For the First Time Ever, the Tribute in Light Goes Live With Music

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the twin beams of light are getting a live soundtrack for the first time.

Since 2002, the Tribute in Light has been defined by its silence. Two vertical columns of eighty-eight xenon spotlights, arranged in the exact footprints of the World Trade Center towers, have climbed four miles into the New York sky every September 11 without a single note of accompanying music — a memorial built entirely on light, absence, and the shape of what used to be there. That silence has been part of the point. It has let the beams speak for themselves, and for two and a half decades, nobody involved in producing the tribute felt the need to change that.

This year, on the 25th anniversary, that changes. Organizers are adding a live music component to the tribute for the first time in its history, a decision that reportedly took years of internal discussion before anyone signed off on it. Performing live from the base of the light beams tonight are country star Lainey Wilson, New York rock-and-pop institution Cyndi Lauper, and John Ondrasik, who performs and records as Five for Fighting. It’s a deliberately generational spread: Wilson represents country music at its current commercial peak, having spent the past several years becoming one of Nashville’s most decorated new stars; Lauper has been a New York fixture since the early 1980s, with a catalog and a personal history in the city that predates the attacks by two decades; and Ondrasik occupies a strange, specific place in the emotional history of 9/11 itself — his song “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” became one of the most-played and most-requested songs on American radio in the weeks after the attacks, without ever being written about them directly.

That last detail is worth sitting with. Ondrasik has said in past interviews that the song was written and recorded before September 2001, and that its adoption as an unofficial anthem of resilience in the attacks’ aftermath was never something he set out to create — it simply arrived at the right emotional moment, on the radio, at a time when the country badly needed something to hold onto. Twenty-five years later, having him perform live at the actual site the song became associated with closes a loop that started entirely by accident.

The tribute isn’t limited to Lower Manhattan tonight. Uptown, the American Symphony Orchestra is presenting a free, unticketed memorial concert as part of its ongoing Bryant Park Picnic Performances series, an outdoor program that’s spent years bringing full orchestral concerts to public parks at no cost to attendees. Tonight’s program pairs Aaron Copland with Gustav Mahler — Copland for his distinctly American, open-prairie orchestral voice, the same musical language that’s scored everything from ballets to NASA footage to national moments of both celebration and mourning; Mahler for symphonies that spend as much time in grief and yearning as they do in triumph, making his music one of the more natural fits in the entire classical repertoire for a night built around remembrance.

Taken together, the two performances represent a genuine break from a quarter-century of precedent. New York has always marked this night with light and silence. Tonight, for the first time, it’s also marking it with sound — deliberately, publicly, and free for anyone who wants to be there.

Sources: iHeart, American Symphony Orchestra

Alice Cooper & Criss Angel Team Up for a Vegas Residency

Las Vegas has spent the last two decades turning into the default retirement-proof stage for touring legends who’ve decided they’d rather stop chasing airports and let the audience come to them instead. Alice Cooper — a man who’s been staging elaborate theatrical horror-shows on stage since the early 1970s, complete with guillotines, straightjackets, and a boa constrictor that’s become as much a bandmate as a prop — fits that residency model about as naturally as any act working today. This fall, he’s making it official, announcing a series of residency shows in Las Vegas.

What makes this particular residency unusual is the co-headliner. Criss Angel built his own career on large-scale stage illusion and street-level “impossible” stunts, most famously through his long-running Mindfreak franchise, and later through his own Cryptic residency show in Las Vegas. Pairing a shock-rock theatrical legend with a working illusionist isn’t just a scheduling convenience — both performers have spent their careers treating the stage itself as the trick, which suggests these shows are being built as genuine collaborative spectacle rather than two separate sets on a shared bill.

The run also marks the return of guitarist Nita Strauss to Cooper’s touring band. Strauss spent years as Cooper’s lead guitarist, building a reputation during that stretch as one of the most technically respected guitar players working in hard rock, before stepping away to front her own solo instrumental career and take on other high-profile touring gigs. Her return gives longtime Cooper fans a reunion on top of the Cooper-Angel pairing itself — a residency with two separate reasons to show up.

