All the Music That Matters
when i came to work at Rolling Stone, grunge and altrock had given way to synthetic teen pop and the splintering sounds of electronic dance music, and the magazine was struggling to find focus in its coverage of music. One of the questions I was asked during my job interview was “How can Rolling Stone cover classic-rock artists” — legends like Dylan and Springsteen who were still vital (and still are, two decades later) — “while also following emerging artists and genres, without seeming schizophrenic?”
The answer was obvious: Covering rock & roll legends as well as the new artists defining the current moment is not schizophrenic — it’s exactly what Rolling Stone at its best has always done. It was the reason I’d been reading the magazine since I was a kid, following the ever-evolving careers of heroes like Brian Wilson and David Bowie, as well as discovering new bands exploding the old styles, like the Clash, Talking Heads and Run-DMC.
These days, thanks to streaming, it’s easier than ever to access every artist and style of music in the world, but it’s much harder to discover what you really want to hear. We see our role partly as curators, helping navigate the sonic overload. We are covering more new music than ever, digging in harder on hip-hop and pop. But we also think you should care about the latest from John Prine and the superb Blood on the Tracks reissue, because we want you to know about the best music being made right now, across styles and genres and generations.
As always, we take you inside the stories of the artists themselves, to discover where the music comes from. For this issue’s cover story on Shawn Mendes, senior music editor Patrick Doyle travels (by private jet) to Budapest, after crashing a Mendes family reunion in Portugal. Elsewhere in this issue we go deep with Elvis Costello, who reflects for the first time on a major health scare earlier this year; we talk to Gary Clark Jr. about his outspoken, political new album; and we profile Noname, the Chicago rapper behind one of this year’s best albums.
Music editor Christian Hoard, who first came on board as an intern in 2002, oversees a much-expanded team of talented writers and editors, including multiple staffers now covering hip-hop and the music business. “It’s a fascinating time to be covering music,” Hoard says. “The recording industry is growing faster than it has in 20 years, and there’s a flood of new music every week. With our incredible staff, we’re ready to cover it like no one else — and have fun doing it.”