Youssou N’Dour’s voice is one of the wonders of music, a soaring bird that has taken him around the globe from his native Dakar, Senegal, as a beloved, ever-visionary arts ambassador for more than four decades.

But there’s another voice of note on one song from his new album, Eclairer le Monde (Light the World), leading a chorus on “On L’a Fait! (We Did It!)”—Nelson N’Dour, 12, making his recording debut.

More from Spin:

• Altin Gün Salutes Neşet Ertaş On New Album
• How a Still-Defiant Shepard Fairey Turned Punk Rock Attitude Into 30 Years of Activist Art
• Repelican’s Jon Ehrens Ponders the Cosmos

“I have a lot of kids,” the dad says, laughing. “And never [have] one of my kids tried to sing or do something with music. And during these last three years, we could feel he loves music.” Nelson is Youssou’s next-to-youngest. 

The pride shines as he speaks by video from his Dakar home, talking some in English and some in French, with translation as needed by his associate Patrick Tucker. The song his son sings on is a tribute to football—our soccer. Nelson is a big fan. “It’s really an honor for me to have my son singing with me.” 

In some ways Youssou N’Dour is a parental figure to generations of African musicians. Born in 1959, just as Senegal was becoming independent from France, he has helped shape the evolution of the nation’s sense of itself.

He was just 16 when he joined the popular Star Band, which specialized in the Afro-Cuban styles that dominated Dakar clubs, and then fronted the break-away Étoile de Dakar, mixing in traditional rhythms and instruments, with vocals largely in the indigenous Wolof language. The hybrid style, known as mbalax, helped fuel a wave of national pride and N’Dour rose as a cultural leader alongside such others as Baaba Maal and Touré Kunda.

His global breakthrough came in the mid-1980s, first in partnership with Peter Gabriel. That’s him, singing in Wolof, on “In Your Eyes” (yes, the song blasting from John Cusack’s boombox in Cameron Crowe’s movie Say Anything…). In 1988, N’Dour joined Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Tracy Chapman as the core musicians on Amnesty International’s massive “Human Rights Now!” tour. 

Another leap came in 1994 when he and singer-rapper Neneh Cherry teamed for the global hit “7 Seconds.” He won the Best Contemporary World Music Album Grammy for 2004’s Egypt, inspired by North African Islamic sounds and themes. An acclaimed 2007 documentary, Retour a Gorée (Return to Gorée), followed him on a trip from the island of Gorée, just off the coast of Dakar, to trace the paths and the music of countless Africans held on the island before being sent to slavery. And in 2013 he became the first African artist awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize. A brief bid to run for Senegalese president in the early 2010s failed, but he was appointed Minister of Culture and Tourism. 

He remains an inspiration to young musicians, including Nigeria’s Burna Boy, who had him sing on the 2020 hit “Level Up (Twice as Tall).” His new album was produced and co-written by Michael League, leader and bassist of the U.S. jazz-rock band Snarky Puppy, with an international roster of musicians including co-producer Weedie Braimah, the Ghana-born, U.S. raised master of the West African djembe drum.

“I was looking for something completely new,” Youssou says of working with League. “Not the usual mbalax we do, not an album that we usually produce in Senegal. Something that had a new spirit to it.”

SPIN spoke with N’Dour on the eve of the album’s release and the start of an international tour, including dates at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on April 25, Kings Theatre in Brooklyn on April 27 and the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland, on April 29. 

What was your life like when you were Nelson’s age?

I was a bit confused at that age. At that time my dad wanted me to stay in school and I wanted to do music. So it was confusing and it was a bit disturbing. On one hand my dad was strict and wanted me to go to school and study. On the other hand I wanted to be a musician and follow my mother’s side of the family’s traditional singing.

My mother’s a great singer. She was singing around all the traditional things, when a baby’s born or a marriage, singing about the importance of family and everything. The mothers of the family, they were the storytellers, the first singers. They were the ones who were invited to ceremonies to sing of the family lineages, during marriages, during childbirth, christenings. They were the ones who called to a new lineage of the families from ancestors to the present day. 

When you were born, Senegal wasn’t an independent country yet. How much impact was that on your young life?

I can’t speak much about what it was, because I was too young to understand. But my generation was born into independence and we knew ourselves as an independent country. There was a lot more being expected of us as Senegalese. The national fever was very active at that time. And my dad, peace to his soul, was very active in the fight for independence. He actually fought for independence in Dakar.

What other music were you hearing when you were young? 

A lot of Cuban music, also soul music. And later maybe reggae music. But, you know, it was really Cuban, Latino music that was very, very, very popular. Orchestra Broadway, Aragon, Celia Cruz. That really was the music I listened to. And a little bit of music coming from outside of Senegal—Nigeria, Fela, Manu Dibango, Miriam Makeba. They were secondhand, but the first things were Cuban music. 

You weren’t much older than Nelson is now when you started singing professionally. It seems there were a lot of new ideas, new combinations. What was your part in that?

The first thing was to make sure to keep the Cuban music, but make sure we were trying to use the local Wolof music. I remember telling my percussion player, “Okay, don’t use the congas, but use the Senegalese drum.” We know expression is more important than the instruments. But I was really trying to have the sound look like what I was looking for.

And that’s the mbalax music that you created, correct?

Let’s say I really developed it. It was something coming from our tradition and a lot of people like the band Xalam 2 were doing mbalax. But I was the one who came to promote it and bring it to different parts.

To someone who doesn’t know that music, how would you describe it?

The language. Mbalax music is [their] first language. And it’s a rhythm. The rhythm doesn’t look like standard rhythm. It’s something we know, we hear, because we are Senegalese. But it’s something sometimes you can say, “Oh, they’re playing against the rhythm,” right? But the downbeat is in the subconsciousness, because mbalax doesn’t have that downbeat, one to count on. And that’s how they play. [To] someone who doesn’t know mbalax, [they] might think that they are playing against the rhythm. Whereas they subconsciously know where they start from and where the downbeat is for them. So that was very important for me. And during that phase of my career I had a chance to meet a lot of other artists and a lot of other influences. And we managed to come together with what today is known as world music. 

So I had my mbalax music with me, which is very important to me. I still maintain it. And then we fused it with influences from other musicians from different parts of the world, then created what is today called world music.

Connecting with Peter Gabriel was a big break. You were still in your twenties then. Very quickly you took to a global stage. How do you feel your role changed with that? 

I felt like an ambassador from Africa to join this connection we call world music. And I saw the potential of this creation and this way to do music for the world. I was really concerned that I’m one Senegalese who joined the world team. You can meet someone like Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon, you can meet Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was like playing a role, like an ambassador from Africa, representing Africa. And the other persons that I mentioned, they were very important, but they were coming from different parts—Pakistan, pop music, Paul Simon, Ryuichi Sakamoto. You know, there’s  a movement. I was feeling like I was representing the continent.

It doesn’t feel like you’ve ever lost where you are from, which is clear on the new album. Could you talk about Dakar and Senegal today? What’s it like now?

Like the world over, Senegal demographically has increased greatly [from] when I was growing up. So that’s one. And as more people are born into the world, our timespan gets shorter. Our attention span gets shorter. You remember, when I was growing up we used to do music for like 10 minutes. Now that’s not the case. Now it’s more like three minutes, and that’s it. Or TikTok songs. [laughs] Thirty seconds. And a lot of things have changed over time. Now you have less time to do a lot of things. And it’s become a bit of a confusion for some of us who are used to taking time to do things the right way. 

Do you ever go back and listen to the Star Band or Étoile recordings?

I’ve been doing a lot of that recently.

For a start, the sound of my voice has changed a little bit, which comes [with aging]. But whenever I listen to myself from those ages, I’m proud of myself because I was young, but there’s no music of mine that I listen to and I’m like, “Nah, I wish I didn’t do that.” Everything that I’ve listened to so far, I’m proud of what I did, even at that age.

You sing in three languages. On the new album, English is the least sung, so many people don’t really know what you’re saying. Does that matter to you? 

I approach it like the person I am, because for me, music is the first language. It’s about the melody and the arrangement, the musicality of it all. But it’s just like who I am. I live in Senegal. I speak Wolof most of the time. French here. English, a little bit of everything. But like I said, music is my first language, and I like my music to represent me. We try as much as we can so that the music speaks to a larger audience, and not necessarily the language in which the song or lyrics are being sung. But the music should speak for itself.

The new album is titled Eclairer le Monde — Light the World. And the first song is titled “Tout Pour Briller” which means “Everything to Shine.” Is that how you see your role in life?

It comes from a place where we went though COVID and a lot of things happened in the world that we are still going through, a lot of extremes, people pulling to different extremes. And we’ve seen of late the success of African music abroad. But then, for me, the creation was more of, we need to look within ourselves and let a light shine from [within] us. The album was not just coming from these dark places, but also it’s now time to start to rebrand ourselves. And it is my role as an artist to say, “Hey, there’s a light. We need to get back to being the happy people that we were.” 

We bring back the joy and peace and happiness in the world, that the world shared, has always shared.

The video for the song “Noflaay” shows a lot of scenes of happy people. In Dakar?

It shows life not in a modern city, but not in a village either. It’s like in between, normal daily life of people just going about their activities.

Do you see yourself as a leader, responsible for a community, for the culture? 

My voice has always served that purpose. And it is my duty as an artist to speak of our society, our daily life, our daily struggles, our dealing with success and triumphs and just show light on what’s happening.

It is my role as an artist to say, “Hey, there’s a light. We need to get back to being the happy people that we were.” 

Some of the musicians on the album have been with you a long time, like percussionists Mbaye Dieye Faye and Thio Mbaye, tama player Assane Thiam, guitarist Tapha Gaye.

These are people with whom I grew up. We’ve been friends for a long time. We actually formed a band together for over 40 years. We have had a long relationship. And when I came to Michael [League] for the album project, we chose to get other musicians that are also good at what they do, not necessarily modern musicians, in a sense, but people who are good at what they do. That’s how we came up with the balafon player [Djiby Diabate], the other instruments. Because Michael and I wanted to have something that is pure. So we went about getting musicians from different areas to complete this album. That’s how Weedie came on board. And we had the balafon player and kora player [Momi Maiga], just to make sure we have an album of few musicians, musical talents. I was honored to have Michael on the bass. 

Do you keep in touch with some of the people you have worked with through the years? 

We’ve always maintained strong relationships, even after working on our collaborations. Like Peter Gabriel, we spoke a few days ago, which was on his birthday. And he loved the [new] album. He’s listening to it. And Neneh Cherry and I speak every now and then. I haven’t heard from Paul Simon in a long while. But every now and then, when we have stuff, we exchange ideas musically. We exchange sounds to hear, back and forth.

What are your thoughts about the newer generation of African artists, such as Burna Boy, Sampa the Great, and others who are making an impact globally? Do you feel you played a role in all of this? 

Something I’ve always tried to do is serve as a source for the younger generation, because if there is no source, there can’t be something new. Afrobeats has a source from somewhere, and we have served as that source, even as Manu Dibango and Fela Kuti served as a source for others and inspired others. And even this album that is out now, it will also serve as a source for them so that they know, “Okay, we are doing this more than urban music, but it comes from somewhere.” And that’s what we try to do and keep doing for them. 

So it’s not so much new, but a continuation and evolution?

Yes. Evolution. Continuation.

Do you like what you’re hearing in contemporary African music? Who are some of the artists you love most?

Yeah, I love it. Oh, Burna Boy’s my son. He is very talented and I have had the occasion to work with him. Also other singers from Nigeria, from Congo, they’re very talented. Burna Boy is my son, my favorite. 

You recorded the new album in a small town in Catalonia at Michael League’s studio. Why there?

It was just circumstances that came together, because when the time came and Michael was available and I was available, the only space we had was the studio in Catalonia in Spain. And I also didn’t want to do something just like what I’ve always done in Dakar. And I didn’t want to do it in an ultra-modern city like Madrid or New York or Paris. And Weedie just happened to be available at the time. That was how the whole thing happened. And it was perfect.

The next-to-last song on the album has an English title, simply “Say Thank You,” which you’ve described as an ode to all mothers. Is that you reminding yourself, or us, to be grateful?

I think it goes both ways. We are who we are because of what we receive from other people. Also, we are because of what we gave out to other people. So it goes both ways for me, and that is the essence of that song.

There is a spiritual, religious, aspect to your music. It seems that you balance your message, the world and God.

For me it’s about music expression, foremost, the arrangement of music, musicality of the songs. And then there are the lyrics. It is more of who I am. Because I live in Senegal, I go about life in Senegal. There’s a huge spiritual part of it. Not like being completely or excessively about it, but I am spiritual. And I think what I do and everything I try to do is show that, “Okay, there is the artist, the musician, and there is this part of me that is also spiritual.” I try to balance it out, even in my music.

The last song, “Ahmadou Bamba,” is a tribute to a Sufi saint. It seems that you’re bringing the album full circle from the beginning, where you want all to shine.

That’s what life is, and that’s what the world is. You have to have all of these things to make the world so you have life in the world. And not forgetting that we are all spiritual beings in as much as we live our daily lives. We also have that spiritual link. And that’s what the album is all about. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The late 1980s were hectic for George Benson—maybe even busier than the late 1970s, when he notched massive crossover hits like “Give Me the Night” and “Turn Your Love Around.” The singer-guitarist, already renowned for bouncing so breezily between pop, jazz, and R&B, released at least one album a year from 1985 through 1990. Each explored a different aspect of his sound and paired him with a new set of collaborators, such as Earl Klugh on 1987’s Collaboration and the Count Basie Orchestra on 1990’s Big Boss Band. Somehow he even found time to produce records for country-jazz pioneer Chet Atkins and Jay Leno Show bandleader Kevin Eubanks. Add in constant touring and something’s bound to get lost along the way. 

More from Spin:

• Everything We Know About Gorillaz’ New Album The Now Now
• Gorillaz – “Fire Flies”
• Watch Gorillaz Debut 4 New Songs Live in Germany

That’s exactly what happened with Dreams Do Come True, an ambitious orchestral pop record he made with famed arranger Robert Farnon in 1989. Farnon was at the time still one of the most celebrated arrangers in the world, a Canadian war hero who had scored film and TV projects before working closely with Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, and many others. He wrote nearly 20 arrangements for Benson, which they recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. Afterwards, Benson brought the tapes back to America, tried to interest his label in releasing them, and then…nothing. He kept moving from one project to the next until he realized that the tapes were lost. 

They stayed lost for more than 30 years, but Benson has managed to complete the recordings and remaster them. More than a decade before every pop singer started doing an American Songbook album, Dreams Do Come True sets a high bar for standards, with a loose interpretation of what kind of song qualifies for that designation. He does a lovely version of the popular “Autumn Leaves,” his voice and guitar both dancing gracefully around the meter, but he also includes the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and Leon Russell’s “A Song for You,” both of which sit well in this orchestrated setting. 

Despite hitting 80 last year, Benson remains as nimble-fingered on the frets as ever, and in January 2025 will even host Breezin’ With the Stars, a four-night festival of concerts and workshops, featuring Tommy Emmanuel, Steve Lukather, and Esperanza Spalding. Benson recently spoke to SPIN and explained how Dreams Do Come True finally came true, and he talked about some of his biggest hits and greatest feats of roller skating. 

What motivated this project in the first place? Why did you want to record in this kind of orchestral setting?

Well, I’ve done so many incredible things that have come to me off the cuff. Somebody would mention an idea. “Hey, man, why don’t you try this?” Tommy LiPuma said, “Why don’t you try ‘Masquerade’ with a vocal?” Remember, I was at the top of the scale for jazz guitar at the time, so when he started talking about doing a vocal, he was one of the few people who trusted my vocals. The record companies did not. They wanted me to be a guitar player. Even my manager said, George, no, you are a guitar player. And “Masquerade” led me to a second career as a singer that’s been phenomenal. So I’m used to strange ideas. So one day I’m talking to the great Quincy Jones, and since he’s a magnificent arranger, I asked him the question, “Who’s the baddest cat in the world today?”

What did he say? 

Well, there were many great arrangers, believe me, and a lot of them I had worked with before. Quincy mentioned two, and one of them he said, “George, for you the man’s name is Robert Farnon.” So I searched him out. Back in those days I was going back and forth to Europe, and when I was over there, I asked about him. I ran into one of his best friends, and he was quite a character. He was a typical Londoner, very British, and he had the whole English accent. A joy to be around. He introduced me to Robert, who was much more serious but a very pleasant guy to be around. It happened so fast. Next thing you know, I was in the studio with an 87-piece orchestra—the London Symphony Orchestra, one of the greatest in the world. He was conducting this music, and it was so mesmerizing. 

