How a jazz pianist disappeared into his music.

On Joni Mitchell and canons.

A week with DJ Avicii.

A singer keeps getting close to stardom. And then something falls apart.

On Taylor Swift’s passive-aggressive lyrics, the life of the writer, and the pain of middle school.

Learning to love music—and to hate it, too.

On the road with the makeup-clad band.

Moe Tucker narrates her time drumming in the Velvet Underground.

A months-long interview with the singer-songwriter.

On codeine syrup and Sprite

On the relationship between rivalry and creativity.

Who really built the first electric rock ‘n’ roll guitar?

Our writer nearly drowns, 236 songs later.

A profile of the Hot 97 DJ a few months after “he told the truth about who he is, even if it’s not entirely clear—even to Mister Cee himself, even now, to this day—what exactly that truth is.”

“What can I say about Jaco? When I first met him he was extremely present tense and, I would have to say for lack of a better term, extremely sage.”

How Brock Pierce ended up as an Epstein guest along with a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics is a bizarre tale involving Steve Bannon and an international man of mystery who may or may not be dead.

How what was once one of the most popular websites on Earth—with ambitions to redefine music, dating, and pop culture—became a graveyard of terrible design and failed corporate initiatives:

In retrospect, DeWolfe says, the imperative to monetize the site stunted its evolution: "When we did the Google deal, we basically doubled the ads on our site," making it more cluttered. The size, quality, and placement of ads became another source of tension with News Corp., according to DeWolfe and another executive. "Remember the rotten teeth ad?" DeWolfe says. "And the weight-loss ads that would show a stomach bulging over a pair of pants?"

“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

Four years ago, Dominique Jones got out of prison and learned to rap. Today he is, by many metrics, the most popular rapper in the world.

A profile of Thelonious Monk.

Was the biggest record sale in the history of Discogs actually someone selling the record to themself? Was a serial hoaxer who had posed as Jimi Hendrix’s son in blackface actually behind both the 1989 album and its 2017 sale?

A profile of the grieving musician, who lost his teenage son 18 months ago.

The early life of “the onetime Black Panther, protégé of George Jackson, and sole member of the San Quentin Six convicted of murder.”

On the young and ascendant Frank Sinatra, “who ruled crowds by seductive magnetism and surrounded himself with courtiers, but had once been an adolescent alone in his room listening to Bing Crosby on his Atwater-Kent.”

A tour with the Stones, an appearance on The Munsters, and a song about “how Boston is a shit hole.”