Tag Archives: music-features

It’s a fairly familiar tale by now: An obscure album sees reissue after decades out of print, and the artist responsible gets to enjoy some overdue recognition. But in the case of Alan Braufman — a saxophonist, flutist, and composer whose 1975 debut, Valley of Search, a potent product of …

Jim James was on a long walk recently near his home in Louisville, Kentucky, listening to iTunes when one of his own songs popped up: “Spinning My Wheels,” a gorgeous, hymn-like ballad that he’d written in 2013. The track was from the scrapped sequel to My Morning Jacket‘s 2015 album …

Hidden within the new Taylor Swift album we were gifted with at the stroke of midnight is a teenage love triangle, told from distinct perspectives in three separate songs: “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty.” “I created character arcs and recurring themes that map out who is singing about who,” she explained. …

When the guys in One Direction teased that they were doing something special to celebrate the group’s 10th anniversary this month, fans around the world started speculating that it was a big reunion announcement. Instead, the group announced that they would be releasing a trove of archival content, including music …

On the Chromatica track “Free Woman,” Lady Gaga sings with conviction: “This is my dance floor I fought for.” She’s not exaggerating; her sixth album is, in many ways, about the journey that paved the way for the pop superstar’s triumphant return to dance music. “I think that the beginning …

During the past few years, Kamasi Washington has found himself in places a jazz musician never would have expected to be. With the release of his aptly named 2015 triple LP, The Epic, the L.A. saxophonist and bandleader was deemed the genre’s next big thing. So there he was, in …

In 2020, disbelief is rare: Once-in-a-lifetime pandemics have a way of making even the most outlandish news seem unimpressive. Yet when Westside Gunn — a Buffalo rapper who channels 90s New York hip-hop of yore — released the tracklist for his latest album, Pray For Paris, fans were bewildered. In …

Neil Young unloaded on Donald Trump earlier this month with a scathing public letter where he labelled the president “a disgrace to my country.”Days later, he reached deep into his vault and posted an incredible video of “Campaigner” from a 1991 Crazy Horse concert — a song written years earlier …

In 1976, on Jeffrey Foskett’s 20th birthday, he and a fellow Beach Boys fan drove up and down Bellagio Road in Los Angeles looking for Brian Wilson‘s home. After about an hour, they found it, decorated with a psychedelic stained-glass window depicting honeybees and flowers (seen on the cover of …

About eight months before the death of EDM superstar Avicii, his friend and French DJ colleague David Guetta received an urgent message from Avicii’s then-manager. “It was a little bit of a crisis, to be honest,” Guetta says. “His manager called me and said, ‘I don’t know what to do …