July 26, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic listens to four familiar musicians and hears something new in the voice of each one.

Emma Delevante

Hello careful listeners,

The other night I heard a voice I’d never heard in person before. That would not be surprising, except that I was reveling in a performance by The Mekons, whom I’ve seen myriad times since I first discovered them as a college kid — a raucous punk band with three main singers and a keyboard player who usually steals the vocal show for one notable number. But that night it wasn’t Tom or Sally or Jon or even Rico who stepped out and changed the temperature in the room. It was Susie Honeyman, the band’s fiddler and in-concert thermostat, whose calm presence anchors the chaos generated by her bandmates, all of them given to shouting and clanging and emoting their hearts out.

“This is a quiet song,” said Sally Timms, whose star turns are the stuff of legend, introducing Susie and “Sanctuary,” from the legendary Leeds band’s great new album Horror. And so it was — a children’s rhyme that reveals itself as an elegy, dusty with the influence of Cormac McCarthy, its lyrics reflecting that late master’s blend of surreal humor and hovering doom. Susie focused on holding the tune as she applied her lacy soprano to the song’s prophecy of sweet oblivion: The dead land is our monument, rising up and round. Quavering, determined and gently supported by Timms, her voice embodied both the migrant souls the song mourns and that land itself, fragile yet imperious, surviving even as it grows ghostly.

Honeyman’s gentle, devastating performance put me in mind of others on a handful of newly released albums, all of which center voices in ways that might seem old fashioned but which to me feel like a balm. Regular newsletter readers know that one of my preoccupations is figuring out how to listen to music in ways that relieve my attention fatigue; I’ve been thinking a lot about what kinds of voices the current economy favors, and how crucial it is to make room for kinds that don’t primarily serve the interlocking systems dubbed “the persuasion machine.” (Best definition, from tech ethicist James Williams: “everything is becoming an ad.”)

Technology made it possible to share and preserve voices, and its democratization has widened that access in great ways. But with the visual supplanting the aural in most media landscapes and the cluttered, repetitive, surface-level values of memes and talk-show chatter feeding our mass addiction to clicks, honoring the voice as a wellspring of insight and compassion feels crucial. Podcast pioneer Ira Glass laid it out plainly in a recent interview: “There’s a power to just hearing things. It just gets to you in a different way.”

I’m all for vocal distortion and other tech-assisted techniques, when employed artfully; the way the rapper and singer Jim Legxacy interweaves samples and his limber singing on his new album Black British Music, for example, expertly evokes the mind’s hidden processes. Still, I’m getting concerned that the flooded multimedia stream that’s dragging most of us through our days is making it harder for people to spend time with voices that encourage active listening. Listening intently to a spoken or sung voice, without being dragged toward it, can be just as rejuvenating as “touching grass” or doing whatever wellness routine TikTok is currently touting. Opening up to the sound of another person shaping words (or even wordless self-expression) into a story can clear the brain and stimulate new insights and greater compassion.

Patty Griffin’s just-released album, Crown of Roses, offers an inspiring example of how a carefully tended voice can forge such memorable connections. On this week’s New Music Friday podcast, Stephen Thompson and North Carolina public radio host Joe Kendrick extoll Griffin’s courageousness in making this revealing, sometimes harrowing set after her mother’s death and her own treatment for breast cancer, which forced her to work to recover her once soaringly powerful voice. Noting that Griffin has said that with this work she’s aiming for the closeness of singers like Billie Holiday and Rosa Passos, Thompson says, “These are ragged stories because the life they reflect is ragged.” Griffin’s determination to both heal her voice and accept its new raggedness is central to this album’s story; it’s the glue that links memories of her mother, expressions of loneliness and distress about the world and her ability to affect it. She fearlessly shares what she’s going through, pushing the microphone closer, using compression to keep the edges audible but not overwhelming and taking on styles she’s long mastered, from blues and gospel to Sondheim-like art song, without hiding how new limits have changed her approach.

Crown of Roses doesn’t flaunt the drama of Griffin’s changes in the manner of the classics it recalls, like Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. She never showboats. Crown of Roses is more like a canoe, with Griffin placing her oar exactly where it needs to be to go through tricky waters, letting the listener sit close enough to see the changing current, the submerged rocks that could ground her if she’s not watchful.

The final track on Crown of Roses, the Rickie Lee Jones-indebted “A Word,” rests in the cover she reaches at journey’s end, and it’s my favorite. Reflecting on the small things she and her difficult mother were able to share, Griffin works her way from grief to quiet conviction. Floating on the delicately woven soundbed made by guitarist David Pulkingham, violinist Heather Trost and santur player Jeremy Barnes, Griffin’s voice retreats and circles back to her subject. She sings the phrase “I believe” three times: first conversationally, then as if to convince herself and finally, in full voice, as surely as a human can. She has taken us to the exact spot where she’s living, in all of its beautiful ambiguity.

