Ben Naddaff-Hafrey

Whether it's a song about longing for a beloved home or breaking away from a stifling one, American musicians are always writing about the places they're from. American music isn't defined by a sound or a set of artists, but by a theme. American…

Lucious Lyon, the emperor from Empire, would be proud: As of Wednesday, the day of its season one finale, the soundtrack for the first series of Fox's hit show is the No. 1 album in the country. Not only that, it's bested Madonna's new record Rebel…

My Morning Jacket has been releasing albums since 1999, and in that time they have become one of the last truly strange American bands in an otherwise staid genre: rock 'n' roll. Still, a 17-year-career threatens complacency, and the band neared…

When the Uber driver finally gave up about two blocks away from the Grammys, my date and I walked. Coming up on a highway underpass, we could see the entry arch well enough to start feeling a little glamorous. Then, a beat-up Civic pulled up…

The Grammy Awards are ultimately more about the show than they are the awards. Most of the "Grammy moments" are feats of self-sacrifice: All through the night, Grammy losers like Sia, Katy Perry and Beyoncé stood and delivered the evening's best…

If the Killers know one thing, it's great schlock. Monday night, they debuted their ninth-ever Christmas song, "Joel, the Lump of Coal," with fellow Las Vegas native Jimmy Kimmel. Between the sweaters and the anthropomorphic coal, they've proven…

Even for the Robin Thicke haters, things are starting to get a little tragic. Three months after the release of Paula, an album meant to win back his wife which amounted to a historic flop both in sales and Thicke's personal life, the lawsuit…

Sporting a mullet and belting in front of 1.5 billion people, Bono wants you to think about Africa. Lying next to a girl on a heart-shaped stage, Bono wants you to think about love. Running across the 50-yard line at the Super Bowl, Bono wants you…

When U2 released No Line on the Horizon in 2009, they said they had another album ready to be released. For the last five years — the longest gap between albums in U2's 34-year career — fans have waited through rumors, false starts and lost…

In a livestreamed announcement coming one awkward hour after the president's press conference on Ferguson, Taylor Swift debuted her new single, "Shake It Off." The song comes after a few weeks of teasing from Swift's camp. On Aug. 4, she posted an…

The news came yesterday afternoon, and by morning it was trending. Weird Al is back: Monday, one day before the release of his new album Mandatory Fun, Weird Al Yankovic made good on his promise with the video for "Tacky," a bastardization of…

After all the concern over the future of the music industry, it's only fitting that the Queen of Break-Up Songs should weigh in with a break-up op-ed of sorts. In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Taylor Swift sang the swan song of the old music…

Sometimes it's easy to overlook the fact that the girl who played Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon while you were growing up is currently blazing a trail towards the future of pop music. Nevertheless, on Sunday, Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea's "Problem"…

"It was only two years ago [that] I was working in a bar — I was cleaning toilets in a bar," 22-year-old Sam Smith told NPR. "I remind myself of that every day, at the moment, because I don't want to take anything for granted."  It's a surprisingly…

A week after the greatest festival of the year, the Bonnaroo farm is back the way it was before Sam McAllister sold it to the festival in 2007. Its 530 acres unfold through big, trampled fields, dotted with the occasional mushroom fountain, loading…

In 2006, OK Go was a small indie band with a pop-rock sound and not much success to speak of. That's when they got together with lead singer Damian Kulash's sister to make a music video. That video involved treadmills and 17 takes. Later, it also…

If you describe Bonnaroo to anyone who hasn't been there themselves, it invariably sounds like hell. For four days, 90,000 people from all over gather in a 10,000-person town where, by mid-June, the temperature is regularly hitting 90 degrees.…

At 10:30 on a brisk June night in Manchester, Tenn., Kanye West was standing in a large field, silhouetted against a monolithic array of of lights, yelling, "What's the new cool?" A good hundred yards away, the words "Fuck Kanye" were scrawled…

In 1972, a 12-year-old Michael Jackson was on network television with his brother Jackie, politely refusing to tell a man 33 years his senior how much money he'd made. It was a fair question — in the two years of the Jackson Five's existence,…