Table of contents for Nov-06-14 in Rolling Stone

OUR FAVORITE SONGS, ALBUMS AND VIDEOS RIGHT NOW 1.Foo Fighters “SomethingFromNothing” “Fuck it all, I came from nothing!” Dave Grohl howls on the first bombshell from the Foos’ upcoming Sonic Highways. An ode to Chicago, it builds from a moody opening to a raging guitar bonfire. Hot! 2.Run the Jewels, feat. Zack de la Rocha “Close YourEyes (and Countto Fuck)” Guest verses from the reclusive Rage Against the Machine MC (below) are as rare as rapping unicorns, so hats off to Run the Jewels for this furious revolutionary anthem. 3.Nude Beach “I Can’t Keep the TearsFrom Falling” Listen to this jangly jam once, and you’ll swear it’s a lost Tom Petty classic. Then you’ll listen 20 more times. 4.Angaleena Presley “American Middle Class” The title track from the Pistol Annies…

WHEN THE DEEPWATER HORIzon oil rig erupted in April 2010, killing 11 workers and spilling 4.9 million barrels of oil, filmmaker Margaret Brown raced to the Gulf of Mexico with a camera, just like every news anchor in the country. Unlike Anderson Cooper, however, she stayed for almost four years. Brown’s new documentary, The Great Invisible, is a humane and infuriating Oscar contender about a Delta culture dependent on oil, told by the people who lived the tragedy – from executives to shrimpers to local fishermen hired by BP to clean oil from water with their own nets. “BP was also paying them to shut up,” says Brown, who was raised in Alabama and has previously made films about Mardi Gras and country singer Townes Van Zandt. “They were told…

When Thom Yorke released a new solo album over BitTorrent with no advance warning in late September, he surprised everyone – except for his bandmates in Radiohead. “Oh, I knew,” says drummer Phil Selway with a laugh. As it turned out, Selway was less than two weeks away from releasing a solo album of his own, Weatherhouse, by more traditional means. “They’re very different records,” he says diplomatically. “I kind of like the way they rub up against each other.” Selway made his debut as a singersongwriter on 2010’s quiet, folky Familial. The follow-up – full of sweeping, psychedelic full-band arrangements – sounds a lot more like the music he makes with his main gig. “I suppose on this one I didn’t want to avoid it, which I did on…

NBA players have been trying to rap – and doing a terrible job of it – for decades. But Full Court Press, Volume 1, a new album that teams hiphop heavies like Twista, Bun B and Birdman with court vets like Stephen Jackson, Trevor Ariza and Carlos Boozer, defies convention by being better than awful and occasionally kind of good. (Its sales benefit the ‘nPlay Foundation, which battles childhood obesity.) Highlights include “Showtime,” where Knicks forward Iman Shumpert trades verses with Mase. “I took it from the perspective of an opposing player coming to New York, the energy and flow of the city,” says Shumpert. Others went for a straight-ahead jock-jam approach, like Cavaliers forward Shawn Marion, who’s joined on “I’m a Champion” by T-Pain, Dorrough and Young Cash. “I…

Tunde Adebimpe, singer for TV on the Radio, keeps rough ideas for songs on his phone as “Voice Notes.” Right now, he has 7,189. “It’s stupid,” he concedes. “But here’s the crazy part: They’re all hits.” Like Adebimpe’s phone, TV on the Radio’s fifth studio album, Seeds (out November 18th), brims with confidence and good ideas. But it didn’t come easy. This is their first album since bassist Gerard Smith died of lung cancer in 2011, the same year TVOR released their last record, Nine Types of Light. “It’s impossible for us to make a record without having him there in some way,” Adebimpe says. The four surviving members took some time off after Smith’s death, unsure if they’d ever reunite. But hanging out as friends turned into weekend sessions.…

