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By the summer of 2003, Johnny Cash was a man recording against time and he knew it. June Carter Cash, his wife of thirty-five years and by most accounts the central organizing fact of his life, had died in May. Cash had been devastated in a way that went beyond grief into something closer to … Read more

In 1966, two bands on opposite sides of the world entered a creative competition so intense and so productive that it generated, within the same twelve-month period, two albums that music critics have argued about ever since — not about whether they are great, but about which of them is the greatest. The albums were … Read more

Bruce Springsteen has written more songs about his father than almost any other subject. The relationship runs through his catalog like a fault line — present in the darkness of Nebraska, in the working-class tension of Born to Run, in the explicit confrontations of Adam Raised a Cain, which is the most direct account of … Read more

Art Garfunkel has never fully forgiven Paul Simon for Graceland. That is not the standard narrative about the album — the standard narrative is one of triumph, of creative reinvention, of a middle-aged musician traveling to South Africa and finding in township music a sound that revitalized his career and produced one of the most … Read more

The date was January 1967. The venue was the Bag O’Nails club in London. Eric Clapton was 21 years old and had already been called God — literally, in graffiti on a London Underground wall: “Clapton is God” — by a British public that had decided he was the greatest guitarist alive and that the … Read more

In the history of popular music, there is no rivalry more studied, more mythologized, or more genuinely consequential than the one between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s. It is usually described from the Beatles’ side — as the dominant force, the innovators, the ones setting the pace while everyone else responded. … Read more

There are voices and then there are forces of nature that happen to live inside human beings. The distinction matters because forces of nature cannot be fully explained by the things that explain voices — training, technique, range, control. Those things can be measured and taught and improved. What Freddie Mercury had included all of … Read more

There is a version of artistic suffering that is romanticized and dishonest — the idea that pain automatically produces greatness, that misery is a prerequisite for genius. John Lennon’s story is not that story. His story is more specific and more uncomfortable than that. It is the story of a man who, at several precise … Read more