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Producer/songwriter Andrew Watt went from the pop world to finding himself in the studio with his rock heroes, from the Rolling Stones to Pearl Jam — and now he’s back at the center of pop as executive producer of Lady Gaga’s upcoming album Mayhem. His career is reaching new heights at the moment, with a Grammy win for the Stones’ Hackney Diamonds, an Oscar nomination for a track with Elton John and Brandi Carlile (who have a Watt-produced dual album on the way), and a long run...

Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance at Sunday’s Super Bowl was the most-watched in history, with more than 133 million people tuning in — and it also may have been the most uncompromising. In a slot that every previous artist has reserved mostly for greatest hits, Lamar only played bits of two older songs, focusing instead on his excellent new album, Gnx, and his Drake-eviscerating smash, “Not Like Us.”

On the latest episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield join host Brian Hiatt to break down the...

In the beginning, R.E.M. would play anywhere that would have them, from pizza parlors to gay bars to frat parties. For all the arty elusiveness of their early music, the band that would end up setting the template for the Nineties alt-rock boom was hungrier and more strategic than it might have seemed — which is just one of many revelations in Peter Ames Carlin’s illuminating new book, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Carlin...

The term “yacht rock” came into being not in the sun-dappled harbors of the 80s, but two decades later through a satirical web series—a perfect origin for a genre that somehow sounds like it should have existed all along. Some see it as a response to the raw angst of the grunge-dominated early 2000s, an ironic celebration of smoothness. Others see it as a subtle message that the most intense cultural shifts need spaces for relaxation.

Garret Price’s “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary” takes a mellow look at this musical period. The film blends old footage with new interviews, acknowledging its history while sharing stories from musicians who shaped the era.

The name itself plays with both the ocean themes incorrectly linked to the music and Price’s examination beyond the comedic surface that shaped its resurrection. The term “dockumentary” moves easily between historical documentation and cultural observation—staying...

Now that the box-office success of A Complete Unknown has achieved the seemingly impossible feat of turning at least a few Gen-z viewers into Bob Dylan stans, Hollywood’s biopic wave is about to turn into a tsunami. Next up is the Bruce Springsteen movie Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White, and four separate Beatles movies from director Sam Mendes. (To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below).

In the new...

Marcus J. Moore, author of 2020’s The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, initially assumed it was too late to follow it with a book about one of his favorite hip-hop groups of all time, De La Soul. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, well, clearly I can’t do that, because there’s already been a book written,'” he says on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. “And then much to my surprise, there wasn’t one.” (To hear the whole episode,...

The funny thing about yacht rock? When the song stylings of Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross were actually topping the charts, no one called it “yacht rock.” You might have found those songs on a radio station that promised “album-oriented rock” or “easy listening,” but it wasn’t until a series of comedy videos in the early 2000s that “yacht rock” actually came to be.

Weirdly, you can thank Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon, at least in part. In the early aughts, Harmon and partner Rob Schrab launched Channel 101, an L.A.-based film fest in which participants submitted “pilots” in the form of low-budget comedy videos. Previous successful filmmakers chose which pilots were shown at live events, while the audiences decided which “series” would be back for encores. One of the most successful entries was Yacht Rock.

Yacht Rock — written and directed by J.D. Ryznar — was a Channel 101 superstar,...

Radiohead have had a spy in their midst for years. As his excellent new book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, reveals, bassist Colin Greenwood has been snapping candid, lovely photographs of his bandmates since the early 2000s — in the studio, in dressing rooms, and even, somehow, onstage during the middle of their concerts.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Greenwood — who just finished a tour playing bass with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — talks about his book, looks back at highlights of his years in the band,...

Amy Allen just scored a Grammy nomination for Songwriter of the Year after co-writing every song on Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet — and she owes her entire career to the vampire baby in one of the Twilight movies. As a nursing student at Boston College, she discovered a major flaw in her career plan during that baby’s gory birth scene. “I blacked out in the movie theater cause I, like, couldn’t see blood,” she says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, “which I didn...

Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, two of the biggest and most interesting pop artists of the past half decade, have a not-so-secret weapon in common: producer and co-writer Daniel Nigro, formerly the frontman of the ’00s band As Tall As Lions. Nigro, who just scored a Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year, helped Roan and Rodrigo step off the pop assembly line and sidestep trends, building uncommonly sturdy catalogs of precisely crafted, oft rock-inflected hits.

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Nigro shares studio...

If you’ve ever plumbed the placid seas of yacht rock — that distinct style of jazz-influenced soft pop and rock that surfaced in Southern California in the late Seventies — you know it’s filled with fools.

“There are so many of these songs about expressing your feelings — the fool in love or the heartbreak of a fool,” Garret Price, director of the new film, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, tells Rolling Stone. “Questlove [in the movie] brought up that yacht rock is emo. It’s emotional music in this hard rock landscape of the Seventies.

Some lessons need to be learned over and over again. When Bob Dylan and the Beatles broke through in the Sixties, they paved the way for generations of artists to write their own songs. But by the early 2000s, the charts had been largely reclaimed by pro songwriters and svengali producers — until a young, putatively country artist named Taylor Swift came along.

As Swift rapidly moved toward pop stardom, guitar always in hand, she started an industry-wide movement toward artists — especially young women — writing about their own lives again. “When...

The yacht-rock era is finally getting the official documentary (“dockumentary”) treatment, with filmmaker Garret Price’s project featuring appearances from such smooth and soulful luminaries as Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, and Toto. But there was one seminal figure Price could not persuade to sit for an interview: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen.

Per People, Fagen does briefly appear in Yacht Rock — or at least his voice does — in a scene where Price calls him up and pitches him an interview about “this genre.” When Fagen asks what genre that is,...

Decades never start quite on time, pop-culturally speaking, and it’s tempting to say that the Sixties didn’t really kick off until the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, just as “Smells Like Teen Spirt” started the Nineties in 1991. But as David Browne’s new book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, suggests, the Sixties’ spirit really began in Greenwich Village, not Liverpool — and the music that really got it going was written by Bob Dylan. In June of 1963, Peter,...

Despite numerous Grammy nominations in the country field, and a Best Country Duo/Group Performance win with Kacey Musgraves for “I Remember Everything,” Zach Bryan says he doesn’t want to be defined as a country music artist.

In an exclusive Rolling Stone interview between Bryan and Bruce Springsteen, the Great American Bar Scene songwriter and the New Jersey working-class hero talked at length about how country music has affected their work. Springsteen cited Hank Williams and Johnny Cash as influences, while Bryan praised Jason Isbell and went on to...

Libby Titus, the singer-songwriter best known for her song “Love Has No Pride” and creating the New York Rock and Soul Revue with future husband Donald Fagen, died Sunday night at the age of 77.

“My beautiful wife, Libby Titus Fagen, passed on October 13th surrounded by family,” Fagen wrote on Steely Dan’s site. “Thanks for keeping us in your thoughts, and for respecting our privacy at this time.” A cause of death was not immediately available.

Titus released two solo albums — both titled Libby Titus — in 1968 and 1977. In between the two albums,...

“This world is bullshit,” Chappell Roan recently said, during an extended TikTok rant. “You shouldn’t model your life on what we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself.” All right, fine, that was actually what Fiona Apple said on the VMAs in 1997 — and at the time, Apple’s dissatisfaction with fame briefly threatened to become the essence of her brand, overshadowing the brilliance of her music. But Apple continued creating, and her songs have long since outlasted any passing controversies.

David Gilmour just released a new album, Luck and Strange, and he’s about to kick off his first tour since 2016 — as for any other future career plans, he’s taking it day by day. Might this be his final tour? “Well, it could be, obviously,” he tells Andy Greene in an interview featured in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. Gilmour dwells on mortality on the new album, which he co-wrote with his wife, Polly Samson, and he’s all too aware that we’ve...

