Raining Blood.” Or consider the Stanley Clarke Band’s biting 1985 hip-hop transformation of Bruce Springsteen’s often-misinterpreted 1984 anthem “Born in the U.S.A.”

Then there’s Miles Davis’ heady, vocal-free version of the 1969 Crosby, Stills & Nash ballad “Guinnevere,” which the jazz trumpet giant stretches to nearly five times its original 4-minute-plus length. (Jazz has long thrived on extending and reinventing existing songs; I could easily devote another article to my favorite jazz cover versions.)

And don’t forget Devo’s wonderfully herky-jerky 1977 take on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — which in 1965 gave the Rolling Stones their first No. 1 single in the U.S.

The Stones, incidentally, started off as a cover band playing American blues, rock and R&B chestnuts. So did The Beatles, The Animals, The Yardbirds and an array of other British Invasion-era English groups from the 1960s.

Six of the 14 songs on The Beatles’ 1963 debut album were cover versions. So were all but two songs on the Stones’ 1964 debut album.

Both bands quickly transitioned to writing nearly all their own music. By doing so they helped set the template that serious rock artists needed to create original works, not copy the work of others. It was only after David Bowie and Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry released all-covers albums, both in 1973, that a new cachet for such projects began to grow.

Today, tribute bands are thriving — at least commercially speaking — around the world by exclusively performing cover versions of songs by a single group or solo artist. In a music world now dominated by TikTok, YouTube and other social media sites, a gazillion or more videos of cover songs performed by people with greatly varying abilities is just a click away. (Justin Bieber, Halle Bailey and Lemon Grove native Conan Gray and San Diego-bred singer-turned-Oscar-nominated actress Andra Day are among those who got their starts doing cover versions online.)

Maybe one day, some of the myriad cover songs posted on social media will be considered classics. Maybe.

In the meantime, here are some of my favorite cover songs but with a key caveat: I could easily pick another completely different batch tomorrow. I have skipped entire decades, simply because it would take at least another Sunday cover story to include most of them. That’s where you come in.

The Byrds, “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1965)

Can a cover version birth an entire musical movement in just two minutes and 18 seconds? Absolutely!

Released less than a month after the Bob Dylan original, The Byrds took Dylan’s acoustic reverie, “Hey Mr. Tambourine,” added a jingle-jangly 12-string electric guitar, drums, electric bass, keyboards, a buoyant beat (punctuated by a tambourine) and luminous vocals by Roger McGuinn, David Crosby and Gene Clark. Quicker than you can say: “Play a song for me,” folk-rock was born and ignited.

So did the career of The Byrds, whose version gave Dylan his first No. 1 hit as a songwriter and topped the charts in the U.S. and the U.K. More significantly, the success of The Byrds — whose co-founder, Chris Hillman, is a former San Diegan — inspired Dylan to go electric and form a band of his own. The rest is history.

Aretha Franklin, “Respect” (1967)

In one of the greatest musical transformations in modern times, Aretha Franklin turned Otis Redding’s brassy 1965 song upside down and inside out.

The beat and melody are largely the same on both recordings. But where Redding’s original was, in essence, a macho man beseeching his woman to live up to the song’s title, Franklin made “Respect” something else altogether. She added lyrics — including her immortal “Sock it to me!” exhortation and the “Ree, ree. ree, ree” refrain that riffs off her name — and turned it into an anthem for strong women who demanded and commanded equality.

Nearly 60 years later, Franklin’s “Respect” remains her signature song. But it’s only one of the classics first recorded by other artists that she indelibly made her own, as her sublime versions of everything from “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Weight” to “Amazing Grace” and “Nessun Dorma” readily attest.

Jimi Hendrix Experience, “All Along the Watchtower” (1968)

Call it musical alchemy or outright magic, but Jimi Hendrix so masterfully reinvented Bob Dylan’s 1967 song, “All Along the Watchtower,” that Dylan himself quickly realized he had been surpassed.

“Ever since (Hendrix) died (in 1970) I’ve been doing it (his way),” Dylan wrote of Hendrix’s version. “Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.” Dylan elaborated on this in 2015 when he was honored as the Grammy Awards’ MusiCares Person of the Year, marveling at how Hendrix “took some small songs of mine, that nobody paid any attention to, and brought them up into the outer limits of the stratosphere, turned them all into classics.”

Hendrix kept Dylan’s biblically derived lyrics and the basic chord progression. But he kicked up the tempo, beefed up the instrumentation, added a glorious six-string opening phrase, sang with more authority than Dylan and transformed the music into a veritable six-string concerto.

The brilliantly crafted electric guitar choruses Hendrix plays after the verses — each with a different feel and tone — enhance the song rather than detract from it. And his mid-song solo is an exhilarating demonstration of his peerless artistry and boundless imagination. It’s less a solo than a magnificent display of music-making as exciting as it is flawlessly executed.

Frankie Miller, “Jealous Guy” (1977)

John Lennon recorded his largely acoustic song, “Jealous Guy,” in 1971 as an ode to the regret he felt over a failed relationship — and his nostalgic yearning for what might have been. The Bryan Ferry-led Roxy Music had a hit in 1981 with its more overtly melancholic — and orchestrated — remake, which was nowhere as compelling as Donny Hathaway’s soulful 1972 version.

But it is Scottish vocal great Frankie Miller who truly reinvented the song in 1977. In his hands, “Jealous Guy” becomes a brassy 1960s soul-music burner, filled with emotional longing, tension and release. Miller’s version poses an intriguing question: What would the mighty Otis Redding — who died in a 1967 plane crash at the age of 26 — have sounded like reinventing “Jealous Guy” when he was at the peak of his musical powers?

In a word (well, a hyphenated one): Spine-tingling.

“I Got You (I Feel Good),” Run C&W (1993)

The iconic James Brown accomplished many feats in his remarkable career as the Godfather of Soul, a founder of funk and one of the most sampled artists in the history of hip-hop.

What he did not do, to the best of my knowledge, is record an all-acoustic bluegrass album of soul and R&B classics that is both a heartfelt homage and a winking send-up. So, take a bow Run C&W, whose “Into The Twangy-First Century” album improbably features note-perfect bluegrass versions of Brown’s “Please, Please, Please,” Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” Rufus Thomas’ “Walkin’ the Dog” and more.

A highlight is what may well be the most uptempo version of Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” ever recorded. Better yet, it’s done as a mash-up with the Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey favorite “Working in a Coal Mine.”

The members of Run C&W clearly were singing and playing with their tongues firmly in their cheeks. But the quality of their musicianship turned what could have been a one-joke album into something hip and memorable. The group’s lineup included former San Diego bluegrass mainstay Bernie Leadon, who went on to co-found the Eagles.

Our Native Daughters, “Slave Driver” (2020)

Bob Marley and The Wailers included “Slave Driver” on the band’s landmark 1973 album, “Catch a Fire,” but it has long been overshadowed by such oft-covered Marley classics as “Redemption Song” and “No Woman, No Cry.”

“Slave Driver” is a stinging musical examination of the racial inequities that persist more than a century after the Civil War ended. It has rarely been recorded by other artists, apart from such notable exceptions as Taj Mahal, Cyril Neville and original Wailers member Bunny Wailer.

The most moving and original version I have heard so far is by Our Native Daughters, the talent-rich quartet formed by 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winner Rhiannon Giddens. The group teams her with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Amythyst Kiah. All four share and swap vocals on this stirring banjo-fueled adaptation, which seamlessly blurs the lines between reggae and gospel music.

Together, they make “Slave Driver” a song about both lamentation and resilience, oppression and unity. What results is a haunting work that exudes grace and grit in equal measure.

No, Elvis can’t cover my song!

Having a music legend cover one or more of your works can transform the life of a struggling songwriter, as former Valley Center resident JJ Cale happily learned after Eric Clapton had hits in the 1970s with his versions of Cale’s “After Midnight” and “Cocaine.”

But there are some memorable instances of a music legend being rebuffed in their quest to record a song by another artist. And few instances are more memorable than when Dolly Parton declined to let Elvis Presley record his version of Parton’s song “I Will Always Love You.”

Her decision was predicated on business, not aesthetic preferences. Letting Presley cover her 1973 country-music hit would have required Parton to sign her music publishing rights to “I Will Always Love You” completely over to Presley and Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s notorious manager. Parker made the same demand, usually successfully, for everything Presley recorded.

But the prescient Parton, realizing the value of her song, declined. It was a wise decision. In 1992, Whitney Houston recorded “I Will Always Love You” for the soundtrack of her hit film, “The Bodyguard.” It became the biggest hit of her career. Or as Parton told a CMT interviewer in 2006: “When Whitney (Houston’s version) came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland!”

Parton remains one of the most prolific songwriters in country music or any other genre. However, her next album, “Rockstar,” features 30 selections, only two of which are by her. The rest are her covers of classics by The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Blondie, The Police and others that team her with founding members of those bands.

Hallelujah! Obscurity to ubiquity

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” did not sound remotely epic when it appeared on 1984’s “Various Positions,” an album his American record company deemed so inferior it refused to release it. Cohen’s gruff vocals, more spoken than sung, made the song sound better suited to a barroom floor than a cathedral.

Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale recorded a more appealing, piano-based version in 1991 that was featured in the smash 2001 movie “Shrek.” Cale’s version inspired Jeff Buckley’s 1994 version, which pared down the 80 (!) verses Cohen originally wrote to a far more manageable four.

