INTERVIEWS
Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s Unexpected, Slow-Simmering Reunion
By late 2021, the odds of a Porcupine Tree reunion seemed beyond slim. It had been 12 years since the alt-prog band’s 10th LP (and apparent swan song), 2009’s The Incident, and singer-songwriter Steven Wilson realized his rabid audience wasn’t counting on a follow-up. “Fans had probably given up on [us] ever making another record,” he tells SPIN, his polite eloquence downplaying a hilariously massive understatement. It’s also not like Wilson initially had Porcupine Tree on the brain. After The Incident, feeling trapped in a hamster wheel of expectations and unspoken resentments, he stepped aside to focus on other projects — including various collaborations (Storm Corrosion with Opeth‘s Mikael Akerfeldt), numerous remixing gigs (King Crimson, XTC), and a solo career...
Westworld Composer Ramin Djawadi on That Epic Lana Del Rey Cover in the Season 4 Premiere: Exclusive
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Westworld, Season 4 Episode 1, “The Auguries.”] The return of Westworld for its fourth season means a whole new set of challenges for series composer Ramin Djawadi, who’s been with the series since the beginning, and thus responsible for the soundtrack’s compelling blend of classical and electronic sounds (not to mention its always exciting covers of pre-existing tracks). “I feel like the show always pushes forward,” he says, in the first of a series of episode-specific conversations with Consequence this season. “With the characters, musically speaking, we always talk about, ‘Okay, do we need new themes? Or are we staying with old themes, and should we arrange them differently?’” Advertisement The season premiere, “The Auguries,” a...
Why Yes, the Westworld Cast Has Concerns About Data Privacy After Working on Season 4
HBO’s Westworld is set in a seemingly far-off future, one where a disaster at a high-tech theme park ends up having massive society-wide repercussions. The third season of the series focused on one-time “host” Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) attempting to bring down a malevolent artificial intelligence that’s using peoples’ personal data to determine the course of their entire lives, and Season 4 takes place in the aftermath of that struggle, in a world which thinks itself free of technology’s control… perhaps quite foolishly. In essence, like all stories about the future, it’s really about the present. Specifically our present-day relationship with the technology that helps us and connects us every day… but with its own costs. Speaking with Consequence during a recent virtual press event, the ...
Jack Johnson’s Unexpected Longevity
In 2020, Jack Johnson’s teenage son came to him with some unexpected news: “Upside Down,” Johnson’s 2009 song off the Curious George soundtrack, went viral. The groovy tune, it turned out, had been used by a TikToker to soundtrack a comical video involving a stolen TV from Arby’s. The video quickly amassed 3.5 million likes and soon, 50,000 other TikTokers were making their own memes around it. In short order, streams and sales for Johnson’s entire catalog skyrocketed. “Soon the people at my record label, Brushfire, were calling me up telling me about this Tik Tok thing,” the perpetually mellow singer-songwriter says over the phone from Hawaii. “It was just so funny because you do all this other work at AAA Radio and one person chooses to put you in the background of their TikTok now and t...
Giveon Is Ready to Wake You Up
It’s release week for Giveon, and just as he jokes, things feel theatrical. As he sits in a director’s chair on Zoom like a movie star, he’s surrounded by white flowers and an enormous cardboard image of his album cover for Give or Take. “It’s feeling like a film rollout,” he laughs. His observation is fitting. While his debut–released on June 24– isn’t going to earn Giveon any IMDB credits, the baritone-voiced ballad-churner’s first full-length project has all the ingredients of a music blockbuster. The anticipation, for one, is there. Fans have been waiting for a Giveon record since he was introduced to the world with his feature on Drake’s “Chicago Freestyle” in 2020, as he released his first two EPs Take Time and When It’s All Said and Done. There’s a concept there, too, he says. The a...
Giveon Is Ready to Wake You Up
It’s release week for Giveon, and just as he jokes, things feel theatrical. As he sits in a director’s chair on Zoom like a movie star, he’s surrounded by white flowers and an enormous cardboard image of his album cover for Give or Take. “It’s feeling like a film rollout,” he laughs. His observation is fitting. While his debut–released on June 24– isn’t going to earn Giveon any IMDB credits, the baritone-voiced ballad-churner’s first full-length project has all the ingredients of a music blockbuster. The anticipation, for one, is there. Fans have been waiting for a Giveon record since he was introduced to the world with his feature on Drake’s “Chicago Freestyle” in 2020, as he released his first two EPs Take Time and When It’s All Said and Done. There’s a concept there, too, he says. The a...