“I do want to put a lot of music out there,” D’Angelo told Rolling Stone in 2015, shortly after the release of his acclaimed, long-delayed third album, Black Messiah. “I feel like, in a lot of respects, that I’m just getting started.” He still has yet to release a follow-up, however, and has largely gone quiet since touring behind it. But now, D’Angelo is deep into recording his next album, according to his friend and longtime collaborator Raphael Saadiq.

“D’s in a good space,” Saadiq says on the...

When the original lineup of the legendary R&b band Tony! Toni! Toné! reunited for a tour last year, co-founder and key creative force Raphael Saadiq had high hopes of recording what would have been the band’s first new album since 1996. But now that the tour is over, Saadiq says the new album has been canceled. “We just got overzealous a little bit,” Saadiq says in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “The tour was amazing. We had a beautiful time … We’re just at...

Last year, back when the prospect of Oasis reuniting seemed about as likely as Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race, Noel Gallagher revealed on our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast that he’d written 40 songs during Covid lockdown. Some of those tracks were included on Council Skies, his most recent album with the High Flying Birds, but that left two full albums worth. “There is an acoustic album as well, which is very, very stripped back,” he said, “and which I started recording recently before I came away...

“Too twiddly didn’t really exist to us, in our minds,” guitar legend Steve Howe of Yes says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, explaining the musical mission of his band — and of prog-rock itself. “There wasn’t really such a thing. If you could play it, then it obviously isn’t too twiddly — because, hang on, you’re playing it! We wanted to sparkle, we wanted a surprise… We were taking untold risks and gambles and playing about with things.”

A new ultra-deluxe box set Yes’ 1971 classic,...

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is much more than a country album — it’s actually a tour through the Black roots of American music that manages to be both thematically rich and stuffed with indelible pop songs, in multiple genres. Kendrick Lamar’s virtuosic “Not Like Us,” meanwhile, completely transcends its status as a killing blow in the Lamar-Drake battle, packing in an astonishing amount of lyrical and musical density — and it’s somehow also the year’s most entertaining, endlessly replayable track.

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast,...

On the evening of Feb. 28, 1984, Prince was at home, watching Michael Jackson become the first artist to win eight Grammys in a single night, including Album of the Year for Thriller. When the broadcast was over, Prince turned to Bobby Z, his longtime friend and drummer for the Revolution, and told him, “Next year, that’s gonna be us.”

As both an album and a movie, Purple Rain was still unfinished at that point, but Prince had a good idea of what he had. The very idea of making a movie was inspired,...

There have been many one-of-a-kind historic events over the last two weeks or so, but arguably — arguably! — the most significant is the release of Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World,” her hilariously catastrophic attempt at a comeback single. Thanks to its brain-dead lyrics (“sexy, confident/ so intelligent”), AI-like chorus, and Perry’s startlingly tone-deaf choice to record a “feminist” song with the likes of Dr. Luke, the song prompted near-universal mockery, and instantly flopped.

“Woman’s World” raises many difficult-to-answer questions. Perry has said its video is meant to be satirical — but...

At the 2024 Republican National Convention, the cover band Sixwire set up shop covering rock classics, like Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years.” Now, Steely Dan themselves have responded to the performance, suggesting the band play Donald Fagen’s anti-Trump song, “Tin Foil Hat,” instead.

The response came in the form of a Comic Sans text image posted on Facebook, almost like the Steely Dan equivalent of a shitpost. It reads, “Hey! Sixwire: If you want to play our music, how about playing The Man in the Tin Foil Hat?”

The song in reference is actually not a Steely Dan song, but a Todd Rundgren song featuring Fagen, released on Rundgren’s 2017 album White Knight. With mentions of “coming down the escalator,” draining the swamp, alternative facts, tiny hands, and more, the lyrics are a circa-2017 condemnation of Trump, describing his taking office as feeling “like a coup d’état.

Happy Traum, a mainstay of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s who recorded with Bob Dylan, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 86.

His wife, Jane Traum, said he died of pancreatic cancer in a physical rehabilitation facility after undergoing surgery. He lived in Woodstock, N.Y.

