Childish Gambino is about to die. It’s still unclear what, exactly, that means. The next Childish Gambino album, which has been repeatedly teased as the project’s last gasp, could simply be the death of a moniker; it could mean the end of Donald Glover’s music career entirely. Fam Udeorji, Gambino’s …
Read More »How Aly and AJ Found 'Sanctuary' With Each Other
Ten years can seem like a long time, but not if you’re Aly & AJ. The sisters spent the decade since their most recent album as a pop duo, 2007’s Insomniatic, establishing acting careers outside the Disney machine that helped launch them. When they independently released the aptly titled EP …
Read More »'Live Through This' at 25: How Courtney Love Proved Herself to the World
On Hole’s 1994 breakthrough album, Live Through This, frontwoman Courtney Love presented a gruesome prophecy: “If you live through this with me/I swear that I will die for you,” she sings on the hypnotic, rumbling “Asking for It.” Love belts the line with more restraint than she usually displays: a …
Read More »Exclusive: CSNY vs. the Red States on Their Anti-Bush 2006 Reunion Tour
Over the course of their five-decade bond, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have joinedtogether for a number of tours. Some, like Crosby, Stills & Nash’s 1982 Daylight Againtrek during David Crosby’s drug addiction, were nerve-wracking. Others, like the quartet’s 1974 reunion tour, were huge-scale and overwhelming. But CSNY’s 2006 Freedom …
Read More »Exclusive: How Bruce Springsteen Created 'Badlands'
My new book,Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs, tells the tales behind every officially released studio recording of Bruce Springsteen’s career so far. In addition to my years of Springsteen reporting, including five interviews with the man himself, the book draws on over 60 hours of brand-new interviews with …
Read More »Hal Blaine: The Lost Interview
It’s a sunny spring day in 2016 and Ronnie Spector is seated at a New York hotel bar. As she looks back on her career, she pinpoints the session she did with the Wrecking Crew for “Be My Baby.” The first time she heard Hal Blaine play the song’s opening …
Read More »How Do You Adapt Motley Crue's Outrageous Memoir Into a Movie?
It’s a sunny spring day in New Orleans, and three men who look like the Sunset Strip coughed them up in 1985 are on a smoke break outside the Saenger Theatre. They’re there to portray Mötley Crüe in Netflix’s unruly new biopic, The Dirt. Inside, fake roadies are setting up …
Read More »Peter Frampton Talks Degenerative Muscle Disease Diagnosis, Farewell Tour
About eight years ago, Peter Frampton started to notice that his ankles felt a little tight in the morning. He initially dismissed it as one of the many pains that comes with getting older, but as time passed, his legs began feeling weak as well. He tried to ignore the …
Read More »Flying Burrito Brothers' 'The Gilded Palace of Sin': 10 Things You Didn't Know
The Flying Burrito Brothers‘ 1969 debut never made it higher than 164 on the Billboard 200. But the album’s country-rock sound cast a shadow almost from day one, influencing artists ranging from the Rolling Stones to Tom Petty, Beck, Uncle Tupelo and entire generations of future Americana luminaries. The Burrito …
Read More »Carlos Santana on the Power of 'The Mona Lisa,' Today's New Hippies
Although Carlos Santana has been playing concerts in Paris since the early Seventies, he never set foot inside the Louvre until 2016. In fact, when his family asked if he wanted to go there, he asked, “What’s there?” “They said, ‘Oh, my God, man. You can spend a whole year …
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