Sonic Highways Fridays, 11 p.m., HBO Dave Grohl struck gold with his 2013 Sound City documentary – who knew the story of a crummy little recording studio could turn into a perfect microcosm for all of American music? Grohl takes that same style of storytelling in his excellent new eight-part series. He rolls from town to town with the Foos, digging into each city’s history and chatting up local legends, whether that means Joe Walsh, Dolly Parton, Chuck D or Paul Stanley. It’s a familiar grind for a traveling band – one more town, one more gig, turn the page. Yet Grohl makes it fresh thanks to his huge appetite for music, as well as his superhuman knack for the schmooze. It’s a road trip that only could have been…

ALEX MORTON CAN STILL REMEMBER the day when he decided that academics weren’t for him. He was a freshman at Arizona State University, sitting in biology class, when it clicked. “My professor starts talking about biomes,” he says. “I’m like, ‘My major is communications, and this guy wants me to memorize all the animals in the rainforest? I gotta go.’ ” ¶ Morton is recalling this catalyzing moment while in the front passenger seat of a white Mercedes sedan speeding down an Arizona highway. To his left sits his unofficial bodyguard and driver, Joe Smith, whom everyone knows by the nickname “Sloppy.” Behind him sits Claudia Chiarelli, Morton’s girlfriend, a 20-year-old aspiring dental hygienist from a Chicago suburb, currently in the midst of an existential crisis caused by Instagram. “OK,…

L.A. beat scientist enlists Herbie Hancock, Snoop and more for a joyful concept album about death Flying Lotus You’re Dead! Warp 4.0/4.0 Steven Ellison likes using jazz elements in his electronic soundscapes: See 2012’s harmonically antsy Until the Quiet Comes and other projects with his virtuoso bassist pal Thundercat. But on the L.A. artist’s fifth Flying Lotus set, joined by Obi Wan elder Herbie Hancock and a team of shredding genre outlaws (cosmic saxophonist Kamasi Washington, ex-Mars Volta drummer Deantoni Parks and Metalocalypse guitarist Brendon Small), Ellison makes the boldest, most fully engaged fusion of the hip-hop-laptop era. Ellison’s West Coast pals Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar (and Ellison himself, in his rap alter ego Captain Murphy) rhyme about astral planes and out-of-body experiences – not as stoner escapism but…

The Detroit classic-rocker goes to Nashville and gets deep Bob Seger Ride Out Capitol 3.0/3.0 New Bob Seger albums don’t show up too often (this is his second since 1995). But he’s still the same heartland warrior with the same sturdy, elastic rock & roll vision. Ride Out goes from “Detroit Made,” a tribute to Motor City automotive ingenuity steeped in Rust Belt rock and soul, to the Chicago-blues overdrive of “Hey Gypsy,” to the freedom-loving “Ride Out,” where he growls his message for our times over a tight boogie with a Southern-soul feel: “Time to disconnect from clutter/Time to hit the road.” Seger’s leanings are rootsier these days, which fits his august Midwestern growl. He recorded in Nashville with reliable session pros, and he covers songs by alt-country artists…

Oliver’s Moment BRIAN HIATT’S TERRIFIC profile of John Oliver reminds me why I turn to Last Week Tonight for news [“John Oliver Is Mad as Hell,” RS 1219]. Oliver’s “Are you kidding me?” fury perfectly matches my own. Sarah Sasco, via the Internet THE ONLY PROBLEM WITH Oliver’s show is that it isn’t in prime time. Put it opposite 60 Minutes and show the old fogies what investigative journalism should be. Dinah Shelton Washington, D.C. I HAVEN’T WATCHED TELEVIsion news in years, for many of the same reasons John Oliver says he reports it: political corruption, media battles and a growing feeling of pessimism about the state of global affairs. Brian Hiatt’s cover story confirmed that if I return to watching news on TV, it’ll be to hear what Mr.…

