Music Features

Musician-actorCalvin the Second was spending a weekend at Coachella when his agent gave him a call. A new music video was looking for a black guitarist, and the multi-instrumentalist who had appeared in films like Whiplash and shows like Nashville fit the bill. Still, he was a bit surprised when …

More often than not, descriptors of Jay Som’s indie rock balladry evoke a sleepy feel: dream pop, bedroom pop, chillwave, shoegaze. But in performance, Jay Som – the alias of 24-year-old Melina Duterte – has a way of transforming her intimate, home-recorded sweet nothings into a swinging party fit for …

Angélique Kidjo first heardTalking Heads shortly after she fled the communist regime in her native Benin for Paris in 1983. Listening to Western popular music was like an act of treason in her home country, she says, so she remembers feeling like a kid in a candy store when discovering …

On a Detroit winter evening, years ago, Jack White punched a guy in the face. Really hard. And not just once, if you believe the police report. It was the culmination of a feud between two garage-rock dudes, back in 2003, when feuds and garage rock and dudes were still …

As it turns out, in the hill country west of Austin, in a big-ass house in a big-ass gated community, the singer known as Meat Loaf is hanging in there. He’s 70. His hair is thinning, his hands are unsteady, his back is such a mess he can’t get into …

For years, Def Leppard were well situated among the ranks of Garth Brooks and Tool as holdouts on streaming services – artists with large, multiplatinum catalogues that still didn’t feel comfortable with the pros and cons of subscription-based music schemes. The hard rockers had long been at war with their …

Earlier this month, the R&B singer Ty Dolla $ign stood in the middle of a small studio crammed with listeners in midtown Manhattan as his Beach House 3 album rumbled through the speakers. Flanked by two golden “$” balloons, he celebrated the new release by dragging on a joint, conducting …

Hours before Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers wrapped up their 2014 Hypnotic Eye tour at the The Forum in Los Angeles, we conducted extensive interviews with three core members of the band: guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench and bassist Ron Blair. The conversations were intended for a special edition …