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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NPR turns 50 this year, and we're marking it by looking back on some other things that happened in 1971. It was that year that songwriter John Prine released his debut album. Prine died in 2020.
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From the opening of their first hit, "Bye Bye Love," the Everly Brothers spoke directly to the deepest longings and anxieties of the generation that would come to define the rock and soul era.
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The new song "Magnolia Blues" by Adia Victoria is a courageous reclamation of the singer's Southern identity. Her new album A Southern Gothic is out in September.
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Welcome 2 America, the first posthumous album from Prince after his death in 2016, was released Friday.
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Confessional songs are all over the pop charts, from Tyler, The Creator's Call Me If You Get Lost to Olivia Rodrigo's Sour. What do musicians who blend fact and fiction owe their real life subjects?
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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?
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The late John Prine was awarded artist of the year, and Black Pumas and fiddler Brittany Haas took home hardware during the abbreviated show.
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Three critics dive into a new album full of surprises — released on a day's notice, co-produced by The National's Aaron Dessner — and ask how it fits into an arguably unprecedented career.
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At 79, 74 and 87 years old, respectively, these three veteran songwriters prove that it's possible to release poignant and powerful work late in an artist's career.
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These songs take on some of the ugliest stories in our history and reflect the commitment of Black musicians to telling the truth of how Black people have been wronged, and survived, and fought back.