Ann Powers
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs.
One of the nation's most notable music critics, Powers has been writing for The Record, NPR's blog about finding, making, buying, sharing and talking about music, since April 2011.
Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2006 until she joined NPR. Prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic at Blender and senior curator at Experience Music Project. From 1997 to 2001 Powers was a pop critic at The New York Times and before that worked as a senior editor at the Village Voice. Powers began her career working as an editor and columnist at San Francisco Weekly.
Her writing extends beyond blogs, magazines and newspapers. Powers co-wrote Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, with Amos, which was published in 2005. In 1999, Power's book Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America was published. She was the editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the 1995 book Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop and the editor of Best Music Writing 2010.
After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, Powers went on to receive a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of California.
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Alynda Segarra invokes old spirits to carry us beyond our current crises and into a cosmic place of healing.
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Good-humored and unsparing, Janis Ian's "I'm Still Standing" answers "At Seventeen" from life's other side, celebrating every line and rough patch on an older woman's face.
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Rae's new sonic approach suits this intimate anthem, a call for redefinition (or, as the lyrics say, an acceptance of what's always been true) that poetically makes its case.
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Emmylou Harris, queen of Nashville, and the Nash Ramblers, an all-star, bluegrass-leaning acoustic band, perform a breakneck live version of the Junior Parker and Elvis classic "Mystery Train."
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From the opening of their first hit, "Bye Bye Love," the Everly Brothers spoke directly to the deepest longings and anxieties of the generation that would come to define the rock and soul era.
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The South Carolina-born blues-folk singer possesses a remarkable grasp of the sounds and stories that make up the South. In "Magnolia Blues," she's joined by Margo Price and Kyshona.
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In spare detail that reveals how an ugly emotion builds, Madi Diaz captures the way resentment can eat at a person, replicating itself until the feeling can't be overcome.
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How do we understand Blue in the 21st century? Can we think of Mitchell's 1971 album, long considered the apex of confessional songwriting, as a paradigm not of raw emotion, but of care and craft?
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The provocative pop star covers Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You" and performs two cuts from Plastic Hearts for her Tiny Desk quarantine concert.
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In this episode, World Cafe's Nashville correspondent and NPR pop critic Ann Powers brings you some of the artists from the Music City that you might have missed this year.