Bruce Springsteen has spent fifty years thinking about the relationship between the performer and the audience with an intensity and a philosophical seriousness that goes considerably beyond the ordinary artist’s gratitude for commercial support. He has written about it, spoken about it in interviews, explored it in the memoir he published in 2016 with the … Read more
The wind howled across the frozen cornfields of Willow Bend like a living thing with teeth. It was the kind of cold that sank past skin and muscle into bone, the kind that made grown men question how long they could keep moving before their bodies simply stopped obeying. For two full days the official … Read more
Some songs never truly age. They may be rooted in a specific era, but their emotional power continues to resonate decades later. Few tracks embody that timeless quality quite like House of the Rising Sun. First made famous by The Animals in 1964, the haunting blues-rock classic remains one of the most recognizable songs in … Read more
The writing of “Hallelujah” is one of the most documented creative processes in modern music. Cohen has talked about it across decades of interviews with the specific combination of wonder and frustration of someone describing an experience that exceeded the ordinary boundaries of what writing feels like. He spent five years on it. The number … Read more
The mythology of Kurt Cobain is almost entirely constructed around what was lost. The music he might have made. The artist he might have become. The career that was extinguished at twenty-seven leaving behind three studio albums and a cultural impact that has only grown in the three decades since his death. The loss is … Read more
Charlie Watts died in August 2021 and the music world spent the weeks that followed trying to find language adequate to what had been lost. The tributes were extraordinary in their consistency — musicians from every genre and every generation saying versions of the same thing. That the Rolling Stones without Charlie Watts were not … Read more
There is a category of song that you can perform without fully inhabiting. That you can learn technically — master the chords, master the vocal, master the performance — without yet having lived the specific experience that makes the song’s meaning fully available to you. The song waits. You perform it night after night, year … Read more
The geography of the last meeting matters. Los Angeles, 1974. The specific period known as Lennon’s Lost Weekend — the eighteen months he spent separated from Yoko Ono, living with May Pang, the personal assistant who had been, by various accounts, encouraged by Ono to be with him during the separation. A period of considerable … Read more
The reputation of Ringo Starr in the drumming community has undergone one of the most significant rehabilitations in the history of musical assessment. The casual dismissal — “Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles” is the joke that has been made so many times it has become its own reference — has given … Read more
A new controversy has placed Taylor Swift and Donald Trump at the center of a heated public discussion. The issue began when Taylor Swift’s song The Fate of Ophelia was used in a social media video connected to the Trump administration. The video, which appeared on an official White House TikTok account, featured images of … Read more