P!nk

Alecia Beth Moore, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 1979, turned a sharp tongue and an acrobat’s body into one of the most durable careers in modern pop. She arrived in 2000 as an R&B singer on Can’t Take Me Home, then immediately refused the lane: M!ssundaztood, written largely with 4 Non Blondes’ Linda Perry, rebuilt her as a rock-leaning pop confessional, brash and bruised at the same time. That tension, the party song that is secretly a sad song, became her signature.

She is a singles machine who keeps making albums that hang together: Funhouse out of a divorce, The Truth About Love out of a marriage trying to survive itself, Beautiful Trauma and Trustfall extending the run two decades deep. Along the way she became one of the great live performers of her era, singing full takes while suspended on cables high over an arena. What holds it together is the voice and the nerve: a belter who writes like she has nothing to lose and performs like she has everything to prove. Start with the record where the warmth and the wreckage sit closest together.