Herb Sundays 128: Ann Powers
NPR Music luminary and acclaimed author shares a playlist "by artists whose voices have guided me through life and continue to make me laugh and cry and dream today.”
Herb Sundays 128: Ann Powers
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Art by Michael Cina
“The first voice every human hears is that of the woman who bore them. My mother loved to sing, though she wasn't too great at carrying a tune; she made my brother and me collapse in delighted giggles with her off-kilter renditions of show tunes and Catholic hymns. Maybe it's that childhood memory that's kept me preoccupied with voices throughout my career as a music writer. A "voice" can be more than the output of one's vocal cords, by the way; it might be a dazzling touch on the guitar or a visionary way of telling stories. But it does have to have a certain inimitable quality, like a fingerprint. The songs gathered here -- all by women featured in the new NPR Music anthology HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC: A REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY are by artists whose voices have guided me through life and continue to make me laugh and cry and dream today.”
- Ann Powers
The bio is as follows:
is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. Throughout a long career she has worked at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice and many other publications. A former curator at Seattle's Museum of Popular Music, she is the author of four books, most recently Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024). With Evelyn McDonnell, she edited the classic anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop (1995). Her essays have been widely anthologized and she has also written for television, radio and podcasts. In 2017 she co-founded the award-winning NPR series Turning the Tables, which shed light on marginalized, underestimated and forgotten voices in popular music. She lives with her family in Nashville.
I’ve always enjoyed Ann Powers’ beat because while she covers popular music, her Best Of The Year lists suggest that she doesn’t seem too affected by what other critics are talking about too much. She actually tells you what records she likes the most, which is a rarity. She writes beautifully, and her sage advice could even have rescued Random Access Memories (“Where is the female voice representing those who truly defined that liberatory spirit? Donna Summer, who died last year, may not have been available, but plenty of others could have filled that role. The body and soul satisfactions RAM offers are many, but without that feminine presence, they remain incomplete.”). She pops up in cool places, like when she stops in to wreck shop with
(Herb 16) on Bandsplain, dueling banjos style on PJ Harvey and her fave, Kate Bush. Her unintended dust-up with Lana Del Rey was one of the more interesting “fan army” incidents that seemed to mark the exact changing of the time, Powers knew what it meant and made it make perfect sense:In the controversy’s wake, I never stopped advocating for the album. Some have wondered if I was simply giving in to LDR’s bullying. Not at all. Continuing to speak up for LDR’s artistry is my way of defying what the controversy—not LDR herself, necessarily, but the conversation that arose around the two of us—demanded. As a critic, I never want to be an artist’s enemy, any more than I can only be a friend. I’ve always felt the idea of the critic as an oppositional force, clearing space for some set idea of quality or truth, is no more accurate than the notion that we are primarily champions. A critic is a person who encounters music, examines her responses, considers the context, and articulates whatever comes up during this process, whether it’s desire, joy, anger, even repulsion. It’s not a thumbs-up-or-down game.
Ann has had a big year both with Traveling, which I’m ripping through as we speak, and with NPR Music’s first book out this month, How Women Made Music (HarperOne), which draws inspiration from Turning the Tables, covering women as the center of popular music, instead of the periphery — “from Beyoncé to Odetta, Taylor Swift to Joan Baez, Joan Jett to Dolly Parton” collecting 50+ years of essays and interviews from the network including Marissa Lorusso (
), Detroit’s Caryn Rose, and many other faves. Both titles deal with canon, which is a hot topic for me, obviously, both in re-imagining it (Made) and also how one can add to it (Traveling) amidst so much already said.By her own admission, Powers enjoys “putting things in context” and Traveling works because instead of trying to delve into the unknowable inner life of Joni Mitchell, or a staid lyrical True Crime investigation, it thoroughly examines the actual life and times of Mitchell, the Canyon scene, what Rolling Stone actually did say about her and her peers, etc. Just the facts. The book is very HERB-Y to me in that it is about Powers' relationship with the already untouchable specter of Mitchell, trying to unpack what can still be understood. She describes her biases and concerns, both tackling a star of such magnitude and remaining transparent about her feelings and intimidations about Joni and by not interviewing Mitchell, she's unafraid to be critical too.
My first ascent with Mitchell was in 5th grade on a hot June Michigan evening when they huddled our parents and faculty into the school gymnasium for a deeply sentimental “graduation” event that which, from what I remember, had a heavily serifed/italicized program, and culminated in one of those video montages of printed photos of the kids through the years set to “The Circle Game” (1966) which I had never heard before. I immediately seized up, gripped by the melancholy of the whole thing as an 11-year-old, and began crying; I don’t remember anyone else doing that. I tried to play it off that candle smoke was in my eyes, but I was outed. I’m still embarrassed by this moment, even though I know my reaction was the only sane one available.
I have been enjoying this new wave of more exploratory and contemporary music books and covered Dilla Time author Dan Charnas (Herb 56) and The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (a brilliant re-engagement with the original) author
. These books and Traveling work because as they are not obsessed with the artist as an enigma, they are interested in how humans with these gifts move through the world and how they survive and sometimes fail, morally, artistically or otherwise. As Powers mentions in her Kennedy Center interview, “every legend is also one of us.”