Buckley, who died in 1997 at the age of 30, gave “Hallelujah” an impassioned vocal grandeur. His majestic version became a posthumous hit in 2007. It also provided the template for countless inferior versions by contestants on “American Idol” — and seemingly every other TV vocal competition show in the Western world. And it begot the title of the 2021 film documentary, “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song.”

Most surreal cover song, ever?

British actor Sebastian Cabot is best remembered by American baby-boomers for his role as Mr. French in the CBS TV sitcom “Family Affair,” which aired from 1966 to 1971.

Few, thankfully, recall his 1967 release, “Sebastian Cabot, Actor/Bob Dylan, Poet,” which featured him doing pompous, quasi-Shakespearean recitations of the lyrics to 11 Dylan classics. Better yet — and just as questionable — are the orchestrations, by Irvin Spice, an arranger who appears to have had little, if any, familiarity with Dylan’s music.

While the entire album is exquisitely awful, it is Cabot’s preposterously over-the-top reading of “It Ain’t Me Babe” that stands out. It is such a howler that San Diego International Film Festival founder Gregory Kahn and San Diego Reader music critic John D’Agostino both choked on their food when I played it for them at a Thanksgiving gathering in the 1980s. And it is such a howler that it ended up being featured on the 1992 Rhino Records compilation album, “Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing Off.”

_______

©2023 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Lambert is at peak Glambert. He’s cheeky, charming, swagger stuffed in leather, and absolutely crushing an insanely difficult song to cover on stage Sunday at the TD Garden in front of a packed house.

Adam Lambert is very good at his job. And at the same time, no one can replace Freddie Mercury. And everyone knows this. Especially Adam Lambert.

The thing is Brian May and Roger Taylor are still perfect — note for note perfect! —  at their jobs, even at 76 and 74, respectively.

Rock has entered an interesting, odd phase. John Mayer can stand in for Jerry Garcia with members of the Grateful Dead. Axl Rose can fill in for Brian Johnson in AC/DC. Eagles tour with Glenn Frey’s kid, Phil Collins tours with his own kid playing his drum parts, Michael Sweet of Stryper actually logged time singing for Boston.

What are we to do? Scream “cash grab?” Skip the show? Mock the revolution for being televised, commodified, commercialized? In the case of Queen + Adam Lambert, so popular they booked back-to-back Garden parties, maybe we can miss Freddie and shout along to “Bicycle Race,” “Somebody to Love,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and rest of the hits and stone cold classics.

May and Taylor should get to play these songs (many of which they wrote) if they can still play them. And it’s shocking what they can do five decades into rock ‘n’ roll. Taylor still plays so deep in the pocket while tossing out fills that are both subtle and virtuosic. May has a bigger role to play — his guitar was always the second most distinctive thing about Queen.

May needed a few songs to heat up, but, my word, he eventually became pure fire. He took his time building up an epic groove on the extended outro of “Fat Bottomed Girls.” He showed off his delicate and lyrical side on the haunting “Who Wants to Live Forever.” He blitzed through the furious, glorious tangle of notes that made up the climax of “I Want It All.”

Of course, ears and eyes often return to Lambert (how could they not? see “disco ball Harley,” “leather swagger”).

The most dramatic, bombastic, histrionic voice to come from “American Idol” can sing every note in the Queen catalog. Sometimes Lambert can sing too much like Freddie — notably on “Who Wants to Live Forever.” But over the past dozen years he’s been doing this, he’s become wonderfully confident. Maximum commitment, eyeliner and ego, costume changes and charisma, glitter and glam packaged with the staccato attack of “Stone Cold Crazy,” the eerie and ethereal intro to “I Want It All,” and the pomp and preening of “Killer Queen.”

Label this rock star fantasy camp or karaoke with a million dollar budget. Queen + Adam Lambert have managed to build something unlikely, imperfect, amazing, endlessly entertaining, and worthy. Skip it — skip anything that isn’t a classic line up — if you want. But know what you’re missing.

Security was tight, with the swanky outdoor mall transformed into a maze of portable hedges over which helicopters hovered — loud enough to drown out the Swift songs playing on the sound system.
But not the screams of the Swifties as they encountered each other, learned of their idol’s arrival via TikTok or saw her posing on the red carpet that snaked past Coach and Barnes and Noble.

Seeing the girls with hand-to-elbow wristbands, sparkly cowboy boots and matching gold fringe dresses as I entered the theater, I confess I felt something of a fraud.

I am not a Swiftie.

It could be age or excessive exposure to elementary-school talent-show renditions of “Love Story” and “You Belong with Me.” Whatever the reason, I would no more pay hundreds, never mind thousands, of dollars to see an Eras Tour concert than I would shell out for Manolos or hire sherpas to pull me up Mount Everest.

I was, however, very much looking forward to seeing Swift’s new concert movie.

Not, perhaps, as much as the woman who sobbed to cameras outside the parking structure about how she has been living for this because Swift means so much to her.

Or the hundreds of fans who lined the red-carpeted main thoroughfare of the Grove, straining for a sight of their idol.

Still, I have been known to sing along to “Mean” with my daughters on the way to soccer games or do a little “Shake It Off” twist.

Proof that you don’t have to be a Swiftie to understand why so many others are.

You don’t have to be instantly transported by her every song like so many appear to be at her sold-out concerts. To admire the many stands she has taken (including calling out Scooter Braun long before everyone else fired him) or appreciate the outsize role she plays in the culture of female and artist empowerment.

A love of fringe dresses is not required to respect her work registering voters or as an LGBTQ activist. Even those not panting for the upcoming rerelease of “1989” (which is predicted to be her biggest sales week ever) can applaud her decision to rerecord her old albums so she would finally own her work, or to hand out $55 million in bonuses to crew members, including truckers. I don’t own a friendship bracelet but I still bow before her ability to boost local economies and inspire childlike awe from the NFL.

Even at the world premiere she was putting in the work — and not just on the red carpet. As the 7 p.m. showtime pushed well past eight, folks were starting to fidget. Until Swift sashayed into the room, at least: Just to say hi, give a shout out to her dancers (some of whom were in the audience) and thank everyone for coming. In each of the AMC Grove’s 14 theaters.

This is a woman who takes her work, her success and herself seriously. And even now that is a rare and wonderful thing to behold.

At 33, she has never abandoned her young followers or voiced, as other young stars have, a desire to move past her established fan base. Her music may have matured, but she remains committed to songs about love and the struggle for identity. She has appeared in movies and TV shows, but does not aspire to be a movie or TV star. And though she is slated to make her feature writing/directing debut for Searchlight — a logical next step after helming her own music videos — it’s with the Eras Tour, a journey through her own musical history, that she has established herself as one of the most popular and powerful performers of all time.

More than anything, Taylor Swift values what she does and takes pleasure in doing it well — which has made her a beacon for everyone who wants to feel the same.

It wasn’t easy. White, blond, tall and thin, her looks have worked, as is so often the case with female artists, for and against her. Easily loved and easily dismissed, she benefited from being seen as “the girl next door,” and was simultaneously saddled with a trope traditionally reserved for white women. In 2009, when Kanye West hijacked her acceptance speech for the MTV Video Music Award for Best Female Video of the Year, she found herself, at 19, in the center of an acrimonious conversation about race in the music industry, portrayed, at best, as a victim and, at worst, a symptom of a larger problem.

Over the years, Swift has been mocked for the often autobiographical nature of her songs — when not alluding to bad behavior by old beaux, she often pushed back against critics and producers. Her deft use of social media, the ultimate marketing tool of the 21st century, was seen as either canny or manipulative. (Um, it’s marketing.)

But her habit of standing up for herself was not limited to lyrics. In 2013, after a Colorado DJ groped her during a photo op, Swift, then 23, reported it and the DJ was fired. When, two years later, he sued her for defamation, Swift countersued for battery and assault and won.

Then, in 2015, she spoke out against Apple not paying writers, artists and producers during the free three-month trial of their new music service. Some saw her as a champion, others as a spoiled millionaire star. Either way Apple began paying for the music.

And in 2019, Swift’s battle against mega-producer Braun and the equity company that helped him acquire Big Machine Label, which owned much of her work, exposed problems that were discussed in the halls of Congress.

Not surprisingly, being the center of such wildly vacillating public opinion took its toll. Lana Wilson’s 2020 documentary “Miss Americana” captures the isolation of an artist who literally cannot leave her home without stirring up an anthill of fans (some of whom are more predatory than others) as she decides, against the advice of everyone in the room, that it’s time to use her voice politically.

So the screaming fans and sold-out concerts really aren’t a surprise, any more than rapturous singing-and-dancing-in-the-aisles reception the concert film received at its premiere.

In a culture increasingly bereft of role models, Swift, whose biggest scandal to date involved the overuse of her private jet, is a genuinely aspirational figure. Even the nightmare many fans faced over getting Eras tickets forced local and national politicians to begin looking into Ticketmaster’s exorbitant fees.

Like her music or hate it, Taylor Swift has raised a generation of fans to take themselves seriously and fight for what they believe in.

Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times./Tribune News Service

“He was the first artist that made me say, ‘I didn’t know we were allowed to say things like that, that you could use the English language this way’,” she recalls. “It felt really special because my parents didn’t listen to him and I didn’t have any friends who did. And I felt really smart because he expects so much of his audience — and also the fact that he was Canadian just seemed crazy to me. I must have spent that whole day going over his Wikipedia page.”

Recently signed to the Fantasy label, Bobbitt makes a return to the Boston area at Deep Cuts Monday evening, on a bill with Will Butler. It’s her second visit this fall, following a show at the Crystal Ballroom last month.

