One of last year’s most unexpected musical twists was the ascent of Zach Bryan, the rootsy singer-songwriter who sounds not unlike Bruce Springsteen or Jason Isbell — and went all the way to Number One on the Hot 100 with the ballad “I Remember Everything,” assisted by Kacey Musgraves. His …
Read More »Kali Uchis Refuses to 'Fit Into One Box'
Kali Uchis‘ genre-jumping career has so far been evenly divided between Spanish- and English-language albums, which feels about right for an artist who was born in Virginia but spent chunks of her childhood in her father’s native Colombia. “When you aren’t just one thing and you are as multidimensional of …
Read More »Green Day Hates Trump. Are You Really Surprised?
On New Year’s Eve, we learned the improbable fact that a trio of middle-aged, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted punks in notably well-tailored suits can somehow still shock and offend the masses. For Green Day, all it took was changing the “American Idiot” lyric “I’m not part of a …
Read More »Chaka Khan Never Wanted to Be a Solo Artist
“I found a piece of my peace right here in Georgia,” says Chaka Khan, who just started a new life in the big rural property she purchased in that state. She recently sat in her bedroom there, gazing at the trees outside, and looked back at her life and career …
Read More »Lessons on Creativity from Snoop Dogg, Lil Yachty, and Gucci Mane
“One of my secrets,” Snoop Dogg tells Latto in their recent Musicians on Musicians conversation, “is that I remain the biggest kid in the room at all times.” The new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now includes highlights of that interview (moderated by Rolling Stone staff writer Andre Gee) along …
Read More »How 'The O.C.' (Almost) Saved Rock
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” says Josh Schwartz, creator of The O.C. For the show’s first few episodes, the music choices were simply plucked from his own iPod. But once the now-legendary music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas came aboard, the show turned into a weekly showcase for some of …
Read More »Should '90s Nostalgia Be the New '60s Nostalgia?
The further we get from the Nineties, the more it looks like a series of musical golden ages all stacked atop one another, a kaleidoscopic moment when grimy hip-hop and future-shock R&B hit artistic and commercial peaks at the same time as a procession of fuzz-pedal-toting rock bands found themselves …
Read More »'Coke Was Everywhere': Getting High During Neil Peart's Drum Solos, and More Geddy Lee Revelations
Nearly 50 years after the release of his band’s first album, we’re still getting to know Geddy Lee. For much of its career, Rush managed to be an arena-level band without over-selling its three members as personalities — but as some fans learned for the first time via the great …
Read More »Geddy Lee Wants to Tour with Alex Lifeson: 'I Keep Working on Him'
Rush frontman and bassist Geddy Lee, author of the excellent new autobiography My Effin’ Life, talks about many things in his new Rolling Stone Music Now interview, from his childhood as the son of two Holocaust survivors to his earliest musical influences (including the Hollies, Motown hits, Cream and Rhinoceros) …
Read More »How 'Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)' Changed Everything
Wu-Tang Clan‘s debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), was more than an album —it was a universe unto itself. The album, which dropped Nov. 9, 1993, introduced the world to nine wildly talented rappers at once, along with the crackly genius of RZA‘s soul-and-kung-fu-movie-inflected production and an entire cosmology of …
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