We asked the Texas guitar star – who just released a great live album – to tell us what he thought of five songs, old and new. OLD Clarence Carter “Bad News” He’s like, “I’m bad news,” but he doesn’t feel bad about it. He’s proud of it, with that evil laugh. It kinda freaks me out. But I like Clarence Carter. Muddy Waters “Let’s Spend the Night Together” The blues police definitely blew the whistle on Electric Mud. It was shocking, but it was brilliant. It changes your swag. NEW The Black Keys “Weight of Love” I like Dan Auerbach’s guitar playing at the end. I dig these guys – they’ve opened the door for young kids to be introduced to the blues. Ed Sheeran “Don’t” I heard this…

Stop twerking, America! Hip-hop’s hottest dance is the “Shmoney Dance.” Introduced in the video for Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda’s Top 20 hit “Hot N*gga,” it basically involves shaking your arms and swaying around like your drunk aunt at a family reunion. The Shmoney went viral this summer on Vine, and countless homages and parodies have followed by everyone from Beyoncé to an American soldier, who did it while brandishing a gun. “I didn’t even know it was gonna be a dance – we just did it,” says 20-yearold Shmurda (born Ackquille Pollard). Shmurda, who is of Jamaican descent, will release his debut EP, Shmurda She Wrote, later this year. On “Hot N*gga,” he raps that he’s been selling crack since the fifth grade, and he says success hasn’t changed much…

Last year, Andrew Hozier-Byrne was living in his parents’ house in Dublin and playing small club shows. Things changed literally overnight, when someone posted the video for his gospel-folk song “Take Me to Church” online. The clip, which was inspired by anti-gay protests in Russia, shows a gay male couple getting attacked by an angry mob. “To this day, I still don’t know who put the video up,” says Hozier, 24. “But it was getting 10,000 views an hour or something. I was kind of freaking out.” Now, Hozier has famous fans like Ed Sheeran (who covered one of his songs) and Taylor Swift (who posted a vine where she danced gleefully at one of his shows). He just released a debut steeped in American soul and blues (which he…

‘ROADWAY IS A REALLY LONG way from Wallsend,” says Sting, laughing about his hometown, a renowned English shipbuilding stronghold that has undergone a painful economic decline. Wallsend provides the evocative setting for The Last Ship, the musical Sting began working on more than four years ago. Now in previews, the show is set to open on Broadway on October 26th. Rather than taking the more conventional route of constructing a jukebox musical based on his lengthy catalog of hits, Sting wrote original songs (and repurposed three tunes from his solo career: “When We Dance,” “Island of Souls,” “All This Time”) in order to tell the story of Gideon Fletcher, a young man desperate to escape the hardscrabble life his father led as a shipbuilder. In part, it’s Sting’s own story.…

‘ DON’T INTEND TO REVISIT THE VAULTS for a while,” Jimmy Page says with a smile in the opulent library of a Victorian hotel in London. The ex-Led Zeppelin guitarist, 70, has spent much of the past decade in a retrospective frenzy: collating the images for his lavish photographic memoir, Jimmy Page, and curating deluxe reissues of his band’s historic studio LPs. Rarity-laden editions of 1971’s Led Zeppelin IV and ’73’s Houses of the Holy come out on October 28th, and Page has finished preparing the rest of the catalog for release. The new version of Presence, he reveals, includes “two extra things” he found on a reel with an early mix of the album. “As there weren’t going to be any more shows, I could concentrate on these more…

Live From Foo York! After a Letterman appearance to mark the release of their new HBO show, Sonic Highways, the Foo FIghters headed to a party for photographer Danny Clinch’s new book, Still Moving, where they jammed on “Miss You.” Expect to see them in bigger venues on the road next year. “The idea is we play as much as we can,” says Dave Grohl. Nicks’ Pics After playing two shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden with Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks debuted an exhibit of Polaroid self-portraits from the Seventies and Eighties. Mick Fleetwood and Christine McVie were in attendance to show support: “Walking into that big white room with Chris and Mick and seeing [the photos] all so large was like an acid trip,” says Nicks. 2014’s Final…