Robert never got negative about anything, even though a lot of the things I picked were not up his alley. We were recording songs in a genre he was not known for. But he never complained. He jumped on it and came back with these arrangements that knocked you out. And he loved us. He treated us like royalty. He said he wished he caught me when I was a young fellow. But I had no abilities then. I was shouting out songs as a kid and working in crazy clubs and running here and running there. I was putting together the things that make me who I am today.

What happened to it? Why didn’t you release it?

I decided not to try to do everything in the studio at that time. I packed up everything and took it all to New York, and I started working on the vocals and the guitar. I ended up with this project in my hand, and I put it in a warehouse or left it in a studio. Years went by, and I heard that Robert Farnon had passed away. That’s criminal, because I wanted to put the project out. At that time the record company did not have confidence in that kind of project for me. We were making hit record after hit record after hit single, and they didn’t want to change anything.

How did you find it? 

A guy called me up from a warehouse and said, “George, we got a lot of your stuff out here.” “Okay, what stuff are you talking about?” It was stuff from my house. I sold one of my houses, and they put everything from that house in this warehouse. So I said, “Read me some of the labels on it.” And he said Robert Farnon, London Symphony. “Send that stuff to me right away!” The guy put it on the tractor trailers and sent it to me all the way in Arizona. I was amazed. 

What was the condition of the tapes?

Everything was pristine because the people involved were the best of the best. We had the best arranger with Robert Farnon, the best engineer with Al Schmitt, and one of the best studios in the world. It was all recorded digitally, so it was very well preserved. That was the beginning of an incredible project. It took me two years to finish it. I played it for the record company—the new members, the new faculty—and they fell in love with it like I did. They said, “Man, this is good stuff. We’ve got to put it out.” I said, “Well, it’s not finished.” And they said, “Finish it.” So I finished it. It was a very hard project, and I thought it would never happen. 

What did you have to do to finish it?

Out of the 17 songs we did, there were 16 left. I used one of the songs many, many years ago on a project I did with the Count Basie Orchestra. So I had to find the other 16. I found 11 of them, but that’s enough to put out an album. I think there’s more stuff, but that’s for a later date.

What do you remember about choosing these particular songs? It’s interesting that there are standards on here, but also pop songs by Leon Russell and the Beatles.

I do love standards. There’s no doubt about that. They’ve proven themselves over the years. Everybody has recorded “Autumn Leaves,” and it never sounds bad. It’s such a great song, and Robert put a special touch on it. He really enhanced the song in a way that made me want to sing it. There’s something about the way everything just falls into place in his arrangements. 

But I also love the Beatles. They hardly ever miss. I just love Paul McCartney’s voice. He had a great character to his voice. He’s one of my favorite singers because I believe every lyric. When he sings, I believe him. To me that’s what makes the story: it’s how convincing someone is telling the story. I always try to use that mentality when I record, and it has worked a lot for me.

You’ve always emphasized diversity and range. There’s some jazz, some pop, some funk, some R&B. 

When I was a young man and went to New York, I had to play a little bit of this and a little bit of that, because that’s what was on the jukeboxes. And I was a jukebox man. I knew all of the hitmakers on the jukebox, and I emulated them. But that kind of range was not popular at the time. You were either this or that. You were a jazz player or a ballad singer or a rock player. Very few people were crossing over. You could get away with it if you were Ella Fitzgerald or Glen Campbell. They showed us how many people you can gather by just being yourself, letting the music come out of you, and putting your stamp on it. Eventually it started opening up, and that’s when my records came along. I was finally able to use all of that stuff I had gathered over the years. They were allowing me to use my total self, which was a great blessing. 

Was there a song that felt like a turning point in that regard?

“Give Me the Night” was quite a different song than I was used to playing. It was actually a last-minute thing on the album Quincy Jones produced. On the last day, he stopped me from going home. He said, “George, you can’t go home today.” I said, “Man, I’m going home to see my children. I’ve been away for a month.” He said, “No, you can’t. We got one more song.” I said, “Okay, but that’s it. One more song and I’m out.” So we did “Give Me the Night,” which is still around today. 

It’s a sophisticated song. What’s the writer’s name? Rod Temperton. That’s his name. He’s responsible for a lot of those smashes that Michael Jackson had. “Rock With You” and things like that. He put “Give Me the Night” together real fast, and I had some friends in the studio. Lee Ritenour was there, tuning my amp for me. I was not good at that. I just turned the amp on and turned the guitar on and started playing. That’s all I know and care about. Quincy wanted him to add something to my guitar playing, and he copied me on the repeating riff and played it at an octave lower or an octave above, I can’t remember now. He added so much character. 

Who else was there with you?

I had Patti Austin there. She can do anything. It was a great recording date, but it was exhausting. Quincy made me change my voice from my normal voice to something that had a little more character to it. “Don’t try to be Frank Sinatra,” he told me. “Give the song what it deserves.” And the song did not deserve a Frank Sinatra voice. It deserved a street voice, something that everybody could understand in the world. Once we settled on that, the song took off.

I’m still amazed whenever I hear it. It sounds as fresh today as it did the first time I heard it. Oh, and the great story is when Quincy sent me a test pressing. I was living in Hawaii at the time, and I put the record on and played it. In the studio I had been disappointed that I hadn’t put a more serious voice on it, but when I heard the test pressing, I could understand what Quincy was talking about. After about three or four plays, my kid, who was about 10 years old at the time, came up to me and tugged on my clothes and said, “Dad? Dad?” I said, “Yeah, what is it?” He said, “Can you play that song that goes, ‘All right, tonight’?” That’s all he could remember, but I said to myself, “This song is going to be a smash.” Because my children never asked me ever about my music. They never mentioned it. But he mentioned that song, and “Give Me the Night” went to the moon when it came out. 

And I have to ask about the video. You do so much roller skating in that clip, and I’ve always wondered if that’s something you knew how to do or if you had to learn?

I grew up on roller skates when I was a kid! Me and a friend used to go skating every other day, man. We’d be up there doing all kinds of tricks. We even roller skated on cobblestone streets. In fact, when I found out they had a rink with smooth floors… oh man, what a blessing that was! So when we did the video and they asked me to stand in front of some skaters who were holding boomboxes on their shoulders in front of a California sunset, I thought that was a good idea. And when I got there, “Give Me the Night” was being played like you wouldn’t believe. Everybody had a boombox and “Give Me the Night” kept coming on the radio.

I asked my manager, “Where are my skates?” And he said, “Oh, you don’t have to skate.” “But I want to skate!” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because nobody here can beat me skating, that’s why.” So he got me some skates, and then I asked him, “Alright, where’s my guitar?” He said, “George, you’re going to kill yourself!” He must have imagined me falling down with a guitar in my hand. I said, “Your problem is that you think about falling. When I skate, I’m just thinking about skating. That doesn’t mean I never fall. I just never think about it. I just skate.” So we did that little routine and it took off. 

What was the reaction at the time?

Nobody believed it was me skating! They threatened to burn down the BBC because they thought they had faked me on some roller skates. How dare you do that to such a great artist and belittle him like that? They were threatening to burn down the BBC. We had to produce a video of me from the skates all the way up to my head so they would believe it was me skating. That’s what settled it. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Corey Feldman makes his own phone calls. “I am doing excellent,” he tells me, conveying undeniable excitement from the start. “Much going on. Much positive stuff. I’m almost overwhelmed with positive energy and love,” he continues, his patent raspy voice giving way to a warm laugh. “I feel like I’m in the realm. I’m in the zone. I’m here. I’m doing it.” 

The “realm” is definitely—defiantly—undeniably his own. An actor since childhood, in recent years he’s focused on his music, as well as a continued cause-driven quest for truth, including his much-publicized allegations regarding sexual abuse in Hollywood, particularly predators who target children. 

More from Spin:

• Altin Gün Salutes Neşet Ertaş On New Album
• How a Still-Defiant Shepard Fairey Turned Punk Rock Attitude Into 30 Years of Activist Art
• Repelican’s Jon Ehrens Ponders the Cosmos

You don’t live a life like this without taking a lot of hits—no doubt he’s had his share. 

“At the end of the day, I don’t think you survive 50 years in an industry if you’re not ready to show your intestines to the world and say, ‘This is who I am,’” he says. “You have to be that real and that raw and that honest in all of your dealings, so that people can always go back and look at whatever quote from whatever part of history when they try to nail you down and say, ‘Oh, but you said this back in 1935.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, well, I’m still saying the same thing today because I don’t lie.’ I do change my opinions from time to time. Give me that space and we’re okay.”  

His 2013 memoir chronicles an extraordinary life of film and famous friends (including best friend Corey Haim, who died in 2010), marked consistently by all measures of heartbreak. Artistically, in a career that spans five decades, he’s never fit into a box, and perhaps this is what makes him such a polarizing artist. The Lost Boys, The Goonies, Stand by Me—just a few of the most iconic films of the ‘80s, and all time, and Corey starred in them. 

This summer, after a 20-year wait, ironically some time around Corey’s mid-July birthday, the horror-comedy film The Birthday will finally be widely released, after a limited run in 2006 abroad. Corey characterizes The Birthday, directed by Eugenio Mira, as one of those “weird cult movies.” 

“It was during a time [20 years ago] where, let’s face it, most of the industry had turned their backs on me. Corey Feldman was not a cool topic. It was not something that you talked about other than in a joking manner on a late-night talk show,” he says. “Not only did I not lose my acting chops when I got older, but I actually got better with time.” 

As if a new film wasn’t enough, last week he released a new single, “The Joke,” complete with jack-in-the-box-themed artwork featuring Corey in clown costume. As he explains, the joke itself refers to “the crap-talkers, the trolls…the bots. The people that come after me, to try to diminish my work. It’s got a real message behind it, which is that we must stay true to ourselves.” Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst directed the music video, a prelude to their upcoming summer tour, which kicks off on July 16, Corey’s 53rd birthday. It’s called the Loserville Tour—but, according to Corey, you might be pronouncing it all wrong. 

“It’s named Lo Serve Ill because we’re going to hit them with a low serve, which is what they don’t expect. Everybody expects the high serve, but they’re getting the low serve and it’s going to be ill.” 

And then he says: “No, I’m just playing. It’s a throwback. [Fred] explained it to me as…we’re a group of misfits and it’s kind of like The Goonies… The misfits, the underdogs, the one that everybody pointed the finger at and said that they sucked—well, that’s all of us.” Regardless, the tour kicks off at Wisconsin’s Somerset Amphitheater, where Corey’s promising his most epic birthday party to date.

So “new” movie, new music, a tour that launches on his birthday, and we haven’t even touched on Corey’s epic performance of Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky” on The Masked Singer, which he called his “highlight.” So, what’s left? 

“I’m telling you, I’m still considering running for president one day,” he drops, rather casually.

No doubt about it, there’s only one Corey Feldman. 

What pushed The Birthday to be released now, 20 years after it was made?

Corey Feldman: Basically, I was sitting at home one day working on my album, and somebody sends me a clip from [a late-night talk show]. It’s Jordan Peele being interviewed, and he’s talking about me, and he’s saying how there’s these little nods to me in each of his films…and how he sees me as some form of muse for his work. I was like, “What? Where is this coming from?” One day [in 2022] I get an invitation to attend a movie called Nope, and I’m like, “What is this? Oh, it’s a Jordan Peele film.” 

I went down and I checked it out. [Jordan Peele is] standing there with a mask on, and I approached him and said, “Hey, thank you for the invitation.”

He is like, “Oh, Corey. Oh my God.” He’s like, “Can I get a picture with you?” I’m like, “Sure.” He is like, “Do you mind if I take the mask off?” I’m like, “No, no, it’s your premiere, man. Of course, you could.” 

I sent him a text and we started bantering, and that conversation went on for a few days. He said, “So what are you up to these days film-wise?” I said, “Well, I’m taking a hiatus or maybe even retiring from film. I don’t know that I really care about playing the game anymore, to be honest.” He says, “Well, do you miss it? Have any regrets?” I said, “Well, there’s only one regret, which is that my greatest movie ever never made it to the theaters. It’s called The Birthday.” 

He said, “Well, how do I see it?” I said, “Well, you can’t. It’s never been released in the United States at all. I do have a copy, but the only way you’d be able to see that copy is if you came over to my house for a screening, because I can’t let it out.” He said, “Okay, well, then let’s do that.” 

He said to me at the end of the film, “Corey, this film is a cinematic masterpiece, and your work is so amazing and compelling that the world needs to see this film. You have to let this film get released.”

I said, “It’s not up to me, it’s been sitting on a shelf for 18 years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.” He said, “Well, let me think about that.”

He said, “This is going to be your year. I promise you, I know these things. The whole world is going to change, and it’s going in your direction, and you’re going to start to realize this very soon.” I was like, “Okay, buddy, whatever you say. I’m just humbly trying to get my album finished, and that’s about it.” 

About two months later, I get a text: “Hey, I’ve got this film festival that I’m going to do [in New York]. We would love for you to come down and be a part of it. We’re going to show four or five of your films as part of this film series to show how your films inspired my films.”

We put The Birthday up on the projection reel, dusted it off, and played that old print, and it sold out two screenings back to back. The crazy thing is, they showed Stand by Me, they showed Dream a Little Dream, they showed some great film work that I did as a kid—those movies were full, but they weren’t sold out. As a result, a bunch of different distributors came down because they heard about it and we started getting offers. 

Isn’t that a great story?

You’re a polarizing artist. 

You have no idea how many people write to me and say, “Your music saved my life because your words are so important to me. They gave me inspiration, they gave me hope, they gave me something to hang on to when I felt like all hope was lost,” or, “I use it to motivate me to go to the gym,” or, “I use it to motivate me to go dancing, or to go running, or jogging,” or whatever. 

I’ve heard so many different things from people about what my music means to them, and then there’s completely the opposite side of the spectrum. “Oh, are you kidding? It’s so awful. Only he doesn’t know how bad it is.” You go, okay, if that’s really how you feel, then I have to laugh at you. Because if you’re that desensitized, and you truly believe that, then you’re the one that’s disassociated with the world, not me. 

I know exactly where my fanbase is, and where the hearts and minds of the people who come up to me and hug me and cry on my shoulders. You can never take that away from me.

You said people have compared you to performance art, as though it was a negative, but I don’t think that would have to be a bad thing at all…

Look, here’s the thing: When we did the Today show, we made history. You can denounce it, you can say it was terrible, you can say whatever you want to say, because they said it all, but…they said on the Today show it was the [year’s] most viewed performance on todayshow.com.

The whole purpose was to put a nail in the coffin of my music career. That was the intention of the media. The moment I walked off that stage, and I’m talking within three minutes of me walking off the stage. The first thing I got was a text from somebody in the industry who said, “Congratulations, you killed it. What an incredible job.”

The very next thing I saw was a headline scrolling across my phone, “Corey Feldman’s bizarre performance on Today show. What was he thinking?” “Corey Feldman’s weird performance on the Today show.” “Corey Feldman’s creepy performance on the Today show.” Every single headline was the exact same with a one-word difference—every story could have been a carbon copy. They all came out within five minutes of each other. How does that happen if this isn’t pre-coordinated? 

Basically, if you remember, that was the dawn of the Me Too Movement. [There was about to be] a big story about abuse in Hollywood. Ronan Farrow called me up and said, “We almost met. I don’t know if you remember this, but I was supposed to interview you as soon as you walked out from performing on the Today show.” I said, “What are you talking about? No, you weren’t.” He said, “Yes, I was.” 

He was like, “No, I promise you. It was all set up with the producers. I was waiting in the sidelines to interview you, and then they pulled the piece at the last minute.” 

I said to Ronan, “That never was going to happen—you would have had to clear that with my publicist.” He’s like, “They did.” 

My publicist was sitting right there with me, and she’s shaking her head: “No, I had never got that call.” I’m like, “She’s sitting right here, Ronan, and said she never got that call.” He’s like, “Oh, wow.” 

Basically, they were planning to ambush me to talk about something that would have been very uncomfortable right after a performance. Because that [ambush] didn’t happen, they wanted to give themselves an excuse for having me on. I think the way that they found that was by bashing my performance and making it look like it was all a joke. 

That’s just a theory. I could be totally wrong.

Is that all on the record?

It is now.

