âHow old do I have to be to release an album?” One of my kids, Chloe, asked me this a few months ago. Not because they have an album recorded or even a song written, but because she and her twin brother Clark have increasingly been getting into performing and listening to pop music. My […]
Fairy lights strung across Anjimile Chithambo’s wall cast a warm, pinkish glow across the singer-songwriter’s bedroom. “I know you didn’t mean that gay,” he says when I say I love the lights. “But I deeply feel like a fairy.” This sends both of us into peals of laughter, effectively breaking the ice in an instant. […]
The cover of the self-titled debut from Jason P. Woodbury & the Nightbird Singing Quartet speaks volumes: It’s modeled on the indelible design of Vintage Contemporaries, a 1980s publishing imprint that helped launch such coolly eclectic authors as Barry Hannah, Jay McInerney, Thomas McGuane and Joy Williams, and depicts a rooster crowing on a mid-sized […]
At 20, Joby Harris was fronting the hardcore band Phatso and attending art school in Pittsburgh. By 21, he was in Los Angeles, playing in bands and working for Walt Disney Imagineering. “I was working on Disneyland things by day,” he says, “and every weekend I was driving to Orange County to go to shows […]
The more digital the world becomes, the more valuable real life gets. Watching something on an IG Story is not the same as being in the room when it happens. In a world where information is abundant and democratized, relationships are currency. People want to work with people they actually know. In-person connection is far […]
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series. In R.E.M.’s early years, Michael Stipe was comfortable with ambiguity, as a lyricist and as a public figure. His lyrics were dense and cryptic, but they wouldn’t be printed out in the […]
Name Michael Hampton a.k.a. Kidd Funkadelic Best known for Joining Parliament Funkadelic at age 17, and over the past 50 years playing more than 5,000 shows in 400 cities across six continents with them, totaling over 10,000 hours on stage. I certainly didnât count all that up, a friend calculated it with AI help on the research. […]