When I caught up with deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-August, it’s raining in Toronto and one of his three cats, Peanut, is going a little crazy with the thunderstorm outside. Zimmerman has been in the basement, where he’s been trying to resolve a developer challenge, before he emerges to speak to […]
Wisconsinite drummer Butch Vig, Nebraskan guitarist Duke Erikson, and Minnesotan guitarist Steve Marker met in the late ’70s in Madison, Wisconsin. Although Erikson and Vig’s bands Spooner and Fire Town each released a couple of well-received albums, it was really Smart Studios, which Vig and Marker founded in Madison in 1983, that made the Midwestern […]
Alex Warren, Busta Rhymes, J Balvin featuring DJ Snake, Ricky Martin, Sabrina Carpenter and sombr are the first performers set for the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, which will be held Sept. 7 at Long Island, N.Y.’s USB Arena and broadcast live on CBS. Rhymes will receive the MTV VMA Rock the Bells Visionary Award […]
The last time I saw John Power, frontperson of Cast, was at a mutual friend’s wedding, where he was throwing up out of the hotel window. That was 24 years ago. When I remind him, he says, “Well, you know, those were hedonistic days.” Power doesn’t look any worse for wear. Cast just finished opening […]
“When we’re writing a song or recording a song, I think we have a pretty good internal quality control of, ‘Is this good?’ or ‘Is this exciting?’ versus ‘This feels forced’ or ‘This doesn’t feel natural,’ ” Mac McCaughan says, explaining how Superchunk have, maybe consciously or maybe not, maintained their high musical standards across […]
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series. The duality of pleasure and pain, of comedy and tragedy, or of life’s highs and lows is fertile territory for songwriters. And John Mellencamp has created some great songs out of those […]
Name Steve Jones Best known for Swearing on the Bill Grundy Show [on December 1, 1976]. Current city London. Excited about I’m going to be touring until middle of October—all around Europe and England, then going to South America for a few dates. We end up in the States, in Dallas, and work our way all around the States. My current music collection […]
B-Real drops a bombshell mere minutes into our interview. Cypress Hill’s 1993 juggernaut, “Insane in the Brain,” was initially written as a diss track aimed at “Treat ‘Em Right” rapper Chubb Rock. Suddenly, after more than 30 years of hearing the Grammy-nominated song in heavy rotation, it was no longer perceived as just a weed […]
I was 21 when Brokeback Mountain was released. I have such fond memories of going to the gay bar in my hometown of Minneapolis and dancing to bass-driven remixes of Gustavo Santaolalla’s gentle, emotive original score. Even in its house-music version, there’s an inherent sadness in these songs, and sometimes that’s the best to dance […]
When John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved from London to New York in the wake of the Beatles‘ 1970 demise, they secured an unassuming one-bedroom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, immersed themselves in the thriving counterculture and lent their voices to the raging anti-war movement in opposition to the American government’s evermore deadly presence in Vietnam. […]