The performer behind the anti-comedian Neil Hamburger on being comfortable getting booed.

Marvin Gaye at the beginning and at the end.

A 16-year-old journalist goes on tour with a band on top. The article that inspired Almost Famous.

Watching the jazz singer in New York.

A profile of Missy Elliott.

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

The creators of This is Spinal Tap, the most influential mockumentary ever made, have been paid almost nothing. Now they are suing for $400 million.

How Paul Tollett gets the world’s biggest acts to perform in the California desert.

A profile of Gil-Scott Heron.

An interview with Dylan, 75, on the power of recording standards.

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?

From 1968-1973, the three teenage Wiggin sisters, guided by a domineering father, played their strange music at New Hampshire ballrooms and recorded a single album. The Philosophy of the World LP goes for over $500 today, but the intervening decades have not been kind to the Wiggins.

The artist at 85.

On the seminal songwriter, who died four years ago today, in his final days before succumbing to dipsomania.

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.

The reclusive Swedish songwriting guru gives his first interview in 20 years.

"The honesty in Perfume Genius’s music has attracted him a devoted audience, and he receives a lot of messages on Twitter from young kids going through the process of coming out, or dealing with their own addictions. “I think people come to my music just to feel less lonely,” he says. “When I write, sometimes I think, What would I have liked to have heard when I was younger?” But on his new record, out this May, he aimed for something a little more developed: essentially, he wanted to make a grown-up album about life after you’ve trudged through the trauma."

" 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."

"And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music".

Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?

Twenty-two years in, E-40 has extended his reign over the Bay Area rap landscape by returning to “making music the way he did back in the late ’80s: completely independently, selling his raps more or less directly to his fans.”

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

Music writer Mark Fisher (who died this week) on the decline of Michael Jackson.

The writer recalls collaborating on an abandoned musical with David Bowie featuring aliens, (fake) lost Bob Dylan songs, and a mariachi band.

Tokyo’s reverent “black music” fandom.