The powers-that-be did their best to prevent this year’s Major League Baseball season from happening, but, alas, we’re back. By we, I mean the annual SPIN baseball preview. As usual, everyone (or almost everyone) is optimistic about their team’s chances in 2022. In 2021, a good chunk of the season was played with minimal fans […]
The 2022 Grammy Awards were finally held on Sunday night, two months and 300 miles removed from the original plan. The 64th annual ceremony, originally set for late January in Los Angeles, was pushed back after COVID-19 cases spiked in early 2022. It was also moved to Las Vegas for the first time, held in […]
Aerosmith started whatever day Steven walked in the door, says Joe Perry, his Boston accent flattening those r’s into ah’s. As in Steven Ty-lah. It’s refreshing that after 50 years in one of the most successful bands in history, Perry still sounds like he really doesn’t give a fuck. Like he would be just as […]
Once upon a New York theatre dream, Kevin Kane and Amy Schumer met at the renowned William Esper Studio’s two-year intensive acting program. “That first year, they break you down,” Kevin tells me. I personally cast him in one of my plays in the early 2000’s. “I feel like…Going through that with somebody, you bare […]
Since the early 1980s, independent label Devil in the Woods has released music from a wealth of future indie-rock greats, including Bright Eyes, Grandaddy, Death Cab For Cutie and Sparklehorse, and eventually grew into a glossy print magazine. But in a surprising pivot, founder Mike Cloward shifted the company during the pandemic from its longtime […]
Hours before the reunited Circle Jerks began a February run of West Coast concert dates, drummer Joey Castillo heard again from a San Diego skater kid. The DMs on Instagram were piling up from 12-year-old Desmond Chavez, who was attending his very first big concert that night: Hey, I’m coming down tonight! What time are […]
Too often living legends go neglected in their own environs, as if already past history. They become walking ghosts, barely acknowledged where they exist–while neighbors thrive off their genius. Austin, Texas is in the middle of its first post-pandemic, in person, somewhat subdued (1,400 bands instead of 2,000) South by Southwest (SXSW) music, film, new […]
In early 1993, L.A.-based photographer Loren Haynes (and his Mamiya RZ 67 camera) checked into New York City’s Paramount Hotel, the same one as Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando, hoping to bond with the musician before their cover shoot the next day. “I always try to arrange private time with the artist, get to know them, […]
Like many 40-year-olds who engage with social media only when necessary, MGMT co-founder Ben Goldwasser doesn’t have a TikTok account. So when the title track of the band’s 2018 album, Little Dark Age, suddenly began appearing in thousands of videos on the platform in the first pandemic summer of 2020, he had to rely on […]
When I wrote about my glimpses of the Ukrainian rock scene in the book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control, many of the musicians I spoke to had been newly radicalized by the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” (or Maidan Revolution), and the Russian annexation of Crimea that followed. One was Sasha Boole, a rambunctious singer-songwriter […]