INTERVIEWS
Duran Duran’s Roger Taylor Talks Future Past, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nomination
Duran Duran took the world by storm in the 1980s, but 2022 is shaping up to be a year to remember for the Birmingham band. In February, they netted their first nomination for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and released a deluxe edition of their excellent 2021 album, Future Past, featuring a new single “Laughing Boy.” Then this month, they announced a North American tour that will take the band across the continent in August and September. Drummer Roger Taylor joined Duran Duran in 1979 and was with the band throughout their swift rise to stardom in the early ‘80s, playing on their wildly popular first three albums. In 1986, Taylor stepped away from the band, retiring to the English countryside. But he returned to Duran Duran in 2001 for the band’s fruitful third act, playing on five new st...
Candyland’s Josie Martin On Reunion After 8 Years: “Hopefully, Our Fans Get to Relive Some Memories”
Candyland are officially back—and with renewed perspective and a creative direction they’re embracing in earnest. In a new interview with EDM.com, Candyland’s Josie Martin explains that the decision to walk away from the music industry in 2019 felt like a “life or death” moment. It was an uncertain end to the Candyland saga, a project that started with a duo skyrocketing to prominence after delivering viral remixes of early 2010s dance hits from Bingo Players, Krewella, Skrillex, and more. But as quickly as their success began, Josie Martin and Ethan Davis found themselves going separate ways in 2014. Martin would continue Candyland solo following the split. Fortunately, however, the story doesn’t end there. In fact, Martin views walking away as one of the bes...
Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead at 15: Isaac Brock, Johnny Marr on Collaborative ‘Brotherhood’ — and Future
For Johnny Marr, one moment crystalizes his brief tenure with Modest Mouse. It was 2006, and the British guitarist, long revered for co-founding the Smiths, now found himself in a situation unsuited for rock royalty: sweating in the hot, crowded Portland attic of Mouse leader Isaac Brock. “There was literally a time [while playing ‘Invisible’], and I thought it was symbolic, where we bumped into each other,” Marr tells SPIN over Zoom, recalling his early rehearsals with the indie-rock band. “And I thought, ‘This is fucking cool.’ It’s two in the morning, and we’re both going for it, and we nearly knocked each other off the track. It was symbolic. When I started making records, particularly with the Smiths, I was able to put guitars together and make them fit. But this was a different ...
How Big Mouth Spin-Off Human Resources Got Janelle Monáe to Do Double-Duty
You can learn a lot about a TV show based on what it chooses for its theme song, and Netflix’s Human Resources delivers on that score with an assist from Janelle Monáe — the pumping synth tones of “Make Me Feel” introduce every episode of the new Big Mouth spin-off, which ages up the central humans of the series but still remains tonally in line with its parent series. Created by Big Mouth creators Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett as well as Big Mouth writer/producer Kelly Galuska, Human Resources explores the world of the Lovebugs, Hormone Monsters, Logic Rocks, Anxiety Mosquitos, Shame Wizards, and more which represent the best and worst impulses of Big Mouth characters, actively courting The Office comparisons with its workplace setting (and more importantl...
Cypress Hill Spark Another One
We live in an era of premature anniversaries and nostalgia-fueled hagiography. But Cypress Hill deserves every glowing retrospective. B-Real, Sen Dog and DJ Muggs have licked shots at pigs, rivals, and the DEA for 30 years. They’ve earned the right to reminisce, to remind you to genuflect before you enter the Temples of Boom or lay a blunt atop their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Cypress Hill sound was inimitable and irrepressible from the beginning, a bicoastal sonic hybrid complemented with bilingual lyrics and localized slang. Muggs dialed back the Bomb Squad’s sonic maximalism, creating a barrage of psychedelic funk with a West Coast bent that would become progressively stranger and layered with each album, forever toeing the line between ominous and zany. The self-proclaimed...
Encanto Composer Germaine Franco on the Magic of Collaboration: “We Felt Like We Had This Amazing Gift”
A Zoom malfunction meant we had to restart midway through our conversation, but Oscar-nominated composer Germaine Franco was more than understanding — because Encanto was a COVID production. “Usually you want to be in the same room so everybody’s listening to the same mix, the same speaker, the same environment,” she tells Consequence via Zoom. “But I was presenting cues on Zoom, and everyone had different headphones. It was so tricky to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to play this. I have no idea what it sounds like on your end.’” Prior to Encanto, Franco’s film work included The Book of Life, Dope, Tag, and Coco — her Oscar nomination this year, for the lively Colombian-influenced score of Disney’s latest animated feature, makes history, as she’s only the sixth woman ever to be nominated for...
