MUSIC

‘ = ’ Ed Sheeran Atlantic

‘ = ’ - the fourth instalment in Sheeran ’ s symbol album series ”is Ed’ s most accomplished work yet; the evolution of an artist who continues to tread new ground. A body of songs that were made over a four-year period following his seminal ‘ ÷ ’ (Divide) album era, thematically, ‘ = ’ finds Ed taking stock of his life and the people in it, as he explores the varying degrees of love (“The Joker And The Queen, ” “First Times, ” “2step, ”) loss (“Visiting Hours ’), resilience (“Can ’t Stop The Rain ”) and fatherhood (“Sandman, ” ‘Leave Your Life ”), while also processing his reality and career (“Tides ”). Sonically, ‘ = ’ encapsulates Ed’ s versatile musical palette, spanning signature, guitar-led tracks and world-class balladry to weightier, euphoric production moments, as first showcased on the album ’ s lead single “Bad Habits, ’ released earlier this summer.

Springtime In New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 1980-1985 Bob Dylan Sony Legacy

The latest chapter in Columbia/Legacy ’ s highly acclaimed Bob Dylan Bootleg Series shines fresh light on the provocative new musical directions Dylan was taking as a songwriter and a recording artist from 1980 through 1985. In the early 1980s, while the music industry was grappling with the arrival of new trends and technology, from MTV to compact discs to digital recording, Bob Dylan was writing and recording new songs for a new decade, creating an essential new chapters in his studio catalog. Bob Dylan -

Springtime In New York (1980-1985) celebrates the rich creative period surrounding Dylan ’ s classic albums Shot Of Love, Infidels, and Empire Burlesque with previously unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, rehearsal recordings, live performances and more.

Tattoo You (2021 Remaster) [2 CD] The Rolling Stones Polydor/Interscope

Tattoo You is a new deluxe remastered edition of the chart-topping, multiplatinum album. The 2CD edition of the album includes the newly remastered album alongside Lost & Found, a brand new collection of nine previously unreleased songs from the period of the album ’ s original release, newly completed and enhanced with additional vocals and guitar by the band. Among these, “Living In The Heart Of Love ” is a quintessential Stones rock workout with all of the group on top form, complete with urgent guitar licks and fine piano detail. Other highlights of Lost & Found include a killer version of “Shame, Shame, Shame, ” first recorded in 1963 by one of the band’ s blues heroes, Jimmy Reed.

Bernstein: Candide Marin Alsop, London Symphony Orchestra LSO Live

Marin Alsop leads the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a new recording of Bernstein ’ s riotous satirical operetta, Candide. Made almost three decades after the composer ’ s own iconic recording with the Orchestra, Alsop ’ s new version was captured during celebratory concerts marking Bernstein ’ s centenary year, and features an outstanding array of soloists, including Leonardo Capalbo (Candide), Jane Archibald (Cun gonde), Anne Sofie von Otter (The Old Lady) and Sir Thomas Allen (Dr Pangloss, Narrator). With lyrical contributions from acerbic writers Richard Wilbur, Dorothy Parker and a young Stephen Sondheim, Candide marries raucous humor with the extraordinary genius of Leonard Bernstein.

Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! Steely Dan UMe

The first live Steely Dan album in more

than 25 years, Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live!, was recorded across tour dates at New York City ’ s Beacon Theatre, The Met Philadelphia, & more, and showcases selections from Steely Dan ’ s extraordinary catalog of slinky grooves, sleek subversive lyrics, and infectious hits.

My Bluegrass Heart Béla Fleck BMG

Over the last four decades, Béla Fleck has made a point of boldly going where no banjo player has gone before, a musical journey that has earned him 15 Grammys in nine different fields, including Country, Pop, Jazz, Instrumental, Classical and World Music. But his roots are in bluegrass, and that’ s where he returns with his first bluegrass tour in 24 years, My Blue-

grass Heart. My Bluegrass Heart is the third chapter of a trilogy that began in 1988. The project features a who ’ s who of some of the greatest instrumentalists in bluegrass music ’ s history alongside some of the best of the new generation of players: mandolinists Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, and Chris Thile; fiddlers Michael Cleveland and Stuart Duncan; celebrated multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses, bassists Edgar Meyer and Mark Schatz, and the amazing Bryan Sutton and Molly Tuttle on guitar.

