The Anniversary

Britney Spears is the first thing you notice upon entering my childhood bedroom: a messily-taped 34-inch poster of a 17-year-old popstar with a million-watt smile.

She was in and out of mental hospitals and drug rehabs constantly. Then she wrote a note about going to join our father in a…

"Right about now/ The funk soul brother/ Check it out now/ The funk soul brother/ Right about now/ The funk soul brother/ Check it out…

American Water dismisses much of the American dream. While many Americans were taught to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to conquer, to climb, in…

For an emerging artist, a hit single is both the best and worst thing that can happen to you.

As far as lyric as band-thesis statements go, Fucked Up never made their ethos clearer than on the chanted refrain of "Twice Born." "Hands up…

Crafted in the California desert, cutting their teeth playing free impromptu parties beneath the stars, and named after an undead creature from the Dungeons &…

The indie rock subgenre known as "noise-pop," which distorts candy-sweet melodies with blown-out guitars and echo, had something of a renaissance in the late 2000s.

In the late '90s, musical genres that once felt as separate as continents began to shift into each other like tectonic plates, the great unifier…

Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach go way back. They go back further than 1998’s Painted From Memory. More than 40 years, in fact.

In the first episode of Succession, HBO's great show about the travails of an evil New York billionaire family, there's a scene that's excruciating on…

I interviewed Lil Wayne once. This was sometime in 2006, when Wayne was deep in his historic mixtape run, when he hadn't yet achieved his…

Everything about Polly Jean Harvey was a revelation when she emerged in the early '90s. Her first two albums with the trio PJ Harvey, 1992's…

The horns sit calmly atop the track, precise and regal. The riff they trill out is pretty complicated, but it's also instantly memorable, a melody…

I want to share with you two scenes, two instances when I purchased Deserter’s Songs, two moments that continue to shape how I hear the…