During her teen years Bobbitt earned some online fame by posting a long string of cover songs on the now-defunct social media platform Vine. “It certainly got interesting. I wasn’t sure what to think when people had some opinion of me based on the kind of song I was playing, or the shirt I was wearing — People do say a lot on the internet. But it motivated me and reassured me that I was doing something right, that people were enjoying it on some level. But the biggest motivator for doing my own music was when I moved away from the small town I grew up in, and into Toronto. That’s when I said, ‘Hey, other people are doing this. Maybe it isn’t so inaccessible and far away’.”

You’d never confuse Bobbitt’s singing voice for Cohen’s, but the two do have something in common: They both spin melodic beauty out of emotional chaos. Bobbitt’s lyrics may address bad relationships and painful times, but the songs are often deceptively pretty, in a sophisticated jazz-pop setting. Take “The Call’s Inside the House,” a track from her recent EP “The Half We Still Have.” It’s about romantic betrayal and even ends with a chant of “How dare you”.

“That was an important song for me, I think. It has a lot of the details of my life and the people I love, and I hope it’s relatable. When I sing it I feel I have a certain amount of power, in a situation where I was powerless. After awhile it starts to feel more like a mantra than excavating these old emotions, so I find it invigorating. I think that’s a through line of the music I love and that I listen to, where the lyrics are confessional and the music is emotive.”

Another empowering song, “More,” came out of an experience with physical illness. “I was going through a lot of pelvic pain, and that experience of going to the doctor and feeling like you’re shouting into the void. And it was tied to the fact that I have a woman’s body and the ability to carry a child, but not necessarily wanting to do that. That song in particular has caused a lot of people to tell me it got them through something.”

“I have written a couple of happy songs, but maybe they don’t translate that way,” she says. “My goal is to do for someone what the music I love does for me.”

Thus, after fashioning some of the greatest acoustic jazz recordings of all time in the ’50s and ’60s, the great trumpeter “plugged in” with 1969’s “In a Silent Way.”

The result is widely considered the start of the jazz master’s “electric period,” which continued on to include such progressive jazz-rock-funk fusion outings as 1971’s “Jack Johnson” (also known as “A Tribute to Jack Johnson”) and 1972’s “On the Corner.”

Those three highly influential albums, as well as the equally significant 1970’s “Bitches Brew,” 1971’s “Live-Evil,” 1974’s “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It,”  are featured in the amazing new vinyl box set “Miles Davis: The Electric Years.”

The 11-LP set comes from the audio powerhouse Vinyl Me, Please, so you know the records are going to sound great — mastered in high-quality AAA fashion (using the original tapes) and served up on 180-gram black vinyl.

Beyond the platters, the set also includes a 24-page booklet complete with pictures as well as listening notes written by jazz critic-historian Ben Ratliff.

It’s a pricey set, but also one that any die-hard Miles Davis fan would likely be thrilled to get.

Cost is $349-$399, vinylmeplease.com.

Yet, she’s done so in a way that is different than ever before, delivering fans a career-spanning major theatrical release that ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest concert films ever made.

The Sam Wrench-directed offering — which hit theaters this week and is expected to quickly set box office records as the top-grossing concert movie of all time — succeeds in numerous ways, magnifying the strengths of the blockbuster tour of the same name as it nicely translates the experience from cavernous football stadiums to movie houses.

That’s not easy to do, but it certainly helps when the film crew is drawing from stellar source material — and “The Eras Tour” is indeed nothing short of brilliant. Yet, there’s more to it than that, given that the tour is designed in a way that makes sense for filming.

As the tour’s name implies, the production is organized by different eras (or, more specifically, albums) in Swift’s career, with the singer performing a batch of material from one album before moving onto the next disc. Each of these segments unfold onstage like individual chapters, with the star embracing different thematic stage settings/wardrobes/special effects that correspond to the specific albums. There are nine chapters in all — well, 10, if you count the “surprise songs” segment.

On film, even more so than during the actual live show, these different chapters really break up the action into easily digestible pieces. You never have time to get tired of what you’re watching, because the next adventure awaits just around the corner.

That’s incredibly important for a film that runs right around 2 hours and 50 minutes. Granted, that run time is still a good 40 minutes less what I witnessed during the first night of the Eras Tour stop at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara back in July.

But it’s an enormous amount of time for pretty much any concert film not named “Woodstock” and is roughly twice the length of the Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense,” the highly acclaimed rock doc from 1984 that recently found its way back to theaters.

Yet, amazingly, “The Eras Tour” doesn’t feel overly long at all. Indeed, there will certainly be some Swifties who will complain about what was edited out of the show to get it under the 3-hour mark. And I can’t be the only one who wishes Swift would have included one more Era in the mix and spotlighted her self-titled debut. (The movie does, however, include the first album’s “Our Song” in the “Surprise” song segment.)

Swift’s greatest strength — of many — is her ability to connect with the crowd. In 30 years of writing about concerts, I’ve never seen anybody do it better. She does it with big pop production numbers, which get everybody dancing and singing along at top volume, and she does it even more convincingly with the most basic of body language, captivating crowds of 50,000-plus with the wink of an eye or a sideways glance.

Wrench focuses the film on capturing that amazing trait, never letting the special effects, dance routines or other big production elements crowd out Swift’s sheer charisma. He’s always directing us back to her megawatt smile, overwhelming sense of joy onstage and connection with fans.

Wrench also eschews such frequent concert movie staples as backstage scenes or interviews with musicians, fans etc. The film sticks to the concert performance.

That’s a very wise and decision, since it must have been tempting to let the magnitude of the occasion — the film is drawn from multiple sold-out nights at the massive SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — really dictate the direction. Yet, this film manages to feel very intimate, even in the midst of tens of thousands of people gathered together in the second largest city in the United States to witness one of the biggest pop stars of all time.

Swift’s performances are simply magnetic, as she waltzes back through her 17-year recording career, stopping here and there to perform some of the very greatest songs of the 21st century. It’s simply can’t-miss viewing for all Swifties.

Of course, the hallmark of any great concert film is its ability to appeal to non-fans. And I think the movie definitely checks that box as well.

“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is really for anybody who wants to not only experience but also more fully understand and appreciate an incredible artist who is accomplishing things that so few have ever done before.

Concert film setlist(“Lover”)1. “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”2. “Cruel Summer”3. “The Man”4. “You Need to Calm Down”5. “Lover”(“Fearless”)6. “Fearless”7. “You Belong With Me”8. “Love Story”(“Evermore”)9. “Willow”10. “Marjorie”11. “Champagne Problems”12. “Tolerate It”(“Reputation”)13. “…Ready for It?”14. “Delicate”15. “Don’t Blame Me”16. “Look What You Made Me Do”(“Speak Now”)17. “Enchanted”(“Red”)18. “22″19. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”20. “I Knew You Were Trouble”21. “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”(“Folklore”)22. “The 1”23. “Betty”24. “The Last Great American Dynasty”25. “August”26. “Illicit Affairs”27. “My Tears Ricochet”(“1989”)28. “Style”29. “Blank Space”30. “Shake It Off”31. “Wildest Dreams”32. “Bad Blood”(Surprise songs)33. “Our Song”34. “You’re on Your Own, Kid”(“Midnights”)35. “Lavender Haze”36. “Anti-Hero”37. “Midnight Rain”38. “Vigilante Shit”39. “Bejeweled”40. “Mastermind”41. “Karma”

For a decade, Nelsons has been exploring Shostakovich with the BSO. The project has won the maestro and symphony an armful of Grammys and may earn them a few more when the final installment of the recordings of the composer’s symphonies, featuring nos. 2, 3, 12, and 13, is released on Oct. 20. And that exploration continues this week, through Oct. 15, with Nelsons conducting Yo-Yo Ma through both of Shostakovich’s cello concertos at Symphony Hall.

Nelsons, who grew up in Latvia during Soviet rule, learned about Shostakovich as a boy in music school.

“I remember reading Russian books that said, ‘Fifth symphony of Shostakovich is a milestone, a wonderful work where the confused artist has lost his orientation and then he finds through the suffering and darkness the light of communistic ideas,” Nelsons told the Herald.

Only that’s not what Shostakovich was writing about. Later Nelsons came to understand that this titan of Soviet art did his best to undermine the glory of the regime in his symphonies.

“Thanks to the genius of Shostakovich, he managed to fool the authorities,” Nelsons said. “From the fourth symphony on, there are these qualities, the grotesque, sarcasm, irony, black humor… He understood that there was only one way, he had to keep writing and fool them.”

Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” thrilled Moscow in the mid-1930 until Stalin saw it. The day after the dictator saw the opera, the state newspaper ripped apart “Lady Macbeth.” Worried about being sent to the gulag, Shostakovich wrote “a Soviet artist’s response to just criticism.” The state approved the symphony, but many heard undertones of protest music.

These notes of protest continued even after the death of Stalin. In the end, living under one party rule seems to crush the composer. The sad and wonderful thing about the BSO recording Shostakovich’s complete symphonic cycle is you can hear that play out over a collection of CDs. But if you’re not ready to commit to all 15 symphonies, you can also hear that in one night with the cello concertos.

“The first concerto was written in this period where he was stronger, ready to, through music, fight against this idealism of nonsense,” Nelsons said. “When we look to the other concerto, Stalin is dead already, so you could think, ‘Good, Shostakovich has won.’ But what we hear in the 11th symphony, in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and the second cello concerto is that he is getting more dark and more depressed.”

But concerto to symphony, light to dark, resistance to resignation, one thing remains true — and you can hear it in Nelsons’ work with the BSO — the composer never wrote a bad note.

