For the past three years, I’ve been impressing people—hell, impressing myself—with the fact that I’ve been to Tom Petty’s house. I’d gone to Malibu to interview him for UNCUT magazine about Hypnotic Eye. Admirably raucous and rancorous, it proved to be his final studio album with the Heartbreakers, the band that he fronted for the better part of 40 years. So that album’s mostly what we talked about in a room next to his studio, which he’d built next to the rambling, Spanish-style, and thoroughly unpretentious home he bought after an arsonist set fire to his place in Encino in 1987. This one nearly burned down too, thanks to the massive wildfires in the area in 2007—as we chatted before sitting down, he pointed out the window to the spot a little higher up the hill where the fires stopped short of his property and the Pacific Coast Highway just below. The house is where he was found unconscious and not breathing after his cardiac arrest early Monday morning. I remember the room in the studio as homey—I could imagine Bob Dylan here with his boots up on the sofa, checking out the tasteful black-and-white framed photos on the walls. (Tom was onstage with his hero Roger McGuinn in one; with his fellow Wilbury Roy Orbison in another.) Petty served us coffee from a big stainless steel urn into oversized southwestern-style mugs that I imagined he washed himself because he didn’t want the pottery to get fucked up in the dishwasher. Throughout the interview, he puffed on a vape pen before rewarding himself at the end with a genuine smoke from a pack of American Spirit. Sporting a big bushy beard along with his usual straggly blond hair, Petty had the tanned and weathered face of an old Florida beach bum, but his bright blue eyes made him look younger by 15 years. He was friendly and a little crotchety—in other words, he was as cool as you could’ve hoped. We were supposed to have an hour but he gave me two. Then he walked me back to the front of the house and got on with his day.So that’s the scene I’ve been replaying in my head since I heard the news. Somehow, our afternoon together—and its complete lack of the audience-with-a-rock-star bullshit you might expect—speaks to the Everyguy/no-bullshit/scrappy-kid-from-Gainesville thing that Petty always exuded. He was a man of the people in a way that Dylan and Springsteen couldn’t be, because they just seemed too oversized, too mythic, too huge from the get-go. Like the characters he tended to write about, Petty was always somewhere between underdog and self-made outcast. Yet the chip on his shoulder was the rare and beautiful kind that seemed to make him more empathetic to people rather than less so. Anyway, that’s what I hear in the songs that I go back to most—some are hits and others are deeper in albums that didn’t quite get as much love as they should’ve (like the Heartbreakers’ final two albums, Mojo and Hypnotic Eye). Petty’s pair of albums with the reconstituted version of his proto-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch proved that the man never lost his songwriting chops even if the snarling, punk-ass Petty of 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It and 1979’s sublime Dawn the Torpedoes was always gonna be hard to outdo.When we spoke, Petty talked about his plans to do an expanded version of his Rick Rubin-produced solo masterpiece Wildflowers from 1994. He didn’t get a chance to realize that ambition but in 2015, he did a preview of sorts by putting out a previously unreleased song from the sessions called “Somewhere Under Heaven.” A deceptively simple vignette that movingly portrays the bond between a “working-man” dad and the daughter who’s too young to know how bad the world can be, it’s arguably as fine as anything he ever wrote. In the last verse, the father has this to say to his little girl: “One day you’re gonna fall in love/ One day you’re gonna pay the rent/ Hold on to what love you find/ You’re gonna need all you can get.” Feels like good advice right now for all kinds of reasons.