You always get back up. How?

It’s scary at times. It’s dark. It’s lonely. It’s frightening. At the end of the day, I have a very deep connection with my higher power who I choose to call God. I feel that I’ve been put here on this Earth for a reason. Not just to entertain people. That’s the secondary reason. That’s the reason that gets people’s attention. I believe that I’ve been put here to help spread certain words of prophecy, whether it’s about speaking truth to power, or not letting people get away with telling certain lies, or making people aware of situations so that they can better themselves.

Based on pain that I’ve experienced or mistakes I’ve made, because I’m a public figure, I can say, “Please don’t do this. Don’t go down this road because you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt. Look at my life, you can see how making this mistake ruined this for me, or you can see how making this mistake has taken this opportunity away from me. Don’t let that happen to you.”

If anything, I serve as a warning for everybody. Hopefully, at the end of it all, I can also serve as inspiration that if you figure things out, it’s never too late to start over, and it’s never too late to correct the course and fix your life and become a better, happier person.

Are you ever afraid?

Every day. I don’t leave my house in a public setting without armed security. That’s an expensive place to live. That means I got to always be working at double speed because not only do I have to support my family and my multiple divorces [Laughs], but I also have to keep my household going. I house my bandmates because they work for me, and so I let them live here free of charge. I help anybody that I can. That’s my motto in life. If I’ve got something to offer that somebody else doesn’t have, then I do my best to try and share with them, or make their life better if I can, as long as they treat me with love and respect. Obviously, if somebody is treating me like crap, I don’t want to help them. The point being, doing so puts a target on your back in many ways.

People have infiltrated my life on many levels, from spies being sent into my home to place cameras, to place recording devices. I’ve had to hire private investigators. We’ve had to use bugging sensor devices where you can scan the room and detect a microphone in the room or a camera in the room, and we’ve found stuff.

It sucks to not be able to just jump in the car and run down the street if I want to. That’s the way it is now because you don’t know. There’s people out there that certainly don’t want me alive because they want to punish me for what I’ve done. Even though all I did was tell people the truth about what happened to me and my friends and say, “Please, don’t let this happen again.” I didn’t even try to have anybody thrown in jail. It’s not like I was going after somebody to ruin their life.

All I was trying to do is get the truth out, and hope that they got some kind of poetic justice or karma for the bad deed that they’ve done. I’ve never sued anybody. I’m just a messenger. Hopefully, they don’t shoot the messenger, as we say.

You are an example of someone being very early, really paving a way for other people to tell their truth.

Thank God that’s starting to happen with the Nickelodeon movie [Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV]. I can’t believe they even let that through. After the resistance I got and the way that they hijacked my movie. I don’t know if you know what happened, but I spent $1.3 million making a documentary to tell the truth because everybody begged me to.

I tried to raise money to do a feature film on my book, which was going to be $10 million. I was trying to raise $10 million to make it into a theatrical feature film. It would’ve been a great film. I was going to direct it. I was going to use big set pieces, and it was going to be just beautiful. I found a way to do it. It was going to look like 100 million, but I found a way to do it for 10 million. We started raising money to that end, and then all of a sudden there was backlash and people trying to shut me down, and saying that I was lying and all this stuff.

It painted me into a corner where I eventually had to just come up with my own money and do a documentary on a much smaller scale to get the true facts of the story out. Because every other attempt I made, from writing a book to making a Lifetime movie to whatever, they kept editing it, they kept changing it. They kept protecting the people that we were trying to name and changing their names.

I was like, “The only way I can really get this out is to put my own neck on the line, to put my own money on the line.” I went and met with all these distributors that were saying, “Oh, we want to support you, we want to support you”, but nobody would make a deal. Everybody would say, “Oh, well, we can’t do it because of this reason or that reason.” Then it was like, “Well, how the hell do I do this?”

I thought of streaming a film as a premiere worldwide, globally, so everybody could watch it at the same time because that had never happened, until My Truth. We did it and then of course it got hijacked with DDOS server attacks so that the film was shut down within the first five minutes, and we couldn’t figure out a way to get it back online for another 13 hours.

The rumor spread that the film didn’t exist, it was all a lie, I was price gouging, I never even made a movie. 

All I could do was work to get it up as fast as I could, which we eventually did, but it took 13 hours to get it back online. A lot of people unfortunately had just given up by that point. 

We watched basically $80 million just go right out the window because that’s how much ticket sales would’ve been if we were able to stay online and see what we were doing because it was working. We’d already sold 50,000 tickets by that point.

So…Fred and the Loserville tour…?

I think it’s not only us, but it’s our audience because the people who still relate to me, the people who understand me, are probably fine calling themselves losers. Like okay, fine, you want to call us the Losers Club, we can be the Losers Club. That means that we have the humility to accept the fact that we’re winning. It’s a positive. 

For those who aren’t aware, Fred and I did our first collaboration back in 2016 for the Angelic 2 the Core album. A big album that I did the Today show for, the “Go 4 It” performance, the song with Snoop Dogg—which, of course, we didn’t have Snoop Dogg on the Today show. We had our good friend Doc Ice.

During that same era, where we did the Snoop Dogg song, we did Doc Ice, we did Kaya Jones from Pussycat Dolls. I did a lot of duets on that album, and one of those duets was Fred. Fred and I did this great song with Scott Page from Pink Floyd, the sax player, and it’s called “Seamless.”. It’s a perfect blend of our styles. It’s really, really cool.

That’s on the Angelic 2 the Core album. People can go back and find that on iTunes, or buy a copy of the CD or whatever if they want to do their research. We also did a live performance together. I think around that year, it was either 2015 or 2016, I joined Limp Bizkit on stage, and we did some karaoke. I did my MJ impression, and I did a little tribute to MJ. I performed “Billie Jean” with Limp Bizkit, and then we did Limp Bizkit’s version of “Faith,” which was a lot of fun.

Fred has become a friend. He’s a great guy. I hosted a telethon that I created for autism on Facebook, and it was the world’s first-ever Facebook autism telethon. It took place over four hours. I got a bunch of my celebrity friends, from Dave Navarro to Fred, you name it. Many people came through on that. It was really powerful. Anyway, we did this great telethon, and Fred performed on it. We’ve done a lot together through the years, but more behind the scenes. 

Last year we [Corey’s band] were on tour. We played Riot Fest and made history. I was expecting to see a few hundred people in front of me when we walked out because we played at 2:30 in the afternoon on the smallest stage. I walked out and there was 20,000 people.

You seem really ready to take on whatever comes next.

No, I took a long hiatus. I’m ready. [chuckles] I’m very energetic, very geared up, very ready to do all of this. You have to also understand, as an actor, I may be a little bit jaded because I’m not going to go make a movie unless it’s a movie that I really want to do. If I don’t love the script, don’t love the character, it’s not something I can really sink my teeth into and it’s not a great director, I’m not interested, because I don’t care.

I’ve done over 100 films. I’m only going to care if it’s special, and it’s worth it, and they come to me with an offer. I don’t read for films. I don’t do the audition thing. Literally, I’m over it. 

When it comes to the music side, totally different ball of wax because I didn’t get these opportunities before. I was always shunned. I was always kicked to the side. I would volunteer. People don’t know this, but every time there was a major world tragedy like 9/11, for example—I was in New York for 9/11. I was there with the Jackson family—I felt very compelled to want to help.

When all those tributes came around, I was like, “Oh, please let me be a part of this. I want to sing. I want to do whatever I can to donate my time, to help bring in funds, to bring my fanbase to the table.” They were always like, “We don’t have room for you.”

It was like, “Okay. Well, I know my fans care. You may not care and you may not want me here, but I know the value that I bring because I know that my fans care. They’re good people, and they would be here to support this. You’re losing out by cutting that off, but that’s okay. We accept it.”

The point is, now that I’m getting these opportunities, it does mean something. It means a lot. It means that I’ve actually accomplished some goals, to get past that blockade that was around me and my music career for whatever reason. I feel like I’m finally etching on this stone tablet, saying, “Look at me. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”

I’ve always said, it’s tough presenting concepts and ideas people aren’t ready to hear. I hope we learned something from Sinéad O’Connor and honor truthsayers while they’re alive. 

In a perfect world, wouldn’t that be so nice? For people to be recognized for the things that they truly stand for and they’re alive. Like you said, Sinéad O’Connor is a great example of a hero, of a strong, determined woman who had great ideas and led the charge in so many ways with feminism and with religion and standing up to your peers and not taking any crap. She was so great at what she did.

I remember seeing the reports about her having depression… I was like, “Does anybody remember that this woman was a leader and did so much to change the world and risked her entire life and career to speak truth to power?” God bless her. Then she was gone. It was almost there. She almost got the recognition she deserved.

There was a bit of a resurgence starting to happen, and then it all went away. The same thing with Corey Haim. It’s so sad to me when that happens. Of course, there’s something in the back of my mind going like, “Gee, there’s a bit of a ticking time bomb here, folks. I’m not going to be around forever.” Hopefully, somebody remembers me before it’s too late and I can still do something about it.

Would you really ever run for president?

I might, but not when all this craziness is going on. 

We need some semblance of normality before I can even put my hat into the [ring]. Because right now what’s happening is so far skewed from normality. There’s such little semblance of respect and dignity and class and all those things that are supposed to be about holding your head high. I feel we’ve been robbed of that great dignity.

There is such great dignity and such importance to that office that I would never want to even put my name near it if I wasn’t fully prepared, fully ready, and capable, and in a time where I knew that I could literally get in there to make a difference. Right now, there’s so much back and forth and hate. It’s a disgrace, and it’s a disgrace to the rest of the planet. People are looking at America, it’s supposed to mean something. It’s supposed to represent freedom. It’s supposed to represent strength. It’s supposed to represent equality. I’m hoping that things can straighten themselves out over the next 10 years, and then I can come in and hopefully help realign things to a better, prosperous, more peaceful way, but these are just dreams right now. Don’t go quoting me that I’m going to be the next president or anything because I’m not. You can tell people I’m considering it. 

I just don’t want it to be like, “Oh, God, Cory Feldman says he’s going to be the next president.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

In the last four years, Andrew Watt has produced albums for and written songs with a staggering list of superstars, from Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Ozzy Osbourne to Justin Bieber, Post Malone, Miley Cyrus and BTS’ Jungkook. But since his music-obsessed childhood in the Long Island suburb of Great Neck, Watt has primarily been dreaming about working with his all-time favorite band, who just happened to play their first show in a dingy Seattle bar two days before he was born on the other side of George H. W. Bush’s America.

The 33-year-old Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist has seen Pearl Jam live approximately 50 times, and is the first to admit that his life is inextricably linked to their music. It’s a bond now further cemented with Dark Matter, the album they unexpectedly made together. The project is in some ways an extension of Earthling, the Eddie Vedder solo album written and recorded in Watt’s basement Beverly Hills studio in the second half of 2021. As the story goes, Watt got to know Vedder over a multi-year period through mutual friends, and once they finally got together in Los Angeles in May of that year, they began making music together nearly instantly. With Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Glen Hansard and Pearl Jam touring member Josh Klinghoffer, Watt is also a a part of Earthlings, the pickup band Vedder drafted to perform his new solo material live.

More from Spin:

• THE 40 GREATEST MUSICIANS OF THE LAST 40 YEARS
• Eddie Vedder Covers Devo, Zeppelin At Ohana Festival
• Brandi Carlile Enlists Aaron Dessner, Justin Vernon For New LP

Amid this flurry of creativity, which found Vedder writing songs on the spot at an uncommonly prolific level, the frontman had a thought: why not invite the rest of Pearl Jam to fly down from Seattle and mess around too? Within days, they’d arrived — with no songs or even instruments in tow. And within minutes of setting up in a circle on gear borrowed from Watt and Klinghoffer, they’d written two superlative rockers, “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond,” which now serve as the opening one-two punch of Dark Matter.

“It’s made by a fan for the fans, and I hope that they dig it,” Watt says proudly of Dark Matter, which weds the grit, angst and power of Pearl Jam’s classic early albums Ten, Vs. and Vitalogy with a sleek and widescreen modern sound. The hooks on the choruses of songs such as “Wreckage,” “Won’t Tell” and “Got To Give” soar higher than nearly anything the band has done in two decades, while the lugubrious guitar grooves and Matt Cameron’s propulsive, fill-heavy drumming on “Waiting for Stevie” feel like a joyous time capsule from the dawn of grunge.

Watt’s basement setup was ruined last year by incessant L.A. rain, but on short notice, Rick Rubin stepped in to offer him the use of his fabled Shangri-La studio in Malibu, which was owned by the members of the Band in the 1970s and has since hosted everyone from Metallica to Harry Styles and Lady Gaga. Pearl Jam reconvened there for 10 days in March 2023 to write a few more songs and finish Dark Matter — a process completed in just two total sessions compared to the nearly seven-year gestation of its 2020 predecessor, Gigaton.

In a literal dream-come-true moment, Watt had a guitar on during the writing sessions to help the band develop their ideas, and as such became the first non-member ever to share songwriting credits on a Pearl Jam album. “Andrew wanted to make a cross between Vs. and [Soundgarden’s] Badmotorfinger,” Klinghoffer tells SPIN. “He’s come pretty darn close. That first session, when I was there, the songs came together so incredibly fast that you’re hearing Matt’s true first instincts. Everyone was sitting within 10 feet of the drum kit, and it’s so powerful to be in the room with him. You can hear everyone’s absolute excitement in those songs. I think the guys really enjoyed being a tight band, in more ways than one. Andrew made that happen.”

Gossard seconded that emotion in an interview last month, telling SPIN, “I personally think that the experience of working with Andrew was fantastic and I would love another shot at making a record with him. The chemistry we had and continue to have with him is something worth exploring.”

Watt spoke with SPIN about why he urged Pearl Jam to lean on their idiosyncratic songwriting strengths, the power of improvisation and what the experience of working with his musical idols has taught him.

You were already working with Ed on his solo album in the summer of 2021, and at some point, he says, ‘I want to call the Pearl Jam guys and ask them to come down.’ Did anything specific precede that decision?

Well, to know Ed is to love Ed, right? Being the 100% genuine and gracious person that he is in terms of the way he thinks about other people that he loves, while we were working together, his brain shifted to, it’s almost wrong of me to not have this much fun with my guys with Andrew, you know? He was having such a good time and wanted to share that with his band. I think it was just as simple and selfless as that.

And then how long did it take them to show up? 

I don’t remember, but for Ed, I think it was kind of quick, like, this is so awesome. I’m going to be here for this amount of time, maybe the guys can come down later this month, and they did.

So, suddenly you’re producing a Pearl Jam record. They’re coming to your house and you’re going to be running these sessions. Where does your brain go then?

Back to being 12 years old, going to a show and holding a sign that said, can I play the guitar solo for ‘Alive?’ I’ve been ready for this gig my whole life. There was no prep needed. What do we want the bass to sound like? Like Jeff Ament. We want the guitars to sound like Mike McCready and Stone Gossard. Let’s go! What was cool is that they didn’t bring anything.

You could easily have said, bring me every demo you’ve written in the past two years, but you went in a very different direction.

I’m a massive Pearl Jam fan. Every member of that band is a great songwriter, a great singer, a great melody writer, a great lyricist, and a great multi-instrumentalist. It’s a band of virtuosos. They all can do everything, including make albums completely on their own. Instead of that process, which they had done so much on the last four or five albums, I wanted to switch it up. I was there to give my opinion and to give my taste as an option. My favorite thing about Pearl Jam, being a true fan, is watching them live. They’re one of very few bands that is even better live than they are on record. They sound bigger and better because there’s no fancy trickery about them in the studio. So, my mission statement became, I’m going to put these five amazing guys together in a small space where they can all see each other, and get them to play together and capture that energy of what happens on stage. Let’s go for full takes. Let’s go for solos that are a little too long. Let Matt Cameron have to turn the bar around in a weird fucking way and everyone’s holding on for dear life and then they land again. That’s the Pearl Jam that I go crazy for. I consider myself such a big fan that I figured, if I liked that, maybe everyone else would like it too? 

