Table of contents for May 2019 in Rolling Stone

“You see something, you have to say something. You have to do something. I tell young people all the time, ‘Be bold. Be brave. Be courageous. Go for it.’”—JOHN LEWIS, Congressman NEAR THE BACK of ROLLING STONE’s fifth issue, in February 1968, next to a news story about the critical response to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film (“Chaotic, appalling, naive, tasteless nonsense”), readers turned to a ROLLING STONE house ad featuring a full-page photo of a roach clip and a promise that all new subscribers would get one in the mail for free. (For the unfamiliar, roach clips allowed you to smoke the remains of a joint without burning your fingers.) “Act now,” read the ad, “before this offer is made illegal.” This was the height of the…

ON THE MORNING of September 5th, Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach walked into Auerbach’s Nashville studio, picked up their instruments and became the Black Keys again. By season’s end, they had finished their ninth album, the self-produced “Let’s Rock” (yes, that’s really the title). As usual, they created the entire album’s worth of songs from scratch in the studio, with nothing written in advance and very little discussion. It had been five years since they recorded together, but that didn’t seem to matter at all. “We fell right back into it, really, day one,” says Carney. “We wrote two songs the first day. We’re just fucking around, and that’s what comes out.” “It’s this magic that happens with Pat and I,” says Auerbach, who started a new band, recorded…

The Counting Crows frontman hosts the podcast Underwater Sunshine. Here are five favorites he recently played on it. SUNFLOWER BEAN ”Come for Me” They are a trio led by Julia Cumming, who reminds me of a lot of Seventies punk singers. This is a fun, sexy, tough little rock song. HOP ALONG ”The Fox in Motion” This band reminds me of Gang of Four. It has this strange indie-rock-meets-funk happening. I can’t stop singing this song. MARIA TAYLOR ”If Only” (feat. Conor Oberst) She sings a double vocal melody on this that reminds me of Elliott Smith. It’s this really simple arrangement of acoustic guitar, strings and xylophone. PETAL ”Better Than You” The guitars are fuzzed-out and grungy, but the singer is really melodic. She has a cool way…

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY gasped at how much money U2’s 360° Tour brought in a decade ago — but that had nothing on the millions made by Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour last year. As artists race to keep up revenues in the streaming era, tours have gotten flashier by the year. Gross revenues and ticket-price data on the top North American tours from 2008 to 2018, as tracked by concert firm Pollstar, show a clear trend: up, up and away.…

WILLIE NELson is sitting on a couch at his home, a modest cabin that overlooks his 700 acres of gorgeous Texas Hill Country, when he reaches into his sweatshirt and produces a small, square vaporizer, takes a hit and exhales slowly. “Wanna puff?” he asks. Nelson’s wife, Annie, setting down a cup of coffee on a DVD case working as a coaster in front of him, speaks up. “Careful with that, babe,” she says. “You have to sing tonight.” Nelson nods and puts it away. He turns 86 this spring and has a history of emphysema, so Annie, who’s been with Willie for 33 years, tries to get him to look out for his lungs, especially on show days. This can be a problem. “He’s super-generous,” she says, “and…

‘YOU HAVE TO promise you won’t think I’m a maniac,” Carly Rae Jepsen says, sitting in the living room of her Spanish-style home on L.A.’s east side. A devilish grin spreads across her face as she jumps off a plush blue couch and runs to the dining room. When she returns, she’s clutching a few large, sturdy poster boards. On the largest — scrawled in different colors and surrounded by a bouquet of Post-it notes — are the titles of nearly 200 songs Jepsen wrote for Dedicated, her fourth album (due May 17th). Her latest track list is on the smallest board. That one is a mere two dozen or so songs. Jepsen, 33, is trying to figure out the next move in one of modern pop’s weirdest careers.…

You’re turning 50 in July. Does that scare you, or do you embrace it? The blessing [of aging] is that I’m artistically getting greater, and getting greater opportunities on my journey. I was writing 16 bars; now I’m writing 120-page screenplays. It’s the same form of art, but it’s the evolution of it. I was [always] that guy that had an old soul. I’m probably about 200 years old. Are you OK with Wu-Tang being called a “legacy group”? That’s a sign of respect. A sign [that] people didn’t think hip-hop itself would be here at this phase. I actually had a conversation with the crew [in 1992] that it had the potential to last for 20 years, and I said maybe then it’d decline and something new would…

“After the ‘Rolling Stone’ interview with Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams, it is safe to say that I think they truly are soulmates. I need a friendship like that in my life.”—Brie, via the internet Stark Sisters All Grown Up To celebrate Game of Thrones’ final season, stars Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner graced our April cover. The onscreen sisters and real-life best friends discussed their unbreakable bond, coming of age on set (which included uncomfortable bras for Williams and a crush on Justin Bieber for Turner), how they are “a nightmare to work with,” and how their decade-long series run came to an emotional end [“Growing Up Game of Thrones,” RS 1326]. When Williams posted their cover on Instagram, she joked, “get u someone who holds you like…

AS THE DIRECTOR of publicity and marketing at PayDay Records in the early 1990s, Vikki Tobak worked with acts like Jay-Z and Gang Starr as they were beginning their careers. “There was this inflection point where hip-hop started to realize its power,” Tobak says. “[Artists] realized that images — what they wore, how they looked — worked together with the music.” Her 2018 book, Contact High, documents that era through contact sheets with never-before-seen outtakes from some of hip-hop’s most iconic photo shoots. “They’re like a diary,” she says of the images, which are also on display through August 18th at the Annenberg Space for Photography in L.A. “A lot of photographers never intended for these to be for public consumption.”…

