This has been going around on Bluesky and I figured you’d have interesting answers: Ten musicians you wish you’d gotten to see but didn’t, the more top of head the better. — Michaelangerlo Matos, St. Paul.

Top of head, fine, but why stop at ten? Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson, Gilberto Gil, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Marvelettes, Platters, Mungo Jerry, Ritchie Valens, Nat King Cole, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra.

Has your opinion of The Smiths changed after all these years? Looking back, wouldn’t you agree they were an ace pop band? Admittedly, more of a singles band than an album band, but still . . . I mean, only B+ for Louder Than Bombs? And their 1995 comp called Singles has to be an A, no? — Ray Tavares, Brooklyn

The Smiths never did much for me, and I gave them their chance more than once—very much a UK band I always thought. This bit from my Louder than Bombs review still seems fair at a distance: “Morrissey’s nattering volubility can get annoying, but the cadence itself always has its charms, and just when you think you’ve had it he gets off a good line.” But since albums are my professional specialty, never felt obliged to put in big time on their “hits.” Could have been wrong, which doesn’t mean I feel compelled to check back. You have every right to your own call, on this as on anything else. I’ve made my living and my rep trusting my own.

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Will The Last Critic be streaming anywhere? — Hal, Florida

That’s the expectation, but no details yet. For now, check here for updates on future festival screenings—I hear tell it’ll be part of a Manhattan-based festival come fall.

Why can Shakira impress you but Rosalía can’t? — Luciano Rasenberg, Buenos Aires.

She has a more fetching sense of rhythm. Also less attached to the European classical tradition. Which in some ways is the same thing.

Re Xgau Sez May 2026: So you salvaged a piece of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar at Monterey and then went on to completely excoriate his performance in your Esquire article? (“He was terrible . . . a psychedelic Uncle Tom . . . vulgar parody of rock theatrics . . . he can’t sing”). Along with a pretty snooty mention of audience members scrambling for chunks of Jimi’s guitar that left out the fact you were in that scrum, wrenching scraps of fretboard from the hands of crying hippie girls (at least that’s how I imagine it). Wouldn’t it have been kinder to leave the remnants for the people who actually enjoyed the show? Maybe the subletter tossing it out was karmic justice. — Steve O’Neill, South Korea.

You imagine it inaccurately; the chunk I grabbed landed pretty much at my feet. Given my arguably misguided misgivings about the brouhaha Hendrix was obviously aiming for, I just couldn’t resist grabbing a piece.

What will become of your record collection upon your death? Any chance it will go to a university or museum for public viewing? Or perhaps someone could start “Christgau’s Record Bar,” one of those trendy Japanese-style listening bars? — Keith Shelton, San Diego.

Answering that thorny question, which has been on my mind for years as how could it not be, makes me wish I was younger than 84, but I’m not. Just have to see what happens when. I may have the chance to finalize some rapprochement and I may not. But I do have a long relationship with as well as geographical proximity to NYU, where I taught for a fairly long spell. Note, however, that what the hell a “Japanese-style listening bar” might be I have no idea, although I’m assured it’s more or less what you’d think.

Gregory Isaacs. Just as George Jones possessed the “greatest” voice in country music, to my ears Isaacs is the most exquisite vocalist to ever sing Jamaican music, but both are unknown beyond fans of the genre. It’s unfortunate—listening to Isaacs from ‘73-‘82 is to hear him evolve from rocksteady crooner into a complex tension of rastafarian determination, rural suffering, and black eroticism. And he did this while being a premiere hitmaker in Jamaica for the better part of two decades. Eat your heart out, Marley. In the early ‘90s you reviewed his ‘77-‘78 material, calling him “a master” and “the sameyest great artist in pop history”—which still contains the phrase “great artist,” so I’ll take it. But after that he never resurfaced for you. Probably because like Jones, he suffers from being over-recorded, re-recorded, and endlessly compiled (plus, drugs). Do you think he’s due a critical and commercial re-evaluation like his great white country counterpart received so long ago? — Nick, Milwaukee

You have every right to prefer something else, but not the authority or detail to make me fear I’ve missed something major. I mean, historically and aesthetically, Marley is one of a kind. “The aural image of an unconquerable, ganja-guzzling serenity,” is another nugget from the review you cite (an A-). That serenity may be why I barely remember Isaacs anymore, but whatever congruences of recording history or substance consumption there may be I see no reason to equate him with George Jones, a vocally blessed genius I never forget. This note may well noodge me into playing Isaacs a little. But I would not so humbly suggest you spend more time with Jones and also that you give a look at the obit I wrote about him.

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Adam Brodsky: American Epitaph (Permanent Records) I swear I’ve never done this before, but I so admired this guy’s spiel I figure there’s no better way to convince you he could be worth your time than to quote it verbatim. Vis: “Combine Bob Dylan with Tom Lehrer and you get Loudon Wainwright III, do it on a shoestring budget and record it over an old Dead Milkmen tape and you get Adam Brodsky. Though long thought to be retired or in prison or eaten by a bear, truth is Adam has been pried off of the couch by the disappointing reemergence of fascism.” A MINUS

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I no longer recall the exact timing or mechanics that led me to shock my rockcrit colleagues by naming Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint’s Lo and Behold my 1973 album of the year. By then, McGuinness Flint was a recognizable UK band constructed around Manfred Mann sidemen, which is not to say many rock fans cared, especially in the U.S; guitarist Coulson, also a Brit, is even harder to track down. As it happens, my CD of Lo and Behold, the pick hit that concerns me here, is on the Raven label along with a tiny sticker that says “Made in Australia.” I can no longer locate my vinyl version.

But there was Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint vinyl in the back of my Toyota station wagon in 1973, when I celebrated my wedding‑bound crush on Carola Dibbell by initiating a long cross‑country jaunt that came equipped with both a suitcase stereo and dozens of LPs, the Manfred Mann‑produced Lo and Behold included. These albums we set up wherever we spent more than a night—in Florence, South Carolina, for instance. And that’s not counting, I can’t resist recalling, the young black hitchhiker who told us he’d begun his own trek at the Whitestone Bridge in Queens, thousands of miles from where we picked him up in New Mexico. He cradled his own portable LP player in his arms to avoid skipping as he played LPs, mostly or entirely ours I’m pretty sure.

This actually happened, I swear. But not until a thousand miles later, when we spent a week with my onetime Dartmouth roommate and future Canadian novelist George Szanto in Laramie, Wyoming did we hunker down in his basement to play some LPs. These included Lo and Behold, and I recall that spell downstairs as where the two of us both grokked an album and bonded even deeper with each other. We played it for our pals when we stopped off at the Creem house in Michigan as we headed east. Consists entirely of Dylan covers, some quite obscure (at least they were then, two years ahead of the release of The Basement Tapes), which is by no means to apologize for the material. “Dylan Album of the Decade” was the headline for the Creem review below. Amazon says the album’s still for sale. I say it hasn’t lost a step.

In my third or fourth fit of enthusiasm, I think this is the best record of the year and the best Dylan record since John Wesley Harding. Which last requires immediate qualification. This record contains 10 unfamiliar-to-unheard-of songs written (or anyway, copy-righted) by Bob Dylan between 1963 and 1971. It was produced by Manfred Mann, whom Dylan once named the best interpreter of his songs. The musicians are Dennis Coulson (vocals), Dixie Dean (bass), Tom McGuiness (guitar) and Hughie Flint (drums). Three of these guys (the two obvious ones plus Coulson, who played keyboards) were in a band called McGuiness Flint that put out a couple of records on Capitol several years ago. McGuiness Flint had one hit, “When I’m Dead and Gone,” and some favorable reviews. Their admirers compared them to the Band, but although I listened more than once to both albums I finally decided they weren’t even worth mentioning. Nondescript country-rock. I’ve never been crazy for the Band, either.

Nor have I ever been what you’d call mad for Dylan, which may explain why I am so, yes, thrilled by this record. Don’t get me wrong—I knew the man was a genius even when he was playing the folkie, and he’s always seemed like the rocker most certain to last, whatever that will mean. But that was appreciation, not adulation or imitation. I was not a nut. I mean, remember all those perfectly, sensible people who damn near lived for the next Dylan record, who charted their lives by what they thought he was saying, as if he were a walking horoscope for disenchanted amateur litcrits. Maybe you were one of those yourself. If you’re reading this, you probably weren’t one of the real kooks, many of whom are now drifting in some occult backwater as their Exemplar goes into hiding for real by making his availability boring.

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Me, I kept my distance, just like Dylan himself. No contact too intimate, no obses- sion too permanent. I never finished Scaduto’s biography and I never even started Gray’s exegesis: I never sought out the bootlegs. And if I bought my records, I’d think before I laid down cash for this one—it looks pretty chancy. Which is too bad, because this a powerful illustration of why Dylan mattered. It’s a history lesson: Bob Dylan—“Yesterday” and Today. Or it’s Greatest Hits Volume II with nothing but new stuff. Or it’s a testament from the most sensible Dylan nut of all, Manfred Mann, who has organized scraps of persona that Dylan himself couldn’t handle and reminded us of everything the genius has been. He loves the man more than the man seems to love himself any more.

To call this Mann’s record is not to ignore Dennis Coulson, who must have been hiding on those McGuinness-Flint albums until melodies as elegiac (and as early Dylan) as “Eternal Circle” and “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” came his way. It would be blasphemous to suggest that Coulson does these songs better than Dylan could himself. But his relatively sweet and conventional musicality does add a note of inspired directness to the 1963-1964 songs. Dylan’s superiority on the choppy, ironic later songs is more clear-cut, but Coulson does interpret these with appropriate humor and punch. In neither case does he sop over into literalness—Baezesque prettifying or Bandesque uglifying. He knows Dylan’s lyrics for the lazy, flirtatious embraces of perception that they are. Nor is it to ignore the musicians themselves. Mann’s own Earth Band has done a version of “Get Your Rocks Off” that isn’t half as strong and clear as the one available here. This is partly Coulson—the Earth Band does quite deliberately without a real singer—but partly the virtuoso folk-rock playing of the others. Folk-rock, or country-rock, is all the music can be called, yet where Arif Mardin or Lenny Waronker and the usual studio guys can be counted on always to add the tasteful riff—the just-so flourish, the swelling rhythm—this music remains jagged. It rocks and it rolls, but it doesn’t just pass over or around you; it seems somehow to stop short every now and then. A producer can direct such energy, but he can’t fabricate it.

Nevertheless, this is Mann’s record. The arrangements, for instance, probably do more to make the music work than the playing itself. Mann lets those songs which can carry their own weight do so, but on two relatively tuneless early compositions—“Let Me Die in My Footsteps” and “The Death of Emmett Till”—he is careful to add a hook, a tabla and a classic build arrangement, respectively. The clownish horns on “Don’t You Tell Henry” are a hook for the whole album and certainly an entree to side two. In addition, someone—maybe Coulson or Dylan, more likely Mann—has eliminated stanzas here and there and taken a long recitative out of the seven minute finale, “Sign of the Cross.”

As so often, the selection of material really defines the album. These songs are contradictory in spirit—cynical and-idealistic, silly and profound, confused and self- reliant—but they are always tough and intelligent and usually funny. Insofar as they are about anything but themselves they turn out to be about the same stuff as the run of escapist singer-songwriter junk—musicianly dedication and alienation, the need for personal freedom, the sense of growing up and out. But they are virtually without self-pity, and it is to Mann’s credit that he has carefully included a seemingly unredeemable protest song, “Emmett Till,” in the line-up.

The one semi-false note is “Sign on the Cross,” which I take to be about Dylan’s Jewishness (the sign on the cross said: Jesus Christ King of the Jews). It is questionable for a WASP like Coulson to sing such a song, although Dylan’s characteristic evasiveness and talent for gospelly overtones provides an escape. In another way, it is in questionable taste for Dylan to write it—for once, he does come perilously close to feeling sorry for himself. But although Mann closes with the song, he has provided an antidote earlier on. Here are four lines from “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” some prophetic 1963 advice which Dylan might do well to heed right now:

            I don’t know if I’m smart but I think I can see

            When someone is pullin’ the wool over me

            And if this war comes and death’s all around

            Let me die on this land ‘fore I die underground

            Let me die in my footsteps

            Before I go down under the ground.

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Hi Bob, it looks like a bunch of the albums that top this year’s Dean’s List received A minuses (e.g. Margaret Glaspy, CMAT, Body Type, S.G. Goodman) while a bunch of straight A’s (e.g. Tyler Childers, Amanda Shires, Danny Brown, Margo Price) land much farther down the list. What gives? — Eric Grossman, New York City.

