Tag Archives: music-features

At the dawn of the Seventies, the Beach Boys had a lot to prove. Their pop success was a thing of the past — even artistic triumphs like Pet Sounds and Wild Honey were commercial flops. The boys of summer were pushing 30 by now, bearded dads reckoning with marriage, …

“Do you remember Limited Too?” Pearl Charles asks. She’s trying to trace just how far back her love of ABBA goes, which brings her to the Nineties pre-teen clothing store. “Everything was flower power and bell-bottoms, and I feel like ‘Dancing Queen’ was huge at all the birthday parties. All …

When Keith Richards first met Gram Parsons in 1968, he felt he’d known him all his life. “There was an immediate recognition,” he wrote in his autobiography, Life. “What we could have done if we’d known each other earlier.” It’s easy to discern the influence Parsons had on Richards. Parsons …

DMX‘s first foray into major-label hip-hop was a failure. In the early 1990s, he released “Born Loser,” a loping anti-anthem for the down-and-out: “Even when I was little, nothing went my way/I got beat up and chased home from school every day,” DMX rapped. The single’s tone turns defiant — …

Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their …

Playboi Carti tells me his mood of late can be described as “punk monk.” He means it sort of holistically. The rapper has an almost religious devotion to the studio, spending every day there; his current project is the deluxe version of his recent album Whole Lotta Red. Carti says …

Come on, girls! Do you believe in Madonna? Because Lady Gaga has got something to say about “Express Yourself,” and she’s turned Madonna’s fourth-best single of 1989 into her own instant-classic club anthem, “Born This Way.” Except it’s actually much better than “Express Yourself,” because it’s faster, with Gaga chanting …

Prince, Sign O’ the Times: Deluxe Edition (Warner) On this 1987 masterpiece, Prince’s second double LP in less than five years, the R&B futurist responded to the serial crises in his personal life — the end of an affair; the firing of his band, the Revolution; escalating wartime with his …

Steve Perry believes that any great song should be able to withstand a campfire test. “You take any song and sit near a campfire with an acoustic guitar and sing it, the song should be able to survive,” says the former Journey frontman. “It should work just as a melody …

It’s 7 a.m. in Venice, and Matt Berninger has already been up for four and a half hours. Why? The National frontman and his wife, Carin Besser, are still polishing up songs for Cyrano, a years-long musical project based on the 1897 play about the life of a 17th-century French …