The Joshua Tree wasn’t one of those albums that quietly arrived on record store racks one dewy morning, attracting a few raves and then enjoying a gradual build before changing the world. Instead, U2’s fifth studio album elicited a reception that in contemporary terms would be described as breaking the internet ten times over.Speaking as an ‘80s kid who listened to his cassettes of War and The Unforgettable Fire obsessively and could sense that something big was on the launch pad, I can tell you that everything about the album felt massive from the get-go. Sending the mass media and the band’s fast-expanding audience into maximum overdrive when it was released in the spring of 1987, The Joshua Tree was the subject of heavy promotion and hype, such that U2’s music and image seemed everywhere at once. According to a Newsweek story published the same week the band made the cover of Time, Island spent $100,000 in 1987 dollars on store displays alone. Not even Bono’s cold-ravaged voice put a damper on the hysteria when the band opened its sold-out North American tour in Tempe, Arizona, on April 2. That show included the first live performance of “With Or Without You,” which became the band’s first American No. 1 single a few weeks later. It would help drive sales for an album that eventually shifted 25 million units worldwide.And the rest is history, which, if we know anything about history, means we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s repeating itself in the form of a summer anniversary tour this year. It too feels massive—over one million tickets were snapped up in the first 24 hours of going on sale—even if no rock act will dominate the pop-culture landscape as forcefully as U2 once did. Indeed, just about every subsequent effort to achieve the same level of impact by U2 or later contenders reeked of an unseemly hubris or—in the case of that iTunes debacle—sheer stupidity.Yet The Joshua Tree is still huge and intimate all at once, which is a testament to the production skills of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (whose thumbprints were far more overbearing on The Unforgettable Fire) and to the big leap in songwriting acumen by a band who had mostly got by on bravura up to that point. True, there were glimmers of what was to come on songs like “40” on War and “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” on October, which now seems like a dry run for “Bullet The Blue Sky.” But this album is where U2 indisputably became U2, achieving the greatest synthesis of their various punk and post-punk influences—especially Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the sorely underrated The Chameleons—and the most anthemic rock of Springsteen and The Clash. Bono also talked up his blues, gospel, country, and folk inspirations at the time, but thankfully they had yet to result in the kind of stodgy Americana that clogs up Rattle and Hum. Here’s our exploration of the fertile ground around the biggest of U2’s big moments.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic.The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Thundercat’s new album, Drunk. Yet the album contains fresh surprises, too. Appearances by Lamar and newbies Wiz Khalifa and Pharrell may not be so shocking, but who could’ve known that Thundercat’s allegiance to yacht rock was so fervent that he’d enlist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins for cameos on the ultra-smooth “Show You The Way”? The album’s crackpot humor and abundance of short, weird tracks are equally suggestive of his devotion to Frank Zappa, and at some shows he’s performed a cover of “For Love (I Come Your Friend)” by George Duke, the R&B maverick who was one of Zappa’s best musical foils.Drunk could only be a product of Thundercat’s vast and vivid musical universe, one that we explore here via songs he’s either created or helped craft, plus equally vibrant tracks by other artists he’s covered, sampled, and loved.

There are a variety of theories as to how a Nordic nation of 10 million people and few other notable exports besides IKEA, Volvo, and gummy candies came to thoroughly dominate the global pop marketplace through its formidable arsenal of performers, writers, and producers.

Some point to the country’s generous funding for artists and arts education—“I have public music education to thank for everything,” über-producer Max Martin said in 2001. Others credit the model set by ABBA, the Stockholm-formed phenomenon that may be just as big today as it was during the ’70s thanks to Mamma Mia! In his essential book The Song Machine, writer John Seabrook emphasizes the influence of Denniz Pop, the Swede who helped mastermind Ace of Base in the ’90s and mentored Martin and other future hitmakers before dying tragically young. Or maybe—like the Bulls under Jordan and Pippin or Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!—they just love killin’ it.

Whatever the reason, the Swedish control of the international charts only intensified through the 2010s, as producers like Martin and Shellback survived the end of the boy-band age they’d owned via their work for *NSYNC and Britney Spears by becoming equally indispensable to new superstars like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. They updated their trusty formula of don’t-bore-us-get-to-the-chorus structures and major keys with the energy rush and dramatic tension of EDM and other elements that added complexity without sacrificing immediacy. Just consider the woozy twists and turns that fill Martin’s production for Ariana Grande’s “Into You” and the reggaetón lilt in Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber’s “I Don’t Care”: fresh variations that otherwise deliver those Swedish pop fundamentals with ruthless efficiency.

