Happy New Year, friends and colleagues. Hope you had a meaningful holiday. I took some downtime to unplug, travel, and think deeply about the future I want to create. 2026 is already shaping up to be a wild ride. A few signals that are hard to ignore: America’s 250th anniversary The FIFA World Cup Grand […]
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series. Ben Stiller’s directorial debut Reality Bites spun off one of the biggest soundtrack albums of 1994, arguably overshadowing the Gen X rom com’s modest box office profits. The compilation sold more than […]
Long before social media, the multimedia performance poet John Giorno, once the toast of New York City’s underground spanning Andy Warhol’s Factory, the punk rock revolution and the Beat Generation, created a free zone of radical poets and socio-political activists available at the end of a phone line — Dial-A-Poem. Beginning in 1969, Giorno offered […]
One of the most intriguing and unexpected current-day musical phenomena is the popularity of tiki, or exotica, a style of music dating back to the mid-20th century. Exotica is quintessentially American — the perfect soundtrack for cocktail hour. In its original quirky run, exotica’s leading lights included Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, and Juan García Esquivel. […]
Olivia Rodrigo is celebrating the fifth birthday of her breakthrough single, “drivers license,” by today (Jan. 8) releasing a cover of the song by friend and collaborator David Byrne. It’s the first in a series of covers pegged to the upcoming fifth anniversary of Rodrigo’s debut album, SOUR. Byrne’s take on “license” is available on […]
Florence Shaw doesn’t tell jokes. As the singer-lyricist for the British post-punk band Dry Cleaning, she speaks in fragments and riddles, in social commentary and startling understatement, mixing serious notions with observations on the human comedy all around her. “We take humor pretty seriously,” says Shaw, whose exceedingly calm sung-spoken delivery is an essential character […]
Bruno Mars will release an as-yet-untitled new single on Friday (Jan. 9), which will be the first taste of his long-awaited next album, The Romantic. The project is due Feb. 27 from Atlantic and is the follow-up to 2016’s 24K Magic, which won six Grammys. Mars has never been far from the spotlight in the […]
Robyn will finally break a nearly eight-year album hiatus on March 27 with Sexistential, a nine-track release on new label Young. On the heels of first single “Dopamine” in November, the Swedish pop favorite today (Jan. 7) unveiled two more tracks, including the title cut and “Talk to Me.” A Casper Sejersen-directed video for the […]
Longtime Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear will miss three of the band’s upcoming shows after “smashing the shit out of his left foot” in “the classic tradition of rockstars having bizarre gardening accidents,” according to a social media post. Multi-instrumentalist Jason Falkner, who has played with Beck and St. Vincent and was also a member […]
When you’ve led a life like Cameron Crowe, you’re bound to keep everything. Backstage passes from touring with Led Zeppelin in 1973. Four hours of tapes from an interview with Pete Townshend at the Quadrophenia tour kickoff the same year. A legendary note from Gregg Allman written on Miyako Hotel letterhead in which he threatened […]