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.
-
NPR's Juana Summers speaks with music critic Ann Powers about NPR's interactive "Best Songs of 2023" online tool.
-
PJ Harvey's new album, I Inside The Old Year Dying, builds off of a narrative poem she wrote about a year in the life of a 9-year-old girl in a fictional town in western England.
-
Listening to Kesha's new album, Gag Order, you can't help but think about all she's been through in the past 10 years.
-
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with NPR music critic Ann Powers on the rise of interpolation in the increasingly litigious music industry and the line between nostalgia and theft.
-
Tonight's Grammy Awards may be big for Beyoncé and her album "Renaissance." The new artist category is also one to watch with bluegrass, jazz and hip-hop - even a rock band from Italy.
-
After Friday's Supreme Court decision, artists from around the world spent the following days sharing their reactions and plans for the immediate future. -
Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the 1960s girl group The Ronettes, has died at 78 after a bout with cancer. She recorded a string of pop hits including "Walking In The Rain" and "Be My Baby."
-
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.
-
Welcome 2 America, the first posthumous album from Prince after his death in 2016, was released Friday.
-
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?
