September 26, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic attempts to express her feelings about one of her most personally beloved musical acts.

Photo of The Roches performing on 'Saturday Night Live' in 1979

Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

A good life has room for all kinds of love, from the dedicated kind that anchors decades to a fleeting fascination’s midsummer thrill. This is true in music fandom as it is between people. My own enthusiasms are both constant and shifting, determined by anything from a hook that feels like an illicit kiss to the full embrace a longtime favorite album offers. And then there are the very few artists who, despite the distance between us, feel like intimates. I’m a critic, what I do is explore and explain why music matters; yet my attachment to these artists is often the hardest to express.

That’s how I feel about The Roches, the harmonizing trio whose songs, weird-sister twists on folk music, took me from teenage starriness to full adulthood. I could say that no one has ever harmonized like Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche, who used counterpoint, slanted lines, dissonance and the nonsensical flourishes pioneered by earlier vocal harmony groups like the Ames Brothers and The Fleetwoods (whose classics they covered) to fully express the heart’s complexities. I could tell you that their songs are funnier, more poignant, weirder and even crueler in their honesty than the greatest hits of Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, the men who got them interested in songcraft in the first place. I can place them in history, telling how they grew up as questioning inheritors of second wave feminism, and geographically, within a Greenwich Village bohemia where punk met theater met brownstone-stoop-sale upcycling.

But none of these explanations really capture my feelings about The Roches. Their music is essential to my being, like certain places I always go back to, or certain people who have me forever. How can I really tell you about the way the air smells in that cove on Puget Sound where I spent so many teenage hours dreaming? Or how it feels to sit across the table from my best friend, laughing, or to recall the half-cocked grin of an old flame? Loving something or someone so intimately over time becomes particular in a way that the precision of analysis defies. You know it when you feel it, when it grabs you.

I can’t keep The Roches to myself, though, and I wouldn’t want to. Nearly 20 years after the group made its last recording and nearly a decade after Maggie died of breast cancer, I’ve noticed new fans emerging, especially among younger musicians. In recent years many artists have covered the trio’s signature “Hammond Song,” an open-throated yet mysterious lament about the family turmoil caused when, in their early 20s, Maggie and Terre left their East Coast home to join a Louisiana martial-arts commune. (Hey, it was 1975.) The cover released this summer by the London quartet Wolf Alice joins others by Fleet Foxes, Whitney, Indigo Girls and scores of lesser-known ensembles and choirs scattered across YouTube and TikTok.

“Hammond Song” is one of those songs that is bigger than it seems, a very personal account that explodes into universals. Maggie's lyrics and The Roches’ cascading harmonies capture the disappointment, fear and sorrow that arises when a tie that felt invincible is broken; the sustained chords the sisters create, with no showy vibrato, open up those feelings until they become borderless, fading and regenerating without end. So many different kinds of longing circle around each other in this vast space. Anyone who’s loved and lost, or loved and held on desperately, can relate to it.

“Hammond Song” is in the repertoire of Roses for the Roches, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter supergroup of Kelly Hogan, Nora O’Connor and Sima Cunningham. I was lucky to see the group perform with special guest Lucy Wainwright Roche (Suzzy’s daughter and a gifted artist in her own right) at the Evanston Folk Festival a couple of weeks ago; we also had a public conversation about what makes Roches music so special. We discussed the musical sleight-of-hand of arrangements that blend doo wop, Broadway, folk and punk influences; all three sisters’s ability to blend pathos with humor in ways that genuinely reflect life instead of romanticizing it, and the importance of the early Roches albums in helping define a new wave of women’s liberation and self-determination. I walked away from that panel and the group’s performance with tears in my eyes, so happy to see the sisters’ legacy well-tended. I also felt fired up to spread The Roches gospel again.

Luckily, there’s a new boxed set to help me do it. Cherry Red Records has assembled five of the trio’s 11 studio albums as Runs in the Family, a handsome package that includes its best-known recordings, for the Warner Bros. label, alongside an expanded edition of the late-period delight Can We Go Home Now. The box includes a booklet full of previously unseen photographs and commentary from fans like Linda Rondstadt, Christopher Guest and visual artist Nina Katchadourian. It’s currently only available on this year’s trendy format, CD, though all the tracks can be found in other ways on most streaming services.

My public service as a true Roches believer is this 20-song playlist, which will prove to any curious ear that there’s so much more to The Roches than “Hammond Song.” Listen for the sketch comedy of “Mr. Sellack,” an evergreen account of the indignities artists face working side hustles. Laugh and cry with Maggie as she free-associates heartbreak in “Losing True,” and with Suzzy sighing through a crush in “Love to See You.” Thrill to Terre’s high notes on the sisters’s rendition of the Irish folk song “Factory Girl.” Enjoy the unparalleled clear-headedness of “The Married Men,” the best country song ever about adultery, and Maggie's way with a mystery in “The Scorpion Lament” — is it the story of a sex worker, or a woman just desperately trying to live free? And if you ever need a pick-me-up, just blast their anthem “Keep on Doing What You Do / Jerks on the Loose.”

I’ve included plenty from the trio’s no-skips self-titled 1979 debut, but also later gems like Terre’s “Christlike” — a song about vulnerability that all of us could learn from these days — and Maggie’s hilarious ode “My Winter Coat,” which is about what it says it’s about (always one layer of a Roches song) but also somehow about living in New York and being a certain age and not having all that much disposable income. I once saw The Roches perform that song to Maggie’s long down jacket, which she’d draped elegantly over a microphone stand. God (or whatever you call your higher power) is in the details, right? She’s there in The Roches, too, in that love you can’t quite explain.

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Here are some things that won my heart this week — maybe they’ll win yours

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I did, in fact, try to explain my love of The Roches not too long ago on the podcast You, Me & an Album, hosted by the lovely Al Melchior, who loves both music and baseball. And Terre Roche herself liked what I said! BE STILL MY BEATING HEART.
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