Table of contents for May 18, 2018 in Rolling Stone

Jack White’s Blues I VERY MUCH ENJOY JACK White’s perspectives and observations [“Jack White’s New Stripes,” RS 1309/1310]. He is forthcoming when he doesn’t know something, he does his homework, and he makes it a point to understand history. You’ve come a long way, Jack. E-Times, via the Internet I DON’T FOLLOW HIS MUSIC much, but White got my complete respect when I read that he requires that cellphones be checked at the door at his concerts – a huge favor for those who hate having dozens of little plastic screens up in their view. Carl LaFong, via the Internet I THINK WHITE MEANS THAT the creative process might be helped by doing things the old way. It’s not that digital stuff is not real, just that some of the…

FOR AVICII, IT WAS A CHANCE TO RELAX. ON APRIL 8TH, after an extended period of recording, the Swedish DJ traveled to Oman, a country east of Saudi Arabia, where he would visit friends in the country’s royal family. But Avicii seemed too excited about his work to take a break entirely. A day after arriving, he held a conference call with members of his management team, talking about which guest artists he wanted to recruit for new music. The conversation continued on e-mail over the following days. “All his notes were in happy mode,” says Per Sundin, the head of Universal Music Sweden, who was lining up meetings with possible collaborators. “He loved what he had created.” Avicii also posed for photos with fans at a resort and went…

Kamasi Washington THE JAZZ/HIP-HOP INNOVATOR As a budding musician, Kamasi Washington would practice with friends in his parents’ garage in Inglewood, California, a cramped, sweltering space they called “the Shack.” It was a typical garage-band setup, except that instead of bashing through “Louie Louie,” Washington and the rest of the West Coast Get Down collective were perfecting a sound that would bring the freewheeling sounds of Sixties jazz and Seventies funk to audiences raised on hip-hop. “I knew it was something special,” says the tenor saxophonist, “but you never know how people are going to respond.” Audiences responded in a big way to Washington’s 2015 debut, The Epic, an explosive three-hour set that won fans well beyond the world of jazz. Washington has played to thousands at Coachella, and was…

1. Tove Styrke “On the Low” Swedish pop singer Styrke deserves to be the next Robyn. Her unduly slept-on single “Say My Name” was one of 2017’s best songs, and “On the Low” is just as great. Over a spare beat, she coolly airs out a lover who’s taking her for granted. It’s the sound of someone who knows she’s worth our time. 2. Octavian “Hands” Drake recently went on the record as a fan of this London-based French rapper – and for good reason. Nothing in hip-hop sounds like “Hands”; the track is spacey and futurist, but the ache in Octavian’s forlorn rasp feels as ageless as vintage doo-wop. 3. Anne-Marie “2002” Ed Sheeran co-wrote this Britney-tinged, Nelly-referencing country-flavored ode to falling in love back in the ’02.…

A new book examines the alliances and betrayals of the band’s last 20 years The Grateful Dead have been the subject of many great books, but most end with the 1995 death of Jerry Garcia. Fare Thee Well, by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Joel Selvin (out June 19th), takes the opposite approach, beginning when bassist Phil Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann needed to figure out what to do after losing their leader. It examines every sad twist, turn and betrayal involved in the Dead’s various offshoot groups leading up to their 2015 Fare Thee Well reunion. The villains are often Lesh and his wife, Jill, whom Selvin presents as the masterminds behind the 2009 decision to push Hart and Kreutzmann out of a…

KACEY MUSGRAVES CREATES lovely little self-contained universes in her songs, as anyone who’s heard her superb, subtly pop-leaning, mildly psychedelic third album, Golden Hour, can confirm. Musgraves can pull off the same trick in conversation, too, as when she describes the concept behind the LP’s opening track, “Slow Burn.” “It’s an idea I can apply to a lot of different areas of my life,” she says, taking a break from editing a new video. “Like, I want to be here for a long time doing what I love, and I don’t feel I need to try to be the biggest I can be, the quickest. And I even thought of a good drink that you sip on for a long time. Or a slow burn of a relationship that starts…

ON A SUNNY JANUARY AFTERnoon, Paula Jean Swearengin, a 43-year-old accounting clerk and single mother of four from Coal City, West Virginia, steers a red rental SUV up a narrow back road in southern Kanawha County. She points at trailer homes caked in a fine layer of black soot, blown off the coal trucks that thunder through the area – “You see the coal dust on these homes!” she says – and stops at a gurgling creek glowing orange. The waste rock of a nearby mountaintop-removal mining site, latent with hazardous elements like selenium, is dumped into valleys, where the toxic chemicals leach into streams. According to a number of studies, the process also increases the rates of lung cancer, kidney disease and birth defects in surrounding communities. “People are…

