Please refrain from completing JJJJJerome Ellis’ phrases. The stuttering composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and writer from New York pleads for tolerance from whomever he is speaking with. He explains, “Sometimes people just walk away.” “Perhaps because I didn’t follow the choreography that we’re accustomed to.” Over a video chat, he tells me that these types of […]

Californian by birth, Oregonian by choice Margo Cilker has spent years honing her story-songs on the road, touring throughout the United States and the Basque Country of Spain, where she created a covers band and sang songs by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. “You have to face your fears,” she says, “and […]

Courtney Barnett was in Los Angeles at the start of 2020, when her native nation was burning and the rest of the world was waking up to a worldwide epidemic. She’d recently finished a tour in the United States, and her intention was to locate an apartment and stay in town a bit longer to […]

Smash Hits magazine interviewed Diana Ross in 1982. Her ongoing commercial success two decades after the Supremes’ initial song was shown by her appearance amid the breathless coverage of Duran Duran and Haircut 100. She mentioned the band’s peak in the 1960s, but argued, as befitting an artist who had just released two platinum albums […]

Eva Cassidy and her bandmate Chris Biondo travelled to a distant plant in rural Virginia on a late May day in 1996 to collect copies of the recording that would turn out to be her last. Biondo recalls, “We picked up about 1,100 cassettes and CDs in total.” “As soon as we got in the […]

Surya Sen, who spearheaded uprisings against British authority in India during the 1930s, was a crucial role in the country’s independence fight. After a century, his namesake – a north London-based musician who prefers anonymity – feels like a radical presence in UK music: a British-Bengali producer/rapper whose bumping and pristinely constructed club music finds […]