Table of contents for November 2024 in Rolling Stone

Mikey Madison has come bearing snacks. The Anora star and I are scheduled to meet in Woodbridge Park — a blip of a green space in Studio City, California, with picturesque benches, a sprawling playground, and plenty of trees. Toddlers wobble about the play area with their moms (or nannies). Exactly on time, Madison, 25, strides across the grass holding two blankets and a stuffed bag of Trader Joe’s goodies. By her side is a tiny, golden-brown Chihuahua named Jam, with bright-green eyes. “I saw that you like trying interesting snacks,” she says. It would seem I’ve been Googled. We unpack strawberry-lemonade-flavored creme sandwich cookies, maple-syrup kettle corn, sea-life-themed gummies, pickle-flavored potato chips, sour jelly beans, dark-chocolate sunflower-seed butter cups, and flavored seltzer to wash it all down. As…

He was a songwriting legend who met the world with grit and grace. By Rosanne Cash I dreamed about him. I got up at 5 a.m. to go downstairs and have a private cry. There was a Kris-shaped mantra running through my head, right in the center of the deep sadness: “Do better. Be bigger. Speak truth. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Write about it.” The space he left is filled with more than grief. It has a sense of urgency. Time is a thief. I’ve never known anyone as authentically themselves as Kris. His very thoughts had an armament of courage. His time in the military and the discipline he cultivated there, coupled with his native kindness and deep sensitivity, made for an unusual kind of…

Not for the first time today, Zach Bryan is making his new friend laugh. Bryan is trying to arrange himself on a plush white studio couch for a filmed conversation, and it’s making him self-conscious. “Do I look pompous with my legs crossed?” he asks. The guy next to him, Bruce Springsteen, who owns the couch, the studio, and the entire Colts Neck, New Jersey, farm surrounding it, cracks up as he chimes in: “What’s the level of my pomposity on this?” Bryan spent his childhood on a Navy base in Okinawa, Japan, and then in Oklahoma, worlds away from New Jersey’s Monmouth County. He was all of six years old when The Rising came out. Still, Springsteen is one of his biggest heroes — he has a lyric…

Within minutes of sitting down with each other at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Reneé Rapp and Cynthia Erivo realize that they’re both Capricorns. They gush over how cosmic this meeting is, after years of mutual admiration from afar. “Now it all makes sense!” Erivo says. “A Capricorn is someone who knows their own self and what they want, what they will stand for, and what they will not. It’s always really fun and refreshing to see.” Rapp agrees: “You’re, verbatim, exactly the same way. Like, 100 percent.” Once they get going, it’s hard to get the two stars of stage, screen, and stereo to stop: They immediately connect on their clear-eyed visions of making their dreams come true from the jump. Along the way, they open…

Reviews The Dark and Glorious Return of the Cure After 16 years without a new album, Robert Smith is back with a triumphant power-doom epic. By Rob Sheffield The words “long awaited” don’t begin to do justice to the new Cure album. Songs of a Lost World is an album that’s been promised, rumored, dangled, teased, longed for, despaired of, imagined. Cure fans have spent 16 years lighting candles and praying for this one, as Robert Smith has kept swearing he’s thiiiiiis close to being finished. The new tunes blew everyone away on the Cure’s marathon world tour, with nobody complaining the material needed work. Yet he’s kept fine-tuning in the studio, promising the results would be worth it. He wasn’t lying. Songs of a Lost World is the…

DANNY CLINCH Photographer Earlier this year, Danny Clinch witnessed Bruce Springsteen and Zach Bryan, our two November cover stars, share a stage for the first time. “I got to see their budding friendship happen right before my eyes,” says Clinch. Now, the New Jersey native has captured the unique bond between the two singers for the cover of Rolling Stone. Springsteen and Bryan were photographed at Springsteen’s house in Jersey, inside the rock icon’s studio and restored barn. In his decades-long career, Clinch has directed Grammy-nominated music videos, co-founded the Sea. Hear. Now music festival, and worked with major musicians like Springsteen, whom he first met in 1987. “He is really a soulful human being,” Clinch says. “He’s just an excitable music fan, like we all are.” PHYLICIA J.L.…

