Rob Tannenbaum

Over the last 14 years, Lambert, 35, has excelled at exposing her fears, foibles and frolics, and won both commercial success and critical acclaim. She’s released three albums with the Pistol Annies, a singer-songwriter trio she founded with Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, and six bold and often hilarious solo albums. Her latest, “Wildcard,” is due Friday.

From her early days in country music, Lambert made a strong impression with the singles “Kerosene” and “Gunpowder &amp; Lead,” in which she defied the genre’s current gender stereotypes and sang about taking violent revenge on men who deserved it. She was propelled from a smart upstart to a tabloid regular in 2011, when she married country star Blake Shelton, and addressed their divorce five years later on a downcast double album, “The Weight of These Wings.” In February, she scooped the gossips by announcing that, a month earlier, she’d married Brendan McLoughlin, who grew up on Staten Island and is an officer in the New York Police Department.

Recently, at her label’s offices in Manhattan, Lambert breezily reflected on her new husband, her sense of humor and how she stopped being a teenage goody-goody. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: After releasing a double album, “Wildcard” must have seemed like a breeze. But it does have 14 songs, which is more than most country singers include on their records.

A: It breaks my heart that you say that. I’m so romantic about albums and the journey. Even since I put out “The Weight of These Wings,” everything is so different in the industry. I’ll joke around and say, if I’m wearing a short dress, “I’m trying to sell some records!” But what are we saying? Am I trying to sell records, or am I trying to be streamed?

Q: Do you worry about offending people with your sense of humor?

A: I don’t mean to upset people. I’m maybe a little too honest.

Q: Was sarcasm always a part of your writing, or was it something you had to develop?

A: I think it came gradually. I’ve evolved into being OK making fun of myself, with “White Trash” or “Way Too Pretty for Prison.” Back in the day, I would’ve went ahead and killed the guy. Now I’m like, “That’s too much work.” (Laughs) I took myself really seriously in my 20s because I was so driven. This is all I’ve ever chased, country music. And a few men.

Q: When you were a kid, did your family think you were funny?

A: No. I’ve been told millions of times I have a terrible sense of humor. But I think it’s just dark or different. Obvious jokes and funny movies, I don’t find funny.

Q: What do you find funny?

Q: You talked about how your songs evolved. Is there a moment when you became the writer you are now?

A: I remember writing a song when I was 17 on my bathroom floor, and my mom came in and listened. It was called “Leave Me Lying Here.” I didn’t really know what the song meant, but it was pretty deep. I lived a little, and then I was like, “Oh, now I know what that song means.” That was one of the moments I realized I could write bigger than me. Because at 17, what have you really lived?

I was a sheltered girl who went to church every Sunday. I had a pretty normal life, except that my parents were private investigators and took in women that were victims of domestic violence. I lived for my whole high school with random women and their kids coming in and out. Some were my friends. Some, I knew their dads.

Q: Did having parents who are PIs give you a sense, early on, that life and love are dangerous?

A: My parents, their conversations while we were eating spaghetti, were about who they caught having an affair. It was normal to me and my brothers.

Q: It leaked into your songs, especially early on. Does it still?

A: I think so. And so did the music I listened to. The first song that ever made me cry was “Desperados Waiting for a Train” by Guy Clark. I was 10. My dad was singing it, and at the time, I didn’t understand why I was crying. I knew it brought out something in me. So all of that, combined with seeing what my parents did for a job, definitely — I was pulling from that early on.

Q: What were you like at 16?

A: I’d started my plan of “How do I not go to college?” I struggled in school. I didn’t fail, but I barely passed. I was really, really a goody-two-shoes and super boring. (Laughs) I was a good kid.

Q: That’s hard to believe now.

A: I know! Even my parents were like, “You’re not much fun.” Then I made up for it. I started working in a bar at 17 and discovered a world outside of my Bible Belt town.

Q: Why were you working in a bar at 17?

A: I’d entered a contest called the True Value Country Showdown and finished third. We got to be friends with the house band at this bar because I was rehearsing with them for the contest. They called my mom and said, “Does your daughter need a gig? We just lost our singer.” So I’d get home at 4 a.m. on Thursdays and go to school the next day. My mom had to come with me for the first two weeks until I turned 18 — which she loved because she could drink beer and listen to music, and I’d drive her home. I graduated high school early. Got in this program called Op Grad for pregnant girls and people on drugs — and me. And I felt more at home in a honky-tonk than I realized I would.

Q: You were 19 when you signed to Sony Nashville. Did you understand what you were signing on for?

A: I didn’t know it would be this much business. That was the shocking part: This is 80% business, and I thought it was 80% art. And then the second part of that was the fame. All of a sudden, there was a tabloid world because of my first marriage.

Q: Are you still in the tabloids?

