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 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. -
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?
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The late John Prine was awarded artist of the year, and Black Pumas and fiddler Brittany Haas took home hardware during the abbreviated show.
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The music of this quintessential Nashville songwriter and lifelong independent spirit makes room for the wide range of emotions that careen through people as they stumble and dance through life.
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Spotify "data alchemist" Glenn McDonald has been regularly scanning the platform for new songs addressing the crisis, updating his master playlist along the way.
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NPR Music's Ann Powers and Rodney Carmichael discuss albums they're looking forward to, as well as the artists they're begging to come back.
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Carlile's tribute concert established a new approach to canonizing Mitchell's work. And in a video produced for the concert, musicians and friends share their favorite lyrics by Mitchell.
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The track, recorded with Colombian singer Maluma, channels "Despacito," with a nod toward Madonna's 1986 song "La Isla Bonita."
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One day after performing the songs in Nashville, the country supergroup has released all three digitally ahead of the release of its new album, Interstate Gospel.
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Her music has been sung at marches and political rallies, heard in churches and on chain restaurant jukeboxes. Everything popular music can be is there in the songs of Aretha Franklin.
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Aretha Franklin died of pancreatic cancer Thursday. Her hits, from the 1960s to the 1980s, helped define the era. NPR's Noel King talks to NPR music critic Ann Powers about the singer's legacy.
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The results are in for our reader poll, and your picks for the greatest albums made by women deeply modify and sometimes openly challenge our original Turning the Tables list.
