Table of contents for April 2021 in Rolling Stone

“Kacey Musgraves is on the cover of the new ‘Rolling Stone.’ If you haven’t heard her music yet, this is your cue. Your life will be better for it.”—Eric Alper, via Twitter After the Golden Hour For ROLLING STONE’s third annual “Women Shaping the Future” issue, Kacey Musgraves appeared on our cover for the first time. Coming off of her recent divorce, the country singer opened up to senior writer Alex Morris about the healing, songwriting, and magic-mushroom trips that have gone into reshaping her path forward — and the making of her new Greek-tragedy-inspired album set for release this year [“Rebirth of Kacey Musgraves,” 1349]. Naturally, our readers had much to say. “This is incredible. So well written, and so good to hear her perspective on this new…

THE 20-YEAR-OLD poet and singer Arlo Parks started releasing music as a teenager, courting blog interviews in between her final exams. Parks, who was raised in London by Nigerian and Chadian-French parents (her full name is Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho), released two EPs in 2019 to critical acclaim. Just before the pandemic hit, she was set to go on her first tour. Instead, she has been stuck at home, waiting out this nightmare like the rest of us. “It’s given me some time to reflect and get used to spending more time with myself,” she says. ¶ She used the year to finish her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams. It’s a lush and expansive project with a patient vulnerability at its core; Parks’ songs about love and regret flutter…

LIKE ONE of those bullets in Tenet, John David Washington is traveling backward through time. Standing on the 50-yard line of his old high school football field in Van Nuys, California, where he hasn’t set foot in 18 years, he starts replaying the game-day ritual. Washington’s alma mater, Campbell Hall, an Episcopal day school in Studio City, didn’t have its own field, so the team would bus over here to Birmingham High for battle. “So we get off there, come to that light, turn left,” he says, pointing beyond the southeast corner of the stadium to the intersection of Balboa and Victory boulevards. “That’s when the butterflies and the jitters started, because here we are.” He points to where the band would stand, where the cheerleaders would do their…

PETE BUTTIGIEG, the man now responsible for managing the means by which Americans travel trillions of miles per year, can’t leave his house. Just days after he was confirmed as secretary of transportation, a member of his security detail tested positive for Covid-19, forcing the newly minted Cabinet member to start turning the wheels on his agenda from quarantine. “We’re trying to practice what we preach, right?” he says of the decision to stay home. He’s trying his best to hide his exasperation. A little frustration is understandable. The Covid scare meant Buttigieg had to attend his first Oval Office meeting via flatscreen, and as far as getting a revamped, eco-centric approach to transportation in gear, it was a big one. Biden and a virtual Secretary Pete sat down…

BARBARA BOXER WAS IN Greenland in July 2007, watching chunks of ice slide off glaciers into the rising ocean. She had brought Republican senators there with her, hoping a first-person confrontation with climate change would persuade them to take action. And as the newly calved icebergs flowed past, the then-senator thought her colleagues might be persuaded to vote yes on legislation to transform the U.S. from one of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas polluters into a leader in addressing the crisis. “This was a moment in time,” Boxer tells ROLLING STONE, “where I thought, ‘We’re going to do it. It’s going to work.’” She was wrong. She’d find out for sure on July 22nd, 2010, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gathered his top lieutenants for a private meeting. Democrats…

You’ve said that as a longtime environmental activist, you’ve become more radicalized over time. Was there a moment when you began to understand that what was happening to our planet was more serious than you’d realized? I was attending a conference in Denver, in 1989, where there was a presentation by two scientists who explained Earth’s temperatures were rising — they called it global warming. They explained what would happen if we ignored this threat. That moment was my wake-up call. I knew they were speaking the truth. Because one thing we’ve learned is that time waits for no one. I realized that when there’s something you have to do, you better act, and act quickly. Where does your connection to nature come from? Well, I think it had…

ONE OF THE last times Annie Clark went to see her father in a Texas prison, a fellow visitor asked her to autograph a receipt — the only paper they had on hand. “You can’t bring phones in, so you can’t take a normal selfie. I guess I’m glad that a selfie of me in there doesn’t exist,” Clark, 38, says. “I find it very darkly comic. It’s obviously very sad, but it’s also incredibly funny.” Clark saw her father taken away by the U.S. government in May 2010 for what she describes as “white-collar nonsense.” Over the next near-decade, she visited him in between releasing four albums of increasingly acclaimed art rock as St. Vincent. She performed with Nirvana at the 2014 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame…

What was it about the Sixties that made the music so magical? Was it just that I was young and everything in the world felt new and magical, or was there truly something special about that time? —Steve, TX There are periods in history when art blossoms. There’s the Renaissance in Italy. There’s the Thirties in Paris’ Left Bank. Around that time, you see a crowd that wasn’t there before and wasn’t there after. That happened again in songwriting in the Sixties and Seventies. There was a peak of songwriting. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Randy Newman, and others inspired it. They made us love good songs, and it was a very rich period. I’m a 17-year-old guitar player and my taste in music is all…

