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In the spring of 1966, inside a London recording studio that smelled of cigarette smoke and tape oxide, a fifteen-year-old boy sat down at a piano and played something that stopped four of the most famous musicians in the world from speaking. The boy was Stevie Wonder. The four men were the Beatles. And what … Read more
There are songs that are written and there are songs that are survived. Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me sits somewhere between those two categories — a piece of music that Elton John produced with the mechanical speed of a man for whom melody arrives like weather, and that contains inside it a … Read more
The landfill on the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas, was a forgotten wasteland most people went out of their way to avoid. Thick smoke curled from smoldering trash heaps, broken furniture and rusted appliances lay half-sunk in the mud, and the heavy stench of decay and rust clung to everything like a second skin. Every morning … Read more
The Last Twenty Dollars on Willow Creek Avenue The late-November wind in Brookdale, Pennsylvania, cut through the narrow streets like a blade that had forgotten how to dull. It hissed between the bricks of the old row houses on Willow Creek Avenue, pried open the seams of threadbare coats, and settled into the marrow of … Read more
By the summer of 2003, Johnny Cash was a man recording against time and he knew it. June Carter Cash, his wife of thirty-five years and by most accounts the central organizing fact of his life, had died in May. Cash had been devastated in a way that went beyond grief into something closer to … Read more
In 1966, two bands on opposite sides of the world entered a creative competition so intense and so productive that it generated, within the same twelve-month period, two albums that music critics have argued about ever since — not about whether they are great, but about which of them is the greatest. The albums were … Read more
Bruce Springsteen has written more songs about his father than almost any other subject. The relationship runs through his catalog like a fault line — present in the darkness of Nebraska, in the working-class tension of Born to Run, in the explicit confrontations of Adam Raised a Cain, which is the most direct account of … Read more
Art Garfunkel has never fully forgiven Paul Simon for Graceland. That is not the standard narrative about the album — the standard narrative is one of triumph, of creative reinvention, of a middle-aged musician traveling to South Africa and finding in township music a sound that revitalized his career and produced one of the most … Read more
The date was January 1967. The venue was the Bag O’Nails club in London. Eric Clapton was 21 years old and had already been called God — literally, in graffiti on a London Underground wall: “Clapton is God” — by a British public that had decided he was the greatest guitarist alive and that the … Read more
In the history of popular music, there is no rivalry more studied, more mythologized, or more genuinely consequential than the one between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s. It is usually described from the Beatles’ side — as the dominant force, the innovators, the ones setting the pace while everyone else responded. … Read more