Music

The breakup of The Beatles remains one of the most discussed events in music history. While fans often focus on the business disputes and creative differences that led to the band’s split, the emotional fallout between two of its most iconic members—Paul McCartney and John Lennon—was equally profound. For years following The Beatles’ breakup in … Read more

There are bands that survive the loss of a member. There are bands that technically continue after such a loss but exist from that point forward as something fundamentally different — the same name, the same instruments, a ghost of the original chemistry haunting every subsequent performance. The Doors after Jim Morrison are the second … Read more

The years between 1971 and 1973 represent the most documented silence in rock history. Two men who had written Yesterday, A Day in the Life, Blackbird, Let It Be, and approximately two hundred other songs together — men who had spent the most formative decade of their lives in a creative proximity so intense it … Read more

Mick Jagger has been famous for sixty years and has maintained throughout that time the specific confidence of a man who knows precisely where he sits in the hierarchy of things and is entirely comfortable there. He is not recklessly unkind — he has learned, over six decades of interviews, the diplomatic language of public … Read more

James Brown was the hardest working man in show business. He was also, by the consistent testimony of musicians who performed alongside him, worked for him, or simply encountered him professionally, the most terrifying. Not in the way that genuinely menacing people are terrifying — Brown was not a violent man in any public sense. … Read more

Max Weinberg has been the drummer for the E Street Band since 1974. He is not the most famous member — that is Springsteen, by a margin that requires no argument. He is not the most mythologized — that is Clarence Clemons, whose saxophone became the sound of Springsteen’s hope and whose death in 2011 … Read more

Noel Gallagher is the greatest quote machine in the history of British rock and roll. This is not simply a matter of wit, though the wit is real and consistent. It is a matter of philosophical commitment — Gallagher has decided, as a foundational operating principle, that honesty about other people’s music is a form … Read more

More than six decades after The Beatles changed music forever, Sir Paul McCartney has finally revealed which bandmate he considers his favorite. The surprising confession came during a recent appearance on Chicken Shop Date with Amelia Dimoldenberg. While the interview featured plenty of humorous moments—including stories from the band’s early days in Hamburg and some … Read more

When Queen’s producer Roy Thomas Baker first heard Freddie Mercury sing in a proper recording studio, he stopped the session and asked him to do it again. Not because something had gone wrong. Because he needed to confirm with his own ears that what he had just heard was real. That a human being — … Read more

There is a specific kind of courage in continuing. Not the courage of the grand gesture — not the dramatic last stand or the farewell tour with confetti and speeches. The quieter, harder courage of simply showing up one more time. Of walking onto a stage when your body is failing and your grief is … Read more