Innehållsförteckning för October 2019 från Rolling Stone

“That’s why I call myself the ‘Grim Reaper.’ I’m killing their socialist agenda.”—MITCH MCCONNELL, Senate majority leader WHEN TAYLOR SWIFT first appeared on the cover of ROLLING STONE, in 2009, she was a self-assured teenager with a vision bigger than the confines of country music. Over the next five years — and two more cover stories — she developed into a global superstar and one of the most gifted songwriters of her generation, while very publicly navigating fame and love, battling insecurities, defending against critics, and defining what it means to be a star in the internet age. She did a lot of growing up in the pages of ROLLING STONE. In 2009, she made mocha-chocolate-chip cookies with writer Vanessa Grigoriadis and explained why she’d never tried alcohol. Five…

The frontman of Dinosaur Jr. (whose four 1990s albums were reissued as deluxe sets) was heavily inspired by the Woodstock movie as a kid. JIMI HENDRIX “Spanish Castle Magic” This wasn’t in the movie, but I saw it in the director’s cut, and Hendrix is just on fire. I wish that had come across in the film. RICHIE HAVENS ”Freedom” He’s strumming the guitar so hard you think he’s going to put a hole in it. It made me realize that someone playing acoustic can still be great. SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE “I Want to Take You Higher” The energy of this just blew me away when I was younger. They were just wailing. I love how they involved the crowd. THE WHO “See Me, Feel Me” This…

ROBERT SMITH wasn’t prepared for what he was about to see when he watched the concert documentary of the Cure’s 40th-anniversary show, filmed last year in Hyde Park in London. “The first close-up of a human face I saw was me,” Smith says of the horror of seeing his 60-year-old face in 4K. “It was quite terrifying.” The doc and film of the group’s Meltdown Festival set last year are being released together as a new box set, 40 Live — Curætion-25 and Anniversary. It marks the first new release from the band in nearly a decade. Smith, however, plans to keep up the momentum with a new Cure album, tentatively titled Live From the Moon and out this fall — and partially inspired by Smith’s newfound contentment in…

IN THE DUSTY, heat-blister town of Vacaville, California, halfway between Sacramento and Oakland, sits the bleak squat prison that holds a trim, handsome, highly articulate inmate named Bobby Beausoleil, almost 72, who has spent the past 50 years behind bars for murdering a musician friend of his, Gary Hinman, either as part of a drug deal gone bad or as a straight-up robbery, all depending on which version of events you believe. All of it happened under the dark cloud of another of Beausoleil’s friends, Charlie Manson, the pint-size, so-called hippie-death-cult mastermind ex-con Svengali, who was convicted in 1971 of directing the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders, which left seven people dead and a bunch of his followers behind bars for life, and who died in 2017, much to the dismay…

TWENTY-TWO-year-old North Bergen, New Jersey, rapper-singer 070 Shake, a.k.a. Danielle Balbuena, hit mainstream radar via Kanye West’s Wyoming sessions in 2018, functioning as fluid superego on “Violent Crimes” and “Ghost Town,” from his album Ye, and Pusha T’s “Santeria.” Born to a Dominican immigrant mom, Shake grew up on Lauryn Hill and My Chemical Romance. Her vocals can come hard and soft, in English and Spanish, with verses suggesting a fierce, strong, proud, brave, spiritual person who’s also hungry, searching, scared, self-loathing, and self-destructive — like plenty of humans, especially in their early twenties. Shake’s enveloping debut LP, Modus Vivendi, charts desire and space, outer and inner — it’s an emo-rap Dark Side of the Moon. Songs address a lover, and perhaps Balbuena, too. The delivery can be slurred…

ELIGIBLE FOR: FREE SPIRIT, “MY BAD,” “SATURDAY NIGHTS,” “TALK,” AND MORE ‘I LEARNED TO not take myself as seriously after the Grammys,” says Khalid, the young pop star from El Paso, Texas. He was just 19 when he attended his first ceremony, in 2018, fresh off the success of his breakout debut, American Teen, earning five nominations. “It really did live up to the dream,” he says. Now, with the titanic Free Spirit out this year, he’s likely got more noms — and hopefully some wins — in the bag this time around. When did you hear about your 2017 nominations? What was that day like? It was like Christmas. The night before, you can barely sleep, and you just feel shaken a little bit because you’re so nervous.…

