Trying to make sense of a fragmented, disparate musical tradition.

A months-long interview with the singer-songwriter.

With an uncompromising vision and the studio hours to back it up, the enigmatic singer is back with a new single—and a promise that her first album in six years will be worth the wait.

An in-depth history of the most important pop innovation of the last 20 years, from Cher’s “Believe” to Kanye West to Migos.

A day in the life of Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, in the wake of the sudden death of his wife when their daughter was four months old.

" I really think that for us, who all grew up listening primarily to recorded music, we tend to forget that until about 120 years ago ephemeral experience was the only one people had. I remember reading about a huge fan of Beethoven who lived to the age of 86 [in the era before recordings], and the great triumph of his life was that he’d managed to hear the Fifth Symphony six times. That’s pretty amazing. They would have been spread over many years, so there would have been no way of reliably comparing those performances."

Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth and the genesis of a break-up album.

Tropicália was a movement that lasted just short of a year, spanning from Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 art installation of the same name, wherein viewers walked along a tropical sand path only to come face-to-face with a television set, to the debut of a TV show, wherein its constituents buried the movement on-air. But Tropicália’s influence was vast.

How an obsessive New Age hustler brought the sound of the ocean to millions of home stereos.

The fabled venue where the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and Prince emerged.

While on a string of tour dates opening for Radiohead, interaction between Mark Linkous’ antidepressants and the Rohypnol he took to sleep caused him to pass out. A hotel maid found him the next morning bent into a position where his legs had been cut off from circulation. When they untangled, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure.

A conversation with Björk about Vulnicura, her new—and confessional—album about her recent break-up with Matthew Barney.

Noah Lennox—better known as Panda Bear—has lived in Lisbon for a decade. How has the Portuguese capital shaped his life and work?

On the late singer Judee Sill, the virtual cemetery site Find a Grave, and memorials in the age of the Twitter RIP.

Inside the cluttered Los Angeles apartment of lo-fi auteur Ariel Pink.

A profile of Chan ‘Cat Power’ Marshall adrift in Miami.

On singer-songwriters Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks.

I get the sense that the labels' attitude toward these guys wasn't altogether different from a parent's attitude toward gifted children: Get them through the system, but make sure to give them a clean little corner to doodle in and pat them on the head when they show you what they've done, whether you understand it or not.

"I don't know if I was as angry as much as I was misunderstood.  A lot of the things we did contained a lot of humor that went over people's heads."

On the increasing tension between the pleasant, thoughtful indie rock of car commercials and those who insist on something weirder.

An excerpt from a new oral history of MTV.

An oral history of the Strokes.