Table of contents for February 23, 2017 in Rolling Stone

‘The ones that destroy me are the ones I like best,” says John Mayer, sitting next to a massive recording console at Los Angeles’ Capitol Studios. He just blasted “Still Feel Like Your Man,” one of more than 30 songs he wrote beginning in late 2014, during a period of “intense sadness.” He had recently split up with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Katy Perry and was going through some deep soul-searching, which yielded his most emotionally revealing music yet. “It’s beyond a breakup record,” he says of The Search for Everything. “It’s about me. Proudly, it is, as my therapist says, a study into the metaphysics of absent love.” Mayer says he was looking for a change after 2013’s Paradise Valley, the second in a pair of more low-key Americana albums. “I wanted…

On the morning of his first battle, Brace Belden was underdressed for the cold and shaky from a bout of traveler’s diarrhea. His Kurdish militia unit was camped out on the front line with ISIS, 30 miles from Raqqa, in Syria. Fighters stood around campfires of gas-soaked trash, boiling water for tea, their only comfort besides tobacco. “I’ve never been so dirty in my life,” Belden recalls. When the time came to roll out, he loaded a clip into his Kalashnikov and climbed into a makeshift battlewagon, a patchwork of tank and truck parts armored with scrap metal and poured concrete. Belden took a selfie inside its rusty cabin and posted it online with the caption “Wow this freakin taxi stinks.” The rest of the militia piled into an assortment…

Ryan Adams Prisoner Pax-Am/Blue Note HHH ½ No one hearts the Eighties quite as aggressively as Ryan Adams. Prisoner is the latest installment in a spate of releases that have cast a fond eye back to those bygone glory days. 2014’s 1984 was his Reagan-era hardcore homage, and the following year brought his college-rock reimagining of Taylor Swift’s 1989. Here he poses eternal riddles like “What would it have been like if Bruce Springsteen had been a floppy-haired indie guitar nerd?” and “What if Johnny Marr was a jean-jacket dude from rural Minnesota?” For an ace retro conjurer like Adams, it’s the equivalent of pondering the meaning of life itself. Adams’ métier here is the maudlin breakup song. Sometimes he swings for the fences, as on the album-opening…

Butch Trucks met Gregg and Duane Allman at a club in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the mid-Sixties, and soon forged what he called a “spiritual” musical bond with the brothers. The Allman Brothers Band became one of the best live groups of all time. In 1999, they recruited Trucks’ nephew, guitarist Derek, into the lineup, beginning a highly creative new era. Derek pays tribute to his uncle, who committed suicide at his home in Florida in January. <div class="thin-border"></div> It hit me in St. Louis, the first time I got onstage after finding out Butch had died. Our band has two drummers. I looked back at that position where he was with the Allman Brothers Band. Then we started playing “Statesboro Blues.” Butch was a major part of that sound,…

SANTA CLARITA DIET NETFLIX Meet suburban zombie drew Barrymore – she’s just another sun-kissed California girl, except she’s got a nasty habit of feasting on human flesh. When we first see Barrymore in Santa Clarita Diet, the excellent new Netflix comedy, she’s selling real estate outside L.A., living the low-key minivan life with her husband, Timothy Olyphant, and their teen daughter. Then one day, something weird happens – she starts puking toxic waste and gets an insatiable lust for the taste of dead people. At first, she just munches on the occasional foot, sweet-talking the local undertaker into giving her body parts. But soon, she transforms into a killing machine, making blood smoothies out of her victim’s internal organs. Before you know it, she’s complaining, “I’m almost finished with the guy in…

On the wall facing John Oliver’s desk, on the eighth floor of an office building so far on the West Side of Manhattan it’s practically floating in the Hudson River, are 30 blue index cards. Each represents an episode of the 2017 season of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. And each and every one of them is blank. That’s one reason Oliver is already arriving at the office before 8:30 a.m. each day, though he has weeks until the February 12th kickoff of the show’s fourth season. But he and his staff also have a near-impossible task ahead of them: planning a season’s worth of television’s smartest, sanest show in the dumbest and craziest of times. Oliver just wants to do his show, to continue using the extraordinary creative…

And the Winner Is . . . La La Land (above), with its singing, dancing white lovers, a boffo salute to the golden age of Hollywood musicals . . . or Moonlight (below), with Mahershala Ali, a raw look at the dangers of growing up black and gay in Miami. Best Picture ■ Arrival ■ Fences ■ Hacksaw Ridge ■ Hell or High Water ■ Hidden Figures ■ La La Land ■ Lion ■ Manchester by the Sea ■ Moonlight Forget #OscarsSoWhite. That was so last year. Oscar 2017 can boast that four of its nine Best Picture nominees (Fences, Hidden Figures, Lion, Moonlight) directly address the experience of people of color. And each of the four acting categories have at least one black nominee. It’s history- making for the 90-year-old…

1. Arcade Fire and Mavis Staples “I Give You Power” Arcade Fire released a surprise single the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated, teaming up with veteran soul singer Mavis Staples for a darkly quaking dance-rock call to community and resistance in scary times. 2. Missy Elliott feat. Lamb “I’m Better” Missy doesn’t grace us with her future-freak presence nearly enough. But here, she’s at her best, shouting out Scandal and her “dudes in Orlando” over a sci-fi slow-glide beat and rocking mirror-shade lip gloss in the eye-popping video. 3. Father John Misty “Pure Comedy” Mankind gets a sidelong spanking in this bitter shot of glitter-soul nihilism. It’s like Elton John via Randy Newman. 4. Elliott Smith “I Figured You Out” The late indie-folk icon was a master of fragile…

Singer-guitarist brian king and drummer David Prowse of the Canadian power-punk duo Japandroids turn to each other in confusion. They are lost for an answer to a simple question: When did the two friends – who met in college, formed the band more than a decade ago and have just made their third and best album, Near to the Wild Heart of Life – last have a serious argument? “Not recently,” King says after a long pause, standing at a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. Prowse claims, “The big part of knowing each other this long is knowing how to push each other’s buttons” – but also, King adds, when you shouldn’t. “It only works if we get along,” he insists. “That trumps the little bullshit that could come between us.…

SNEAKY PETE AMAZON The wonderfully nasty Amazon thriller Sneaky Pete is a harsh look at family life through the eyes of a con man. Giovanni Ribisi plays Marius, a grifter who gets out of jail owing a hundred grand to gangster Bryan Cranston (who co-created the show). He recalls how his cellmate Pete used to tell stories about his rich grandparents in Connecticut – and decides to drop in on them posing as Pete, whom they haven’t seen in 20 years. It’s a bold scam – he plans to worm his way into the family fold, then take the money and run, except nothing goes as planned. Cranston has only a supporting role – so the real pleasure is Margo Martindale as Marius’/Pete’s suspicious grandmother. As the matriarch of this…

Drive down an unmarked alley on Atlanta’s northwest side. See the thrift shop on your right and you’ll know you’re headed in the right direction; reach the dog boarder and you’ve gone too far. Approach the chain-link gate guarding a squat building with surveillance cameras all over its windowless facade: This is Quality Control studios, where million-dollar hits get made. As the gate slides open, follow the McLaren 650S Spider currently rolling into the parking lot, white paint aglow in the dusk. Quavo – 25, one-third of the hip-hop phenomenon Migos – is behind the carbon-fiber steering wheel with his sneakers off “because you gotta respect the suede,” he explains. His passenger is a young woman named Destiny, a nursing student who took a semester off to pursue modeling. Quavo…