Traum and his brother, Artie, were revered musicians in the folk world. The brothers performed at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1969, toured the world, and released five albums. Artie Traum died of liver cancer in 2008.

Happy Traum recorded and performed with Dylan, Pete Seeger, Levon Helm of the Band and the reggae star Peter Tosh.

He was part of a 1963 session that featured Dylan, Seeger, Phil Ochs and other folk stars that created the seminal folk album “Broadside Ballads, Vol. 1.” Among the tracks on that album was Traum’s duet with Dylan, who used the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt,...

Some summers are just hotter and poppier than others — and summer 2024 is turning out to be a wild one, with way more than its share of pop breakthroughs. Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are conquering the world, Shaboozey hit Number One with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and two longer-running artists, Tinashe and Charli Xcx, are having the biggest moments of their careers.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we take a deep look at a summer of pop magic, with Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion.

Which Nineties band once dropped $32,000 to buy a dealer’s entire supply of Ecstasy at once? The answer would’ve been hard to guess at the height of their fame, but the culprits were the seemingly clean-cut dudes in Hootie and the Blowfish — who, as frontman Darius Rucker reveals in his excellent new book, Life’s Too Short: A Memoir, could out-party any band you can name. “When I’m dead, I’ll let them study my brain and tell you if I have any serotonin,” Rucker says.

Rucker looks...

Billie Eilish held nothing back in her most recent Rolling Stone cover story — and amidst her many personal revelations, she also went deep on the making of her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. As Finneas, her brother, producer, and co-writer told Rolling Stone‘s Angie Martoccio — in a quote that was immediately picked up everywhere — the pair intended to make an “album-ass album,” their most cohesive statement ever. The songs twist and turn as they go, sometimes moving from balladry to tranced-out dance beats along the way, and...

You remember 2007. We were at war in Iraq. Britney Spears shaved her head. The Sopranos ended. Mad Men premiered.

And R.E.M. gave its last public performance at its Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.

That last item changed on Thursday night in New York, as R.E.M. was inducted into the 2024 Songwriters Hall of Fame and marked the occasion by performing for the first time together in years.

The band — lead vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry — reunited for the 53rd annual Induction and Awards Dinner, which took place at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. They playd

The band — lead vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry — reunited for the 53rd annual Induction and Awards Dinner, which took place at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. They played an acoustic version of their Top 5 hit,...

Kevin Bacon reprised his role in Footloose to honor the title track’s songwriter, R.E.M. reunited after calling it quits 13 years ago and Sza said winning an honor for her songwriting “validates my entire career.” All this and more occurred at a jam-packed and starry Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction and Awards gala Tuesday night, as R.E.M., Timbaland, Steely Dan, Hillary Lindsey and Dean Pitchford officially became members of the prestigious organization’s 2024 class.

Jason Isbell honored R.E.M. — who split in 2011 after three decades of success — with a performance of “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).”

“I don’t know if humanity will make it another thousand years, but if we do, a weird kid in a tiny town will hear “Nightswimming” and feel [something],” Isbell said to cheers from the crowd.

Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Bill Berry...

The four founding members of R.E.M. reunited (for an interview only) to reflect on their history with CBS Mornings ahead of their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame Thursday night. The quartet confirmed they would not play together again (it would take “a comet,” according to bassist Mike Mills, and guitarist Peter Buck opined, “It would never be as good,”) but they said they were proud of their accomplishments and ended the band in 2011 at the right time for them.

“At that point, there wasn’t anything we could agree on really,...

When Linda Perry started allowing director Don Hardy to film her day-to-day existence, she didn’t realize the cameras would arrive just in time for her life to fall apart. Perry is the singer-songwriter-producer behind 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” Pink’s “Get This Party Started,” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” among other hits — and at first, Hardy was filming her artistic process as she began exploring the idea of writing for herself again. Then her mother got sick and eventually died, and Perry herself faced a diagnosis of breast cancer.

Independence Day is here, and Deep Tracks is focusing on the most essential fourth releases from American classic rock artists! We’re counting down your favorites, as voted by you.

