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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Maggie Rogers' voice allows the duo to play with perspective and, in doing so, refreshes the template of Zach Bryan's laments.
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Jones lets the sun shine in on this jazz standard, but maintains a pensive undertone.
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One of three new boygenius tracks, this Phoebe Bridgers-led song captures the feeling of being both carried forward and entrapped by love.
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DeMent contemplates her powerlessness in the face of her own mortality — she won't be around to see the changes today's climate activism might accomplish.
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NPR's pop critic shares her favorite albums of 2022. -
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. -
NPR's pop critic and correspondent shares her favorite albums of this year. -
The Roches' blend of distinctly slanted harmonies, vaudevillian humor and poignancy can all be heard in this Seductive Reasoning outtake.
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In Goodman's songs, music is a route to both survival and transcendence. Watch her perform three powerful tracks that confront grief and stump for understanding.
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On Swift's 10th and most challenging album, she and producer Jack Antonoff push her voice in new directions, rethinking the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shaking off old habits.