A: Here and there, I see myself at Kroger. I sell magazines; I guess I’m still interesting.

Q: There are two songs on “Wildcard” that mention New York City. How much time have you been spending here?

A: Quite a bit of time. I’m not great at navigating the city, but I’m great at calling an Uber. (Laughs) I got lost one day, walked to the West Side Highway, and my Apple Watch said I’d walked 13 miles. When people recognize you here, they don’t make a big deal. “Oh. Hey. You’re Miranda Lambert. Like your music. Bye.”

Q: How did you meet your new husband?

A: I met my husband doing press for the Pistol Annies record, this time last year. Our record came out the day after Halloween, and we did “Good Morning America.” My husband was doing security there for the show. My girlfriends, the Annies, saw him and knew I might be ready to hang out with someone. They invited him to our show behind my back. They plucked him for me. My security guy Tom, he was in on it too. He said to me, “He’s here. And he’s pretty.” (Laughs) Now the Pistol Annies have three husbands, two ex-husbands, three children, a stepson and 23 animals. We’ve done a lot in nine years!

Q: I imagine you’re tired of discussing the plight of women in country music.

Q: But here’s a different approach to the topic. Female singers can’t get their songs on the radio, so they’ve stopped trying to be commercial, and that’s freed them to sing what they want. For the past few years, the women in country have made much better records than the men.

A: You do have a different approach, because that is it. I made “The Weight of These Wings” and couldn’t get a single on the charts to save my life, but I won song of the year (for “Tin Man” at the 2018 Academy of Country Music Awards). I already had that mentality because my relationship with radio has been tumultuous. I didn’t even have a Top 5 song until my third record. I had platinum albums and I was winning awards. I just couldn’t get played on the radio. It sucks.

Q: Once you had your first hit, quite a few more followed quickly, didn’t they?

A: My first No. 1 was “White Liar,” which I had to work my ass off to get. We were on tour with Brad Paisley and set up a conference room at the show. I had my whole band, crew, family, the opening acts and their bands, all dialing radio stations to request my song. On this record, the label said, “What do you want the single to be?” I’m like, “Y’all tell me. That way, if it doesn’t work, it’s your idea.”

Q: Is “Wildcard” a less somber album than “The Weight of These Wings”?

A: I bought it back to straight down the middle Miranda Lambert. People want the humor, the sarcasm, something not too musically out there. And I get that. But would I love to just go off and make a stone cold country record? Hell, yes. Maybe I will. You have to grow as an artist. I can’t sing “Mama’s Broken Heart” when I’m 80 years old. That’d be weird.

Q: Can you write happy songs when you’re sad and sad songs when you’re happy?

A: I can. I’m transparent to a fault sometimes. I write from my experience and the people around me. But I want to be one of those songwriters who can write amazing stories, like “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” Or John Prine.

My goal is to get better at writing amazing stories that aren’t my own. But I’ve got to live more life, and I’ve got to try way harder. Until then, I’m just writing about my own (expletive). Sorry, y’all!

This article originally appeared in

Miranda Lambert Doesn't Mean to Offend. She's 'a Little Too Honest.'

NEW YORK — One night not long ago, Miranda Lambert was drinking wine on her porch in Nashville, Tennessee, with a friend who’d planned to drive home. Lambert discouraged her from getting behind the wheel: “You’re way too pretty for prison,” she said. The next day, Lambert and three other songwriters turned that phrase into a song.

Of Hunter’s four bandmates from Mott's defining 1972 album, “All the Young Dudes,” two are dead and one is incapacitated from a stroke.

Multiple deaths are rarely the end of great rock bands. So Hunter will tour with the guitarist and keyboard player who joined Mott for its anticlimactic 1974 swan song, “The Hoople.” Displaying a level of honesty rarely embraced by those trying to sell concert tickets, he called this band not Mott the Hoople, but Mott the Hoople ’74.

It’s possible that Hunter could have picked some musicians from a Craigslist ad and legally presented the group as Mott the Hoople. (He declined an interview request.) Increasingly, calculated misrepresentations are part of an older band’s repertoire. Once a band name turns into a brand name, there’s a strong incentive to continue on, even with a lineup that makes fans ask, “Who are these guys?” As rock approaches its eighth decade, partially intact bands are more the rule than the exception. If you’re a purist who wants to see only bands with their full original lineups, you’d better love U2.

Kiss is on a farewell tour featuring half its original lineup, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. (The other half, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley, are alive). Ditto for the Who, touring this spring with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend. (The other half, John Entwistle and Keith Moon, are dead.) Yes and Journey march on, as did Boston for a while, despite not having their original singers. Styx tours without Dennis DeYoung, who wrote and sang its biggest hits. Lynyrd Skynyrd, currently on its own farewell tour, is down to one original member, as is Eagles. Foreigner tours with only one founding member, guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones, and when Jones became ill a few years ago, the band continued without even him.