For tickets and details, visit bso.org

Don’t blame Taylor Swift if she was totally enchanted when Beyoncé surprised her at the “Eras Tour” film premiere, as both pop stars prepare for their concert flicks to overtake box offices.

The “Enchanted” singer, 33, took to Instagram early Thursday to share a boomerang of the pair posing at the front of an empty auditorium, as Beyoncé, 42, tosses popcorn.

“I’m so glad I’ll never know what my life would’ve been like without Beyonce’s influence,” wrote Swift, whose Eras tour has thus far grossed over $2 billion. “The way she’s taught me and every artist out here to break rules and defy industry norms. Her generosity of spirit. Her resilience and versatility. She’s been a guiding light throughout my career and the fact that she showed up tonight was like an actual fairytale.”

PHOTOS: ‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’ concert movie premiere in L.A.

The previous afternoon, Swift — citing “unprecedented demand” — announced that the “Eras Tour” film would open in North America on Oct. 12, a day earlier than planned, and that additional showtimes were added for the film’s opening weekend.

As of Tuesday, the film had racked up a record-breaking $100 million plus in ticket sales.

AMC Theatres, which first scored access to the film, has released a list of rules for fans who plan to treat the film as their own private concert.

“Taylor Swift Eras attire and friendship bracelets are strongly encouraged! Masks (except for standard face masks used explicitly for health and safety reasons) are not permitted),” said AMC.

While the theater says it will “encourage dancing and singing,” patrons are not allowed to dance atop seats nor block their fellow Swifties “from viewing, safely walking or exiting the auditorium.”

Attendees are allowed to snap selfies and group photos, but are barred from recording the flick.

Yes, yes, a ton of 15-year-olds dreaming of becoming rock stars. But most of them haven’t already written a song like “Kiss Off.”

Violent Femmes singer-songwriter-guitarist Gano still plays a dozen or more of the songs he wrote in high school — and he still enjoys playing them; nobody has a healthier relationship with their back catalog. On Friday, Violent Femmes will perform its entire 1983 debut (and a bunch of other songs) at MGM Music Hall.

“I started writing songs when I was 13,” Gano told the Herald. “I thought they were good at the time then later they would all make me cringe. But there’s a song, at least one song, that I wrote when I was 15 on each of the first four albums… And everything on the first album was written when I was 15 to 17. I think I might have been right around 18 when we recorded it.”

The adolescent energy of the band, its punk sneer and experimental freedom, drives the Femmes 1983 debut. Acoustic instruments played with fury, lyrics that felt like Lou Reed and the Ramones soundtracking “The Breakfast Club” (or should that be “Repo Man?”), the sound remains like nothing else in rock.

Gano and the band couldn’t stand the polished stuff that dominated the radio and it shows on “Violent Femmes.” Call it folk punk, college rock, or alternative, from “Blister in the Sun” to “Add It Up” to “Good Feeling,” the album turned a generation on to music made without sheen, synths, or Top 40 aspirations.

“There’s nothing in the music, nothing in how we recorded it, that we couldn’t have done in the ’70s or the ’60s or even the ’50s,” Gano said. “It gives it, we’d like to think, a timeless quality. It has a certain sound, a certain energy… There’s something about hearing an actual instrument, you’re hearing picks or fingers hitting strings. Things are very natural, very raw.”

At first not even producer Mark Van Hecke got what the band was going for. When he delivered the initial mixes of the LP, they didn’t work.

“We thought, ‘Oh, no, we have to be there,’” Gano said. “They started to sound, I don’t know, more correct for the times, less of that thing we had played… (We didn’t want it) to sound glossier or smoother or make it sound nicer.”

When it arrived in 1983, next to no one bought it. “Violent Femmes” didn’t make it into the Billboard 200 until 1991, when it peaked at No. 171. That same year it went platinum. (If the Billboard calculated high-schoolers passing around dubbed cassettes, it would be triple platinum.)

“It’s the only record that’s ever become a gold record without having been on the Billboard 200,” Gano said (it went gold in 1987, long before that No. 171 peak). “It continues to be popular, absolutely going through, not just older brothers and sisters, but generations. Parents to kids and now through grandparents.”

Now 60, Gano remains in love with the music, with its vitality.

“There’s nothing about going through the motions, that’s unimaginable to me,” he said of playing the songs live. “To me it feels like the intensity is still there.”

For tickets and details, visit vfemmes.com

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A little too country for rock ‘n’ roll, and a little too rock ‘n’ roll for country, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams has always played by her own rules.

That’s never changed — even after November 2020, when she suffered a stroke. Williams underwent grueling rehabilitation, eventually leading to her memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” and her album, “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart.” The latter, released earlier this summer, features contributions from Bruce Springsteen, his wife Patti Scialfa, Jesse Malin, Angel Olsen, Margo Price, Jeremy Ivey, Buddy Miller, and more.

“The recovery part is really hard because you get impatient,” Williams told the Associated Press. “You want it to happen all at once.”

On Saturday, Williams reaches another recovery milestone: Her 2023 tour kicked off at the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee.

In a phone interview earlier this year, Williams spoke to the AP about her recovery, collaborating in new ways, and what’s in store for the future.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

WILLIAMS: I wasn’t able to write how I usually write, which is with my guitar, because I haven’t been able to play. But I was able to make enough of a chord to make a note, and I’d figure out something in my head. And, you know, my friends jumped in and helped by playing the chords. It turned into a collaboration, a collaborative effort. So, in a way, it was a mixed blessing. We ended up with songs we might not have otherwise.

It ended up being kind of liberating to work with other people because I hadn’t really done it before, to that extent.

WILLIAMS: Margo, we’ve started to (become) really good friends. She’s in the same neighborhood we’re in Nashville. We were in the studio and I think (my husband) Tom (Overby) suggested seeing if she wanted to come in and sing some background stuff and she was excited about it. She’s just so fun to work with because she’s real enthusiastic, and, you know, she’s fun to be with. And then, Angel Olsen was in town already. She didn’t live here. She’s living in Asheville. But she was in Nashville when we were recording, so she came in and an added amazingly beautiful, really small little part vocal to “Jukebox,” which I think just makes the whole song.

WILLIAMS: People are just amazed. They can’t believe I’ve been going out and playing shows and I’m in the studio. I mean, I’m still doing the same stuff. I can manage things well enough. I’ve got a lot of great help. I’ve got a great band, two fantastic guitar players … they play, and I sing.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. The physical therapist gave me hand exercises that I do. I kind of stretch my fingers out. I do about 50 of those a day with my left hand. And I do some with my right hand, too, just in case. It’s mainly the left side of my body that was affected. But, you know, I just try to think positive. I keep thinking, ‘Well, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to walk across the room without falling down at one point.’ But I was able to, you know, I overcame that.

WILLIAMS: I think the world’s caught up, with Americana, you know, that’s exactly what that is. I wish they would bring back “folk rock.”

WILLIAMS: Another album. We’re already talking about that.

The albums have indeed proven timeless, and the current incarnation of Little Feat plays them both at the Wilbur on Monday and Tuesday; doing one album plus bonus tracks each night. The band has weathered some major losses, including the death of founder Lowell George in 1979 and the more recent passings of drummer Richie Hayward and guitarist Paul Barrere. But Little Feat is now recognized as the precursors of Americana and the jam-band movement. And after all these years, they’ve still never had a hit single.

“That’s probably a blessing in disguise,” says Bill Payne, the band’s keyboardist and cofounder. “I know Lowell had grand hopes for ‘Easy to Slip’ as a single, and I thought that one sounded great, but it didn’t happen. We were in an age of albums, and we came up in a time when people were promulgating the whole album and not the single. That made it difficult for us commercially, but I think it’s allowed us to last 50 years. We weren’t the Doobie Brothers (another band Payne has played with). They’ve lasted 50 years as well — but I’ll put it this way, we had a wider vocabulary.”

The “Dixie Chicken” album brought two New Orleanians into the band (bassist Kenny Gradney and percussionist Sam Clayton, both still aboard) along with that city’s musical influence. “It was a grand experiment and a fun one at that,” says Payne. “My parents were married in New Orleans, which probably explains a lot. We always loved trading our different influences with each other. Little Feat is really a platform that invites inclusion, but it’s also something of an exclusive club. We’re like an Appalachian family that lets a few people through the door every now and then.”

Payne admits that continuing the band without George, and now without Barrere and Hayward, has been a challenge. (The new frontman is Scott Sherrard, late of the Gregg Allman Band). “Put it this way: Back in 1966 when I was in high school, I went with my friends to see the Yardbirds, and I was there specifically to see Jeff Beck. We were all pretty ticked off that he wasn’t there, until the other guy started to play guitar — and it was Jimmy Page. So I took my impetus from that concert years later when we were putting Little Feat back together without Lowell. Same thing with Scott now — If it wasn’t working I would have been the first to say, ‘Just let it go, our legacy’s too important’.”

The two albums getting played this week include a handful of Feat standards, along with a couple songs that have never been played live before. “We’re going to do the experiment in terror and play those. It’s challenging, but it’s not like we’re copying Stravinsky or trading licks with Charlie Parker. My frustration with Little Feat from time to time is that we’ve compromised our vocabulary a little too much for my taste. So I’m very happy to be exploring the catalogue with players who can do just about anything. That’s the essence of what we’ve always been, a group that has found its challenges by the platform that we live by, which is our songs.”

Things changed this year. The concert industry not only made it out of the pandemic, it’s bigger than ever, with artists clamoring to get back on the road and fans eager to see shows rather than deal with the fear of missing out.