I decided to construct that list NOT by replaying the many albums that got straight A’s, a herculean timesuck of a task, but by scanning the list and seeing what had taken up some kind of residence in my memory, which means in turn that they had played an active role in my life. That means some albums were left off, and so be it. It also means others that I did replay were upgraded, most notably CMAT and, obviously, Glaspy, which started sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear at the very start of the process. Of the downgrades you mention, the ones that stir the most regret are Tyler Childers and Amanda Shires. Least: Danny Brown though of course you never know. Might there be others were I to devote another day to checking everything out yet again? How could there not be? But working late in the game due to health reasons and eager to move on to the April and May Consumer Guides, I had no intention of doing so.

Hi there. I was re-watching Monterey Pop the other night, and there’s a guy in the crowd pictured applauding at the end of Ravi Shankar’s filmed performance, and it shore do look like you. No lengthy response required, unless you want to expound. But, aware you were there: is it? — David Poindexter, Illinois.

That is me, definitely. I wrote a big piece for Esquire about Monterey that’s in Any Old Way You Choose It. Was sitting up front and salvaged a hunk of Hendrix’s guitar that was thrown out as garbage that by a subletter a few years later. Arrrghh.

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Reading your essays on the enduring power of the Rolling Stones, I am consistently curious (certainly not surprised per se, as the band is highly polarizing amongst the rockists) about your general dislike of the Eagles—the band, I believe, to a very great extent that continued on the Stones dichotomy of iconographically fronting the excess whilst inwardly always acting as detached, and gritty observers of it. Only the Henley and Frey band did it within broadly-defined corporate rock; but Hotel California album milieu speaks of highly literate narratives that are both functional for the image and stimulating for the intellect/self-criticism beneath it. Doesn’t “The Long Run” opening speak to you as the same sort of exhausted bravado Eagles describe, that the Stones did on “Rocks Off”? And, far beyond accusations of misogyny, “Those Shoes” actually a poignant take on females being preyed upon by predatory males? — Jakub, Poland

When I was at Newsday I wrote a piece called “Trying to Understand the Eagles.” (Relevant aperçu: “Listening to the Eagles has left me feeling alienated from things I used to love.”) Eagles fans hated it. I’m still proud of it myself.

I am 61 years old and have a broad spectrum of musical interests, but find very few personal acquaintances who share my musical interests or variety. From time to time I have a question about music, but don’t have a person to turn to and discuss it with. Can I use you as a source? My first question would be: I enjoy the Kronos Quartet. They are classical virtuoso musicians who appear to perform non-traditional arrangements. What rock band would be a good comparison to them? — John A. Davis, Nebo North Carolina

I liked a 2017 collaboration of theirs with a Malian supergroup. But asking me questions about classical music is a waste of time for everyone involved.

Hello, Enjoyed seeing your Dean’s List as if anything I find it interesting how you compile such a review of all your reviewed albums for the year. Easy to assume A+s make it to the top, with full As following, then the A-s arrange afterwards, with maybe the occasionally the odd B+ being buoyed up after a whole to digest. In recent years, it appears that if the list reflects anything, it reflects your current response to a record when creating the list, in which your previous opinion may have waned or even grown. Examples, Beyonce’s Renaissance (an A+) coming second to Selo i Ludy Performance Band (a full A). Or Charli XCX’s Brat (B+) coming above several full As. Looking at this year’s list I notice several full As be ranked rather low (Skrillex: F*ck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not, dead last; Corook: Committed to a Bit, 49). What changed your opinion, if anything? Also noticed Lorde’s Virgin wasn’t present. — James, Liverpool

See above. Might my response levels change over the months and years? Of course. But at a certain point I play what I feel like playing or a guest has requested and find out from there. In the case of Selo i Ludy I had a conversion experience that hung in there for a while, and although I’ve only played it a few times since, it always sounds good. Remember: I OWN A LOT OF ALBUMS!!!

My name is Michael, and I am a budding film critic/essayist from Milwaukee, WI. I had recently seen the documentary about you, The Last Critic, and I was floored. What I truly loved about the doc is your openness to discuss the craft of writing, and I felt immensely inspired to go home and write (which I am doing). — Michael Viers, Milwaukee

I’m glad you liked it. I had my doubts about the project but I’m very proud. It’s currently showing around the country at film festivals, and I expect it to get to a Manhattan festival later this year.

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Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman: Miami Lice: Season Four (Rhymesayers Entertainment) Both New Yorkers first even though one is Hispanic and one Caucasian, one a Queens guy and the other from Montauk, together they lay endless verbiage with uncountable referents over spare beats. Instrumentally, it’s never quite compelling, but flow‑wise it’s unstoppable in its way, and verbally something like unequalled. Humpty Dumpty rhymes with guppies. Someone bowls 300 with a human skull. Those who feel in a fix are told to go remix the a cappella. The burgers constructed of who knows how many barely edible things turn out to rhyme with Gerber’s. A trail of talent‑show bombers whisper Our Fathers through their balaclavas. A MINUS

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Having long ago appointed myself the Dean of American Rock Critics, I have dibs on a catchy cognomen for my version of the year‑end top tens or fifties or whatevers with which my tribe beefs up its December copy: the Dean’s List. I know—not only isn’t it December anymore, it’s May. So I’m way late with a “year‑end” list that stretches down to 61 picks. But looking over the year‑ends my colleagues at Rolling Stone and such have long since finalized, I don’t feel like I’m short‑changing my readers or myself. The internationally renowned Rosalia? I don’t speak Spanish and have major reservations about her grandiose musical romanticism, though it’s certainly distinctive and you have every right to disagree. The producer-singer-songwriter Dijon? We’ve all savored sharper condiments. Further over on the rock side, NYC’s Geese? Honk honk honk: “Bellowed, fatalistic, expressionistic moan” was the quick take I stand by. I can imagine other up‑and‑coming rockers on other people’s lists winning me over in the end. But most of the possibilities seem pretty iffy from here, especially the male ones. Which brings me to a striking stat about this year’s Dean’s List: 30 of its 61 picks spotlight female vocalists who include the Memphis rapper GloRilla, the now-transitioned Ms. Ezra Furman, and the eternal Sally Timms undercutting the Mekons’ Horror.

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The way I figure, there’s a reason for this statistical anomaly, which reflects what musical entities I find myself responding to as I negotiate my eighties. One way of putting it is that as I age I prefer songs I said SONGS to the dub‑tracks‑sorta that sonic‑gestalt album fanciers like Dijon and Geese fans believe prove their aesthetic sophistication. Repeat: songs. From “In the Still of the Night” to “Don’t Be Cruel” to “At the Hop,” songs made rock and roll go as it dawned in my teen ‘50s. Indeed, what marketed itself as a two‑sided album music for well over half a century (although vinyl fetishists may stubbornly disagree, the album‑side thing, of course, failed to survive the CD era) is constructed from discrete songs that grab us one by one until at their best they cohere into musical wholes. As the singles music called rock and roll morphed into the album music dubbed just “rock,” poetically inclined collegiate folkies elevated the lyrical ambitions of the songs they wrote to embellish and empower their music as they strove to emulate the Beatles and the Stones. At more or less the same time, Nashville’s Music Row fed off, professionalized, and pretty much perfected pop songwriting per se, ending up with what they understood to be nothing less than not just an art form, which they cared about in itself, but a commercially potent fusion or amalgam of irresistible and well‑sung melodies shoring up meaningful verbal constructs capable of inflecting the love lives and even the world‑views of its audience. Soon hundreds if not thousands of rock bands followed suit, not to emulate Nashville per se but to kick off from its example to perfect what many already regarded as their “art.” As a result, descendants of the Beatles‑Stones‑Who triumvirate as well as countless American folk‑rock bands initially typified by the Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful made a thing of songwriting per se. And soon comparable goals were inspiring the scruffy upstarts of the more minimalist punk/new wave era.

All this is self‑evident enough. But I felt obliged to explain it in so many words to flesh out the evolving aesthetic expectations of what has long been a very much album‑oriented school of criticism that addresses everything from garage bands to rappers as well as ambitious aesthetes and accomplished pop professionals, all of whom traffic, once again, in songs. True, I feel obliged to credit and lucky to enjoy artists who get across principally on their fetching sonics and well‑honed grooves, particularly the funk/hip‑hop honchos and the many Afropop musicians I’ve been promoting for decades without understanding most of their lyrics at all. Prime African examples this year—four in all, though there are often more—include Malawi’s Kasambwe Brothers and Congolese Titi Bakorta’s Mapambazuko, both worth a dip on Spotify whether you think they’re your kind of thing or not. Moreover, not all that different formally or conceptually are, say, the Dingonek Street Band’s Primal Economics from Brooklyn and for that matter Chicago’s utterly un‑African FACS’s Wish Defense.

All these options feed off each other, and all embrace “rock” as a wide‑ranging sonic, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon or maybe just catchword to which I’ve devoted my rather long life. So as I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself more and more taken with the telltale signs of maturity that have emerged from the youth music I’ve been fascinated by since I wasn’t yet a teenager—a music that keeps getting older itself. And speaking very generally I’d mention my special attraction to what over the years I’ve come to call for the sake of brevity “good albums” that fall into two or maybe I should make that three categories. Unreconstructed leftist that I will remain for what years I have left on the planet, I definitely have a thing for songs with politics, although they’re admittedly hard to do well: running down my list I’d cite Bruce Springsteen, Jason Isbell, Buck 65, Robert Forster, Chuck D of course, the all too obscure James McMurtry knocking it out of the park, Jeffrey Lewis, and there are more. A happily and indeed romantically married feminist till death do us part, I’m also biased in favor of love songs that nail connubial bliss, which it should surprise no one to be told are best left to women such as, for instance, Helene Cronin, Lucy Dacus, and Margo Price (who, FYI, also takes the trouble to ding “fascism”).

I could expand on these generalizations, but we are after all in Dean’s List territory, where were anybody doing the handicapping not a single reader nor for that matter your faithful dean expected to see Margaret Glaspy’s The Golden Heart Protector atop my list with its seven songs in 26 minutes. The possibility didn’t occur to me at first even though I actively perked up with my wife concurring every time I encountered the clarity of Glaspy’s delivery because I just liked the way it sounded. And that’s not all. At 37, the now NYC‑based Glaspy is a Californian who moved east with scholarship that took her through one semester of guitar studies at Berklee, and initially I didn’t quite grok her. But as I started replaying contenders so as to sharpen my chops as I prepped for this Dean’s List roundup, I found myself perking up every time her clear, conversational soprano‑plus came around on the changer till I wrote “There’s a sweetness here, but also thought and the kind of intelligence that values the lubricious without getting swamped by it”—and will now add that the album is jacked up by superb not to say revelatory cover versions that come alive as they honor history: Creedence’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” with its dark “Yesterday and days before/Sun is cold and rain is hard/I know, been that way for all my time,” Jackson Browne’s “These Days” with its regretful “These days I seem to think a lot/About the things that I forgot to do for you/And all the times I had the chance to,” and most remarkable one I’m not sure I’d ever fully registered before, the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love” with its “The book of love is long and boring/And written very long ago/It’s full of flowers and heart‑shaped boxes/And things we’re all too young to know.” All three of those citations are just samples; thanks to Glaspy, all three mine songs so substantial they’re worth sinking your teeth into. Without Glaspy I doubt I’d have thought of any of them ever again. But it seems likely that her album is going to be a standard around our house. One of many, sure. But there’s what can only be called a wealth of them by now, because a long life as a rock critic has made me the only kind of rich man I’ve ever much wanted to be.

