James Hunter

Photo by Rankin Grant Marshall, who has operated mysteriously for almost 15 years as Daddy G, is a thin English guy in sunglasses who in 1980 co-founded the Wild Bunch Sound System in Bristol. Out of that mobile society of Jamaican-minded record-spinners, musicians and rappers, Marshall later formed, with fellow......

Photo by Russ Harrington Van Lear Rose is an album of 13 songs explosively written and sung by Loretta Lynn. Jack White, of the White Stripes, produced it. Eric McConnell recorded the sessions, on an 8-track board in an old house in Nashville; the mix, by White and Stuart Sikes,......

Pharrell Williams doesn’t shout. Today, the co-producer of Jay-Z and Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake and No Doubt (and others) is sort of urgently whispering on the phone about N.E.R.D., the restless trio he fronts with Chad Hugo, his production partner in the Neptunes, along with a friend, one Shay......

Photo by Sam Jones In the late ’80s, I sat with the great Japanese pop artist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto on a hotel rooftop in L.A. talking about Burt Bacharach. He was the last of three contemporary orchestral visionaries that Sakamoto, in his quietly passionate way, had cited — after......

Photo by Joseph Cultice Ever since Avril Lavigne got herself crowned the scowling princess of skateboarders bent on self-expression, the music biz has had three new L.A.-based writer-producers to telephone, flatter and buzz about. The team’s members are Lauren Christy, an England-born singer-songwriter who during the mid-’90s recorded two albums......

Jack Johnson climbs on a touring bus, eluding the afternoon New Orleans thunderstorms and heat. He and his band — just two guys, drummer-percussionist Adam Topol and bassist Merlo Podlewski — are there to play, later, one of the clubs that cater to music fans who visit the city for......

Pop records can come with some pretty heavy reps. Travis‘ The Man Who appears in the U.S. after moving two and a half million copies in Britain, where it was 1999’s sales leader. And indeed, this amazingly mature second album from the Scottish quartet seems sprung from another solar system......