“Harry’s story teaches us to live our damn lives. You’ll get heartbroken, you might experiment in psychedelics, and you might be lonely while the world has no idea.”—Emily G., via the internet Everyone Loves Harry The last time Harry Styles appeared on our cover [RS 1286, in 2017], the boy-band star was in the midst of his coming-of-age moment. Two years later, Styles returned to the pages of ROLLING STONE [“The Eternal Sunshine of Harry Styles,” RS 1331] as a fully realized rock star. From California to London, there was no better guide for the Fleetwood Mac-fueled journey than writer Rob Sheffield. “When you’re about to read an RS cover story, you know it won’t be just another interview,” says Twitter user “BeeBee.” “But this went further. Every reader…

IN THE 1970s, Linda Ronstadt was the reigning queen of country rock: nearly a dozen Top 10 singles, including the swaggering classics “It’s So Easy” and “You’re No Good.” She basically formed the Eagles, who began as her backing band, and released nearly 30 albums, making her one of the most successful female singers ever. “She was like what Beyoncé is now,” said Bonnie Raitt. And then she disappeared. Ronstadt gave her final concert in 2009. Three years later, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and has rarely appeared in public since, not even attending her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2014. Unlike her contemporaries, she never capitalized on her legacy. Ronstadt finally tells her story in Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, a new documentary…

Who Owned Summer 2019? A hip-hop cowboy ruled, but he wasn’t the only newcomer to score big SONGS OF THE SUMMER may bring to mind bubblegum pop like “Call Me Maybe” and “California Gurls,” but this summer, ears were mostly on hip-hop. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was the runaway winner, and up-and-coming rappers DaBaby and Lil Tecca broke through as well. Elsewhere, young artists put up big numbers — including Billie Eilish and Khalid, whose second album, Free Spirit, is shaping up to be one of this year’s biggest despite no huge hits. Using stats from Alpha Data, the company that powers the RS Charts, we also looked at this season’s highest-ranking artists, a more veteran-heavy list (shocker: Drake is still huge). For more on charts, head…

RANDOM QUOTE “L.A. upside: new songs. L.A. downside: getting carsick in every Uber from now until the end of time.”—Maren Morris…

‘I KNEW I WANTED to do something different,” says Billie Joe Armstrong. He’s talking about his search for a new sound after 2016’s Revolution Radio, the album where Green Day got back on their feet after the messiest period of their career. Armstrong wanted to find a way to incorporate the soul-music phase he was going through, which ranged from Smokey Robinson to Amy Winehouse. “I’d always loved British mod music from the Sixties, but I wanted to go to where the source was and see if I could put [soul] through the Green Day filter,” says Armstrong. “It was a lot of trial and error, a lot of pulling my fucking hair out.” Then it happened: Armstrong was at his home in Newport Beach, California, jamming with drummer…

For most of his adult life in eastern Kentucky, Tyler Childers performed what he calls “bottom-rung grunt shit”: doing carpentry, driving forklifts, digging ditches. He drew on those experiences for 2017’s Purgatory, a raw, bluegrass-steeped LP that established Childers as a back-porch philosopher. “Cuttin’ paths like a forest fire/Pupils wider than backhoe tires,” he sings in his honky-tonk ballad “I Swear (to God).” Childers leans into Kris Kristofferson-like details on Country Squire, the new Appalachia-centric album covering everything from drug addiction to solo loving. He also writes about life on the road. Childers and his band spent 220 days on tour last year; “Gemini” describes how you’ll “run forever if you never let it end.” “I’m a married man trying to develop a home, and at the same time…

