Interview

Wavves is the stage name for a young SoCal musician who escaped a life of zonked-out video-game boredom by writing songs about it. He now enjoys zonked-out video-game bliss.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/28/09

Janelle Monáe has a sound rooted in old-school funk, but this conceptual lyricist stretches
her soulful grooves way beyond R&B into post-pop Blade Runner territory.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/28/09

Peter Bjorn and John, the cerebral Swedes behind that whistling song, are vying to avoid one-hit-wonderdom with a new album that features a children’s choir. And they might be onto something.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/28/09

Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, is back with a new album that’s a meditation on fame, religion, and the spiritual lives of artists—and a postcard to his old peace-, love-, and wonderment-devoted self.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/28/09

Girls are two Bay Area boys making mellow rock bent on uniting the whole world. Did you think lo-fi love jams were only for biological girls?  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/03/09

Amazing Baby, the next hot psychedelic-rock band from Brooklyn, has yet to actually put out an album. Maybe it’s because they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prove they aren’t drugged-out, nudist hippies.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/24/09

Rapper Kid Cudi gives lovelorn potheads a reason to get off the couch.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/24/09

Chris Blackwell put Jamaica on the musical map, helped shepherd in the golden age of British rock, lit the fuse on Bob Marley’s Rasta uprising, and launched u2 into the stratosphere, transforming the music business in the process. As the label he founded, Island Records, celebrates its 50th anniversary, he surveys what he hath wrought.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/24/09

Today’s version of Patti Smith performs like she’s on fire (and sometimes she is). But Alison Mosshart. The feminine half of the band The Kills might tour forever—unless the bus driver runs away with all their equipment again.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/24/09

Marianne Faithfull has spent more than four decades channeling her checkered life of addictions, dark troughs, and Rolling Stones into some of the most elegantly damaged music this side of the Great Abyss. And no, it hasn’t been easy.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/24/09