STEPHEN KING’S OFFICE building sits on a particularly dreary dead-end road on the outskirts of Bangor, Maine, just down the street from a gun-and-ammo store, a snowplow dealership and, appropriately enough, an old cemetery. From the outside, the anonymous building looks like a new branch of Dunder Mifflin, a very deliberate choice meant to keep King and his tiny staff safe. “We can’t be on a main road because people would find us,” says one of his assistants. “And it’s not people you want to find you. He draws some weird people.” ¶ Once buzzed in, a visitor enters a sort of Stephen King nirvana – rooms decorated with fan-created artwork populated with characters from his novels, a Stephen King Simpsons action figure, a freakish bobble-head doll of the demented…

AC/DC “Play Ball” 3.5/3.5 Founding rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young bowed out due to illness this year, but the rock & roll train chugs on: Hard rock’s most reliable band has constructed the sort of unwavering, fouron-the-floor bar rocker that it’s been recording since 1975, and singer Brian Johnson still begs to “mix in the sin” as lead guitarist Angus Young whips up a flurry of blues bends. KORY GROW Pink Floyd “Louder Than Words” 3.5/3.5 Pink Floyd says the forthcoming The Endless River – their first new album in 20 years – will also be their last, and this majestic song serves as an honest elegy for their music. “With worldweary grace/We’ve taken our places,” David Gilmour sings over prog-rock drift. It’s a reminder that for all its mind-bending grandeur,…

Swedish pop singer Tove Lo makes her debut with a concept album about a relationship Tove Lo Queen of the Clouds Island 3.5/3.5 Like her pals in Icona Pop – not to mention Robyn, Lykke Li, First Aid Kit and who knows how many more Swedish prodigies waiting in the wings – 26-year-old Tove Nilsson is a pop adept fond of big hooks and selfaware emoting. Yet for sheer sucker-punch verse-slinging, no one’s touching her, as showcased on this smartly produced arc-of-a-love-affair concept LP. How is it that no one has built a perfect single around the enduring bon mot “I’m not on drugs, I’m just in love” until now (in “Not on Drugs”)? On the self-deprecating “Moments,” the singer asserts, “On good days, I am charming as fuck” over…

In RS 1219, contributing editor Tim Dickinson wrote a devastating exposé of one of the country’s most powerful and politically influential families [“Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire”]. The story exploded across all media, and ROLLING STONE readers responded by the thousands. AN ABSOLUTE FIRSTclass story on the Koch brothers. I’ve been looking for authoritative information about them for some time, and now I have it. This article should be widely distributed. Our country deserves better than to be governed by politicians bought and paid for by the Kochs. John M. Beebe Via the Internet I AM SICK AFTER READING about the Koch brothers. Story upon story detail how the Kochs break the law and lie at the expense of the environment, yet the fines they pay for these crimes…

David gilmour has spent much of the past 20 years trying to make Pink Floyd a thing of the past. The band broke boxoffice records touring behind 1994’s The Division Bell, but Gilmour grew tired of the rock-star life. “The whole thing was becoming bigger than I liked,” he says. “I wasn’t enjoying the lack of connection with the audience.” ¶ The singer-guitarist focused his energy on raising his young children and making the occasional solo album. But one piece of unfinished Floyd business: their final jam sessions, from 1993. The band – who, at that point, had been without founder and chief songwriter Roger Waters for nearly a decade – cut 20 hours of tapes for a disc of ambient music to be included with The Division Bell, a…

Who killed Hae Min Lee? That’s the question at the heart of Serial, an addictive new podcast from the creators of This American Life. According to the state of Maryland, it was her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, who was given a life sentence for the 1999 murder. But each week, Serial unravels a new strand of the case, delving into everything from Hae’s diary to an overlooked alibi witness to the streaker who found the body. Syed himself is a regular, affable voice on the show, over the phone from jail. “I like a lot of these people I’m talking to, even the ones who may have done terrible things,” says host Sarah Koenig.…