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1. Margaret Glaspy: The Golden Heart Protector (ATO)

2. CMAT: Euro‑Country (AWAL)

3. Bruce Springsteen: Land of Hope & Dreams (Columbia)

4. Body Type: Expired Candy (Poison City)

5. S.G. Goodman: Planting by the Signs (Slough Gates/Thirty Tigers)

6. Rhett Miller: A Lifetime of Riding by Night (ATO)

7. The Mekons: Horror (Fire)

8. Lily Allen: West End Girl (BMG)

9. Haim: I Quit (Columbia)

10. Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow (Southeastern)

11. Jeff Evans Porkestra: When Pigs Dance (self‑released)

12. Big Thief: Double Infinity (4AD)

13. Margo Price: Hard Headed Woman (Loma Vista)

14. Buck 65: Keep Moving (Handsmade)

15. Robert Forster: Strawberries (Tapete)

16. Public Enemy: Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 (Def Jam)

17. James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (New West)

18. The Kasambwe Brothers: The Kassambwe Brothers (MASS MoCA)

19. Dingonek Street Band: Primal Economics (Accurate ‘18)

20. Todd Snider: High, Lonesome, and Then Some (Aimless)

21. Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out (City Slang)

22. Sabrina Carpenter: Man’s Best Friend (Island)

23. Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta: Mapambazuko (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

24. Jubal Lee Young: Squirrels (Reconstruction)

25. Jax: Dear Joe (Atlantic)

26. Danny Brown: Stardust (Warp)

27. Marshall Allen: New Dawn (Mexican Summer)

28. Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter (RCA)

29. Amanda Shires: Nobody’s Girl (ATO)

30. Wednesday: Bleeds (Dead Oceans)

31. Craig Finn: Always Been (Tamarac)

32. Adrienne Lenker: Live at Revolution Hall (4AD)

33. Ms. Ezra Furman: Goodbye Small Head (Bella Union)

34. Girl Scout: Headache (Human Garbage)

35. Common/Pete Rock: The Auditorium Vol. 1 (Loma Vista)

36. Chuck D Presents Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon (Def Jam)

37. Amadou & Mariam: La Vie Est Belle (Because)

38. FACS: Wish Defense (Trouble in Mind)

39. Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya Come Back (Umsakazo)

40. Helene Cronin: Maybe New Mexico (self‑released)

41. Patterson Hood: Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams (ATO)

42. The Delines: Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom (Cortez)

43. Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1) (self‑released)

44. Manu Chao: Viva Tu (Because)

45. Billy Woods: Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)

46. Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling (Geffen)

47. Kadef: Kadef (RR Gems)

48. Willi Carlisle: Winged Victory (Signature Sound)

49. Corook: Committed to a Bit (Atlantic)

50. Grace Potter: Medicine (Hollywood)

51. Peter Stampfel, Friends & Daughters: Song Shards (Jalopy)

52. Funkrust Brass Band: Make a Little Spark (self‑released)

53. Jenny Hval: Iris Silver Mist (4AD)

54. Jeffrey Lewis: The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis (Vintage Voltage)

55. Sudan Archives: The BPM (Stones Throw)

56. Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts: Talkin to the Trees (Reprise)

57. Wet Leg: Moisturizer (Domino)

58. GloRilla: Glorious (CMG/Interscope)

59. PinkPantheress: Fancy That (Warner Records)

60. Smerz: Big City Life (Escho)

61. Skrillex: F*ck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not <3 (Owsla/Atlantic)

By July of 1972 I’d already written about the Grateful Dead for The New York Times and the Voice, but this Newsday piece on the band has special resonance for me, because it turned out to be the first writing of mine that Carola ever read. Although I was still dating the woman I dubbed here Nadine Robinson—real name, Ellin Hirst, who as a singer-songwriter billed as Ms. Clawdy was soon to be covered by none other than New Yorker rock critic Ellen Willis and became friendly with Greil Marcus when she emigrated to the Bay Area—I had fallen big-time for Carola and had an invitation to come visit her on Shelter Island out near Montauk. So as Newsday’s rock critic I traveled out to Jersey City with Ellin as described, then returned to Manhattan, picked up my repaired car, started writing my Sunday column for Newsday at my apartment on Avenue B, drove out to Newsday’s Hempstead office, kept crushing out the column till it was done, left it on my editor’s desk, kept the carbon or as it was called “flimsy,” and set off for Shelter Island, the main event far as I was concerned. Arrived at, say, 6:30, got into bed with Carola for the first time, and when we woke up took the opportunity to show her my piece. Given my priorities, I’ve always assumed that what I came up with was what I’d call quality hackwork. But then Carola unearthed the below piece a few months ago while working on her memoir. Here’s how she wrote about it: “When he handed me a typewritten copy of his Newsday review of a Grateful Dead show the morning after the night when we’d just about plighted our troth, I’d never read a published word of Bob’s in my life. What impressed me in this review wasn’t just the tone, but how the tone hopped around the way I’d noticed his mind did, first nuts and bolts, then goofy, down-to-earth and sweaty with a touch of, you know, agape that for a moment burst into absolute possibly stoned radiance before hopping off nuts and bolts, leaving a scent of leftover agape.” I wouldn’t be putting it on my Substack if I didn’t think it was still worth reading. But given how it came to be it retains considerable personal value as well. So I hope both the piece and this tale are of some intrinsic interest.

My car had a busted muffler, so my friend Nadine Robinson and I had no way to get to the Dead concert in Jersey City except the Hudson Tubes. Hustling press tickets was one thing—Dead freaks hustle tickets the way other crazy people play chess or collect stamps—but it wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow, to taxi to a Dead concert in New Jersey and charge it to Newsday. I’m sure Jerry Garcia would pass off such scruples as the old New York Movesymp moralism—if you can rip off a cab, you rip off a cab, right?—but we took a deep breath and went by tube anyway.

At Journal Square we had trouble finding the bus to Roosevelt Stadium, and we felt a little out-of-place—I in the Dead T-shirt Warners gave me once, Nadine in one of her basement special dresses. We were rescued, though, by a neat young woman with a McGovern button who offered us a ride to the concert. Her name was Anita and she worked for Golden Books. This was her third Dead concert and she was very excited.

There was the predictable hassle at the gate—our names weren’t on the list, somebody from some congressman’s office wanted six tickets, and so forth—but we got in eventually, which was also predictable. Fortune favors Dead freaks, especially when they work for newspapers. The music was already underway, but there was no rush because there never is. That’s not the way the Dead affect people. Nadine and I pushed and excused our way through the crush up front to claim our seats, which were relinquished cheerfully by a couple who immediately occupied the aisle.

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The Dead were tuning up and jollity prevailed. The ushers made only token attempts to discourage aisle-milling, and everywhere three and four and five fans crowded into two and three seats. New marijuana lore: For an effortless direct hit, the informed dope fiend places the lighted end of the joint in his (more often her) mouth and blows smoke directly into some lucky fellow fiend’s lungs. Wine futures: Boone’s Farm continues solid. The guy in front of me extended his greetings on the basis of our Dead T-shirts, which were similar. He also had a Dead patch on his jeans. A young woman behind me extended greetings on the basis of our Dead T-shirts, which were identical. Someone had given her hers in Vermont.

We were seated well to the front and side, so that one bank of tie-dyed amplifiers half-hid Jerry Garcia. Pigpen was nowhere to be seen, but Keith Godchaux, the new man, whose piano would continue to cause tuning delays until intermission, was ensconced on the far side of the stage. Garcia played a lick and Bob Weir stepped to the mike and suddenly just about everyone on the field was boogieing on top of his folding chair. It was a new Chuck Berry song, perfected for the Dead: “Promised Land,” the tale of how the po’ boy overcomes his tribulations to travel from Norfolk, Va., to Los Angeles, and places a long distance call at the end of his wanderings.

Nadine had been skeptical. Jerry Garcia had suggested in an interview that the downfall of the Haight began when Chester Anderson, a New Yorker, started distributing handbills detailing the underbelly of the hippie scene. A gang rape was Garcia’s example, that had really bummed him out, but his bumout couldn’t have compared to Nadine’s contempt for this sexist creep with his know-nothing vibes. Yet there she was, boogieing on her chair, and as Garcia took one searing, soaring solo after another she said: “You know, he really convinces you. He really makes it real.”

The only thing Dead freaks have in common is this passion for making it real. The dope and the music are means to that end, means to feeling the love that our children’s children may feel in their everyday life, if they’re very lucky. You can check out your fellow celebrants and wonder: “Will you still love me tomorrow?” But tonight’s the night, and tonight it’s true. In the service of that perception, maybe it’s permissible to ignore the seamier contradictions of life in these United States as a matter of principle.

It was hot and humid and we hadn’t slept much. Between songs, Nadine would sit down and swear to remain there, even though the air gets a little fetid when you sit surrounded by dancing, sweating bodies. To hell with it, she didn’t have to see, she’d just listen. But then Keith Godchaux, who has emerged full-grown as one of the premier pianists in the music, would do something incredible, or his wife Donna, who looks more like a waitress in a truck stop than a chick singer, would come out for “Playing in the Band,” or Garcia would sing “Sugaree,” and Nadine would get on up again.

Eventually, though, perhaps half an hour into the second set, we felt so wasted that we moved toward the rear. For a while we sat far from the stage in the lower grandstand, and discovered an unsuspected peace there—the same celebration, only cooled out, rested. We missed Pigpen and his blues, though, the music was a little too rockabilly, not enough ground to it, and soon we left. No regrets, no complaints—the celebration was over for us, that was all. Walking around the stadium toward the bus stop, I spotted a Toyota with New York plates and Nadine urged me to run after it. Together with a stockbroker and his girlfriend we rode back to New York City. He told us he’d seen them better and that he was sorry Pigpen had been sick. But he had had a good time, too.

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Allo Darlin’: Bright Nights (Slumberland) Elizabeth Morris’s overall thematics—plus, admittedly, her casual praise for Leonard Cohen—always made her and her guys seem like a hookup group, let’s call that aesthetic strategy. But some combination of the fond calm and sustained kindness of her singing got me thinking. Did she just have a kid? Does all that “sweetness of music is mine” and “I will love you till the end of time” signify not midlife eros, just enduring parental affection? The answer would seem to be yes—she has two young daughters it’s hard to not figure will follow in their mother’s path, though exactly when, how, or whether she becomes a grandma remains to be determined. A MINUS

De La Soul: Cabin in the Sky (Mass Appeal) In which the Long Island alt-rappers essay their first album in a decade aware that they’ve lost original Native Tongue Trugoy the Dove, who having spritzed things up while spelling yogurt backwards died three years ago after suffering with congestive heart failure.

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I know I have a Dean’s List overdue. But after an afternoon with an excellent doctor who allowed as how she was challenged by my bum elbow and spending a major chunk of Wednesday night with Joe Boyd while failing to take a bunch of notes like the good journalist I ought to be, it seemed only mete to jot down a few details for my readers while Boyd was still on my mind. The occasion was a screening with commentary at the Film Forum on Houston Street that bore the title And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, which is also the title of a 941-page Faber & Faber book Boyd published in 2024. I admit it—due to the aforementioned elbow plus my tendency to read while lying on my back, I’ve barely opened the tome, although Carola has given it her seal of approval and what I’ve paged through has proved pretty fine. But what went down at the Film Forum definitely added plenty. Boyd, a lean guy I learned was about my age though to me he looked younger, was spotlighted stage left, reading from the book as pertinent film footage filled the screen next to him.

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Where these visuals originated was seldom self-evident, but who the principals were was usually clear enough. To wit, and this is barely a sampling: Django Reinhardt, Miriam Makeba, Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Taj Mahal with some Malians who names were familiar but on the wrong side of my recall memory, Ravi Shankar featuring George Harrison, Indian summer in Bulgaria, Celia Cruz advising the ladies to hit their husbands back with a frying pan should their fists prove inadequate. The presentation went on for three hours and left a full house hungry for more. The extent to which Boyd can take this show on the road is unclear. But believe me when I assure you that the readings themselves would be worth acquainting yourself with if they come anywhere near your vicinity.

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As someone who turns 84 in a month, my appetite for long-distance travel has shrunk close to zero, not just because airfare is so pricey (and getting pricier thanks to Trump’s war in Iran) but because the whole rigmarole has so many wearying drawbacks and complications. Speaking of which, so do festivals, conventions, and other such socioprofessional aggregations. But this year’s Austin, Texas, SXSW—in case you didn’t know, that means South by Southwest, one of the biggest—beckoned pretty much irresistibly because I myself was a featured attraction as the subject of a documentary called The Last Critic that would premier there. The nearly 90 minute doc is the work of a trio of Austinites: director Matty Wishnow, director of photography Bun Wu, and editor Paul Lovelace, the latter of whom had worked as my assistant and done a student doc about me at NYU in the late ‘90s. Carola and I couldn’t resist, especially with And It Don’t Stop editor and doc co-producer Joe Levy providing support. Carola even bought a gold bomber jacket for the occasion. Looked great.

