Features archive
August 2026
Filter
63 articles
- August 31
-
- “It’s a song that has been misinterpreted greatly, to say the least. I think people too often look for symbolism in songs when they’re simpler than they seem”: How an irresistible track about dreaming big turned into the breakout hit for Counting Crows
- “The first time you heard them you had to hear them again, because there was a whole bunch of stuff in there that nobody had done before”: Trevor Horn on the band he’s proudest to have produced
- August 30
-
- “He wasn’t listening to anything I had to say. So I went home and wrote that song and took it back the next morning. I sang it and he was crying”: How Dolly Parton’s heart-wrenching ballad became one of the most famous songs of all time
- “We could play the same groove for a number of hours – Prince would walk in and out of the room saying, ‘Don’t stop! Nobody move!’”: Lisa Coleman on how Prince insisted on perfection from his Revolution bandmates
- August 29
-
- “I was playing a reggae cover of The Beatles' song This Boy and King Charles was really interested in it – I had to relax and answer his questions”: We speak to the DJs behind the legendary sound systems of London's Notting Hill Carnival
- “Everybody goes on about how brilliant Kraftwerk were, but they were only brilliant because they were rich!”: Heaven 17 legend Martyn Ware on how financial barriers can prevent great music from ever being heard
- August 28
-
- Play to win: It's MusicRadar's Quiz of the Week #19!
- “Bill brought it in and it was a one-minute-long country and western song. It took us forever to figure out the arrangement and who was going to play what”: How REM turned a simple idea into a classic song of life-affirming power
- “Rick Rubin's mansion wasn't a studio – it was a house that got wired up to sound incredible”: Will Yip explains to us how he built his dream studio with a little influence from Rick Rubin
- “Would prog music have happened without the synth? I’m not sure it would”: Rick Wakeman on the vital significance of the synthesizer to music history
- August 27
-
- “I sat on the toilet, with a mag in my left hand and my sax in my right and we did the takes there”: The genius - and unusual recording story - of Supertramp’s greatest song
- “In the ‘90s, I was eager to demonstrate that samples were a legitimate form of making music – I wanted to articulate that in as many ways as I could”: DJ Shadow on his original mission statement and why he no longer puts the MPC on a pedestal
- “I said, ‘Hey, guys - we’ve got a visitor’. They looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ and then Joey Ramone walked in and went, ‘How’s it going, guys?’ Everyone’s jaws hit the floor”: We speak to Primal Scream legend Bobby Gillespie
- August 26
-
- “Rock and roll is for senior citizens now – However strange one feels, you can just look at the Stones who are far older and further down the path to oblivion”: Robyn Hitchcock reflects on his many decades of innovative songwriting
- Dolly Parton’s unique creative process remembered: “Dolly said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’ I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the transposer. She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’”
- “Martin Gore brought along his synthesizer – we thought, this is a lot easier than learning chords on a guitar and you only need one finger to play it”: Vince Clarke on the early days of Depeche Mode and his first synth memories
- August 25
- August 24
-
- “He was divorced, drinking, and involved with drugs a little too much – and yet he was this beautiful soul who we got to know”: How Rhinestone Cowboy became an everyman anthem for the ages
- “There’s nothing more threatening than a girl with a guitar”: The classic ’80s hit that topped the US chart for seven weeks and turned Joan Jett into a rock icon
- “There isn't one thing about the gear that we’re using now that we don't understand”: Autechre on their diligent tech-learning ethos and very first workflow
- August 23
-
- “In ’70s post-Vietnam America there was no album that better captured the fall from Eden, the long slow afterburn of the ’60s”: Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne’s golden years – by Bruce Springsteen and Browne himself
- “I’ve released music that I’ve only monitored on laptop speakers”: Chris Lake on his mixing secrets
- August 22
-
- "There's no barrier to capturing a performance that's happening on any instrument in any part of the space": Inside Hot Chip's London studio
- “Ahhh, what a tune! It has more melodic genius and simple power than I ever realised”: The melancholy classic that made Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel the world’s hottest songwriting duo
- “I said, 'Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Not as amazing as Brian Wilson’”: Giles Martin on the overwhelming talent of Brian Wilson
- August 21
-
- “Analogue is better than digital, Behringer gear is garbage and your cheap-ass monitors are ruining your mixes”: 10 of the most enduring music tech myths busted
- “I guess it’s a real summer song – as soon as you play it, you know it’s going to kick off”: Ash’s Tim Wheeler tells us about the making of their most beloved song
- “She was a bit nervous at first. She just sat down and she sang. I directed her. I wanted her to improvise”: How Lana Del Rey collaborated with movie maker Baz Luhrmann to create one of her most hauntingly beautiful songs
- “James’s rhythm parts are insane. His right hand looks like it's not even moving – It's one of the most aggressive, precise things you've ever heard in your life”: Andrew Scheps on the complex legacy of Metallica’s Death Magnetic
- August 20
- August 19
-
- “We liked the sound of what Giorgio was doing with I Feel Love. We thought the marriage of electronics with what we were doing would be something really fresh and special”: Russell Mael on how Sparks went beyond pop to create their own sonic universe
