Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner — the country music star who had been her mentor and her professional partner and who she was leaving to pursue a solo career that she understood she could not pursue while remaining inside the creative and professional structure … Read more
There are objects that become more than objects because of what they contained at a specific moment in time. A hotel room tape recorder. A small machine of the kind that musicians of that era carried the way writers carry notebooks — as a capture device for the things that arrive in the middle of … Read more
The little girl asked if I could be her daddy until she dies. Those were her exact words. Seven years old, sitting in a hospital bed with tubes in her nose, and she looked up at me—a complete stranger, a scary-looking biker—and asked if I’d pretend to be her father for however long she had … Read more
There are musicians who perform and there are musicians who transform. The distinction is not about talent exactly — it is about what happens to the space when the music starts. Whether the room remains a room or becomes something else. Whether the people in it are entertained or whether they are taken somewhere that … Read more
Bob Dylan has spent sixty years in a state of conflict with his audience’s expectations. Not accidentally — not as the byproduct of restlessness or inconsistency. Deliberately. With the specific intention of someone who has decided that the audience’s comfort with a version of him is a problem to be solved rather than a condition … Read more
The relationship between Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi is one of the strangest and most durable partnerships in rock history. Strange because by any conventional measure it should not have survived. The number of times Ozzy’s chaos — the addictions, the behavior, the specific form of self-destruction that he has navigated in public for fifty … Read more
The experience Paul McCartney describes about the composition of “Let It Be” is one of the most extraordinary accounts of musical creativity in the documented history of songwriting. It is also, depending on how you receive it, either the most humbling or the most inspiring thing a songwriter has ever reported about their own work. … Read more
The voice is the instrument and the instrument is the body and the body is not permanent. This is the truth that every singer eventually confronts — that the thing they have built their life upon, the specific biological gift that everything else depends on, is subject to time and to damage and to the … Read more
Keith Richards has made a career of performing indifference to things that should produce awe. It is part of the persona — the weathered, seen-everything cool of someone who has been at the center of one of the most extraordinary rock careers in history and has developed the specific equanimity of someone for whom extraordinary … Read more
The Million Dollar Quartet session of December 4th, 1956 at Sun Studio is famous. Elvis, Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis — an accidental convergence that Sam Phillips was smart enough to record. The photographs exist. The tape exists. The cultural mythology of that afternoon has been enormous and well-documented. What is less documented is … Read more