But, somehow, concertgoers are worse than they’ve ever been. One of the wildest trend stories of the summer was recounting the numerous things people were throwing at performers on stage. Back in July, the Today Show ran a piece that compiled eight such incidents, including a mobile phone thrown at Drake and a bag containing the ashes of a fan’s mother lobbed at Pink.

For me, though, the breaking point took place at a show last month at Xcel Energy Center. I was standing next to two women in wheelchairs waiting for an elevator. When the doors opened, a group of oblivious boomers rushed in and filled the space. I couldn’t believe it and when I turned to apologize to the two women, they shot back a look of sad resignation that said this wasn’t the first time something like this happened.

What is wrong with people? I mean, large crowds have always been filled with awful people, but I think it got worse after lockdown. People forgot how to employ basic common courtesy to others. That, and ever-increasing ticket prices seem to have emboldened people to act like jerks because, well, they paid a lot to be there and they think they deserve it.

Speaking as someone who has spent the past 19 years reviewing local arena and stadium concerts, I can confidently tell you that bad concertgoers come in every age, every race and every demographic. People who act like jerks at shows come in all shapes and sizes.

The good news is that there’s an easy fix. The bad news is, well, the people who need to follow this fix probably won’t. But I’m holding out hope that at least some people don’t realize what they’ve been doing wrong and heed at least some of my advice.

So, as I said, this fix is easy. People simply need to be more self-aware of themselves and others when they’re in a crowd. Just imagine how much more enjoyable not just concerts but things like grocery shopping or driving would be if more people paid a little more attention to their surroundings.

That said, I do have some more tips to enhance the live music experience. I can only hope to change a few minds along the way.

Prepare for the show

Take a few minutes to prepare before you head out to the local hockey arena or football stadium. It’s become increasingly common for venues to email ticketholders a “here’s what you need to know” email the day prior that lists the basics like the bag policy, parking and dining options and timing for the doors opening and showtime. The same info is also available on the venue’s website for each concert.

A big problem I see is at entrances. Somehow, there are people who are still surprised they need to go through a metal detector. And then there is the whole bag thing. For the most part, only small clutches, wristlets and wallets are allowed through. I’ve watched many grown women argue, at length, with security over a clutch that’s an inch or two too large.

These rules are pointless, you may say while adding that a lot of it is just ridiculous security theater. I agree and I’m pretty sure the people working security do too. Do know that some restrictions may be put in place due to the professional sports league that uses the space, not the venue itself. But also remember that yelling at security about the size of your bag does absolutely nothing to change the policies, it only gets security and the people waiting in line behind you needlessly riled up.

Again, a few minutes of reading before the show is totally worth it. You’ll learn the venue probably is now cashless and how many opening acts are on the bill. Large venues do not like to publicly share exact set times, but you can still get a rough idea when the main act will be on stage. The doors open time is just that, it’s when fans can start coming into the venue. Showtime is typically between one or two hours after doors open. In most cases, you can expect the opening act to start at that time or soon after. Most arena and stadium concerts are done at some point between 10:15 and 11:15 p.m.

If there’s a general admission floor and you’ve got tickets for a seat, you might want to avoid arriving when doors open, because there will likely be large crowds of people waiting to ensure they snatch a prime space near the stage. If you’re not interested in the opening act, aim for arriving at the posted showtime as crowds will probably be thinner.

Be thoughtful

Getting to your seat at a concert means a whole lot of interactions with both fellow concertgoers and venue employees. It’s a process that can run much smoother than it does.

If you’re in a restricted place with others, like an elevator, don’t yell. Don’t honk if you’re in a parking garage or ramp. Have your phone, keys and any other metal objects out and ready to toss in the tray as you go through the metal detector. If you’re in line for a snack or a beer, decide what you’re getting before you reach the register.

Once you get through security, or off an escalator, don’t stop and block the way for people behind you. When you’re walking through a crowd, put your phone in your pocket and pay attention to where you’re going and the people around you.

Don’t be a jerk to security or other venue employees, some of whom might be volunteers working concessions. Keep in mind that while you’re there to have a good time, they are there to work. That work is easier and more enjoyable if the workers don’t have to deal with rude concertgoers.

Once you’re at your seat, enjoy the concert. Also, be aware of group dynamics at play. If everyone in your section decides to stand, you will have to as well if you want to see the stage. If everyone is dancing along, feel free to join in if that’s your jam. If everyone around you is sitting down and you want to dance, go ahead and do so. But don’t move into other people’s space and by absolutely no means should you yell at those around you to loosen up. Everyone hates that, trust me.

Singing along to songs is fine and some acts openly encourage it. Don’t yell along to songs. Think about enjoying the concert in ways that allow others to also enjoy the concert and not spend time giving you dirty looks. (This is Minnesota, where dirty looks are a thing.)

Many people drink at concerts and that’s cool. For a lot of people, it’s a big part of seeing a show. But don’t be sloppy. Don’t spill beer on people around you. And absolutely without a doubt, if you’ve had too much to drink and are feeling queasy, get yourself away from people and into a bathroom stall as quickly as possible. Throwing up on people at a concert should be, at the very least, a misdemeanor. (Call your representatives and demand action!)

After the show

Getting out of concerts is much easier if you walked, biked or took public transit to the venue. (I’ve taken the Green Line to nearly every U.S. Bank Stadium show and never had an issue.) And there’s always the option to catch a drink or snack at a nearby bar while you watch the crowds dwindle. Do know that large venues don’t like crowds to hang around inside after the show is over.

If you did drive, it’s the time for you to put that phone of yours to work. Driving away from a venue usually means bottlenecks at parking ramp exits and nearby intersections. And remember that the larger the show, the more likely there will be people from out of town who aren’t as familiar with the streets around a venue. I’ve long since used an easy trick to get out faster.

Open the map app on your phone, input your final destination and then ignore it. Free yourself from the notion of a single path home and think about it in terms of following the path of least resistance. Use sidestreets or whatever it takes for you to get away from other cars. Then let the phone guide your way from there. Your trip may take longer than expected, but it’s a better option than wasting time in a slowly moving line of cars.

Concerts are fun! Live music is terrific! And it doesn’t take much effort to make it a better experience for everyone.

The singer and songwriter from tiny Hillaryville, Louisiana, thinks about everyone the letter is addressed to.

“I think of that kid within me, still with me to this day, that kid that always wanted to do this,” Jones told the Herald from a tour van crossing the Canadian border. “I think of that kid and I tell him, tell myself, dream bigger than any dream anyone can have for you. Even if it’s just one nerdy kid out in the rural South, I just want them to know that if I can do it, they can too.”

No one can do what Jones does, he’s a wonderfully unique artist, but his point is taken.

“Wait Til I Get Over” looks back at Jones’ teen years of the 2000s growing up in Hillaryville. It’s full of honest admissions —  “That Feeling” is his ode to Black queer love — set against a backdrop of history: the legacy of Southern soul music, his grandmother’s remembrance of a town founded by eight former slaves. It’s packed with lush strings, gospel cheers, rock guitar, lonely piano figures, and Jones’ defiant and intimate voice.

Already a rising star for his work in R&B band Durand Jones & The Indications, Jones felt he had to make a deeply personal solo record.

“It was scary, I had a couple panic attacks about making this record,” he said ahead of his Sunday show at Somerville’s Crystal Ballroom. “But I learned through James Baldwin that there is so much strength through vulnerability… I felt like, even though I put out three records (with The Indications), no one really knew who I was, where I was from, what things I held true and dear to myself.”

Jones poured a lot of himself into “Wait Til I Get Over.” Obviously in the lyrics, but also in the instrumentation and arrangements. That’s his tender piano under the strings of “Gerri Marie.” That’s his voice, just his voice, layered over and over again to create a choir effect on the title track.

“It was supposed to just be a demo,” he said of the vocal layering. “But when I showed it to the guys who helped me produce this record, they were like, ‘This is it. You don’t need to hire a choir.’”

Many of the album’s vocals were recorded in a single take or pulled from demos or warm up takes. They give the LP an immediacy and organic quality.

The words, the voice, the music, the rawness, they add up to a brilliant record born of nostalgia and heartache. The most aching of the tracks, the most emblematic of Jones’ message, is the aptly-titled “Letter To My 17-Year-Old Self.” In the almost avant garde soul song, he sings, “I’m trying to understand this thing/Oh, this thing called life.”

“During this dark period in my life I was trying to overcome, every morning I would go to the piano before I went to work and I would play the chords to the song and try to figure out the lyrics and melody,” Jones said. “I felt a little insecure about putting the song out, but maybe somewhere someone has some sort of similar situation or testimony. I want people to know, don’t be discouraged, perceiver. In many ways life can be like a bow and arrow. You have to be drawn back to be propelled forward. It takes a long (expletive) time but stay with it.”

For tickets and details, visit durand-jones.com

Ian Anderson is understandably pleased Jethro Tull — the pioneering progressive-rock band he founded and has led since 1967 — has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide and is now embarked on the aptly named “The Seven Decades Tour.”

The veteran flutist, singer, songwriter and guitarist is also pleased Jethro Tull counts a number of high-profile musicians among its fans. They include former R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, Nick Cave and members of the bands Midlake and the Decemberists, as well as actress Lisa Lampanelli.

But Anderson scoffs when asked if he has seen any unlikely fans — a contentious political figure, perhaps — turn up at Jethro Tull’s concerts.

“I have no idea who is in the audience; they are all strangers to me,” he replied, speaking from his home in Wiltshire, England. “But that’s part of the appeal. You are in front of people you don’t know, will never meet, and don’t want to know.

