Music and Recording Features

John Michael Osbourne was obsessed with the Beatles. Better known by the sobriquet "Ozzy," the cofounding lead singer of Black Sabbath who later turned uber-successful solo artist and still later became a reality TV star was deeply in love with the Fab Four. Osbourne passed away on July 22, 2025, at age 76.

Adrian Belew had an itch that needed some serious scratching. The iconoclastist/vocalist had a hankering to perform material from the three King Crimson albums he fronted during the proto-prog band's 1980s revival—October 1981's Discipline, June 1982's Beat, and March 1984's Three of a Perfect Pair.

If you find yourself in Monaco on a Sunday night, make your way to La Note Bleue, a rant and music bar on the beach by the Avenue Princesse Grace. There, you're likely to find a legendary world/fusion guitarist sitting in with a group of young jazz musicians eager to cut heads with the acknowledged maestro of inner awareness and otherworldly spirits.

Once and forever iconoclast Vernon Reid, the Britain-born guitarist for iconic American band Living Colour, is perpetually in pursuit of sonic excellence, regardless the point of entry. "A lot of different things have attracted me—everything from gentle breeze to thunder and lightning," Reid told me during a recent Zoom interview.

If you are at all familiar with the Netflix sci-fi/horror phenomenon known as Stranger Things, you've heard its foreboding, pulsating theme music dozens of times. The familiarity of that signature Stranger synth bed should in turn lead your ingrained sound-sense memory to conjure the music of Tangerine Dream, the pioneering German electronic band.

You could say that guitar phenom Derek Trucks grew up in a musical family. His late uncle, drummer Butch Trucks, was a cofounder of The Allman Brothers Band, and his younger brother Duane drums for Widespread Panic. Derek's jam-centric DNA shaped the sound found in the grooves of Future Soul (Fantasy), the sixth studio album from Tedeschi Trucks Band/

Notoriously opinionated and obstinate Steve Albini, a guy ever vigilant and vocal about the wicked ways of the music business, showing up in Austin, Texas, at the annual South by Southwest festival? This I had to see. After a near-miss at his Austin hotel, we spoke the next morning on the phone.

"It was unspeakable on all levels, as bad as I imagined, and in some ways worse."

Any notion that he'd somehow softened, somehow accepted the music biz as it—

Wait. What the hell am I thinking?