Dale Crover is perhaps the most interesting man in grunge music. The Melvins’ drummer formed a band with Kurt Cobain in the 1980s called Fecal Matter and recorded some of the earliest Nirvana demos, including a couple songs on that band’s first album, Bleach. Crover has also played in Redd…

Van Morrison performs in 2018; courtesy. I’ve invented a moment in musical history that I like to envision over and over again: It’s New York, late summer, 1969 in the penthouse of A & R Recording studios. Producer Lewis Merenstein is at the board with a couple of engineers.…

Most folks associate the Bee Gees with John Travolta’s strut down gritty New York City sidewalks in the classic 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever.” The famous falsetto of lead singer Barry Gibb flowed over disco dance floors in the late ’70s on huge hits like “Staying Alive” and “Jive Talkin’.”…

A lot of music nerds are like John Cusack’s character in the 2000 film, “High Fidelity”—otaku geeks who click their tongues, critiquing and ranking the musical greats, all while possessing little to no musical chops of their own. Far rarer are musicians like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Wilco’s Jeff…

The Avalanches have been together almost a quarter century and We Will Always Love You is only the Australian duo’s third album. The pair works at its own pace, obviously, and the result of this slow evolution is a star-studded album of mellow beats and deft knob twiddling. We…

There’s a scene in “The Simpsons” in which a group of children is brought in to serve as a focus group to give their opinions on the long-running cartoon “Itchy and Scratchy.” Naturally, the kids want the show to remain true to its origins, but they also want the…

Novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” The maxim is not simply applicable to the study of history. People are haunted by the things they have and haven’t done, as well as those they’ve known. Artists are haunted by their influences, desperate simultaneously…

Guitar shredders are a dime a dozen. A quick perusal of Instagram reveals a seemingly endless string of bedroom guitarists who can unleash a firehose spray of pentatonic scales that sound like angry hornets. But a guitarist who lends his fretboard talents in service of the song is a…

Unless you’ve been living underneath a sub-woofer for the last 40 years, you already know that Brian Eno is one of the most important figures in modern music—providing sonic sorcery as a producer for everyone from David Bowie to U2 to Coldplay, along with making some very cool albums…

Among noise buffs, fuzz is considered the most extreme form of distortion, often completely blowing out a signal with staticky white noise (think of the bass sound that begins Norm Greenbaum’s 1969 hit “Spirit in the Sky”). Similarly, among Ty Segall fans, Fuzz albums are known to be heavier…