When Florence Shaw was small, she dreamed of cows. She collected pictures and distributed them throughout her family’s large, run-down house in southeast London, which was soon filled with grazing bovines as far as the eye could see. “I was just completely enamored with everything about them,” she says now. …
Read More »Anna B Savage Takes Flight
Anna B Savage keeps writing about birds, but she’s not sure why. Her debut album, A Common Turn, released in January, is full of them: swallows, corncrakes, doves, and in one punny instance, a song about terns. “I’m still trying to work this one out,” she says. “When I was …
Read More »Todd Snider's New Concept Album Is a Funky, Funny Tribute to Recently Departed Friends
Todd Snider’s live shows are unparalleled experiences. The folk singer delivers hilarious, heartbreaking songs about his life, punctuating them with stories that can stretch as long as 18 minutes — about everything from the time he joined a Memphis cover band called K.K. Rider to the time he took mushrooms …
Read More »Noname's 'Rainforest' Is Revolutionary Music You Can Dance To
Fatimah Warner’s verified Twitter page is an endless sprawl of revolutionary reading material (she’s been studying Karl Marx), a bulletin of global atrocities (LGBTQ activists in Ghana are living in fear of violent persecution, don’t you know), and a celebration of advocates and activists (Nina Simone and communist writer Claudia …
Read More »Las Sombras Are the New Vanguard of Argentine Rock
A narrow street in Buenos Aires rings with the melodic blare of Julián Pico’s voice and the low hum of his acoustic guitar. It’s a striking opening image for Argentine rock band Las Sombras’ debut short film, El precio de la canción (in English, “The Price of the Song”), and …
Read More »Brad Elterman Channeled the Sunset Strip of the Seventies for Rolling Stone Cover
When Brad Elterman met Miley Cyrus, the photographer felt as if he’d gone back to his early days on the Sunset Strip, where he’d cut class as a teenager to take a candid shot of David Bowie walking down Fairfax Avenue and followed his runaway muse and friend — Joan …
Read More »Year in Review: So, How Was Your 2020, 'Weird Al' Yankovic?
So, How Was Your 2020? is a series in which our favorite entertainers answer our questionnaire about the music, culture and memorable moments that shaped their year. We’ll be rolling these pieces out throughout December. “Weird Al” Yankovic was always planning on spending much of 2020 at home after touring …
Read More »Ghostemane's Major-Label Deal Fell Through — and He's Doing Fine
The songs that Eric Whitney makes under the name Ghostemane are lacerating and distorted, drawing from the pummeling energy of hardcore, the murky atmosphere and triplet flows of Memphis hip-hop, and the scabrous, anxiety-inducing wing of electronic music. This combination hardly seems readymade for mass consumption, especially if you believe, …
Read More »'Blizzard of Ozz' at 40: Ozzy Osbourne Reflects on Career-Reviving Solo Debut
In 1978, toward the end of Ozzy Osbourne‘s original stint as Black Sabbath’s main madman, the group posed for a promo photo. In it, the singer wore a T-shirt with a funky, homemade logo for something called “Blizzard of Oz.” “When I was in Black Sabbath, I wanted to do …
Read More »Big Sean's Holistic Healing
Big Sean has a cure for what’s ailing the world. In fact, Sean hawks so many cures on his latest album that it’s hard to keep track. The first one resides on the opening bar of “Why Would I Stop?” when he proclaims: “This shit the antidote, this the ‘cure …
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