It wasn’t some big conversation or arm-twisting thing. What was communicated was, come with nothing and don’t even bring a guitar. Andrew’s got everything. Just bring a riff and a B-section. Don’t develop anything further than that. Everyone was in a circle, and it would be like, who’s got a riff? Stone would say, I’ve got one, and start playing it. Ed had a mic right there and started vibing off of it. Stone is kind of like the weird painter of the band. He puts things that aren’t in 4/4 over a 4/4 beat. His riffs are oddball. Jeff takes what Stone does and sometimes plays in literally an opposite direction. He makes beautiful chord symmetry out of Stone’s wacky stuff, which has made it sound special ever since Green River. That started happening, and Mike McCready would solo over all of it. That was the process of how every single one of these songs was made. Because of that, it has a lot of live feel. Once everyone knew the song and the take was finished, that was our last take. We didn’t then go again. As it was figured out, that was the take we used, when it was a little uncertain and a little fresh. That’s why the improvisational energy stayed. 

Can you describe the room where you were working?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore, because my house flooded during that bad L.A. rain. The studio was molded over and unusable. Rick Rubin did me a solid and cleared out Shangri-La for us to work for the rest of the period at a moment’s notice. It was fucking so cool of him. We wouldn’t have been able to make this record without him and that place. My studio was not a big room. It’s your typical basement. It was originally a home theater when the house belonged to the manager of Charlie Chaplin. We turned this space with concrete walls into a studio, treated it and put speakers up. The amps were upstairs all over the house. The guys were very much right next to each other. We’d track, put the main band down, and if someone had to fix a thing or two, they’d fix it or do some overdubs and make things fuller. Then, Ed would sing. That was it. Same thing every time. It’s not fancy, you know? It’s a fucking band. Let’s hear them play. When you listen to the record, at any point you can close your eyes and say, there’s Jeff, loud and proud. There’s Mike, there’s Stone, there’s Ed.

At first, you’ve got a guitar on and you’re feeling out the songs with them as they come to life.

To be completely honest, that was like a double-sided thing. Since I was a little kid, it was my dream to jam with Pearl Jam. When I was jamming along in the beginning, those guitars are not even on the record. It was just for the pure fucking blissful joy of it, like Charlie in the chocolate factory. I was like “Andy in the Chaplin Factory,” or whatever you want to call it. Then it became, as someone’s got a riff and we’re putting together sections very quickly and Ed is writing to them, it really helped me to know the chords and understand where a section should go. What’s going on musically, riff-wise or harmonically? On every record I ever make, whether I’m playing on it or not, I know how to play the song, because I need to be inside it in order to know what’s right for it. I started out playing in bands, so you don’t really know what you’re doing or how something should be arranged unless you can sit down and play it as a song.

Was there a discussion about how the band wanted this album to sound?

That’s not really the process, you know? Nothing changed from what it sounded like when the band was putting it down. We have good tones. ‘React, Respond’ is a great example. That’s a Jeff riff. He had the A and B sections. So as he’s showing them to us, I’m tweaking the bass sound and getting it gnarly. Especially when you’re working with a band, you’ve got to listen to each other and you’ve got to be willing and open to learn. Matt Cameron knows how he wants his drums to sound. He’s been recording our favorite rock drums for a very long time. The musician that you’re working with guides you to help them get the sound that’s in their head. It’s a very collaborative thing. For Matt, it’s important for it to feel like you’re almost standing over him and can hear the air off the drums. The overheads are a big part of the sound. There are little things you can do to make things more exciting as they’re going and feature those parts. You can hear the way his body moves together on the kit. It’s not like the band put a bunch of stuff down and then all this production was added. The sounds were carved as we were rolling together and the band was very much involved in each getting the sound that they hear in their part. Then, it was our job to make everything speak. I wanted it to stand up against other modern music that’s out now, but it’s very much all five guys.

To my ears, I don’t know that Pearl Jam has ever really allowed themselves to nod to their musical past as they have here. There’s even a moody instrumental intro like ‘Master/Slave’ from Ten.

That was Ed’s idea to have an intro there. He kind of served something up and then Jeff had an idea for it too. It was just very collaborative. They were all so into this. They gave so much of themselves. The album started like this before (hums the opening riff in ‘Scared of Fear’), like, bang bang bang. Of course, I’m thinking of ‘Master/Slave’ after it happened, and then we’re talking about it, and as we talk, it gets to be cousins with that.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was like, what’s Matt Cameron in Pearl Jam? Matt Cameron in Pearl Jam is like Temple of the Dog, right? It’s Soundgarden drums over Stone riffs. You also have to remember that Matt Cameron also played on the demos of Ten. When Eddie Vedder went surfing and listened to that original instrumental cassette, he was hearing Matt Cameron’s drums, not Dave Krusen’s. When you’re together for a long time, everyone becomes better musicians and a master of their craft. In Pearl Jam, there was a time where each guy would bring in their demo and already have an idea for the drums. Matt would do what’s right for the song and expand on it a little bit. I didn’t want that to happen here. I wanted each of their instincts to be able to come out fresh and unaltered, and that’s what is on this record, which was written by every member of the band on every song. Every song started with a riff and then went through the filter of each guy together. We were playing ‘Dark Matter’ and Mike was like, ‘Stop, stop!’ He wrote the bridge in two seconds, on the spot in his head. I think they had a lot of fun recording like that.

How fun too that they’re playing your gear and Josh’s gear. Were there some specific items that wound up being used a lot?

A guy named Alexander Dumble made the amps. He was a very strange guy who unfortunately passed away in 2022. He made Stevie Ray Vaughan’s amps and countless others. He would refuse to build them for a lot of people but for whatever reason, he agreed to make four for me. They’re all ‘50s Fender mods: a Vibrolux, a Champ, a Deluxe and a High Powered Tweed Twin. Jeff played through a Fender Bassman. We plugged Stone into a Les Paul and a Strat again. Mike played all old Strats and a 1959 Les Paul. Jeff was laughing because he said, no producer ever wants me to play my 12-string. And I was like, play the 12-string! Can you play ‘Jeremy’ on that for me? He wrote the main riff for ‘Dark Matter’ on a 12-string.

It took more than a year-and-a-half from the first session at your studio until you started back up at Shangri-La. Was the band tweaking the songs during that time?

It’s kind of not believable in a way, but so much work was done in such a short amount of time to these arrangements. The band was learning the thing, putting it down and doing a little bit of overdubbing. There was some semblance of a melody that Ed had, and then he would finish the song from a vocal standpoint. So many of those songs from the first week were left in that place where there was just a semblance of an Ed melody and this stuff we’d tracked. So, there was nothing to do with these songs until Ed, from his perspective, had put his words and melodies together. On ‘Scared of Fear’ and ‘React, Respond,’ Ed did his thing right then and everyone crafted them together after that. 

‘Wreckage’ was one of the songs that came together at Shangri-La. Can you talk about how it evolved?

That one also started with the riff and everyone kind of formulating sections together. That song just came to Ed right away. Within the first couple takes before the music was even right, his vocals were right. His melodies and words are so strong in that song. Once the initial spark was there and there were a few sections, it was just really about following him. I’m playing a ’54 Telecaster that I got when I was doing the Stones album. Keith [Richards] used that a lot on the record we made and showed me a couple tricks for how to play in an open G tuning. Now, it lives in that tuning. It got brought into the mix on ‘Wreckage,’ so there’s a little bit of crossover on those two albums right there.

The origin of ‘Waiting for Stevie’ is almost too good to be true, in that you and Ed were literally waiting hours for him to show up at your studio to record his parts for a song on Earthling.

We were sitting around with guitars and waiting, and I said, I have this idea. Check it out. He says, that is so fucking weird, because I’ve had this riff for literally years — since albums and albums and albums and albums ago. He showed it to me, and it was almost exactly the same. So, they both kind of melded into each other. We presented that to everyone in the first week, and they all wrote their parts and how the sections would move. It really only became a thing because the thing I showed Ed reminded him of something he’d written that was very similar. The drums on that song are fucking biblical to me. The Matt Cameron dirge! Matt is a pretty stoic guy. He’s like Charlie Watts or something. I was screaming, go harder! Come on! It was like I was at one of their shows or something. At some point, he just had to laugh.

I could definitely see this song being jammed out live.

Oh, yeah. Let McCready go! He would laugh, because something I was screaming from the mountaintops was, this is the return of the Mike McCready guitar solo on a Pearl Jam album. There’s some kind of lead guitar on every song, and on songs like ‘Upper Hand,’ there are two solos. I really love that song. Stone came in with that riff and we jammed it. There were other songs where we’d kind of let it take shape, and once Ed started singing, he’d be like, what if this part doubles? What was cool is that no one presented anything with dry paint. It was all malleable.

You were also able to share this experience with Josh Klinghoffer, who has a writing credit on ‘Something Special.’

Josh, that’s my brother. His talent goes beyond anything comprehensible. Talk about a virtuoso. We had a ball together doing this.

Has there ever been a Pearl Jam song with a gang vocal chorus like on ‘Running?‘

(laughs) [Pearl Jam manager Mark] ‘Smitty’ [Smith] is singing on that one. We needed a gang vocal and I think it was me, Jeff, Stone and Ed that were left at the studio, so we grabbed Smitty, like, we need one more!

Is it possible to quantify what you’ve learned about the members of Pearl Jam through making this record with them?

Well, they love each other so much and it’s such a beautiful thing. I have the most precious pictures of all time of them embracing and enjoying the process of making something really great together. Watching Jeff hear a Stone riff for the first time and then figuring out how to make it singable for Ed. Jeff’s an unbelievable bass player and has only gotten better with time, but sometimes his role is to be the rhythm guitar player because Stone’s stuff is so out there and Mike is surfing over all of it and playing lead. Jeff is the one who’s got to make a base that Ed can cling to. I had worked with Ed before, but he is almost primal in the way that he works. Like, get the fuck out of his way. He’s going to be moving around and putting his whole body into it, and 90% of the song is written in the first 15 minutes of what he’s hearing. The melodies just come to him.

Take the bridge in ‘Dark Matter.’ The riff is (plays riff) very chromatic. Someone like Ozzy would write to that by singing the same melody, but Ed has this way of crafting these brilliant melodies over these weird chords. What he does in a matter of a couple of minutes would take me six months. It’s so natural and unthought that it’s amazing to witness. The power of improvisation is so important in being a great musician. Each of these guys really possesses that. 

You’ve had a very privileged position in that you’ve been able to watch Ed write two albums worth of material over the past couple of years.

I mean, he’s incredible. He’s at the center of it all. Because of how intensely we were working, he was just flowing. There wasn’t time for me to stop and be like, hey man, what’s this about? His voice means so much to me. It was the voice I’d listen to in headphones as a kid, whether it was ‘Leash’ or ‘Nothingman,’ wallowing in tears and feeling that emotion. I’ve always felt so connected to the words coming out of him and applying whatever he’s feeling in that moment to my own life. There were some moments when songs were being written, and I would close my eyes and instantly go back to my childhood bedroom. I’d open my eyes, and he’s right there, now. All I can say is that the lyrical content is extremely intense and extremely soul-gripping and really, really affected me as we were making this music. It was a very beautiful experience — something that none of us will ever forget and something that I think means a lot to the band.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

It’s the proverbial calm before the storm at Pearl Jam‘s Seattle headquarters at the moment, as the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers prepare for the April 19 release of their 12th album, Dark Matter, and a supporting world tour kicking off May 4 in Vancouver. First, they just need to learn how to play those new songs again. “I’m getting the basics going on my own,” founding guitarist Stone Gossard tells SPIN over the phone. “Then, [guitarist] Mike [McCready] and I will start playing some guitar together and mapping things out.”

While fans await Dark Matter, Pearl Jam already have their biggest hit in years on their hands with the album’s title track, which has topped multiple different Billboard rock charts. Its urgent, aggressive sound was inspired by Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt, a lifelong Pearl Jam fan who cultivated a friendship with frontman Eddie Vedder over a period of years before going on to produce his 2022 solo album, Earthling. Vedder got such a kick out of the spontaneity of the experience that he encouraged Pearl Jam to come try it too. Sure, 20 months passed between separate 10-day writing and recording sessions at Watt’s Beverly Hills, Ca., home studio in July 2021 and Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La in Malibu in March 2023, but Pearl Jam work in mysterious ways. Indeed, sometimes the long road to completing an album must be taken, even if the journey on it is unexpectedly quick.

More from Spin:

• THE 40 GREATEST MUSICIANS OF THE LAST 40 YEARS
• Eddie Vedder Covers Devo, Zeppelin At Ohana Festival
• Brandi Carlile Enlists Aaron Dessner, Justin Vernon For New LP

Watt, who earned plaudits for his recent work with the Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop, pushed Pearl Jam to lean into their collective natural songwriting instincts while also coloring the follow-up to 2020’s Gigaton with a modern production touch rarely heard on their prior albums. The songs were hatched with Gossard, McCready, Vedder, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron all together in a room, an approach they’d often previously set aside in favor of bringing in nearly complete demos made on their own time. “There have been different times where each of us individually wanted to break things and move things around and try new stuff. The trick is trying to get that all to align in the same moment, and this was our moment,” Gossard says.

The result is an album with something to love for every iteration of Pearl Jam fan, from kick-ass rockers such as the opening one-two punch of “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond” to the open-hearted, acoustic-flecked ballad “Wreckage” and the swaggering grooves of “Waiting for Stevie,” a “Breath”/”State of Love and Trust”-style throwback Vedder and Watt started writing while waiting hours for Stevie Wonder to show up and record a guest turn on Earthling. There are songs about the challenges of parenting (“Something Special”), being visited by Laurel Canyon legends in a dream (“Won’t Tell”) and trying to make genuine human connections at a time when such a thing seems more difficult than ever (“Setting Sun”). You’ll hear a beguiling synth intro one moment and McCready playing some serious “Yellow Ledbetter”-ish blues guitar the next — a sonic kaleidoscope of Pearl Jam past, present and future over the course of 48 minutes.

Below, Gossard walks SPIN through the making of Dark Matter, collaborating with Watt and what new doors it has opened for a band nearly 34 years into their still-evolving career.

Let’s talk about the unusual origins of this album. My understanding is that Ed was working on his own at Andrew’s studio in the summer of 2021 and got so inspired that he asked the other Pearl Jam members to fly down and join him.

That sounds about right. I know that he was full-on making his solo record already and maybe close to even being done with it. So I think he probably went through that process with Andrew and then was like, this is fun. I don’t know if this is gonna work for Pearl Jam, but let’s just jump into Andrew’s studio, which has got, you know, everything. Like, come to L.A. Don’t bring anything. Come. Just play. It’s not our normal M.O., which is great. That’s what was exciting to all of us. Andrew is a guitar collector, so everything you could ever want to try to play is there. You’re diving in headfirst to a new situation that you’re excited about because one, Ed’s excited about it. And two, you don’t know Andrew or anything about him, but it’s different. What’s the worst that can happen? It doesn’t work out, or it shakes something different loose.

Is it fair to say there was a time when you guys would have been less apt to do something like that, especially on such short notice?

We were comfortable because of Ed having already said, I think this is a good choice. Let’s experiment together. Gigaton was made over a long period of time. It was done from individual demos, using the parts that were raw and rough from them that we loved, but also adding onto them. It was a cool process, but this was the anti-that. This was, you barely bring in a riff, but in 30 minutes, here’s two or three chords you might not have even known how to play but they sound cool in the bridge. We encouraged Matt Cameron to be more and more aggressive. Let’s make these feel like they’re being enacted right in the moment. That was what was exciting about the process with Andrew.

At first, we were there for probably 10 days. We knocked those first two songs out and I think we recorded the basics for ‘Waiting for Stevie’ on day two or three. We recorded three or four more quickly like that. As we got home and listened, some of those started to fall back into being not as urgent and more cerebral … maybe more arranged. They didn’t have the excitement we got from that first batch, where it was like everybody jumping off the cliff together. We got what we felt like was maybe half a record done or close to it, and then we hung. Lots of things went on. Ed went on tour. I don’t know whether Andrew finished with Ozzy first and then made the Rolling Stones record, but he’s constantly working. There was a scheduling thing where we just didn’t get back together again right away. The next round was a year later and we said, okay, we’re gonna finish the record. We’ve got two weeks at Shangri-La.

At that point, were you armed with new bits you were hoping to turn into fresh songs?

I’m sure everyone had some riffs and some arrangements. The thing is, the more it’s arranged and you’re attached to it, the harder it is to work other suggestions in. The way we were working really was, everybody in the room, let’s pull something out and really work it over together. In general, you were better off having a sketch than you were a complete idea. People getting invested in a song and, reacting and then hearing their own parts in it was the alchemy making these songs come to life.

Had you ever set foot in Shangri-La before?

