Music Features

Bazzi‘s breakout hit “Mine” – currently in its 17th week on the Billboard Hot 100 – started as a phone note labeled “melody fire as fuck.” Sitting in an upstairs booth at a Times Square sushi establishment, Bazzi (first name Andrew) fiddles with an app, first to record a bit …

“My booking agent said, ‘I think you’re having a Leonard Cohen moment,’ ” says David Byrne – before hastening to clarify, with a laugh, that the reference was to renewed relevance and popularity, not his impending demise. In March, he’s releasing a strong new album, American Utopia (written over tracks created …

Admit it: You thought Mark E. Smith would be the last to go. And in a way, he was the last to go – when the punk legend died on Wednesday, after 40 years leading the U.K. band the Fall, he took most of the world’s bile with him. “There …

Just south of Blackshear, Georgia, down a bumpy dirt road, the Moccasin Creek Off-Road Park spreads across 500 acres of wooded countryside. On a Thursday in late September, RVs, pickup trucks and trailers loaded with all manner of all-terrain vehicles wait to enter the park for the sixth annual Lactember …

“I certainly don’t keep up with hip-hop but I’m trying to now,” says iconic British illustrator and painter Ralph Steadman, best known as the twisted mind behind the dark, grotesque, hilarious, disturbing art that accompanied the early-1970s gonzo journalistic screeds of the late Hunter S. Thompson, including his 1972 novel …

Up until the moment he learned the Moody Blues were entering the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, frontman Justin Hayward spent almost no time thinking about the institution. “On Friday, I couldn’t have cared less,” he says. “On Saturday, when I found out we were in, I was thinking, …

The year leading up to the release of the Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967 was turbulent but fantastically fertile for the Beatles – they were working on its songs more or less simultaneously with the ones that ended up on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the …

It ended as it began – only bigger. Nearly 50 years after Black Sabbath formed in Birmingham, England, they played the final show of their farewell tour there this past February. During the gig, they revisited many of the colossal blues rockers they wrote in the late Sixties – numbers …

I missed the birth of a tradition – the advanced, instrumental ecstasy, cliff-edge improvisation and impromptu theatrical hijinks of Frank Zappa‘s annual Halloween concerts in New York City – by less than a week and a 90-minute drive. On November 5th, 1974, I saw Zappa in performance for the first …

“To be on this last tour was such a thrill,” singer Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band said, reflecting on his working vacation this past summer as an opening act – with his solo group, the Midnight Travellers – on Tom Petty‘s last tour with the Heartbreakers. A few …