Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their …
Read More »The Last Word: David Byrne on Embracing Nonsense and Owning His Mistakes
David Byrne has been getting along relatively well this year, since he and the rest of the world started quarantining. He’s even developed some new cooking skills. “It sounds like a country song, but here we go, I’ve been ‘cooking for one,’” says the 68-year-old singer with a smile during …
Read More »'He Made the World Bigger': Inside John Zorn's Jazz-Metal Multiverse
One day in the late Nineties, Dave Lombardo, the metal drumming powerhouse best known for bringing a tornado-like fury to Slayer‘s early thrash masterpieces, was driving from San Francisco to his home in Los Angeles. On the way, he threw on a recording of an unusual gig he’d just taken …
Read More »David Crosby on Live Music's Uncertain Future — and Why He Hasn't Given Up on Reuniting CSNY
David Crosby had a busy 2020 lined up, with three separate tours, major shows with Phil Lesh, Joe Walsh, and Jason Isbell, and a lot of new music to make. At the moment, Crosby has no idea if any of that is going to happen. “I don’t want to be …
Read More »'We Are the World': A Minute-by-Minute Breakdown
“Check your egos at the door” read the sign on the front door of A&M Studios in Los Angeles on the night of January 28th, 1985. Producer Quincy Jones had placed it there because dozens of the nation’s biggest singers were walking through that door, and he had exactly one …
Read More »The Unsolved Case of the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
With its rigid beat and dry, monotone vocals, the song sounds like a synth-pop hit you would have heard in a dance club in the Eighties. (Or at least on an Eighties Spotify station.) Close your eyes and you can imagine a music video: awkwardly lip-synching musicians, exploding lightbulbs, foggy …
Read More »A Softer Side of Howard Stern
H oward Stern hasn’t released a book in 24 years. Back in those days, he was a guy who didn’t think twice about calling Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig”; using a giant, rotting fish as a mallet to spank a naked woman on the air; or viciously mocking a member …
Read More »Sail Away: The Oral History of 'Yacht Rock'
This story was originally published on June 26, 2015 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, musical artists like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, Toto, Hall and Oates, and dozens of others regularly popped up on each other’s records, creating a golden era of smooth-music collaboration. And on June …
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