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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DeMent contemplates her powerlessness in the face of her own mortality — she won't be around to see the changes today's climate activism might accomplish.
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In Goodman's songs, music is a route to both survival and transcendence. Watch her perform three powerful tracks that confront grief and stump for understanding.
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On Swift's 10th and most challenging album, she and producer Jack Antonoff push her voice in new directions, rethinking the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shaking off old habits.
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Drawing from her new album Breaking the Thermometer, Leyla McCalla and her band explore the weight of memory in songs deeply immersed in the rhythms, sounds and history of Haiti.
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The iconic singer-songwriter performed her first public full-length show anywhere since 2000, with a little help from Brandi Carlile.
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Bonnie Raitt's new single shows that the 72-year-old blues-rock treasure is the master of the form.
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From her state-of-the-art home studio, the beloved singer-songwriter plays selections from her 2021 album, Ocean to Ocean, as well as a fan favorite.
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We're all feeling too much. Mitski's music can help. On her sixth album, she embraces dramatic emotions — and even in the depths of inner dysregulation, her clarity is remarkable.
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The star who commands a planetary position in the galaxy of pop chronicles divorce and soul-searching recovery on an album that thrillingly redefines her artistry by bringing her gently down to earth.
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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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The South Carolina-born blues-folk singer possesses a remarkable grasp of the sounds and stories that make up the South. In "Magnolia Blues," she's joined by Margo Price and Kyshona.
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How do we understand Blue in the 21st century? Can we think of Mitchell's 1971 album, long considered the apex of confessional songwriting, as a paradigm not of raw emotion, but of care and craft?