Deep TracksFourths for the FourthListen on the App

Listen on the App

Stream the “Fourths for the Fourth” countdown in the SiriusXM app now, and catch it on-air when it premieres on Deep Tracks (Ch. 308) on July 4 at 4pm Et.

Directions: Vote once for up to 15 of your favorite albums in the poll below before 11:59pm Et on June 16, 2024.

Can’t see the poll? Click here to vote.

Fourth releases from American classic rock artists

These are the possible album choices for this year’s “Fourths for the Fourth” countdown:

Allman Brothers Band – Brothers And Sisters

Aerosmith – Rocks

Al Kooper – New York City (You’re A Woman)

Alice Cooper – Killer

Beach Boys – Little Deuce Coupe

Big Star – In Space...

For all its surface smoothness, yacht rock — and the artists who created it over the last few decades — can be turbulent below deck. Some of the musicians and singers associated with the genre (whether they want to be linked to it or not) can have dark sides, illicit pasts, insecurities, and surprising rock & roll antics sides.

As he reveals in his new memoir, What a Fool Believes, no one encompasses that dichotomy quite like Michael McDonald. That gently huffing mellow voice and electric piano often hid a wild lifestyle, at least during his early,...

The Offspring’s “Come Out and Play” (you know, the “gotta keep ’em separated” song) was all over MTV in 1994 — with a video that cost all of $5,000. The Nineties were full of unlikely breakthrough acts, but the Offspring were one of the few bands of the era who made it to the mainstream without even leaving their indie label, Epitaph.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Offspring frontman Dexter Holland looks back on his band’s hit-packed 1994 album Smash, which turns 30 this year. Go here for the podcast provider of your choice,...

Kendrick Lamar’s battle with Drake may or may not be over for good, but it’s clear that it was easily one of the greatest hip-hop beefs of all time, producing no fewer than nine separate songs — including Lamar’s current Drake-savaging Number One hit, “Not Like Us.”

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, we look back at the rapid-fire exchange of songs between the two artists, with Andre Gee joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion. Go here to find the episode on...

From “Fortnight” to “The Manuscript,” the latest episodes of Rolling Stone Music Now dive into every single track of Taylor Swift’s longest album ever, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. Along the way, we debate larger issues, including whether Swift intends all 31 tracks to be seen as the album proper, or if the latter half — added by surprise on the night of release — is actually more of a collection of bonus songs.

Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield join host Brian Hiatt for the discussions, which also place every song...

At the very moment Taylormania was hitting preposterous heights, threatening to turn the artist at its center into an untouchable icon, it turns out that the real Taylor Swift was spending her time between glittery three-hour concerts making some of her most fearless art. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology is stuffed with the rawest, angriest, and most unguarded songs of Swift’s career – quite the opposite of the ingratiating, focus-grouped inoffensiveness that a skeptic might expect from an artist at her current level of visibility.

On the new episode...

With a few lines in a guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s chart-topping hit “Like That,” Kendrick Lamar ignited his long-simmering cold war with Drake into what’s become the widest-reaching rap beef in years. Since then, it’s all gotten incredibly messy, starting with J. Cole recording an entire diss track about his erstwhile friend Lamar and then deciding to retract it and apologize — a fairly unprecedented move in hip-hop. We trace the whole saga on the latest episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast — go...

On Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé mixes R&b, country, and some hard-hitting guitars, among many other elements, and as the artist herself is well aware, there used to be a name for that kind of American melange: rock & roll. She slyly acknowledges that fact with two Chuck Berry moments on the album, including a segment of “Maybellene,” his first hit, in which a Black genius helped invent rock & roll via revved-up country.

So, there’s an argument that Cowboy Carter — which the artist has made clear is a “Beyoncé album” rather...

Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock has been known to take as long as eight years between albums, but nearly three decades into his band’s career, he’s ready to pick up the pace. Three years after the release of the well-received The Golden Casket, he’s already recorded enough songs for a new Modest Mouse album with producers including Jacknife Lee and Dave Sardy, and intends to put one out by next spring. “In my early days of putting out records, I wrote music every fucking day,” he tells...

