Music Features

If you work in radio right now and you want to hear the new Taylor Swift single before it comes out at midnight, you are required to navigate a series of stringent security measures. A label representative comes to your station at a pre-appointed time. Before hearing the single, you …

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson was sobbing in front of a row of rotisserie chickens. Standing dumbfounded in the aisle of a New York grocery store after her boyfriend dumped her, she heard Adele’s “Someone Like You” come over the sound system — and “I was trying to smile through it, but …

Lizzo‘s major-label debut album, Cuz I Love You, re-introduces the world to a freshly evolved artist. While she launched her solo career years ago as a backpack rapper, the new album highlights the fact that Lizzo has since become a world-class belter, using the raw passion in her voice to …

In April 1969, Bob Dylan went to Nashville to record his ninth studio album. It would be his third time recording there with local session pros and producer Bob Johnston, but this time it would be different: Unlike the “thin, wild mercury sound” of 1966’s Blonde on Blonde and the …

“RealLife Rock Top Ten” is a monthly column by cultural critic and RS contributing editorGreil Marcus. 1 Amy Rigby, “The President Can’t Read” (amyrigby.com/bandcamp). With a jangly sound that places it right where all the half-Beatles/half-Byrds LA bands were in 1966—the Leaves, say, or Jackie DeShannon with the Byrds—the same …

If the Monkees were supposed to be uncool, someone forgot to tell Jimi Hendrix, the Who, half the Beatles, Mama Cass and the future members of Crosby, Stills and Nash — all of whom spent a good chunk of 1967 and 1968 hanging out with Peter Tork in Los Angeles. …

Not long after Travis Meadows, an aspiring singer-songwriter, moved to Nashville over a decade ago, he hit a wall. “Every possible crisis a man could have, I had: a marriage crisis, a crisis of faith, a career crisis, all at the same time,” he says. “I crashed and burned, went …

From the start, few mistook Michael Caine for typical movie-star material. “I had a thick Cockney accent and I was a tall, skinny guy,” Caine recalls. The situation was compounded during the filming of one of his first hits, 1965’s spy thriller The Ipcress File: “I wore glasses, and during …

Last year, as people stormed the streets of Charlottesville with tiki torches as a symbol of white pride, Ice Cube didn’t flinch. “It was a weak attempt to scare people,” he says. “It’s just a very weak attempt to make people feel like something was about to happen, or that …