Charli XCX Announces a Fall UK & Europe Run

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly Charli XCX’s last couple of years have reshaped how people talk about her career. After more than a decade spent as a critical favorite and hitmaker-for-hire — writing and shaping hits for other pop stars while her own albums built a devoted but comparatively smaller following — she became the center of a genuine cultural moment, one big enough that its signature color became shorthand for an entire summer’s aesthetic. That kind of crossover doesn’t happen to many artists twice in a career, let alone once, and it’s completely reset the scale she’s now touring at.

The newly announced Fall “Music, Fashion, Film” tour, stretching across the UK and Europe, follows her North American arena run and leans into the same multi-hyphenate branding that’s defined this era of her career. Charli has spent years working across music video direction, fashion collaborations, and now film, and framing the tour explicitly around all three disciplines signals that these shows are being built as full sensory productions rather than a standard album-cycle victory lap.

There’s also a homecoming element worth noting. Charli is British, and bringing this specific version of the show — at this scale, after this kind of year — back to UK and European stages carries a different weight than the North American leg did. Home audiences are getting the full-scale version of a moment that’s largely played out on American charts and American festival stages over the past year.

Harry Styles Breaks His Live Hiatus for 2027

Styles wrapped his sprawling Love On Tour run having played to millions of fans across several years and continents, in a run widely regarded as one of the most successful pop tours of its era — the kind of run that would normally be followed fairly quickly by another cycle. Instead, he stepped almost entirely out of the touring spotlight, turning his attention toward film work and largely avoiding the kind of high-visibility public performances that had defined the previous several years of his career.

That gap has done exactly what gaps like it tend to do: it’s fueled a steady stream of speculation about whether Styles would return to touring at the same scale, scale down entirely, or step away from music as a primary focus altogether. Today’s announcement answers that question directly. Styles has revealed a wave of global tour dates for 2027, breaking a hiatus that had stretched long enough to start to feel, to some fans, like it might be permanent.

Specific dates and routing are still emerging, but the framing — a “massive wave” of global shows — suggests this isn’t a scaled-back return. It reads instead like an artist picking back up at the exact scale he left off at: one of the biggest solo live draws in pop, with a fan base that has spent more than a year waiting for exactly this news.

Sources: Pollstar, Consequence, Pitchfork

Viral Sensation Angine de Poitrine Makes Its American TV Debut

Every few years, an act built entirely out of internet virality manages to cross the line into legitimate mainstream television booking, and this week it’s happening to a French-Canadian duo whose entire identity is built around instruments made of cardboard. Angine de Poitrine — a name that translates roughly to “chest pain,” which tells you a little about the group’s sense of humor — built an online following through short clips of homemade, hand-built instruments tuned to microtonal scales, meaning intervals that fall between the notes of standard Western tuning.

That’s a genuinely unusual sound to build a viral following around. Microtonal music has existed at the edges of experimental and academic composition for a very long time, but it’s rarely the kind of thing that translates into short-form video virality, let alone a booking on one of American television’s most-watched late-night programs. The duo has been confirmed as the musical guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon this coming Monday, September 14 — their first appearance on American network television.

It’s a booking that says as much about the state of late-night music bookings as it does about the duo itself. Streaming and short-form video have increasingly become the actual farm system for what used to be handled entirely by radio and touring, and a cardboard-instrument microtonal duo landing a mainstream network slot is about as clean an example of that shift as currently exists.

Sources: Live For Live Music, Instagram

Alison Krauss & Union Station Cancel Their Entire Fall Tour

Alison Krauss has spent more than three decades building one of the most decorated careers in American roots music, with a voice that’s become synonymous with a certain kind of controlled, crystalline clarity rarely matched in bluegrass or Americana. That voice is also the entire reason today’s news lands as hard as it does: Krauss & her longtime band Union Station have canceled their entire upcoming fall tour, citing a strict medical directive requiring Krauss to undergo a prolonged period of vocal rest.