“Concerts give you the opportunity to make some new friends, or some new enemies. Then, after the show, I disappear into my little dressing room and crawl under a rock, because I’m not a social creature.”

Depending on the day and his mood, Anderson can indeed be a prickly character on occasion. He can also be warm, endearing and an insightful commentator on his chosen profession. He is the only member of Jethro Tull who has been in all of its 30-plus lineups.

“Sometimes the people you dread meeting — because of anecdotal, spurious hearsay — turn out to be the nicest people,” Anderson said. “Sadly, the opposite is true, as well. People you think are going to be nice turn out not to be. I guess I’m the same.

“Catch me on the right day and you’re fine. But I’m sure I’ve disappointed some people who were catching me at the wrong moment, when I didn’t want to have to stop — in mid-mouthful in a restaurant — to take a selfie with them.”

Flute first, then and now

The Scottish-born Anderson turned 76 in August, 58 years after Tull — the band long synonymous with his name — was launched as a jazzy blues-rock ensemble.

Its latest album, the 12-song “RökFlöte,” was released this year and boasts lyrics inspired by the polytheistic beliefs of Norse mythology. The band’s 2022 album, “The Zealot Gene,” finds Anderson exploring themes of political fanaticism and using biblical texts to reflect on current events.

With Anderson’s 80th birthday just four years away, how important is it for him to surprise himself when creating new music?

“It’s incredibly important when you’re recording it,” he said. “And I’m pretty pleased with my aspirations to continue making music that we have brought to fruition through good luck and hard work. (It’s like) riding a bike. If you fall off, there’s a danger you might be able to get back on. So, it’s good not to fall off.”

Jethro Tull’s most popular album, 1971’s “Aqualung,” has sold more than 12 million copies. Tull’s wildly ambitious 1972 concept album, “Thick as a Brick,” made history in at least two ways.

It is the only release to ever top Billboard magazine’s U.S. album charts that consists of just one song — albeit a very extended, complex song that lasts nearly 44 minutes. Moreover, “Brick” was a progressive rock opus that simultaneously parodied the bombast and self-indulgence of progressive rock.

Like all of Jethro Tull’s albums before and since, it featured Anderson singing and playing the flute. The instrument had not previously been a focal point of any rock band. But Anderson changed that, starting with Jethro Tull’s 1968 debut album, “This Was.” Nearly every song on it boasts prominent flute work, none more so than the spirited version of jazz sax and flute great Roland Kirk’s vocal-free 1965 classic, “Serenade to a Cuckoo.”

That Jethro Tull was led by a bearded, long-haired, seemingly crazed young musician — who often played flute and sang while perched on one leg — added to the band’s image and appeal.

Anderson discussed his move to the flute in a 1988 San Diego Union-Tribune interview, saying: “I was a not-very-good singer in a not-very-good blues band. And so I started also to play not-very-good harmonica, and ended up playing not-very-good flute. I did it largely because it was different, and because it was there.”

In 1967, the year Tull was formed, only a few rock bands memorably utilized a flute, but not as a lead instrument. One was the American band the Blues Project. The other two were both English: The Moody Blues and Family.

Did any of these bands inspire Anderson as a “not-very-good flutist?” In a word: no.

“What inspired me as a flute player was Eric Clapton, because it was his guitar playing I wanted to emulate,” he said.

“It was really my determination to do something other than play the ubiquitous electric guitar, which everybody wanted to do — including me — when I was a teenager. I quickly realized Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and (Deep Purple’s) Ritchie Blackmore were the wiz-kid guitar players down in London and were way ahead of me.

“That made me look for something else to play. But I had no idea what to do with the flute once I got a couple of notes out of it. I tried to play the blues and went on from there. Like anything else, you realize there is more to it, so I did listen to a few other players, including — after a few months — Roland Kirk.”

But Kirk, Anderson contends, was not his primary influence.

“One of my favorites as a teen was Mose Allison,” he said. “Mose would mumble and sing along with his piano playing, which was rather endearing. I suspect I picked up on scat-singing (while playing flute) from him and other people in the world of jazz more than from a flute player like Roland Kirk.”

In the early 1970s, then-still-fledgling Anderson topped the masterful Kirk as the No. 1 flutist in Playboy’s annual jazz and pop poll. Was Anderson flattered, embarrassed, or both, at this turn of events?

“Well,” he answered, “I did actually meet Roland Kirk, who I was terrified of. Because word was that he was a pretty intimidating person and not flattering or kind to other people. We met when I played this jazz festival in 1969 on the East Coast, I don’t remember where.

The Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island?

“Yes, Newport,” Anderson said. “I don’t know why they booked us and Led Zeppelin, which seemed weird. Our manager said: ‘Roland Kirk wants to meet you.’ I thought: ‘Oh, god, what am I going to do?’ Plus, Kirk was blind which made it even more difficult to confront him in a social setting. But he was really kind and nice. Or, at least, he pretended to approve of my rendition of his song because he was getting the mechanical royalties for it!

“Many years later, Kirk’s second wife (Dorothea) showed up at one of our shows in New Jersey, long after he was dead. She said: ‘Thanks. I get a (royalty) check twice a year for your performance of Roland’s song and it’s helped to have that coming in to help pay the bills.”

Nyet to Russian oligarchs

Paying bills has not been a problem for Anderson since Jethro Tull began selling millions of albums and filling arenas in the 1970s. By the 1980s he owned several salmon farms in Scotland. At their peak, they employed 400 people and — in 1997 alone —produced 900 tons of smoked salmon, with annual revenues of $26 million.

Commenting on his fish-fueled entrepreneurship in a 1988 Union-Tribune interview, Anderson said he would rather be remembered for providing hundreds of new jobs than for selling tens of millions of albums.

“I guess I’m a socialist at heart,” he said at the time. “Actually, I’m a communist bastard at heart, but I live in a capitalist world, so I try to be a good capitalist. My kids usually prefer to say: ‘My daddy’s a fish farmer.’ It’s easier to say that than: ‘He plays in an old man’s rock group with these fat, balding fellows!'”

By 2003, Anderson had sold his salmon farms and processing plants. His concert tours with Jethro Tull and as a solo artist are a near-constant. And he has the financial liberty of declining performance opportunities as he sees fit.

“There are quite a few offers that have come my way, for large amounts of money,” Anderson acknowledged. “The offers are to do things I feel are quite inappropriate, whether it’s a private party for some Russian oligarch, or a cruise ship tour, or things at big, multi-act festivals. I think I know what I’m worth and there are times I would not do things just for the paycheck. It’s not worth it.”

By his count, Anderson has performed in 55 countries on at least five continents. He recalls first encountering Russian President Vladimir Putin at a 1992 Jethro Tull concert in St. Petersburg. At the time, former KGB agent Putin was the chairman of the city’s External Relations Committee and an assistant to its mayor.

“We were supposed to play in Kyiv last year on a tour that we had to cancel because of the invasion of Ukraine by Putin,” Anderson lamented. “And we canceled our tour of Russia, where I’ve enjoyed playing in the past. Given Putin’s propensity for extremism — and his desire to rebuild the Soviet Union to resemble what it was when he was an officer in the KGB — I don’t expect we’ll ever play again in Russia in my lifetime.”

Earlier in his lifetime — 1969, to be exact — Anderson turned down an offer for Jethro Tull to perform at the now-legendary Woodstock festival, citing the fact that he didn’t “like hippies.” In the 1970s he sometimes berated concertgoers for smoking pot because the smoke impacted his singing and flute-playing.

Yet, in photos of Jethro Tull in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Anderson looked very much like a full-blown hippie.

“Clearly, my personal outlook was very much not aligned with the hippie lifestyle, especially when it came to drugs,” he said. “It wasn’t as individuals — some of them were probably nice people, if they ever had a shower — but the lifestyle seemed synonymous with all the drugs and the ‘free sex’ thing, which I just never got the hang of…

“I didn’t go in that direction, and I’m glad I didn’t. But in my final years, I might deduce I want to catch up on that. And there’s a 50% chance I’ll end my days on a morphine drip.”

He chuckled.

“Of course, at my age there is that element of uncertainty,” said Anderson, who titled Jethro Tull’s 1976 album “Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.”

“You have to be realistic about longevity, potential ill health and the onset of dementia,” he continued. “Although, theoretically, for people who do what I do there’s a fighting chance of staving that off. Because, playing concerts and making new music, we are so engaged with the process of concentration, performance and remembering things we did last night and 50 years ago.

“Ultimately, nothing will save us but our genes. But, to some extent with music, you can increase your odds of longevity.”

©2023 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Don’t come at me with Orpheum 2022, or 2021, or 2016. Don’t tell me the band has a ten-way tie for best set (even if you are right). Wednesday was it. And here are a few dashes of why:

The band vamped on Joe Cocker’s “Woman to Woman” for five minutes letting Susan Tedeschi saunter out, full rock star entrance to open the homecoming show. Later the Boston-born Tedeschi took the ecstatic crowd to Chicago in 1966 (and the Fillmore East in 1971) with “Just Won’t Burn” — her blazing blues leads shot from her mint green telecaster signed by BB King. The whole band somehow turned the Nola stroll of “Fall In” into a Radiohead-does-Southern-rock-on–acid crescendo.

Oh, and Warren Haynes joined the band, and his fellow Allman Brothers alum Derek Trucks, for “Dreams” and “Blue Sky.”

Wednesday’s show had so much more, but a little history might be helpful to contextualize TTB’s grandest Boston show to date.

