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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Blues singer and guitarist Buffalo Nichols brings a mid-twentieth century field holler into the 21st century.
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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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NPR turns 50 this year, and we're marking it by looking back on some other things that happened in 1971. It was that year that songwriter John Prine released his debut album. Prine died in 2020.
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Here is the logical end of the arc that began with "Old Town Road": Lil Nas X has covered Dolly Parton's "Jolene."
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One half of the sister duo Chloe x Halle respectfully and ardently invokes Aaliyah on her debut solo single.
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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. -
There are so many ways that women are made into monsters. On The Dreaming, Bush expresses the pain and explores the potential of monstrous transformation — and teaches us how to do the same.
