Beauty School Dropout has been a band for barely half a decade, but they’ve already played the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. When SPIN caught up with the busy Los Angeles quartet of singer Cole “Colie” Hutzler, guitarist Brent “Beepus” Burdett, producer-guitarist Bardo Novotny, and drummer Colton Flurry, they were fresh off a July […]
It had been 19 years since Pete Droge released a solo album before his incredibly emotional and personal record, Fade Away Blue, was released on August 22. Turns out, he’d been busy. Droge was 40 when he decided he needed to find his birth mother. It was Thanksgiving weekend 2009. Droge was going through some […]
For the first time since 1916 when Pancho ‘La Cucaracha’ Villa and hundreds of revolutionary gangbangers (los Villistas) stormed the southern border to sack the New Mexico town of Columbus, America is experiencing — our government claims — a land invasion. The intervening century-plus has been quiet, too quiet, on the invasion-front — but not […]
When Ron Flynt began writing “Back to California,” the jangly title track and lead single of the first 20/20 album in twenty-seven years, he had no idea that the line “Not everybody wants to burn it down” would eventually be heard against the backdrop of the January L.A. wildfires. “Honestly, I thought that was a […]
Prior to meeting Mat Osman of Suede some three decades ago, I had already heard many positive things about him from colleagues who’d interviewed the bassist. We crossed paths on February 2, 1995, after Suede’s landmark show at the American Legion Hall in Los Angeles. He was approachable, warm, and inclusive. I gave him a […]
“Yeah, trumpet’s a motherfucker,” Theo Croker says with a chuckle when I express amazement at the range of sounds a skilled musician can get out of an instrument with just three valves. “Y’know, the pitch of the notes is determined by the shape of the aperture, which is the hole that you create with the […]
Robyn Rihanna Fenty was born in Barbados in 1988, the daughter of an accountant and a warehouse supervisor. But when American producer Evan Rogers discovered Rihanna and brought the teen singer to the attention of Jay-Z, then president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings, she began a rapid ascent to multiplatinum success. Rihanna’s 2005 single […]
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 […]