BRANDI CARLILE remembers feeling a new kind of anxiety when she became a mother in 2014. “I was wondering how it was fair that our children were born into relative safety just because of geography,” says the acclaimed singer-songwriter. When she expressed these concerns to her wife, Catherine Shepherd, who coordinated Paul McCartney’s charity work for 10 years, Shepherd told her, “If you want to feel better, you really need to focus this into something productive.” Not long after that conversation, Carlile launched an ambitious campaign to use her fame for good. In 2017, she oversaw the release of Cover Stories, a star-studded rerecording of her 2007 LP The Story, with artists from Adele to Pearl Jam; all proceeds went to War Child UK, a nonprofit that provides aid…

For two decades, Robyn has built a cult following for her emotionally cathartic club stompers. For her first-ever U.S. arena show, at Madison Square Garden, she put on an epic dance party. The highlight? 2010’s “Dancing on My Own,” when she took a long moment to soak in the crowd’s cheers. She kicks off an extended U.S. arena run in July. RANDOM QUOTE “On Halloween, one in seven people dress as Stevie Nicks. She is both an adjective and a verb. To quote my father, ‘That was very Stevie Nicks,’ and to quote my mother, ‘I Stevie Nicks’d that shit so hard.’”—Harry Styles…

Out in the leafy suburbs of Woodland Hills, California, in an OK house in an OK neighborhood, the actor Corey Feldman is wandering around, saying he soon might name the name of the man he says raped his like-a-brother best friend and frequent co-star, the late Corey Haim, back in 1985. He’s been talking about naming this name for more than seven years now. But each time, Feldman has shied away at the last minute, citing lawsuit fears, further ostracism and derailment of a career already off the tracks, and possible physical harm to him and his family. He sucks on a nicotine-filled vape, exhales a plume, drops his head a little and says, “I mean, I’ve had my life threatened twice in the last six months.” His wife…

XIUHTEZCATL MARTINEZ was sitting in his living room in Boulder, Colorado, watching the environmental documentary The 11th Hour, when it hit him for the first time. “I kind of began to grasp the idea that human beings are responsible for creating a crisis that threatens not just nature but humanity — everything about our civilization.” He was six years old. Martinez became one of 21 child plaintiffs suing the U.S. government for failing to protect them from climate change. He was 15 when they brought the suit. He turns 19 in May. It still has not seen the inside of a courtroom. ¶ As scientists make increasingly dire predictions about the future habitability of the planet, climate activists are being radicalized at younger and younger ages. Many can’t vote,…

BILLY JOEL hasn’t released an album of new pop songs since 1993, but that hasn’t stopped him from selling out Madison Square Garden every month for the past five years and packing baseball stadiums across the country each summer. “I’ve gone onstage and said, ‘I don’t have anything new for you, so we’re just going to play the old shit,’” Joel says on the phone from his house in Palm Beach, Florida. “And the audience goes, ‘Yeah!’ I’ll be sitting in the stadium looking out at 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people, thinking, ‘What the hell are they all doing here? Why now?’ I guess, in a way, I’m an anachronism. There aren’t that many of me left. There’s a rarity to it, which gives it value.” Are you looking forward…

JERRY NADLER, CHAIRMAN of the House Judiciary Committee, is about to do something wholly out of character: pay the Trump administration a compliment, sort of. It’s a late morning at the end of March, and Nadler is sipping Diet Coke from a paper cup in his spacious office in Washington, D.C., slouched so deeply into his chair that he seems to be submerging into the books and manila folders stacked atop his desk. “It’s a very intelligent press strategy,” he says, jabbing a finger onto his desk, where a pocket-size copy of the Constitution peeks out of his business-card holder. He’s talking about Attorney General William Barr’s March 24th letter outlining the “principal conclusions” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Barr’s letter…

CONGRESSMAN JOHN LEWIS’ WASHINGTON, D.C., OFFICE IS filled from floor to ceiling with photographs and souvenirs from a lifetime of activism: the Freedom Rides he risked his life for from the age of 21; the March on Washington, where Lewis wrote a speech so fiery that Martin Luther King Jr. advised him to tone it down; the voting-rights work in Selma, Alabama, where, as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was beaten by state troopers during the march to Montgomery. Looking at this wall of history, one is reminded that Lewis represents so much more than Georgia’s Fifth District. He has become the custodian of America’s moral character. During his 33 years in Congress, Lewis, 79, has not only led the charge for legislative victories like Obamacare…

Vampire Weekend Father of the Bride COLUMBIA AT 18 songs in under an hour, Vampire Weekend’s first album in six years sounds at first like a manic effort to make up lost time. Singer-guitarist Ezra Koenig, the band’s composer-lyricist and a co-producer on virtually every track, has stuffed his hooks and bridges with so many change-ups in rhythm, guitar tone and dramatic instrumental flourish that, by the finish, you feel like you’ve been whipped through a modern-pop homage to the Beatles’ Abbey Road medley — twice over. Father of the Bride is so zealously detailed and meticulously contoured that you easily sink into its inventions: the whirl of country picking, surf guitar and classical interlude in “Harmony Hall”; the loopy hip-hop of “Sunflower” with its creeping-vocal riff; the Soweto-like…

‘ONCE MORE WE SAW Stars” is a quietly heartbreaking memoir from Jayson Greene, a contributing writer at Pitchfork. It’s his first book — but the last he ever would have wanted to write. He and his wife, Stacy, lost their two-year-old daughter, Greta, in a horrifying accident — the girl was sitting with her grandmother on a park bench in New York when a piece of brick fell from the eighth story of a nearby building and hit her. The book begins with their shock: the hospital rooms, the funeral, the realization that everything has changed. As he writes, they’re figuring out “how to breathe on this new planet.” It would be totally understandable to fear this story might be too bleak to face — indeed, there would be…