Music writing
The Black Keys take Manhattan
“It’s the Akron curse: you’ve gotta get out to win,” Auerbach concludes. Will he leave too? “Thought about it. Thinking about it. The only thing keeping me there is my family.” At gigs, he makes a point of telling the crowd “we’re the Black Keys, from Akron, Ohio.”
At home with the National
“Anxiety and worry are common mental states,” says Berninger. “But it’s not a mid-life crisis because it never goes away.” Sitting on the sofa with his bandmates, a glass of wine in his hand, it looks like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
TV On The Radio’s curse
TV On The Radio are victims of their own success. After three albums, they are indisputably the most critically adored band in the western world, but every ecstatic review draws them deeper into a game they don’t enjoy. They write political songs, but are contemptuous of politics. They’re angry, but don’t like raising their voices. Although they make uplifting, exhilarating music, everyone thinks they’re miserable.
Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion
Metheny is not even playing his guitar. He stands at the back with a grin on his face, ginger curls tumbling out of a backwards New York Yankees cap. Although he’s 55-years-old, he looks like a little kid, lost in his favourite hobby.
Sufjan’s road trip
The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway – or BQE, as it is known to New Yorkers – is a miserable stretch of road. It has narrow lanes, no hard shoulder, countless potholes and is usually one long traffic jam. When Sufjan Stevens was commissioned to write a symphony about the city he calls home, the crumbling concrete flyover became his muse.
By the time they get to Phoenix…
“In America, there is a culture of welcoming musicians,” says Brancowitz. “In France, if you play music you are a gypsy – they check your ID and your belongings. Even in the Midwest, if you say to Grandma that you are playing a gig, she wants to hug you. In France she will be afraid.”
Jeffrey Lewis - indigenous New Yorker
Lewis is as neurotic about success as he is about rejection. He sometimes feels like he’s becoming gentrified, like his old neighbourhood, both gaining and losing something in the process. A fortnight ago, he went into his friend’s studio and recorded a batch of songs the way he used to: “one take, solo acoustic, roll the tape and you get what you get.” It felt good.
Herbie rides again
As a Nichiren Buddhist, Herbie Hancock starts and ends each day with an invocation of the mystic law of cause and effect. He sits facing a sacred scroll, rings a bell, recites two chapters of the Lotus Sutra and chants nam-myoho-renge-kyo – meaning that in life there are threads unseen and every action has consequences. His cadence is a calming, measured monotone you could set your watch or tune your piano by.
Dion De Mucci
For a sixty-seven-year-old, Dion is evidently in robust health. He looks like Jack Nicholson might if he too had been sober for decades, with a micro-beard under his bottom lip, a black New York Yankees cap, and expensive shades. He is aware that “the junkie finding God is a cliché” but speaks the language of self-help regardless. “When is a train most free,” he asks, “on or off the tracks?”
Flash, one more time
With hindsight, making a mixtape of old school funk and hip-hop for Grandmaster Flash was a bad idea. “This is the wack part,” he tells me, a few seconds into Shack Up by Banbarra. “They’d be throwing water at the speakers if we played that part.”