This fractious dynamic isn’t limited to classic-rock bands: The punk groups Dead Kennedys and the Undertones have long toured without their original singers. Bikini Kill’s shows this spring won’t feature the band’s first guitarist, Billy Karren. Recent tours by Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and the Replacements, who each lacked one or more key band members, prompted social-media arguments about whether fans were seeing the “real” band.

“If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall,” singer Mark E. Smith, who peremptorily hired and fired dozens of members of the Fall, once said. But only a few musicians can carry off such lordly “l'état, c’est moi” proclamations. Mick Jones might be on that short list.

Over the years, Foreigner has shed every main member of its early lineups until only Jones was left. But, argued Phil Carson, the band’s manager, “There’s only been one original member, ever. Mick hand-picked everyone. We’ve had five or six keyboard players, almost countless drummers. If Mick Jones says it’s Foreigner, it’s Foreigner.”

In August 2011, the group was playing a show at Jones Beach on Long Island when Jones felt too ill to continue. He was diagnosed with cardiovascular problems, but tour dates had been booked, so Foreigner continued on without the one man who’s synonymous with it.

Jones still sometimes misses shows, depending on his health. Last year, when he was forced to skip a show at a 10,000-seat arena in Tel Aviv, a fan told The Jerusalem Post he felt the night was “tainted with con.” (Foreigner is huge in Israel. Who knew?)

But Carson says fans enjoy Foreigner just as much whether Jones is onstage or in his slippers at home: “I’d say 90 percent of people at the shows have no clue who was in Foreigner.”

For each fan, there’s an invisible emotional calculus involved in deciding whether a band is or isn’t still “real.” That accounting can seem arbitrary to others. I loved seeing the Replacements in 2014 with only two of its four original members, yet I would not see Pixies, who are touring through mid-April, because they’re missing bassist Kim Deal, one of its original quartet. If it’s weird to care that much about a bassist, well, being a rock fan is often weird.

Brian Koppelman, a former record executive and current pop-culture maven who co-created the Showtime series “Billions,” saw Van Halen play in 2006 without its longtime bassist Michael Anthony, and felt it wasn’t “the real Van Halen.” And despite the charisma of Robin Zander, he refuses to see Cheap Trick now that the drummer Bun E. Carlos isn’t in the band.

“His playing and attitude, the way he held a cigarette, that’s Cheap Trick to me,” he said. “I want to know that we don’t have to die. When I’m with my favorite bands, I can forget mortality for a minute. But I can’t if they’ve been affected by time and the vagaries of the world.”

Koppelman believes there’s a “purely romantic ideal” to loving a band, especially one whose set list can summon feelings from days you often can’t remember. He and I are not the only reunion truthers prone to dramatic feelings about bass players.

Briony Edwards, the editor of the music site Louder, loved Smashing Pumpkins when she was “an angsty teenager,” and she especially cherished the bassist, D’arcy Wretzky. Last year, Smashing Pumpkins reunited for a tour that purportedly celebrated its legacy, but Wretzky wasn’t in the band.

“People say D’arcy wasn’t important, she didn’t write songs,” Edwards said, “but my enjoyment of their music is based on the relationship I had with them when I was a teenager.” Edwards saw the D’arcy-devoid Pumpkins at London’s Wembley Arena, and felt cheated: “As a fan, you come preloaded with ridiculous opinions you’re willing to die for.”

Rock music constantly asks the question, “What’s real and make believe?” Strict constructionists like Koppelman, Edwards and I may scoff at some incomplete band reunions, but for less skeptical fans, including apparently many people who adore Foreigner, there’s a simpler, ontological litmus test. If you have as grand an emotional experience seeing Journey without Steve Perry as you would with him, how is your experience not real? Because if Journey won’t perform with Perry, your choice isn’t Fake Journey or Real Journey, it’s Semi-Journey or No Journey at All.

While fans might feel joy at seeing a band that’s missing a key member, there are few happy feelings for the spurned exes. DeYoung, for instance, has not gone to see Styx play with a lineup that doesn’t include him. “I saw them plenty in the first 20 years,” he wisecracked.

When Styx began to perform in 1999 without DeYoung, who was ill with a virus that left him sensitive to bright lights, he was one of four partners in the band who jointly owned the name. He sued, claiming misuse of the Styx trademark, and his ex-bandmates countersued. “We came to a settlement,” DeYoung said. “I can’t divulge the details, but I won’t have to sit on a street corner and sell cookies.”

He is on tour with a show billed as Dennis DeYoung and the Music of Styx, and Styx still tours with Lawrence Gowan, a keyboardist who sings DeYoung’s hits in an imitative tenor. “I’m not in the band I helped make famous,” DeYoung said with a mix of frustration and resignation. “I wish I was in Styx, but I’m powerless.”