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So there we were watching ourselves on the big screen with hundreds of people we’d never met and whaddaya know? The audience was clearly having a good time at a well-made film, to the extent that the wisecracks that sometimes end my reviews were getting real laughs. There was vintage footage from Paul’s old film adding historical weight, as well as testimony from (among others) Boots Riley, Randy Newman, Greg Tate, and Ellen Willis—the last two both now gone, and seeing them onscreen was especially moving. And when the flick was over, there were Carola in her gold jacket and me in my What’s More Punk Than the Public Library T-shirt doing Q&A from the stage. Of course we were flattered. Why wouldn’t we be?

Except for the tail-end of a set by Jon Langford, none of the pretty good music we saw knocked us out, but catching up with friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a long time, particularly former Voice music editor Chuck Eddy, my nephew Julian Dibbell, and Texas Monthly editor (and my onetime assistant) Jeff Salamon, who put us up with help from two of the most memorable dogs I’ve ever met, more than compensated. Will we catch SXSW next year? Could be, could be.

The Last Critic screens March 26 at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, with more film festival showings to be announced shortly.

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Hello, I’m curious how you got to where you are. What first drew you to music, what continues to draw you to it? What prompted you to pursue this as your career, and did you ever wonder whether you’d made the right choice? I love reading your work, thank you for doing what you do. — Eli Krash, Richmond, Virginia

Although both my parents and for that matter my more dexterous maiden aunt Mildred played piano, I thought lessons were boring when I could have been playing stoopball outside, hence have zero formal knowledge of music. But the big living room radio console my fireman father splurged on was always part of my life, not least because it came with a phonograph he converted 78s to LPs when they became a thing. Plus I loved baseball, particularly the Yankees, which means my brother and I had a radio in the basement, where we slept. What I can no longer remember is whether WINS was the Yankee station back then, because it was the (first) Alan Freed station, and it was Freed who leaned down on the biracial pop music he dubbed rock and roll. Plus there was DJ Peter Tripp on WMGM nearby and at the upper end of the dial WWRL, a black-oriented (and Harlem-based?) station that played only r&b. My parents were also good dancers. And my beloved grandfather Tom Snyder was the first person I knew who owned a 45 RPM record player. So there was always plenty of music, especially pop music, in my life, and by the time I was 10 I was into it. At Dartmouth I hung out with the tiny bohemian clique insofar as they tolerated me, and they hipped me to jazz. By the time I was out of college I played pop radio all the time and also occasionally visited jazz clubs, where Thelonious Monk was my special fave. All of which is to say that not just that for most of my life I was a serious rock and roll fan. Add to that my night-gig boss, the painter Bob Stanley, who was glad to play the radio at F.I. Dupont where we filed margin calls and before too long the pop art movement was under way, which added an extra layer of validation to my attraction to pop music, which Bob liked too—there’s a Shirelles piece of his hanging in my living room and a Ringo in the dining room. Aesthetically, the-“high”-art-to-pop-art switcheroo made it easier to write critically and with aggressive respect about pop music. Hence: rock criticism.

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If you could invite yourself to join a band, any band at any time from recorded music’s brief past, which would it be, what instrument are you playing, and why? You can ruthlessly replace any band member of your choosing. — Dean Sterling Jones, Belfast

Answer: none. Although sleeping I’ve had dreams about being in a band a few times, I find I have not the slightest interest in speculating about what band I’d most like to join. Professionally meeting John Lennon in particular was an honor and a treat. But I like being a writer, and I like being a critic. That’s where both my talents and—work though both are—my pleasures reside.

Hey . . . A couple of quick questions. I noticed positive reviews for three Only Ones’ records from ‘79, ‘80 and ‘91 and wonder if you have any thoughts on Peter Perrett’s 2017 solo album, How the West Was Won. It’s one of my favourite 21st century albums. — Tony from Newfoundland, Canada (51st state, my ass)

Because Carola named her novel The Only Ones (check it out!!) we retain a theoretical fondness for the band—when she’s creating playlists for a reading she always sticks in one of their songs. But that Perrett solo album was a B+ by me, and sampling it again on streaming I soon decided that he came across better sonically as a group leader than as a solo artist. So though you might ultimately prove right about how good that solo album is, I’m not sure I’ll dig on a nearly decade-old release to double-check.

Hi! I just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done and continue to do. For all these years you’ve encouraged people to listen harder to music and really think about what they’re hearing and how it makes them feel. Twenty-five years ago I submitted a snotty letter to the editor of the Village Voice after you wrote something dismissive of Wilco’s Pazz and Jop topper Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I was rude and shitty and I’ve felt ashamed of myself ever since. I apologize. I thought I knew everything and I did not. I still love that album though. — Jake Brown, Michigan

I never liked Wilco as much as I was supposed to. There was and still is something a little too sluggish about them. As for your snotty letter, I’m glad you changed your mind, but as I believe I’ve written somewhere, criticism is not a popularity contest. Which is not to say I don’t feel contempt for all the Kansas and ELP fans who not only think I’m a fraud but underestimate my IQ.

Longtime fan, first-time caller. I’ve always appreciated your economy of words and felt that your precision in word choice reminds me very much of my own dad, who’s about your age and similarly snarky. I comb through your reviews every now and then and have found you have an apparent fondness for woman country singers, but it seems you’ve never covered Bobbie Gentry! As someone who only recently found her music, I’d like to know: do you have any opinion of her? — Mark, Oakland, California

I presume with no memory of the facts that I didn’t review Gentry’s albums because I didn’t think they were good enough. I did, however, once compare Laurie Anderson invidiously to “Ode to Billie Joe”—which is not to say I don’t enjoy and admire Anderson.

Dear Mr. Christgau,

I hope you are doing well. I’ve been a reader and fan of your Consumer Guide columns since the late 1970’s. Do you listen to live albums very often, aside from new releases that you review? Below are 10 live albums that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the years:

1 The Beatles, The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl

2 James Brown, Live At The Apollo Vol 1

3 Janis Joplin, Joplin In Concert

4 Neil Young, Weld

5 Black Flag, Who’s Got the 10-1/2?

6 David Johansen, Live It Up

7 Patsy Cline, Live at the Cimarron Ballroom

8 Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York

9 Alex Chilton, Ocean Club ‘77

10 Ramones, It’s Alive

Best — John Vest, Roanoke, Virginia

I gave As to every one of the albums you list. But you guess correctly when you figure I don’t listen to many live rock albums, though JB’s Sex Machine, which I’ve never been fully convinced is all the way live though that’s its rep, is an exception. I do however listen to many live jazz albums. Coltrane’s Live at the Vanguard, Ornette’s Friends and Neighbors, Davis’s Live/Evil and Monk’s Palo Alto are four that come to mind as I wonder whether Monk’s London albums are live or anyway part live and I bet there are others.

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Aesop Rock: I Heard It’s a Mess There Too (Rhymesayers Entertainment) Due to turn 50 in June, the alt-rapper christened or at least legally named Ian Bavitz comes bearing the largest vocabulary in all of hip-hop from Montauk Point to my Manhattan living room, self-evidently impressive from “Blood in my hair/Shit on my shoes/Spit on my shirt” to “Friends I hope you find what you need to find/So you can be the people you’re supposed to be/And friends I hope that you talk that shit you talk if it helps you deprogram,” and that’s just a few examples. He’s clearly got the kind of politics that could lead a bystander to hope he comes up with songs that transform rhymes into instruments of social change. But that’s asking a lot, and this is a good place to start getting your hopes up. A

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Hello Mr. Christgau. Are you alright? It’s been more than a month now since your last post. Regards — Martin Moeller, Vejle, Denmark

I am now officially and more or less completely recovered from prostate aquablation, a notoriously slow-healing procedure for old men with enlarged prostates which as I understand it is seldom cancer-related and definitely isn’t in my case.

Hi there, I hope this finds you both well. My question is very slightly time-sensitive but I’m aware it might too closely resemble work, in which case please ignore it. I’m not asking you to do my research for me. I enjoy listening to jazz but I’m not knowledgeable. Davis and Coltrane, both of whom I love, have releases for Record Store Day: The New Sounds, From Bebop to Blue, and Lady Be Good: Live in Europe with the Birdland All-Stars (for the former); and From Form to Spirit, and France 1965: The Complete Concerts (for the latter). There’s no way I can afford all of these, but of those you’re familiar with (assuming you are), could I ask which ones might represent the wisest investment? — Fred Hodson, Ipswich, U.K.

I’m not familiar with these, but a cursory glance suggests the Davis releases are archival and the Coltrane for completists (which I’m not). Instead let me recommend you investigate alto saxophonist and de facto inventor of bebop Charlie Parker, aka Bird, who seems to have gotten lost in the historical shuffle. Made his crucial breakthrough in the ‘40s. Check him out in the CG and you’ll find two full A’s and two A plusses. I’ve been playing Now’s the Time around here a lot recently and it never gets tired.

In my attempts to gain better appreciation for the Grateful Dead, your essays such as “They’re Grateful for the Dead” have been useful in capturing the atmosphere of the Deadhead culture. But the overall arc of your writing suggest there may have been a drop-off point partway through the ‘70s—after Europe ‘72, ratings drop from A’s and B+’s into B-’s and C’s, and the ‘90s ‘Dozin at the Knick review refers to the widespread belief that “two decades of Deadheads” may have been “marshmallow-ears.” Do you think this is an accurate reading of the Dead’s trajectory? Do you think something got lost in the tumult of Pigpen’s passing and the brief touring hiatus? — David D., Mesa, AZ.

I paid more attention to the Dead live than most critics, but as the Deadhead subculture became a mass cult the physical strain became too much. Note however that I covered a Dead concert in Jersey that I wrote up in the Newsday offices in Nassau County and then drove further east on Long Island to join Carola on Shelter Island, where I made our romance official and surprised her by showing her my copy after we got out of bed. At that point I don’t think she’d ever read a word I’d written. Pretty sure we saw them together at the Academy soon enough. Please also note that the review in question praises a 1990 live show for its “mesh of the tight and the shambolic that on their best nights rendered their music responsive and interactive”—there were good nights, not as many as there once were, but this was one. Parsing the exact moment when the good nights might have begun to dry up isn’t worth my time, and probably not yours.

Completely baffled by this review: “The Best of the Damned (Big Beat, 1999) A little late, I admit—going on half a century after Britpunk’s heyday, actually—an album by this well-named, overpraised band songful and rocking enough to play three times and squeeze into the A shelves (‘Jet Boy, Jet Girl,’ ‘New Rose,’ ‘Hit or Miss’) ***” 1999 --> not a half century after Britpunk’s heyday (1977 to 1999 ~ 22 years?). Maybe almost a quarter at best. “an album by this well-named, overpraised band songful and rocking enough to play three times and squeeze into the A shelves” --> it’s not going on the A shelf per your own grading rubric which awarded it a 3-star honorable mention. Do you think it’s any good? How good, if so? Straightforward language requested, something my Reader’s Digest reading late grandma would understand. — JM Welch, Elmira, NY

I don’t review every album on release; in this case, a collection made an impression many years after it appeared, and I reviewed it in the April 2024 Consumer Guide. So the half a century thing made sense in context. As for the A shelves, one problem with being known for grading things is that people get literalistic about it. Please allow me to use the term “A shelves” the way any normal person would—the shelves where I keep the important stuff as opposed to “housing only albums graded A.” Credence, for example, was one of those major bands whose catalogue included a B and B+, but at a certain moment in history I wanted to keep it all in one place. Haven’t played them in years though bet they’d sound pretty OK if I did.

You once raved about a reissue series released in 1982 on Epic Records called Okeh Soul, Okeh Western Swing, Okeh Jazz and Okeh Rhythm & Blues. I never bought them at the time when they were released as double vinyl albums but I see now that they were reissued on CD. You probably haven’t played them in decades—or have you? Are they all worth searching for? Hope you’re doing fine. — Harold Fenniman, Queens

I liked these sets in 1982 (ahem: “the finest major-label reissue anthologies since Atlantic’s long-lost History of Rhythm & Blues”). I see no reason I wouldn’t like them now. That said, for better or worse I play very little vinyl. CDs keep me busy enough unless I’m doing research or Carola or a visitor puts in a request. If the label were to send me the CDs in the mail I’d probably revisit them. But that is highly unlikely these days.

Maybe it is too demanding . . . but if asked about THE favorite album of all time, what are the quick choices that jump into your mind? Thank you and best wishes for all. — YMH, New York

Monk’s Misterioso, The Beatles’ Second Album, The Rolling Stones Now, something picked blind from my two dozen or so Armstrong CDs, maybe the longtime Bob and Carola fave Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (although obviously that’s not a timeless classic except for us who played it plenty when we were becoming a couple and the guys who made the record).