No. It’s a beautiful, beautiful spot and it sounded good. It had a pool table and no TVs. Andrew does things really pro. We had an amazing chef and we ate great food. We recorded for 10 days, and we got to listen to the old stuff. We were editing, like, this is a keeper, that one is a keeper. We got to the point where it was like, we need three more. We were scrambling and burning the candle on both ends, but it was also fucking great. It’s exactly what made sense for the band.

Let’s talk about Andrew. This is the first time where someone who’s such an overt fan, but also a music business professional, gets to have their hands on the wheel and even help Pearl Jam write songs. Did he encourage the band to do anything differently? Was he pushing you to rock more?

Subtly, there were things he would do, and he probably wouldn’t even talk to us about them, but we were playing through his gear. He’s genuinely a fan and was affected by the band at a young age. He’s also a great guitar player and a great engineer, and he’s manifesting on a high level — like, this is my dream. When I was a kid, I said that I was gonna make a Pearl Jam record, and now it’s happening. We’re all players in Andrew’s bigger narrative going on, which is him collecting his childhood favorite bands.

In the past, [longtime producer] Brendan O’Brien would help us with a chord or two every once in a while and be the outside ear. It’s hard because even if you hear that something’s not quite working, it’s better that it comes from somebody who’s not in the band. Andrew had a guitar on the whole time. We would all play together, and some of his playing is on the album. For the most part, he was feeling the song with us and experiencing it as it goes down. He loves our oddball, idiosyncratic things, but he also pushed us to get to the point, to be aggressive, to be ourselves and not shy away from who we are.

Do you recall some of the things that came out of the first round of plugging in and messing around?

‘Scared of Fear’ and ‘React, Respond’ were done on the first day. We just did those one, two.

Let’s go through all the songs. ‘Scared of Fear’ sounds like a Stone riff. Is that yours?

Yeah, it was. It was a Stone two-parter, you know? It evolved. Ed was like, maybe this one part goes two times or three times. We just sat down and hammered it out and it was recorded during the first day.

‘React, Respond’ has some heavy Police and Devo vibes.

Yeah, it’s the best. I love it because my part is so caveman on it. I’m just hitting those big open E’s throughout the verses. It’s so fun.

‘Wreckage’ dials down the aggressiveness temporarily, with shades of Tom Petty.

Andrew and Ed worked that out together. One morning, we came in and they had something going on. That was definitely a Shangri-La track. That one probably has the biggest build for me personally, in terms of hearing it at first and thinking, it’s kind of an Ed song. I wasn’t quite aware of its potency until later. Andrew encouraged me to play this little harmonic, acoustic part almost like a Cure melody. I’ve been playing along with the song to relearn it and I’m really looking forward to playing it live. It’s a really powerful lyric and I think we did a really great job of taking something and really pushing it to its limit.

‘Dark Matter’ showcases Matt Cameron and has some tasty riffs in the vein of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. How did this song come to life?

Matt comes into the studio and tunes up his drums every morning. 90% of the time, he’ll start playing a beat just to warm up. When we heard him play what became ‘Dark Matter,’ we were like, oh my god, that’s fucking classic. We asked him to let us record it and we made a little loop. Jeff and I took that home and both of us were writing to it. We both came in the next day and played our parts. We needed a bridge, and then Mike had a bridge. We had that song in literally 24 hours, and I look at it as the lighthouse of what’s possible for the band in terms of changing our writing style and really honoring the rhythm first and foremost. I look at that as a Matt Cameron song, because I don’t know that I’ve heard a drum beat start a song like that. It feels unique. Ed’s lyric is very timely, even though I don’t know exactly what it means. It just feels good to hear somebody say that. I love that it’s really hard rock but it doesn’t feel gratuitous or fake. It feels real to me. I wrote the little [hums the descending riff in the song’s pre-chorus], and everybody’s got something in that song that’s special.

There’s a guitar effect similar to what was used on [the 2002 Pearl Jam song] ‘You Are.’

Yeah, it’s got that Eventide tremolo guitar effect on my part throughout it. It’s bouncing around in the rhythm and creating a backbeat.

‘Won’t Tell’ is like Pearl Jam refracted through the Cure or U2.

It’s really special. Jeff wrote that song. He told me he had a dream about Joni Mitchell, and maybe even Neil Young was there. She said something about the lyric ‘waiting for your message to come. Can you heal? Can you feel the chains in my heart?’ Then Ed took all of that and we reinterpreted the whole thing. It evolved quite a bit from where Jeff had it, but we knew that lyric and we knew the spirit of it. We started going down the path of those 16th notes, with Matt playing that hi-hat groove that’s reminiscent of the Cure or U2 where you groove into a beat and the drums become a little bit more of a backbeat. Ed’s vocal is just soaring. It’s gorgeous. It’s one of those songs that’s easy to play. It kind of plays itself. It really does have a different quality to it. It’s a real amalgamation of, being inspired by a dream, starting with a rudimentary arrangement and then us taking it and completing it. It was really fun to do.

‘Upper Hand’ starts off somewhat resigned, a la ‘All Those Yesterdays or ‘Parachutes,’ but has quite a build at the end.

I had those two parts as a starting point, but that song definitely evolved too. Ed helped with the verses and they really changed a lot. The verses remind me of Bob Dylan or something like that, where it’s not so much about the melody but the delivery. I love how Ed can be so many different people and you can hear his influences, and yet it’s still him. He takes and picks from so many different places.

Even though it didn’t start with the other band members in the room, ‘Waiting for Stevie’ sounds more like early or Singles-era Pearl Jam than just about anything I’ve heard from the band in a long time.

Yes, and I think Andrew had more to do with that song than any song on the record because in a sense, it’s almost a tribute to Soundgarden. It has a riff that gives Matt Cameron the opportunity to be as great as we know him to be. I think that drum fill coming out of the bridge is probably one of the greatest drum fills of all time. There’s just no way you can’t make the Mötley Crüe sign. I love that song. It’s the way the bass line and the guitar line play against each other melodically. To me, it feels kind of like a hit, you know what I mean? I’ll be curious where it ends up sitting in the pantheon of favorites among Pearl Jam fans.

There’s a little snippet of something after ‘Stevie’ and before the next song, ‘Running.’ What is that?

It’s a little segue now, but we worked on it as a song that was never finished from that first session. We all loved one particular part of it, which Jeff, Andrew and I tweaked a little bit. In the end, we just decided it should become a transition.

On ‘Running,’ it’s rare to hear a Pearl Jam song with this chant-y, gang vocal chorus. It just sounds like fun.

Jeff had the main parts for that one, and we worked it over as a band. I love the bridge. I don’t know what the hell those chords are that Mike’s playing, but it sounds original. It’s one of the last ones we recorded at Shangri-La, and it was fun to come up with one more uptempo song. Ed’s vocal dexterity here and on a few other spots on the album is just stunning. Same thing goes with that second verse of ‘React, Respond’ where he’s almost frickin’ rapping.

Ed previously said that [touring member] Josh Klinghoffer had a big hand in ‘Something Special.’

‘Something Special’ was recorded in that first session at Andrew’s house and those are Josh’s initial chords. We moved things around a little bit, but the song really came from him. I love that it’s a song about parenting and kids, but I also love that Josh Klinghoffer joins the band live on tour and also writes a song for the album. I just think that’s fuckin’ cool.

We’re in the home stretch. What can you tell us about ‘Got To Give?’

That’s an Ed song. It definitely has kind of a Who vibe, and it rocks. I have a little guitar lead in there that I really like a lot — a fun, melodic thing that happens at the end of the bridge. I’m looking forward to playing this song live.

‘Setting Sun’ is an epic closer. Did it naturally feel like the perfect way to end the album?

We were looking for a vibe that felt percussive and cool and a little bit hypnotic without trying to get to any huge destination, although I think we got there anyway. The mood is supposed to be this in-between state. This is another song that’s opening doors for us and I think we can do more of, without feeling like we have to get crazy.

The album has a vaguely unsettling ambient intro, which evokes the ‘Master/Slave’ intro and outros on Ten.

Jeff and Andrew came up with that. We wanted to open the album with ‘Scared of Fear,’ but that would have been a dead start to set the table. So, we built this little intro, and I’m sure Andrew was excited about having something that harkened back to Ten a little bit.

How are you feeling about incorporating this batch of material into the live shows? 

I’m excited. I think everybody is, and our goal is to play a lot of new stuff. So, listen to the record, everybody. Know the material! We’re gonna play it. We’ll have some new production too. We’re working on something right now, so it will be a little bit of a different show.

When Pearl Jam finally played again in 2021 after a three-year break, the shows were comparatively shorter than the three-hour-plus marathons from before the pandemic. Does that help the band stay fresh and not burn itself out?

Well, everyone’s almost 60 years old. So if you want us to keep doing this, we can’t do it the same way we did over the last 10 years or so. The length is gonna be a little bit shorter in general, but there will still be a lot of variety and we’re still going to take chances. We just might do that in different ways. We’ve been so fortunate that our fans have been so open to our whims and experimentations, even if sometimes they wish we’d play ‘Jeremy’ and instead we play a B-side not very well (laughs). They’ve grown to understand and even appreciate that. It’s not going to be a marathon every night, because we just can’t do that. Ed and Matt in particular are physically doing so much on stage.

Let’s close with this. What has the experience of making Dark Matter meant to you, and what might it lead to for the band moving forward?

I’m not racing to reflect, which should be the name of my new biography, but I’m looking forward to where it can go. I personally think that the experience of working with Andrew was fantastic and I would love another shot at making a record with him. The chemistry we had and continue to have with him is something worth exploring. He’s an astronaut. He likes to go out and try different ideas, but he also has a great sensitivity to the things he loves about this band, and will let us know if we’re not moving in a direction that feels authentic.

All the drifting we’ve done is important. Now, No Code is one of people’s favorite Pearl Jam records, but at the time, a lot of fans felt like, what is this? Where are they going? If we had worked with Andrew on our fourth record and continued to work with him, we might not have gone into some places that we needed to go. The timing of all of this is good though, because we’re still energized. We have a lot of perspective on how lucky we are to still be playing music and being creative together.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Taj Mahal flows effortlessly through his soundcheck at the Luckman Arts Complex, an elegant theater at California State University, Los Angeles. It’s only the second show of Mahal’s tour supporting Swingin’ Live at the Church in Tulsa, his latest live album with the Taj Mahal Sextet. But, at 81 years of age and over six decades of playing music, Mahal doesn’t need much preparation to perform.

The roots and blues musician is considered a national treasure. Besides winning four Grammys (and being nominated for 15), Mahal has been awarded several honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Fine Arts from his home state’s University of Massachusetts Amherst. For a lifetime of contribution to World’s history of Music, Mahal was given the United States Congressional Recognition Award, in addition to an Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. An inductee to the Blues Music Hall of Fame, he’s played with everyone from the Rolling Stones and Etta James to Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Wynton Marsalis, Morgan Freeman, and Keb Mo’. Among his numerous studio, live, soundtrack and compilation albums, there is even a collection compiled by one of film’s most revered directors: Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues – Taj Mahal.

Shuffling carefully off stage, Mahal settles into a straight-backed chair in his sparse dressing room. You won’t find an alcohol-and-junk-food-filled rider here. Instead, he has a tidy set up with a carafe of water and a small electric kettle, plus fresh ginger and lemon for his voice. As legendary a musician as Taj Mahal is, the fact that he’s clearly had an elevated upbringing is what stands out to me. He sips from a bottle of ginger beer as he enquires about my cultural background, how I came to write for SPIN, and if I’d like something to drink. His comfortable sandals-cum-shoes (his dress, or should I say “church” shoes, are tucked under the table), colorful jacket, beaded bracelet, fish necklace, and red bandana accentuate his down-to-earth energy.

For tonight’s show, Mahal will change into his signature straw hat and shades, his hippie chic giving away to resort wear. He looks like he could be on holiday, but he’s hard at work. Positioned at the edge of the stage, he pulls from the guitars, ukulele, banjo, and dobro arranged around him in a circle. The riveted audience is seated, but every so often, someone—usually a woman—will stand up as if possessed and begin moving to the music. The diverse crowd is older and younger, dressed up and styled out, be it in fishnets or a sharp suit. These aren’t fans as much as acolytes. They know every song and movement, anticipate every word, and react to the emotion-filled performance almost involuntarily.

Mahal would be forgiven if he were arrogant and removed. He’s earned the exalted status he occupies. But he is warm and inclusive. He gives props to countless musicians during our conversation. His voice is a gravelly rumble, and he talks about farming almost as much as he talks about music, a throwback to his college days studying agriculture and animal husbandry. “I would have been glad to be a farmer and only play on Saturday night,” he says. “But the music started happening, and I started being able to make a living.” That hasn’t stopped Mahal from fashioning a farming analogy for almost anything. In the hour or so that he regales me with the stories he’s been telling for the last half-century, his phone dings incessantly. But he never looks at it, confirming once again that he was raised right.

SPIN: How did your family and upbringing influence you as a person and a musician?

TAJ MAHAL: My father was first-generation. His parents came from the Caribbean. My mom was from South Carolina. She was a Southern American woman but married outside that culture. Two Afro people, one from the United States and one moved here from the Caribbean, culturally, was different. They were really good together. Very smart people. It was an exciting childhood with lots of music and culture and food and people from all over the place. They gave us an incredible beginning, which opened us up to being connected to people globally. You got a feeling of the world, but I didn’t want to be wandering around from culture to culture. I wanted to be representing something.

My parents moved to Massachusetts because there wasn’t much work for my father. They wanted to raise a big family, so he went where the work was. That’s where I grew up, in a community with music and people coming from all over the place. My culture, other cultures, an amazing amount of humanity that worked together. Those years, the factories were working three shifts a day so men could come up from the South or the Caribbean or Italy or wherever, get a foothold, house, good schools. There was a lot going.

Your mother worked as a teacher in Massachusetts?

Yes. She had 40 years. The problem with guys is that they take their position for granted and they abuse that privilege. If you look at the Serengeti plains, you don’t ever see the males abusing their privilege with the women or vice versa. Only when you get into the agricultural sector is where it changes in America. Another place is Alaska. I was much more comfortable with the women there than the women in the cities. They could drive a tractor. They’re milking cows. They’re having kids, nursing a baby, cooking. Not that it has to be domestic. If agriculture is what we’re in, everybody helps. I grew up knowing lots of women who were professional but who handled everything else too, with glory.

My mother was a professional woman, as well as a gospel singer. She told my father, “We’re having fun, but what are we doing?” He said he wanted to have a big family. She said, “At some point, I’m going to want to go back to school and get my master’s degree. Are you willing to work and make that life easy enough for me to be able to do that?” He said, “Sure, but in the deal, I want a grand piano in the house.” He was a classically trained bebop piano player, played everything: swing, jazz, jump blues. He also bought a radio record player so he could play all the music. He said, “The music is always changing. I’ve got to keep up with the records.”

When did you start doing music?

Somewhere around 8 or 9. There were some interesting things going on in music that were being shared, the framework of the blues and the tone of other music that I could hear. One of the first albums I bought with my own money was called Port Said. Maybe it was the lady on the cover belly dancing that made me buy it, but I listened to it a lot. I was making a connection with the music. Music jumps in before the words do. I don’t know what the words are, but I know what I’m feeling. Eventually I knew it’s not just here in increments that are sold by big record companies. This is people’s history. I wanted to maintain it. That’s why I got into it, to keep bringing these little jewels out of the past and bring them forward. I found out that’s a particular way that certain African people do. They reach back every now and then, bring something good, put it on the table, and everybody says, “We’ll do that again.”

It seems like unlike most people, you skipped popular music and went straight to the origins.

Yes. By the time rock and roll came, I had already heard the imprint that it came from as a complete music. I was like, “Why are you so excited about this? This is the stuff over here. Why don’t you get excited about that?” But it’s what people wanted.

What pushed you in the musical direction you went in?

It was the water I swam in. From this perspective, I could see I was really surrounded. I was deep in the water of the music. When I started, it was really important to play for myself. Then I had some opportunities to join different bands. I knew a lot of music to play. Those guys didn’t know the origins of the music. I would bring them songs I would think they knew, and I had to teach them the songs. We ended up having bands that sounded so different. They were oriented toward: “It’s on the radio, therefore it is.” I was like, “It’s in the universe, therefore it is.” I realized if it wasn’t somebody else’s music, I didn’t really know the music or the tradition or any of the people who were in it. That’s when I started buckling down and paying attention.

