Tag Archives: music-features

In October 2017,Candi Staton was at a Nashville recording studio, working on a new song called “The Prize Is Not Worth the Pain.” As her band stretched out the disco-funk tune into an extended jam, the singer began improvising phrases and one-liners. At the very end, Staton eventually arrived at …

Wilco recently announced that they will be going on hiatus. The reason: Drummer Glenn Kotche’s wife, Miiri, got a Fulbright Scholarship to study medical device design in Finland. “It just seemed like a good reason to honor her and honor his commitment to the band: kind of allow them to …

Alina Baraz has released just two EPs of her feathery, crazily calm music — like R&B buried under a layer of permafrost — but hasn’t produced anything that could be considered a mainstream hit. And yet she has amassed over 1.2 billion streams, many more than artists who are multiple …

Louis Forster of the excellent Australian indie-pop band the Goon Sax started writing songs when he was seven years old, right after he got his grade-school-aged mind blown by Green Day’s American Idiot. He kept at it for years, but he never really felt comfortable sharing his work with anyone …

Lars Ulrich knows Metallica’s reputation. “Back in the day there was a lot made about Metallica and ‘Alcoholica’ and all of our drinking habits,” he says. “But we didn’t have any money to drink anything other than white-label shitty beer and vodka. It wasn’t until we got to L.A. to …

The only time I ever caught Rachid Taha live, at the Lincoln Center Arts Festival in 2002, I told my diary that the French-Algerian singer reminded me of another brazen rock usurper: Pink. An impiously cocky little troublemaker sporting a full panoply of grand gestures to go with his vinyl …

There’s a secret behind the last three decades of pop music: Writer-producers run the show. This is partially a numbers game — Whitney Houston had an inimitable voice, but Babyface had a hand in over 200 R&B hits, so who exerted more influence over the direction of a genre? When …

Last month, Halsey and Khalid released a new song, “Eastside,” with a silent partner: producer and songwriter Benny Blanco, who’s credited as a third lead artist on the single (and co-stars in its video) even though he doesn’t audibly sing on it. For Blanco, who’s been crafting pop smashes at …

“Just for once, we couldn’t find an anniversary,” Nick Mason says with a laugh, explaining the imminent arrival of Unattended Luggage, a new box set of the Pink Floyd drummer’s solo work, on August 31st. The three-disc reissue, in vinyl and CD editions, collates Mason’s eclectic releases under his own …

As anyone who’s seen the excellent 2012 documentary Beware of Mr. Baker knows, the wildman Cream drummer isn’t the easiest person to get along with. He’s moody, easy to anger, extremely opinionated and prone to sudden flashes of violence. It’s therefore not very surprising that his son Kofi doesn’t hold …