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 Music critic Ann Powers reviews a new docuseries called "The Beatles: Get Back". It centers around hours of unseen footage of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. -
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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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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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? -
Taylor Swift surprised her fans and released a new album Friday. Folklore is her eighth studio album.
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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. -
In a new song and video, Anderson .Paak and video director Dave Meyers take a hushed look at the lives amidst the movement.
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NPR Music correspondents Ann Powers and Sidney Madden recommend a few favorite livestreaming performance series to check out while in-person concerts are on hold. -
As part of NPR's series "One-Hit Wonders / Second-Best Songs," NPR Music's Ann Powers nominates "Jesse" by Janis Ian. She's known mostly for her 1975 hit "At Seventeen."