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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This song's story always must be told and heard again; we have not yet moved beyond the need for its witnessing. -
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. -
Williams's catalog has, across more than a dozen albums, shaped Americana. Here's a map of her career's many high points. -
Spotify "data alchemist" Glenn McDonald has been regularly scanning the platform for new songs addressing the crisis, updating his master playlist along the way. -
Roberta Flack is only solo artist to win two consecutive Record of the Year Grammys and she helped usher in an enduring style of R&B. Could she be pop music's most under-appreciated influence? -
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. -
Emerging as a major pop star in 2019, Eilish is emblematic of her moment: a rebel who is also a popular kid, a loud cultural presence emanating from a carefully maintained private place. -
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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These women made some of the most significant music of the past century. They originated genres, broke political boundaries, nurtured generations of followers and in most cases, became icons.
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In trying to unpack one of the a stranger periods of Bob Dylan's strange life, Scorsese had to meet the bard on his home turf of half-truths and obfuscation.