Disputes over the rights to a band’s name are thorny because they combine elements of trademark law and contract law, said Loren Chodosh, an entertainment attorney whose clients have included Nada Surf and TV on the Radio.

Band names typically qualify as trademarks, and trademarks can be assigned by contract. “A band agreement, in a lot of ways, is like a prenup,” Chodosh said. “It’s about what will happen if things go wrong and somebody leaves, which nobody wants to talk about. Bands don’t start to hate each other until they’re successful.”

Most bands, Chodosh said, never establish contractually how the band trademark is owned. In the absence of a contract, she added, “Trademark law prevails. And because trademark law is not uncomplicated, it’s difficult to say who owns that trademark.”

Before there was an internet where fans could find up-to-date information, bands engaged in outright chicanery. When the Velvet Underground played England in 1971 with drummer Maureen Tucker as the only original member, a Melody Maker reviewer deemed it “a travesty, a masquerade.” Then Tucker quit, and the group continued.

One of the faux Velvet Underground’s tours of England was arranged by Clifford Davis, manager of Fleetwood Mac, who in 1974 fabricated an all-time deceit. The band had canceled tour dates after drummer Mick Fleetwood discovered his wife was in love with one of his bandmates, but Davis was unwilling to return the advances promoters had paid, so he cobbled together a sham band while claiming that he owned the name. “He can put four dogs barking on a leash and call it Fleetwood Mac,” singer Bob Welch quipped in Rolling Stone.

Band ownership isn’t about what’s right or fair, but about what’s legal. In 1954, Clyde McPhatter of the Drifters sold his half-share of the vocal group to its manager, George Treadwell, who signed new members to personal services contracts, then hired and fired them at his whim. After he died, the trademark passed on to his wife, and then their daughter, as if it were an ancestral quilt.

Chuck Negron, a founding member of Three Dog Night who sang several of its biggest hits, including “Joy to the World,” said bandmates had him sign a contract — which stipulated that any member fired from the group would have no further right to use the name — while he was a heroin addict.

Negron was later fired for missing shows. His attempt to bill himself as “Chuck Negron, formerly of Three Dog Night” led to a legal battle that the two parties resolved by agreeing that he could use the “formerly” designation, provided that in all print advertisements, the words Three Dog Night were no larger than half the size of the words Chuck Negron.

After his former bandmate Cory Wells died in 2015, Negron listened to a current version of Three Dog Night and felt it was “a rip off. Not to say the people in the band aren’t good, but they just aren’t the same ilk.” Though bitter, he’s also proud that the music is still meaningful to people. “There are people who just want to hear that music and relive that time of their lives, and don’t care if two cats and an elephant are singing it.”

If you’re one of those people who can enjoy a band even if most of the founding members are gone, consider two cases of groups with zero original musicians.

Drummer Bobby Colomby co-founded the New York jazz-rock group Blood, Sweat &amp; Tears, which grew to eight by the time of its 1968 debut. Band members left and were replaced, and by 1974, Colomby was the only original member in the group. “We had an agreement: Last man standing owns it,” he said.

While Colomby took a less itinerant job, as an executive at CBS Records, he leased the Blood, Sweat &amp; Tears name to David Clayton-Thomas, who sang the group’s signature hits, including “Spinning Wheel,” but was not an original member. After a 20-year lease, Clayton-Thomas formed a new band in 2004, so Colomby hired musicians to tour as his salaried employees. “As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m the guy behind it, it’s still the original band,” he said, adding that if his 1960s bandmates still played in the group, “you’d see guys with walkers onstage.”

Blood, Sweat &amp; Tears still play 55 to 65 shows a year, according to its manager, Larry Dorr. In a phone interview with Dorr and Colomby, neither could name all current members of the band. But Colomby likens it to a franchise: “When you go to a Yankees game, what do you see? There’s no Babe Ruth, no Mickey Mantle. But you’re going to see the pinstripes, a tradition, a style.” Blood, Sweat &amp; Tears, he insists, isn’t a group of specific people, “it’s a musical concept.”

Soft rock bands are not exempt from legal feuds. Wayne Nelson, a bassist who joined Little River Band in time for the successful group’s sixth album in 1981, said with a laugh, “We fought as much as a metal band, but it was all passive-aggressive.” Nelson was a paid employee first, and then was made a partner via LRB Proprietary Ltd., the group’s unit trust. When singer Glenn Shorrock left, he was paid $85,000 to turn over his shares, Nelson said.

Eventually, the name was owned by guitarist Stephen Housden, who had joined for the group’s seventh album, and stopped touring in 2006. Now, Nelson effectively licenses the trademark from Housden, who earns tour income without ever leaving his home.