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Thomas Anderson: Letters From the Hermit Kingdom (Out There) By my count (and I may have missed a few), this is the 13th album by the Oklahoman proprietor of Angry Young Grad Student Music, not one of which lacks at least a song or two worth hearing again and some half of which are much better than that. On this one he follows his honey all the way to Paris, not exactly the world’s most Anglophilic metropolis, especially if the Anglo at hand comes up with the line “I say merci beaucoup, she says don’t you get pretentious.” Have I missed an NYC gig of his? I hope not, because I’d be happy to not just see his show but shake has hand even if I haven’t made him any kind of star. A MINUS

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Dear Mr. Christgau, What’s your favorite instrument? — David, Montclair, New Jersey

It depends, right? So say “rock,” as it’s called: electric guitar. Jazz: saxophone. Funk, etc.: drum kit. “Rock and roll”: human voice. Folk: “human voice.” Jazz: also piano. Trumpet doesn’t fit anywhere despite Satchmo.

Hi, Robert. I noticed that you didn’t rate FKA Twigs’ Eusexua. Did it slip your radar, or did you just not think much of it? Some of it was inspired by the Prague club scene, and the record is a big success here. To me, it compares pretty favorably with Madonna’s Erotica. — Mario, Prague

She didn’t slip under my radar. But while I’ve found her interesting as an artist, she’s never seemed quite compelling. Just played the new one and thought it sounded like a B plus. (Also thought the Erotica comparison an overstatement.) That said, I’d need to listen more before it sinks in enough to finalize that informed conjecture.

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Mr. Christgau, During your time at the VV, were you editing classical music critics Leighton Kerner, Greg Sandow, Tom Johnson, and Kyle Gann? Did you ever have the opportunity to write about classical music or “new” or modern classical music? Finally, do you read any classical critics today, and if so, who? — Steven Ward, Jackson, Mississippi

I edited all the critics you cite above and was fond of all of them as people—even Leighton, a sweet man who was inevitably late with his copy. Sandow and especially Johnson proved good friends and I always respected Gann. Moreover, John Rockwell—who started at the NYT as a classical guy before becoming the chief pop critic—is one of my closest pals; he and his wife were here for dinner a few nights ago. But with a few exceptions I’ve cited before—Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Beethoven’s C Sharp Minor Quartet—I have little active interest in “classical” music. Not a judgment, though I could transform it into one. My ears are very happy as they are—and by the way are in pretty good shape for 83.

Phish. They’re absolutely foundational to my understanding of how players pay attention to each other while making music—Rift blew my mind in high school and I legitimately loved the aural aesthetics of their records for a long time. However, as I’ve grown up, I’ve gradually started to hate them—like, really loathe them—and I can’t quite pin down why. Maybe it’s something about the not-quite-elegant poetry, or how the adept musical ideas seem detached from any significance, or how the whole endeavor has a whiff of defensive irony and cynicism that I can smell but can’t detail. These are only possibilities, though, and the full story eludes me. Please advise. The internet has not helped as much as I’d hoped. Your reviews are a good start but I’m hungry for more. — G., Damiriscotta, Maine

Seems like you’ve done a more than adequate job of pinning things down. Having always thought they were absolutely overrated—dud, C+, dud, B+, B-—I recommend you put this false step behind you and give, oh, Jefferson Airplane a visit.

Any thoughts on Joe Boyd’s recent world-music tome, And The Roots of Rhythm Remain? Whatever its flaws may be, I find it so much superior to White Bicycles (which I liked, but neither more nor less than I expected to) that I wonder if he wrote the earlier memoir just so someone might give him an advance (or at least an avenue) to publish this behemoth. — Mark Bradford, Brooklyn

I’m pretty sure I met Boyd on one U.K. venture or another, although I don’t recall the details. But I sure know his name and was so flattered when he called me and Carola up in NYC that we invited him and his wife over. They proved exceptionally interesting and sociable people, and I was quite flattered when he complimented me in the frontispiece to his book. Reading the book, however, is another matter for me, because I tend to read on my back in bed and have a bad left elbow that puts a 960-page tome like this one out of my range physically. Carola, however, has gotten into it. She’s impressed by his knowledge of various “folk” and international styles, and as a resident of London for much of the late ‘60s found Boyd’s knowledge of its bohemian variants accurate and evocative.

You are an absolute fucking wanker. — Tim A, Australia

From a limp-dick like you, that’s a compliment. Thanks for caring.

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Lily Allen: West End Girl (BMG) Some sixteen ago I wrote a full-length Barnes & Noble Review essay praising this then-23-year-old British ingenue-in-disguise. Then I pretty much forgot about her as she became a renowned minor U.K. star. Sonically, this album is, like Allen’s voice, lightweight albeit tuneful, but after all this time she seemed worth checking out and proved surprisingly complex. I believe the album reflects a major lacuna in marital mores between the UK, where the concept of the “open marriage” is often all but taken for granted, and the USA, where such notions are less casual and explicit. “I know you’ve made me your madonna,” Allen reminds her theoretical lifemate before informing listeners that “my marriage has been open

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I have come across your name so many times in my search tracing my dad’s side of the family. I did a Google search and came across this post of someone asking about your last name. I read the same things about the meaning but my dad also told me it had a French spelling and sound prior to the current spelling. Have you ever come across this? His name was Henry William Christgau. He passed in 2018 and was 63. I am from upstate New York but live in Florida now. I love my last name and that it is rare. I did trace the origins and where it came from in Germany. Side note I appreciate your Taylor Swift reviews—die hard Swiftie here and was pleasantly surprised to see your ratings. Reputation is my favorite album and so misunderstood by those who don’t follow her and what has happened to her. “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is a dis track for Kayne West and all the drama they caused her. It is one of my favorite songs on that album. — Andrea Christgau, Florida.

In my family lore the name Christgau is either North German or Danish—there is a Danish coffee brand of that name, an empty bag of which hangs on my office door. And huzzah huzzah, as noted in a strange coincidence you can find below but as I’ve long known, Minnesotan Victor Christgau was an early director of the Social Security Administration, which is something for all Christgaus to be proud of. Plus, oops, a Minnesotan jerkola named, oops, Robert Wayne Christgau was once arrested for driving his pickup with a young kid on the roof. Hope he did hard time for that.

Being born in 1961 and not getting into rock music until the late ‘70s, I was not contemporaneous with a lot of rock’s goings-on in the ‘60s and ‘70s. For example, Emotional Rescue was my first Rolling Stones cassette. I did voraciously listen to everything I missed, thanks to several guides, notably Paul Gambaccini’s Rock Critics’ Choice: The Top 200 Albums (to which you were a contributor) and two copies of Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. What I could never replicate was the live experience. While the Stones “Not Fade Away” was easily accessible to me, the visceral experience of their live show from the ‘60s and ‘70s was not. My question is, how crucial is this? Are they two different experiences or essential parts of one? Is it the difference between viewing (and being a part of) history and reading about it or simply different facets? Or is the difference simply unavoidable? — Ted Raikin, Metuchen, New Jersey

The answer, obviously, is that they’re two different but related experiences, with the recording generally more foundational, although it happens a lot that seeing a performer you’ve never heard before live inspires you to buy his/her/their recordings. One nice thing about records is that they tend to be a lot cheaper; another is that by familiarizing the listener with the artist’s material they generally render the performance more revelatory. And of course, many artists make more money on the road than they do from royalties.

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At least a couple times in your reviews you’ve made the distinction between “tuneful” and “melodic” music (I’m thinking in particular of your reviews of the Beths’ Expert in a Dying Field and Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods). How exactly do you personally distinguish the two terms? — Rogan, Melbourne, Australia.

Tuneful, implies simple and catchy. Melodic has more duration in it. Which is not to say I feel any need to be strict and/or absolute about the distinction.

In 1989, you named Pulnoc’s Live at P.S. 122 Album of the Year. Was it the Eastern European Revolutions that were a shock to you? — Barbara, Prague

Shock? Nah. Barely even a surprise. As I recall, it was my minimalist avant-garde colleague Tom Johnson who first alerted me to the Plastic People of the Universe, who evolved into Pulnoc. As for the P.S. 122 show, which Carola and I attended a few blocks from home and enjoyed tremendously, someone but I no longer recall who who made me/us a CD of that show, which Carola and I enjoyed tremendously just this morning. Under the title “Reality Czech,” Carola also reviewed Jana Chytlovas’s documentary The Plastic People of the Universe. And as it happens, my fan Joe Yanosik has published a book called A Consumer Guide to the Plastic People of the Universe.

Hi Robert, Your review of The Clash US version mentioned a tape you made of the Clash singles from that time period and how dandy it was. Do you still have said tape and if so, what was the sequencing of the songs. — Chris Kelly, Raleigh, North Carolina

By moving coats around in my hallway I was discombobulated to discover I’ve shelved, alphabetically of course, what looks like hundreds of homemade cassettes, none of which I’ve played in years. Couldn’t find a Clash one, unfortunately. Sorry.

Dear Mr. Christgau, Why do you dislike and rag on so much delightful music? — Brent, New Orleans

Because over half a century I’ve found that a lot of people either agree with me about what’s “delightful” or enjoy my rhetoric.

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The deep sense of loss inspired by the sudden death of 59-year-old Todd Snider is a surprising thing. After all, this wasn’t a titan like Lennon, Joplin, Hendrix, Marley, Cobain, even big Snider fan Prine. It was a goofy, resilient, stealth-political, cult figure who was seldom taken seriously, in part because he was so funny and in part because he wasn’t what most would call inspirational. This isn’t to suggest he didn’t have loads of fans. My wife has never forgotten the time she traipsed from the bleachers to the stage to see Snider up close at the 2019 Finger Lakes Festival and heard a throng of concertgoers male and female singing along. And a pal from East Nashville reports that the entire neighborhood, where the Oregon native and Austin fixture had long made what home he had, is in mourning. Me, I’ve Consumer Guided 19 of his albums, 12 in full grafs, the latest just last week. The 2012 piece I’m reprinting here first appeared in The Barnes & Noble Review. Buy Snider’s albums before they become collectors’ items.

Usually Manhattan’s Irving Plaza is a stand-up venue, but the folding chairs were out March 8 for fans of East Nashville singer-songwriter Todd Snider. These were predominantly but not overwhelmingly male, guys who could easily populate a bar scene in My Name Is Earl and look to average a few years younger than the 45-year-old they always come out to see. After two decades of performing mostly solo, Snider is touring with the same terrific band that gives his Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables extra bite and body. Three of his first five selections were from that album, which had been out all of three days. Every one of the five was about class struggle.

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Not that those fortysomethings were seeking political enlightenment. Snider makes a living on the road primarily because he’s the finest natural comedian in music today. His foundational hits are a grunge joke he’s left behind, the fortysomething apologia “Alright Guy,” and the one most newbies notice, “Beer Run,” the saga of two underage frat boys looking to get drunk at a Robert Earl Keen concert. But the songs that began the show, while still funny, were considerably less jovial. “In the Beginning” traces the roots of theism to a foiled Paleolithic attempt to revolt against the first rich guy. “Too Soon to Tell” ponders the eternal prospects of a recently fired screw-up who has more immediate concerns: “They say living well is the best revenge / I say bullshit, the best revenge is revenge.” In “The Devil You Know,” Snider gives his car keys to a young black bank robber fleeing the police and holds the money for him. “Precious Little Miracles” is a tongue-in-cheek attack on teenagers who wear their pants too low, kill for thrills, and won’t pick up garbage in the park. And in “Lookin’ for a Job,” a drywall-hanging ex-con warns his boss to show some respect: “Broke won’t take much getting used to / Neither will a barbwire jailhouse wall / Watch what you say to someone with nothing / It’s almost like having it all.”

Snider grew up in Oregon, took up the harmonica, and drifted to Austin after college. There he was inspired by the folksinger Jerry Jeff Walker to learn guitar and embark on a career whose beginnings he recounts with more hilarity than reliability on his 2003 live album Near Truths and Hotel Rooms. An anxiety-prone insomniac with a deep fondness for marijuana and red wine, he has whole routines mocking his prowess on the guitar. But he always wrote with the kind of colloquial simplicity that seems so off-the-cuff and isn’t, always charmed with a live-and-let-live drawl he wasn’t born to, and always attracted supporters more together and famous than he is. Fellow artists you can understand—his first label was Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, his second John Prine’s Oh Boy. But that Cokie Roberts should write this barefoot stoner’s press bio or Rahm Emanuel hip him to the Goldman Sachs Abacus Fund, whose name he names in “New York Banker,” suggests he could get larger.