Voice Of Nature: The Anthropocene Renée Fleming & Yannick Nezét-Ségui Decca

Renee Fleming explores how music ’ s relationship with nature can be relevant for the age of humans. Looking back to the Romantic era and looking forward with new commissions from Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw and Kevin Puts. Renee Fleming

said,

“The music on the album begins in a time almost two centuries ago, when people had a profound connection to the beauty of nature. Now we have reached a moment when we see all too clearly the effects of our own activity, and the fragility of our environment. ” n

<14 BYE BYE MISS AMERICAN PIE obstacles: severe asthma; a sister ’ s addictions; his father ’ s sudden death, which he watched and predicted. Eleven years later he began siphoning his sorrow into a song shrouded by “the day the music died. ”

Holly died when McLean was 13. I was 13 when I first heard American Pie. My family had settled in our house in the South Fork hamlet of Wainscott, renting our New Rochelle home to save money and my parents ’ troubled marriage. My mother and I were driving through the Springs, scouting real estate in a cheaper hamlet, when the radio played a song seemingly beamed from another galaxy.

Everything about American Pie mesmerized. The snappy rhymes. The happy melody. The exotic settings. The cosmic images. The galloping pace that conjured mustangs and Mustangs.

That afternoon our Ford morphed into the narrator ’ s Chevy in 512 musical seconds. I felt like McLean must have felt when he discovered Holly ’ s voice. Reborn. Restrung. Retuned.

My horsepower passion was revved up by my homeroom mate and basketball buddy, Gregg de Waal, an East Hampton native with a goofy grin, searchlight eyes and the quiet curiosity of a budding bayman. We made American Pie our research project, dissecting countless stories and theories as we decoded the eight-minute-plus, two-sided 45. We uncovered an elegy for a country gutted by wars, race riots, assassinations and generation gaps wider than the Grand Canyon. We disappeared into an amazing maze of pop-culture allusions. The line “Eight miles high and falling fast” referenced “Eight Miles High, ” the Byrds ’ helter-skelter rocker. “Helter Skelter ” was the Beatles ’ heavy-metal hymn that Charles Manson mutated into a murderous mission. The “generation lost in space ” lost themselves in moon landings and the sci-fi TV show Lost in Space.

Gregg and I created a spacy fantasy around the couplet “While Lenin read a book on Marx/A quartet practiced in the park. ” We replaced Vladimir and Karl, founding fathers of the Soviet Union, America ’ s greatest enemy, with John Lennon and Groucho Marx, radical quipsters who appeared on talk shows and in bedroom photographs. We had absolutely no idea that these revolutionary pundits would share a 1995 stamp issued by Abkhazia, a Russian republic.

We cast the Beatles in two roles: the parkpracticing quartet and the marching-band sergeants who refuse to yield the football field after the fallout shelter falls. After all, we figured, didn ’t the Fab Four masquerade as Sgt. Pepper ’ s Lonely Hearts Club Band? And doesn ’t their namesake album cover ’ s choir of cutout celebrities include Karl Marx?

Songs make us dance, romance, and retreat into a trance. American Pie made me a character in my own South Fork musical. I felt the narrator ’ s sock-hop jealousy while watching my eighth-grade crush dance with another guy to the Moments ’ “Love on a Two-Way Street. ” The bored South Fork natives with whom I drank Boone ’ s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine in a pickup by a Wainscott beach reminded me of McLean ’ s “good ol’ boys ” toasting their imminent deaths with whiskey and rye by a dry levee. I linked the levee to private jetties littering the sand like concrete buoys, eroding dunes they were designed to guard.

