Tag Archives: rolling-stone-music-now

In his new documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), Questlove delves into the genius and torments of Sly Stone —and uses that story as window into many other artists’ lives, including interviewees D’Angelo and Andre 3000. Questlove talks about the making of the film (now streaming on …

How does a truly terrible song end up an otherwise flawless album? Blame ego-appeasing band-politics concessions, drug-fueled studio experiments, songwriters working through a few too many personal demons, and artists who just ran out of songwriting steam a little too soon. Or maybe it all comes down to bad judgment. …

Mike Campbell was always more than just the deeply gifted guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — songs from “Refugee” to “You Wreck Me,” not to mention Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” began with music he wrote. In his essential, vividly told new autobiography, Heartbreaker: A Memoir, due March …

Producer/songwriter Andrew Watt went from the pop world to finding himself in the studio with his rock heroes, from the Rolling Stones to Pearl Jam — and now he’s back at the center of pop as executive producer of Lady Gaga‘s upcoming album Mayhem. His career is reaching new heights …

Kendrick Lamar‘s halftime performance at Sunday’s Super Bowl was the most-watched in history, with more than 133 million people tuning in — and it also may have been the most uncompromising. In a slot that every previous artist has reserved mostly for greatest hits, Lamar only played bits of two …

Marcus J. Moore, author of 2020’s The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, initially assumed it was too late to follow it with a book about one of his favorite hip-hop groups of all time, De La Soul. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, well, clearly …

Radiohead have had a spy in their midst for years. As his excellent new book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, reveals, bassist Colin Greenwood has been snapping candid, lovely photographs of his bandmates since the early 2000s — in the studio, in dressing rooms, and even, somehow, onstage …

Amy Allen just scored a Grammy nomination for Songwriter of the Year after co-writing every song on Sabrina Carpenter‘s Short n’ Sweet — and she owes her entire career to the vampire baby in one of the Twilight movies. As a nursing student at Boston College, she discovered a major …

Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, two of the biggest and most interesting pop artists of the past half decade, have a not-so-secret weapon in common: producer and co-writer Daniel Nigro, formerly the frontman of the ’00s band As Tall As Lions. Nigro, who just scored a Grammy nomination for Producer …

Some lessons need to be learned over and over again. When Bob Dylan and the Beatles broke through in the Sixties, they paved the way for generations of artists to write their own songs. But by the early 2000s, the charts had been largely reclaimed by pro songwriters and svengali …