IN JULY, FOR WHAT HE SAYS WAS the first time in his 60-year career, Jerry Lee Lewis took a vacation. “I had to ride a train,” says Lewis in his thick Louisiana drawl, reclining in his favorite leather chair in his living room. “I was really looking forward to that.” Lewis and his seventh wife, Judith, headed out from Mississippi to visit his 28-year-old son in Grand Rapids, Michigan, boarding an Amtrak double-decker with sleeping cabins. But the accommodations were tighter than they expected. “They had us in a cubicle that was like two coffins,” adds Judith, 64, sitting beside him, puffing on an e-cigarette. “It was like being in an MRI. He had to push me up to the top bunk.” “It ain’t like it is watching it on…

“I don’t usually let people see me cry,” says Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan. “But I cried and cried and cried.” Crahan is talking about listening to “XIX,” a dirge-like song on the metal band’s new album, .5: The Gray Chapter. The LP pays tribute to bassist Paul Gray, who died of an overdose of morphine and the painkiller fentanyl in 2010. Since coming out of Des Moines in 1999, Slipknot have been one of rock’s most extreme bands, wearing demon-clown masks onstage while playing screeds like “People = Shit.” But The Gray Chapter reveals their human side. “Losing Paul shook us to our foundations,” says frontman Corey Taylor. Unlike nearly every other band to emerge from the “nu-metal” boom of the early 2000s, Slipknot are still successful – they even…

Tom Morello Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello has begun work on a solo record that he promises will “rock furiously, but in a way that you haven’t heard yet.” Morello has finished one track and has 19 “percolating” that he plans to record with his backing band, the Freedom Fighter Orchestra. “The model is ‘The Hendrix of Now,’_” he says. Big K.R.I.T. Mississippi hip-hop auteur Big K.R.I.T. has finished his second Def Jam LP, Cadillactica, due out November 11th. The album takes place on a fictional planet and features a wide sonic palette and intense displays of lyrical prowess. “My songs might not be in the club,” he says. “But from your house to the club, you gonna put my album on.”…

MANY OF US HAVE RANDOM IMPULSES, BUT BILL Murray is the man who acts on them, for all of us. Consider, for example, the time a couple of years ago when he caught a cab late at night in Oakland. Facing a long drive across the bay to Sausalito, he started talking with his cabbie and discovered that his driver was a frustrated saxophone player: He never had enough time to practice, because he was driving a taxi 14 hours a day. Murray told the cabbie to pull over and get his horn out of the trunk; the cabbie could play it in the back seat while Murray drove. ¶ As he tells this story, Murray is sitting on a couch in a Toronto hotel. Wearing a rumpled shirt with…

Taylor Swift 1989 Big Machine 4.0/4.0 BY ROB SHEFFIELD When Taylor Swift decides to do something, the girl really knows how to overdo it. So on her fifth album, when she indulges her crush on Eighties synth-pop, she goes full blast, spending most of the album trying to turn herself into the Pet Shop Boys. 1989 is a drastic departure – only a couple of tracks feature her trademark tear-stained guitar. But she’s still Taylor Swift, which means she’s dreaming bigger and oversharing louder than anyone else in the game. And she still has way too many feelings for the kind of dudes who probably can’t even spell “feelings.” Swift has already written enough great songs for two or three careers. Red, from 2012, was her Purple Rain, a sprawling…

Jerry Lee Lewis makes his most personal LP in years with some seriously heavy-hitting sidemen Jerry Lee Lewis Rock & Roll Time Vanguard 3.0/3.0 For his follow-up to 2006’s Last Man Standing and 2010’s Mean Old Man, Jerry Lee Lewis once again invites his famous friends to play on some old favorites. This time, though, he’s not in a duetting mood. Lewis relegates the likes of Keith Richards, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young and Nils Lofgren to guitar and backing vocals – making this less a star-studded spectacle than a personal statement, with the 79-year-old singer bringing his voice and piano to several blues standards, a couple of Chuck Berry tunes and an unexpected Dylan deep cut (“Stepchild”). Lewis’ tortured heart is still a primary concern – see his version of…