Table of contents for February 2020 in Rolling Stone

PHOTOS Australia Goes Up in Flames All eyes are turned to Australia in 2020, as the climate crisis continues to unleash devastating brushfires across the continent. Our photo series documents the human (and animal) costs of this spiraling calamity — and searches for hope amid the devastation. MOVIES Sundance: Taylor Swift, Will Ferrell, Ethan Hawke We hit Park City, Utah, for the best of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, including a Taylor Swift documentary (below), a Will Ferrell/Julia Louis-Dreyfus comedy, Ethan Hawke’s Nicola Tesla biopic, and much more. VIDEO Life Stories From Robbie Robertson In his interview for “The First Time,” the songwriter remembers falling in love with the guitar, stepping onstage with Bob Dylan in 1965, playing Woodstock with the Band, hanging out at Big Pink, writing “The…

WHEN HARRY STYLES wanted to celebrate his excellent new album, Fine Line, he went all the way: a one-night-only show at the L.A. Forum in December, featuring a surprise duet with his idol Stevie Nicks on “Landslide.” Two days before the show, hard at work rehearsing with his band in Hollywood, Styles kept singing even while getting a vitamin IV — in his customary mix of high fashion and thrift-shop clobber, rocking Gucci shades and a T-shirt from U.K. indie band Swim Deep. Fine Line topped the ROLLING STONE 200 Albums chart in December — the last album of the 2010s to do so — 10 years after Styles first blew up with One Direction. As he says, the songs come from “a long period of self-reflection and self-acceptance.…

1. Roddy Ricch “Gods Eyes” The Compton rapper’s breakout LP, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, made it to the top of the RS album charts thanks to his liquid flow and radiantly catchy songs, like this ode to the head-spinning spoils of his freshly minted stardom. 2. Frances Quinlan “Your Reply” Quinlan, frontwoman in the great Philly indie rock band Hop Along, just released her solo debut, Likewise, full of songs that evoke the lyrical and melodic invention of Elvis Costello and Courtney Barnett. Just check out the standout “Your Reply.” 3. Tyler, the Creator “Best Interest” The L.A. rap renegade showed some surprising warmth on his 2019 album IGOR, and he keeps the vibe going here, delivering a lovely slice of openhearted chipmunk soul. 4. Caroline Rose…

BEST FOR WORKOUTS Jabra Elite 75t $180 If you’re going for a run or heading to the gym, try these earbuds, which are mapped to fit the shape and contours of your ear. The result is a slightly smaller pair of buds, but one that provides a more secure fit. Jabra’s noise-reducing capabilities keep your audio crisp and clean even when you’re on the move. BEST FOR EVERYDAY EARBUDS Apple AirPods Pro $249 Apple seems to have addressed complaints about its previous buds, namely the loose fit and poor range of sound. This welcome update gets you a better listening experience, with the addition of noise cancellation and new silicone tips that grip your ears. BEST FOR TRAVEL Master & Dynamic MH40 $299 The lightweight construction and memory-foam padding…

Smells Like Team Spirit It’s been a little while since the surviving members of Nirvana shared a stage, but they did it to benefit the Art of Elysium, an L.A. art-therapy organization. Stepping into the role of Kurt Cobain were St. Vincent, Beck, and Dave Grohl’s 13-year-old daughter, Violet, who nailed her version of “Heart-shaped Box.” “I was in the most insane mosh pit of my life in this room,” Beck told the crowd at the Hollywood Palladium. Pop’s 2020 Vision The Grateful Dead have been doing legendary New Year’s Eve shows for 50 years, and they did not disappoint when it came time to truck on into 2020. Dead & Company opened their second decade of existence at the Chase Center in San Francisco with an NYE epic,…