On his new album Snipe Hunter — also celebrated on this week’s New Music Friday — Tyler Childers, also makes welcome demands of his listeners with his voice. He’s at a very different point in his trajectory than is Griffin — a bit more than half her age, emerging into full stardom as a genre-defying country artist, Childers is focused on fun, not on contemplation. Snipe Hunter sees our cult hero possibly going for bigger audiences with some new assistance: He put his longtime friend but first-time collaborator Rick Rubin in the producer’s chair, enlisted Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn to “put the drugs on it” in post-production and asked celebrity engineer Shawn Everett to add even more dimension.

Snipe Hunter runs on flashy energy that could be mistaken for recklessness; but as I discovered when I interviewed him a while back, Childers is an introvert who always brings more thoughts than most people can process to the table, and you can hear his meticulousness coming through even on Snipe Hunter’s most unhinged cuts. Throughout this big-swinging collection, he remains focused on storytelling. If Griffin’s courageous voicings lead a listener into dark corners, Childers hails fans heartily and says, strap in for the ride.

Dedicated to a wide definition of country, Childers has long been experimental in his approach, working with DJs on one project and turning to old-time bluegrass on the next. After 2023’s polished, ballad-heavy Rustin’ in the Rain, this bar circuit-seasoned performer is ready to show his range again. He belts Southern rock style on album opener “Eatin’ Big Time” – Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy would be impressed — shows the swagger of a young Dylan on “Snipe Hunt” and uses all of his lungs, bluegrass-style, on “Bitin’ List.”

I love it most, though, when he reclaims the art of storytelling for its native habitats — not the Instagram reel, but the barroom, the poker table, the bedside where a kid listens to a parent and lets his imagination run wild. Tenderness and teasing exaggeration blend in “Watch Out,” which has Childers introducing his young son to the joys and hazards of the great outdoors; in longtime fan favorite “Nose on the Grindstone,” he deeply inhabits the panic of a different kind of son, a prodigal doubting his chances at redemption. Basking in his own range, Childers reminds me in these songs of a young Steve Earle, another generational talent and rebel who could have squeezed himself into the modes country music encouraged when he was young, but chose to keep his options open and his voice flexible. (Earle dealt with heroin addiction, which temporarily derailed him; Childers got sober before similar bad habits interrupted his trajectory.)

On my favorite one-two Snipe Hunter punch, Childers struts in full raconteur mode where others would have taken a more predictable route. “Tirtha Yatra” reflects his interest in Indian culture and his recent travels to that subcontinent. Most Western stars who’ve sought fulfillment in the East have shown their work George Harrison style, adopting the tones and rhythms of the sites they’ve explored; “Tirtha Yatra” does start with what could be a sitar’s twang, but soon reveals itself as a Bobby Bare-style honky-tonk tall tale that places Childers in the role of a happy philistine. He declares that reading the Bhagavad-gita “changed me metaphysically,” but finally admits that were he to relocate to the East, he’d bring his family, his band and “fiddles, basses and rental guitars and mandolins, ‘cause that’s the way the Dharma works.” Childers and the band quickly jump into “Tomcat and a Dandy,” just the kind of old-style folk tune he wants to bring on his pilgrimage — but then they fold in a Hare Krishna chant, embracing the productive cacophony that results when borders are lovingly crossed. Through it all, Childers maintains his agile playfulness, a man who knows his golden tongue will help him find a footing in any setting.

As I leave you with these examples of questing voices that demand serious listening, I’ll just add a little love letter to another artist who’s been sharing his for half a century. From his “Road Runner” days with the proto-punk band the Modern Lovers throughout his prolific solo career, Jonathan Richman has always been an avatar of open-heartedness. Many have been influenced by this wide-eyed savant, but no one can truly match the way Richman vocalizes — he blends impressive chops with a dedication to remaining unmodulated, his melodic sense loose and his dynamic range looser. Richman sings like no one is listening and as if he’s welcoming the entire world to join in his song. He’s a guileless virtuoso, a rebel without a tuning fork. Though deliberately unstudied, his voice is, in fact, as resonant as a cantor’s, his sense of timing unrivaled. He sings as if there is never a moment that he’s not singing, at least in his head.

On his 18th studio album, Only Frozen Sky Anyway, the man who wrote songs of the sublime like “I Was Dancing at the Lesbian Bar” and “I Eat With Gusto! Damn, You Bet” accepts his eventual entry into the afterlife with typical unhinged grace. In a homespun groove with longtime drummer Tommy Larkins and former Modern Lovers bandmate and current producer Jerry Harrison, along with his wife Nicole Montalbano on tamboura, Richman ponders the great beyond while still relishing the small gifts — a little bat, his beloved guitar, the bandmates who let him get weird — that have made 74 years on Earth an unending wonder. At times, Richman has weathered accusations that his singing is too mannered, but now that he’s gazing into the finite space of his final years, it’s evident that he knew what we all need to remember all along: There’s nothing more life-affirming than a voice that rings forth truly and is freely shared.

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