Stories

Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city works as a coming-of-age story, a crime narrative, a family portrait and a spiritual reckoning at the same time.…

There are instruments that impress me with their precision, and then there are instruments that seem to remember something before they have even played a note.…

The best live albums that captured a band in their prime do more than preserve a successful tour. They reveal how musicians think under pressure, how a crowd…

I used to hear vocal harmony as decoration. It was the pleasant layer around a lead singer, the polished lift in a chorus, or the familiar stack of parts that…

The first song I ever committed to a hard drive was recorded on a borrowed dynamic mic, a cracked copy of GarageBand, and a borrowed electric guitar with a…

When the needle drops on "Dreams" or "Go Your Own Way" today, the records still feel closer to a live conversation than a polished artefact. The 1977 album…

Growing up in suburban Sydney, I biked to the local record store on Parramatta Road with whatever pocket money I could scrounge. Some weeks I came home with a…

I still remember the afternoon I decided enough was enough. I'd been humming melodies into a voice memo app for months, and every time I played back those…

I still remember the arvo I first put on Ambient 1: Music for Airports. I was on a Fitzroy verandah, the cicadas competing with a distant tram, and the record…

Few recordings carry the gravitational pull of So What from Kind of Blue. Since its release in 1959, the tune has become a kind of doorway into jazz for…