Tag Archives: music-features

Enough books have been written about the Grateful Dead over the years to fill a small library, but nearly all of them wrap up with the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. Veteran San Francisco Chronicle writer Joel Selvin takes the novel approach of beginning his upcoming book Fare Thee …

In February 2016, Beyoncé released “Formation” without warning. “That was a culture shock,” remembers Mike Will Made-It, who co-wrote and co-produced the single. “I thought that was going to go Number One. When that shit didn’t go, I was like, I ain’t never gonna get a Number One. Fuck that. …

A little more than a dozen years ago, Willie Nelson stumbled out of the poker room at his house in Maui in a haze of marijuana smoke to find his then-14-year-old son Micah playing Mario Kart on a Nintendo 64. Micah had just returned from a school trip, and his …

In the 2015 Backstreet Boys documentaryShow ‘Em What You’re Made Of, a single telling scene sums up the strange tension that arose between two of the biggest-selling boy bands of all time. “It was almost like a betrayal,” Kevin Richardson recalled in the doc, looking back at the moment in …

“In any job, there are times where you do things out of necessity in order to pay the bills,” says Sebastian Robertson. “And then there are times where you create things that feel more artistically inspired. This was definitely one of those times – I was inspired by what was …

Since breaking through in 1971 with a classic album he wrote as a mailman in Illinois, John Prine has created some of the strangest, funniest, most surreal and most enduring songs of our time. He’s been covered by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Bonnie Raitt (who popularized his classic “Angel …

“As a young band, people always tell you not to do stuff, which is kind of strange,” says Eric Moore, manager and drummer for King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, throwing himself onto a couch in their Melbourne studio. “It’s always, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and, ‘People don’t do …

Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan can vividly recall what he felt the moment he learned that Donald Trump had been elected president: “horror, depression, sadness.” Rather than bottle up those feelings, which escalated in the weeks to come as he saw the alt-right gain newfound confidence, he began work on what …

The first cold night of November in Portland, Oregon, found John Gourley and Zach Carothers of Portugal. The Man in a familiar position: in a maroon Ford E350 van, Carothers driving, Gourley in the back. Nine years ago, after the van they’d been touring in shot its transmission for the …

“Let’s say you [are] going through something, and you tell me about it,” says Bronx rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, sitting in a conference room at Atlantic Records, the hood of his Nike jacket pulled tightly around his head and a half-empty Red Bull in hand. “I would make …