The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond, the newly released Gallery Books memoir from pioneering music executive and Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, would have been an amazing read even if it had stopped before Blackwell discovered a teenage Steve Winwood blowing minds in a London club in 1964, happened upon a struggling Jamaican […]
More often than not, the identities of wives/girlfriends/partners of famous musicians are defined in association with their notable counterparts. Olivia Harrison, widow of George Harrison, incorrectly falls into this category. Prior to becoming romantically attached to George, the Mexican-American Los Angeles native worked for his label, Dark Horse Records. They fell in love and he […]
Nabil Ayers has always been surrounded by music. He played drums in Seattle indie rock band The Long Winters, co-founded Seattle’s Sonic Boom Records, and is currently the U.S. president of the Beggars Group, which distributes 4AD, Rough Trade Records, Matador Records, XL Recordings, and Young. It’s his last name, however, that has always attracted […]
Kenny Loggins may forever be associated with his era-defining contributions to the soundtracks for such ’80s classics as Caddyshack, Footloose and Top Gun, but they are just a few of the countless milestones in his eventful, 50-plus-year career in music. Already a folk-rock superstar by his early 20s as part of the duo Loggins & […]
“This is the cutest thing, but I was interviewing Ihsahn from [Norwegian death metal band] Emperor and I thought I’d recorded it,” Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor author Kim Kelly says with a laugh, “I realized halfway through — he was in Norway and this is in the early 2000s — […]
We are rarely permitted a visual glimpse into a rock icon’s psyche the way we are with Shane MacGowan’s new book, The Eternal Buzz and The Crock of Gold. To be released on April 29, it showcases six decades of the English-born Irish singer’s unpublished writing, unseen handwritten lyrics, and drawings and sketches from MacGowan’s […]
For music journalist Dan Charnas, telling J Dilla’s story was a personal quest. Dilla, the highly influential rap producer, died in 2006. “In the 15 years since his death, journalists and academics have written about him, and musicians have extolled his work,” Charnas says. “But no one had put it all together in a definitive […]
Darryl “DMC” McDaniels is 57, but he still speaks with the boundless energy and commanding voice that he changed the music world with as a teenager. Whether he’s talking about the MCs that made him want to rap in the early ‘80s, his youth outreach work, or his upcoming single with Sebastian Bach, Travis Barker, […]
Will Sergeant never considered himself a writer. “I was rubbish at school. I wasn’t interested in English at all or anything like that. I’m rubbish at writing. When at school, I used to just write any old crap just to get through. It would just be scribble. They’d be like, ‘What the hell’s this?’” he […]
Thirty years ago, Raekwon (or Corey Woods, as the government knows him) was just a young man from Staten Island with a passion for rapping. A year later, he and his childhood friend, now known as Ghostface Killah, joined seven other kids from New York City’s fifth borough to form Wu-Tang Clan. The rest is […]