Snider’s career split down the middle circa 2003. The airplay-targeted production of his early recordings undersold the personality that made him worth signing, so that the five songs his first live album shares with the retrospective That Was Then: 1994-1998 aren’t just looser and rowdier, but markedly more emphatic. And although the homespun whimsy of Oh Boy’s recording philosophy was a better fit for him, those songs sharpened live as well. Then too, Snider’s writing kept improving in general, at least in part because sometime around 2003 he picked up an Oxycontin addiction that put him in rehab before it killed him like it did his friend and road manager Skip Litz, who extracted a deathbed promise from Snider that he’d kick. A turning point, you might say.

Lo and behold, in 2004 appeared East Nashville Skyline, easily his finest studio album till then and rapidly followed by many others. Snider continues unabstemious. Even coming off opioids, one of the few things he’s ever moralized about, he made no bones about hoping he could go back to reefer and wine, and in 2009 he told The Onion‘s Steven Hyden: “I’m not a big integrity freak. If there’s ever a drug that makes me feel like I’m going to come up with a new kind of song, I’m taking that drug.” It’s not very 12-step of me, and I truly hope it doesn’t explode in Snider’s face, but I find this devil-may-care attitude heartening, and so far it’s worked. Since 2004 Snider has topped the excellent East Nashville Skyline with the extraordinary 2006 The Devil You Know and 2012 Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables and the superb live 2011 The Storyteller, as well as adding the merely notable 2008 EP Peace Queer and 2009 album The Excitement Plan. Few 21st-century artists of any drug profile have been so fecund.

All three of those studio albums were top 10s for me, but as a skeptic regarding both the utility of re-recorded material and the durability of comedy routines, I’m surprised to find that in practice I enjoy The Storyteller every bit as much. Snider’s spoken shtick always enriches his songs, sometimes decisively, and once in a while tops them. But more important is that his mongrel, stage-ready, Oregon-Texas-Tennessee-roaddog delivery deserves the honorific “flow” as much as most rappers’. The timing and syntactical choices of his stories—which he parcels out carefully so as not to repeat himself in the same city—reimagine the offhand so shrewdly that I admire as well as enjoy them every time out.

A prototypical example is the 1:09-long “Eighteen Minutes Speech” on The Storyteller, also available as the 0:48-long “Hello . . . Sorry” on Near Truths. That’s because Snider delivers this speech whenever he performs. He’s up over a thousand by now; his fans count on it, cheer it wildly, recite along: “My name’s Todd Snider, I’ve been drivin around this country m-more than 15 years, I make these songs up and I sing em for anybody that’ll listen to em, summum are sad, summum are funny, some are short, some will seem like they go on forever, sometimes I may ramble on for as many as 18 minutes in between a particular song.” The words do shift slightly night to night, but the ungrammatical, uniquely idiomatic “in between a particular song” was the same at Irving Plaza as on both live albums. He knows what he’s doing.

Before I go into the addendum the speech has picked up, let me explain how Snider got interested in class struggle. The Jerry Jeff Walker tradition is generally slotted “outlaw country,” but its theme song is Billy Joe Shaver’s “Old Five and Dimers Like Me”—the marginal folk it romanticizes are colorful drunks and lost ramblers, not stick-up men or meth dealers, and too often its romanticism slops over into squishy myth and stinky sentimentality. Nevertheless, this kind of antihero worship has a substantial history in American culture—consider such titles as Bob Dylan’s “Only a Hobo,” Al Jolson’s Hallelujah I’m a Bum, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Woody Guthrie’s “Gypsy Davy,” Cher’s “Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves”—and Snider is part of that tradition. He can be squishy occasionally—right on top of Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables he released a 70th-birthday tribute to Walker called Time as We Know It that pretty much qualifies. But a lifetime of hanging with slackers and stoners down on their “luck”—and to a certain extent being one, while also hitting the typewriter on the regular and enjoying a durable marriage with his painter wife Melita—seems to have set him thinking. George W. Bush did too. And starting with The Devil You Know, he began to draw conclusions in song.

The masterstroke targeted GWB himself. “You Got Away With It” recalls an unnamed bigshot as the connected fratboy he was in the voice of a college buddy who’s got his back: “Aside from that one hippie / We never really hurt anyone / Well, there’s that other thing that I won’t even say / As God is my witness, I’ll take that to my grave /’ Cause that was an accident, and you did what you had to do.” Beyond the drywall and bank-robbing songs, the rest of the album is less overt, though the lowlife romance “Just Like Old Times” has a story to tell and the deluded recidivism of “The Highland Street Incident” follows “You Got Away With It” with malice aforethought. But a couplet from the bank-robbing song resonates throughout: “There’s a war going on that the poor can’t win / Helicopters over the house again.”

You might not think that’s perfect politics—assuming defeat seldom is. But five years into a financial crisis Snider didn’t need to predict because he saw the bigger economic picture going in, it’s still a relief to hear a song put it so baldly. Peace Queer and The Excitement Plan were both slighter than The Devil You Know, although the former dwelled on injustice and the latter included one called “Bring ‘Em Home.” But Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables is strong start to finish, and with a fresh musical texture—on the one hand the keyboard-violin-bass-drums band embellishes songs that might be perilously simplistic on their own, but on the other the band is so raggedy-ass it makes the whole album seem tossed off, as Snider clearly prefers.

The title sums up Snider’s philosophical orientation: stoner agnosticism. But class pervades the record. In addition to the three new ones that led his show, there are the Abacus Fund song, two lowlife vignettes including a gem unearthed from Jimmy Buffett’s 1973 breakthrough album, one that begins “If I had a nickel for every dime you had / I’d have half your money” and then thinks about taking his wallet. There’s a sympathetic, economically insightful depiction of a power couple who turn out to be Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And there’s the band-carried closer “Big Finish,” which ruminates on Snider’s personal insecurities while delivering the album’s key line: “You got to admit it ain’t the despair that gets you / It’s the hope.”

Yet for all Snider’s burgeoning class consciousness, that new addendum to his speech goes like this: “I want to let you know that I also might share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evenin. I’m not gonna share them with you cause I think they’re smart or b’cause I think you need to know em, I’m gonna share em with you because they rhyme. I didn’t come down here to change any of y’all’s mind about anything, I come down here to ease my own mind about everything. If everything goes particularly well this evening we can all expect a 90-minute distraction from our impending doom.”

Snider likes to say he’s an “evangelical agnostic.” Brought up Catholic, he’s religious about his irreligion. The main concern of “Too Soon to Tell” is God’s cruelty, if there is a God: “It seems like even the wicked get worse than they deserve.” Snider has such respect for the dead-end lives he chronicles, such sensitivity to the impending doom all humans share—and is so aware, as he says on Near Truths, that although he’s mainly afraid of Republicans, Democrats scare him too—that he refuses to preach. Although not many American musicians make more of class even today, he won’t politicize any further. Cynics might just figure he’s coddling the Robert Earl Keen fans, and that must enter his mind—how could it not? But I figure the real issue is the perils of hope.

If Snider has musical comedy competition, it’s Jon Langford of the Mekons, the Waco Brothers, et al., a not especially ex-Marxist who’s been harping on rich-versus-poor since Snider was in fifth grade and ad-libbing sardonically for exactly as long. Langford’s more militant and cerebral, but he’s not long on professions of hope either. For both these artists, hope is too squishy—a by-product of soft-headedness that’ll let you down in the end. Laughter makes you happy with fewer compromises and complications. In a world where the big war hasn’t gone our way for decades now, it’s something to rely on.

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Big Thief: Double Infinity (4AD) I worried at first about the disappearance of their trademark delicacy, but a few listens in I’d not only cheered up but fallen in love—they were going for shameless beauty and getting there track after track, most strikingly on one called “All Night All Day,” which begins with a transported Adrianne Lenker stanza I can’t resist quoting: “All night, all day/I could go down on you/Hear you sing your pleasure/God is good/Or whatever made the mouth/To drink the treasure.” But the hero is drummer James Krivchenia, who I’d given so little thought that I had to keep looking back to make sure I got the spelling right and whose own idea of transport if not pleasure itself is mating clatter with momentum verse after verse. A

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My sister Georgia got her B.A. at fundamentalist Taylor University in 1971 and since then has worked as both a now-retired high school English teacher and a journalist—first at Creem, then at a journal called Nuclear Times, and finally at The Village Voice, where she was night editor for several years. She got interested in Peggy Seeger—half-sister of seminal folksinger Pete Seeger, full sister of longtime folk music activist Mike Seeger, and wife of the late U.K. folk titan Ewan MacColl—researching a paper on abortion songs that she delivered at the 2022 Pop Conference. Peggy Seeger’s story, which Georgia boils down here, proved more complex than Georgia figured when she and her husband decided to organize a vacation visit to Great Britain that would include seeing Peggy perform some 95 miles southeast of London in New Milton. Seeger was so impressed with a Kitty Wells piece Georgia sent her that the interview on which much of this essay is based ensued. — RC

Peggy Seeger, who is 90, so reveres the American folk music she grew up on that by 1970, when she wrote “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer,” the song she is still best known for, she was an accomplished storyteller. In England, where she has lived most of her adult life, as well as the U.S., where she was raised in a renowned folk music family, fans clamored for another “Engineer,” but she didn’t have one. “My ‘anothers’ were folk songs featuring murdered women, girls left with babies in their arms, females complaining about men and parents—victims and self-pity all over the farm,” she explained in her 2017 memoir, First Time Ever.

I’m not sure I agree. What I hear in the old songs Peggy Seeger has inspired me to track down—and consequently, to love—is their variety. They seem neither dated nor out of touch. For every “Poor Ellen Smith” “lying dead on the ground” there’s another still-breathing female with her own tone and point of view. For instance, on Seeger’s first solo album, Songs of Courtship and Complaint (1955), released when she was 19 to help finance her second year of college, there’s a bored virgin tired of waiting in “Whistle, Daughter, Whistle,” a woman who’d rather stay single than take up with a lazy “Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn,” and someone who’s holding out for a better-looking dude than the guy doing the talking in “All of Her Answers To Me Were No.” In “The Wagoner’s Lad” a young man’s pride blinds him from seeing that the woman he loves wants him to stick around despite her parents’ disapproval. There’s a rumbling undercurrent of rebellion in this one and its premise is a knockout:

Oh hard is the fortune of all womankind

They’re always controlled

They’re always confined

Controlled by their parents until they are wives

And slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.

Seven hundred words and 100 lines long, “Engineer” hasn’t dated much either, from girls who learn early to limit their expectations, to wives who get degrees and still do all the housework and childcare, to women for whom dignity in the workplace is a daily unknown. The lilt in Seeger’s voice moves her long list of complaints along at a breezy pace. These sarcastic depictions of female stereotypes help me remember how liberating it was to hear them shouted out for the first time. Here’s a mother to her young daughter:

Dainty as a Dresden statue, gentle as a Jersey cow

Smooth as silk, gives creamy milk

Learn to coo, learn to moo

That’s what you do to be a lady, now.

And a boss to his employee:

You’ve got one fault, you’re a woman

You’re not worth the equal pay.

A bitch or a tart, you’re nothing but heart,

Shallow and vain, you’ve got no brain

Accompanying herself with a handful of up-and-down guitar notes that only hint at melody, Seeger, clear and bright, sets sail on all those lyrics. She lands on top of the note, each word distinct—an essential talent given all that verbiage—and carrying the same weight with only the occasional slide, as on “moo.” Her even delivery, buffeted by her warm soprano, is unnerving. How can she be so angry and sound so nice? That’s her special sauce. And she knows when to back off—this time in deference to the character, who lands cheerfully on this sendoff:

I’ve been a sucker ever since I was a baby

As a daughter, as a mother, as a lover, as a dear

But I’ll fight them as a woman, not a lady

I’ll fight them as an engineer!

