Music Features

As Fred Goodman makes clear in Why Lhasa de Sela Matters (University of Texas Press), the late world-music troubadour never made it easy on anyone. Start with her music. Lhasa (as she called herself professionally) was born and raised in America but became a one-stop global musician: Goodman accurately describes …

Long before Donald Trump was our omnipresent, problematic president, he was New York City’s omnipresent, problematic gadfly. He flexed his supposed billions to attend any number of events around town, from WWE WrestleManias at Madison Square Garden to baby-boomer rock concerts. In 2008, he went to so many Neil Young …

When Yes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, the surviving members of the band lined up behind a podium at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and delivered the sorts of speeches you’d expect from veteran musicians who had waited decades for this moment of …

This interview originally appeared in the April 17, 1997 issue of Rolling Stone You knew he was tall, but when Ric Ocasek walks out of the Blue Room at the Chung King House of Metal, in New York, you realize he’s impossibly tall — and reedlike to the point of …

Decades before Greg Kurstin was producing hits for Adele, Paul McCartney and the Foo Fighters, he was a preteen Van Halen diehard. “I saw them on their Diver Down tour,” he remembers. “I got to see them play ‘Unchained,’ and that was amazing. I was a massive Van Halen fan …

Fifty years ago, a handful of milestone albums set the tone for rock of the following decade. Crosby, Stills & Nashinitiated a fresh approach to harmonies and looser group names; the eponymous debut by the Allman Brothers Band laid the foundation for the Southern rock of the Seventies. And setting …

Listen an audio version of this story below: Robbie Robertson has seen a lot in six decades of rock & roll, but nothing quite like what happened at the Toronto Pop Festival in 1969. He and the Band were on a bill that included the New Orleans studio musician and …

Robert Smith wasn’t ready for the full 4K experience when he sat down to watch a concert film of the Cure‘s stunning 2018 Hyde Park concert. “The first close-up of a human face I saw was me,” he says. “It was quite terrifying.” The recent Rock and Roll Hall of …

Around 2009, no one probably foresaw that the Disney stars of that moment would be leading the pop conversation a decade later. These days, the Jonas Brothers are selling out arenas around the globe, Miley Cyrus is still at the forefront of pop conversations, Selena Gomez continues to chart Hot …

Any time you catch a DJ set from Will Holland, who spins and produces as Quantic, there’s sure to be at least one transfixing moment on the dancefloor. At the small Brooklyn club C’Mon Everybody in 2016, that came when Holland dropped a reggae cover of Tammi Terrell’s “All I …