“I’m more of a visual person than a music person.” It’s a bit late for that, Fran Healy of Travis! The songwriter joined his band in 1991, at the same time as he began a degree at Glasgow School of Art. But he dropped out of art school in his second year, and 14 platinum…
While the music scene lies dormant around him, Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell has actually found a way to play some gigs. When we speak via webcam, the Irish guitarist is on an extended holiday with two musician friends – James McGovern from The Murder Capital and Lewis Lazar of Oracle Sisters – on Hydra, the…
“In March, everything was so depressing. I texted Sia and said, ‘The world needs us.’” David Guetta makes the writing of a new song sound like two Hollywood superheroes getting together to bash seven bells out of the baddies. No wonder: the French DJ and Australian songwriter Sia Furler have a reputation for blockbusters. The…
“I’m a total introvert,” says mxmtoon, which on the one hand sounds feasible – she’s quietly spoken, thoughtful, unfussily dressed, and speaking to me via the laptop in the Brooklyn bedroom where she spends most of her time. Everything she writes is in muted lower case, and although you are invited to call her by…
Attached to a magnetic board in Anna Meredith’s studio are a series of pencil drawings that look like a seven-year-old’s designs for new Galactic Starcruisers. These are her songs, conceived as shapes that grow wider towards the right of the pages, divided by dark vertical lines and marked with words including “strong”, “full”, “softer”, “massive,…
Angel Olsen’s new release, Whole New Mess, sounds like a lockdown album even though it isn’t. Like Taylor Swift’s Folklore, it has a quiet intimacy, as though written to be experienced alone rather than heard at top volume in a concert crowd. Like Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now, it was recorded quickly, deliberately lacking…
While it’s enough of an honour to be invited to perform at Glastonbury in any year, Nubya Garcia is a member of a highly exclusive club: those who can say they played Glastonbury 2020. Amid the BBC’s June airings of past shows at the cancelled festival, the London saxophonist, Laura Marling and Arlo Parks were…
Kane Brown isn’t big over here just yet. The Tennessee country singer has only played one London gig, at the 2,300-capacity Forum this February, and could easily be confused with a British comedian of the same name. As an indication of how big he is in the US, however, consider this: this week he made…
Jacob Collier is possibly the first person I’ve spoken to this year who looks completely at home on a Zoom call. The fast-talking multi-multi-instrumentalist is perched at his work station in his music room in Finchley, a sunny space crammed with tempting kit that will be familiar to viewers of his “Logic Session Breakdowns” on…
Here’s a crumb of comfort for the millions of parents who have been struggling to educate their chldren at home over the past few months: you might at least get a pop star out of it. Before Billie Eilish became one of the biggest singers in the world she was being homeschooled by her mother…