Chris Martin remembers what it felt like when the script flipped. It happened just after Coldplay’s second album, 2002’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. “We started to get the backlash to having become popular, and then suddenly we were the least popular band in the world as well,” the frontman says over Zoom from Los Angeles. “We never had to deal with that before, and we were a total mess.” With their 10th album, Moon Music, out now, Martin looks back on the lessons they’ve learned since then — and tells us why he sees the band’s story winding down soon. “By the time we finish album 12, which is the end, it will all make sense,” he says. “So if it doesn’t sound like Coldplay right…

The Irish author Sally Rooney’s first two novels, Conversations With Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), launched her into the stratosphere of literary celebrity, garnering critical raves and commercial success. (They also spawned live-action adaptations, one of which, Hulu’s Normal People, catapulted its young leads, Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, to stardom, too.) Rooney’s name has become synonymous with an excavation of modern womanhood and bone-deep generational discontent. So it’s not a surprise that before her fourth book, Intermezzo, was even released in September, advance copies became an It-girl status symbol. But the highly-anticipated novel has the substance to back up the hype. Intermezzo is a languid tumble with grief as told through the eyes of two brothers grappling with the death of their father. For Ivan and his…

This year, Tinashe notched her first Hot 100 entry in eight years with the sexy, propulsive song “Nasty,” which started climbing up the charts in June. Around the same time, a TikTok video of dancer Nate Di Winer went viral: In the clip, the nerdy-looking white boy winds his hips to the song’s chorus, inspiring memes that helped make Tinashe’s line “Match my freak” part of the cultural lexicon. For the 31-year-old star, “Nasty” represents hard-earned success after a rocky road that started in the major-label system. Now, after a few years as an independent artist, she says her work is just beginning. This fall, she’s on her second tour of the year, and around the holidays, she’s getting back into the studio to record the third installment of…

At 14, Coco Jones was catapulted into stardom thanks to a role as teen singing sensation Roxie in the 2012 Disney movie Let It Shine. That rush of fame was short-lived. Jones was signed then dropped from a label before she was 16. The industry didn’t know what to do with the young girl with the big voice. She was too sultry, too confident, too Coco. But in that short time, Jones had already managed to touch another girl halfway around the world. A young Nigerian named Oyinkansola Sarah Aderibigbe was looking to Disney movies as a road map to turn her own dreams into a reality. And she saw Jones’ Roxie as a role model. Aderibigbe began singing, and would later take the stage name Ayra Starr. Her…

Earlier this year, Tyla and Lisa both happened to be free one night in Los Angeles — and it turned out to be perfect timing. The South African singer was preparing to release her debut album, Tyla, and the Blackpink superstar was in the studio with producer and songwriter Sammy SoSo, who’d worked with both of them. So Tyla hopped over to the studio and let Lisa listen to her entire album. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she tells Lisa, recalling the moment they met for the first time. “You were literally so sweet. It was so cute.” Months later, in early July, the two global phenoms are together again at L.A.’s Henson Recording Studios for a photo shoot, soundtracked by Beyoncé and plenty of Nineties R&B. They…

Tucked between a taqueria and a discount tobacco store on downtown San Francisco’s Market Street sits the International Art Museum of America (IAMA). The white-column-framed double doors open into a towering hall with a pond and a mossy wooden treehouse. Upstairs, past a pair of imperial guardian lions, the collection begins — a mishmash of statues, Chinese ink paintings, European landscapes, and modern art. It’s odd, but not remarkably so, until you see it: Behind heavy wooden doors sealed with three metal bars that act as bolt locks is the Treasure Room. Inside sits a sculpture created by His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III; it’s a cave-like structure that holds a fog that never dissipates. The sculpture is a miracle, the museum guide will tell you, proof that this…

