Kusun

There are moments that arrive in a life with such force that the ordinary responses — the phone calls, the grief, the practical management of shock — feel completely inadequate to what has actually happened. Moments where the only thing that makes any sense at all is to go somewhere alone and do the thing … Read more

Elvis Presley in 1969 was a man in the middle of one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of popular music. The wilderness years — the movie contracts, the formulaic soundtracks, the long period when the most important rock and roll musician of the twentieth century had been reduced to a reliable … Read more

John Lennon was not a man who handled rejection with grace. This is not a criticism — it is simply an observation about the specific emotional architecture of someone who had experienced enormous loss very early in life and had developed, as a consequence, both a fierce attachment to the people he loved and a … Read more

The Hendrix vault is one of the most discussed and most mythologized archives in music history. He recorded constantly — not just in formal sessions but in the continuous, almost restless way of someone for whom the act of recording was as natural as breathing, who could not be near a studio without putting something … Read more

There are weapons made of words. Most people who have ever been in a serious argument know this — know the specific experience of a sentence landing in a place so precisely aimed that the damage it does is not like ordinary damage. It does not fade in a few days. It lives in the … Read more

George Harrison was a man who processed things slowly and privately. Where Lennon was immediate — combustible, impulsive, the kind of person whose first reaction was usually also his public reaction — Harrison sat with things. He thought them through. He turned them over in the quiet of his enormous garden at Friar Park, in … Read more

The public image of Elton John is feathers and platforms and oversized glasses and a theatrical extravagance so complete that it has become, over fifty years, one of the most recognizable personal brands in entertainment history. The costumes are real. The showmanship is real. The extraordinary capacity for spectacle is genuine and has been sustained … Read more

London in 1967 was a small world. The musicians who would go on to define rock guitar for the following half-century were moving through the same clubs, the same studios, the same late-night sessions in the same compressed geography of a city that was in the middle of reinventing what popular music could be. They … Read more

Abbey Road was recorded in the summer of 1969 by four men who were, in any meaningful personal sense, no longer a band. The legal machinery of the breakup was already in motion. The financial disputes were already poisoning every room they shared. John Lennon had privately told the others he was leaving — had … Read more

Fame has a way of arriving at people who did not request it and did not prepare for it and would not have chosen it if the choice had been presented clearly and honestly in advance. It comes attached to someone else’s story — to a song or a film or a book that uses … Read more