Finding Light in the Darkness of Grief
About 18 months ago, violinist-composer-singer Lili Haydn sent me a kind text: our dear friend, the irrepressible singer-songwriter Angela McCluskey, had suffered a massive heart attack and was in a…
Old Dominion Get Weird (and Personal) with ‘Barbara’
For a hugely popular, contemporary country music act—especially one with a fine, stately name—Old Dominion sure like to get weird. That creative impulse goes all the way back to their…
Wham Bam, Thank You Glam!
The modern glam rock resurgence can be attributed to a few bands, though it was The Darkness in the early 2000s that gave the movement weight. While bands like Starcrawler,…
The ‘Reinvention’ of deadmau5
When I caught up with deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-August, it’s raining in Toronto and one of his three cats, Peanut, is going a little crazy…
Every Garbage Album, Ranked
Wisconsinite drummer Butch Vig, Nebraskan guitarist Duke Erikson, and Minnesotan guitarist Steve Marker met in the late ’70s in Madison, Wisconsin. Although Erikson and Vig’s bands Spooner and Fire Town…
Cass McCombs: “Music should be personal”
In the run-up to Interior Live Oak, his alchemically melodious new LP, Cass McCombs’ plan was to strip the songs’ arrangements to their communicative basics. “When you do that,” he…
John Power Explains How Cast Landed the Most Coveted Support Slot in Music
The last time I saw John Power, frontperson of Cast, was at a mutual friend’s wedding, where he was throwing up out of the hotel window. That was 24 years…
Reliably Explosive: Mac McCaughan on 36 Years of Superchunk
“When we’re writing a song or recording a song, I think we have a pretty good internal quality control of, ‘Is this good?’ or ‘Is this exciting?’ versus ‘This feels…
Deep Cut Friday: “Between a Laugh and a Tear” by John Mellencamp
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.The duality of pleasure and pain, of comedy…
Inside our new free Uncut CD: Sounds Of The New West Vol. 7!
The new October 2025 issue of Uncut comes with a free CD – Volume 7 of our much-loved Sounds Of The New West series. The new October 2025 issue of…