Music worth listening to

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Friday, March 7th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: some of the year’s most spiritually provocative music.

Popular music has long been dismissed as faddish, or sensational or shallow— sometimes all three! But WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza says there’s more to it than that. If you know where to look, you’ll find songs with real depth and meaning.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was accomplished, talented, and aristocratically bred.She had the world on a string at age 21 when she experienced an existential crisis after she let the offer of a music scholarship in London slip through her fingers. When the dust settled, she had instead committed herself to the life of an Ethiopian Orthodox nun against her family’s wishes. And she spent the first decade of that time barefoot because she’d been told that the grounds of the monastery were sanctified by the blood of Christ.

Guèbrou died in 2023, but her music lives on. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru Played by Maya Dunietz & String Ensemble, Live in Paris features the Israeli pianist Maya Dunietz. She has been performing Guèbrou’s music for more than a decade, and on this album she adds four violinists, two cellists, and a double bassist to Guèbrou’s solo-piano sound. As one might expect, the dimensions that those additions bring to “Spring Ode” , “Evening Breeze,” and “Ballad of the Spirits” give those ruminatively meandering pieces an almost “classical” formality.

SOUNDBITE: Excerpt from “Ballad of the Spirits” by Maya Dunietz & String Ensemble

With the album Another Mississippi Sunday Morning, we go from music originating in an Ethiopian convent to music originating in the American prison known as “Parchman Farm.” The music is credited to singers and musicians collectively known as Parchman Prison Prayer. Another Mississippi Sunday Morning picks up where its 2023 predecessor Some Mississippi Sunday Morning left off, with 13 additional informal, untutored, mostly a cappella, and totally gospel vocal performances by inmates at the maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Yes, the men doing the singing (or, in some cases, the rapping or the speaking) apparently deserve incarceration. And, also yes, their crimes were most likely heinous. But they’re still human. Ministering to them is a condition of being a sheep,not a goat. And the redemption heard in their voices can break your heart.

SOUNDBITE: Excerpt from “Grace Will Lead Me On” by Parchman Prison Prayer

Next is Cover Story, the new collection of other people’s songs by the veteran gospel singer Russ Taff. It’s soulful, bare-bones, and eclectic.And it’s already being favorably compared to the stripped-down, late-career series of recordings that Rick Rubin produced for Johnny Cash. It isn’t Taff’s first all-covers project. That honor goes to his 1991 album Under Their Influence. But that one was an all-gospel-standards affair. Cover Story begins that way with Blind Willie Johnson’s century-old gospel blues “Tear This Building Down,” but it ends with 21st-century CCM by Andy Gullahorn and All Sons & Daughters. Along the way we also hear Taff’s take on songs by Simon & Garfunkel, Bill Withers, Bob Dylan, U2, Depeche Mode, the National, Duran Duran, and Prince.

What Taff and his producers were looking for was material that accurately mapped the ups and downs of his life, a subject that has become well known thanks to the 2018 documentary, I Still Believe. It explored Taff’s decades-long struggle with alcohol and the grace by which Taff finally came out on top. Heard as a kind of belated soundtrack, Cover Story’s material makes perfect sense.

SOUNDBITE: Excerpt from “When Love Comes to Town” by Russ Taff.

Finally, we have the recording that inspired the January Forbes headline “Ringo Starr Charts the First No. 1 Album of his Solo Career.” Alas, the details regarding that Ringo Starr album, Look Up, are more modest: The only charts that it has topped are the Americana and the country charts in the U.K. Still as the Fab Four member with the spottiest track record and an 84-year old to boot, he deserves an attaboy for being number one anywhere.

He couldn’t have done so, however, without a lot of help from his friends, most notably T Bone Burnett, who wrote and produced most of the songs. Burnett’s Rolodex also no doubt helped in enlisting the likes of Alison Krauss, Larkin Poe, Greg Leisz, Colin Linden, and David Mansfield. Burnett also wrote the title cut, which is as close to outright gospel as anything he has written in years. One couplet goes “No matter where you place in the human race, / there is mercy. There is grace.” True—and especially cool coming from a Beatle.

SOUNDBITE: Excerpt from “Look Up” by Ringo Starr

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.