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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List-making season has arrived and with it a mad rush to define the year that is almost over. Wouldn't it be nice if critics built a mechanism for acknowledging earlier mistakes into the process? -
A recent article argued that irony dominates youth culture today, but "Thrift Store," a rising hit by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, shows how misplaced that worry may be. -
Recent live shows by some of the geezers of rock — from Neil Young to Roger Waters — have been much more than exercises in nostalgia.
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The new hour-long TV drama gets plenty about Nashville's music scene right, and one of its best features is the way it uses the duet, a classic country music form, to reveal how musical values connect to bigger ones, like honesty, loyalty and ambition. -
Writer Nelson George, who saw Teddy Pendergrass on his "Ladies Only" tour in 1978, says R. Kelly's recent shows are an effort to reconnect R&B to its most devoted fans. -
In an interview with Ann Powers the singer reflects on her twenty-year career, her new album and making set lists.
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On the new album Glad Rag Doll, Krall teams with producer T-Bone Burnett for a set of songs about love and independence that looks back to the style of the 1920s. -
The British band, which draws inspiration from American folk and Christian tradition, has become one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Its new album, Babel, will be the biggest album in the country next week. -
It's hard to know in the present what the future will sound like. History tells us that the most popular musicians don't always survive their era, but tiny gestures and innovations often influence the next generation. -
The blues guitarist and singer talks with NPR's Ann Powers about her career, her musical influences and the young musicians who have covered her songs at the Americana Music Conference.