The same drive to innovate is just as clear in the songs by Swedish artists such as Robyn, who began and ended the decade with a pair of heartache-filled masterpieces, and Tove Lo. As for Avicii—a.k.a. Tim Bergling, the DJ and producer who sadly took his own life in 2018—there may be no artist who more successfully bridged the realms of clubland, streaming, and old-school hit radio. The extent of his influence will be felt even more in the decade to come.

But as for now, here’s a playlist that shows how those Swedes got it done.

Amid the anxieties of recent times as well as potential concerns about the well-being of musical heroes of a certain vintage, it’s been reassuring to the international community of Sparks fanatics to know that Ron and Russell Mael are weathering things in their customary manner. Along with rave reviews for the Los Angeles-based duo’s new album, A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip, the web has been filling up with the brothers’ stream of quarantine-inspired home videos, including one of Ron showing off his collection of international hand sanitizers.

Clearly, this is not how Sparks should have been celebrating their 50th anniversary of crafting irrepressibly witty and wondrous music, but it will have to do. Current circumstances also demonstrate a quality that has long been one of the band’s greatest virtues: an ability to engage with the now—or perhaps 15 minutes beyond it—without ever sacrificing their idiosyncrasies. That’s as true now as it was when the Maels left L.A. to become glam-pop heroes in early-’70s Britain, where their impact was clear on the likes of Queen, who dropped their Zeppelin shtick for a more flamboyant mode not long after they opened for Sparks. It was equally clear when they transformed again, with Giorgio Moroder’s help, to create some of the most effervescent electronic dance pop ever recorded, devising a template for New Order, Duran Duran, The Human League, and many more acolytes.

Not that the Maels are much for resting on laurels. Instead, they’ve continually engaged with younger admirers (as they did in FFS, their 2015 team-up with Franz Ferdinand) while releasing new albums that maintain their standards of excellence, A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip being another case in point. Their cult may soon see an expansion of their ranks with the pending release of two new movies: Annette, an L.A.-set musical by French director Leos Carax featuring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing original Sparks songs, and a documentary about the band by super-fan Edgar Wright.

To celebrate the past 50 years of Sparks, we present this set of essential songs by the Maels themselves and many others whose music bears their influence, all to be savored along with the sanitizer of your choice.

There’s a kid inside of us, no matter how decrepit we get, and the kid inside Tom Waits probably sounds a lot like the one in “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a highlight of Waits’ gloriously ragged 1992 masterpiece Bone Machine. Given that there’s “nothing out there but sad and gloom” based on what he’s seen in the lives of the adults around him, the world of grown-ups rightly seems unappealing and bewildering. “How do you move in a world of fog that’s always changing things?” he wonders, articulating a dilemma that stymied so many of the hard-luck characters who tell their stories in the hundreds of songs authored by one of American music’s most cherished mavericks.

That question is probably still on the man’s mind as he turns 70. We like to imagine him as the coot prospector he played in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, scratching his head and grumbling, “How the hell did that happen?” in that iconic voice, which never seemed as if it could get any raspier but somehow always did.

Then again, turning 70 maybe isn’t such a big deal to a guy who tried hard to seem old before his time. When Waits first emerged in the Los Angeles club scene of the early ’70s, his clear devotion to heroes like Jack Kerouac and Thelonious Monk made him seem like a scruffy relic to listeners more hip to Jackson Browne. He styled himself as a piano-playing Charles Bukowski, tickling the ivories as he spun hard-luck tales equal parts miserable and hilarious. (Check out his 1975 live album Nighthawks at the Diner for vivid early evidence of both his storytelling chops and his ability to delight a crowd.)But anyone who figured they had him pegged would be surprised again and again by what followed in the ’80s and beyond. Once Waits found a long-sought sense of personal stability with wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan, his creative moves grew bolder, starting with 1983’s stunning Swordfishtrombones and continuing with later triumphs like 2004’s Real Gone. The music they contained could be tender and heartbreaking or crazy and chaotic. Whatever the case, it all remained true to his reliably skewed vision of that confusing grown-up world.

