Kusun

Smokey Robinson has been writing songs since he was a teenager in Detroit. He is now in his eighties. The catalog that spans those decades is one of the most extraordinary in American music — not simply in its commercial achievement but in its emotional range, its lyrical sophistication, its consistent ability to find the … Read more

The Rolling Stones have always had a relationship with the darker and stranger dimensions of their mythology that they have managed with deliberate ambiguity. They have not discouraged the associations — the satanic imagery, the occult references in song titles and album artwork, the specific atmosphere of menace that certain of their recordings carry. They … Read more

Joni Mitchell’s withdrawal from performing across the late 1990s and the two decades that followed was understood publicly as primarily a health matter. The Morgellons disease — a condition whose existence and nature was contested in the medical community, adding a layer of public skepticism to her private suffering — was the reported explanation. It … Read more

Tom Petty was, by the consistent testimony of everyone who worked with him and knew him across his forty-year career, the least pretentious major rock star who ever lived. This is not a small distinction. The music industry is structured around pretension — around the performance of importance, the maintenance of status, the specific social … Read more

Keith Richards and Chuck Berry had one of the most complicated relationships in rock history. Complicated because the love was total and the professional reality was often difficult. Berry was famously demanding in performance situations — insisted on being paid in cash before he played, refused to rehearse with backing bands, arrived at venues with … Read more

The pressure of being Michael Jackson in a recording studio during the peak of his commercial career was a pressure that very few people in the history of popular music have been required to carry. After Thriller — after the most commercially successful album ever released transformed every expectation that surrounded him — every subsequent … Read more

The architecture of Led Zeppelin’s mythology has always distributed its attention unevenly. Jimmy Page is the guitarist-magician, the occultist-producer, the man behind the curtain and simultaneously the man at the center of the stage. Robert Plant is the voice and the hair and the mythological presence — the golden god, as Cameron Crowe famously and … Read more

Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner — the country music star who had been her mentor and her professional partner and who she was leaving to pursue a solo career that she understood she could not pursue while remaining inside the creative and professional structure … Read more

There are objects that become more than objects because of what they contained at a specific moment in time. A hotel room tape recorder. A small machine of the kind that musicians of that era carried the way writers carry notebooks — as a capture device for the things that arrive in the middle of … Read more

There are musicians who perform and there are musicians who transform. The distinction is not about talent exactly — it is about what happens to the space when the music starts. Whether the room remains a room or becomes something else. Whether the people in it are entertained or whether they are taken somewhere that … Read more