The Sexy, Multi-Dimensional Genius of Roberta Flack

Cannonball with Wesley Morris

The New York Times

News Commentary, News, Arts, Society & Culture

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2026

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wesley has a practice as a new year begins of saying goodbye to those who won’t be coming with us. He could have easily done an episode on any number of household names. He could have done the same with people who weren’t the biggest names, yet still loomed large for many. But out of all the artists who passed in 2025, Wesley decides to dedicate time to Roberta Flack. The critic and scholar Daphne A. Brooks, a friend of Wesley’s, joins him to reflect on treasured moments in Flack’s music. They reminisce on the powerful range of her discography, the quiet it kept and the fire it sparked in others.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Wesley Morris and this is Cannonball today.
0:14.6	Strumming my pain with his fingers.
0:24.0	I... fingers. I have a kind of practice around this time of year of paying my respects to the people in my
0:30.9	life who will not be coming with us into the next year.
0:34.9	Some of those people I knew.
0:37.0	Some of those people did work that I knew. And part of paying my
0:40.9	respects to those people, the artists I love, part of mourning them, is to celebrate what they made.
0:47.9	This year, I could have easily devoted entire episodes to giants in their field. It would have
0:52.9	been cool, for instance, to do a whole Frank
0:55.5	Gary episode where we just tore the buildings he designed and talk about what was so cool and
1:00.8	controversial about them. I'm an architect. I'm not an artist, but I don't know if there's no
1:05.2	line in my opinion. So I don't know where that is. I mean, the artists are architects, and architects are artists.
1:13.1	David Lynch's movies probably each need their own individual episode.
1:17.1	You know, I always say film is the thing.
1:20.7	The film is the thing.
1:22.5	Diane Keaton, what a life.
1:24.7	I mean, what a career.
1:26.2	I think it would have been really fun to try to balance the meaning of that career on, I'm going to say it, baby boom.
1:35.8	What? Are you telling me that I inherited a baby from a cousin I haven't seen since 1954? No, I know, no way.
1:44.7	Rob Reiner, oh my God.
1:47.9	I mean, look, he may not have made the best movies,
1:50.9	but he certainly made some of your favorite ones.
	...

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