Can you pinpoint some musicians from whom you learned?

The beginnings of playing guitar [came] from my next-door neighbor who came from North Carolina. Then my neighbors up the street who are from Mississippi. I didn’t learn to play none of their tunes, but I watched them play. It had nothing to do with sitting down with notes and being taught by some professor somewhere. I had two weeks of formal training on the piano. The woman told my mother, and I quote, “Mildred, I wouldn’t waste my money on that boy. He already playing boogie-woogie.”

You get inspired by people who say “I watched so-and-so and learned. So-and-so showed me how to play this song.” When you get that song, that’s a key that gets you on the inside. From there, you expand. When I first learned to play, it was very different. I still play exactly what I learned. But I got more and more interested in the guitar. I target what I want. I get on and keep learning. At my age—I’ll be 82 my next birthday—I’m still learning.

What brought you to the West Coast?

Ry Cooder. I heard his ability to be able to teach and play music through another musician. I was just struck because it was the real music. I asked, “Where did you learn to play music like that?” He says, “This guy named Ry Cooder out on the West Coast.” I’m like, “Wow. You think that guy would like to be in a band? Can we get him out here?” He says, “I don’t think so. He’s 17 years old.” I said, “We’re going to California.” Just like that we came. Within two or three days of me being here, I met him and in no time we had the band Rising Sons together. I was 23. Ry was playing like a grown man. That was the whole thing I couldn’t get out of these other musicians. They were happy to imitate what they heard. Some very good. Others even better. But Ry heard the music and he put himself in the music. He is a very creative musician, loves a lot of different types of music. We have similar interests.

What was it like out here at the time?

It was really different for me because I came from the East. But there were some places where people really played the real music. The Improv on Melrose used to be the best music club in Los Angeles for roots music, Ash Grove. Lightning Hopkins, Judy Wells, Georgia Monica Smith, Big Mama Thornton, the Chambers Brothers. It was a good scene. People knew what the music was. It was not the popular music. Popular at that time was Sonny and Cher “I Got You Babe.”

Pretty soon it got to be an incredible scene with Love, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Wrecking Crew. It was a lot going on. There was emphasis on the commercial side. I didn’t particularly care for some of the studio musicians. They wouldn’t touch some of it because it wasn’t commercial enough. It was how they were making their living. I didn’t want to take my song and give it to the studio musicians. They put it out. It becomes a hit. Then you have a band copying your music. Here’s a band. We go into the studio. We make this music. We go on the road, and we play it. That’s all I know.

Knowing what you want and sticking with it from so early on, that is something that is difficult for a lot of musicians.

Making music, that’s why I came into it. My ancestors, my DNA, my culture, all these things contribute to me being honorable toward that culture and representing. I’m not letting it down. This is what we do.

What were your experiences with the Rolling Stones like?

They were big stars, but they came to the Ash Grove. They’d be rapt and having a wonderful time: meet, take pictures, and just so excited. This is why the Stones are still there because they get in the real part of the music, and they always knew it. They were always inspired by it. They didn’t just grab it and turn around and run forward.

We collided when we were playing The Whisky a Go Go. I looked down off the stage, playing my harmonica, and I said, “Wait a minute, that’s Mick Jagger dancing; that’s Keith Richards; that’s Brian Jones. Over here is Eric Burdon and Hilton Valentine.” They’re all dancing and grooving. I said to myself, “When you get off this stage, you need to go talk to those guys.” I can tell you exactly what I said: “Listen, let me tell you something. I don’t know what you got in the water over there, but if there’s any projects that you’ve got that you think we can be a part of, don’t hesitate to call.” Four months later, eight first-class tickets BOAC, Los Angeles to London. Unbelievable. I’ll use a correct English term, “whilst” there, I never stuck my hand in my pocket for anything other than chewing gum, cigarettes, postcards, or gifts to bring home. They gave us everything. If there was royal treatment, we got it from the Rolling Stones.

There is an entry for you in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It says you created what’s now known as “world music.”

It didn’t have a specific name that they could focus on. I didn’t realize I had that ability to hear, to listen globally because I come from everywhere. When I’m listening in South America: tango, samba, choro, all have their roots in Africa. Candomblé, mambo, bachata, salsa, they all have their roots in Africa. I’m just playing the music from those perspectives.

You’ve had musical overlaps with children’s books and songs. How did that come about?

As a kid, we all heard Disney stuff on records. The story that you knew in the cartoon, that you knew in the book, had a musical component to it. I realized that if I ever got a chance, I would like to do some music for young kids. I would have been able to do an awful lot if I heard certain kinds of music as a kid. What happened in the ‘80s was I had a lull. The last major record company I was with was in the ‘70s. From then it was one-offs, two-offs. The ‘80s came in and I didn’t have a contract, so I thought now is a good time to do some of that stuff like children’s music, so I got busy.

It’s like farming. That field has been lying fallow for a bunch of years. Let’s get in there and get it plowed up and get some fertilizer, get something going. Somebody pointed out to me that I didn’t go into farming, but I farmed music. That’s not a bad point.

Is that also how the literature overlap happened with Langston Hughes’ and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mule Bone?

That was an interesting project. I had never read anything that had to do with farming. I came upon Zora Neale Hurston. She did a book called Mules and Men. I was taken by this woman. She was one hell of a writer. 

One day they rang me from the front desk of a hotel saying, “There’s a gentleman here with his son. They would like to have you come down.” He put him on the phone and said, “I was the last secretary to Langston Hughes. He and Zora Neale Hurston had written a play, which had not been done for 60 years. They’re getting ready to put it on Broadway. And we would like you to be the person to do the music. We can’t think of anybody else.” I came down, and this guy had a book that was that thick of Langston Hughes’ poems and writings. “At your leisure, put these poems to music.” So I got busy and had big fun doing it.

I got to stand off the stage and hear the music play. I put the band together. I brought Kenny Neal, who was a guitar player from Louisiana. It would be terrible to have some actor that doesn’t really know how to play guitar be on stage. I hustled this guy in there. He got to be the lead in the play. It ran for about nine months at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. So many nights, for the first time, I was off the stage listening to the music that I’d written.

You have a new live album that was recorded at The Church in Tulsa, the home of Leon Russell. How did that come about?

A woman that’s coming to the show tonight, her name is Claudia Lennear. She used to be one of the Ikettes. She also was part of 20 Feet From Stardom. She also went on the road with Joe Cocker. She’s “Brown Sugar” to Mick Jagger. She got called by Teresa Knox, who runs out the studio down there in Oklahoma. She came down and did a show, and she was just knocked out. They started talking. She brought my name up. Teresa said, “Do you think he would want to come down here and do a project?” Claudia talked to me. I was recording with a sextet, and I said, “If we can get a gig there, that will be the perfect way.” Because we wouldn’t have to have a gig and then stop and record. While we’re doing the gig, you keep recording then you get it in the early stages of being put together. There’s something there that’s magic.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

In the music world, a band is never really gone – just ask Sublime.

Indeed, at a time when unlikely reunions have become, well, likely, Sublime was rarely mentioned as a possibility, for good reason: their original lineup could never reform.

More from Spin:

• Sublime Revisiting Third LP In Full At Red Rocks
• Sublime Unplugs For ‘Lipps Service Live!’ Concert Series
• Sublime To Rock Lipps Service Live! Concert Series

That’s because singer-songwriter-guitarist Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose in May 1996, two months before the Long Beach, Ca., natives released their self-titled third album. Despite the tragedy, it sold 5 million copies thanks to the enduring hits “What I Got” and “Santeria” powered by the band’s punk-rock-reggae fusion. That sound would influence a new generation of bands.

Twenty eight years later, Sublime t-shirts can still be seen on celebrities, hipsters, kids and at big box retailers. Lana Del Rey even enlisted bassist Eric Wilson to play on her cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time.”

Following Nowell’s death, Wilson and Gaugh joined forces with old Long Beach friends in Long Beach Dub Allstars, which lasted from 1997-2002. In 2009, Wilson and Gaugh returned to familiar musical territory by enlisting singer Rome Ramirez for what became known as Sublime With Rome, and performed the self-titled songs for the first time live. However, Gaugh had a falling out with management and left the band two years later.

Fast forward to the middle of 2021, by which point Sublime With Rome existed largely to tour on Sublime’s legacy. Despite being partners on a shelved documentary, Wilson and Gaugh hadn’t been in touch in ages, but Wilson’s wedding that year helped them rekindle their friendship. Every so often, they’d talk on the phone, and late last year, at the behest of their old producer Paul Leary, they recorded a track together for the first time since Long Beach Dub Allstars.

In the meantime, Nowell’s son Jakob was carving out his own musical career, first in Law and presently in Jakobs Castle. He was less than a year old when his father died, and even though he has considered Wilson and Gaugh his uncles for his entire life, he never thought joining forces with them was within the realm of possibility until 2023.

Wilson and Gaugh received a call about playing a benefit for Bad Brains frontman H.R., and Wilson suggested that Jakob join them for the show. That led to an initial jam session to check the rapport. Once they got going, they knew it could be special. Beyond the public debut of the younger Nowell in his father’s position, their December performance at the aforementioned benefit was the first time Wilson and Gaugh played together live since 2011.

Now, what was intended as a one-off has grown into something much bigger. In April, Sublime will play in front of thousands of fans at Coachella – a far cry from the Long Beach backyard brouhahas on which the band originally made its name. The fact that fellow ‘90s band and their longtime friends No Doubt is also on the bill further demonstrates the timeless quality of the music originating from Long Beach and Orange County at that time. The band also has several other festival dates confirmed, but for now, they’re focusing on the big one in the desert.

SPIN spoke with Nowell and Gaugh separately over Zoom about the band’s prospects, how the reunion came together and whether there could be new music on the way.

You previously said that your sobriety helped you embrace the Sublime legacy. How did that happen?

Jakob Nowell: Growing up in the household that I did, a lot of people might think there’s a silver spoon or nepotism element. To that, I say, I wish! Although there were certain opportunities I was granted, it’s not like I was the son of some insanely powerful music executive or something like that. My dad had a punk rock band that got more popular after his death and so it was not this crazy thing. My mom and stepdad were in their 20s and it was a party lifestyle non-stop when I was growing up. At the same time, it prematurely led me down a path of addiction, although I think I would have gotten there no matter what. Going through that experience of addiction uniquely connected me to my father’s music in a way that had nothing to do with us being related. I’ve even had fans say to me that it was a more sufficient deterrent to trying drugs. It was part of the impetus of how I came to be asked to sing for my dad’s and my uncles’ band.

When did you and Eric kick around the idea of playing music again as Sublime?

Bud Gaugh: I got a call over the summer last year from [Sublime producer/Butthole Surfers member] Paul Leary. He said, I’m in the studio right now with Wilson and he’s jamming and writing these songs with H.R. They’re doing it to a drum track and the songs deserve your drums on here. So I called Eric and we played phone tag for probably a month or so and we finally got together. He said H.R. wasn’t doing so well and we’re gonna do this benefit show for him. I think it would be really cool if you, me and Jake do it. So Eric’s transitioning from Sublime With Rome at this point. So, we all got together and jammed it out to see if it could work.

I know I can jam with Eric. Eric knows he can jam with me. But Jake? Well, can we even jam with Jake? Are we even gonna get along? Is it gonna groove?

When did you first jam together?

Gaugh: In late November. It happened fast. 

What was that like? 

Gaugh: I closed my eyes and it was like going back to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in Brad’s dad’s garage. ​​Relearning all these songs all over again was great and it had a little edge on it because Eric and I already know him. It was eerily familiar to that point and time in my life. After the first couple of songs, it was surreal: a lot of emotions, a lot of anticipation and anxiety. With Eric, it was like riding a bike. His father trained us how to play so it was like, alright, let’s do this. Pop open a beer and here we go. It was reminiscent of the early days.

Nowell: It was surreal – not because of who they were, but because they’re so good. They’re tight without sacrificing any of that chaos. I’m hoping we get better and sound better, but there’s always gonna be people out there who don’t like my way of doing it. They don’t like me singing up there. They don’t think I’m good enough at guitar. This new era of Sublime doesn’t have to be for them, but that is not what this is about. This is for the people out there who still want to experience the music in some capacity. I’ve got to do it the most genuine way I can. I want to be well-rehearsed, and I want to take my gig seriously. Sometimes it’s gonna be messy and crazy and chaotic. 

Was there a specific moment when you knew the time was right for you to play music with them?

Nowell: Last year, I was with my band Jakobs Castle touring in Northern California. Whenever I’m up in that area, I always try to take a trip through Petaluma [because] the Phoenix Theatre was the last place where my dad and Sublime ever played a show. The venue is a little community center now. There are skate ramps there, and I sort of walk around and trip out and have my little moment. I get up there on the stage and sort of reflect like, ‘Wow, this is really where it all went down.’ I’m on stage and then I hear clapping on the other side of the door. Theaters like that usually have double doors off to the side, and there’s probably an old green room in there. Then, I hear a big audience.

I opened the door, and what did I see? A huge AA or NA meeting happening in there. Everyone at the meeting was cool, young punk rock-looking folks, and here they are coming together, like a family. At one point, I stood up and said, ‘This is who I am and my dad had died of a heroin overdose in a band that played here. That’s his writing on the wall.’ 

That meeting coincided with my uncle Eric not wanting to play with Sublime With Rome anymore. I’m sorry, but without one of the original members of the band, that’s not Sublime. It’s something totally different. And if Eric wants to do Sublime with Bud, and they want me to sing in the band, I felt like I had this custodial duty to pay my respect and homage.

How did you get to that point?

Nowell: I have to respect where I came from because I wouldn’t be doing this if not for my dad, my uncles and everybody else they were involved with and worked with. When asked to do it, I almost felt like I couldn’t possibly do this. It’s not my place. That isn’t right. But it’s simply my custodial duty. I want to make it clear that Sublime is where the members of actual Sublime are playing together. I’m not Sublime, I don’t want to act like I have any entitlement, right or any of this stuff. He was just my dad, and I want to help out in any way that I can be a custodian of the music.

What do you have planned for Coachella?

Gaugh: We’re not gonna go for a whole Hollywood production. No extra crap. That’s what Sublime was back then. We set up, we kicked ass or fell down (laughs). We might venture into a different version here or there to maybe do some improv dub stuff. 

After Coachella and some of these other festivals, what’s next for Sublime?

Gaugh: We’ll see how it goes from the rehearsals, but I’m pretty certain we’re gonna see some music coming out with this project.

Nowell: Sublime is gonna be playing a few shows a year and some festivals, and I’m hoping to get to those alternative scenes and work with cool alternative artists. I’m going to be touring with Jakobs Castle and I hope both things can fuel each other. The way I look at it is, you have these two dudes who are best fucking friends playing in the same band and they want me to be involved with them because I’m their buddy’s kid. I have to do this. I don’t have an option. I hope we can add to the legacy of this band. Hopefully we can get Gwen Stefani to come up with us to perform [Sublime’s] ‘Saw Red.’

Gaugh: I mean, come on. It seems like a no-brainer.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

If anyone could use a rest, it is Duff McKagan. At the start of the year, the Guns N’ Roses bassist played on Iggy Pop’s new album before joining the rock legend on his West Coast tour. Six weeks later, McKagan headed out on Guns N’ Roses’ nearly six-month world tour which wrapped earlier this month in Mexico.

McKagan will finally have downtime at Thanksgiving, but not before he finishes making the media rounds to promote his recently released record, Lighthouse, his third solo album to date. Plaintive, rootsy, and punk-tinged, Lighthouse was produced by Martin Feveyear, who produced two Duff McKagan’s Loaded albums in the aughts. Beyond his vocals, McKagan plays acoustic guitar, bass and drums on the album, which is the follow-up to 2019’s Shooter Jennings-produced Tenderness.

More from Spin:

• Dizzy Reed’s Tour Entertainment Essentials
• Guns N’ Roses Gather For 2026 Tour, New Songs
• Foo Fighters, Guns N’ Roses Ready For Rockville

Throughout Lighthouse, McKagan doesn’t shy away from sharing his feelings about his family or the state of the world. On the title track, which pays homage to his wife of 25 years and co-host of the SiriusXM radio show Three Chords & the Truth, McKagan pleads to her, “I washed up on the rocks there / all broke up on the stone / my legs are weak on dry land / but my heart is not alone.”

