It’s a few days before the autumn equinox, the leaves outside are still green and well attached to the trees, and Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford isn’t quite sure why he’s promoting a Christmas record right now. “I was surprised,” he says. “Our label says you have to start ramping …
Read More »Happy Birthday, Bruce Springsteen: 70 Years of Proving It All Night
Here’s a birthday toast to Bruce Springsteen, who turns 70 today. He’s spent his sixties experimenting with crazy ideas he’d never tried before — his one-man Broadway show, his memoir Born to Run, his SoCal cowboy excursion Western Stars, dropped just a few months ago as a total surprise, with …
Read More »Baby Hold On: Why Eddie Money Was the Patron Saint of Rock Uncool
As he himself would have admitted, Eddie Money was no one’s idea of a conventional rock star. His stage moves were always a little gawky and spasmodic, his borderline hoarse voice in need of a lozenge or two. Emerging during the punk era though never part of it, he preferred …
Read More »The Harry Styles Hit List: A Few of His Favorite Things
So what does a young superstar spend his time thinking about? Classic rock, mostly, along with the occasional movie or TV show. Harry Styles has always been a voracious scholar of pop history — the kind of guy who obsesses over John and Yoko album covers and Fleetwood Mac deep …
Read More »Mark McGrath Is Just as Shocked as You Are That There's a New Sugar Ray Album
About a year and a half ago, the producers of Celebrity Big Brother asked Mark McGrath to stage a fake recording session so they could shoot a quick sizzle reel of him before the reality show began filming. But when Sugar Ray guitarist Rodney Sheppard arrived at the studio, he …
Read More »Flashback: Roky Erickson Serenades Demons and Zombies on 'The Evil One'
In an early-Eighties documentary on Roky Erickson, an interviewer asked the late singer-guitarist about his religious background. “Well, I’ve gone through three changes,” Erickson responds. “I thought I was a Christian, then I was with the devil … and then the third one where I know who I am; I …
Read More »Ann Marie Is an Insanely Popular R&B Singer Hiding in Plain Sight
Ann Marie is an R&B star in a world that’s currently low on them. Much of her style feels like an anomaly: R&B’s streaming elite are typically mysterious mush-mouthed singers who forgo longing for drug-fueled existential dread. Ann Marie, along with a new class of singers like Ella Mai and …
Read More »03 Greedo May Be Behind Bars, But He Won't Stop Releasing Music
Since signing the rapper 03 Greedo in 2017, Alamo Records founder Todd Moscowitz has grown accustomed to playing catch-up. “This is how Greedo works,” he explains. “You get a phone call one day: ‘Hey, I made four albums over the last few weeks.’ Oh really? ‘Yeah, I went in with …
Read More »Here Comes the 'Bride': Inside Vampire Weekend's Return
Last fall, Ezra Koenig experienced a brief moment of panic regarding Post Malone’s hit single “Sunflower.” “We have a song on this record called ‘Sunflower,’” the Vampire Weekend frontman, 34, recalls thinking. “‘God, we have to get this out!’” The album he’s talking about is Father of the Bride, the …
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