Music Features

Ryan Gould has worked as astring bass player in Austin since 1999, playing early jazzmusic inbands that include the Texas Moaners and the Rock Step Relevators. He and his wife Lauryn, a horn player, live in Southeast Austin, and performed around the city most nights of the week before the …

TOBi’s “Dollas and Cents” was impressively austere: The beat was distilled to rhythmic elements so bare that they seemed to precede any possible genre distinctions. The bassline, courtesy of the great British-Ghanaian producer Juls, could’ve come from slippery Seventies funk, club-ready Nineties house, or window-shattering West Coast hip-hop. TOBi rapped …

One day circa 1964, a young Diane Warren looked at the songwriting credits on The Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” and decided upon her life’s mission. “It said (Goffin/King),” she says. “I remember wanting to be in the parentheses.” Warren ended up writing dozens of hits, beginning with DeBarge’s “Rhythm …

When Rolling Stone joined the Black Keys on the road in 2010, the band was facing a problem. To promote their single “Next Girl,” their label had commissioned a video featuring a dinosaur puppet singing the track surrounded by women in bikinis — and the band wasn’t into it. “There’s …

E rykah Badu and Summer Walker are used to long phone calls. In late October, in lieu of a planned BET Hip-Hop Awards performance, they had a private catch-up that ended up veering far off topic. “We talked about the cypher for five minutes,” says Badu, “and we talked about …

Since his earliest days playing music, Eddie Van Halen was a Black Sabbath fan. “We played just about every Black Sabbath song,” he once recalled in a Guitar World interview, looking back to a time when he wanted to name his band “Rat Salad,” after a Sabbath song title. “I …

Seven seconds into Kelsy Karter’s “God Knows I’ve Tried,” an electric guitar wails languidly and the listener immediately knows what they’re in for. It’s a power ballad, and an undeniably soulful one at that. “Daddy wishes I was the girl next door, mama tells me I should smile some more,” …

Last year, North Carolina rapper Rapsody was searching for an introductory track for her new album, Eve, a concept LP about the history and power of black women. Her producer suggested a song she didn’t know well: Nina Simone‘s 1965 version of “Strange Fruit.” A concise but graphic evocation of …

In 1988, reality-TV producer John Langley was plotting out his next show. A few years earlier, his first foray into the then-nascent genre, American Vice: The Doping of a Nation, had brought live drug arrests to prime time. He had the basic premise for a follow-up — follow police officers …

On May 25th, George Floyd died after being continuously and repeatedly choked by a Minneapolis police officer. The cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have risen up in protest in the days since Floyd’s death, which came less than four years after a Twin Cities police officer killed Philando Castile …