The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why? In his new audiobook book, The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity” — how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest countries. Drawing on original interviews, archival and social sc

Elvis Costello seemed to arrive fully formed with his 1977 debut, My Aim Is True . The look, the voice, the wordplay and the attitude were already there, along with songs like “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” that helped establish him as one of the most distinctive songwriters of his generation. But behind that seemingly sudden arrival were years spent

Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo helped transform the possibilities of the electric guitar at a time when its role in rock music could seem well established. He came of age in New York City’s downtown No Wave art scene in the late 1970s before co-founding Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in 1981. Over the next three decades, the band became an artistically and critically important act in Am

Brandon Flowers’ new album, Thrasher , is a beautifully written ode to the Southwest where he grew up. It’s a deeply personal record, shining a light on the people close to him, the lives they’ve lived, and the difficulties they’ve navigated between his childhood in Henderson, Nevada, and Payson, Utah. It also explores some of the dead ends Brandon himself might have easily gone down had he not fo

Tom Morello arrived in Los Angeles from Libertyville, Illinois, in the mid-1980s with a Harvard political science degree in his pocket and a guitar slung across his back, determined to become the next great guitarist on the scene. Instead, he found himself locked out of the glam-rock world that had taken over the Sunset Strip. By day, he worked as a secretary to a state senator; by night, he playe

David Porter's story goes well beyond writing songs and releasing albums for Stax Records. His recent memoir, The Soul Man , tells how he and his partner Isaac Hayes helped invent a sound rich and enduring enough to define American music from the 1960s to today. Together they wrote and produced hits for Sam & Dave, Johnnie Taylor, and dozens of other artists, and in the process built what became k

Travis Barker grew up in Fontana, California, and was gifted his first drum kit at the age of four from his mother, who made him promise before she died that he would never stop playing. This was just before he started high school and though he spent his early years dabbling with skateboarding and other interests, he always came back to the drums. After graduating, he moved to Laguna Beach and spe

Daniel Kessler grew up between London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., listening to his older brother’s early UK rock records. He picked up guitar as a teenager, the same day he quit skateboarding, and after moving to New York in the late ’90s, he set out to find musicians serious enough to start a band. In 1997, that band became Interpol and when their debut Turn on the Bright Lights came out in 200

Brittany Howard has never been the type to do things quietly. Whether it was fronting Alabama Shakes with a voice that could fill a room and level it in the same breath, or striking out on her own with two solo records that pulled her sound in wilder and more personal directions, she's spent the last decade refusing to stay in one place for long. Now she's back with her bandmates—Zac Cockrell and

In Revisionist History's new season The Staten Island Problem, senior producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigates the story of what was, at the time, the biggest secession movement in the U.S. since the Civil War. The Staten Island Problem reconstructs the battle for New York City amidst the turbulent early 1990s—the rise of Rudy Giuliani, the peak of the homicide rate, young Donald Trump, and the fi

Harvey Mason Jr. grew up steeped in music. His father, Harvey Mason Sr., was half of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters rhythm section and played on countless sessions through the '70s and '80s. After a brief detour through college basketball, Harvey Mason Jr. built his own life in music, starting where a lot of careers do: writing jingles. From there he assembled a production and songwriting résumé tha

My friend W. Kamau Bell has a new show out, Who's With Me?. Known for having conversations about the issues that divide, enrage, and confuse us, Kamau sits down with someone he admires to give them their flowers, ask his most burning questions, and invite his guest to give him and his audience homework on how to make the world a better place. Daveed Diggs joins Kamau to discuss his hip-hop career,

Melissa Auf der Maur came of age in Montreal's bohemian art scene in the '80s and early '90s, at the very moment that alternative rock was becoming the defining sound of a generation. Through an unlikely chain of events, her band Tinker landed an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins, and Billy Corgan, sensing her natural talent on bass, recommended her to Courtney Love. What followed was a turbu

Today we're revisiting a conversation with acclaimed British guitarist Johny Marr. Marr started playing guitar as a young teenager growing up in Manchester. When he turned 15 he dropped out of school and moved to London to join the band Sister Ray. A couple years later he would help form The Smiths with Morrissey, Mike Joyce, and Marr’s friend and bassist, Andy Rourke. After The Smiths broke up in

Joe Jackson showed up in the late '70s UK New Wave scene, all nervous energy and biting wit, with hits like "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" putting him in the same conversation as Elvis Costello and Squeeze. But where a lot of his peers stayed in their lane musically, Jackson kept moving: into the jump-blues swing of "Jumpin' Jive," into the sophisticated, Latin-tinged jazz of Night and Day ,

Ed O'Brien has spent decades crafting some of the most textured, expansive guitar in modern rock. From the fragmented beauty of Kid A and Amnesiac to the experimental layers of The King of Limbs , with the more straightforward muscle of OK Computer somewhere in between, few players have done more to expand what the instrument can do in a rock context. In recent years, Ed has been building a parall

Just before the premiere of Earth, Wind & Fire's new Questlove-directed documentary , the three OGs of the group stopped by Broken Record: vocalist Phillip Bailey, singer and percussionist Ralph Johnson, and bass player Verdine White. Host Justin Richmond will tell you straight up that talking about Earth, Wind & Fire's music feels a little beside the point. It exists on a level that resists expla

The New Pornographers have never been easy to pin down. Since forming in Vancouver in the late ’90s, the band became one of the defining acts of the Canadian indie rock explosion. They’re part of a scene that also produced Neko Case, Dan Bejar, and a generation of artists who seemed to operate entirely outside the commercial mainstream. Co-founders Carl Newman and Kathryn Calder have spent more th

Mopreme Shakur is 2Pac's half-brother, a rapper, filmmaker, and record producer living at the intersection of revolutionary politics and hip-hop. He's one of the only surviving members of Thug Life and Outlawz, raised alongside 2Pac in the tradition of Black liberation activism. And now, for the first time, he's telling his own story. His new book, This Thug's Life , is a book about brotherhood, s

Before Hardy was known as the breakout artist who pushed country music into hard rock territory, he was a self-proclaimed redneck from Philadelphia, Mississippi who studied songwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. Since moving to Nashville in 2013, he's written 22 number ones for artists like Morgan Wallen, Blake Shelton, and Dierks Bentley. In 2018, with the encouragement of producer Joe