| May 9, 2026 
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I like to see pop concerts multiple times — for serotonin, yes, but also to try to figure them out. So I can’t fathom why I caught one of the best I’ve ever seen only once: Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour, a masterly live-music spectacle where 90 percent of the spectacle is simply Eilish herself. This week, the 3-D movie version of the concert, which she made with the director James Cameron, arrived, underscoring what had blown me away the first time and revealing a lot more: the weightiness and yet incredible lightness of Eilish onstage, zooming around the arena floor and pausing for stretches of stunning stillness; the quality of her songwriting, and her vocals (especially with the sprinting and bouncing); and of course the thing the film most wanted us to notice, the role her fans play in the experience. (Onscreen, they are around 30 percent of the spectacle, and in a callback to last week’s Louder, I can scarcely recall a face that wasn’t streaked with tears.) Pop docs like to remind us how much rests on one person’s shoulders, but on Eilish’s stage there are no dancers or distractions — the point of the show is purposeful focus. The film similarly doesn’t take many excursions, but I loved it as a pure distillation of the live experience, and I would take any opportunity to have her grand epics (“The Greatest,” “Happier Than Ever”) blasted into my face. You can read more about the making of the movie here, and our critic’s review here. Our biggest features this week also centered on musicians known for their stage work: Grayson Haver Currin spent time with Peter Frampton (can you even say his name without “Comes Alive!” attached?), who is grappling with a progressive muscular disease, making music with his son and very much at peace: “In my mind, I’m more successful than I’ve ever been — because I like myself, I like what I do.” And Jon Pareles gave us a beautiful portrait of Taj Mahal, productive as ever at nearly 84, who told him, “Jazz will give you back your mind, reggae will give you back your body, but the blues will give you back your soul. That’s why they ain’t goin’ nowhere.” |
