For a lot of years, Vera Brandes couldn’t listen. Not once had she heard the bestselling solo jazz album of all time—Keith Jarrett’s passionate and sublime The Köln Concert—though she’d been essential to making it happen in 1975 as an 18-year-old music promoter in Cologne, West Germany. It wasn’t the first show organized by the […]
Mike Frazier doesn’t waste time. A title card flashes over footage of him opening a garage door: “The Belly Is In the Brain.” It immediately cuts to Frazier, now seated and centered in the frame. “For two years I felt debilitating nausea, chronic pain, and the worst mental health crisis of my life.” As he […]
Director Lee Kirk is hoping you’ll have the time of your life watching his new film, New Years Rev—we’ve seen it with an apostrophe, too, though we’re told it doesn’t have one—the Green Day collaboration which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) September 13. The title doesn’t convey that it’s […]
*SPIN helped curate the soundtrack to this film. About a month and a half ago, a friend of mine I’ve known since seventh grade died unexpectedly. I immediately called our mutual friend, Bryan, to tell him the bad news, and we grieved together. So, when I watched filmmaker Brian Brightly’s new independent film, The Wake, […]
Somewhere deep in the archives of the lime-green, forum-shaped headquarters of Mutato Muzika, Mark Mothersbaugh is digging up the distant past. The building houses his music production company on the Sunset Strip, but also the entire recorded history of Devo, the groundbreaking art-punk new wave band he co-founded with Jerry Casale back in the 1970s. […]
Over the week my mother was dying, I listened to Boy George’s second solo album, Tense Nervous Headache, every night after coming home from the hospital. Locked in my bathroom, sitting on the floor, my 21-year-old self needed at least one full playthrough to help process what was happening. Less than a year later, still […]
“Now I think you can stay there. It’s like an Airbnb now,” says filmmaker Amy Berg about the now-famous house where musician Jeff Buckley lived during his three-month stay in Memphis, the city he retreated to after the release of Grace to work on his second album, My Sweetheart the Drunk. Buckley’s time there was […]