Tag Archives: music-features

Plenty of songwriters spent the early 1970s looking for some kind of truth, but none of them sang about that quest with as much authentic conviction as Cat Stevens. On songs like “Where Do the Children Play?,” “Miles from Nowhere,” “The Wind,” and “Father and Son,” the London-born artist spoke …

Around three years ago, a film-marketer friend of Dave Grohl’s was in a meeting with a “huge movie studio.” When Grohl’s name came up, the studio floated the outlandish idea of a Foo Fighters horror movie. Grohl’s initial reply? “I said, ‘That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in …

When it came to making their 10th studio album, Epik High had a clear goal in mind: stick with the honest themes of self-love, loneliness, and confidence that have made them one of South Korea‘s most popular hip-hop acts since debuting in 2003. “Epik High has always been best at …

By the early 2010s, Whitney Houston wanted to turn her life around and save her career. Despite years of mental personal struggles and drug addiction, she was still an R&B superstar with an enormous, devoted fanbase, as well as many impassioned supporters in the music industry, most prominently RCA Records …

Happy birthday to Brighten the Corners, Pavement’s slyest, funniest, most underrated masterpiece, released on Feb. 11, 1997. It’s their pinnacle of rockness, full of majestic guitar bravado and stupid-beautiful melodies, with room for terrible jokes, instrumental detours, gossip about Geddy Lee and Conrad Hilton. Brighten is their turning-30 album, as …

Donzell Taggart was the youngest pastor in his Arkansas church — so popular that members of the congregation used to ask him to sign their Bibles — when Covid hit. To that point, Taggart’s extracurricular life had been hyper-focused: Singing rehearsals with the choir could start as late as 10 …

The Rochester, New York rapper RXK Nephew released about 400 songs in 2021. “Probably more than that,” he says via Zoom. “I was going crazy. Every day.” Neph’s steady pace of projects, which are often free-flowing raps that straddle earnestness and provocation, share a creative framework with Lil B, an …

The singer Raveena, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from India after the 1984 Sikh genocide, has been listening to the late playback vocalist and composer Lata Mangeshkarher entire life. She grew up on Bollywood films and music, and Mangeshkar’s distinctive, piercing soprano is among the first voices she remembers …

Aside from maybe cold beer and hot wings, or blue jeans and work boots, few things pair as well together as a distorted riff and a sneering lyric. Elvie Shane knows this and wisely uses the one-two punch to announce his new single. Remember the first time you heard Eric …

Early last year, Joe Jonas was in Savannah, Georgia, filming the Korean War-set film Devotion when he had a burst of another kind of creativity. “I felt so inspired by what a beautiful city I was in and some of the music I heard when I was there,” Jonas tells …