Table of contents for February 8, 2018 in Rolling Stone

A Political Jedi I WAS VERY SKEPTICAL WHEN Disney acquired the rights to the Star Wars franchise [“Jedi Confidential,” RS 1302/1303]. But Rogue One and The Force Awakens were wonderful examples of why the Star Wars saga is in great hands, and the next two films should be great as well. Jeff Swanson, Everett, WA ADAM DRIVER SUGGESTS that blowing up the Death Star is an act of “terrorism.” Just wondering, has Driver seen the ultimate Star Wars conversation, between Dante and Randal in Clerks? Might just give him a new perspective on that concept! Tom Trinchera, via the Internet “STAR WARS” HAS ALWAYS BEEN progressive and liberal. This is old news for any serious Star Wars fan. Remember the garbage-masher scene? That was Leia leading them – she was…

BEFORE JACK White walked into a New York recording studio, he issued himself a challenge: Spend only three days recording a new batch of songs with a group of musicians he had never played with. Many of them were from the hip-hop world – he had reached out to players he’d seen with Jay-Z, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and others. “I had no idea if we’d be able to communicate musically,” White says. “It could’ve been a recipe for disaster. I think it would scare the hell out of most people, so it was very enticing to me.” Within 10 minutes of playing, White knew his plan would work. “There was so much amazing music being played,” he says. “Some of those songs could take up an entire side of…

‘MY BOOKING AGENT SAID, ‘I think you’re having a Leonard Cohen moment,’ ” says David Byrne – before hastening to clarify, with a laugh, that the reference was to renewed relevance and popularity, not his impending demise. In March, he’s releasing a strong new album, American Utopia (written over tracks created by his longtime collaborator Brian Eno), before heading out on the most elaborate tour he’s attempted since the Talking Heads shows captured in 1984’s Stop Making Sense – with a career-spanning set list that will include updated versions of his Eighties work. “We have six drummers and percussionists,” says Byrne, 65, who envisions a stage full of musicians in constant, choreographed motion, expanding a concept he and St. Vincent used for the horn section on their joint 2012 tour. “The…

Bruce and Jon: Out in the Street Jersey titans Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi braved the frigid New York weather to have lunch at Lure Fishbar in Soho. A few days later, Bon Jovi announced that Howard Stern will induct his band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “We’ve been looked over a couple of times,” Bon Jovi said recently. “It’s really an honor [to be] in the same building with the greatest of the greats.” <div class="thick-border"></div> <div class="thick-border"></div> <div class="thick-border"></div> <div class="thick-border"></div> Rock of the Irish Bono and Johnny Depp were in Dublin to perform at the 60th birthday of Pogues legend Shane MacGowan. Bono also paid tribute to the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, singing part of “Linger” during his rendition of the Pogues’ “A Rainy…

THE HIP-HOP ONE-PERCENTER LIFE IS A GATED MANSION IN ATLANta that sits on more than two acres and has two Bentleys in front of it, and when you open the front door a cloud of weed smoke punches you in the face. Welcome to the huge, half-empty house owned by Offset of Migos. Some rooms have nothing but clothes on the floor. Some seem to have never been entered. There are still tags on some of the furniture. “We just thuggin’ it out,” Offset says. “I been on the road so much I ain’t been here.” You can picture him paying for it just yesterday in stacks of crisp new bills because, as he says on “Bad and Boujee,” Migos’ chart-topping hit from last year, Offset’s got a whole lot…

“Got your chemicals all in my veins. Feeling all the highs, feeling all the pain. Let go on the wheel, it’s the bullet lane.”—Camila Cabello, “Never Be the Same” Camila Cabello Camila Epic/Syco HHH½ Only age 20, Camila Cabello is already a seasoned veteran of the pop-star wars. Born in Havana, raised in Miami, she blew up with the girl group Fifth Harmony, who formed on The X Factor before scoring superb hits like “Reflection” and “Work From Home.” Although Cabello was the most high-profile member of Fifth Harmony, this group wasn’t built to last, and Cabello broke away in one of the messiest, most shade-intensive pop splits of recent years. It was not exactly a love-and-kisses farewell: When Fifth Harmony performed at the VMAs last fall, they took the…