The Quiet Resilience of ‘Now’ Playlists are a dime a dozen, but ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!’ compilation albums remain popular IF DAMIAN GANDIA HAD TO RANK his three favorite installments of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, it’d go: Now 10, Now 64, Now 57. Probably. With Now 10, it’s mainly a nostalgia thing. Even though the 14-year-old from New Jersey hadn’t been born when it was released in 2002, the 10th edition of the long-running pop-hits compilation — which starts with Britney Spears’ “Overprotected” and ends with Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” — still brings back memories of music he heard as a kid. As for Now 64, which features Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” and Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes,” Gandia credits the “top-notch” sequencing: “I…

SELENA GOMEZ’S first Spanish-language EP, Revelación, has been a decade in the making. She first teased her fans by writing on Twitter about the idea in 2011. Life and a constantly expanding career happened, but the dream was never far from her mind. “If I’d put [this] album out back then, it wouldn’t have had the same impact,” she says. The biggest influence on the EP’s sound is her namesake, the late icon Selena Quintanilla-Pérez; it also features production from reggaeton hitmaker Tainy and a duet with Rauw Alejandro. Since 2020’s Rare, Gomez, 28, has linked up with Blackpink, hosted a cooking show, and launched a makeup line (Rare Beauty). Soon, she’ll be appearing in her first TV role since her Disney days, starring alongside Steve Martin and Martin…

GINA MCCARTHY logged on to Zoom one day in early February and saw a crowd of Cabinet secretaries and other agency chiefs staring back at her, a Brady Bunch of senior bureaucrats. It was the first meeting of the Biden administration’s National Climate Task Force, a team of nearly two dozen top officials from across the government in charge of jump-starting Biden’s “whole-of-government” climate agenda. To lead it, Biden turned to McCarthy, a 66-year-old New Englander (with the chewy Boston accent to prove it) who knows a thing or two about how to wield executive power in the fight against climate change. As the head of the EPA under President Obama, she led the creation of the Clean Power Plan, the first national emissions limits for power plants, and…

ERIC CHURCH MAKES IT A TRIPLE The Nashville maverick delivers his biggest, boldest statement Eric Church Heart & Soul EMI ERIC CHURCH might look like a tough-guy outlaw who plays by his own rules, but his real gift has been for bending the rules to his will. No recent country artist has maneuvered the Nashville system as successfully, remaining dedicated to the power of down-the-center hitmaking even as he’s helped expand the parameters of the genre to include everything from soft-rock balladry (2009’s “Carolina”) to U2-Metallica arena grandeur (2014’s The Outsiders) to Wilco-referencing classic rock (2015’s Mr. Misunderstood). Church’s latest project is his most ambitious: a 24-song triple album released over the course of a week in three segments. Heart, &, and Soul further refine the melodic, midtempo storytelling…

PLAYBOI CARTI tells me his mood of late can be described as “punk monk.” He means it sort of holistically. As if devoutly observing a religious practice, the rapper spends every single day in the studio; his current project is the deluxe version, due this spring, of his recent album Whole Lotta Red. Carti says he barely even sleeps, preferring the Zen of the creative process. He splits his time between living in Atlanta and flying to California to see his son, though he’s plotting a move to New York, eyeing places on the Lower East Side. “It’s a city that I can get lost in,” he says. “Punk Monk” is also the title of one of the more memorable cuts from Whole Lotta Red, which topped the charts…

WHEN JOHN KERRY was a kid, his mother took him for walks in the Massachusetts woods, where they often stopped and stood among the trees. “Just listen,” she told her son. Whatever he heard, it stuck with him. Kerry, who is 77, has been on the front lines of the war for a habitable planet since the first Earth Day in 1970, when he was just back from Vietnam, carrying shrapnel in his leg and a Silver Star for bravery in combat. Over the past 30 years, Kerry has been a central player in virtually every climate conference and U.N. climate meeting (he first got to know his wife, Teresa, at the Rio Summit in 1992). He has talked about the climate crisis when it would have been politically…

ONE BY ONE, the witnesses described the stench, a rancid odor that befouled the air and ruined your clothes, made you close your windows in the summer and run from your car into church on Sundays lest you bring that smell into God’s house. They talked about undrinkable tap water and swarms of yellow flies. The cause of this pestilence, they said, were the hog farms, sprawling industrial operations that disposed of vast amounts of pig shit by sinking it in lagoons or spraying it across fields. To live near one of these farms was to live in an environmental nightmare. North Carolina is home to some 2,000 swine farms and nearly 10 million hogs. In 1995, the bursting of a hog-farm lagoon in the town of Jacksonville sent…