Table of contents for March 2021 in Rolling Stone

“BE STEADY. STAY FOCUSED. Remember your purpose. And always press forward.” This was journalist Yamiche Alcindor’s tweet after going toe-to-toe with President Trump in the White House press room. The women in this year’s “Women Shaping the Future” issue have much to teach us about persistence, grit, and the power of staying true to yourself. Amid the unprecedented challenges of 2020, many of them found a path to their best work. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ leadership through a tumultuous year of pandemic and protest have made her a rising star in the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, many of the artists and musicians we spoke to took time during isolation to reflect and go deeper than ever with their craft. “It’s been a spiritual kind of year,” says the rising…

Erika de Casier recently spent a few weeks holed up in a century-old house on a small island off the coast of Denmark, called Fanø. She was there with other artists who’d chosen to isolate together — something like a TikTok Hype House, but less annoying. She describes the surroundings as quiet, and even spookier than usual in the ongoing pandemic: “You can really hear your thoughts.” De Casier is no stranger to introspection. Her singing voice is gentle, nearly a whisper, and her love songs have an existential bent. Take her recent single “No Butterflies, No Nothing,” in which de Casier sings about fading love over a deconstructed club beat: “Yeah, I’ve been looking real closely/Didn’t really find nothing.” De Casier was born in Portugal, with a mother…

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Steven Brandenburg, a Milwaukee-area pharmacist, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine, because, he admitted, he feared the Moderna drug would “alter the recipient’s DNA.” Described in law-enforcement documents as a “conspiracy theorist,” Brandenburg, 46, had reportedly warned his wife that “the world is crashing down around us” and that “the government is planning cyberattacks and plans to shut down the power grid,” according to divorce-court documents. If you’re surprised that a scientifically educated medical professional, trusted with dispensing lifesaving medicine, could suffer a rebellion against reason and give himself over to discredited conspiracy theories, you haven’t been paying attention. In the America of the 2020s, respectable men and women surrender to this kind of unreal thinking every day. (Brandenburg pleaded guilty to…

NANDI BUSHELL is midway through a busy Saturday when she logs on to Zoom: She’s just spent the morning taking advantage of a rare snowfall in her home of Ipswich, England. “First, I just threw snowballs at my brother,” says the 10-year-old musician, who became an online sensation last fall thanks to a YouTube drum battle with one of her idols, Dave Grohl. “Then, all of the other kids in my street started playing. We got the sled out and sledded down the street, and then it got too cold.” She could have been describing any kid’s winter-weekend fun, but Bushell’s childhood has been anything but standard. A few years ago — with help from her rock-loving father, John — she started posting her impressive drum covers of everything…

IT’S HARD FOR PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor to pick one moment that encapsulates the experience of covering the Trump White House. But if she had to choose, it would be in March, fairly early in the pandemic, when she took the mic at a press briefing and calmly asked President Trump why the White House had dismantled its pandemic-response office. “Well, I just think it’s a nasty question,” the president fumed. A few weeks later, in response to a question Alcindor asked about the availability of ventilators, he chided her again: “Be nice. Don’t be threatening.” “I wanted to be a professional witness,” says Alcindor. “I wanted to be someone who was bringing the hard truth to America.” Trump’s abrasive remarks to Alcindor went viral, with many pundits interpreting…

AT THE TAIL END of Time — the feature-length documentary that, since its heralded Sundance debut last year, has deservedly made its director, Garrett Bradley, one of the film world’s women of the hour — an extraordinary thing happens. The movie follows a black family living in the shadow of incarceration. At the center of that family is Sibil Richardson, known as Fox Rich, whose husband, Robert, is serving a 60-year sentence for a crime the two of them committed when they were young, newly married, and desperate. The film is a stunning, surprising mix of present-tense footage (filmed by Bradley and others) and video diaries Rich has been compiling over the course of 21 years — footage shot to show Robert all that he’s missing of his wife…

FIVE TIMES OVER the past 15 years, reports surfaced that Kim Ng was about to become the first female general manager in Major League Baseball. In 2005, she interviewed for the job with the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 2009, she was considered by the San Diego Padres. So it went, until last November, when Miami Marlins co-owner Derek Jeter finally gave her the nod. Ng, 52, calls the position a “dream,” even if it was excruciating each time she lost out to a man (which she says happened more than five times). “At the end of the day, you keep the faith, and just keep plugging away, because really, there’s no choice,” Ng says. Besides, she adds, “If you’re in baseball, you’re fairly measured. We play 162 games [a…

