Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond

The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?  In his new audiobook book, The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American...

Elvis Costello seemed to arrive fully formed with his 1977 debut, My Aim Is True . The look, the voice, the wordplay and the attitude were already there, along with songs like “Alison,” “Watching the...

Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo helped transform the possibilities of the electric guitar at a time when its role in rock music could seem well established. He came of age in New York City’s downtown No Wave art...

Tom Morello arrived in Los Angeles from Libertyville, Illinois, in the mid-1980s with a Harvard political science degree in his pocket and a guitar slung across his back, determined to become the next great guitarist on...

David Porter's story goes well beyond writing songs and releasing albums for Stax Records. His recent memoir, The Soul Man , tells how he and his partner Isaac Hayes helped invent a sound rich and enduring enough to...

Travis Barker grew up in Fontana, California, and was gifted his first drum kit at the age of four from his mother, who made him promise before she died that he would never stop playing. This was just before he started...

Daniel Kessler grew up between London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., listening to his older brother’s early UK rock records. He picked up guitar as a teenager, the same day he quit skateboarding, and after moving...

Brittany Howard has never been the type to do things quietly. Whether it was fronting Alabama Shakes with a voice that could fill a room and level it in the same breath, or striking out on her own with two solo records...

In Revisionist History's new season The Staten Island Problem, senior producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey investigates the story of what was, at the time, the biggest secession movement in the U.S. since the Civil War. The...

Harvey Mason Jr. grew up steeped in music. His father, Harvey Mason Sr., was half of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters rhythm section and played on countless sessions through the '70s and '80s. After a brief detour through...

My friend W. Kamau Bell has a new show out, Who's With Me?. Known for having conversations about the issues that divide, enrage, and confuse us, Kamau sits down with someone he admires to give them their flowers, ask...

Melissa Auf der Maur came of age in Montreal's bohemian art scene in the '80s and early '90s, at the very moment that alternative rock was becoming the defining sound of a generation. Through an unlikely chain of...

Today we're revisiting a conversation with acclaimed British guitarist Johny Marr. Marr started playing guitar as a young teenager growing up in Manchester. When he turned 15 he dropped out of school and moved to London...

Joe Jackson showed up in the late '70s UK New Wave scene, all nervous energy and biting wit, with hits like "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" putting him in the same conversation as Elvis Costello and Squeeze. But...

Ed O'Brien has spent decades crafting some of the most textured, expansive guitar in modern rock. From the fragmented beauty of Kid A and Amnesiac to the experimental layers of The King of Limbs , with the more...