In the process, he’d honor his own inspirations—Bob Dylan, Harry Partch, Mose Allison, Captain Beefheart—while inspiring countless younger artists who absorbed his profound influence on how great songs get made and sung. To celebrate the occasion of his 70th, here’s a set of 70 Waits essentials and many more songs that show his grubby fingerprints.

Fifty years ago, in a true-life science-fiction story wilder than anything concocted by an Area 51 conspiracy nut, a neon-colored interplanetary vessel lifted off of a top-secret launchpad somewhere in Michigan. Of course, the P-Funk Mothership only existed as an LSD-induced pipe dream back in 1970—it took a few years before audiences got to see George Clinton’s Afrofuturist UFO in all its cosmic glory at halls, stadiums, and arenas around the world. (Visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture can still check out a 1990s-vintage rebuilt version.)

But Clinton’s almighty vision of psychedelically charged funk and soul was already soaring sky-high, judging by the first three long-players—Funkadelic and Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow by Funkadelic; Osmium by its twin enterprise Parliament—to emerge from his ever-more-sprawling P-Funk collective at the beginning of the ’70s. The surreal and exhilarating contents of those albums and the many that followed would ultimately comprise one of the most inspiring and influential bodies of American music ever made.

They’d also prove to be a seemingly limitless resource for several generations of musicians, producers, DJs, and anyone else who ever saw fit to sample the grooves, riffs, beats, and assorted whatnot concocted by Clinton and such pivotal P-Funk collaborators as bassists Bootsy Collins and Cordell “Boogie” Mosson, guitarists Eddie Hazel and Garry Shider, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, drummer Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey, and the Horny Horns. Indeed, P-Funk’s importance in the history and development of hip-hop is incalculable, the Mothership Connection being the force that binds iconic jams by Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, and EPMD to the best of Dr. Dre’s G-funk era to modern-day journeys into parts unknown by Kendrick Lamar. Here’s a set of essential tracks by rocket-powered travelers in the universe that Clinton created.

Fifty years ago this summer, Sly and the Family Stone were melting down amid a mess of missed shows, internal frictions, and bad PCP. Yet the funky utopia they briefly represented remains utterly compelling even now.

The band’s mastermind was Sylvester Stewart, a singer and multi-instrumentalist who had first gained fame in San Francisco’s music scene as a DJ and producer under the handle of Sly Stone; this surname would also be used by the two bona fide siblings among his bandmates. Sly and the Family Stone were integrated not only when it came to matters of race and gender but also in terms of Stewart’s remarkably inclusive creative vision, one that would be presented with an exuberance that dissolved any boundaries between rock, funk, soul, pop, and psychedelia.

As per the boastful title of the band’s 1966 debut, they were indeed a whole new thing. And on the heels of their set at Woodstock in August 1969, record buyers were ready to go wherever Stewart wanted to take ’em. Alas, life within the Family fold had already become a far heavier trip than listeners could have known based on their three iconic hits of 1969 and early 1970—“Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Everybody Is a Star,” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”—and the massive success of 1970’s Greatest Hits, the most indispensable album ever to bear the title. Things just got heavier after that, though Stewart managed to prevent his complete personal collapse long enough to make two more masterpieces in 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and 1973’s Fresh.

As grim and weird as the later chapters of this story have been, the music Sly and the Family Stone made in their imperial phase is somehow as inventive, exhilarating, and downright joyful as ever. One reason it still feels fresh is the abundance of hip-hop, R&B, and dance tracks powered by samples of the originals’ hooks, horns, and harmonies—and, of course, the unbeatable grooves provided by the rhythm section of bassist Larry Graham and drummer Greg Errico. Here’s a set of songs that wouldn’t be half as amazing if not for their sturdy foundations of Stone.