IN 1976, Kathy Sullivan was finishing up her Ph.D. in oceanography when an intriguing, if somewhat far-fetched, opportunity presented itself: the chance to become an astronaut. Her expertise was in the geology of the deep-sea floor, a few hundred miles in the exact opposite direction of where a space flight would take her, and joining NASA, she realized, could shut the door forever on her career in oceanography. “I loved the expeditionary part of oceanography best of all,” she says, “being out at sea, adapting to what odd circumstances came your way, bad weather or broken equipment. I adored that.” But on a visit home during Christmas break, her brother told her that NASA was recruiting astronauts for its new space-shuttle program. It seemed at first to have nothing…

IT’S EARLY January, and Sarah McBride is sitting at a desk in her parents’ house in Delaware. A SARAH MCBRIDE FOR STATE SENATE yard sign is wedged between a bookshelf and the wall — already a relic from the election she won two months earlier. “It’s been a whirlwind,” she says, leaning forward and taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. And not just because it’s her first time holding public office: When she won her election for state senator of Delaware’s 1st District with an overwhelming 73 percent of the vote, she became the highest-ranking openly trans elected official in U.S. history. Even on a video call, it’s easy to imagine how she captured three-quarters of her constituents in November. At 30 years old, she’s already well…

I MOVED TO Chicago from St. Louis in my early twenties. The winters were really tough, and I’d have to get up at 5 a.m. to open the cafe where I worked. Candi’s music was something I would turn to every day on my way to work. It’s hard to find anyone who compares to the way she yell-sings. You can hear her background in choir singing: There’s a need to be redeemed, whether it’s from God or a partner. She sounds like she’s stuck in a trauma cycle because she loves someone so much, but they’re bad for her. I really love her song “Sweet Feeling”; it’s upbeat and exciting, but it’s a sad song. It’s weird to me that not that many people have heard of Candi,…

THE THING I relate to most about Nina is her sensitivity, her ability to be incredibly powerful, and to also be incredibly vulnerable. She knew her worth. She fought for the rights to her music, and she fought for her royalties that were indeed owed to her. People cast her to the side, like she was this crazy, angry black woman. But those were her songs. Those are her performances. She deserved exactly what she was after. That’s something I hang on to: You have to watch your own back in this industry. She wanted love, connection, to feel her worth. She wanted to be heard. She wanted justice. She wanted to talk about the things that no one wanted to talk about in music. I don’t know if…

I WAS INTRODUCED TO Carly Simon through my parents, more specifically through my mom. She was like, “Oh, yeah, you’re superlate on this,” and I was like, “I know! Please enlighten me.” For a long time, I only really knew Carly for “You’re So Vain.” But once I heard “Nobody Does It Better,” it set off everything. Part of me couldn’t believe that those songs were the same person, because they’re just such different moods. My mom is a very spiritual person. When she was in college, Carly Simon’s music acted as this safe space for her and her friends to hang out in. Every time she went back to Carly, it was this understanding place, where she could have her guard down and feel understood. That’s what I…

JULIEN BAKER’S HARD TRUTH One of the best young singer-songwriters in indie rock starts thinking big Julien Baker Little Oblivions MATADOR ‘I CAN SEE MYSELF inside your bloodshot eyes,” Julien Baker sings on her excellent third record. “Wondering if you can see yourself in mine.” It’s a moment of raw, bleary intimacy that gets to the heart of this 25-year-old Tennessean’s potent appeal. On two standout solo albums, and as a member of the indie supergroup Boygenius, with Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, she’s established herself as one of the leading female singer-songwriters of her generation, both for her music’s muted grandeur and lyrics that seem to dive headlong into emotional chaos. In 2019, Baker took a break from music to finish her undergraduate degree. But she’s emerged a…

“Love running to her tunes on repeat — banging bass, funky guitars. Just got the vinyl LP in the mail, too. I love the cover!”—Jayson Reynoso, via Facebook Dua Lipa Dances Through the Dark When Dua Lipa released her sophomore album last March, the pandemic era was only just beginning. The pop star’s modern disco bops hardly matched the mood of the times, yet ended up being exactly what we needed to get through the dark days of isolation. For our February issue, Lipa appeared on the cover — photographed by David LaChapelle — and opened up to senior writer Alex Morris on how she followed her vision to come out on top, even when it meant going against the grain [“Dancing in the Dark,” RS 1348]. ROLLING STONE…

I’m 43, and I’ve dated many women over the years. Some of these relationships have lasted for years, and I truly felt that I loved them, but I’ve never had the courage to take the next step and propose marriage. How do you know when a girl is the one? —Kevin, Chicago I once asked my mom, “What’s the deal with love and marriage? You find someone who loves you, and then you’re happy?” She said, “Actually, if you want to be really happy, find someone who you can make happy.” That’s a really brilliant piece of information, and it’s what I did. I found someone I always want to put first. I have been in a relationship some 43-odd years. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because…

IT’S EXACTLY one week after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and her nerves having been frayed like a rodeo rope, Kacey Musgraves is today opting for some self-care. This is how she finds herself, raven tendrils piled carelessly atop her head, pale cheeks slightly flushed, in a floral and fetching Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit and up to her armpits in steaming hot water in a private session at Nashville’s Holiday Salon & Bathhouse (SWEAT OUT YOUR SINS, its bumper sticker beckons, with a cheekiness that could easily find a home in a Musgraves lyric). “I just felt like starting the day off on some kind of therapeutic note,” she explains, as if — that week of all weeks — an explanation were necessary. In truth, her day started…

WHEN MICHELLE ZAUNER lost her mother in 2014, the only thing that got her through was food. The Korean American musician, who has won acclaim for the dreamy indie rock she records as Japanese Breakfast, found that learning to cook comforting dishes like jatjuk (pine-nut porridge) and kimchi-jjigae (a savory, spicy stew) helped her grieve. “There was no sense of urgency to learning that [before],” says Zauner, 31. “I never thought I was going to have so little time with my mom.” Zauner’s new memoir, Crying in H Mart, tells the story of their relationship through a lifetime of shared meals. She describes growing up as a mixed-race kid in Oregon and finding a new connection to her identity as she slurped jajangmyeon (black-bean noodles) with relatives in Seoul.…

“WE’RE NEVER REALLY quite satisfied with anything we do,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of the ultramodern architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It’s not quite a humblebrag, more a lingering anxiety about her most famous creation: New York’s High Line. When the first section of the elevated park opened in Manhattan, in 2009, it transformed the island’s west side. Once a dilapidated train track, the High Line is now flanked by luxury condos and office buildings designed by the world’s leading architects. But as she watched the area rapidly gentrify — driving out longtime residents — it began to gnaw at Diller, who’s lived in Manhattan since her family emigrated from Poland when she was a child. “The question is, ‘How do you prevent that from happening?’ Would…

PALOMA ROCÍO CASTILLO ASTORGA was just 18 when she wrote her first song. She self-released it as a single — “Not Steady,” a gauzy, Spanglish R&B reproach to an overzealous suitor — with a music video that she filmed in the parking lot of her tía’s apartment complex. Within a few months, she became the first Chilean American artist to sign to Sony Music Latin. “Literally, ‘Not Steady’ was the first song I ever wrote, ever sang, ever recorded,” she says. That was almost three years ago. Right now, she’s trying to stay very still so as not to disrupt her Wi-Fi: She recently moved into a new place, in Santiago, Chile. It’s a change of pace from how she spent much of 2020, quarantining and recording her upcoming…

MARISA ACOCELLA was raised in a devout Catholic family. But one of the Bible’s main teachings bugged her. “I always thought, ‘How could a male God give birth to all this?’” Acocella says, gesturing at… everything. “It never made sense to me. There had to be a God the Mother.” The question nagged her all through her childhood in Roselle Park, New Jersey, her college years studying art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, her early jobs in advertising in the Eighties. In 1992, while she was working on her first comic strip, “She,” for Mirabella magazine, another idea for a title popped into her head: The Big She-Bang. Which just so happens to be the name of her latest graphic novel, published last fall. The Big She-Bang (subtitle: The Herstory…

THE THREE SISTERS who make up Haim — Este, 35, Danielle, 33, and Alana, 29 — grew up on Joni Mitchell’s music, listening to her songs from the time they were kids in California’s San Fernando Valley. Mitchell has gone on to serve as a key inspiration for their own music (as heard most clearly on their 2020 homage “Man From the Magazine”) and their fearless approach to creativity. DANIELLE HAIM Miles of Aisles was the Joni Mitchell album that started our love affair, and it’s the one that I always go back to. It’s her live album from 1974. There’s a little bit of everything, songs from all her albums up until then, and she’s playing them with the L.A. Express, which was this amazing jazz band, backing…

WITH SO MANY WOMEN, I’ll like how one dresses, I’ll like how one expresses herself, I’ll like the performance style of another. But with Rihanna, I admire every aspect — as a woman, as a businessperson, as a singer, where she comes from, representing Barbados, where she’s gotten with her talent. We’ve heard her do the richest, clubbiest music and the most melancholy sounds, songs that are extremely profound, peak collaborations, historic feats. In this industry, it’s really easy to lose yourself. I see her standing by her style and what she likes. She inspires you to feel great without worrying about what people around you say. The first song of hers that made me go “Who is she, and where did she come from?” was “Pon de Replay.”…

THE FIRST TIME I heard of Betty Davis was in college. I was in a class that was about Miles Davis, and we were reading his autobiography. I got to the page where he was describing meeting her, and how she influenced his fashion and his art. She styled him, and she introduced him to Jimi Hendrix, and that changed his trajectory to go toward more psychedelic rock. When I listened to her music, I was instantly struck by the quality of her voice. She makes me want to listen to what she’s saying. Listening to her records, it’s this raw emotion that makes you believe what she’s saying. That’s a really good lesson as an artist. I can get caught up in “Oh, did I hit the note?”…

“I don’t ever write a lyric that I wouldn’t feel comfortable sending to Emily Saliers.” THE INDIGO GIRLS were so deeply influential in my life — not just musically, but as an activist and as an out queer person. The representation and the visibility that they managed to scrape together, despite all odds and all the obstacles against them, were really important in my life. I needed them. I was about 13 or 14 years old, and I had come home from a friend’s house — it was a girl who I had a total crush on — and I was very confused about it. I got home, and my parents had rented the movie Philadelphia on VHS. I snuck it into my bedroom, popped the movie into my…

ONE MORNING early this year, Kehlani decided to look up the tarot card she’d be aligning with in 2021. It’s a numerology practice: You add up your birthday with the year, then you add the digits of that new number. She got the number six, the placement of the lovers card in the tarot deck. “The lovers card is all about developing meaningful relationships, whether that be romantic or familial or community-based,” she says, calling from her new home in Simi Valley, California. “I really like that one. I’m on that path already.” That path has at times been rocky for the singer. Born in Oakland, Kehlani Parrish’s upbringing was marred by drug addiction, which put her mom in prison, and gang violence, which took her dad’s life when…

Olivia Rodrigo Hits the Gas THERE’S NEVER BEEN anything quite like “Drivers License.” While Olivia Rodrigo’s breakup ballad takes its sweet time to get to its poignant musical peak, it took off in a sprint right away on the charts. The Lorde-esque track — released as Rodrigo’s official debut single after a slew of songs from High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, the Disney+ show on which she co-stars — not only debuted at Number One on the RS 100, it broke the record for the biggest debut in the chart’s history, which was previously set by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s era-defining 2020 smash “WAP.” It also marked the biggest first-week streams for a single in all of Alpha Data’s history. Next to other debut singles,…

WHEN CYNTHIA Erivo was cast as Harriet Tubman in the 2019 biopic Harriet, the internet lit up with criticism. Erivo is English, the outcry went, how could she do justice to a uniquely American hero? Her answer was a muscular performance that earned her an Oscar nomination. Backlash surrounding her casting as another American icon, Aretha Franklin, in the National Geographic series Genius: Aretha (premiering March 21st), was barely a whisper. Perhaps people are learning not to underestimate Erivo. Or perhaps it’s just that anyone who’s heard her sing knows her voice is undeniable — even the Queen of Soul herself. During Erivo’s Tony-winning turn as Celie in The Color Purple on Broadway, Franklin visited backstage, singing a line of Erivo’s bring-the-house-down number “I’m Here” back to her. When…

THE PAST YEAR of Keisha Lance Bottoms’ life has been, to borrow one of the Atlanta mayor’s favorite euphemisms, interesting. When she’s got nothing nice to say about a situation, Bottoms, diplomatic Southerner that she is, reaches for this damningly anodyne descriptor. It’s all in the delivery. Consider, for example, the fact that in the middle of a pandemic killing black Georgians by the thousands, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp had the nerve to sue to block a mask mandate from going into effect in the city of Atlanta — and only the city of Atlanta. “He sued me, personally, which was interesting,” Bottoms says. “And what was really interesting about that is the fact Van Johnson, the mayor of Savannah, had gone out first with the mask mandate.” Over…

AYO EDEBIRI still remembers the first joke she ever told. She was in eighth grade and had just joined the improv team at her school in Boston. She was a nerdy teen, fond of writing fan fiction about Twilight’s Jacob Black. Improv was not an obvious fit. Then she made a crack about why Christians’ favorite cheese was Swiss: “Because it’s holy,” she says, rolling her eyes. “People thought that was funny.” The 25-year-old’s comic sensibility has matured considerably since then. She’s currently a writer for Netflix’s hilariously profane animated series about puberty, Big Mouth, where she’s started voicing Missy, a similarly awkward black teen with a predilection for writing steamy fan fic and humping her Glo Worm. In her stand-up and on her Comedy Central series Ayo and…

DEJA FOXX WAS unpacking in her dorm room to start her sophomore year at Columbia University when Meena Harris DM’d her about working on her Aunt Kamala’s presidential campaign. “I just started repacking,” Foxx says, laughing. “I wasn’t going to sit in a classroom and talk about Plato and Aristotle when I had skills that could make a difference.” The youngest staffer on Kamala Harris’ campaign, Foxx, at 19, was already a seasoned activist, driven by her own experience with homelessness and her struggle to access birth control growing up in Tuscon, Arizona. By the time she graduated high school, she had helped launch a teen-led program that provides reproductive-health resources to young people, helmed a successful movement for comprehensive sex-ed classes at her school, and gone viral for…

LAST MARCH, Julia Garner shot an all-day subway scene with 400 extras in New York for the upcoming Netflix series Inventing Anna. By the time she took off her wig, she heard production had shut down due to the pandemic. So, she flew home, fell asleep for a month, found two suitcases she hadn’t unpacked since 2018, and for the first time in four years, spent some extended time in her own skin. Which, as pale and platinum-curled and recognizable as that skin is, couldn’t be more different from the characters who’ve made her famous — especially Ozark’s Ruth Langmore, a money-laundering moppet who exhales expletives, assassinates her uncles, and marches through the casino boats of central Missouri in cheap, ruffled blouses that she wears like football pads. As…

WHEN I was 15 years old, I came home drunk to my parents’ house to find Björk performing on TV. She was at Royal Albert Hall, and I think she was singing “Hyperballad.” I’d only ever heard “It’s Oh So Quiet,” and I didn’t know anything else about her. I came home and was just mesmerized by the television. I just wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to get my hands on every single song, every album she had released. The more I learned about Björk, the more I felt an affinity with her because of the way she was so connected to the place where she grew up — to nature, to fields and mountains and elements. I had just started to write at the time,…

“She has taught us that you don’t have to dim your light. Shine. Be yourself. Be free with it.” BEYONCÉ IS the true definition of what it is to be yourself and work hard and give it your all. As young artists and as young black women who watch her, you automatically know your worth. You know to stand in your power, because you’re like, “Wow, look at this other black woman killing it. All she had to do was be herself. Let me try to do that.” She understands what it means to be an artist, so when it’s us creating, it’s purely our own ideas, our own lyrics and melodies. [Chloe x Halle are signed to Beyoncé’s label, Parkwood Entertainment.] We have total creative freedom. She lets…

FRIEND, SISTER, HIGHWOMAN: Sheryl Crow is what you want your hero to be, which is nothing that will shatter your illusions of them. I can count on one hand the people that have been that for me. Dolly Parton is one of them. Sheryl Crow is the other. There’s really no one quite like her. She’s genre-less. That’s something that I try to hold true to myself: not worrying about the label attached, just putting songs out that you love. I still cry when I hear “Strong Enough.” It resonates with me so much, even though I’m happily married. She called me five or six years ago. My song “My Church” had just come out. I was at a bar after a write, and I was like, “Hold on,…

You had a busy 2020, appearing on The Masked Singer and participating in a Verzuz battle. How else have you been spending your time during the pandemic? You know what I’ve been able to do, actually, is sleep. Get as much rest as I want to, or not get up if I don’t want to. It’s just been a pleasant retreat for me for a bit. I’ve been able to do some other things that have been meaningful for me as well — I’ve still been able to become involved with charitable organizations. I’ve been watching a lot of TV, which has been hysterical, because I’m watching shows that I hadn’t seen since I was a child, on MeTV. What kinds of shows have you been watching? Right now,…