Music

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

There is a version of yourself that the world knows and a version that exists when the world is not looking. For most people the distance between these two versions is manageable — a matter of degree rather than kind, the public self a somewhat more polished or more guarded version of the private one. … Read more

There are mornings that arrive after nights that should not have been survived. Nights so heavy with loss that the act of continuing — of breathing, of existing in time, of being a person in a world that has just done something irreversible — feels like an offense against the magnitude of what has happened. … Read more

December 8th, 1980. The news moved through the music world the way terrible news moves — in waves, person by person, each person absorbing it and then reaching for the phone because the absorbing required another person to absorb it with. John Lennon was gone. Shot outside his home in New York by a man … Read more