I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the brilliant author Francis Spufford for the Barnes & Noble Review. I suggest you go read our conversation, but I suggest even more strongly that you read his books, including Red Plenty (a brilliant fictionalized history of the Soviet Union) and the new Golden Hill (a exhilarating novel […]

posted 29 June 2017 in Articles. no comments yet

Leonard Cohen, poet, genius, and gentleman, has died at the age of 82. I interviewed him two years ago in a banquet room at the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles, and although I didn’t have a lot of time in his presence, every sentence he uttered was a pearl. I wrote two completely different articles […]

posted 11 November 2016 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Have you been wondering what Nena, the German singer best known in the States for her 1984 single “99 Luftballoons,” has been up to for the past three decades? Then you’re in luck, because I wrote an article for the New York Times about her. Be warned: the history of the song becoming an American […]

posted 12 October 2016 in Articles. 1 comment

I wrote an article for the New York Times about Jeff Jampol, who manages musicians including Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, and Rick James–as I put it, “the performers that the music business calls legacy acts and that the general public refers to as dead people.” If you’re interested in that niche of the show-business ecosystem, […]

posted 24 June 2016 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

The jury is still out (literally) on whether Led Zeppelin plagiarized elements of Spirit’s “Taurus” for “Stairway to Heaven,” and whether that Wayne’s World scene will have to be updated with a sign that says NO STAIRWAY AND/OR TAURUS. But that’s not the only time Plant and Page cheekily borrowed somebody else’s work–I wrote up […]

posted 23 June 2016 in Articles. no comments yet

Shaun White is on the halfpipe today in Sochi (no spoilers here!). If you want to flash back to his first Olympic triumph, eight years ago, you can read my Rolling Stone cover story on the Flying Tomato here. “I need a Crunk Juice glass with diamonds on it,” he told me. Something that didn’t […]

posted 11 February 2014 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

For your reading pleasure, some of my writing for the Rolling Stone website in the past month. I attended the annual KROQ Christmas show, with eighteen bands playing over two evenings. Night one had more guitar oriented-bands, such as Queens of the Stone Age and Vampire Weekend, while night two had more dance music, such […]

posted 27 December 2013 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

You may have missed this one: I recently compiled forty of the greatest Christmas albums of all time for the Rolling Stone website. I wanted to include albums that rewarded repeated plays, not wacky Yuletide novelties–which means that I didn’t include Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart, even though I really wanted to use my […]

posted 23 December 2013 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Lately, I’ve been writing more dispatches for the Rolling Stone website, and it occurred to me that you might like to know about them. I don’t want to slam you with a barrage of links, so once a week or so, I’ll do a quick roundup and you can click on whatever interests you. On […]

posted 10 October 2013 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

Hugh Laurie has released his second album, Didn’t It Rain: another disc of New Orleans jazz and blues, a genre that he loves and proves to be a surprisingly fluent performer in. It’s been almost two years since I wrote a profile of Laurie for The New York Times Magazine (and almost seven years since […]

posted 13 August 2013 in Articles, News. no comments yet