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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The Grammy nominations are ripe for attempts to predict the future of popular music — but this year, we need to examine just one category to see how much everything is changing, and already has. -
Carlile's tribute concert established a new approach to canonizing Mitchell's work. And in a video produced for the concert, musicians and friends share their favorite lyrics by Mitchell.
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Bikini Kill's instant anthem for the '90s riot grrrl movement found new purpose at rock camps, where young girls learn to express themselves through music. Hanna breaks it down with NPR's Ann Powers. -
The NPR Music series Turning the Tables enters its third season this week with a new concept: Which eight women were the pillars upon which American popular music was built?
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Springsteen's new album connects to a stream of pop balladry that emerged in tandem with Hollywood's turn in the late 1960s toward hippie antiheroes and modern masculinity's fatalistic drift. -
The allegations against Michael Jackson in the documentary Leaving Neverland make listening to his songs a struggle, one that resists the comfort those songs once provided. -
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. -
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.
