Kusun 
Jimi Hendrix is remembered as the most visually extraordinary performer in rock history. The guitar played with his teeth. The guitar played behind his back. The guitar set on fire at Monterey in 1967 — a moment so perfectly theatrical that it has been discussed for fifty years as the ultimate act of rock showmanship. … Read more
John Lennon was a man who enjoyed the gap between what was visible and what was actually happening. This was true of his personality — the famous humor as armor, the wit as deflection, the public persona as a carefully maintained distance between the world and wherever the real John Lennon actually lived. It was … Read more
There is a specific kind of creative frustration that has no adequate outlet. The frustration of having things to say and being systematically denied the platform to say them — not because what you have is insufficient but because the people controlling the platform have a vested interest in prioritizing what they have over what … Read more
Ray Charles Robinson was seven years old when his younger brother George drowned in a washtub in the backyard of their home in Greenville, Florida. He was there. He saw it happen. He was too small and too young to prevent it and the specific horror of watching and being unable to stop what was … Read more
There are moments in the life of a working musician when someone whose opinion exists in a completely different category from the ordinary categories offers a judgment on your work. Not a critic. Not a fan. Not a colleague of equivalent standing. Someone whose relationship to music goes so deep and has produced work so … Read more
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
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