Vocal rest directives of this severity are not handed down lightly. For a singer whose entire reputation rests on precision and control rather than raw power, doctors ordering a full tour cancellation rather than a handful of postponed dates suggests this is being treated as a serious, if hopefully temporary, medical situation rather than routine caution ahead of a demanding run of shows.

Union Station’s touring calendar has been a fixture of the bluegrass and Americana circuit for years, and a full cancellation removes a significant run of dates from a genre that, as covered elsewhere in tonight’s issue, is already dealing with a difficult touring economy for anyone outside the biggest headliners. No rescheduled dates have been announced. Ticket holders should watch for official refund and rebooking information directly from the tour rather than secondary resale platforms.

Sources: Rolling Stone, Live For Live Music

Cody Tyler & the Gypsy Evangelists at Secondhand Ranch

Not every night of live music needs a stadium or a headline to matter, and tonight’s booking at Secondhand Ranch is a good reminder of that. Local favorite country outfit Cody Tyler & the Gypsy Evangelists take the stage for an intimate show with a five-dollar cover — the kind of low-barrier, small-room night that keeps a regional live music scene actually functioning between the bigger touring dates that dominate headlines.

Shows like this rarely get written up outside of local listings, but they’re the backbone of any healthy live music ecosystem: a place for a working local band to build an audience one night at a time, and a place for fans to hear something new without the cost or crowd of an arena show.

Source: Bandsintown

Together on the Battleship Takes Over the USS New Jersey

The Battleship New Jersey Museum & Memorial, permanently docked in Camden, is one of the largest battleships ever built and typically spends its days hosting tours, school groups, and military history programming. Tomorrow, that changes entirely: the deck becomes a multi-stage venue for Together on the Battleship, a house and techno festival built around one of the more unlikely venue choices in the entire regional festival calendar.

Pairing electronic dance music with a decommissioned World War II-era warship isn’t a combination that happens often, which is exactly what’s made this event build a following of its own over the past few years — equal parts music festival and genuinely strange, memorable setting. For anyone in the area looking for something outside the usual amphitheater-or-arena rotation, this is about as far outside it as local options get.

Source: PhillyBurbs

Tickets Moving Fast for XPoNential Music Festival

WXPN’s flagship weekend has built a reliable reputation over the years as one of the region’s strongest showcases for Americana, roots rock, and songwriter-driven music, and this year’s lineup looks to be living up to that standard. Dawes brings the kind of warm, Laurel Canyon-indebted songwriting that’s made them festival mainstays for well over a decade; Little Feat carries genuine Southern rock and boogie lineage stretching back to the early 1970s; and Devon Gilfillian adds a soul and R&B-rooted voice to a bill that otherwise leans heavily rock and Americana.

With the festival now just over a week away, tickets are reportedly moving fast enough that anyone still on the fence should treat this as a closing window rather than a standing option. For a festival built entirely around songwriting depth rather than headliner spectacle, that kind of demand says a lot about how strong this particular lineup has landed with the local audience.

Billy Strings: Ionia Freak Fair, Live From Ionia, MI

Every week, New Music Fridays hands the Friday Night Lights slot over to a freshly recorded live release, and tonight’s pick is one of the more personally loaded bookings the show has aired all year. Billy Strings has spent close to a decade turning flatpicked bluegrass guitar into arena and festival headliner material, dragging a genre that used to live almost entirely in small rooms and regional festival circuits into rooms most bluegrass acts never get near.

Ionia Freak Fair was recorded live at the Ionia County Fairgrounds in Strings’ own hometown of Ionia, Michigan, on August 28, 2026 — the exact release date of his new studio album, So Much for Goodbyes. Bringing a hometown festival together on the same day a new album drops is a deliberate, high-stakes bit of scheduling, and by all accounts the show delivered on the occasion, blending a full live run through the new record with the kind of hometown energy that only comes from playing for the people who watched an artist’s career start from nothing.

Tonight’s broadcast brings that entire night to Live Jam listeners, airing 9:00 PM to 11:45 PM EST — a rare chance to hear a genuinely full-circle homecoming show exactly as it happened on the fairgrounds where it was recorded.

Source: Live Jam Radio