Regina Spektor Is On Her Own Hero’s Journey
Regina Spektor still waits for inspiration to strike. The singer-songwriter, who is about to release her first album in more than half a decade, explains that she isn’t the sort of person who sits herself down at the piano when she doesn’t feel like she has something to say. She’s often struck by peers and friends who have developed different types of discipline, people who craft songs with the skill of someone assembling furniture, but her process has always been much more organic. “It’s like somebody screaming at a fish pond for 10 minutes and then like putting in their their fishing rod,” she tells Consequence of trying to force herself to write. “Where are all the fish? Well, maybe you shouldn’t have brought a megaphone to this.” Home, before and after, the name of Spektor’s eight...
A Deep Conversation With Jeff Bridges
On the other end of the phone, I heard the gravel-toned voice belonging to 72-year-old beloved, legendary actor, musician, and philanthropist Jeff Bridges. All it took was his “Good morning!” to conjure the image of him behind the wheel of a well-worn country pick-up truck, waving, as he ambles up my make-believe driveway toward my sprawling, somewhere-out-West front porch. The truck bed, loaded with bushels of peaches. Or explosives. Or both. Bridges has been through the ringer the last two years. In October 2020, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and then, after successful chemotherapy treatments, spent five weeks in the intensive care unit after a near-death bout with COVID-19. He eventually recovered and returned to work. He’s currently playing Dan Chase, an ex-CIA officer o...
How Only Murders in the Building’s Music Supervisors Perfected the Needle Drop
It’s hard to think of an element of filmmaking that is as simultaneously critical and hidden as music. It is the unassuming link that binds a film together from moment to moment; it is the final piece of the puzzle that makes the whole experience that much more cohesive; more emotional; more impactful. So what is the key to curating the perfect soundtrack or score? Patience? Determination? For music supervising power-duo Bruce Gilbert and Lauren Mikus, the secret to success is enjoying the work, and having the most fun as possible. In fact, Mikus describes the perfect project as, simply: “a fun conversation,” and the approach seems to work for them: The two have overseen, both individually and as a team, music featured in an impressive catalog of films and TV shows, including, but certainl...
Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez on Channeling The Weeknd, Getting His ‘Broadway On’
At one point during my Zoom call with Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez, I fumble my words so heavily that our conversation grinds to a halt. Not because of awkwardness. The Coheed and Cambria mastermind remains one of the world’s most reliably affable rock stars: smiling widely, entertaining my nerdy questions about his synth-stacked home studio, punctuating every other sentence with a stoner-friendly laugh. The real reason I’m flummoxed: Even after listening to this band’s music for two decades, I have literally no idea what sub-genre shorthand to use during a question. (“Prog-metal-emo-power-pop” doesn’t exactly leap off the tongue.) Even crazier, the band’s upcoming 10th LP, Vaxis — Act II: A Window of the Waking Mind, expands beyond even that broad description, flirting more o...
Hazel English and Day Wave on The Perks of Collaborating With Your Friends
Both Hazel English and Day Wave have had a busy couple of weeks. Last Friday (June 17th), Hazel English released a new EP, the dreamy and nostalgic Summer Nights, and this Friday (June 24th), Day Wave will release his first album in five years, Pastlife. However, the pair of releases come at a very different point in each artist’s career — whereas Day Wave (the project of Oakland musician Jackson Phillips) has been a major proponent of the dreamy bedroom pop that is unavoidable on TikTok these days, Phillips has been very deliberate about taking these five years to hone his sound and arrive with a fully-formed sophomore LP. Meanwhile, Hazel English — the project of Australia-to-California musician Eleisha Caripis — has been hard at work over the last couple years, releasing her brilli...
The Kills Are Ready to Roar
At the old Mayan Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, fans are wound up for a smoldering night of jagged, turbocharged punk and deep blues. The Kills have come to reignite the present and reflect on their past amid the room’s angular, pre-Columbian temple decor and packed dance floor. At stage left is singer Alison Mosshart, with a mane of startling platinum, wailing to the riffs of “Murdermile,” a bleak tune from 2005. She grabs her mic stand and snaps her head forward and back, convulsing to the raw bursts of guitar from her creative soulmate, Jamie Hince, now blasting through his amplifiers. Together, Mosshart and Hince pause between riffs to growl and purr, “It’s a train wreck/You got me on the wrong track, honey.” This is only their third night back in the spotlight since 2019, part of a ...
