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
The Yellow Dress She Was Afraid to Wear When Graham Weller came home that evening with a small white shopping bag, his wife knew what was inside before he spoke. It wasn’t jewelry. It wasn’t flowers. It was something far heavier. Graham stood in the doorway in his leather vest and motorcycle boots, rain still … 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
The night pressed down like a living thing. It was the kind of darkness that lived in the spaces between the sodium lights of the Marathon station off Highway 41, the kind that swallowed the edges of the parking lot and made the pine trees on the far side look like they were leaning in … Read more
The waitress at Denny’s refused to serve my 72-year-old father-in-law because he walked in wearing his motorcycle jacket, saying “We don’t serve gang members here.” I sat in the corner booth, watching Harold stand there with his helmet in one hand, while this twenty-something server loudly announced that “bikers make other customers uncomfortable.” I’m ashamed … Read more
David Bowie’s relationship with his own work was one of the most complex and least sentimental in the history of popular music. He was not a man who clung to what he had made. The famous persona changes — Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke to the Berlin period and beyond … Read more
Neil Young has a complicated relationship with his own catalog. He is famously inconsistent about what gets released and what gets withheld, about what he considers finished and what he considers private, about the difference between music that belongs to the world and music that belongs to specific people or specific moments that the world … Read more