Shorrock and two other founding members tried to perform as the Original Little River Band, but Housden forced them to change the name. Since then, the band’s ex-members have called the current lineup “a tribute band” and “a joke.” No musician grows up dreaming of fighting in court and parrying insults, but, Nelson concluded, “That’s the life of a band in these times.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/arts/music/band-name-reunions.html" id="86d9f808-d366-385b-a2fb-d8d63e8dc8f9">The New York Times</a>.

Singer Ian Hunter recently announced a reunion tour of Mott the Hoople, the British band that recorded some memorable hits in the early 1970s. But, Hunter tacitly acknowledged, it wasn’t quite a reunion.

The Music Lives On, Minus Familiar Faces

He was rehearsing, layered in black, in a nearly empty Lunt-Fontanne Theater in Midtown Manhattan, preparing for his fifth Broadway run since 1977, a hit-packed show called “Manilow Broadway.” The goal was to ease a transition from “Somewhere in the Night” to the Grammy-winning “Songs.” His longtime music director, Ron Walters Jr., cued the band in the new key.

“That’s not bad,” Manilow said after hearing a few bars, meaning it wasn’t great either. They tried E flat. They tried F. Manilow’s manner was unhurried, even though — and this seems like it should cause some urgency — the show was opening in two days and seven hours.

Manilow, who turned 76 this summer, walked gingerly offstage for a break, and a little later, he and the band worked on the introduction to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Memory,” a hit for Manilow in 1982. Trumpeter Charlie Peterson began the song with a solo, but it was too demure for Manilow’s taste. He asked Peterson to try again, with more drama: “Make us look at you,” he instructed, his Brooklyn accent apparent.

Manilow is one of the last holdovers from the prerock era, a time when “Make us look at you” was the prime directive. He is the Prince of Pizazz, a man who works, unabashedly, in the spirit of a showbiz trouper, from his self-deprecating quips to his committed delivery of songs about adult romance. He has a Grammy, a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar nomination. “I’m like Starbucks,” he told CNN’s Larry King in 2002. “You can’t get away from me.”

In a typical Manilow arrangement, there are dramatic notes he holds at the top of his vocal range, and at the end, an upward modulation for variety, drama and catharsis. His music, with its antiquated use of grand melodies and crescendos, has a higher schmaltz content than a good chopped liver.

From his debut album in 1973 to 1981, when he had nine Top 10 singles on the pop charts, and, more important, 12 No. 1 hits in the mellow Adult Contemporary radio format, he was always at odds with pop culture. He was not just knocked but pilloried by music critics, including those at The New York Times, who wrote him off as schlock. With his feathered hair and sparkling jumpsuits, Manilow, a few crucial years older than baby boomers, is the least-rock ’n’ roll singer to grow up in the rock era.

In retrospect, schlock was often a heteronormative code word used to dismiss gay performers as lightweight or insincere. Manilow came out in 2017 and said he’d been in a relationship with his manager, Garry Kief, since they met in 1978. (They married in 2014.) Some fans were not surprised — a photo on the cover of his 1977 album “Live” was a pretty strong hint of his sexuality — and others mocked the idea that he’d ever fooled anyone.

Years later, we’ve learned to discern great schlock from awful schlock. Manilow has recorded plenty of both: “Could It Be Magic,” “Looks Like We Made It,” “Ready to Take a Chance Again,” and “Tryin’ to Get the Feeling Again” in the former category; “Can’t Smile Without You” and “Weekend in New England” in the latter, and “I Write the Songs” and “Mandy” in both.

“I find it really heartwarming when people don’t back away from lush melodies and positive expressions,” said cabaret upstart Bridget Everett, a lifelong fan who performed a tribute to Manilow at 54 Below in 2012. “There’s a lot of hope in his songs. They spark a feeling that everything’s going to be all right.”

Even nonfans admit that his music has adhesive properties. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails once complained, “I had ‘Copacabana’ stuck in my head for a full year.”

The day after rehearsal, Manilow sat in the backroom of Sid Gold’s Request Room, a piano karaoke bar in Manhattan’s Chelsea section, took frequent hits on a white vape pen, and explained why he was making last-minute changes to his songs: “I’m nuts,” he said simply. His voice has grown huskier, but up close, his face is as smooth as an ironed sheet.

Many current pop singers leave him baffled and in despair. “I mean, some artists these days, they just stop at the end of the song,” he said. “I’ve never done that. I like big endings.”

He explained why he was tinkering with “Memory,” which he referred to as from “the dreadful show ‘Cats.’”

“I didn’t record it the way Andrew wrote it. I gave it three key changes and built it, and changed some melody notes too. When I got to the end, it was huge.” How did Lloyd Webber feel about the liberties? “He hated it. My God, he hated it,” he said with a laugh.

