Music Features

Paul Simonhas never had much use for drugs beyond a brief flirtation with LSD in the 1960s. But in early 1998 when his Broadway musical The Capeman closed after a mere six-week run, he turned to a powerful South American hallucinogenic, ayahuasca, to numb the pain. He’d first encountered it …

Lou Reed may be punk’s godfather, but he also figures in a great American poetic lineage including the Beats and the New York School – and a new book of his writing, Do Angels Need Haircuts?, offers compelling evidence. This isn’t rock-crit hyperbole. As a Syracuse University undergrad, he studied …

Some of the most warped, exciting indie-pop of recent years has spilled from the East London commune housing most of Superorganism‘s eight members. The collective’s sound splits the difference between vintage Beck and meme-era mash-ups: a mix of synthetic and organic, funny, weird, internet-fueled, self-aware and very tripped-out. However, their …

When Lucius‘ Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig first sang with Roger Waters, the clouds above them parted and a giant rainbow stretched across the sky. Literally. The two women were late additions to the singer-songwriter’s surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 2015, when he came out with My …

There are hit albums, and then there’s Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd‘s eternally popular song cycle has sold more than 15 million copies in the U.S. since its release on March 1st, 1973, and more than 45 million units worldwide. A true colossus of classic rock, the album …

Mavis Staples is sitting in the lounge of her tour bus outside the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, telling a story about her current tourmate, Bob Dylan. The other day, Dylan asked Staples to rehearse a duet of “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” a funky gospel rocker from Slow Train …

“Guys, can we cheers again?” asks Zach Herron for the umpteenth time. The giggling 16-year-old is in the middle of directing a intricate Instagram story, in which his Why Don’t We bandmates hold up matching mugs of hot chocolate at a restaurant a few blocks away fromLive With Kelly and …

Niall Horan surprised longtime fans of his boy band One Direction when he became the first still-active member of the group to go solo following the release of the group’s 2015 LP Made in the A.M. In September of last year, he dropped the folky, tender single “This Town,” a …

In the Communist Seventies and Eighties, popular music was repressed in the Soviet Union, and the hunger for it – particularly Western rock & roll – led Russian fans to extreme measures. Black-market records, bootlegs etched into X-rays and even the opportunity to dub cassettes could easily cost fans a …

The past three years have tested U2 in different ways, from the fierce backlash they received for gifting 2014’s Songs of Innocence to every iTunes user to Bono’s devastating bicycle accident, which left him with several fractured bones and a shattered left arm. But those setbacks didn’t compare to another …