Leonard Cohen’s estate has failed in its attempt to block Donald Trump from playing the late singer-songwriter’s iconic anthem Hallelujah during the Freedom 250 rally.

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The estate of legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has publicly condemned the unauthorized use of his iconic song “Hallelujah” at a Donald Trump rally, despite efforts to prevent the performance from taking place. On June 24, the official Instagram account of the Leonard Cohen Estate issued a statement revealing that it had learned Hallelujah was scheduled … Read more

The Song Johnny Winter Played That Made Muddy Waters Stop Mid-Sentence — And Change Everything He Said Next

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Johnny Winter arrived in New York in 1968 from Beaumont, Texas with an albino appearance that made him impossible to ignore and a guitar technique that made everything else about him irrelevant once he started playing. He was 24 years old and had spent his adolescence and early twenties absorbing the Texas blues tradition with … Read more

The Betrayal That Ended Simon and Garfunkel’s Final Reunion — And the Letter Paul Simon Never Sent

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The 2003 Old Friends tour — the final Simon and Garfunkel reunion — was, by the commercial measurements that the music industry uses to assess such things, an enormous success. The tour grossed over a hundred million dollars. It sold out arenas across North America and Europe. The audiences that filled those arenas were not … Read more

Five Songs Tom Waits Wrote That Other Musicians Said Were Too Honest to Be Commercial — And Too Good to Ignore

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Tom Waits occupies a position in American music that is almost impossible to map onto the conventional coordinates of the industry — not famous in the way that commercially successful musicians are famous, not obscure in the way that cult figures are obscure, but something in between that has no clean name. He has sold … Read more

The Rivalry Between Chuck Berry and Little Richard That Nobody Dared Talk About — And What Elvis Said When He Was Asked to Choose

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In the mid-1950s, American popular music had two figures who were, simultaneously and independently, inventing something that did not yet have a name but that would shortly be called rock and roll. Chuck Berry was doing it from St. Louis with a guitar and a lyrical precision that documented teenage American life with the specificity … Read more

The Night Stevie Ray Vaughan Played a Concert the Day Before He Died — And Every Musician There Knew Something Was Different

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There are final performances that reveal themselves as final only in retrospect — nights that seem, in the moment, like excellent concerts from excellent musicians, and that become something else entirely once the context is supplied by what comes after. And then there are performances that people who were present describe, even before knowing what … Read more

Bruce Springsteen Seeks ‘Common Ground’ With Fans Alienated by His Political Views

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That was Bruce Springsteen’s message as he accepted the 2026 Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. During a candid conversation with U2’s Bono, The Boss addressed one of the biggest questions surrounding his career today: what happens when speaking your mind costs you part of your audience? Rather than … Read more

The Story Behind Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”

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In 1991, the world of legendary guitarist and singer-songwriter Eric Clapton changed forever. His four-year-old son, Conor, tragically lost his life after falling from the 53rd floor of a New York City apartment building. The unimaginable loss left Clapton devastated, leading him to withdraw from the public eye as he struggled to cope with overwhelming … Read more