Kusun

The Beatles were four people trapped inside the most intense professional and personal relationship that popular music has ever produced. They spent years together at such close quarters — touring, recording, living, traveling — that the boundaries between professional collaboration and personal entanglement became impossible to locate. They knew each other with the suffocating thoroughness … Read more

At 83, Paul McCartney is showing no signs of slowing down—neither creatively nor digitally. The legendary musician has recently embraced modern social media platforms as part of the promotional push for his upcoming album, even appearing in a TikTok Live session on May 27th where he engaged directly with fans around the world. During the … Read more

Legendary guitarist and activist Tom Morello is once again using music as a weapon for social change. The Rage Against the Machine co-founder has released a powerful new protest song set to appear on his forthcoming untitled solo album, due out via independent label Mom + Pop. The track wastes no time delivering its message. … Read more

Few musicians possess a catalogue as rich and influential as David Gilmour. Whether with Pink Floyd or throughout his solo career, Gilmour has helped create some of the most ambitious and emotionally resonant music ever recorded. Yet these masterpieces were never the result of inspiration alone. Behind every soaring guitar solo and atmospheric soundscape was … Read more

There is a myth at the center of the Rolling Stones that has been carefully maintained for sixty years. The myth is called Jagger-Richards. Two names. Equal billing. A partnership so complete and so balanced that you cannot imagine one without the other. It is printed on every record sleeve, registered with every publishing house, … Read more

They only met once in person. August 1965. The Beatles were at the absolute peak of their first wave of fame — freshly arrived in America, still slightly disbelieving that any of this was real — and Elvis Presley invited them to his house in Bel Air. It was the meeting of two worlds, two … Read more

Paul Simon is one of the greatest lyricists the twentieth century produced. That is not a controversial statement. It is simply what the evidence shows — album after album of writing so precise, so emotionally intelligent, so perfectly calibrated between the specific and the universal, that generations of listeners have heard his songs and felt … Read more

David Bowie and Freddie Mercury occupied the same cultural space for years without ever quite occupying the same room. They were aware of each other — deeply, professionally, with the specific alertness that major artists have toward other major artists who are working in adjacent territory — but they maintained a careful distance for most … Read more

There is a version of Jim Morrison that the mythology has constructed — the leather-pants poet, the Dionysian shaman, the beautiful self-destructive face of a generation’s excess — and it is not entirely false. But it is incomplete in the specific way that mythologies are always incomplete: it sacrifices the complexity of the actual person … Read more

Eric Clapton has spoken about grief more honestly than almost any major rock musician of his generation. Not always in words — words were sometimes too direct, too exposed, too much — but in the specific choices he made about what to play and what not to play and what to step away from entirely … Read more