The Reason Stevie Nicks Left Fleetwood Mac Three Times — And Why She Always Came Back to the One Song That Made Her Stay

Stevie Nicks has left Fleetwood Mac three times over the course of her career. Each departure had its own shape, its own set of reasons — creative exhaustion, personal conflict, the impossible weight of being both essential to a band and suffocated by it — but each time, something pulled her back. She has said … Read more

The Letter Janis Joplin Mailed to Herself the Week Before She Died — That Changed Everything We Thought We Knew About Her Last Days

Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970, at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, at twenty-seven years old. The official accounts of her final days have always described someone who was, by the accounts of friends and musicians around her, in relatively good spirits — working on Pearl, what would become her masterpiece, and seemingly … Read more

The Drum Pattern John Bonham Created on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ That No Producer Has Been Able to Fully Reproduce in Fifty Years

In 1970, Led Zeppelin set up their recording equipment in the main hall of Headley Grange, a 19th-century English workhouse with stone staircases and high ceilings, and John Bonham sat down at his drum kit at the bottom of the staircase while the microphones were placed two floors above him. The result — the opening … Read more

Five Things Roger Waters Built Into ‘The Wall’ That Pink Floyd Didn’t Realize Were About Them Until the Album Was Already Released

Pink Floyd’s The Wall, released in 1979, is one of the most autobiographical albums in rock history — but it is autobiographical in a way that its own creators did not fully decode until after the fact. Roger Waters, who wrote almost all of the material, was drawing from sources so personal and so close … Read more

The one musician Phil Collins never wanted to speak to, calling him “a miserable bastard.”

Phil Collins never pretended to be a tortured artist. While critics often dismissed songs like Sussudio and I Can’t Dance as lightweight, Collins embraced the idea that music could simply be fun. After years of success with Genesis and his solo career, that optimism eventually drew backlash from listeners who preferred the band’s progressive-rock roots. … Read more

Geddy Lee opens up about the difficult conversation he had with Neil Peart’s family before Rush considered performing again with a new drummer.

The rock world was forever changed when progressive rock legends Rush announced their highly anticipated return to the stage with the 2026 Fifty Something Tour. For the first time since the band’s retirement in 2015, surviving members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are once again performing under the Rush banner—an announcement that has sparked excitement, … Read more

The Song Eric Clapton Recorded and Then Locked Away for Twenty Years — Because He Said Playing It Again Would Destroy Him

Eric Clapton has a reputation for emotional distance in interviews — a guardedness earned through decades of public grief, addiction, and loss. But in a conversation with a music journalist in the early 2000s, he said something that stopped the interview cold. He had recorded a song in the early 1980s, after the death of … Read more

The Moment David Bowie Called Mick Jagger and Said the Rolling Stones Were Making a Terrible Mistake — And Why Jagger Never Forgave Him for Being Right

David Bowie and Mick Jagger had one of rock’s great friendships — a complicated, competitive, admiring, and occasionally brutal relationship between two men who each privately believed the other was doing it slightly wrong. Friends from the 1970s who knew both men have described their dynamic as “two chess players who genuinely liked each other … Read more

The Five Led Zeppelin Songs That Jimmy Page Has Refused to Discuss in Any Interview — And What He Said Might Be in Them

Jimmy Page is one of the most interviewed rock musicians in history, and he is also one of the most careful. Over fifty years of conversations with journalists, biographers, and documentarians, Page has developed a precise and almost forensic sense of what he will and will not say. There are five Led Zeppelin recordings he … Read more