Gaye released Got to Give It Up a year after Bowie released Station to Station—two long grooves stretching into double-digit minutes, blatantly unconventional, with quizzical vocals and rubberband-man...
Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. ’Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and s...
But the best cover has to be D’Angelo, on his long-awaited 2012 comeback tour—within minutes of the first gig in Paris, the whole world was YouTubing his Space Oddity with our jaws hanging open. After...
But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job...
As Iggy later recalled, in a typical week they’d spend two days drunk, two days nursing their hangovers, and three days straight—which is a pretty good balance for musicians.
A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.
Ziggy was a requiem: Bowie came to bury the sixties, not praise them. He hit the road and toured like a madman, spreading the glitter gospel in a rock scene full of interchangeable flannel-and-denim s...
You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me and Money (That’s What I Want), but for me Please Mr. Postman houses them both. It’s another blizzard of oh yeah screams—in America Please Mr. Postman was on The Beatles...
You have blundered into an adult existence you don't understand, and you can't tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it's too late either way.
There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.
The world couldn’t have been hungrier for Anthology, with a ten-hour documentary and three huge-selling volumes of outtakes, turning into a joyous global celebration. The Anthology double-CD packages...
The things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has ins...
The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impu...
That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private. That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least...
He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't se...
Girls are the White Album and they all have Revolution 9's. They have all that stuff you wish you could edit out.When you fall in love with a girl, she's the bloody White Album. That is what you whisp...
Getting a Dog: She won this one easily, as I've already mentioned; I thought my graceful surrender would win me a concession or two down the line. i was wrong. Renee saw the dog not as a personal vict...
Even George Clinton sounded befuddled by Mind Games when he covered it on the very odd 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero, where he joined the likes of Blues Traveler and the Red Hot Chili Peppers...
But right now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is—building a shared language out of the things that fire up...
But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he’d never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofe...