Table of contents for Jul-16-15 in Rolling Stone

1. Miguel feat. Lenny Kravitz “Face the Sun” Miguel’s new Wildheart is a sexy whirlwind of future-soul vibes. This standout track adds a nicely rocking edge to the mix via Lenny’s reverbed-out guitar part. Are we gonna go Miguel’s way? Oh, hell yeah. 2. Rod Stewart “Love Is” Rod goes Mumford! The folky fiddles and acoustic strums on this song, from his upcoming LP, are perfectly campfire-ready. 3. Pavement “Circa 1762” This dank nug from 1992 would have been one of the best songs on Slanted & Enchanted – and it’s a highlight of the upcoming rarities set The Secret History, Vol. 1. 4. Kitty “Drink Tickets” Back when she was called Kitty Pryde, she made one of our favorite songs of 2012 with her clever rap “Okay Cupid.” Now,…

WHEN DON HENLEY WAS A BOY growing up in rural Texas, he used to listen to country greats like Hank Williams and George Jones on the legendary Louisiana Hayride radio show. For Cass County, his first solo album in 15 years, Henley went back to those roots, recording in Nashville with singing partners like Mick Jagger, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Miranda Lambert and Alison Krauss. “I got people whose voices move me, people whose music I respect,” says Henley. “They’re real singers who can really get the job done.” Henley wrote songs for the album during the 160-mile drive between Dallas and his tiny hometown of Linden in Cass County, Texas, drawing inspiration from a landscape he describes as “where the Old South meets the West.” Co-produced by former Tom…

Austin ‘Chumlee’ Russell Best known as: Co-host of the History Channel show Pawn Stars, where his goofball comic charm has made him a breakout star. Years DJ’ing: Since early 2015 How’s it going? After taking lessons at a “DJ institute” called Blend and practicing “for, like, a month straight,” Chumlee made his debut in February at Vegas’ Ghostbar Dayclub; his rider for the show requested five Nerf guns, Girl Scout cookies and “beautiful waitresses to take me to the stage.” Kristian Nairn Best known as: Hodor, the lovable gentle giant on Game of Thrones. Years DJ’ing: 12 How’s it going? Nairn, who grew up in Northern Ireland, was a fixture on the Belfast DJ scene years before he started acting. “I’m shooting emotional laser beams out into the…

JUDD APATOW SETTLES INTO THE home office at his Brentwood mansion one recent evening. He’s wearing socks, jeans and a polo shirt. Messes of paper and books cover every surface – scripts he needs to read, novels and biographies he wants to. The mess is a fitting visual corollary to his neuroses, which, after all these years, still gnaw at him. “I have a very hard time filing things away,” he says. “Someone will come in and straighten up, but then it’s back to looking like this in three days.” Over the past decade, Apatow has become the most prominent comedy-maker of our time. His name evokes not only a particular comedic tone (heartfelt raunch) but also particular stars (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Melissa McCarthy, all of whom he helped…

THE BOARDING PROCEdure has barely started at Chicago O’Hare, and Ben Schlappig has already taken over the first-class cabin. Inside Cathay Pacific Flight 807 bound for Hong Kong, he’s passing out a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of designer chocolates to a small swarm of giggling flight attendants. The six suites in this leather-bound playpen of faux mahogany and fresh-cut flowers comprise the inner sanctum of commercial flight that few ever witness. They’re mostly empty now, save for two men in their twenties who seem even giddier than the flight attendants. The two stand to greet him. “This is so cool!” exclaims one, and soon Schlappig is ordering champagne for everyone. This sort of thing happens to Schlappig nearly everywhere he goes. On this trip, his fans will witness Schlappig’s…

Miles DavisMiles Davis at Newport 1955-1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 Columbia/Legacy Every five years after Miles Davis hit New York in 1944, he instigated new forms of musical insurgency. Each genre we love today bears his expansive influence, not least because Davis was that rare artist who wrecked us as much with the notes he didn’t play as with those he did. Like the late B.B. King, the trumpeter knew his tone was molten and that one hot, bent blurt from him could slay audiences more efficiently than other bozos’ full metal jackets. Between 1969 and 1975 in particular, Miles innovated and changed styles more often than his hippiepimp shoes. He plugged in, turned up, took off , then sucked the future of music into his mythical tailwind…

Orange Power I WATCHED THE FIRST FEW episodes of Orange Is the New Black, but I wasn’t fully sold [“Caged Heat,” RS 1237]. After reading your cover story, I have to give it – and the intriguing cast of misfit actors – a second chance. This show is a groundbreaking look at a world too long ignored by television. Bruce Sterling, Westminster, VT THE TAYLOR SCHILLING AND Laura Prepon photo, while visually alluring, doesn’t jibe with the content of Mac Mc-Clelland’s excellent article. Since OITNB challenges the status quo, it’s a missed opportunity not to feature Laverne Cox, Uzo Aduba or Lea DeLaria on the cover. Any one of them would have more accurately reflected the content of the article, as well as the show itself. Ben Bogart, Louisville, KY…

CLASSIC Elvis Presley “One Night” (from 1968’Comeback Special) On the really early stuff , his voice sounds so incredible – but this has another level of intensity. Grateful Dead “Help on the Way/Slipknot” This is one of their most musical performances. They’re doing some instrumental stuff that no band can hang with. Bob Dylan “New Pony” Dylan has one or two great blues songs on every record. Likening your relationship to having a pony is so bizarre, but it’s great. NEW Mumford & Sons “Believe” This is their best-recorded song. When the drums come in, it’s like, “Holy shit, how do you get drums to feel that huge?” I think they knocked it out of the park. Future “Fuck Up Some Commas” There’s a lot of things I did not…

Filmmaker Sean Baker was intrigued by the transgender streetwalkers he’d seen in his West Hollywood neighborhood, so one day he approached a tall, striking woman named Mya Taylor to ask her for stories. Says the director, “She told me she’d help me make a movie on two conditions: ‘You have to be brutal and show what it’s like on the streets_._._._and you have to make it funny.’_” The result is Tangerine, a raucous comedy starring Taylor and breakout performer Kitana Kiki Rodriguez. Shot on an iPhone, it’s the summer’s best microbudget buddy movie. “We weren’t trying to be part of a revolution,” says Baker. “But when you see Mya and Kiki, you understand why these stories need to be told.”…

THE MAN WHO JUST PUBLISHED one of the best novels ever written about the Internet has spent less time online than almost anyone else his age. After graduating from college in 2001, Joshua Cohen lived in Eastern Europe for six years, writing fiction, filing overseas dispatches for The Jewish Daily Forward and generally avoiding the Web – he didn’t even have a dial-up connection. When Cohen returned to New York in 2007, everyone suddenly had smartphones and Facebook accounts. He found the Web’s unrelenting creep so unnerving that he considered going back to Europe. “I realized I didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket,” says Cohen, 34, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes at a bar near his home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one recent afternoon, “and I had shipped…

Mr. Robot Wednesdays, 10 p.m., USA How many times have we gotten our hopes up at the words “Christian Slater comeback”? Remember him as a rogue ex-cop in The Forgotten? Or as a quasipsychic ex-con on Mind Games? Sad. But this time, he’s the title antihero of Mr. Robot, the grizzled guru of a secret team of anti-corporate vigilante hackers out to bring down capitalism. It’s like Scorpion meets the 1999 WTO riots in a New Radicals video. And Slater gives it the necessary gravitas, hot on the heels of his amazing season-stealing run on Archer. (He also gave the finest performance in Hot Tub Time Machine 2 – that’s meant as a bigger compliment than it sounds.) Put it all together and you’ve got it: a full-on Slater-ssance.…

ON A CHILLY MORNING DURING LOS ANGELES’ “MAY gray,” as mist rolls off the sea’s marine layer to cool down the city, Kim Kardashian wakes up at 6 a.m. and an hour later heads to her “glam room.” That’s Kardashian-speak for her capacious dressing room, where even at this early hour, a professional makeup artist and hairstylist have already arrived, awaiting her with hundreds of little brushes, blushes and combs. She relaxes into her chair as layer upon layer is applied – she loves the feeling of getting makeup done, the way you can be at one with your eyeliner – while also glancing at a baby monitor in case North, her two-year-old daughter with husband Kanye West, wakes up. West has his own monitor too, and keeps it close…

Tame Impala Currents Interscope BY JOE LEVY There’s a half-remembered quality to Kevin Parker’s songs for Tame Impala. Melodies and rhythms arrive in thunderclaps – carefully orchestrated or artfully accidental – or float by in soothing clouds. These are the epiphanies and freakouts of decades past: soul, space rock, nerd funk, studio-whiz pop. You feel sure you recognize something, but you don’t quite know from where or when. For Parker, that quality is the point. Traveling the world with Tame Impala for the past five years, the 29-year-old Australian musician has captured song ideas and the ambient sounds of touring in his head, on his phone, with whatever’s handy. A home recorder since age 12, he works in the studio largely on his own: Tame Impala is his way…

Lianne La HavasBlood Nonesuch When we first met Lianne La Havas, on her 2012 debut, she was a South London 22-yearold coming of age, electric guitar in hand. Plucking out rhythm lines that sounded like bossa nova gone rockabilly, she sang about love’s ups and downs in a voice that moved from gold to gravel in a blink, intertwining strength and vulnerability. On her second album, she still strums and fingerpicks like an alt-folkie, but that new sound you hear is bass, and plenty of it. Standouts like “Unstoppable” and “What You Don’t Do” make the case for La Havas as a cosmic soul queen, recalling the daydream music Aretha Franklin made in the mid-Seventies. Many will attribute the change to Prince – La Havas performed with him on…

Kid Rock’s life of selling crack and riding the bus through the streets of Detroit was far behind him when he appeared on the cover of ROLLING STONE for the first time, in June 2000. “I think I was pretty ugly a year ago,” he said. “But after 7 million records, I’m a sexy son of a bitch.” Rock’s popularity skyrocketed after a performance at Woodstock ’99 and when redneck rap-rock anthem “Bawitdaba” went to Number 10 on Billboard’s Top Modern Rock list. Photographer Mark Seliger remembers being excited about using the wood sculptures to bring out Rock’s “good ol’ boy” roots: “If Kid was carving a totem pole, what would it look like? Of course it would be women with great talent, let’s say.” To dive further into five…

WHEN I CAME TO THE END OF ROLLING STONE’s beautiful tribute to B.B. King, I flipped back to see who’d written it. Of course it was the incomparable David Fricke. Thanks for the empathy, the carefully crafted details and the deep understanding of the man and his incredible legacy. Timothy Greene Via the Internet I LOVED B.B. KING AND Fricke’s tribute to him. One thing I’d have included is the role gospel played in influencing King’s vocal style. King told me that when he was a kid in Mississippi, his mom would tune the radio to Nashville’s WLAC at the crack of dawn before he went out to work the fields. He’d listen to live broadcasts of the Fairfield Four and their lead singer, Rev. Sam Mc-Crary, who had a…

MUMFORD & SONS ARE STUCK in Tennessee traffic on the way to Bonnaroo a day before their headlining set, their bus nosing past a series of Waffle Houses and Flying J truck stops. “Is it going to take us three hours to get to this fucking place?” banjo-guitarist Winston Marshall wonders to no one in particular. A messyhaired Marcus Mumford f lips channels on the bus TV, failing to find the Wales-Belgium soccer game. Marshall sits on the couch, his newly grown-out hair spilling onto his unbuttoned white Renaissance-style shirt, blasting Kendrick Lamar from his iPad. • It’s the second week of their summer U.S. tour, and one of the most important shows of their career: the first major festival set since the release of their third album, Wilder Mind,…

Dennis Dunaway – bassist for the Alice Cooper band from 1968 until Cooper became a solo act in 1975 – has collected his wildest tales for a new memoir, Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Group, written with ROLLING STONE contributor Chris Hodenfield. Here are five things we learned. Early on, the band’s management team paid the bills by selling Dylan bootlegs. Cooper’s managers allegedly got the tapes through a source at Columbia Records and sold them to record stores as the band toured. “They had carloads of them,” writes Dunaway. Cooper’s famous boa constrictor fell into his lap – almost literally. The snake, featured with Alice on the cover of ROLLING STONE in 1972, became a signature after a fan threw it onstage one night.…

FOR PRODUCER-DJ DIPLO, THE PAST 12 years have been a slow but unrelenting march from the ultrahip fringes to the dead center of pop music. Right now, he has two Top 20 singles from two different projects: the Justin Bieber-featuring “Where R U Now,” from his Jack Ü collaboration with Skrillex, and “Lean On,” from his dancehall-inflected act Major Lazer, which went from studio lark to festival-packing force. Diplo, who first broke through to the mainstream circa 2005 as M.I.A.’s producer, says there’s never been a master plan: “I’ve been 100 percent improvising,” he says. “When I moved to L.A. to produce and write, I kept DJ’ing on the side, but I thought that was never gonna go anywhere.” So is Justin Bieber officially cool now? He’d been stuck in…

ON MARCH 20TH, INSIDE THE HIGH-SECURITY wing of Los Angeles’ Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, the man once called “the most feared man in hip-hop” is looking more like the 50-year-old with chronic health issues that he is. Suge Knight sits in shackles, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and chunky glasses, his beard flecked with gray, listening impassively. It’s the end of the day’s proceedings, and Judge Ronald S. Coen is announcing the bail for Knight, who is facing charges of murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run: “In this court’s opinion, $25 million is reasonable, and it is so set.” A gasp erupts from Knight’s row of supporters – some of whom sport red clothing or accessories, a color associated with the Bloods and Piru street gangs. The most shocked…

Jason IsbellSomething More Than Free Southeastern With his honeysuckle drawl and unrivaled knack for lyrical detail, Jason Isbell is arguably the most revered roots-rock singer-songwriter of his generation. On his latest, Isbell, 36, sings plenty about romantic dedication and past recklessness, familiar territory that the singer mined to great success on his 2013 breakthrough, Southeastern. But this time around, he trades in that album’s personal tales of crisis and redemption for a more nuanced, wide-angled form of storytelling, packed to bursting with evocative specifics: “Jack and Coke in your momma’s car/You were reading The Bell Jar.” KEY TRACK: “Speed Trap Town” The Alabama-raised songwriter’s new collection, set to his trademark countrytinged soft rock, is populated with everyday snapshots from the modern South – from the young man fleeing his…