Tag Archives: music-features

My Bloody Valentine had already been a band for five years by the time guitarist Kevin Shields found his secret weapon. After years of hopping between knockoffs of popular Fenders and Gibsons, a friend loaned him a 1964 Fender Jazzmaster – a melty, hotrod-shaped instrument with a bevy of switches …

TheFlaming Lipshave conducted boombox and car-stereo orchestras, constructed a single album across four separate CDs, composed a 24-hour song, and issued music on gummy fetuses and skulls. So for the long-running psych-rock crew, releasing a conventional best-of package and early-era box set might be their strangest experiments to date. The …

In the three years since Alessia Cara released her Isaac Hayes-sampling anti-party anthem “Here,” the Canadian singer-songwriter has released a debut album; appeared on two Top 10 hits in collaboration with other stars (Zedd’s “Stay” and Logic’s “1-800-273-8255”); sung the pop radio version of a the latest Disney princess classic …

As a young rock fan in Madrid, Carlotta Cosials once made a scrapbook full of Arctic Monkeys lyrics. “When [2011’s] Suck it and See had just come out and nobody had a printer, I handmade this book,” recalls the singer-guitarist, 27. “Our obsession with lyrics began with Alex Turner.” Cosials’ …

At this year’s Grammys, where he was up for several awards, Jason Isbell didn’t exactly tear the place up. “We weren’t on the televised part of the show, so we didn’t get the good seats,” he says with a good-natured laugh. “We wound up eating chicken fingers from the concession …

Two weeks before the Grammys, Code Orange drummer-vocalist Jami Morgan is admiring the outfit he’ll be wearing on the red carpet: a bespoke black fur coat. He never thought he’d possess something like this, let alone sport it during such a high-stakes occasion. “After we announced the nomination, I got …

Elvis Costello has found himself pondering some unusual questions lately. Like, say, “What does a slightly absent-minded cat sound like?” On the upcoming animated children’s special, Pete the Cat: A Groovy New Year, the quick-witted singer-songwriter plays the titular character’s scatterbrained father. The show, which is based on illustrator and …

David Robinson woke up early on the morning the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced their class of 2018. The Cars drummer was told a couple of days earlier by his manager that they’d finally gotten inducted, but he wanted to see the news coverage himself. “I thought the …

Last week, Ron Tutt, best known as Elvis Presley’s drummer from 1969 to 1977, did something he hadn’t done in nearly 40 years: He listened to the Jerry Garcia Band’s Cats Under the Stars. Appreciated as Garcia’s most fully realized and produced solo album outside the Grateful Dead, Cats Under …

On a desert road hours northeast of Los Angeles, the singer Miguel stands on a small makeshift stage of wooden pallets in his first act of political protest. Across the street is the Adelanto Detention Facility, temporary home to nearly 2,000 federal immigration detainees, and where guards quietly watch from …