Music
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Bob Dylan's Southern Odyssey March 24, 2025
Soon after Time Out of Mind rang back to life that cathedral bell in his wandering mind — his Genius Zone, or whatever you want to call it — Bod Dylan made some moves.Whatever you want to call it: the Zone is what makes somebody extraordinary, a conj...
The Surprising Thing I Learned from Quitting Spotify March 21, 2025
Last summer, I quit Spotify, and wrote about it with the rather unsubtle headline “Why I quit Spotify.” My reasons remain sound: The software had become clunky, the ads relentless, and the Sabrina Carpenter songs too inescapable. I wanted to find a b...
Hype Train Coming March 20, 2025
Rock and roll ghosts are possessing our movie stars. Austin Butler apparently went so deep into character over the years-long process of filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis that he got stuck there, eventually hiring a vocal coach to help de-Elvis him. Watch...
The Vanishing Genius March 19, 2025
Sixty years ago this month, The Beach Boys Today! appeared in record stores across the country. The Beach Boys were, in 1965, one of the very few American rock acts to stand up to the British Invasion; they were not only pumping out top ten hits but ...
The Contemplative Jazz of Colin Vallon March 17, 2025
I wasn’t sure how to write about Colin Vallon. The brilliant Swiss jazz pianist is one of my favorite musicians, and his new album Samares is ravishing. I wanted to describe the atmospherics, lovely melodies and deep space of Vallon and his trio. Yet...
The Rise of Gracie Abrams March 14, 2025
Gracie Abrams was three months old when the O2 Arena’s dome was opened to celebrate the new millennium. Back then, most of the 20,000 people who came to the O2 to see her perform on 6 March were still a decade from being born. Abrams is known as a “b...
Lady Gaga’s Return to Form March 14, 2025
In the spring of 2011, Lady Gaga, then twenty-five years old and on the cusp of releasing her second full-length studio album, “Born This Way,” did something unexpected—at least for a pop star of snowballing fame. I’m not talking about the way she’d ...
Lady Gaga and the Mayhem of Modern Music March 12, 2025
Do you remember when studio albums told stories? When you bought a CD and listened to every song on it, in order? There was no shuffle, and if you wanted to make a playlist you had to burn it onto a disc, so musicians gave their albums narrative arcs...
Glenn Gould’s God Complex March 12, 2025
It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has taught music history on an Anglophone campus: streaming platforms have intensified the characteristic presentism of the undergraduate worldview to an extent that was impossible during the days ...
How Baron Davis Found His Voice as Rapper Bart Oatmeal March 11, 2025
IF YOU DON'T immediately understand Baron Davis, just wait a few minutes. The retired NBA All-Star is a man of ambitions, concepts, goals and imagination. A cheerful optimist, a charismatic charmer and a serial entrepreneur....
The 5 Best Albums of 2025 (So Far) March 07, 2025
The collapse of American civilization does weird things to our sense of time. The Grammy Awards were only a month ago? Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show was, too? Feels like forever. Regardless, and maybe because of those high-profile events sucking up ...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
Panda Bear’s Long Road Home March 05, 2025
Last night, Panda Bear got a shot in the ass.He was about to play the first show of a sold-out, two-day stand at the 930 Club, a Washington, D.C. room so legendary it houses its own museum of LPs and CDs by almost every band that’s performed there si...
REVIEW: ‘The Brutalist’ March 03, 2025
The most impressive film of 2024, up for 10 Oscars this weekend, is The Brutalist. It is an extraordinary achievement—nearly three-and-a-half hours and never less than gripping, beautifully rendered dialogue, stunning cinematography and music, all in...
The MJ Lenderman Story You Haven't Heard February 24, 2025
When Jake Lenderman was a rock-and-roll-obsessed kid in Asheville, North Carolina, he never dared to dream about selling out two nights at the Orange Peel, the biggest club in his cozy mountain hometown. “One, maybe,” he tells me with a sheepish chuc...
American Renaissance Man February 24, 2025
American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Elements of American Character is mistitled. The title, and the advertising that has accompanied the book, suggests a biography of Buckley and his role in American life. (Something I was still ant...
The Stones That Keep On Rolling February 21, 2025
Most books about the history of rock music are written by people who weren’t there when that history was made. It’s something they have in common with books about World War II: the authors may know all the facts, but they don’t feel the chronology in...
Bow Down to Doechii February 20, 2025
Doechii is tired, but she doesn’t have time to relax. We’re standing in the lobby of the Civilian hotel in midtown on a freezing December afternoon, and after a brief introduction, we’re already on the move. The rapper doesn’t walk; she strides, her ...
On the Clock February 19, 2025
It is an unusual thing for Hollywood to walk back across the ground that Steven hath trod. Whole subjects become untouchable once Spielberg folds up his director’s chair. The era of truly epic shark films began and ended with Jaws. No more boulders w...
Tempted by the False God of Convenience February 19, 2025
When the phonograph was invented, the composer John Phillip Sousa was heartbroken. In a 1906 article on “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he worried out loud that recording tools would reduce music from a matter of the heart and soul to a mere mechan...
Desperado Dadaism February 18, 2025
Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Light...
A Little Night Music: On VIVIENNE and Surrealism February 17, 2025
The residue of the day is a dream. The residue of World War I was Surrealism. We know a surreal moment when we see it: familiar-foreign, supremely freaky, frighteningly true but not actually real....
The Eternal Spring of Spring Training February 13, 2025
One of the greatest things about annual traditions is how eagerly they are anticipated by those who celebrate them. Each November, there emerges a great debate about how early Christmas music or decorations should be enjoyed. For American sports fans...
Classical Music as Art—and Play February 12, 2025
It is customary for rising musical stars to begin their recording careers with the tried-and-true works of their genre. A pianist will, for instance, record Mozart and Brahms before attempting MacDowell or Tippett, and a cellist will tackle the Dvořá...
Mister Lonely February 10, 2025
Dylan hasn’t always been a legend. Or at least not consistently. Joan Baez, in her poison-pen love-letter ‘Diamonds and Rust’, sang that he burst on the scene ‘already’ one. Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, he travelled east in January 1961 to mee...