What was your favorite book as a kid and what does it say about you? It was a book about Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I pilot. It was an adventure, and it made me want to travel around the world. What do you do to relax? Drive. The car is a pen and the road is a pad. As I drive, I’m singing songs, writing songs, playing songs, living songs. What’s the most indulgent purchase you ever made? My house. But I’ve never even had a brand-new car. In 1995 I bought a 1994 Montero, but that’s the closest I ever got. Who are your heroes? My parents. They gave me all the tools that it took to take on life. They taught me humility, what goes up might…

1. Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats “You Worry Me” Denver roots revivalist Rateliff’s breakout 2015 album was the sound of a folk rocker going deep on Memphis soul. The first single from his forthcoming LP adds Southern-rock bite and weary longing to make for his most urgent song yet. 2. Troye Sivan “My My My!” The 22-year-old actor, singer and YouTube star, who is also an outspoken gay artist, makes hooking up feel like a religious experience. “I’ve got my tongue between your teeth,” he sings over a sleek club throb. You’ll hope he never lets go. 3. Jay Som “Pirouette” Indie-rock hero Som’s music often gets called “bedroom pop.” She must have a pretty big bedroom. The kiting guitars here are as transporting as classic R.E.M. 4. Car…

MGMT know exactly how the world feels about everything they’ve done since their breakthrough 2007 debut LP, Oracular Spectacular. The psychedelic synth-pop duo – who met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and crafted their early hits “Kids,” “Electric Feel” and “Time to Pretend” in their dorm rooms – became indie darlings in the late aughts. But they alienated fans, critics and even their record label by releasing two disappointing experimental albums, 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT. “A lot of people wrote us off after the third record,” says frontman Andrew VanWyngarden. “They were like, ‘Oh, they have no pop juice left in them. It’s not happening again.’ ” The two briefly felt that way themselves, so they decided to take some time off. Keyboardist Ben Goldwasser moved to L.A. with his…

The big story of the 2018 Grammys? The ceremony is finally getting serious about hip-hop. The awards have always had a strange history with rap, going back to the Eighties, when the voters were convinced (along with most of the music industry) that all this rap stuff the kids were into was a fad. For years, hip-hop artists were allowed to play but not to take home trophies. But this year, all major categories are dominated by rap. Album and Record of the Year are both Kendrick Lamar vs. Jay-Z battles, along with surprise nominee Childish Gambino. From MC Hammer to Lauryn Hill to ODB, here’s a timeline of how far hip-hop has come at the ceremony.…

ON A QUIET, TREE-LINED street in Racine, Wisconsin, in a neighborhood known as the Danish Village for its Scandinavian ancestry, sits a two-story white house with a large American flag hanging from the porch and a pro-police we back the badge sign in the yard. It’s the home of Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard, a 65-year-old former cop whose blond hair resembles that of Dennis the Menace. Two houses to the south, Wanggaard’s state Senate district – the 21st – abruptly cuts off to exclude the rest of the largely Democratic neighborhood. This used to be one of the state’s most competitive Senate districts, encompassing all of rectangular-shaped Racine County, a 50/50 mix of urban and rural communities in southeast Wisconsin. But since the GOP gained control of the state’s…

AS IT TURNS OUT, IN THE HILL COUNtry west of Austin, in a big-ass house in a big-ass gated community, the singer known as Meat Loaf is hanging in there. He’s 70. His hair is thinning, his hands are unsteady, his back is such a mess he can’t get into bed at night without help from Deborah, his wife of 10 years, much less put on his socks and shoes. To get to the easy chair he’s sitting in now, he had to plod along using a real-old-duffer’s walker. It all pretty much sucks. “And because it hurts my back, I haven’t been able to sing in a year,” he says. “You use everything to sing, and I just cannot do it.” ¶ He takes a swig of sparkling water,…

