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Mick Jagger has been famous for sixty years and has maintained throughout that time the specific confidence of a man who knows precisely where he sits in the hierarchy of things and is entirely comfortable there. He is not recklessly unkind — he has learned, over six decades of interviews, the diplomatic language of public … Read more

James Brown was the hardest working man in show business. He was also, by the consistent testimony of musicians who performed alongside him, worked for him, or simply encountered him professionally, the most terrifying. Not in the way that genuinely menacing people are terrifying — Brown was not a violent man in any public sense. … Read more

Max Weinberg has been the drummer for the E Street Band since 1974. He is not the most famous member — that is Springsteen, by a margin that requires no argument. He is not the most mythologized — that is Clarence Clemons, whose saxophone became the sound of Springsteen’s hope and whose death in 2011 … Read more

Noel Gallagher is the greatest quote machine in the history of British rock and roll. This is not simply a matter of wit, though the wit is real and consistent. It is a matter of philosophical commitment — Gallagher has decided, as a foundational operating principle, that honesty about other people’s music is a form … Read more

More than six decades after The Beatles changed music forever, Sir Paul McCartney has finally revealed which bandmate he considers his favorite. The surprising confession came during a recent appearance on Chicken Shop Date with Amelia Dimoldenberg. While the interview featured plenty of humorous moments—including stories from the band’s early days in Hamburg and some … Read more

The story of George Harrison’s place in the Beatles has been told as a story of quiet endurance — the youngest member, the least celebrated songwriter, the man who spent a decade being given two songs per album while Lennon and McCartney occupied the remaining twelve slots with the comfortable authority of men who had … Read more

There is a specific kind of generosity that great artists find almost impossible to sustain — the generosity of recognizing that someone in your immediate orbit is operating at a level that exceeds your own. Most musicians manage it at a comfortable distance. When the threat is abstract and far away, admiration is easy. When … Read more

Wade Mercer had grown used to the weight of other people’s assumptions long before he ever spoke a word. A leather jacket worn thin at the elbows, faded tattoos peeking from his sleeves, scuffed boots that had seen too many miles—people took one glance and filled in the rest of his story. They never glimpsed … Read more

\Ray Charles was not a man who spoke about other artists with easy admiration. He had earned the right to be selective — a man who had survived poverty, the death of his brother, the loss of his sight at seven, heroin addiction, and decades of an industry that tried repeatedly to tell him what … Read more

On the evening of December 7, 1980, Paul McCartney attempted to reach John Lennon by telephone. The details of this call — whether it connected, what was said, whether McCartney reached Lennon directly or left a message with someone at the Dakota building — have been reported with slight variations across different accounts and McCartney … Read more