THE WILD, REBEL HEART OF ‘SATURDAY NIGHT’ As the sketch show enters its 50th season, a look at its gloriously weird early days. By Alan Sepinwall Saturday Night Live wasn’t Saturday Night Live, both literally and spiritually, when it premiered on Oct. 11, 1975. Weeks earlier, ABC had debuted a prime-time variety show called Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. So Lorne Michaels’ late-night creation had to go by, simply, Saturday Night — the same title of the Jason Reitman film (out now) about the sketch-comedy institution’s very first telecast. But that inaugural season was different from what we think of as Saturday Night Live in ways that go much further and deeper than the name. In that first year, Michaels, Chevy Chase, and company were still figuring out…

IT TAKES TWO On a sunny day this past April, Rolling Stone traveled to a 378-acre farm in Colts Neck, New Jersey, complete with stables, rolling hills, and — that day at least — two of the best singer-songwriters alive. The one who lives there, Bruce Springsteen, had invited us, his new friend Zach Bryan, and his old friend, the photographer Danny Clinch, to his property for this issue’s cover shoot. After Clinch shot the artists in the studio and historic barn, Bryan and Springsteen sat down in a homey studio lounge. The younger star clearly saw Springsteen as a mentor. But Springsteen’s interest in Bryan was equally genuine, and the pair questioned each other on everything from how they put their bands together to the genesis of the…

The Atlanta rap scene, like the rest of the music world, is still mourning the loss of Rich Homie Quan. In early September, the 34-year-old artist was found unresponsive by his girlfriend at their home, leaving behind five children and an immense musical legacy. With hits like 2013’s “Type of Way” and 2015’s “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he once looked like a legend in the making. By the late 2010s, label woes had stalled his climb up toward the pop-culture stratosphere, and those in the know lament that he didn’t get the chance to fulfill his superstar potential. Many tributes have focused on the collaboration that Quan began with fellow rising Atlanta star Young Thug in 2013. Their 2014 project, Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1, showcased their generational…

Raye, wearing a black, formfitting Versace dress, can hardly contain her smile as she thinks about that legendary Christina Aguilera riff in Burlesque. You know, the one at the end of her “Show Me How You Burlesque” number, where her voice does cartwheels up and down a scale? Yeah, Raye knows it perfectly. “When I tell you I studied that run, I studied that run,” says Raye. “YouTube, me. The living room. Door shut. Play, rewind. Play, rewind.” It just so happens that Raye is sitting in Aguilera’s living room, admiring the colorful art on her walls (there’s an iconic Banksy painting on one). They’re about to meet for the first time, and Raye is quickly going over the list of questions she has for the diva. “She’s ready,”…

MCO Studios is a quiet, woodsy space tucked away in the leafy neighborhood of Anzures in Mexico City. With its sky-high ceilings and the bursting trees on the patio, it’s a site that reflects the beauty of the Mexican capital, and singers Leon Bridges and Natalia Lafourcade are immediately at peace when they arrive here one bright afternoon in August. It could be because both of them have been finding endless inspiration in Mexico City. Lafourcade was born here, and in the past several years, she’s made albums like the two-part Musas projects and 2022’s De Todas las Flores, digging into folk sounds from her hometown and the rest of Latin America. Bridges is a more recent arrival; after releasing three acclaimed, soul- and R&B-inspired LPs, he found himself…

“I carry the flag for all dreamers.” Who are your heroes? The first big one was Charlie Parker. I loved his work and still do. It just seemed so beautiful, yet so angular and vibrant and so full of life. The first record I ever bought was a Charlie Parker EP. I could whistle all those solos. Then I loved the music from Memphis, Otis Redding, and so on. I saw the Stax road show when it came to England in ’67 — it was life-changing, really. I was just like [stares with jaw hanging open]. Bob Dylan was amazing. I always thought Neil Young was good, great voice. The Velvet Underground — they were so adventurous. They really had something. Are there film heroes who play the same…