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Few songs in rock history carry the weight and prestige of Rush’s iconic anthem “Tom Sawyer.” For drummers, the track represents one of the most challenging and recognizable performances ever recorded, thanks to the legendary Neil Peart’s intricate rhythms and explosive fills. That’s why fans at the Kia Forum erupted with excitement when acclaimed drummer … Read more
Pete Townshend has been making music and talking about music and theorizing about music and writing about music for sixty years with an intellectual energy that has produced, alongside the records, an enormous body of writing and spoken commentary on what music is for and what it does and why it matters. He is not … Read more
The official story of why the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 has been told so many times that it has achieved the status of settled history. The screaming. The impossibility of hearing themselves play. The specific absurdity of performing music of increasing sophistication to audiences who were not listening to the music — who were … Read more
The greatest trick Paul Simon ever pulled was convincing the world that what he was doing was simple. The melodies arrive with such naturalness — the lyrics land with such apparent ease — that the listener receives the songs as gifts that required no particular effort to make. As if Simon sat down, felt something, … Read more
The relationship between Bruce Springsteen and his father Douglas is one of the most documented father-son relationships in American music. Springsteen has written about it, spoken about it, built entire albums around the specific emotional landscape it produced in him — the complicated mixture of longing and resentment and love and the desire for approval … Read more
The proposal is the famous part. February 22nd, 1968. The concert in Ontario, Canada. Cash stepping to the microphone in front of thousands of people and asking June Carter to marry him. She said yes while the crowd erupted and the moment has been replayed in documentaries and biopics and anniversary tributes as the romantic … Read more
The relationship between an artist and their most famous work is almost never simple. The song that the world associates with you — the one they scream for, the one that appears in every article’s headline, the one that will be in the first line of the obituary — is rarely the song you love … Read more
The relationship between Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley is one of the most complicated and least examined in the history of rock and roll. On the surface it looks simple: two foundational figures of the same musical revolution, operating in adjacent territory, sharing sources — the blues, the rhythm and blues tradition, the specific American … Read more
The relationship between a major artist and their record label is almost never a relationship between equals. The label controls distribution, marketing, the specific machinery that transforms a recorded piece of music from a private object into a public one. The artist controls the creation. And in the space between those two spheres of control … Read more
John Lennon was the most honest major public figure of his generation. Not the most diplomatic. Not the most strategic. The most honest. He had developed, possibly as a defense mechanism against the overwhelming unreality of his own fame, an almost compulsive commitment to saying the true thing even when the true thing was damaging … Read more