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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PJ Harvey's new album, I Inside The Old Year Dying, builds off of a narrative poem she wrote about a year in the life of a 9-year-old girl in a fictional town in western England.
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Harvey talks with NPR Music's Ann Powers about her album I Inside the Old Year Dying, a ragged, highly crafted adaptation of her epic poem Orlam, and why she prefers to make art without boundaries.
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Listening to Kesha's new album, Gag Order, you can't help but think about all she's been through in the past 10 years.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with NPR music critic Ann Powers on the rise of interpolation in the increasingly litigious music industry and the line between nostalgia and theft.
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Tonight's Grammy Awards may be big for Beyoncé and her album "Renaissance." The new artist category is also one to watch with bluegrass, jazz and hip-hop - even a rock band from Italy.
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Jones lets the sun shine in on this jazz standard, but maintains a pensive undertone.
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Her album-as-Sistine Chapel: awe-inspiring from a distance and glittering with detail, a star-filled imaginary sky and an origin myth that comes to life through its brilliant brush strokes.
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On Being Funny In A Foreign Language, the new album by his band The 1975, Matty Healy makes romantic music for cynical outsiders who insist they're ready to give love a try.
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The era-defining star's seventh album sparks a conversation about the infinite possibilities of dance music, the difference between fun and pleasure and why disco is always political.
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NPR Music staffers convene to offer up the Kate Bush tracks we think deserve a powerful, paradigm-shifting sync in a television show or movie.