American Pie crowned a year of momentous firsts: first football heroics; first sexual experience; first betrayal. McLean ’ s hopeful rhythms consoled me after my father sold our Wainscott home without consulting my mom, who at the time was house sitting for my dad’ s brother in California. In August 1972 we returned for good to our New Rochelle house, where we never lived as a whole family.

Buddy Holly inspired McLean to play music for a living, to make people “happy for a while. ” McLean inspired me to write about music for a living. I mention American Pie before I ask musicians for the first song they couldn ’t forget, the one that rearranged their vital organs. I channel the challenges of deconstructing American Pie before they deconstruct their own challenges: rewarding mentors; protecting proteges; hitting brick walls after breaking through.

I interviewed Mr. American Pie himself in 1984, two weeks after starting at the paper that employed me for 25 years. McLean spoke from his home near the Hudson River, nearly four miles from the birthplace of “American Pie. ” I spoke from my mom ’ s home in New Rochelle, a special place for a special event.

McLean was equally engaging and elusive. Holly ’ s death devastated him because he considered the musician an unsung master and his “ secret” agent/angel of good vibes. “As far

as I was concerned, ” he said,

“I was the only person in the world who understood him, who dug him. ” Remembering that piercing pain freed him to write a fable/parable about apocalyptic times in “the world known as America, ” a national loss of innocence triggered by the days the music died. The overwhelming popularity of American Pie overwhelmed him; he learned the hard way that unfamiliar success is much harder to handle than familiar failure.

McLean declined to identify American Pie characters and meanings, sticking to a longtime script. All his songs, he insisted, were mostly “flashes of light, pure strokes of brilliance from somewhere, usually not from me. ” He laughed when I told him about substituting Groucho & John for Karl & Vladimir. “Hmmm,

not bad, ” he said. “I’ll give you an A for effort. ”

McLean and I reunited for a 1999 story on Martin Guitar ’ s limited-edition, signature American Pie model, inlaid with seven of the song’ s mythic names. He praised a beloved, long-lost Martin D-28 as “the rocket ship ” that zoomed him to “ some good places, ” enabling him to buy the New Rochelle house his mother lost after his father died. Royalties from hit tunes— “American Pie, ” “Vincent, ” “Castles in the Air ” —allowed him to afford rare Martins and a totem pole for his kids, a stand-in for a New Rochelle totem pole that was my childhood attraction, too.

American Pie looped through my system as I wrote The Kingdom of the Kid, a 2013 memoir about the South Fork in the late ’60s to early ’70s, the last gasp for a middle-class paradise. McLean ’ s bizarre bedfellows—the Bible and the Book of Love; the Rolling Stones and the Holy Ghost—encouraged me to pair baseball hall of famer Carl Yastrzemski and literary hall of famer Truman Capote, my chalkand-cheese heroes. I opened the last chapter in Wainscott Cemetery, searching for my writing guru ’ s grave, as a tribute to McLean ’ s final verse, where the narrator searches for solace in the dead record store where the music thrived.

I don ’t know why I left out my American Pie pilgrimage. Maybe it was because I lost track of my fellow pilgrim for 43 years. I finally met Gregg de Waal again in his East Hampton Star obituary, published in 2015, the year McLean ’ s American Pie manuscript was auctioned for $1.2 million. I was happy to know that Gregg loved fishing and dogs. He certainly looked happy in the obit photo, hugging his pup, his lighthouse eyes glowing.

Gregg and I shared a mystical moment during a 2016 reunion for the East Hampton High School Class of ’76, which I attended as a special guest of the East Hampton Middle School Class of ’72. We reunited at a table of photos of deceased graduates. I was staring at Gregg’ s 17-year-old self when the DJ played—no lie— “American Pie. ” In a flash we were teen-age broncin ’ bucs, kicking off our shoes and blues in life ’ s rodeo. n

Geoff Gehman is a journalist and the author of the memoir The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons (SUNY Press).