ROLLING ALONG on Farm Road 350 outside Livingston, Texas, past the billboard advertising Aqua Plumbing (FOR ALL YOUR PLUMBING NEEDS), and the plain white cross casting halfhearted shadows over the East Tempe Baptist Church, and the sign announcing “Grocery” where only broken-down nothingness and weeds currently exist, and the desultory sadness of the Lake Area Mobile Home Park, you eventually come upon the flattened, sandy-colored expanse of concrete buildings known as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Allan B. Polunsky Unit. Five gun towers, officially called pickets, help make sure its roughly 3,000 inmates stay put, including all 209 prisoners currently marking time on death row, though that number is constantly changing, primarily because Texas has the most active death chamber in the country, praise be to its stockpile…

DENVER, COLORADO The Mile High City has exploded in the past decade, thanks to jam-band fanatics, a wild shape-shifting venue, and decriminalized magic mushrooms PERHAPS NO PERFORMER has embodied Denver’s past decade more than native Nathaniel Rateliff; at its start, he was playing in a basement bar to 25 people; by its end, he had sold out multi-night stints at Red Rocks. “The music community here is always supportive as artists grow and change,” says Rateliff. “They’re here to listen.” Denver is in the midst of a huge live-music boom. By some counts, it now has more venues than Austin; one recent study found residents bought more secondary-market tickets than anywhere else. The city’s growing reputation as the “Amsterdam of the West” adds to the festive vibe; recreational cannabis…

A FEW SHORT years ago, no one had huge expectations for Black Pumas, including its two founding members. Guitarist and producer Adrian Quesada had left the Grammy-winning Latin funk band Grupo Fantasma and needed a singer for instrumentals he’d cut in his home base of Austin. A friend turned him on to Eric Burton, a busker from L.A. who had grown up with gospel and was 13 years Quesada’s junior. Neither man had heard of the other, and it took Burton a few days to return Quesada’s call. “I was talking to my friends, and they said, ‘Dude, hit that guy back up,’” Burton recalls. “They kind of scoffed at me for leaving him hanging.” In the studio, Burton’s voice, which recalls a more somber Curtis Mayfield, proved to…

LIZZO KNOWS THAT security guard was checking her out. It’s a crisp November evening in downtown Los Angeles, and she just breezed through a Sam Ash music store to see if they had a flute-studies book by Danish composer-flutist Karl Joachim Andersen; she wants to get back to practicing the instrument she started playing in fifth grade. The door has barely closed behind her when Lizzo makes note of the guard’s not-so-subtle glance. “He wanted to make sure he saw that thang twice!” she says, strutting down Sunset Boulevard in faux-snakeskin boots and a short, pinkish coral dress, and running her rhinestone-studded talons through her slick, wavy black hair. How could he not do a double take when he saw Lizzo? After a decade of hustling, 2019 was her…

THE LOUD, SLEEK HIP-HOP sound known as trap music burst into the pop mainstream in the 2000s thanks to newly minted Atlanta stars like T.I., Young Jeezy, and Gucci Mane. It’s grown vastly more popular in the years since, and today, elements of trap — especially the booming-but-unhurried bass lines and the skittering, rapid-fire drum programming — pervade nearly every kind of music, from R&B to EDM to country to gospel to Top 40 pop. “Trap music has become this international phenomenon,” says photographer Raymond McCrea Jones. “Everybody knows Migos, knows 21 Savage, and knows they’re from Atlanta.” Jones moved from New York to Atlanta at the end of 2011 and quickly became enamored with the city’s music scene. Trap reminded him of the punk he loved years earlier…

IF ANY ARTIST has encapsulated the past decade of pop, it’s Kesha. Her journey through the 2010s was a long, hard road, but she always reflects the times, from “TiK ToK” to TikTok. On the excellent High Road, she fuses all of her passions together — the road she’s traveling in the title is a spiritual path, but it’s also “high” in the earthier sense. She sets the tone for the whole album in “My Own Dance,” when she boasts, “Woke up this morning feeling myself/Hung over as hell, like 2012.” This woman has earned her hangover. Kesha High Road RCA Ten years ago, she was Ke$ha, the new party-monster queen on the block, brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack. But then she began a long fight…