In the 2000s, Tedeschi recorded a series of tough blues albums (most of them Grammy nominated). Meanwhile, guitarist Derek Trucks led his solo group and did a ten-year stint with the Allmans. Both were doing fine. Neither knew that Tedeschi Trucks Band would be way better, and eventually way bigger.

In 2010, the married couple quit fronting their own projects and since then it’s been up and up and up — albeit over a too-slow climb. What started with three-night runs at the Orpheum Theater nearly a decade ago graduated to four-night stands in 2021 and 2022. Those shows had them playing to 10,000 plus fans. Wednesday they did that in a single night (the Garden was maybe 80% full.)

Finally the group was on the stage it’s meant for. The 12-piece lineup could spread out and jam. (Note: They are a band that jams, not a jam band, equal measures an Americana act, jazz ensemble, gospel choir, soul revue, blues traditionalists, and Southern rock outfit).

The three-piece horn section swaggered New Orleans and Memphis style, with sax player Kebbi Williams getting wonderfully weird, almost channeling Pharoah Sanders. All three backup vocalists took lead on at least a verse or two, and as usual Mike Mattison fronted the band for a couple. They all got very loud but left space for Tedeschi and keyboardist Gabe Dixon to do a lonely and soft “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

The band is so rich and full and locked in. Still, there are those who consider this the Derek Trucks show. That’s not fair, and also, the guy could easily be the world’s greatest, most-lyrical guitar player. On “Circles ‘Round the Sun,” he evoked Duane Allman and also Black Sabbath. On “Blue Sky,” he danced around the melody, touching it warmly then detouring wildly then coming back to it. For all his flash and fire, he can be exceedingly tender, as he was on “Midnight in Harlem.”

All in all, TTB is where it should be. Finding a space between catchy hooks and abstract jams, retro music so indebted to the 1960s and sounds that charge into the future. All on stage at the TD Garden.

Wonderfully, thankfully, the definition of classical music is changing. The genre can be classical (in the well, classical sense of the word) or it can be thoroughly modern, and, of course, it can be everything in between.

Take a look at these fall calendar highlights for stuff from Beethoven to Arab-Andalusian songs to something from Kennedy Center composer-in-residence Carlos Simon.

Opening Night with the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Oct. 7, Symphony Hall

The Boston Symphony Orchestra celebrates its 2023-24 season with old and new friends, expected and underappreciated repertoire. Maestro Andris Nelsons will conduct works by Beethoven and Mozart. But the BSO expands beyond European icons by welcoming jazz pianist Aaron Diehl’s trio to collaborate with the symphony on Duke Ellington’s “New World A-Coming” and “Tonk.” Between Ellington and the Europeans, the BSO reimagines traditional Southern dances in the Carlos Simon commission “Four Black American Dances.” bso.org

“Israel in Egypt”

Oct. 6 & 8, Symphony Hall

If an annual trip to see “The Messiah” doesn’t quench your thirst for Handel’s biblical oratorios, make sure to check out a Handel and Haydn Society performance of “Israel in Egypt.” For those who only know Handel for the Hallelujah chorus, the composer’s other big Bible-based work has everything “The Messiah” has — huge choruses, soaring strings, drama galore! Bonus points: This is the first program Jonathan Cohen will helm in his debut season as H&H’s artistic director. Handelandhaydn.org

Boston Baroque celebrates 50 years

Oct. 13-15, various locations

Our city’s baroque masters go gold this year, opening their season with an all-Beethoven night. Obviously, these concerts will include “the hits” but they will come with a twist — Symphony No. 9 will be performed on period instruments, a rare treat. Rounding out the program will be the “Coriolan” Overture and “Elegiac Song”; lending a hand will be four Metropolitan opera stars including soprano Heidi Stober and mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack. baroque.boston

Rossini/Elgar/Beethoven

Oct. 20, Symphony Hall

The Boston Philharmonic gets its 45th season started with this diverse program featuring Rossini’s “Willam Tell” Overture, Elgar’s Violin Concerto, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Sure, go for the big names, but we’ll wager Elgar will move you just as much. Often regarded as the English composer’s masterpiece, it’s an ideal balance of virtuosity and passion, histrionic blaze and lyrical restraint.  Bostonphil.org

“Peter and the Wolf”

Nov. 11, Symphony Hall

Everyone has taken a turn narrating Sergei Prokofiev’s orchestral fairy tale. And we mean everyone – Viola Davis, Alice Cooper, Kirstie Alley, David Bowie, Weird Al… With luck, Weird Al will sit this one out and let the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra handle the piece all on its own. Family-friendly and full of visuals kids can follow along with. bso.org

“Karim Sulayman and Sean Shibe”

Nov. 14, Longy’s Edward M. Pickman Hall

So many programs claim to cover a lot of ground. Ha! Try this: Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman and Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe have put together an evening of 16th- and 17th-century Italian and English works, traditional Sephardic and Arab-Andalusian songs, 20th-century and contemporary compositions, and plenty more. Celebrityseries.org

“It was a cute post, wasn’t it?,” she told us later that morning. “I am hoping that her fans will be super excited, even if they don’t know us. I think audiences are different now. If a band comes out in front of the headliner, they know he headliner has backed them and they won’t be mean. We’ve been in front of Foo Fighters audiences and they’re a really sweet crowd, with husbands and wives sharing their love for that band. And this will be my first time at Madison Square Garden — unless the Pixies ever played there, but I really have no idea.” (In fact they did, but only after Deal’s departure).

Before that happens, the Breeders will be in Boston Sunday night to play the entirety of their “Last Splash” album at the House of Blues. When the Breeders made that album 30 years ago, they were still fresh from playing Sunday nights at the Middle East in Cambridge. But “Last Splash” became one of alternative rock’s cornerstone albums and gave the Breeders more recognition than they expected.

“I was used to our albums being stuck in the import bins at Newbury Comics — when they still wrapped the CD’s in plastic, remember? So there was no expectation that anything we did would ever get on the radio, even though I knew ‘Cannonball’ was a good song. But we never looked at the Top Ten, because who was on that? The worst bands in the world. And suddenly they were all talking about this crazy alternative rock thing. To us that meant there was a college circuit, where we could actually tour from city to city and play with all kinds of cool bands, like Husker Du and R.E.M.”

As an Ohio transplant, Deal recalls being impressed by the Boston circuit. “Everybody seemed really smart and successful, and I felt like a failure to launch. I remember Charles (aka Frank Black of the Pixies) throwing a party and it wasn’t cocaine or smack — He had tables full of hummus. People were really funny too — I remember touring with Throwing Muses, and that was the funniest tour I’ve ever been on.”

The classic lineup of the Breeders — Deal and her sister Kelley on vocals and guitar with bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim McPherson — as now been reunited far longer than they were originally together. They made a reunion album “All Nerve” in 2018 and are slowly working on another. “It’s better because we’re sober — That’s a big, huge difference. It changes communication when people are conscious. Maybe somebody’s having a bad day, but they’re not hurting from a hangover. And it certainly does help when people are able to wake up.”

The Breeders’ reunion coincided with Deal’s final exit from the Pixies — and though she wishes that band well, she won’t be back. “I think they’re loving what they do, they’re doing a fantastic job, and they’re probably going to be in existence longer than I was with them. They deserve a pat on the back. But I also get people coming up to me and saying ‘You know, I like the Breeders even though I never liked the Pixies’.”

Now any list like this is purely subjective, but, c’mon? Really? Lumped together the members of Mac can’t make the Top Ten? Stevie can’t even crack the Top 50 on her own?

For decades, these lists — often led by Rolling Stone — have tried to turn the subjective opinions of male writers into an objective truth about the superiority of male artists. As Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner made clear this week, too many men can’t listen to female artists without thinking, “Oh, this is fine, but it sure ain’t Dylan or Jagger or Springsteen or ZZ Top or…” (Earlier this week, Wenner told a New York Times reporter that women and people of color weren’t “articulate enough on (an) intellectual level” to discuss rock ‘n’ roll).

Wenner and his peers should listen to everything on Nicks’ new boxed set, “Complete Studio Albums & Rarities.”

On Saturday, at her show with Billy Joel at Gillette Stadium, Nicks will play the hits, oh so many hits: “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “Gypsy,” “Stand Back,” “Edge of Seventeen,” and, fingers crossed, a duet with Joel on “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” But Rhino Records’ 16-LP set “Complete Studio Albums & Rarities” offers so much more than a single setlist.

There are too many gems to dig up here so start with just four, four you won’t hear at Gillette but should spend time with, especially if you think ranking Nicks (with or without Mac) on any list at No. 83 is a crime.

“Outside the Rain”

For fans of Nicks’ ’70s work with Fleetwood Mac (read: nearly everyone) and fans of Tom Petty’s early ’80s sound (read: also nearly everyone). On this deep cut from her solo debut, 1981’s “Bella Donna,” Nicks’ voice rises to a shout right on the word “change” as she sings, “Maybe you thought that I’d never change/But you know I’m changing, you’re wrong.” That perfect rasp, climbing from resignation to defiance, rises right as the Heartbreakers’ guitars and keys crescendo.

“I Sing for the Things”

“You say I have everything/Well, I’m living on dreams and chains/But I sing for the things money can’t buy.” Good God, this is an amazing opening line to a song. But wait, it gets better! On this little lost mid-tempo ballad from 1985’s “Rock A Little,” in a tender whisper that pulls you in close, she sings, “I’ll take off my cape for you/I’ll take down my hair for you/Anything you want me to do, my love.” The track never builds, never climaxes, never cheapens its intimate magic with bluster or big production.