ANDREW ONESCHUK AND JEREMY HIMMELman had been living in Tampa, Florida, for two weeks when, on Friday, May 19th, 2017, their roommate Devon Arthurs picked up an AK-47 rifle and shot them at close range. Oneschuk had just turned 18. Himmelman was 22. They’d been staying in a lush gated community near the University of South Florida, in a two-bedroom, terra-cotta condo rented by their fourth roommate, 21-year-old Brandon Russell, a rich kid from the Bahamas who worked at a gun shop and served in the Florida National Guard. Oneschuk, a prep-school dropout, was hoping to become a Navy SEAL. Himmelman also considered the military, though he was more of a drifter. Eighteen-year-old Arthurs, a pale, freckled kid who sometimes called himself “Khalid,” was unemployed and spent most of his…

Leon Bridges Shakes Up His Retro Soul Rootsy Texas soul man meets Meghan Trainor’s producer and good things happen Leon Bridges Good Thing Columbia HHH½ Texas singer-guitarist Leon Bridges filled his 2016 debut, Coming Home, with Sixties-soul verities so breezily rendered they felt like half-remembered snatches of old songs, which in some sense they were. So when Good Thing opens with a cloudburst of strings, harps and glockenspiel on “Bet Ain’t Worth the Hand,” it will seem like Bridges has simply moved up a decade to the Seventies. But Bridges is reaching on this album, looking for a future sound that connects his own past and the sweeping history of African-American music with the present moment. One minute, the intimate acoustic strum of “Beyond” (co-written by Selena Gomez song…

What’s an important rule you live by? That anybody else’s opinion of me is none of my fuckin’ business. That’s a big one, especially in my business. I don’t read reviews; I won’t read this. If [critics] don’t like you, you can’t help but take it personally, because you make art and art is you. And if they do like you, that’s kind of bad for you too. I do appreciate when people write about me, though, because being a singer-songwriter in this day and age is like being a bluegrass or jazz musician. It’s not part of the pop-music mainstream anymore. Does that make you a little sad? It’s kind of cool, actually. I was lucky I got in at the tail end, and I have a career that’s…

The Yo La Tengo singer is digging a diverse group of tunes at the moment. “They aren’t really by acts that get mentioned in ROLLING STONE much,” he says. The Afro Blues Quintet “There Is a Mountain” Donovan’s “There Is a Mountain” is so cool that it can be turned into a 35-minute jam by the Allman Brothers [“Mountain Jam”] and this beautiful Afro-Cuban stomper. Benny Spellman “I Feel Good” This is an uptempo R&B song with Allen Toussaint on backing vocals. He’s not discussed much as a singer, but his voice comes through here. Antietam “Birdwatching” This is an instrumental, which is exciting because Tara [Key] just wails on the guitar. She goes nuts. Ray Bryant “Pata Pata” A stunning record. It’s an Afro-pop instrumental of a Miriam…

THE FIRST ARCTIC MONKEYS album in five years is lush and claustrophobic at the same time – it calls to mind a guy going a little nutty in a small room in a nice house on a hill, constructing a fantasy world in his head and setting his visions to piano. Which, to hear Alex Turner tell it, is more or less exactly how Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino was born. It’s mid-April, and the Monkeys frontman has descended from his home in the Hollywood Hills to a cafe for breakfast. It’s barely 10 a.m., but he’s wearing a crisp, vintage tan suit – safari pockets, flared legs – as he slides into a booth: “Christian Dior,” he says. Turner started writing the new album at home here in 2016,…

JANELLE MONÁE IS CRYING IN HER SPACEsuit. It’s early April in Atlanta, and she’s in one of the basement studios of her Wondaland Records headquarters, surrounded by computer monitors and TV screens, one of them running a screensaver that displays images of her heroes: Prince, Martin Luther King Jr., Pam Grier, Tina Turner, Lupita Nyong’o, David Bowie. She’s about to reveal, for the first time, something the world has long guessed, something her closest friends and family already know, something she’s long been loath to say in public. As she sings on a song from her new album, Dirty Computer, “Let the rumors be true”: Janelle Monáe is not, she finally admits, the immaculate android, the “alien from outer space/The cybergirl without a face” she’s claimed to be over a…

“Open up your insides, Show us your innermost lecherous.I’ll rip it out carefully.I promise you won’t feel a thing.”COURTNEY BARNETT, “Need a Little Time” Courtney Barnett Tell Me How You Really Feel Mom + Pop HHHH Back in 2013, Courtney Barnett covered Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” on Australian radio as a guitar-charged glam-grunge stomp, reframing its outrage in her bedhead Melbourne white-girl flow. It was a questionable yet telling move for a fellow verbose storyteller, delivered just as her single “Avant Gardener” – a deceptively offhand first-person account of an asthma attack – announced the arrival of a rare talent. Now a bona fide indie-rock heroine, Barnett has made a second LP that occasionally recalls her early come-to-Yeezus session. Tell Me How You Really Feel is noisy and way more…