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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In trying to unpack one of the a stranger periods of Bob Dylan's strange life, Scorsese had to meet the bard on his home turf of half-truths and obfuscation.
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The track, recorded with Colombian singer Maluma, channels "Despacito," with a nod toward Madonna's 1986 song "La Isla Bonita."
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One day after performing the songs in Nashville, the country supergroup has released all three digitally ahead of the release of its new album, Interstate Gospel.
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Aretha Franklin died of pancreatic cancer Thursday. Her hits, from the 1960s to the 1980s, helped define the era. NPR's Noel King talks to NPR music critic Ann Powers about the singer's legacy.
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Her music has been sung at marches and political rallies, heard in churches and on chain restaurant jukeboxes. Everything popular music can be is there in the songs of Aretha Franklin.
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At the behest of a 14-year-old fan who launched a Twitter campaign, the forever-game pop-punk faves have covered one of the Internet's favorite songs. The crossover is, somehow, pretty illuminating.
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The country music legend is still writing and recording original material at age 84.
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The results are in for our reader poll, and your picks for the greatest albums made by women deeply modify and sometimes openly challenge our original Turning the Tables list.
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The night's winner, "Remember Me" from the film Coco, and Sufjan Stevens' "Mystery of Love" — two ballads — represented the best of what songs can communicate within film.
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Kacey Musgraves has spent the past five years building a new musical world in Nashville. Now she's showing the world that she is fully living in it.