As pulsing mellotron and warm acoustic guitar lines give way to a powerful crescendo, McKagan reminds us of what matters most: “I’m coming home to you.” Pop returns the favor by appearing on a reprise of the song to close the album. Elsewhere, the album’s first single “I Saw God on 10th St.” is a brash rocker warning of holy vengeance unless humanity gets it together: “I saw God on 10th St. / says we’re rotten to the core / some said we will end in fire / repent now or there is no hope.”

Sitting at a café in Los Angeles noshing on fruit on a breezy late-fall afternoon, McKagan tells SPIN about the making of Lighthouse, his reaction to one of his songs being publicly praised by Bob Dylan, and the thrill of working with Iggy Pop. 

SPIN: Did your desire to make singer/songwriter albums begin with Tenderness?

Duff McKagan: I started to write like this around 2014. Then Guns went on tour [in 2016], so I didn’t have time to record these songs until 2019. After I recorded with Shooter and toured with his band [in 2019], it was the first time I delved into what’s become my favorite way to write songs, which is on acoustic guitar. I’ve always written on it, but with a mind for the song to be electric and faster. Now, I’m writing on acoustic at this tempo because it is where the song is going to be and I’ll fill everything else from there.

You then went back on the road with Guns N’ Roses from late 2019 to early 2020, when COVID was just starting to spread around the world. 

Yeah. We got into rehearsals and had a sense of what was going on. We kept the doors of the rehearsal room open and started washing our hands up to our elbows. My nephew works at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and told me this [virus] is different. We went and played our first show in Mexico City because, at that time, [COVID-19] was just in Seattle and Asia, not in Central and South America. It ended up being the last show on Earth.

How many songs did you write and record?

I had so many songs. As one month turned to two and turned to 16, I ended up with 60 songs. 

With 60 songs written, why didn’t you release an album earlier?

I didn’t want it to be considered a COVID record, because it wasn’t. This record has a lot of reflection, but that’s what I do anyhow. Then finding a time to put it out when Guns isn’t touring is another tricky thing. This record came out on Oct. 20, and the Guns tour was supposed to end on Oct. 16 [laughs]. Axl likes it and was talking about it at the shows, which was very sweet of him.

How did you distill Lighthouse down to 11 tracks?

I knew when I recorded ‘Lighthouse’ that I wanted it to be the first song on the album. When I got to ‘I Just Don’t Know,’ I knew it would be the last song. From there, I tried to fill it in, almost like a novel, with peaks and valleys and a story from beginning to end. I like to listen to records from cut one to the end. I grew up at a time when records took you through stories, and that’s what I tried to do with Lighthouse. I want to tell the truth, our truths. You don’t need a lot of fancy riffs and shit to get your message across.

Why didn’t the other songs work for this album?

I looked at those songs’ narratives and realized that I had another album that was a concept record. It was about getting fucked up and falling all the way in, kind of like the arc of my book [It’s So Easy: And Other Lies, McKagan’s 2011 autobiography]. There’s a song about a drug dealer called ‘I Found My Guy.’ That’s a record I could have put out as well. There may be another record next fall.

Are those songs mixed and mastered? 

We’re still mixing them. But for this narrative, my thought was to have a song like ‘Forgiveness,’ because I’ve always been curious about other people. Every person has a story. For example, if you’re in an elevator with others, do you think you’re the most interesting person in that elevator? Oftentimes not. So for me, ‘Forgiveness’ is a commentary about how I stopped watching cable news in 2016 because I realized the divide they were trying to sell and it was fucking bullshit. When you go into a coffee shop in a small town in Kentucky or New York City, most people want to look for a little goodness and a little hope. I believe that to be true, and this divide was just a selling mechanism to keep you fucking locked into cable news. And it works. So, the song’s message is about forgiving each other and moving on.

Did you discover anything working with Shooter Jennings that you incorporated into your work with Martin Feveyear?

Shooter taught me how to play without thinking too much, going with intuition, and [the knowledge] that music doesn’t have to be perfect. He reminded me that if the intent is pure and the tempo is right and in tune, then let it go. Martin is a perfectionist. Shooter is not a perfectionist, but he goes on feel and gave me confidence in my range. 

What was your reaction when Bob Dylan told the Wall Street Journal that the Tenderness song ‘Chip Away’ had ‘profound meaning’ for him?

The Bob Dylan thing was such an epic surprise to me. Imagine waking up one morning and having a link to a Bob Dylan interview in your email where he keys in on your songwriting! I work hard on my lyric writing and coupling a good turn of a phrase with a strong or unusual melody. The Dylan thing let me know, at least in his eyes, that I am on the right track.

What was it like recording and touring with Iggy Pop?

[Producer] Andrew [Watt], [Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer] Chad Smith, and I have a little group together. We did these two Ozzy [Osbourne] records, and we did it for Iggy, too. To do something like that with Iggy, who, for me, is one of my most influential people, along with (Mötörhead singer/bassist) Lemmy [Kilmister] and Prince … so, when he asked if we could be his band for these shows, we were all into it. To do those shows and rehearse with Iggy was like rehearsing with James Brown, I imagine. Do you know how many bands he has run in his career? Probably 150, I’m guessing. We wanted to be the best band Iggy ever had. I think there were moments where we achieved that at those gigs.

You appeared on his album and then he appeared on yours. How did that come about?

Somewhere in that timeframe, he asked if I wanted him to do something on my record. So our managers spoke and the next thing I knew, I had Iggy’s voice reciting ‘Lighthouse’ and it was shaking the speakers in my studio. I’d only heard that with Mark [Lanegan]’s voice. Then we put this beautiful music around it. We called it ‘Lighthouse (Reprise)’ and added synths.

How about working with Slash on ‘Hope’?

That song was actually recorded in 1996. All I did was sing it again. It was a song from a record that was shelved when Geffen was bought [in the late ‘90s].  Even though it was written so long ago, the words to ‘Hope’ fit this record. Listening to it again, I realized that [longtime Paul McCartney drummer] Abe Laboriel Jr. was on drums! And I recorded them myself on tape!

So you engineered the song as well?

Yes. When he came over to my house, I remember asking [Slash] if he wanted to play on that song. I had a guitar amp mic’d up and I knew how to record … sorta? But it sounded good!

Why did you choose to dig into the past and include ‘Hope’ on Lighthouse?

It just seemed to fit. The lyrics show that feeling of fear of what’s going on in the world was just as alive and well in 1996 as it is now.

How did Jerry Cantrell end up on the album?

He and I have been playing on each other’s demos for years and have known each other since around 1989 or 1990. We watch football together on Sundays and I played a lot of bass on his last solo album. I sent him ‘I Just Don’t Know’ and he was like, ‘Man, this is great. Do you want me to do anything on it?’ I said, ‘Yeah! A solo!’ He brought that beautiful solo and then asked if I needed him to sing, and I said, ‘Sure!’ 

I read that you learned how to fingerpick by watching a video on YouTube?

Yes. I had a moment where I was like, ‘I want to learn how to fingerpick.’ I had been avoiding it for years. So I found a video of a guy doing it to [The Beatles’] ‘Blackbird.’ Once I got the rhythm in my right hand, it all fell into place. I had to practice for a bit then suddenly, I figured it out.

Have you often used YouTube as a resource that way? 

Funny enough, in 2013, I was playing with Jerry, [Black Crowes guitarist] Rich Robinson, [Alice in Chains singer] William DuVall and [drummer] Barrett Martin for this Led Zeppelin tribute in Seattle. I didn’t know how to play like John Paul Jones and somebody said, ‘Just go watch YouTube!’ [laughs]. They said I should watch him play and that there were plenty of bass players who do that. So I went down a rabbit hole [laughs]. I wanted to be as good as John Paul Jones, if not better. 

That’s always how I aim: to be the best. I always want to be the best I can be. When I put the band together for Lighthouse, I wanted it to be the best version it can be. Guns N’ Roses, same thing. We’re perfectionists and rehearse six hours a day for six days a week for a month before we go on tour. There could be a fucking storm or the power could go out. Nothing can freak us out.

Will you tour behind Lighthouse?

I’m not sure. I need to take some time off. I’ve been on the road for seven-and-a-half months and didn’t take a big break. It has been non-stop since 2021. But I need to take some time and put together a good band for that. Look, I love being the bass player and singing my best backing vocals in Guns. I love it. It’s a really solid thing to do and I try to be the best at doing it. But being the singer, playing the guitar, and where the lyrics are all 100% your own? It’s almost like doing a book reading where you’re singing. Performing Tenderness was so personal and it’s where I try to go with my solo stuff.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

A few days before he is set to embark on something of an unprecedented tour serving double duty in the Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Gibbard is still finding some time for himself. For the past month, he’d been rehearsing with both acts ahead of a co-headlining outing to celebrate the respective 20th anniversaries of their Transatlanticism and Give Up albums. But today, prior to speaking with SPIN, he was sneaking in a pre-tour haircut ahead of a trip to Seattle’s T-Mobile Park to watch his beloved Mariners in their fight to make the Major League Baseball playoffs.

Were they to do so, it would only add to the already celebratory vibes of the fall season for Gibbard, who improbably found himself simultaneously fronting two indie titans back in 2003. The origin story has been oft-told: after collaborating with electronic-leaning musician/producer Jimmy Tamborello on the latter’s Dntel album Life Is Full of Possibilities in 2001, Gibbard continued exchanging vocals and instrumentals with him through the mail. They christened the project the Postal Service and enlisted then-Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis to contribute backing vocals on the material, which filtered OMD, Depeche Mode, and Human League-style synth-pop through the artists’ more homespun sensibilities.

More from Spin:

• Deep Cut Friday: ‘Stable Song’ by Death Cab For Cutie
• Iggy Pop, Devo, Death Cab Saddle Up For Project Pabst
• The 6 Most Influential Artists According to Bose x SPIN Decades of Sound 2024

Legendary Seattle indie label Sub Pop came calling, signed the group, and released Give Up on Feb. 18, 2003. It has since sold more than 1 million copies, second only to Nirvana’s Bleach in Sub Pop history, but Gibbard wasn’t done releasing music that year, despite Death Cab having been on the brink of a breakup not long beforehand.

The group’s 2001 breakthrough, The Photo Album, was completed in rushed fashion so Death Cab could get back on the road and earn the money its members had foregone by giving up their day jobs. Tensions rose on that tour, culminating in a backstage fight after a show in Baltimore. 

Instead of dissolving Death Cab, Gibbard left Seattle for Los Angeles and worked on what would become Give Up. By late 2002, the band was on more steady footing and regrouped in the studio with new drummer Jason McGerr. The result was Transatlanticism, a concept album tackling themes of isolation and long-distance relationships which breathed new life into the band and dramatically expanded its audience. Further thanks to an appearance on the then-popular TV show The O.C., the album cracked the top half of the Billboard 200 upon its October 2003 release by Barsuk Records and went on to sell 500,000 copies over the next two years. Death Cab parlayed this success into a deal with Atlantic Records, which has been its home ever since. 

“They both came out at a time when indie rock was starting to move from this kind of smaller, connoisseurs, club-level genre, to something I would never say was mainstream with a capital M, but certainly became a more popular and omnipresent genre,” Gibbard says of how Give Up and Transatlanticism fueled the subsequent indie rock boom that defined the rest of the decade.

While the Postal Service toured extensively in 2003, the group abandoned sporadic work on a follow-up and disappeared, leaving Give Up to organically influence a new generation of synth-powered acts such as M83, Owl City, Sylvan Esso, and Passion Pit.

In 2013, the Postal Service reunited to tour for the 10th anniversary of Give Up, and released a pair of new songs, but following a show at the Metro in Chicago that August, Gibbard said the Postal Service would disband. Now, a decade later, he says he felt compelled to acknowledge the band’s influence and tour yet again – this time with Death Cab in tow, and both groups playing their 2003 releases in their entirety.

In the below conversation, Gibbard elaborates on the reasons for doing so, how he feels about the full-album-as-live-show experience, and what’s next for Death Cab for Cutie.

SPIN: How did the idea originate to not only reunite the Postal Service but also tour with Death Cab?

Ben Gibbard: Initially the idea had been floated about doing these as two separate tours, and I felt that the show would be significantly more impactful if we did both. I think often when, in this kind of new touring economy of bands playing seminal albums, unless the record is like, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, most of these records are like, 40-45 minutes, right? Then you have to fill the rest of the show with other material, which is fine. No shade on that, but I came to the conclusion that Death Cab is playing around two hours at this point, and both of these records clock in under 45 minutes, so it’s really about the same workload for me doing both of these records as it would have just doing a regular Death Cab show. There’s no way to say this without sounding at least a little bit self-aggrandizing, but I don’t think there’s anybody else who would be in a position to do this. I can’t think of another artist or band that’s had two separate projects released in the same year that had a similar impact. I felt [that] because I found myself in this unique position to even attempt this, it would be foolish not to do it. This is such a unique opportunity for both bands, but for me specifically.

You announced 17 dates initially, which grew to more than 30. Has that surpassed any expectations that you had?

Oh, of course, I felt confident that we would be able to fill some of these venues we had signed on to play, but I didn’t think we’d get the two Madison Square Gardens, or two Climate Pledges [Arena in Seattle], or certainly three Hollywood Bowls. During the initial on-sale, I was feeling confident, and then we did that thing were we held some second dates, just in case. And then, the first set of dates blew out, so we decided to add other ones, which is totally humbling. It’s really moving to see the response to the tour.

What do you think of the album-in-full live experience?

I’ve gone to see some of these shows of artists playing a record, and it’s a welcome alternative as a fan to a typical touring show where a band has a new record, and they’re trying to highlight some of those new songs. They’re also playing the old stuff, and you go to the show and you’re like, “Oh, I hope they play this song from that record, they played it a couple of nights ago at this venue, but I don’t know if they’re gonna do it tonight.” There’s some fun mystery in that — the mystery of discovering what the band is going to play. Conversely, there’s a comfort in knowing, “I’m gonna go see this show, and this is what they’re going to play, and I know the order it’s going to happen in, and I can emotionally prepare in that way.”

Of those shows where you saw an artist play a complete album, what was your favorite?

I saw Liz Phair do Exile in Guyville. That was pretty fantastic. I’m not sure if it was exactly in order in order. When I was living in L.A., John Cale played Paris 1919 at Royce Hall with the UCLA Philharmonic. It’s one of my favorite records, and to get a chance to hop up on stage and play a couple of songs with him was a real trip.

What do you think fuels nostalgia for anniversaries and complete album performances?

It seems to me that this kind of trend started, more or less, around the time when physical media was starting to disappear from people’s lives — the rise of the iTunes Store, and people buying digital music or streaming sites started to pop up. We were doing an interview with the Stranger here in Seattle, and the writer was sharing this theory about millennials — specifically that they’re spending their money on experiences and not necessarily things. One of the reasons these shows are popular is that they give people another way to have an experience with a record that they really love. 

We’re living in a world now where not a lot of people are buying physical albums. They’re not interfacing with the physical embodiment of a record. I mean some people buy vinyl, but people don’t buy CDs anymore, people don’t read the liner notes, and people don’t know who produced the record. In this phenomenon of artists playing the record live, it’s really a wave. I think that it’s a response to a deep-seated need amongst music listeners and fans to have a new experience with an album — a visceral experience, in the room with the music in a way that we don’t really have that much anymore, at least certainly not with a physical media.

Have you spoken with Chris Walla? Is he going to be part of any of these shows?

Yeah, we see him from time to time. We hung out in December. He lives in Norway, so…

I guess not…

It’s a long commute [Laughs]. I wouldn’t foresee that happening. If we were playing in Trondheim, where he lives, then yeah, we’d invite him down.

How has it been playing without him, specifically on this tour?

This iteration of the band has existed for almost 10 years. It has been said ad nauseam, but band dynamics are not that different from romantic relationships or friendships you have. Over time, you value the people who have been in your life and have contributed to your experience on this planet, and in this case, [Walla was] at the helm for making some of these records that will forever be seen as some of our best records. But, you also recognize that sometimes you have your time with somebody, and that time comes to a close and you move on. And they move on as well. With Chris, we all think back on those times together rather fondly, and we admire and love each other.

What do you think the Postal Service album remains so beloved 20 years later?

Jenny and I were just texting, literally before this phone call, about some random stuff, and we were both lamenting how there’s too little mystery in the world anymore. We know so much about artists now, certainly younger artists, especially [who] are on social media seemingly 24/7 sharing their entire lives. We didn’t come up with that. When the Postal Service record came out, obviously the internet existed, Pitchfork was a thing, and blogs were happening, but social media wasn’t a thing. There wasn’t this 24/7 kind of assault of people sharing every detail of their life and what they’re having for breakfast and dinner.