Japanese Breakfast and Alton Brown on Cooking, Music, and Cooking While Listening to Music
What do celebrity chef and TV host Alton Brown and Grammy-nominated indie rock star Michelle Zauner (AKA Japanese Breakfast) have in common? Quite a few things, believe it or not; both have a passionate love of food, with Alton Brown hosting multiple Food Network shows and Zauner exploring the relationship between food, love, and grief in her memoir, Crying in H Mart. Not only that, they’re both musicians; Zauner released her excellent third studio album Jubilee last year, whereas Brown is currently trekking across the country with his “ABL: Beyond The Eats” tour, which features him fronting a live band every night in addition to food science experiments, live cooking, and more. Together, they’re both ambassadors and sonic enthusiasts for Fender’s new futuristic and visually stunning...
Josh Klinghoffer Gets on With ‘The Show’ on New Pluralone Album
When it comes to Josh Klinghoffer’s musical output, it helps to have Google and Wikipedia handy to keep track of his voluminous work on dozens of projects by everyone from PJ Harvey and Gnarls Barkley to his own bands Dot Hacker and Pluralone. Of course, the 42-year-old Los Angeles native is best known for his 10-year stint playing guitar in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which ended in 2019. Since then, he joined Pearl Jam as a touring member and wrote and recorded with Eddie Vedder on his latest solo album, Earthling. And in tandem with Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and producer/guitarist Andrew Watt, Klinghoffer just wrapped a short U.S. tour with Vedder in support of the project, during which he was forced to miss a Chicago show after contracting COVID-19 on the road. Klinghoffer had pl...
Living the Electronica Dream
So, here’s the thing. Whether you know it or not, a lot of musicians work at music publications. And ours is no exception. This week, our creative director Danny Klein and his “ultimate creative manifestation” as he likes to call it, Robot Sunrise, is heading down to SXSW to close our main stage lineup on Thursday, March 17 at Austin’s Stubb’s-Bar-B-Q. His dreams of a life in music started in childhood, and over the years he’s racked-up some impressive credits, including co-writing and performing with Grammy-winning artist Really Doe and appearing along with Kanye West as a featured vocalist on Doe’s 2009 album First Impressions. With his electronic duo dreamfreak he’s co-written with Grammy-nominated Télépopmusik. “Robot Sunrise is electronic music. Sometimes dance, sometimes minimal and ...
Greg Daniels on How Jim and Pam’s Romance on The Office Inspired Season 2 of Upload
“You’re familiar with my last two years of life, then,” is how Greg Daniels responded when Consequence told him, at the beginning of a Zoom interview, that I’d seen both new seasons of his current TV shows: The Netflix original comedy Space Force, which he co-created with Steve Carell, and the latest installment of Upload, the futuristic rom-com now making its debut on Prime Video. Both seasons are second seasons consisting of seven episodes each, and both were shot with, as Daniels explains below, a lot of the same crew up in Vancouver, Canada. But while Space Force is a workplace comedy set within a satirical version of America’s newest branch of the armed services, Upload is first and foremost a love story. That’s the element which made Daniels excited about telling the story of a not-t...
Drug Church Goes Melodic (But Not That Melodic) On Hygiene
On the surface, Drug Church is just another hardcore punk band. They play fast and loud. Vocalist Patrick Kindlon often sounds angry. It’s the kind of music your grandma would probably hate. But underneath their aggressive facade, the Albany quintet’s catchy melodies and dark humorous takes on current societal and cultural issues make their tunes — like the ones on their brand new album, Hygiene (out now on Pure Noise Records) — as profound as any more “mature” artist. Drug Church is able to sing about topics and connect with fans who would likely be turned off by some self-righteous band with a “message” so to speak. Hell, even Kindlon himself doesn’t want to hear about his lyrics being anything of particular importance. “I think any profundity in music is best when it’s accidental,” Kind...
The Dropout Creator Liz Meriwether Took on the Elizabeth Holmes Story With a Writers’ Room Full of Lizes
The Dropout creator Elizabeth (or Liz) Meriwether is pretty open about how, before taking on the story of famed entrepreneur-turned-fraudster Elizabeth Holmes for the Hulu limited series, she didn’t know too much about the world of entrepreneurs, or science. “It was totally new for me,” she tells Consequence in a phone interview. “I had to really learn a lot.” Holmes first became a famous figure as an anomaly in the Silicon Valley tech sphere: a young, conventionally attractive female innovator, whose big ideas for a blood-testing device that could lead to a massive uptick in early detection of medical issues led to magazine covers as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in investment funds. However, her innovative ideas turned out to be based on lies and deception, leading to the end o...