High Fidelity NETWORK Hulu AIR DATE February 14th STARRING Zoë Kravitz David H. Holmes Da’Vine Joy Randolph Jake Lacy Kingsley Ben-Adir Rainbow Francks ROB, THE record-store-owning hero of Nick Hornby’s classic novel High Fidelity, has strong opinions on many musical subjects, particularly the making and deployment of a great mixtape. He has rules about what kinds of songs to use, in what order, and believes that structuring the playlist just the right way says more about who he is and what he cares about than anything he could say with his own words. In the 25 years since the book was published, Hornby’s words have been used and reinterpreted plenty. There was the 2000 High Fidelity film, co-written by and starring John Cusack, then a 2006 Broadway musical. Now,…

How We Listened in 2019 Streaming soared, vinyl kept growing, and Post Malone proved unstoppable. Our year-end stats take you inside the year’s biggest trends Streaming: Good News, Mostly STREAMING’S TIPPING POINT came in 2016, when streams swelled to 432 billion and became the main source of music consumption in the U.S. Every year since, while sales have plummeted, overall album consumption has increased. Our year-end numbers show that this upward trend continued in 2019, with U.S. consumption up 13.5 percent, to 795.9 million album units. (The main metric for ROLLING STONE’s albums charts, album units, combines digital and physical album sales, digital song sales, and audio streams, using a custom weighting system.) Streaming’s share also continued to swell, accounting for 85 percent of all units. There were 705…

MOST OF the world knows Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I.’s “Blurred Lines” as a half-forgotten hit song from 2013. The music industry remembers it as its worst nightmare. In the five years since a court ruled that “Blurred Lines” infringed on Marvin Gaye’s 1977 “Got to Give It Up,” demanding that Thicke and Williams fork over $5 million to the Gaye estate for straying too close to the older song’s “vibe,” the once-sleepy realm of music copyright law has turned into a minefield. Chart-topping musicians have been slapped with infringement lawsuits like never before, and stars like Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry are being asked to pay millions in cases that have many experts scratching their heads. Across genres, artists are putting out new music with the same…

PETE BUTTIGIEG has returned to the scene of the crime. He is back at Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, on a desultory Saturday in January. The ancient gym walls were bathed in red, white, and blue spotlights the last time he was here for a Fox News Town Hall with Chris Wallace last May. That night was seen by most as an overwhelming success, a breakthrough on the path of a 38-year-old gay mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city becoming a plausible presidential candidate. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party saw it differently. To them, Buttigieg had not only granted an interview to Hannity Enterprises, but espoused a litany of milquetoast half measures that revealed he was a centrist at best and, according to the more conspiratorially…

IN 2014, A MUSCULAR, MIDDLE-AGED OHIO MAN NAMED PETER TOOK A JOB TRUCKING WASTE FOR THE OIL-AND-GAS INDUSTRY. The hours were long — he was out the door by 3 a.m. every morning and not home until well after dark — but the steady $16-an-hour pay was appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. “This is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the state’s rural southeast corner. “Throw a little money at us and by God we’ll jump and take it.” In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas. He hauls a salty substance called “brine,”…

ADULTING Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens NETWORK Comedy Central AIR DATE Wednesdays, 10:30 p.m. The Farewell star goes autobiographical for this comedy, in which she plays an aimless young woman desperate to stop living with her dad (B.D. Wong) by any means necessary, whether that means working as a cam girl or helping a smug Silicon Valley cousin develop an app to scrub embarrassing pics off the internet. Nora often feels like a version of Broad City where Abbi and Ilana have been combined into one emotionally inconsistent person, and the wilder parts of Nora’s persona — like an episode where her “melancholic flute-like queefing” becomes part of a SoundCloud sensation — tend to suit Awkwafina better. Lori Tan Chinn is hilarious and warm as Nora’s grandmother, a Chinese…