“Trouble in Shangri-La”

Those who choose to see Stevie as a gypsy, witch, mystic, siren, dryad, fortune teller, high priestess, dark princess, and/or grand rock goddess will love her title track from her 2001 album. It’s just right for spinning in scarves and shawls of lace, chiffon, and velvet. The song finds a welcome space between her folk singer roots and new millennium electronica as earthy guitars mix with pulsing synths.

“Soldier’s Angel”

A burning stomp of a song. This dirge from 2011’s “In Your Dreams” features Lindsey Buckingham on guitar and vocals, but it doesn’t sound like Mac. It’s closer to a seething Neil Young or simmering Led Zeppelin. Like “I Sing for the Things,” “Soldier’s Angel” never gets cheap. It resists pop, resists sweet turns while relishing framing a meditation on battle with raw vocals and guitar.

The big screen.

The 1984 Jonathan Demme-directed masterpiece, which many consider to be the greatest concert film of all time, opens in IMAX theaters on Sept. 22. One week later, on Sept. 29, distribution widens to include other theaters across the country.

In either format, the film — starring Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Talking Heads at the very height of their powers — will be a great treat for rock fans. Yet, having had the chance to catch this new 4K IMAX restoration of the film during a special event screening earlier in the month, we implore music lovers to try to catch “Stop Making Sense” on the big, big screen.

Seeing Talking Heads front man David Byrne tower over you on the IMAX screen, as he moves and shakes his way through such great songs as “Girlfriend Is Better” and “Crosseyed and Painless,” just underscores his uniqueness as a performer in ways that watching the film on your phone or tablet could never do.

The guy was simply a force of nature at that point in his career, whirling about the stage with equal amounts of ideas and energy. It’s hard to take your eyes off him, whether he’s grooving solo next to a boom box or rocking out on a stage filled with other talented musicians. And once he dons his famed “big suit” then the party is really on.

Don’t be surprised if the audience breaks out in applause after many of the numbers — as they did during the screening we saw. And definitely don’t be surprised if you decide to embark on a Talking Heads listening binge after seeing the movie, diving even deeper into the wonderful music of Byrne, drummer Chris Frantz, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison and bassist Tina Weymouth.

Art rock should probably navigate the unexpected, embrace experimentation and flirt with the odd while never forgetting pop craftsmanship.

If you’re digging this definition so far, here are three new, wildly-different art rock vinyl reissues for you to dive into.

“The Lexicon of Love,” ABC

This little masterpiece is art rock that’s pop. Pop that feels like a new romantic opera. Romance both intimate and epic.

In 1982, ABC’s dramatic songs, lead singer Martin Fry’s dramatic voice, Trevor Horn’s dramatic production and Anne Dudley’s dramatic string arrangements came together on this meditation on heartbreak and rejection. The whole thing is wonderfully overwrought, dripping with strings and synths, horns and hooks – see best known tracks “The Look of Love” and “Poison Arrow.”

Fry has said he was aiming for Cole Porter remade for the modern New Wave scene. Sure, that’s not bad. But the LP also seems like something Pink Floyd would do if the band was in love with being lovelorn and wanted to dance that ache away.

“Pretzel Logic,” Steely Dan

Where “The Lexicon of Love” sees a band desperate for romance, Steely Dan seems desperate to keep romance at arm’s length.

In 1974, songwriting geniuses Walter Becker and Donald Fagen populated the third Steely Dan LP with characters living night by night. These shifty, shady, sly rogues steal guys’ girls, gun down people in the rain, and pawn gold rings for fleeting pleasure. Sure, they could have a change of heart (but won’t).

Between tales of the desperate and depraved, these jazz heads add the best guitar solos money can buy (note, money could buy flabbergastingly awesome guitar solos in the ’70s). Feel free to ignore the dark lyrics and obsess over the knotty chops of the LA studio cats all over this album. Musically rock doesn’t get as slick, cool and sophisticated at this. (And “Pretzel Logic” isn’t the only Dan returning to vinyl, Geffen/UMe is slowly reissuing all the classic albums in the coming months.)

“Rain Dogs,” Tom Waits

Steely Dan’s characters not tragic enough for you? Looking for session musicians who favor ugly over clean? You are going to flip for “Rain Dogs.”

The middle installment of a thematic trilogy with “Swordfishtrombones” and “Frank’s Wild Years” — also recently reissued by Island/UMe —1985’s “Rain Dogs” has Waits doing hobo jazz. That’s not a genre? Fine, this LP is carnival noir or its stray dog folk or maybe beat poetry set to a German organ grinder’s caterwaul.

No established genre or hastily invented genre can encapsulate this album. A liquored up jockey, World War II veteran who plays accordion in a slaughterhouse, and somebody dying their hair in the bathroom of a Texaco fill these wicked fairy tales. Musicians score the chaos with a cacophony of guitars played sideways, drunken horns, and what has got to be somebody hired solely to shake a bag of rusty nails at the edge of the noise.

Oh, and the songs are somehow full of striking beauty and catchy melodies.

“It was initially written as an antinuclear song,” he said this week. “We were thinking of two people melting together as the world explodes. And that’s probably what you’d do if the world was ending, you’d want to be with the person you love. Everybody has their own interpretation, but it started out about making love as the bomb drops.” But he doesn’t mind if people have a softer interpretation. “I’m a sexual person, and I enjoy pursuing the art of sex with my wife,” he says. “And we’re not the kind of band that hates the fact that we had a very popular song. It makes the concerts more fun — I don’t even have to sing it, the crowd does it for me. And it pays all our bills.”

Having toured extensively in recent years, Modern English plays the Hawks and Reed Center in Greenfield on Saturday and Sonia in Central Square Sunday. The lineup is nearly the same quintet that made “I Melt With You” in 1982; only the drum slot has changed. “We’ve gotten to know each other so well that we can let things slide that we probably couldn’t have done in our 20’s, there would have been more arguing and fighting. But if you’ve heard us, you know there isn’t anything like Gary (McDowell)’s guitar work, or the atmospheric sounds Stephen (Walker) makes on his keyboards.”

Modern English was originally part of a vital post-punk scene in the UK, though they probably had stronger commercial instincts than peers like Killing Joke or Joy Division. “To my mind, one of the big differences is that American groups were better musicians; but people like us were more interested in sound textures — That’s why we used so many pedals. The craft of songwriting wasn’t high on the list for most post-punk bands, including us. If you listen to (Modern English’s debut) ‘Mesh & Lace’ it hasn’t got any songwriting at all, it’s just pieces of music stuck together — That’s why I like it. It was (producer) Hugh Jones who really introduced us to songwriting, and ‘I Melt With You’ was the first song I really sang on instead of just shouting.”

The band is about to release a new album, “1-2-3-4,” and the advance single “Long in the Tooth” is that rare thing in rock, a song that celebrates aging. “When I introduce it onstage, I say it’s about getting a little older and a little bolder. It’s about how I don’t want to just age and wither away, but keep some kind of spirit in my life.” This seems a far cry from the world-weary lyrics he wrote in younger days. “That hasn’t changed much, to be honest. I get confused as to why I feel the same way and haven’t grown more, but I think that’s true for everyone. We all feel displaced sometimes, and I like to put that into the songs.”

It all felt so new because, well, it was so new.

For 30 years, Peter Gabriel didn’t look back. Then he looked back a lot.

From his early days in Genesis to 2002’s “Up,” he charged forward. He dressed like a flower. He rebelled against Top 40, then went Top 40, then rejected Top 40 again. Along the way, he added a tinker’s cart of instruments to rock ‘n’ roll: sabar drums, ney flute, Chapman Stick. Then Gabriel seemed to discover nostalgia, and did a covers record, a symphonic record of old songs, a tour celebrating 1986 blockbuster “So,” a “hits” trek with Sting.

But in January, Gabriel started releasing a new song every full moon. Eventually, they will add up to new album “i/o.” On Thursday, they added up to Gabriel’s freshest set list in two decades at a crowded TD Garden.

Over the nearly three hour performance, complete with intermission, he did 22 songs. Half of them new, all welcome editions to his catalog.

Beyond the ballad of “Playing for Time,” he mixed some light industrial booming and banging with an earthy acoustic guitar refrain on “Panopticom.” He dug into ambient strangeness (without ever getting lost in dissonance) on “Four Kinds of Horses.” With “ Live and Let Live,” he conjured a song that moves between a delicate, flittering firefly and a primal thump.

After woodshedding since the turn of the century, Gabriel has emerged with at least 11 charismatic songs meant to be played by his ace band. The core that powered so much of Gabriel’s live history is intact — guitarist David Rhodes, bass legend Tony Levin and master drummer Manu Katché. Augmenting every rhythm and melody were half a dozen other players who handled horns and strings, whistles and mandolins, keys and keytars.

The music came with twisting, rectangular video screens beaming out work created for the tour by a score of visual artists. There were lights, and mirrors, and techs in bright orange jumpsuits (the band dressed in all black). The spectacle totaled what Gabriel fans have come to expect.

Of course, most didn’t come for the lights or new songs (even if most seemed to dig them). They came for the titanic trumpet wallop of “Sledgehammer.” And the epic battle between resignation and optimism that is “Don’t Give Up” (singer and cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson proved the sublime counter vocal). And the drums of “Red Rain,” singalong of “In Your Eyes,” and emotional release of “Solsbury Hill.”

But old songs often feel dead when packed into a set with just more old songs. When framed by vital, pulsing new stuff, Gabriel’s classics felt more alive than they have in two decades. Which is, not surprisingly, the last time Gabriel toured a studio album of his originals.