- “Steven started singing, ‘Cruisin’ for the ladies.’ I said, ‘That’s really bad. I don’t think Van Halen would put that on the B-side of their worst record’”: When Aerosmith got schooled by hit songwriter Desmond Child
- “People often crack jokes about that album. We had that dreadful picture on the cover with the three of us looking like the Bee Gees, and I’m thinking, ‘This is wrong’”: Carl Palmer on the disastrous album that led ELP to break up
- “There's not a night that passes when that doesn't still sting”: When Skrillex shared with us his anger at having four years of his work stolen
- August 18
-
- “We would speak for about a year after he passed on – he was very, very present”: Twin Peaks and Dune’s Alicia Witt tells us how the late David Lynch guided her new album
- “That was a classic example of hiding the meaning of the song in a whole glorious backdrop of crazy arrangements and cutting-edge synthesizers”: Roland Orzabal on the hidden depths of Tears for Fears’ first hit
- “As soon as I started writing music with computers, I got so addicted to it”: Tom VR on his creative process, "game-changing" Ableton Live tips and the hardware synth he can't stop talking about
- August 17
-
- “Prince liked it loud on stage - Your head would be vibrating after those shows. Your body and your mind were shaken to the core”: We find out what it was really like being on-stage with Prince
- “He heard us playing his song electric. You could see the gears grinding in his head. It was like watching a slow-motion lightning bolt”: How The Byrds reinvented a great Bob Dylan song and inspired Dylan to revolutionise his music
- August 16
-
- “Mutt said, ‘Give it a go, and if it doesn’t work get rid of the guy.’ And that’s exactly what we had to do, because Jim was less than useless!”: Why Def Leppard couldn’t make their monster hit Hysteria with Jim Steinman as producer
- “Lindsey was beating his guitar as hard as he could and screaming his lungs out. The first time I heard it, I thought, 'What the heck is going on?’”: Inside the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours
- August 15
-
- “We wanted people to say, ‘Wow, that's Cypress Hill?’”: Cypress Hill’s beat-master Eric Bobo tells us why the band recorded their new album entirely in Spanish
- “When Kraftwerk became an institution we stopped being contemporary. Instead we became salesmen of nostalgia”: Karl Bartos reflects on the end of Kraftwerk’s golden era
- August 14
-
- How Pete Townshend’s drunken night with two Sex Pistols inspired The Who’s last classic song with Keith Moon: “I used to go to clubs and get insulted. Just stand there and endure these snotty little kids saying, ‘Boring old fart!’”
- Check yourself (before you wreck yourself): It's MusicRadar's Quiz of the Week #17!
- “We always recorded with Michael in the dark - he hated light. The studio was absolutely dark”: Behind the scenes of Michael Jackson’s monster hit
- August 13
-
- The guitar genius of Ritchie Blackmore in 5 classic tracks: “There is nothing cooler on record than the dimension-altering alliance of Blackmore, Roger Glover’s bass and Lord’s Hammond organ”
- Travis Barker’s new doc is out today - here's 8 other drummers whose incredible stories deserve to be told on screen
- “Our producer worked with Ozzy Osbourne, so I said, ‘What if Ozzy sang on this song?’ But then I said, ‘How about Rob Halford? The Metal God!’ They all went, ‘Nah, that’s a crazy dream’”: When the Judas Priest legend teamed up with Five Finger Death Punch
- "My goal was, get it out before I die! If I live another 20 years, I'll hit everyone with part two!": Travis Barker in 2012 on his memoir, becoming sober and why he's never really changed his kit
- “It’s a sick, twisted song. I thought it was a love song. Just like all those people that get married to it not realising it’s a dark, demented track”: Stewart Copeland on The Police’s double-edged classic
- August 12
-
- “Artists who use AI should step to the side and let real artists do their thing. There is too much amateur music being released that clogs the arteries of the music business”: Tony Visconti on why human musicians will never be replaced
- “I sang it to Yoko, Phil Spector and a few people and they always winced. I decided to change it... The words were silly anyway”: How John Lennon created one of his greatest post-Beatles songs – with a little help from Yoko
- "Every time I played it, I got phone call after phone call. I thought I'd get howls of protest": How turning a tear-jerking orchestral classic into an unlikely dancefloor hit launched William Orbit's solo career
- August 11
-
- “Everybody used to say how great Clapton was, but I remember saying to Eric, ‘You try playing that one riff for eight minutes!’”: How rock legends Status Quo stole a riff from The Doors and built an entire career out of it
- “I’m still disappointed when people hear the chorus line as ‘got to’ rather than ‘get to’”: How One rescued Achtung Baby and saved U2
- “The first three times I performed it in public, I burst into tears – because it brought back the intensity of the experience”: How Joni Mitchell wrote Woodstock – an era-defining song that spoke to a generation
- August 10
- August 8
-
- “I think the song seems more relevant than ever, especially in the US, with the ICE raids and all that”: How David Byrne and Brian Eno anticipated a darker tomorrow on Talking Heads’ 1979 masterpiece
- “It’s a strange little song - even for a ska song. It has a different kind of rhythm”: We chat with The Selecter’s Pauline Black about their breakthrough 1979 single
- August 7
- August 6
-
- We speak to the noise music creatives pushing out at the extremes of sound: “It's somehow a kind of fetish”
- “It feels like the most ‘us’ thing we’ve ever done – Suno isn’t coming up with that anytime soon”: Sylvan Esso on the making of Ow ∞, their self-built Betty's studio and why they pulled their music from Spotify