Congratulations to Roger Deakins, who won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography last night for his work on 1917! (It was his second Oscar, after Blade Runner 2029 in 2017, both of which followed thirteen nominations without a trophy across two decades.) I was rooting for him, not just because he’s amazingly gifted, but because […]

posted 10 February 2020 in Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet

This past week, I had obituaries printed in The New York Times for two very different, very accomplished women: Marie Fredriksson and Rose Mackenberg. Marie Fredriksson was one-half of Roxette, the Swedish pop group that was intensely successful in the United States between 1989 and 1991; she died on Monday after a long illness. I […]

posted 13 December 2019 in Articles. no comments yet

Fifty years ago today was the beginning of “an antiquarian exhibition: 3 days of peace & music”–better known to you and me as the Woodstock festival. I wasn’t there, but I feel like I’ve been soaking in it my whole life anyway. I had the privilege of contributing to a special New York Times section […]

posted 15 August 2019 in Articles. no comments yet

Catching up on a couple of recent articles in The New York Times (in the subcategory of articles that are written by me): I wrote about the Universal Music Group giving a facelift to a huge chunk of their music-video catalog, upgrading both the audio and the visual. I got on the phone with Billy […]

posted 5 August 2019 in Articles. no comments yet

Dr. John, the New Orleans singer and piano player so mighty that he exerted his own gravitational force, died last week. I wrote his obituary for the New York Times. (The vagaries of obituary writing being what they are, I actually wrote it three years ago, but I’m thankful that he stayed around for as […]

posted 10 June 2019 in Articles, News, Outside. no comments yet

A few weeks ago, I was driving across North Carolina to interview a photographer–but halfway to my destination, I needed to pull over someplace where I could do two crucial interviews for an article I was writing for The New York Times about Originals, the next album drawn from Prince’s vaults. That’s how I ended […]

posted 6 June 2019 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Kurt Cobain died twenty-five years ago today. When I heard the news, I was sitting at my desk at Details magazine, where I was working as a music editor. (The office was on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street; I had a great panoramic view of Brooklyn, lower Manhattan, and New Jersey, when I […]

posted 5 April 2019 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

I recently interviewed Tim Mohr for Billboard on the topic of his excellent new book, Burning Down the Haus, which tells the story of punk rock in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell–in other words, a punk scene that had real political stakes (unlike many in the United States). He told me, “The German […]

posted 29 September 2018 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Three days before Aretha Franklin died, I got a call from an editor at the New York Times, asking if I could put together an oral history of the Queen of Soul’s amazing 2015 performance of “Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center (honoring Carole King). The catch was that since she didn’t have very long […]

posted 10 September 2018 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Sometimes the pleasure of journalism is that you learn everything you can about a topic and then share that information with the world. A few weeks ago, I knew a lot about the music-video business in the 1980s–that’s what happens when you cowrite a book with the original MTV VJs–but I wasn’t too savvy about […]

posted 15 August 2018 in Articles. no comments yet