Swifties have known since early February that Taylor Swift has a new album, Tortured Poets Department, due April 19, with some notably provocative song titles (“So Long London,” “But Daddy I Love Him”) and big-name guest stars (Post Malone, Florence Welsh). But since then, information on the album has been scarce, so fans have more than filled the void, passing around possibly fake leaked snippets of songs while pranking each other with both ChatGPT-generated lyrics and a ridiculous viral parody where an AI-generated Taylor sings lines like, “I’m so happy...

Music movies are having a moment — if, indeed, they ever stopped having one. Take the pop-music biopic. There are times, like right now, when it surges in popularity, yet the form has never gone out of style. And music documentaries, a staple of the indie-film world, have only proliferated during the streaming era. This means that they have to compete for visibility, but a ton of them are getting made and (mostly) getting seen. They’ve become a happy epidemic.

A few, like “Amy” or “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?,” are popular and vital enough to have carved out a place in the culture — and, in the case of both those films, to have inspired the creation of a biopic. I have it on good authority that when you’re trying to put together a music documentary, the prospect of it spawning a biopic can be a key selling point.

Just last summer, experts on the intersection of AI and music told Rolling Stone that it would be years before a tool emerged that could conjure up fully produced songs from a simple text description, given the endless complexities of the finished product. But Suno, a two-year-old start-up based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already pulled it off, vocals included — and their latest model, v3, which is available to the general public as of today, is capable of some truly startling results.

In Rolling Stone‘s feature on Suno, part of...

One of the biggest influences on Ariana Grande’s new album, Eternal Sunshine, turns out be the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. That inspiration isn’t exactly instantly evident within the album’s sleek production and Max Martin-assisted songwriting, but Grande said in an advance listening session for journalists that she had John, Paul, George, and Ringo in mind as she stuffed it full of unexpected melodic twists and half-buried ear candy.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we discuss Grande’s newfound Beatlemania and much more, going...

Jim Beard, a Grammy-winning keyboardist, composer and member of Steely Dan since 2008, died Saturday in a New York hospital of complications from a sudden illness, a publicist announced. He was 63.

Beard had been touring with Donald Fagen’s Steely Dan on the Eagles’ current “Long Goodbye” tour; his final performance was Jan. 20 in Phoenix.

Beard worked alongside such jazz legends as Wayne Shorter, Pat Metheny and John McLaughlin and recorded with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, The Brecker Brothers, Mike Stern, Dianne Reeves, Meshell Ndegeocello and Steve Vai during his career.

He produced for Chick Corea, Al Jarreau and Esperanza Spalding and taught at institutions including the Mason Gross School of Arts, Berklee College of Music, Aaron Copland School of Music and the Sibelius Academy in Finland.

Beard recorded six solo CDs spanning the years 1990-2013 and won his Grammy in 2007 as a featured performer on the album Some Skunk Funk,...

Welcome to the Beatles Cinematic Universe. Continuing the current wave of music biopics — which just saw its most recent box-office triumph with Bob Marley: One Love — director Sam Mendes (Skyfall) has signed on to helm not one, but four separate Beatles biopics, all due in 2027. The movies, set to begin production next year, will each focus a single Beatle’s perspective, so John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and even Ringo Starr each get a turn in the spotlight.

It might seem like overkill, but as we discuss on the...

From J Noa’s speed-rapping to Gale’s polished pop-rock songwriting to Ralph Choo’s electronic experiments, 2023 was packed with incredible Spanish-language music from artists who aren’t superstars — at least not yet. In the last of our four Rolling Stone Music Now podcast episodes on under-the-radar albums from last year, we dig through multiple nations and genres to find the best lesser-known gems.

Rolling Stone‘s Julyssa Lopez joins host Brian Hiatt for the discussion, picking her favorites from our recent comprehensive list of the year’s top Spanish-language albums,...