Suffice to say it’s not been a good year for best-laid plans. On the brighter side, 2020 has seen a welcome abundance of acts and artists who spent years (sometimes decades) underneath the radar and who have returned with new music that instantly reminds us why we loved them in the first place.

Some—like Tame Impala and Grimes—really weren’t gone for long but clearly had too much going on in their lives to find the necessary time to realize their big ambitions, and we’re happy they finally did. Other cases—like Paramore’s Hayley Williams and LINKIN PARK’s Mike Shinoda—involve familiar lead singers who’ve been understandably careful about how they want to launch their post-band careers. Someday, hopefully, Zack de la Rocha will feel as if he’s ready to do the same and let some of those unheard collaborations with Trent Reznor, DJ Shadow, and Questlove outta the vault—his guest spot with Run The Jewels will do fine for now.

Then there are those who are back after some truly epic-length hiatuses. There was no lack of coverage for the end of eight-year waits for new material from Bob Dylan and Fiona Apple (and Brandy and Alanis Morissette, too) or the 14-year pause for The Chicks. Yet those gaps hardly compare with the more extreme creative layovers that recently concluded, like the 29 years in between new albums by The Psychedelic Furs, the 35 in between efforts by the original lineup of X, or the 36 for Bob Geldof and his Boomtown Rats.

Arriving at the tail end of 2019 was one of the weirder comebacks: the first new album in 16 years by Gang Starr, constructed under controversial circumstances by DJ Premier from unreleased raps by his former partner Guru, who wasn’t around to argue over the results since he died of cancer in 2010. Similarly surprising (and awesome) is the return of Eddie Chacon. Formerly one half of Charles & Eddie—a ’90s soul-pop duo who scored a global hit with “Would I Lie To You?” before disappearing into oblivion—Chacon left the music business decades ago to become an art and fashion photographer. Full of gorgeously eerie and deeply stoned alt-R&B made with Solange and Frank Ocean collaborator John Carroll Kirby, Chacon’s very belated solo debut, Pleasure, Joy & Happiness, is the kind of album that feels very much worth the wait even if you had no idea you were waiting for it. Here’s hoping this playlist of 2020 returnees directs you to more music that gives you that feeling.

‍Photo by Sachyn Mital

Like everyone else in the world, Billie Eilish may be wishing that 2020 had gone a lot differently. Back in February, she entered the grand pantheon of performers enlisted to sing a theme for a James Bond movie. Her mission: to somehow wrest something mellifluous out of lyrics based on a title that would be un-singable in any other circumstances. In the case of her movie assignment and her accompanying single, that title was No Time to Die, the 25th official entry in the franchise of espionage thrillers about agent 007 that was launched by 1962’s Dr. No.As fine as it is, Eilish’s moody and grandly orchestrated song would not feel complete until it followed the tradition of its predecessors by accompanying a Bond-movie opening credit sequence (intros which, in keeping with other efforts to make the series more contemporary and less sexist, now feature far fewer shadowy female nudes than they once did). Alas, “No Time to Die” still awaits that honor, since its namesake film—one of many big Hollywood releases delayed by the coronavirus crisis—will not be seen on big screens until November.

A James Bond theme without a James Bond movie might hardly count as poignant to some people. After all, it can be hard to overlook the character’s reputation as a repellently chauvinistic and possibly sociopathic symbol of badly outmoded colonialist and Cold War ideals who murders in service of the state. And don’t get us started on that thing Roger Moore used to do with his eyebrows.But just like the sight of Daniel Craig in swim trunks, there’s so often something magnificent about the music the Bond movies have produced, caused, or inspired. Whether shaken or stirred, songs like Eilish’s contribution swell with all the high drama, old-school cool, and/or cheesy grandeur that listeners could possibly desire—and perhaps crave more than ever now that the pandemic has torpedoed so many of the summer’s usual pop-cultural distractions. Here’s a playlist of Bond-related songs (both official and not) to make you feel more suave than you ought to.