Around this time Peggy worked a couple of sentences she’d overheard—“I love you so much I’d do anything for you. Even marry you”—into a dialogue between a man and a woman that became the lyrics for “Darling Annie” (cf. Folkways Record of Contemporary Songs by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, 1973). An independent type with an old-fashioned name, Annie wants a commitment and her autonomy, too. It’s a revisionist folk tribute—where the woman in love leads instead of losing out. Fifty years young, “Darling Annie,” performed as a duet with Billy Bragg, held up well at a 2005 concert in London celebrating her 70^th birthday and on the subsequent 2007 live album, Three Score and Ten. Organized by her sons Neill and Calum MacColl—“the best of the best of me, on stage,” she’s said—they’re joined by their sister Kitty; English folk standard bearers Eliza Carthy and her parents Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson; Peggy’s brothers Pete and Mike; her future wife, Irish folk singer Irene Scott; and eight grandchildren. It’s a loose show, and a tight one. She opens solo with “Hangman,” accompanying herself on banjo, her preferred instrument and the one for which she is most admired, for a generation-proof tale of family dysfunction—noting the irony on this special occasion. She picks up the pace and calls out the chords for a brisk “Logan County Jail” as surely as Norma Waterson and Liza Carthy belt out “Lowlands of Holland,” about lovers separated by war and stormy seas. What’s most striking, though, is Peggy’s rapport with her self-effacing brother Mike. Just two years apart, they were close growing up, and their onstage banter is always affectionate. She starts by saying how much likes having peace and quiet at home these days. Did it bother him, she asks, that when they were children, “there was always music going on around the house?” “Oh gosh, I loved it,” he replies. She tries again. “I mean, what about when you wanted to be thinking of something else?” His soft, chuckling finesse: “What else?” He introduces “When First Unto This Country”—in which a man, accused of being a thief, is beaten and jailed, as one of the “easier” songs they learned when they were very young, “before we started playing music [ourselves],” as he put it. For his solo, he avers that although he loves the songs written by both his siblings, “I can’t do that.” What he’s about to play is different every time, he says, so here goes: a wonderfully strange, hoot-and-holler instrumental on quills (an African-American pan flute) called “Quill Ditty.”

I came to know Peggy Seeger’s compassion, politics, and sense of humor while writing about contemporary abortion songs some three years ago. Folk music was the last thing on my mind then, but not any more. By contrast, Seeger has never known a time when folk music was not important, a jumping-off point from which to spin five decades of composition. Included in the CD accompanying her memoir are two versions of “Cindy”—a contemporary one and a second clip probably recorded when she was around seven. Immortalized in dozens of versions and hundreds of stanzas, Cindy is womanchild who’s often chased away with the couplet “Get along Cindy/I’ll marry you someday.” A clown, a dancer, and so sweet that “honeybees swarm around her mouth,” Cindy is forever just beyond reach. As banjo player Frank Proffitt summed up in 1928, “Cindy in the summertime/Cindy in the fall/If I can’t have Cindy all the time/I don’t want her at all.” She has an effervescence and a power that epitomize Peggy Seeger. When she announced her “Last Farewell” tour of the British Isles to celebrate her 90^th birthday last spring, I felt the least I could do was show up. I bought two tickets to one of her gigs, planned a two-week vacation abroad with my husband like we hadn’t had in 20 years, and requested an interview, which took place in September.

Peggy tells me she wasn’t aware of feminism at the time she wrote “Engineer.” She also didn’t know back then that there were engineers in every branch of science. “To me, an engineer was somebody who worked with big machines, or who was a driver on Casey Jones’ train, you know…” She was inspired by one woman in particular operating heavy machinery whom she and her future husband, singer, playwright and songwriter Ewan MacColl, had met on a field trip at an auto plant in Cork, England. She was 35 at the time—about the same age as the worker. “She was in charge of an enormous machine—one of these things that comes down and makes a template, and then the template moves and they jump, jump, jump down the assembly line. She was glorious. We talked to her and she said, ‘I’ve learned to bring this machine down literally just to an eighth of an inch there, so that it doesn’t whack on the bottom platform.’ And she brought out her lunch, which had a hard-boiled egg in it. She put it right where the machine came down, and whack, she brought it down so that it was literally a sixteenth of an inch from . . . and I was absolutely gobsmacked! I’d been to steel mills and down coal mines, all kinds of things. But I’d never seen a woman doing this.”

I reminded her of how many women’s issues “Engineer” touches on—husbands who feel superior, the double standard on the job, sexual harassment—and wondered how long she had been thinking about such things before putting pen to paper. “Oh no, I was thinking about the accounts. I was doing the accounts, and I was not in a good mood at being interrupted,” she recalled. “And I’m told to write a song.” Told by MacColl, that is, who had realized that they’d prepared nothing about the growing women’s movement for the upcoming Festival of Fools, an annual satirical review in theater and music that they had been running together for five years. McColl told her to write something, pronto, and she turned it out in two hours. “I’d read about these issues, but I was in a traditional relationship,” she explained. “In our life together, Ewan and I, there were jobs I did that he wouldn’t think of doing. He never cooked, unless it was an occasion. He never ironed, or laundered, or mended anything, or cleaned the toilet.” “And he was 20 years older than you, so he had a different mindset growing up, I’m sure,” I added. “Oh yes, extremely,” she replied. “And his mother was with us from practically the moment we got together. She wouldn’t see him pushing the pram. Oh, no. She wouldn’t have him polishing the shoes. Oh, no.” The welfare of Ewan, her only surviving child of four, preoccupied her, but it was equally true that, like the other caregivers in Ewan and Peggy’s life—she devotes a chapter to them exclusively in First Time Ever—Ewan’s mother gave of herself generously to these working parents and their two young sons. Although she had retired by the time Peggy’s last child, Kitty, was born in December 1972—nine years after her second son, Calum—in her 1979 album Different Therefore Equal, Peggy would honor this difficult, beloved woman in two sensitive but direct lines of the housewife’s lament “What Do You Do All Day”: “I care for a lovely old mother-in-law/She’s 87 and cranky.” Peggy was finding her voice, and a pile of “anothers” started to accumulate.

“It always distresses me to hear the housewife put down. A good housewife is a genius. . . Nor, if she happens to be inefficient at it, should it reflect on her as a woman,” wrote Seeger in the liner notes. It was one priority among many in Seeger’s breakout album as a songwriter that includes “Engineer” and another favorite, “Nine Month Blues.” The acapella “Reclaim the Night,” a rallying cry inspired by the opening of rape crisis centers, compels us first with a single voice, then two, then many. In “Union Woman” Seeger’s warp speed on the five-string banjo underscores but does not overwhelm the lyrics, taken from an interview with Mrs. Jaybean Desai, a defiant employee who became a strike leader representing 160 workers, most of them Asian women, in the 1977 West London Grunwick film processing plant strike that ended in defeat after 14 months. It didn’t matter that they lost, she believed, because “the fighting is further on/The ladies take the lesson home to husbands and children.” The parent union didn’t support the strike: a story within a story of both the union movement and the women’s movement.

Organized or not, workers figure large in Peggy’s pantheon of heroes. In “Third Shift,” from 1982’s Where I Stand: Topical Songs from America and England, a woman who earns 27 cents more per hour working the lobster shift appreciates her crew that’s “friendly and strong/as steady as heartbeats/the whole night long.” From 1996’s An Odd Collection, the jazzy “For a Job” asks why society places so little value on the lives of breadwinners—in this case, men—who get sick and die from environmental health hazards certain jobs entail. Remembering the Grunwick workers, in “If You Want a Better Life” she warns, “And if you want a union/You’ve got to learn to fight/Cause when you’ve got a union/You’ve got to make it fight for you.”

When Peggy performed “Nine Month Blues”—a mere 600 words—at the concert we saw last June at a modest community center in small town New Milton, England, I was so happy I almost jumped out of my folding chair. It’s about a woman who enjoys sex and motherhood in equal measure, who puts loving her kids alongside the failure of birth control. It feels lived in, familiar. Wikipedia’s “list of songs about abortion,” pro and con, precious and precocious, was the back door through which I met Peggy virtually in the months leading up to June, 2022, curious if pop culture history would provide any comfort as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to overturn our constitutional right to abortion that had been guaranteed for 50 years. When I mentioned that her song was on the list, she felt there had been some mistake: “But it isn’t about abortion,” she said. That was my first thought also; most—but not all—of them have been written by women born post-Roe v. Wade and home in on a specific detail such as the clinic, the boyfriend, the family, the procedure, or the decision itself. Instead, at 40, Seeger scripted the biography of an imaginary marriage in her typical funny-not-funny style, from partnering to parenting, from the first blessed event to too many kids and not enough money. How much support did the woman receive when she visited her doctor, equivocating about pregnancy number three? Not a lot:

The SPUC* and the FDA

They said to keep that child

Don’t fling it away

The doctor said he had the right to refuse

The law says if you want to beat the noose

You have to be rich, or near to your grave

So away I went again on my nine-month rave

*SPUC = England’s Society for the Protection of the Unborn Childs

At her next appointment—birth control pills are making her sick—the wife brings her husband, who stands by, dismayed at doc’s indifference towards her health. She “sees the worry on the old man’s face/thinking of the future of the female race.” Me too.

“I began reading feminist classics and familiarizing myself with feminist issues,” she told me. One alternative magazine that focused on women’s health, Spare Rib, now a classic digitized by the British Library, had a particular impact. So did the legalization of abortion in England in 1967. Peggy had had an illegal one in 1960, when her first son, Neill, was an infant. “I could have died on that toilet. I could have died. I flowed blood like a faucet.” She used that experience 30 years later when Planned Parenthood asked her to donate a song. In the acapella chiller “Judge’s Chair,” a young Annie refuses to identify her lover and dies alone in her “childhood bed” after visiting a “backstreet woman.” “They didn’t like it,” she recalled. “They wanted something they could march to.” By that time Peggy, 54, had lost Ewan, who died of a chronic heart condition in 1989, and found Irene Scott, an Irish folk singer who had also been her singing partner. They’d grown closer on trips to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, the six-years-long, round-the-clock, women-only antinuclear protest that led to the removal of cruise missiles stockpiled there in 1988. Not that she’d stopped touring—sometimes with Irene, but not always, and how much she’s missed Seeger lovingly recalls in An Odd Collection’s “So Long Since I Been Home.”

Seeger had also begun volunteering at Forest Hill Refuge in Sydenham, where women were sheltering with their families and away from domestic violence and abuse. The lyrics to “Emily” came verbatim from a resident. Peggy asked for permission “to tell your story,” which was poetry to her. Recited over a handful of repeating notes on guitar for six minutes, “Emily” describes 13 years of abuse in a 14-year marriage, as in the terrifying lines, “Each afternoon my heart would start trembling/I followed his journey all the way home/His step at the door would nearly dissolve me/When he walked in, my judgment was gone.” Since finding safety for her and her children at the refuge, the speaker had had to move twice, but at least “Here I have friends, I’m no longer alone.” “Emily” makes you bear witness. You might be glad you didn’t look away.

The idea of making art from the words of others was not new. Seeger jump-started her career—at 23—to assist Ewan and producer Charles Parker to put together the award-winning “Radio Ballads,” which aired between 1958 and 1964 in a series of eight shows based on interviews with railroad workers, fishermen, coal miners, and one or two of their wives. It revolutionized how the BBC portrayed working people—as themselves, rather than relying on third person summaries or voiceovers. MacColl composed some of his most memorable songs for this series, including “The Shoals of Herring” (for Singing the Fishing, 1959), and “Schoolday’s Over” (for The Big Hewer, 1960), as well as additional background music. Seeger helped edit the interviews, played banjo and autoharp, and then, as if summoning a superpower, arranged and conducted musicians live in the studio, where everything had to come together at once. No multitracking or overdubs in those days; a single episode in one program went through 70 takes. In her memoir she cites this experience as one of her most creative, one that “tested me to my limits,” adding, “I was as green as grass.”

But was she, really? When asked to explain her craft Peggy credited the British for her sense of humor and Ewan for bringing her closer to the common man. But I demur: this is the work of an American woman born in 1935 to a storied family—or two families, if you count Pete’s, who was 15 years Peggy’s senior and one of three sons in the earlier, first family of their father, musicologist and composer Charles Seeger. He held on and off jobs teaching and worked for the FDR administration when he wasn’t being accused of being a Communist. Ruth Crawford Seeger, a classically trained pianist, teacher, and archivist who was the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim in composition, was the breadwinner. She taught piano in their home full time while logging hundreds of hours with the researchers and archivists John and Alan Lomax to select, transcribe, and ultimately publish folk song collections. Hired in 1937 to work on Our Singing Country, in her introduction Ruth admitted that in meetings to finalize their choices for the collection she found herself “often very hesitant to cast my [vote.] What standards had I—a mere composer—for judgement? My basis for evaluation was that of written rather than unwritten music—of fine art, not folk art.” The committee often sang together to determine a tune’s accessibility. By the time American Folk Songs for Children was published in 1945, she’d grown more confident. Jean R. Freedman’s comprehensive 2017 biography, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, cites a “mammoth battle” between Ruth and Alan over a single word in one recording they’d chosen. She played it “85 – or perhaps 86” times before finally concluding that she had been correct. Our Singing Country was a flop, but American Folk Songs for Children became a best-seller.