SPOTLIGHT HOW LIZZO BECAME ONE OF 2019’S BIGGEST BREAKOUTS “SORRY IF YOU follow me,” Lizzo tweeted in September 2017. “But imma promote Truth Hurts all day cus it’s the best video I’ve ever made & i’m proud of it.” The world took notice in a big way — eventually. This year, “Truth Hurts” has found a second life, becoming the singer-rapper-flutist’s biggest hit yet and a key reason for her position as one of ROLLING STONE’s top artists of the summer. The success of “Truth Hurts” was the product of great timing and tireless hustle. Lizzo got her start in the rap underground, working out of Minneapolis, where her mix of hip-hop and old-school soul got the attention of Prince. After signing a major-label deal with Atlantic in 2016,…

FITTINGLY ENOUGH, it was hot as blazes in Kentucky when Mitch McConnell slunk back home for Congress’ annual summer recess. One week earlier, Robert Mueller had testified that Russia was meddling in the 2020 U.S. elections. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, responded by shooting down Democrats’ efforts to bring two election-security bills to a vote — bills that McConnell, in his familiar fashion, had previously sentenced to quiet deaths after they passed the House. In the hailstorm of opprobrium that followed, McConnell had been tagged by “Morning Joe” Scarborough with the indelible nickname “Moscow Mitch.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called him a “Russian asset.” Twitter couldn’t decide whether he was #putinsbitch or #trumpsbitch. The Kentucky Democratic Party was selling red JUST SAY NYET TO MOSCOW MITCH T-shirts, emblazoned…

How Bad Bunny’s manager saw a superstar before anyone else did NOAH ASSAD Manager, co-founder RIMAS ENTERTAINMENT About 18 months ago, Noah Assad was driving in L.A. when he heard his client’s music blasting from a car in the next lane. “I look to the right, and it’s a lady not understanding what [Bad] Bunny’s saying, but she’s rapping along, murmuring words,” says Assad, 29. “That’s when I found out: People who don’t even know Spanish are very interested in what we’re doing.” Three years after Assad became his manager, Bad Bunny has scored billions of streams and gate-crashed spaces once closed off to artists singing in Spanish, like American pop radio and the upper reaches of the Coachella lineup. And thanks in large part to Assad’s leadership —…

The Beatles Abbey Road (Super Deluxe) APPLE/CAPITOL/UME ‘ABBEY ROAD” has always been an album full of mysteries. How could the world’s most beloved band make its sunniest, warmest, most charming music while in the middle of breaking up? How did John, Paul, George, and Ringo come together to drop their all-time biggest crowd-pleaser, while they were gearing up to go their separate ways? The eternal mysteries of Abbey Road only get deeper as you explore the revelatory new Super Deluxe Edition, released on the album’s 50th anniversary. It follows the recent Sgt. Pepper and White Album boxes — and like them, it will change the way fans will hear and argue about this music. Abbey Road has always represented a historic peak of pop perfection — that’s why Drake…

Vampire Weekend ELIGIBLE FOR: FATHER OF THE BRIDE, “HARMONY HALL,” “SUNFLOWER,” “THIS LIFE,” AND MORE AFTER Vampire Weekend finished touring in support of their acclaimed 2013 album, Modern Vampires of the City, Ezra Koenig hit a wall. “When you’re starting out, it can be hard to imagine that one day you would play so many shows that you literally don’t want to get onstage,” the 35-year-old singer-songwriter admits. “I found touring totally joyless.” It was the kind of exhaustion that a quiet year off the road wouldn’t fix: It took Vampire Weekend six years to release their follow-up, Father of the Bride. The album offers a contemporary spin on the tasteful styles of Seventies rock, at times crunchy, at times pristine, but always filled with a sheer delight in…

Predicting the Major Categories GRAMMY VOTERS tend to reward establishment heavies at the expense of young rule-breakers. This year they can do both, because the rule-breakers are the establishment, from Lil Nas X moving from TikTok to the top of the charts, to Billie Eilish turning her teenage goth visions into world-owning hits. Album of the Year Who Will Be Nominated Taylor Swift Lover Lizzo Cuz I Love You Ariana Grande Thank U, Next Chance the Rapper The Big Day Ed Sheeran Collaborations: #6 Who Will Win Taylor Swift Swift’s Grammy run (32 nominations, 10 wins) is nearly unprecedented for someone still in her twenties. Her last album, Reputation, was unduly snubbed in 2018, despite being the biggest seller of that year, and it’s hard to imagine the voters…