Tag Archives: music-features

“I’ve always been an ill dude,” rapper, producer, and multi-hyphenate Westside Gunn reflects during our FaceTime Audio session. “I didn’t know I was ill enough to have 50 grown men with my face [tattooed] on them.” When we spoke, the Buffalo-born artist was in Germany, prepping for a flight back …

For decades, a major piece of counter-culture history was wedged behind a bed in Merl Saunders’ San Francisco house. The crude pipe looks like something a teen may have cobbled together at summer camp, but according to art historian Steve Cabella, it’s basically a religious object. A so-called “spirit pipe,” …

The first time that brothers Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez sat down to play guitar together, something just clicked. The two had been living in different places when Alejandro invited Estevan to visit him in Zurich. “We were just hanging out in my apartment and we just played together,” Alejandro says, …

I T’S NO LONGER the mid-Nineties, but Shania Twain is still the reigning queen of country pop. Just look at the over-the-top reaction from the Gen Z crowd when Harry Styles brought her onstage at Coachella this year, or check out Post Malone rocking out during Twain’s AMAs appearance a …

When most unknown bands come over to America from England, they find themselves in a cramped bar playing to roughly 12 people only paying half attention. The floors are sticky, the bathroom makes the NYC subway look like Buckingham Palace, and they’re running their own merch table. But when the …

We’ve reinvented our Songs You Need to Know franchise as a weekly playlist of the best new music — featuring the week’s biggest new singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week we’ve got the feverishly awaited return of Rihanna, as well as must-hear new songs from …

R OGER DALTREY WALKS through Kore Studios near London’s Shepherd’s Bush, opening doors and looking for Yungblud. “Is he here?” the Who frontman asks. Yes, he is. “A young musician on time! Unheard of,” Daltrey booms. Everyone within earshot laughs. This location was chosen for its familiarity (Daltrey has recorded …

In the way it avoided a conventional timeline or stories behind the making of some of his best-loved albums, Bob Dylan’s 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One wasn’t a remotely traditional memoir. And let’s not even start on the whirligig prose in his Sixties head-scratcher Tarantula. Next to them, his third …

When Giovannie Yanez was writing the brooding ballad “The Letter” for the new album by his band Giovannie and the Hired Guns, he kept hearing the voice of Seventies country crooner Freddy Fender in his head. Yanez wanted to sing a verse of his song in Spanish and he figured …

When rising pop star Chappell Roan left Missouri for Los Angeles, she thought she hit the jackpot. Born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz in the town of Willard, Missouri, she’d grown up feeling stifled by her small, conservatively Christian upbringing. “I felt so out of place in my hometown,” the now-24-year-old recalls. …