First Aid Kit Ruins Columbia HHH½ Scandinavian sisters spool out country-folk grandeur On their 2012 hit “Emmylou,” Swedes Klara and Johanna Söderberg repurposed country harmony into a bright new thing. Producing their fourth set, folk-rock impressionist Tucker Martine (Neko Case, My Morning Jacket, the Decemberists) helps shape a dreamy grandeur, with touches of pedal steel and guitar atmospherics from R.E.M. alum Peter Buck, like a Sergio Leone film starring Lana Del Rey, doubled. At times, the musical ornamentation can be a little much. But when those two voices combine, it falls away. WILL HERMES Franz Ferdinand Always Ascending Domino HHH½ The dapper post-punks return, and they wanna dance Scotland’s louche dance-rock heroes invoke David Bowie’s “Fashion” and Talking Heads’ “Houses in Motion” on the title track from their first LP…

The Pearl Jam bassist struggled to make this list. “It’s hard to pick just five,” he says. “Proof that there’s more great music being made than ever.” Grizzly Bear “Mourning Sound” This has it all: killer bass and drums, both voices, signature guitar chords and great lyrics. Probably my favorite band the past few years. Gord Downie “Snowflake” Gord made an unbelievable swan song of an album. I cried the whole first listen. So beautiful and honest. Lemon Twigs “Why Didn’t You Say That?” I hear Queen, Beatles, 10cc and other radical prog-pop that I haven’t heard since Jellyfish left us. Killer harmonies and incredible instrumental interplay. Charlotte Gainsbourg “Deadly Valentine” This is lyrically centered around Christian wedding vows, with a tinge of sarcasm. I love the big synth production.…

DOLORES O’RIORDAN SEEMED IN GOOD SPIRITS the second weekend in January. On the 12th, the Cranberries frontwoman and a longtime bandmate, guitarist Noel Hogan, spoke by phone about a March tour and starting their first studio album in six years. “She was great,” says Hogan. Two days later, O’Riordan e-mailed him several fresh songs. But those plans never came to be. On the morning of January 15th, O’Riordan was found dead in a London hotel room. She was 46. At press time, the results of an autopsy and toxicology report had not been announced, and police were treating the death as unexplained but not suspicious. The news marked the shocking end for a singer whose steely voice and lyrics about both the personal and the political made her one of…

A FEW DAYS AGO, MARGO Price’s husband, Jeremy, and her seven-year-old son, Judah, discovered a moonshine barrel on a hill behind their brand-new home, located 20 minutes from downtown Nashville. “I went, ‘I gotta see this. I can’t be left out,’ ” Price says, milling around her retro wooden kitchen in jeans, a white tank top and a denim shirt. She climbed up a steep, stony incline and found it. “Then I saw eight more, just built into the ground,” she says. “It was really surreal.” Price’s area, she learned, was once heavy bootlegger territory. She jokes about bringing the barrels out of retirement for a little home brewing. It makes perfect sense that this discovery would excite Price, whose songs routinely find beauty in scenes of decaying America: dried-up farmland,…

RANDY LANIER WALKS ALONE AND UNNOTICED through the Homestead-Miami Speedway. The racetrack is quiet. The grandstands are empty. The infield is deserted but for a huddled clutch of millennials and a husky Floridian wearing a VIEW TO A GRILL T-shirt. Next to the garages, Lanier greets a young man named Tim Read. A former Marine, Read is burly and thick-bearded, with a Latin tattoo stippled across his forearm meaning “Brother Through Death.” A prosthesis is fitted to his left knee, the result of an IED blast in Afghanistan. Like the 50 or so others gathered, Read had signed up to drive around the speedway for the day, unhampered by speed limits. ¶ “Tap the brake, let off the brake. It’s called setting the car,” Lanier, who will serve as his…

Fall Out Boy Mania Island/DCD2 HHH Fall Out Boy’s eighth LP comes with a tense backstory that befits their emo roots: The band scrapped Mania last year at the last minute and built it again from scratch. But the album is less a reboot than a re-affirmation of their ability to fuse over-the-top oversharing and Queen-ly operatic stomp with an elastic vision of pop – swerving from EDM grind (“Young and Menace”) to bubblegum trap swing (“Hold Me Tight or Don’t”) to Police-style reggae glide (“Sunshine Riptide”), referencing drama queens from Tonya Harding to Britney Spears and kicking lyrics like “I’ll stop wearing black when they make a darker color.” As always, the ADD sound works best when it’s glossy and streamlined; “Champions” might be a wan echo of their stadium-rattling…