I’m not a Peca Popović. I just put it all together like this: I didn’t know the lyrics of Destiny until now. Sia, inherent in her own right, does what she does in her voice, completely subordinates everything to it, words sometimes do not even make out, she is the most sensual of the three, […]
I thought I knew that song. My mom sang it the most beautifully, with the piano. She still sings it wonderfully today, only the crowd that followed her with the guitar, the maligans and the drunk carp on St. Ignatius has thinned out a bit. One July, I came back from the sea and a […]
Fully settled in Berlin, with a work system established and in a far better place, physically and emotionally, than he’d been in years, David Bowie completed the second LP in his Berlin Trilogy quickly and efficiently. He began right after wrapping Lust for Life, his second collaborative home run with Iggy Pop. Bowie co-conspirator Brian Eno had also […]
The Joy Division story has been told many times, yet it never stops seeming too bizarre to be true. Jon Savage, best known for his classic punk history, England’s Dreaming, was one of the band’s first chroniclers in the 1970s, but he tells the tale in a new way in his excellent new book This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else. It’s the ultimate […]
To mark this month’s fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles’ ninth album, “The Beatles”—universally known as the White Album—several new expanded and enhanced editions are being released this week. These new versions were created under the supervision of Giles Martin, the son of the album’s original producer, George Martin. As was done last year with “Sgt. Pepper,” the […]
Claude Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old. Bound only lightly to the past, it floats in time. As it coalesces, bar by bar, it appears to be improvising itself into being—which is the effect Debussy wanted. After a rehearsal of his orchestral suite “Images,” he said, with satisfaction, “This […]
“We’ve been doing new tracks that are really fantastic and we’ve just been getting into them,” Jimi Hendrix told Rolling Stone in February 1968, right after he and the Experience had played San Francisco’s Fillmore West. “You have these songs in your mind. You want to hurry up and get back to the things you were doing in the […]
Psychedelic drug inspired their masterpiece – but also opened wounds that never healed The story of Revolver began in a night of hell and illumination. “We’ve had LSD,” John Lennon told George Harrison. It was spring 1965. Lennon and his wife, Cynthia, and Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, were attending a dinner at the London home of dentist John Riley […]