Mike put it like this: “Our parents’ mission was to keep old time songs and some of the sounds alive. It really took hard with me.” Discipline, patience, and getting it right was instilled in them from the start. As Charles explained in the liner notes to 1957’s American Folk Songs Sung by the Seegers featuring the four children of his second marriage to Ruth—Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penelope/Penny—they grew up in a home that “resounded morning, noon and night to the nearly 1000 discs involved in their parents’ occupations.” He boasted, “By the time she was three, Peggy had a very respectable repertory of ballads, game, and love songs.” She “was learning folk music as part of a rigorous study of classical music,” Freedman observed. Or, as Peggy put it herself in the introduction to 1998’s The Peggy Seeger Songbook: Forty Years of Songmaking, “Unless you’ve played ‘The Irish Washerwoman’ in C# in the Lydian mode at the age of ten, you haven’t lived.” She studied piano with her mother starting at age six, was helping her transcribe by the time she was 11 and first performed when she 13—to help promote her mother’s books.

The Seegers were loving bohemian parents. Money came and went like their clothes on summer Sundays spent at home in a house they couldn’t afford in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They sang together as a family after dinner, and daily routines were musical as well. “Cindy”—or “get along, Cindy,” as the lyric goes—meant it was bedtime. How Ruth did it was to stop playing the piano if the children were slow in skedaddling upstairs. The vibe could be oppressive, though, especially for Barbara. Freedman reports that “she loved the things that the other Seegers disdained: high heels, makeup, television, ballroom dancing, popular music. In a family of gifted left-leaning intellectuals who learned music from field recordings, folk festivals, European emigres, and American vagabonds, Barbara wanted only to be a normal American teenager.” In other words, she may not have been impressed when Lead Belly would accompany Alan on his visits to the family, or Pete would bring Woody Guthrie with him when they were both in town. Nonetheless, the Seeger children—with their children in turn—reunited to record a 1992 two-CD set of 58 tunes chosen from Ruth’s Animal Folk Songs for Children. These gophers and rabbits, foxes and raccoons and alligators, wrote Peggy in the introduction, “set an example in an anthropomorphic world of survival, fun and exploitation, a world where everyone gets a chance.” I’ve road-tested it with my grandkids, who give it a thumbs up.

As the eldest daughter of a working mother, once she was in high school Peggy would often shop for groceries on the way home, cook supper, and “make sure the homework was done.” She “tolerated” school, she told her biographer, because “I had everything I needed at home.” She and Mike had started performing together locally, too. Then in November 1953 Ruth, who had been diagnosed in January, died of cancer and the radiation treatment that was meant to cure it. When Peggy left for freshman year at Radcliffe that August accompanied by an aunt, Ruth’s absence was the first indication Peggy had had that her mother was unwell. Her sudden passing so shocked Penny, who was nine, that she stopped speaking for six months. “Everything Changes,” written decades later, is Seeger’s deep reminiscence of the happy years that she and her siblings were “safe in the dark” followed by the time after they lost Ruth—that is, it’s getting late and her mother hasn’t called her home.

The disassembled Seegers reassembled. Conscientious objector Mike moved to Baltimore in 1954 to work at a hospital, his alternative to military service during the Korean War. Turning 18, Peggy completed the school year as per Ruth’s wishes. Around Cambridge she was a not unfamiliar sight, gigging, playing hootenannies, even recording Songs of Courtship and Complaint. A bereft Charles, who was 67 and, Peggy soon realized, “becoming an old man,” realized they could no longer afford their Chevy Chase home and asked Peggy to find a buyer. By the next summer it was gone. Barbara, 16, stayed in D.C. working as an au pair for family friends. When Peggy returned to Cambridge that fall Charles and Penny came with her, squeezing into an apartment so short on privacy that Peggy studied Russian in the linen closet. At night she resumed the tradition of their childhood and sang Penny to sleep.

Although Peggy’s summation of this hard year typically accentuates the positive—“We thrived,” she wrote in her memoir—this would be her last year at Radcliffe, and she wouldn’t live in the U.S. again for a long time. Her father would soon remarry, move to California, and suggest that she stay with relatives in Europe for a year. It didn’t work out. The following spring Alan Lomax paid her expenses to audition in London for a new quartet—an “English Weavers, junior style” —modeled on the successful American quartet started by brother Pete and Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert. Present at the audition was Alan’s partner in this endeavor, Ewan MacColl, a singer, playwright, and songwriter twice Peggy’s age and already married. He drove her home after their second meeting and told her that he loved her.

Seeger was both smitten and freaked out by this relationship, which was on and off by definition. She was overdue for a visit with her family in California, but when she got there, she couldn’t settle in. That summer she landed her first extended gig at the new Gate of Horn club in Chicago, first stop Albert Grossman, the agent who had hired her. He offered her lodging if she would “agree to be his girlfriend” during her three-month stay, before conceding that the Gate provided other accommodations. She’d promised Ewan she would come back to perform at the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, which drew 34,000 participants from 131 countries but the reunion was awkward for both of them. Peggy then bounced over to China on an invite to play more folk music from a government the U.S. didn’t recognize. This was all with the support of Charles, who’d had his own run-ins with the Feds over his Communist connections, and with whom Peggy had figured out the exact wording of two telegrams—one from him, one to him—showing, they hoped, that they didn’t know they were breaking any laws.

One constant during this rocky year was the platonic love of her life, Ralph Rinzler, a musician who would become a major producer, organizer, and caretaker of American folk music until his premature death at 59 in 1994. They’d met while she, Mike, and Pete headlined the Swarthmore College Folk Festival in 1955. Ralph was the sort of friend to whom you could send an urgent note requesting “a wool skirt—and mittens” when you’d arrived in Moscow absent the proper wardrobe. In the gently rocking “Old Friend,” she observed, “As a woman among men/it was hard to find a friend/then you were there/and with you I was free.” After her adventures as a world traveler Seeger learned that her passport would only get her back into the United States. Unwilling to break up with MacColl and unwilling to stay too far away, she landed in Paris. Ralph was there studying the language, his friend Diane needed her Bentley driven to Florence, and why not? For once Peggy took a spontaneous break just for herself as they embarked on a 10-day road trip, also remembered in that song, an endearing testament to things said and unsaid:

We traveled far by scooter and by car

From Paris down to Rome

In Germany we clowned

In Switzerland broke down

We were so young then

While Seeger remained in France, blacklisted in several European countries, McCall’s sporadic visits continued. She was pregnant. Waiting for she knew not what for several days in October, 1958 she watched the rescue of 70 surviving miners in Nova Scotia on television—the first such disaster to be internationally broadcast—and wrote the excellent “The Ballad of Spring Hill.” MacColl loved it but thought it should include a verse she couldn’t have written yet—about being underground in a mine—and supplied it. Their conundrum as a couple was resolved when a mutual friend, Alex Campbell, agreed to marry her. Seeger became a British citizen just in time to give birth to her first son, Neill, in 1959. A brave, buoyant soul, she raised three children, partnered in two successive 30-year relationships—first with MacColl, then with Irene Scott. An anti-nuker, ecological warrior, environmentalist, and openly bisexual person who sings love songs and recites intimate poems she’s written to Irene from the stage, but please don’t ask her to be a poster child for the cause.

In concert Seeger introduces “Engineer” as her albatross before cheerfully charging through it one more time. It’s Ewan’s own “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that’s she’s saddled with for better and worse. Royalties from Roberta Flack’s 1969 hit cover version—and its use two years later by Clint Eastwood as a theme for the first movie he directed, Play Misty for Me—enabled the MacColl family to buy some land, take vacations, and breathe a little. But it’s weak stuff compared to his many sharply observed, beloved compositions, from which Kitty, Calum, and Neill selected their favorites for the two-CD Joy of Living tribute compiled in 2015 on the hundredth anniversary of their father’s birth. To me the title track, written when Kitty was around 14, sounds like his love song to Peggy. MacColl, trailing behind their daughter on a hike, realized his legs were giving out. Afterwards he cast aside his frustration, reflected on his well-spent life, and thanked his family instead. “First Time” is a one-off he wrote for Peggy in 1957 when she was in California and they were trying to figure out their impossible affair long distance. It’s a crowd pleaser—apparently no one but me minds that after their first kiss, the guy “felt the earth move in my hand/like the trembling heart of a captive bird/that was there at my command.” So not the irrepressible Peggy we know and love, am I right? I much prefer her succinct, two-line capture of their bond from her autobiographical “Song of Myself,” written in 1968 and included in The Folkways Years, 1955-1992: Songs of Love and Politics: “For the joys of a lover can equal no other/forever anew and yet always the same.” Now that I can relate to.

Peggy and Ewan raised their family in Beckenham, England, but after he passed away and President Clinton declared amnesty for former citizens with revoked passports, Peggy wanted only to return to the U.S. with Irene. Mike, who lived only a couple of hundred miles away in Lexington, Kentucky, suggested Asheville, North Carolina, their home for 12 years. To qualify as a resident, Irene opened a coffee shop and hired American workers. After his military service ended, in 1958 Mike helped shepherd string band music into the present tense by co-founding the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen (who would marry Penny Seeger) and Tom Paley. They sounded as good as the originators they admired. No one knew how they did it; Bob Dylan, an early fan, called them “mystery men.” In a funhouse mirror, Peggy and Mike would resemble each other closely. During their childhood, in contrast to the mastery passed down to Peggy by her mother—the modernist composer and groundbreaker who could “swing dissonances like a man,” according to her Spotify biography—Mike refused to practice piano, quit guitar lessons after two months, and never learned to read music. When she was 13 Peggy consumed their elder brother Pete’s classic 1948 How to Play the 5-String Banjo, but Mike scoffed, “You can’t learn the banjo from a book!” According to Peggy, their mother replied, “Prove it.” He mastered the autoharp, fiddle, dulcimer, mouth harp, mandolin, and dobro, too, and produced albums that brought new audiences to legendary artists such as Doc Watson and Elizabeth Cotten. A year before his death in 2009, Peggy and Mike recorded an album of duets, Fly Down Little Bird. He had one condition: one take per track, like in the old days. Their jubilant versions of “Cindy” and “Old Bangum” are standouts.

Many of her people are gone, but the 21^st century has been good to Peggy recording-wise. The lilt and foreboding of “Swim to the Star,” a collaboration with Calum using phrases from survivors, takes the schmaltz out of this 2012 assignment to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. It’s on 2014’s Everything Changes, Peggy’s first recording with a band—a big deal for someone who admits in the notes, even at this late date, that backbeat drumming is “my nemesis.”

A performer since her teens, a person who may be more comfortable on stage than off, Seeger’s two live albums have a spontaneity and coherence that capture her big personality. Her second live album, Peggy Seeger Live, recorded in 2012 to raise money for a women’s health center damaged by arson in Nelson, New Zealand, showcases songs that challenge sexual stereotypes more than 2007’s more traditional Three Score and Ten. “Engineer” was not a folk song; she prefers to be called a singer/songwriter now. In “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are,” a mature woman delights in seducing a novice. “Everyone Knows” dismisses the prejudice against menstruating women by comparing it to how indifferent we are about men’s moodiness. “Give ‘Em an Inch” makes fun of those who believe that being born with a penis entitles one to special treatment. She peppers her repertoire with personal ads she’s saved to read aloud for laughs. One element of performance that’s missing and that brother Pete excelled at—“he could make a rock sing,” she told me—is the audience sing-along. That may be because of all those words, and a decision she made long ago to forego the chorus in much of her repertoire, because “half the people will agree with you, and half won’t.” She knows what she’s singing about is not easy, but she also knows it’s not hard. In “Different Therefore Equal,” an acapella standard she’s relied on for decades, a spirited romp amplified with spoons and a bodhran, she observes that “nature gives us equal chances/and to get ‘em you shouldn’t have to wear pantses.” It’s that simple—isn’t it?

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