Manilow was born Barry Alan Pincus, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which, in his Broadway show, he refers to as a slum. He said his mother, Edna Manilow, was 19 when he was born, and he believes she married his father, Harold Kelliher, an Irish truck driver for the Schaefer brewery, only to avoid public shame. She made Harold take his uncle’s name, the more Jewish-sounding Pincus, though he went back to Kelliher after they divorced. Barry lived with his Russian immigrant grandparents Joseph and Esther while Edna worked as a secretary.

He knew his father mostly by Edna’s nickname for him: Harold the Monster. Edna’s second husband was Willie Murphy, another Schaefer driver. At 13, Barry moved in with them to an environment that helped spark his musical awakening. Murphy had an impressive array of albums: Broadway scores, classical music, jazz titans and great arrangers. Manilow learned to play the accordion, and then a cheap spinet piano.

Performing was the part of music that least interested him. When Edna took him to a Broadway musical, he stared at the orchestra, not the actors. When he heard the Beatles, he listened for what producer George Martin was doing. He idolized not stars, but arrangers, like George Gershwin and Nelson Riddle.

For three years, in his 20s, he wrote commercial jingles, which was great training: If you can pack a hook into a 30-second ad, imagine what you can do with a three-minute song. To please his mother, who had a history of alcohol problems, he overcame his reluctance and began to perform. He became Bette Midler’s pianist, music director and producer, and began singing his own songs in her show, not because he liked what he called the “pear-shaped tones” in his singing, but so the songs would be heard.

And then, disaster struck: Clive Davis, the head of Arista Records, offered him a contract. “I wasn’t really excited about it,” he said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I didn’t want to be a singer. I was on my way to becoming Nelson Riddle. I signed and said, well, it’ll never work.”

For his second Arista album, Davis brought him “Brandy,” a minor British hit that Manilow first hated (“I fought Clive constantly because I didn’t want to do outside material”), then transformed into “Mandy,” a career-launching hit. He and Davis reached a bankable compromise: Each album, Davis could bring in two songs he wanted Manilow to record. “And those two songs were the hits,” the singer says with a rueful chuckle. “Clive pushed my career into Top 40 radio, and everything went haywire.”

Though he’d never paid attention to pop music, he was suddenly its human incarnation. “When I found myself on the radio next to ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ and ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie,’ I was humiliated. Believe it or not, I was hoping it would stop,” he said.

Q: Did you ever think about walking away from it?

Q: Would you have been happier playing piano in a jazz group?

A: Happier? I like the house and the Range Rover. I love the way I live.

Q: You did network TV specials, and that made you an even bigger star. Why do that?

A: They offered it to me! Did I enjoy performing on them? No. It’s my least favorite thing to do.

Q: Is there a younger singer who performs in the same style you do, who’s an heir to your music?

A: I can’t find them. [Michael] Bublé is close. But there’s no witty lyrics anymore, or moving lyrics. There’s a lot of anger and a lot of great rhythm, and I like that. But no melody or lyrics anymore.

Q: The history of the last 100 years of music is the transition from melody to rhythm, isn’t it?

A: That’s it. That’s what I’m fighting all the time. So I went back to my Gerry Mulligan records.

Q: Do you ever think about retirement?

A: Listen, I’m as old as the [expletive] hills, but I can still hit an F natural. I think I’ll be able to keep going. But how long can this last, for God’s sake?

Q: Audiences in your shows are always giddy. When you perform, are you also having a good time?

A: I never have a good time. I’m working. I kind of bleed up there, night after night, because in order to do these songs, I’ve got to find it in my stomach. Will I be having a good time like they are? No.

It’s a mistake to think of Manilow, who left New York for California in 1978 and now lives on a 64-acre estate in Palm Springs, as anything but a New Yorker — specifically, a Brooklyn kid who grew up poor. “Don’t pick a fight with me. I learned from the best — my mother,” he said, adding, “I’m pretty hard, and the older I get, the harder I get. I’m kind of cynical, and there’s more anger in me than I ever knew.”

Before he met Kief, he said, he “never even thought about whether I was gay.” In his early 20s he was married, for a little over a year, to his high school girlfriend, Susan Deixler. “As you get older, I met people and started to see people, and liked it,” he said vaguely. “That was that.”

In a 1990 Rolling Stone profile, Manilow declared that he was living with Linda Allen, a Hollywood set designer, about whom he wrote “A Linda Song.” Whether Allen was a sham relationship for PR purposes or he dated her while also being with Kief, he won’t say.

“Don’t go too far into this,” he warned. “This is too personal for me.”

When he came out, it put him back into a public spotlight he’d evaded for decades. In the 1980s, Top 40 radio became more modern, and Manilow stopped striving for hits. For many years, he’s recorded themed albums that look back to previous eras or bygone styles, including a “duets” album with 11 singers, all of them now dead. His 2017 album “This Is My Town: Songs of New York” included six new songs he wrote or co-wrote, but many fans would like a new album with nothing but new songs.

