John Schaefer

When it comes to Metallica, there seem to be two kinds of people: those who believe the band broke new ground in thrash metal in the 1980s and then lost the thread in the 90s; and those who maybe had sort of heard of the band, but then fell in ...

Cover songs can be tricky – on one hand, a cover of a song you like will often simply remind you of why you liked the original in the first place, and will often suffer by comparison. (There are exceptions – I liked “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but let’s ...

So the story goes like this: Estelle releases her song “American Boy” on Atlantic Records. It does well on iTunes and becomes a top 10 single, and the folks at Atlantic Records, struggling to find their place in a changing music marketplace, decide this is great and heave a huge ...

Why Music Is So Cool, Reason #325: if you’re the least bit curious, it will lead you to other things you didn’t even know existed. One of those things is the huge sloppy musical mess we call ...

Yesterday on the show, the Zimbabwean pop singer Chiwoniso (pictured) played a song in our studio without her band, without all the production and amplification that she uses on her album. It was just Chiwoniso’s voice and the mbira, or thumb ...

So 20% of the people polled in the UK would give up their jobs for a chance to work in the music business… I wonder what they think “working in the music business” means? Sure, the bricklayer probably dreams of becoming a rich and famous pop singer, with a starlet ...

Ever find yourself listening to a song on the radio and thinking, “who decided those would be good words to sing?” It is, naturally, a matter of taste, but sometimes it seems like the songwriters aren’t even trying anymore. (Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons,” anyone?) So maybe it’s time for you to ...

David Bowie’s “Fame” is a pretty good take on the elusive nature of stardom (“Could it be the best, could it be? Really? Really?”), but music is full of cautionary tales – and occasionally heartwarming ones – of fame. If you listened to rock music in the 1990s, you knew ...

When I was 10, my parents bought me a guitar for my birthday. Or maybe it was Christmas – the two are really close together and I wasn’t always clear on which event was being celebrated. Anyway, it ...

By a fluke of scheduling, we have Lila Downs, the Mexican-American singer, on today’s show, and Joan Baez, an earlier generation’s Mexican-American singer, on tomorrow’s program. Both have made their reputations as singers who refuse to shy away from hot-button topics. Forty years ago, Baez’s songs were a highly visible ...

Like many Americans who didn’t actually live there, I always thought of Minneapolis and St. Paul as the land of Mary Tyler Moore, snow, and the Vikings (whose games always seemed to be played in the snow – which was football the way God intended it to be. Moving that ...

McCarren Park Pool is closing. Well, not closing forever, but when it reopens, it will be as a pool. For the past 3 summers, McCarren has been one of the hottest music venues in New York – a place to watch the most ...

Well before I ever started writing liner notes, I was a big fan of them. And by liner notes I mean all of the printed matter that came with an LP or a CD – production credits, lyrics, and occasionally some sort of explanatory or laudatory prose. I always felt ...

At the end of next week, all the major league baseball teams will call up their promising minor leaguers for September games. This annual roster expansion gives everyone a chance to see who has the next potential MVP.

Also at the end of next week, the horse racing season ...

When I started listening to classical music, after spending the first 18 years of my life basically immersed in rock, I found that I was really drawn to early music – the earlier the better. And of course to modern music, especially the so-called Minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve ...

The world’s most famous guitarist. The girlfriend who wanted to be his wife. The famous rock singer. The rock singer’s wife who wanted to be the guitarist’s girlfriend. The guitarist’s manager, who mysteriously “misplaced” a fair amount of money. The manager’s associates, both of them angling to take over as ...

Daniel Levitin’s best-seller, This Is Your Brain On Music, contained some provocative stuff. The musician-turned-neuroscientist also displayed a philosophical streak, with answers to questions like “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” His answer – an ...

So Giacomo Puccini is the biggest opera composer in the States. That’s no surprise. Fred Plotkin reports from Italy, though, that in Puccini’s home country it is Giuseppe Verdi who is considered to be the superior composer, and apparently by quite a large margin. In a sense, that’s not too ...

While my lifelong love affair with horse racing is a poorly-kept secret, I am not in fact into gambling at all. (Thoroughbred racing is different. Don’t ask me how – it just is.) So while work has occasionally taken ...

I’ve followed the Billboard charts since I was in school, back in the late 70s (and that, kids, is what they mean by “old school”). But it wasn’t the Hot 100 that I was interested in; that was just pop pablum, nothing interesting there. I read the Top 200, the ...