Rolling Stone

rolling stone

Jason Fine EDITOR DEPUTY EDITOR Sean Woods MUSIC EDITOR Christian Hoard CREATIVE DIRECTOR Joseph Hutchinson DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE CONTENT Catriona Ni Aolain DIGITAL DIRECTOR Jerry Portwood MANAGING EDITOR Alison Weinflash DEPUTY MUSIC EDITOR Simon Vozick-Levinson ENTERTAINMENT EDITORS David Fear Maria Fontoura NEWS DIRECTOR Jason Newman POLITICS EDITOR Patrick Reis SENIOR EDITOR Phoebe Neidl CULTURE EDITOR Elisabeth Garber-Paul SENIOR MUSIC EDITORS Patrick Doyle Brendan Klinkenberg Hank Shteamer REVIEWS EDITOR Jon Dolan SENIOR MUSIC BUSINESS EDITOR Amy X. Wang NEWS EDITOR Brenna Ehrlich ASSISTANT EDITOR Suzy Exposito SENIOR WRITERS David Browne Tim Dickinson David Fricke Andy Greene Kory Grow Brian Hiatt Alex Morris Stephen Rodrick Jamil Smith Brittany Spanos Matt Taibbi CHIEF FILM CRITIC Peter Travers CHIEF TV CRITIC Alan Sepinwall STAFF WRITERS Jon Blistein Ryan Bort EJ Dickson Charles Holmes Daniel Kreps Elias Leight Claire Shaffer Tessa Stuart WASHINGTON, D.C., BUREAU CHIEF Andy Kroll RS COUNTRY EDITOR Joseph Hudak RS COUNTRY DEPUTY EDITOR Jon Freeman DIRECTOR OF CHARTS Emily Blake PRODUCTS EDITOR Tim Chan ART DIRECTOR Matthew Cooley DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR Toby Fox DESIGNER Kyle Rice DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR Sacha…

when musicians ask the questions

“I think it’s important not to be dissuaded by the difficulty of the task. I mean, yeah, it’s a tall mountain we’ve got to climb. But you do it one step at a time.”—GOV. JAY INSLEE, on the climate crisis OVER THE COURSE of 52 years and thousands of interviews with musicians, actors, politicians, and celebrities in these pages, at least one thing has remained consistent: We’ve always asked the questions. Aside from a memorable encounter between Carrie Fisher and Madonna for a 1991 cover story, our staff has rarely given up the role of interlocutors. Until now. For our first annual Musicians on Musicians issue (or, the “Icons on Icons” issue, as Diddy and DJ Khaled renamed it in their conversation), we invited some of our favorite artists to get together…

+ love letters & advice

“People are going to focus on the Kanye revelations, but we cannot overlook what Taylor Swift says about politics today. She’s spot-on.”—Kimberly, via Twitter Taylor Breaks Her Silence In the years since Taylor Swift last appeared on our cover [RS 1218, in 2014], she withdrew from the public eye, stepping back to reclaim privacy. In conversation with senior writer Brian Hiatt [“Taylor Swift: The ROLLING STONE Interview,” RS 1332], Swift gives the most revealing interview of her career, and in four days it surpassed half a million unique views online. She delved into her contentious relationship with Kanye West, why she’s focusing on the 2020 election, and the surprise betrayal of her former label boss. “Reading this feels like we personally caught up,” said reader “Doj.” “What a brutally honest deep dive…

post malone: moshing his way across america

POST MALONE’S new album, Hollywood’s Bleeding, is full of songs about the Dallas rapper’s grueling inner pain. But on his Runaway Tour to support the chart-topping album, ongoing through late November, Post has also experienced some pretty serious outer pain. “My creative and brand manager, Bobby Greenleaf, hurt my wrist moshing to Slipknot in my hotel room in Sacramento,” Post says, in reference to this dressing-room photo, “so I was struggling to put my socks on.” Post brings a similar visceral intensity to the show itself. “My name is Austin Richard Post, and I’ve come to play some shitty music for y’all,” he recently said onstage at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Post turned introspective songs like “Goodbyes” and “Allergic” into high-energy moments as he rampaged across the…

baby of the year

SINCE LAST YEAR, DaBaby has released two hit albums, two mixtapes, 15 music videos, and more than 20 high-profile features, while coining one highly distinctive catchphrase (“Goin’ baby,” an amorphous term that means to do something well). If you ask him, it’s all part of his more-is-more (but never enough) strategy. “When you’ve got a sound that don’t sound like nobody else, and it’s brand-new, you’ve got to feed it to ’em,” DaBaby stresses. “You’ve got to force it on ’em.” The sound in question is a precise, staccato, syllable-crushing flow that has cut through a rap landscape dominated for years by singsong melodies and Auto-Tune, making DaBaby one of 2019’s biggest new stars. The week following the release of DaBaby’s latest album, KIRK, 12 of the top 25 tracks on…

linda mccartney’s heart of the country

Linda McCartney: The Polaroid Diaries $50 Before she married a Beatle, Linda McCartney was renowned photographer Linda Eastman. She was the first woman to shoot a cover for ROLLING STONE — of Eric Clapton — and photographed icons like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan (and, yeah, the Beatles). From the 1970s until her death in 1998 at 56 from breast cancer, Linda turned her camera to her home life. The new book Linda McCartney: The Polaroid Diaries features intimate snapshots of the McCartneys and friends like Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde, who wrote the book’s intro. “They often, like a demo tape, capture the vibe better than a proper recording,” Hynde writes of Linda’s Polaroids. She was one of the last people Linda photo-graphed, in a portrait shot at Linda and Paul’s…