Tag Archives: music-features

According to Mary Ramos, Quentin Tarantino’s longtime music supervisor, the process for selecting songs for one of his films starts in a record store—which happens to be in his Hollywood home. What Ramos describes as Tarantino’s “record room” looks like a vinyl boutique, with LPs separated into bins labeled by …

This story originally ran in the March 22nd, 1990 issue of Rolling Stone. It was a January in Johannesburg of events unimaginable only months earlier. Merchants in the Saturday flea market hawked T-shirts celebrating the release of seven leaders of the outlawed African National Congress. The New Nation, a radical …

“Our legacy is up to you to decipher really,” Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris says nonchalantly. This week, his band is embarking on a U.S. leg of its Legacy of the Beast tour, which shares its name with the band’s new mobile game. They’re focusing on fan favorites from throughout …

One of 1994’s heaviest albums was also one of its strangest. Released on June 21st of that year, Betty, the third full-length from NYC four-piece Helmet, retained the huge staccato riffs, free-form solos and supple vocal hooks that had helped make their prior album, 1992’s Meantime, into a period classic …

Joan Shelley sees Kentucky as her nest. But looking for fresh perspective, she decided to work on new music in Reykjavik, Iceland, at Greenhaus Studios. “Coming Down For You” suggests it worked out quite well. The sound will be familiar territory to fans of her six previous albums (not counting …

When Tal Wilkenfeld finished recording her album Love Remains in late 2015, the first person she sent it to was Pete Townshend.“Pete was very encouraging of the music,” Wilkenfeld says. “The compositions, the production, the whole thing. Very smart too, in terms of the advice that he gave me from …

This week, Moby will release his second memoir, Then It Fell Apart. Out May 7th, the book picks up where 2016’s Porcelain left off, chronicling the heady, hedonistic period after the release of his 1999 breakthrough, Play, which fused electronica with folk, blues and gospel. Play would go on to …

Beyoncé’s headlining set at Coachella in 2018 was a master class in pop performance: an instantly iconic celebration of blackness, HBCUs and her own historic 22-year career. She was originally slated to headline in 2017 following her Formation World Tour, but a surprise pregnancy — with twins, nonetheless — delayed …

Looking back, it seems odd that one of the Seventies’ greatest feel-good songs begins in such dispiriting fashion: “Well, I tried to make it Sunday/But I got so damn depressed.” When “Sister Golden Hair” was released in 1975, America had little reason to be depressed. In the prior four years, …

It’s natural for aspiring musicians to learn through imitation. But in smaller countries, the first impulse of artists — at least those with commercial inclinations and YouTube access — may be to imitate hits from abroad, potentially impeding the growth of a rich local scene with its own sound and …