Music Interviews

Logic's new album, Everybody, is out now.

Music & Culture

Logic Is Ready To Tell The World Who He Is

7:40am May 15, 2017

The son of a black father and a white mother, Logic says he was "born to make" his new album, Everybody. On it, he confronts issues of identity he says he's been scared to rap about in the past.

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In her new album as Fiver, Simone Schmidt imagines the songs that might have been sung by women incarcerated at Ontario's Rockwood Asylum in the 19th century.

Music & Culture

A Songwriter Gives Voice To The Silenced Women Of Rockwood Asylum

8:07am May 14, 2017

For her new album, Simone Schmidt, who performs under the name Fiver, researched the stories of women committed to the 19th-century Ontario institution for the criminally insane.

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Composer Lou Harrison was open to the vividness of other cultures throughout his life. He helped introduce Indonesian gamelan music to the West.

Music & Culture

Lou Harrison, The 'Maverick' Composer With Asia In His Ears

8:04am May 13, 2017

by Tom Huizenga

Routinely labeled an "American maverick," Harrison lovingly brought Eastern traditions and the rugged American West together in his music, blazing new paths and constructing his own instruments.

Otis Redding performs on the TV show Ready Steady Go in 1966.

Otis Redding's 'Unfinished Life' Still Resonates

8:04am May 13, 2017

Nearly 50 years after his untimely death, Redding's influence as a spirit of soul music remains. Jonathan Gould, author of a new biography of the singer, explains why.

Nathaniel Cross on trombone, Binker Golding on tenor saxophone, Moses Boyd on drums and Theon Cross on tuba perform at SXSW in March 2017.

Music & Culture

Get To Know London's Thriving Jazz Scene (By Way Of Austin, Texas)

6:26pm May 12, 2017

by Nate Chinen

Players like Moses Boyd, Shabaka Hutchings and Sarathy Korwar drive London's jazz scene forward with sounds from around the world. In March, SXSW hosted all three for an up-to-the minute dispatch.

Pete Townshend of The Who performs at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Calif., photographed for Rolling Stone in 1967.

'Rolling Stone' Founder Jann Wenner On 50 Years Of Rock And Roll History

6:01pm May 11, 2017

When Wenner started Rolling Stone, he says, other publications weren't taking rock and roll seriously. Since then, the magazine has documented five decades of music, politics and culture.

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"This instrument right here, born in Africa, but then made in America and then altered by white America — that's the story of so much of our music," Rhiannon Giddens says of the banjo.

Music & Culture

Rhiannon Giddens Speaks For The Silenced

3:00pm May 11, 2017

by Terry Gross

Giddens' Freedom Highway is an exploration of African-American experiences accompanied by the banjo, with "a sound, that deepness, that quality is what people associated with American music."

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Eight years into his relationship, Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas says, "it still doesn't feel intuitive. It always feels sort of strange and almost mystical."

Music & Culture

Perfume Genius Is Still Figuring Out How To Be In Love

5:03am May 09, 2017

by Barton Girdwood

Mike Hadreas' new album as Perfume Genius, No Shape, centers on his relationship with boyfriend Alan Wyffels. The couple tells NPR's Rachel Martin about making music as recovering addicts and gay men.

Min Kym is shown at her debut recital at the Serenates D'Estiu Festival in Majorca in July 1992.

Her Violin Stolen, A Prodigy's World Became 'Unstrung'

9:25am May 08, 2017

Min Kym had found her perfect partner in a 1696 Stradivarius — until it was snatched in a London cafe. She comes to terms with the loss in her new memoir, Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung.

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Feist says her goal with Pleasure is to "[go] back to a place that would be sustainable, that I can imagine enjoying when I'm 90."

Music & Culture

Feist Has A Message For Her 71-Year-Old Self

8:16am May 07, 2017

That message is embedded in the Canadian singer's new album, Pleasure. "I appreciate the perspective that 28-year-old Leslie's shed on my life," she says. "I kind of want to echo that forward."