When the record came out, it allowed for some mystery. With the exception of that first tour we did in 2003, there weren’t any live dates. This wasn’t a band that you could go see. Although people obviously knew who the three of us were, in some capacity, the band as an entity was very much a mystery. There’s a mythology around the record. It made its way through the culture and jumped the fence of provincial indie rock and settled into the mainstream, as much as any record could at that point. I keep coming back to this quote, and forgive me for not turning in a brand new quote, but William Gibson talks about the Neuromancer trilogy like “I feel like my books are my children who kind of went off into the world and had great adventures.”

Like, you were the author of that work and you created it, but once it leaves your desk or the recording studio, it becomes everybody else’s. It’s no longer yours. So I certainly feel like we can take some credit for the success of the pulse of this record because we made it, but once it left our little home studios and ended up out in the world, it kind of took on a life of its own and became this completely other entity.

Is it a coincidence that on the 20th anniversary of Transatlanticism in October, you are playing in Seattle?

Oh, we are? Really?

Yes. 

Oh, I didn’t know that. That is a complete coincidence. I did not know that.

So I guess we won’t know then if you’re going to be doing something extra special that night.

We do not know that yet, because you just told me that. I do not even know myself.

Have you been writing any new Death Cab stuff lately?

I’ve been writing here and there. I don’t think we’re anywhere near going into the studio to make a new record. Even if we were tomorrow, I think we’ll be a little overexposed by the time this tour is over. It’ll be time to head back into the woodshed and spend some time in there, away from prying eyes and not playing shows for a while to just come up with some new ideas.

Will the Mariners make the playoffs this year?

It really could go one of two ways. The American League is just really, really competitive this year. I would of course love nothing more than the Mariners to win the division. I wouldn’t put money on that. I think in all practicality, they’re probably looking at squeaking into a Wild Card. My hope is that they can just stay healthy, hang on, get to the playoffs, and then once they’re in the playoffs, as we all know, anything can happen, right? This team has all the pieces to win a World Series. That doesn’t mean they’re going to. It doesn’t mean they’re even going to make the playoffs, but they have a top-three starting rotation, and a top-three bullpen, the defense is stellar, and they’re finally hitting. The piece for them was always like, “Will they score enough runs?” and they’ve been scoring a ton. So, it’s completely possible. Would I put money on it? Probably not to win the World Series. But it’s not outside the realm of possibility. It’s not something that I think is insane to dream on a little bit.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

More from Spin:

• The Graphic History of Hip Hop — The Comic Novel!
• QUOTE/UNQUOTE
• QUOTE/UNQUOTE

Set the scene: 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, August 11, 1973, a summer party in an apartment building’s rec room. Twenty-five cents admission for girls, 50 cents for boys. Olde English 800 or Colt 45 for a buck. Could be just another sweaty night in the city, except that the DJ is up to something different. Instead of playing the hits of the moment, he plays some slow jams — yes — and lots of hard, drum-heavy funk: James Brown’s “Give it Up or Turnit a Loose,” Baby Huey’s “Listen to Me,” the Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun.”  

He’s a Jamaican-born 18-year-old named Clive Campbell, or DJ Kool Herc, and he’s noticed that some kids only dance to the parts of the songs when everything drops out except the drums, and then they break wild. So that’s what he gives them: playing the break on one of his Garrard turntables, then repeating it on the other, back and forth, back and forth. On the microphone, he and his friend Coke La Rock call out the names of people in the room, giving them status. 

That night 50 years ago, hip-hop came into being. 

Everybody knows that story, or at least parts of it. It is hip-hop legend and creation myth, mostly true. The first wave of hip hop stars — Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, MC Sha-Rock, the whole nine — took their cues from Herc and his crew: Coke La Rock, Timmy Tim, Clark Kent, and the rest. How burnished is the legend? Last year a collection of Herc’s gear and memorabilia sold at Christie’s auction house for more than $850,000. An index card bearing an invitation to a party at 1520 Sedgwick fetched $27,720. 

What’s less well-known, or less celebrated, is the contribution of the other central figure in that scene: Cindy Campbell, Herc’s younger sister. The party on that August night was hers, to raise money to buy some back-to-school clothes, and she was her brother’s true ride-or-die through all his moves. Many of the records he played — soaking off the labels to conceal them from other DJ’s — were her discoveries. And when rap recordings came, and the next generation moved on without Herc, she helped him manage that transition too. The cultural big bang that is hip-hop would not have been the same without her. 

For Herc, as for many of the first generation, the limelight did not last. After being stabbed at one of his parties in 1977, he largely withdrew from the scene, and when his father died in 1984, he fell into a depression and substance abuse disorder, for which he underwent rehab at Daytop Village. By 2011, as the music he created blanketed the world, the founding father had no insurance and had to raise money online for surgery for kidney stones. This year, finally, he will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — the equivalent of Chuck Berry or Little Richard having to wait a half-century for recognition.  

I caught up with Herc and Cindy Campbell at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, where she is the multi-cultural arts coordinator. At 68, Herc walks with a cane and has some lacunae in his memory. “I can’t go back that far,” he said. “I don’t fight it. Old age is catching up with me.” He carried a shopping bag full of sunglasses, some in disrepair, from which he tried on half a dozen before settling on one for the interview. 

“Glory days,” he said, beaming. “Glory days.” 

SPIN: Everybody thinks they know where hip-hop came from, how it began. What don’t they know? 

DJ KOOL HERC: Some of them wasn’t born. They go by what their mother told them, or their grandfather told them. I’m the beginning. I’m still young, but still old. The worms didn’t get me. It’s all good. 

I can think of one thing people don’t know. People think hip-hop started in the South Bronx, but really it started with you in the West Bronx. 

HERC:  I went to the west because the South Bronx was burning. Everything was burning. But “South South Bronx” [the iconic chant from Boogie Down Productions’ 1987 song “South Bronx”] sounds strong. “West West Bronx”? Nah. 

Cindy, You’re the missing piece of the history. 

CINDY:  People know it, but they don’t want to write about it or acknowledge it. That’s why there’s some questions that you ask him that he can’t answer. I was there with him, and I know the playlist because I was the one monitoring it and directing it to see where we was going to go. We worked together.

It really began as a family affair. 

CINDY:  My father was a very musically inclined person. So we always had records playing: Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Perry Como, the Big Bopper, any kind of music. My father bought him turntables, and he had everything hooked up in his room. That’s how he learned his skills, how to play the records at home in his room. When I organized the party, he had all that equipment there. So I’m like, I don’t have to pay anybody for music. We have the music already. I told him, this is how it’s going to be. And he moved down from his room to downstairs in the recreation room.

Can we talk about Jamaica? What part of this music comes from Jamaica? 

HERC:  I would say my start came from Jamaica, and my father was a mechanic at Kingston Wharf. I’ll never forget “White Christmas.” I played that. All that stuff. His favorite person was Ella Fitzgerald. So I know my records. But in Jamaica there were other groups called Byron Lee and the Dragonaires. Then come the Skatalites, and then the Paragons and U-Roy and Big Youth. I learned from that. 

Was there something about that music you heard in Jamaica and the way that you heard it that you brought with you, and went into your style of DJing?

HERC: Yeah. Because I knew my records. Even [country star] Jimmy Reeves. I knew that. There’s no racism in my music. Martin Luther King was coming with “I have a dream.” Yeah, yeah. And then he said, if a little white boy and a brother dance together — good. Then I heard Baby Huey say, There’s three kinds of people. There’s white people and there’s Black people and there’s my people. That’s good. 

When you moved to the Bronx, what was going on? 

HERC: I was learning. My mother said, Don’t let nobody stick needles in my arms. And sniffing glue and all that stuff. I was learning. The first time I saw snow I was like Dennis the Menace.

Someone called me Hercules. I didn’t want to be Hercules. Everybody going to challenge you. I said, Just call me Herc. I dropped the name Clive.

I did graffiti, I took the name Clyde As Kool. Taki 183 was the king. I was following him. I did markers, a little spray. But it smelled, and my father would bust my ass. We called ourselves Ex-Vandals. I would tag “Clyde As Kool.” Those were the days.

When did you start looking for break records? 

HERC: I’m always looking for breaks. 

But guys before you were playing whole records, and you got the idea to just play the breaks. Where did that come from? 

HERC: I was watching a crowd, and everybody was waiting for the breaks to come in. I said, I’m going to do something tonight. I’m going to call it the Merry-Go-Round. I’ll put on two copies of a record, James Brown, “Give it Up or Turnit a Loose,” and just play the break.

How did you find it? ’Cause you didn’t have headphones to listen for it.

HERC: You could see it. If there’s a dark spot, that’s the break. You don’t have to listen. I’m like a shepherd looking over the flock. I watch and watch, and then I noticed that people were waiting for certain parts to come in. Okay. So what happens if I put together all the breaks I got — I wonder how it will do. So I put it on. 

How many times would you play a break? 

HERC: I wouldn’t go too far. Two times. I’ll just extend it two times. And James Brown says “Clyde” [for drummer Clyde Stubblefield] — that’s my name. So James Brown shouted me out. Oooh. Then the break comes in. I used that to start me off, and then go into the Isley Brothers and [Babe Ruth’s] “The Mexican.” Oooh, I like this. And then Jimmy Castor Bunch. Them were the records, man. I lay claim to it: That’s a Herc record. I’d say, “You never heard it like this before, and you’re back for more.” That’s it. 

I wasn’t doing no scratching shit. No. That’s tricks. Tricks are for kids. I played music. It was grown folks’ groove. They can’t dance to no scratching.

CINDY: It’s amazing how certain songs, you know it’s a Herc song, ’cause he found those songs and introduced them to the world. And it gave life to these artists — and residuals, too. So many of them have been sampled so many times.

HERC: And my sister, she knows her music. “Trans-Europe Express” [by Kraftwerk]? I got that from her. She put me onto that. And Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” That was her. Her name was PEP 1.

CINDY: When hip-hop was evolving, we didn’t know what it was. You became a graffiti artist. You started tagging your name. If you were brave enough to go out there with a marker and spray paint, that’s what you would do. 

I did PEP I, with a roman numeral one, so if anybody came after me, they might want to say they were PEP 2. We became graffiti artists. And the next thing, when the music started going, you became a break dancer. Some people took it to the next level, where it became them. But our thing was giving the parties. We were producers. We gave the party, promoted it, found the venue, did all of that. And everybody came and became a part of it. 

Did you disguise your records? 

HERC: Yes, I had to cover it up. My father told me, scratch it up. So everybody don’t have it. 

There were parties in the Bronx before August 11, 1973 at Sedgwick Avenue. What was different about that party?

HERC: Right now, the conversation for us, you’re going back. Some things I don’t remember. All I remember is: Behave yourself, smell good, and enjoy. That’s it. Don’t start no shit. 

CINDY: He was playing music that you really didn’t hear on the radio. You only had one Black station playing songs. He would play what he thought was good. And people didn’t have this music setup in their homes. And for teenagers, it was something new to go out, where it wasn’t at somebody’s house or in a church basement. This was different.

How many people were there? 

CINDY: Could have been 200, 300 people. People just showed up, to the point we had to tell people, you can’t go in and out. Once you go out, you can’t come back in. We had to figure out how to control it. It was just a party that we were giving for our friends and to raise some money. We weren’t depending on the money. It was just for me to have money for back-to-school shopping.

How much money did you make? 

CINDY: Between $300 and $500. It was just a lot of change. It was too many quarters.

How often did you give parties? 

CINDY: We couldn’t do it often. We had to go to school! We started doing it for special occasions, like a Thanksgiving party or maybe a Christmas party. And we did it when people said, when are you going to give the next party? It had to be supervised by our parents also.  

Before hip-hop, musicians all went by their given names, like James Brown or Diana Ross. How did the hip-hop names get started?

HERC: I was giving guys their names. I gave them fame. If their name was Bo, I call them Bo-ski, so if the cops come looking for them, I’ll never rat them out. The cops looking for their government name. Not Bo-ski. And I told people, don’t start no shit here. Any problems, take it down the block. I look out for people. I called the party The Joint. And I called it “butter.” Like: Look fly, with your clothes. That’s butter. That means it’s nice. 

You’re the one who first said “That’s the Joint?” That’s you? 

HERC: Yeah. We used to go down to Delancey Street to shop for school clothes. ’Cause on Delancey they sold knockoffs. One spot on Delancey was called The Joint. 

Like when I first heard “my mello.” It was at a club called Top of the Lane. And the guy was calling people “my mello.” And we stuck with that. That means you’re nice, you’re cool, no problem. That was it. I got it from Dixie. He used to run the spot. We played there, me and Coke took shifts. People were coming out of church on Sunday morning, and we were still playing. 

You got stabbed at one party. What happened? 

HERC: I didn’t blame anybody. That was it. So I backed off a little bit. I still played, and then [the movie] Beat Street came along, and they put me in that. I played myself. 

Did you stop giving parties?

HERC: A little bit. Things was changing. I didn’t jump on board. People get older. It drew me into a shell. The mystique wasn’t there no more. Different generations came along and did their thing, you know what I’m saying?

CINDY: It’s just something that happened. And as he says, it gave people the opportunity to start DJing, because people still wanted to go to the parties, they were looking for a new home. 

Then the record companies came along and left you behind. 

CINDY: The whole industry profited off this. Vinyl was selling, and turntables. Now you needed two turntables. Fast forward up to now, it’s amazing that everybody can do a little 50th-anniversary thing. Television, the news, even little people in their neighborhoods: I’m going to do a 50th-anniversary block party. People coming up with T-shirts with Herc’s name. You’re not going to go after the little man on the street trying to make some money selling something like that. If it’s Nike or Adidas, go after them. But it’s amazing that everybody is finally getting a little something from it. You have the big rap artists, like Jay-Z or Ice Cube, but now everybody can do that. 

How do you feel about your status? People in the know know who you are, but you’re not famous like some of the people who came later, and you didn’t get rich off it. 

HERC: How do I feel about it? Give me an endorsement. Give me one. Just like weed. Weed is legal now. I want an endorsement. 

CINDY: One? How about a few? 

With any industry — could be the movies, comedians — the regular comedians who set the trends for the Eddie Murphys or Kevin Harts, like your Redd Foxx, your Moms Mabley — Redd Foxx didn’t make the money that Chris Rock or these guys are making, but they’re coming from that, an extension of that. When you think about it on that level, you see the transition and the evolution and where it came from. We’re still here. We’re not super rich, but we’re here. We’re still flying below the radar, but every now and then the radar picks you up. 

For a long time you didn’t do interviews.

 HERC: For what? 

CINDY: I mean, he’s getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. There’s some things that don’t have a price on them. 

How do you think your experience with addiction and recovery changed you? 

HERC: A lot. My mother wanted to save me, but I was smoking crack. I went to rehab. Amy Winehouse says, I don’t want to go to rehab. I went. It worked. Amy Winehouse isn’t here. Monsignor O’Brien at Daytop Village, I give him a shout-out. I big-up Daytop. 

Who is in your Top 5 now? 

HERC: I’m always listening. My Top 5, I don’t know. “White Trash Party” [by Eminem], that’s one. That’s my shit. Or Millie Jackson, way back, saying “Fuck you.” Kid Capri, I give him love. Vinnie [Vin Rock] from Naughty by Nature, that’s my man. Betty Davis, Miles Davis’s wife.

Do you still DJ?

HERC: No, that’s over. And it’s not about me no more. I did my thing. Other people come in. The basic stuff came from me. The stew had been cooked already. Don’t break it up. Run with it. How long it lasts, go ahead. Everybody’s a millionaire now.

Were you disappointed when people took it and had a kind of success that you never had? 

CINDY: For me, no. I’m happy. Because it’s about sharing. If we held onto this thing they call hip-hop now, and if someone tried to do something with it we interfered with them — we didn’t go to Brooklyn and say, We started this in the Bronx. We stayed in our lane. You had to stay focused, ’cause we were building something. We didn’t try to go to Queens or Brooklyn or Staten Island. 

Everybody was doing something for themselves. That’s why it is where it is today. We just got something from Lula, the president of Brazil, saying they’re making August 11th to be Hip-Hop Celebration Day in Brazil. To me, that’s worth more than money. That’s me. We have the recipe, and you know how the recipe works. And just like you have different hamburger places and chicken places, all cooked in a different way that people like. 

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.