“I’m in the middle of recording one,” he said. “Just give me a minute.”

Other fans want the comfort of his old songs. Manilow’s distinguishing talent as a singer arises from a quality more often ascribed to actors: commitment. He doesn’t sing with irony or emotional distance. He wants pop songs to feel like arias, grand and overstated.

“‘Mandy’ was a good vocal because it was so honest and vulnerable,” he said. “I’m dead serious about the songs. I mean it. Onstage, I’m always making up my imaginary partners.” In order to be committed to his songs live, he has to re-experience the emotions in real time. “I surprise myself with the stories I make up in my head while I’m singing,” he said.

When “Manilow Broadway” opened in late July (it closes Aug. 17), he no longer moved gingerly — he even threw in a few hip thrusts for comic effect. His two-hour performance included a few dance steps and some snappy one-liners, mostly about himself. He has made himself a one-man TV variety show.

Manilow sang more than 30 songs, some in a medley, because if he sang all his hits at full length, the show would end at four in the morning. In a grand showbiz tradition, he did a boffo job of seeming to enjoy himself. And he played “I Write the Songs” in its original key: F major.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/arts/music/barry-manilow-broadway.html" id="f41b2b78-9603-3c56-aebd-c575964b082f">The New York Times</a>.

Barry Manilow Just Wanted to Write the Songs. He's Still Singing Them.

NEW YORK — “What if we did ‘I Write the Songs’ in E?” Barry Manilow asked.

Guitarist Bryce Dessner asked for more drums in his monitors. A violinist wanted more piano. And singer Matt Berninger had a lead singer’s frequent request: “Can I get a little more of myself?”

Frontmen are often bigger than their voices, and Berninger, a headstrong, charming former graphic designer and creative director who vibrates with ideas and similes, is a confessed egotist. But on a new album, “I Am Easy to Find,” and a 26-minute black-and-white film of the same name soundtracked by the group, the five bring in other musicians, to see how much Berninger they can remove and still be the National. The shift was prodded by two non-musician collaborators: film director Mike Mills and Berninger’s wife, Carin Besser.

A band is a tribe, and the members of this one — Berninger, the brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner, who play guitar, and the brothers Scott and Bryan Devendorf, on bass and drums — grew up around one another outside Cincinnati. They all gravitated to New York for college, internships and jobs, formed the National in 1999 and slowly became a band closely identified with Brooklyn bohemianism and neurotic self-awareness and despair — writing songs for people who, despite their privilege and education, don’t feel safe. Their previous LP, “Sleep Well Beast,” was one of the best-reviewed records of 2017 and won them a Grammy for best alternative album.

The new album’s transformation began innocuously: In August 2017, Mills, who directed the acclaimed Annette Bening film “20th Century Women,” emailed the band’s management and suggested he direct a video for them. Then, as so often with the National, things got complicated.

The band wasn’t in the mood to start a new album, Berninger said as he sat next to his wife in a hotel lobby shortly after their Colbert rehearsal. They’d done a lot of touring. All five are in their 40s; each is married and is a father. And the members don’t always get along, as they acknowledge — Aaron Dessner and Berninger, in particular. They call their dynamic “dysfunctional democracy,” and even named a 2007 album “Boxer,” at Besser’s suggestion, because they were fighting so often.

Bryce Dessner confirmed the group “was exhausted,” in an interview with his brother Aaron, as each sat in matching hotel room armchairs. They’re identical twins — Bryce has curlier hair and a little more gray in his beard. Aaron writes most of the band’s music, sometimes with Bryce. The arrival of Mills, Bryce explained, was “a sort of serendipity.”

“Mike has a positive, disarming, optimistic disposition,” Aaron Dessner said, in a way that suggested those qualities aren’t abundant in the band.

The National was ready to take a sabbatical. Maybe the group would have fallen apart — they all have side bands, and Aaron Dessner is an in-demand producer. But Berninger sent Mills 15 fragments of songs, some with full lyrics, some as vague as a white door. When Mills got excited, the band did too. (He is credited as a producer on the album.)

Instead of making a video, Mills wrote a screenplay about the life span of a woman and cast Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl”) in the role. When the band saw a rough cut of Mills’ spare, troubling movie, they had a set of new song ideas.

They also realized that because of Berninger’s leathery baritone, the music didn’t fit the film. “If we’re telling the story of a woman’s life, wouldn’t it be interesting to hear a woman sing?” Bryce Dessner asked. So they brought in several female vocalists, including Sharon Van Etten, David Bowie’s band member Gail Ann Dorsey, and Bryce Dessner’s wife, Pauline de Lassus. They didn’t place these women in a stereotypical role as harmony singers — at times, they supplant Berninger at a song’s center.

