As I greet Bryan Adams on our phone call, he’s surprised that SPIN is doing a feature on him. “I didn’t know that SPIN was a big fan,” he says, as he heads to Italy to continue his world tour supporting his new album, Roll With the Punches. I’m confused and ask him to elaborate. […]
On May 21, 1998, I saw Garbage at what used to be The Palace in Hollywood. I wasn’t there for Garbage—I came for the opener, bizarrely, Talvin Singh—but I left singing Garbage songs. I knew all the singles. How could you not in the ’90s, when their music was everywhere? Even more than the songs […]
Smack dab in the middle of the final decade before the millennium—when some truly believed the world would end—chaos and catastrophe marked a year of strong attempts towards peace and world change. The O.J. Simpson murder trial began in January, 1995. The Oklahoma City Bombing took the lives of 168 people in April. The Srebrenica […]
Name Tom Johnston Best known for Being a singer, guitar player, songwriter for the Doobie Brothers. Current city Marin County, north of San Francisco a little bit. Really want to be in Dublin, that’s a great town. I really like Dublin. Excited about Our new album, Walk This Road. We’re starting the U.S. version of touring on that right now. We’ve been over in […]
Cha Wa is a traditional Mardi Gras Indians greeting in New Orleans that means “here we come” or “we’re comin’ for ya.” Appropriately, a hearty shout of “CHA WA!” is the first thing I hear out of “Spyboy” Irving “Honey” Banister Jr.’s mouth when he and two of his bandmates appear on my Zoom screen. […]
*SPIN helped curate the soundtrack to this film. About a month and a half ago, a friend of mine I’ve known since seventh grade died unexpectedly. I immediately called our mutual friend, Bryan, to tell him the bad news, and we grieved together. So, when I watched filmmaker Brian Brightly’s new independent film, The Wake, […]
In the middle of a rainstorm in Miami, Mau y Ricky are finding shelter in the place where they feel most at home—the recording studio. After nearly a decade of penning multi-platinum hits for themselves and other artists, the Latin superstars are opening a new door to more creative control with their EP La Llave, […]
Tom Hanks made his directing debut in 1996 with That Thing You Do!, a fictional saga of a one-hit-wonder 1960s band punningly called the Wonders. The title song, written by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, captures the ’60s zeitgeist in a tidy two minutes and 43 seconds. But Hanks chose it after a wide audition. […]
Somewhere deep in the archives of the lime-green, forum-shaped headquarters of Mutato Muzika, Mark Mothersbaugh is digging up the distant past. The building houses his music production company on the Sunset Strip, but also the entire recorded history of Devo, the groundbreaking art-punk new wave band he co-founded with Jerry Casale back in the 1970s. […]
Frederick Mark Linkous was born into a family of coal miners in Virginia in 1962, and in the ’80s he moved to New York City and then to Los Angeles in search of success in the music industry. Linkous’s gift for riffs and hooks is readily apparent in the two albums he recorded as the […]