This was a big change in style, and Aaron Dessner began to worry whether Berninger was OK with it. He texted the singer: “Matt, do you think there’s enough of you in the songs?” Berninger replied, “I’ve heard enough of myself.”

Over the months, as the Dessners kept sending more new music to Berninger, the singer burned out. “I was trying to zero in on lyrics, but I couldn’t,” he explained. “And Carin picked up the baton.”

Carin Besser, a writer and former fiction editor at The New Yorker, has no musical training. When they moved in together, Besser said, “This sort of giant microphone also moved in to the middle of the living room. He was either touring or working all the time, so I found a way to make that interesting for me, too.” Berninger first used some of her lyrics on “Boxer.” “But it always felt more like I was a prep chef or something,” she said.

She and Berninger often wrote side by side at night, and Besser would sneak into his notebooks when he wasn’t around. “I’d write down my lines, and sort of triple-star them and underline them, just ideas and options for him to try.”

As any “This Is Spinal Tap” fan knows, wives who take a creative role in a husband’s band are generally met with derision. Years ago, Berninger gave his wife a nickname: Yoko, after Yoko Ono, whose ideas about Beatles songs were not always warmly received by the band. “It’s a huge compliment,” Besser said.

As the Dessners sent more music that needed lyrics, and Berninger flagged, Besser wrote more and more. In this case, Yoko’s ideas took root.

The pair, married since 2007, have a teasing, gibing relationship, almost like a comedy duo.

“We met the old-fashioned way,” Besser said.

“In a bar,” Berninger piped in, delivering the punch line.

It was 2003, and each was day drinking with a friend at Boat, a bar in Brooklyn. They were the only four customers. Berninger asked Besser and her friend to join them for a drink. She declined. An hour later, when the bar had filled up, he asked again (“Are you coming over, or what?” he recalled saying), and this time Besser joined them.

Instead of working late at night, Berninger now wakes up before dawn, drinks tea, smokes weed and writes lyrics. On “I Am Easy to Find,” the band’s eighth album, he tried to move away from its customary mood, which he referred to as “that depressed, bitter, sludgy, angsty, drunk, tired thing.” His lyrics, which are sometimes darkly hilarious, still mull the ways in which relationships yield disappointment. “If you wanna be alone, come with me,” he sings in “Rylan,” a fan favorite.

While similar “depressed, bitter” predecessors, like Sparklehorse or Sun Kil Moon, never filled basketball arenas, the National has, oddly, become one of the biggest bands in rock.

Bryce Dessner said R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe once gave the National a bit of weary counsel: A band, he said, needs either lots of hits or none. “So we went with the none,” he said with a smile.

Bryce Dessner writes modern classical music, has two degrees from Yale and founded a festival for avant-garde music. The brothers share “an opposition to bombastic rock tropes,” Aaron Dessner said. “We prefer to play off each other in mirrored patterns and cross rhythms.” Reaching from minimalist tradition, their guitar riffs coil, claw and recur, rarely offering catharsis or resolution. The songs end where they began. If you were writing a business plan for a big rock band, you wouldn’t base it on mirrored patterns and cross rhythms.

“You go into the Gap,” Berninger said with a laugh, “and you’ll hear a bunch of songs that sound bright and connect right away. You can hear the melody in the dressing room. And then all of a sudden, you’ll hear this mumbled, murky sound — and I’m like, ‘Oh. That’s one of our songs.’

“Our music is far more popular than we ever thought it would be,” he added. “Oddball stuff does creep through sometimes: R.E.M., Tom Waits or Nick Cave.”

For years, the National trailed behind cooler New York bands: the Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio. If they hadn’t sold a song to a car company in 2006, they probably would have been too broke to go on, Berninger said. Aaron Dessner likens the band to a tortoise — they’ve taken a slow path, inch by inch, despairing thought by despairing thought.

Besser, whom the band turns to for conceptual clarity (her other nickname is the Oracle), has been changed by changing the National. She’s eager to do more songwriting, even with bands her husband is not in. “I’ve got the fever,” she admitted.

Berninger sat up straight and blinked. “You do?” he said. “What’s the name of your solo album going to be?”

This article originally appeared in <a id="6d6a3fdf-9efc-3f88-a39f-cec804d5a151" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/arts/music/the-national-i-am-easy-to-find.html">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The National is a band of five men, but on a May afternoon, they were 13 men and women. Onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, they rehearsed for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” bundled in wool caps and scarves to brace against the theater’s Arctic air conditioning. After running through a stammering new song about emotional paralysis, “You Had Your Soul With You,” the musicians requested some tweaks.

Dysfunctional? That sounds good

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Rob Tannenbaum

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