Ringo Starr has lived in America for more than 50 of his 86 years, and he has held his annual Peace & Love Birthday Celebration in various U.S. locales, including his current home city of Beverly Hills, since 2008. During a recent press conference for his reflective new Americana album, the T Bone Burnett-produced Long Long Road, he revealed that before getting the fateful invitation from Brian Epstein to join the Beatles, he’d seriously considered moving to Texas at age 18.

So, when Starr spoke with Lyndsanity at this year’s Beverly Hills birthday bash, just three days after America’s own big birthday, we had to ask how his life and career might have panned out if he’d gone down what he has called “another path I could have taken,” and had actually emigrated to the U.S. of A. back in 1958.

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“You never know, do you? I’d probably be queuing up to see Ringo playing!” quipped Starr, who just wrapped the spring leg of his All-Starr Band tour at Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre. He speculated, “I’d be doing rock/pop,” even though his original inspiration for wanting to relocate to Houston had been Texan blues great Lightnin’ Hopkins, but the scrappy, plucky, lucky musician always knew that no matter where he ended up, he’d be playing the drums — or at least a cymbal or snare.

“I came in with skiffle, which was with brushes and you learn how to play, and then went to just a snare drum,” Starr said of his humble beginnings. “In fact, with the Beatles even, at the Cavern [in Liverpool] one time, everything turned up, all the instruments and the amps — but no drums, just the cymbals! And we went on anyway! We were a lot looser in those days.”

Among the illustrious performers at this year’s Peace & Love Birthday Celebration were several of Starr’s Long Long Road studio players, including Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz, Daniel Tashian, Colin Linden, David Mansfield, Ketch Secor, Jeff Picker, and Gregg Bissonette. “Before Ringo was in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Rory Storm called his band the Texans. So, we’ve been calling this band the Texans, because I just thought it was the greatest name for a band ever,” producer Burnett declared in his introduction, in a full-circle way connecting the celebration to the 18-year-old Starr’s American dream.

“The Texans” then took the stage to perform Ringo and Beatles classics like “Drive My Car,” “Act Naturally,” “Octopus’s Garden,” and, of course, “Birthday.” Starr joined in for that finale, along with his wife Barbara Bach and famous friends like Toto’s Steve Lukather, actor Ed Begley Jr., the Cult/Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum, and Starr’s favorite drummer of all time, Jim Keltner, while guests like superstar songwriter Diane Warren, rock photographer Henry Diltz, current Rolling Stones drummer Steve Jordan, and even Purple Rain star Apollonia Kotero looked on.

See highlights from the event below!

Adam’s sixth solo album is his most personal yet, so it is simply titled ADAM — because this man has paid his dues, time after time, so he needs no further introduction. The singer, actor, style-setter, and greatest American Idol alumnus of all time opened up about the album, including the major life changes and the ’90s electronica of his angst-ridden youth that inspired it; obsolete industry gatekeepers; double-standards about sexiness for male (especially queer male) and female pop stars; how he finally learned to “un-neuter” himself and “give less of a fuck” about what people think; performing solo vs. performing with Queen; and what to expect from his upcoming solo tour.

Click here to read the Q&A, and watch video of the full conversation below!

In the Audio Journalism category, my outrageous and unfiltered Lyndsanity conversation with the Church’s Steve Kilbey took home first prize for best Personality Profile/Interview, Entertainment Personalities (Over 10 Minutes) — which the L.A. Press Club judges described as “a smart, multi-faceted look at a singer and songwriter who gracefully and uniquely describes close to 50 years of survival as an artist” — and in the Online category, my adorable Lyndsanity interview with Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill snagged third prize for best Music Feature, Groups.

My fun Gold Derby opinion piece breaking down my personal 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot, which the judges called “excellent” and “from the heart,” scored me my other first-place trophy of the night, for best Entertainment Commentary, Arts. And rounding out my tally was third place for best Music Feature in the Magazines category, for one of my favorite articles of my career: a 25th-anniversary Gorillaz cover story for FLOOD.

I was also delighted and excited to co-present at the ceremony with actor/Travel Channel host Jack Maxwell, in front of a Millennium Biltmore Hotel ballroom audience that included many of my talented peers plus honorees like country superstar Kenny Chesney, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa (who Jack and I had to immediately follow!), ABC sports journalist Rob Fukuzaki, civil rights attorney Carol Sobel, and NBC’s Craig Melvin.

Congratulations to all of the winners, nominees, and presenters, and many thanks, as always, to the Los Angeles Press Club for having me. Click here for the full rundown of categories, results, and judge commentary, and scroll below for direct links to my five winning entries.

FIRST PLACE – AUDIO JOURNALISM: PERSONALITY PROFILE/INTERVIEW, ENTERTAINMENT PERSONALITIES (OVER 10 MINUTES)
Lyndsanity, “The unguarded moments: The Church’s Steve Kilbey opens up about 45-year career, loveless fascinations with Duran Duran and record label ‘f***ing idiots and philistines,’ and more”

FIRST PLACE – ONLINE: ENTERTAINMENT COMMENTARY, ARTS
Gold Derby, “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2025: Our voter’s unfiltered official ballot”

SECOND PLACE – ENTERTAINMENT JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR
Lyndsanity, Licorice Pizza Records, FLOOD, Gold Derby, Music Connection

THIRD PLACE – MAGAZINES: MUSIC FEATURE
FLOOD Magazine, “The House Gorillaz Built”

THIRD PLACE – ONLINE: MUSIC FEATURE, GROUPS
Lyndsanity, “How powerpop power couple Vicki Peterson & John Cowsill’s real-life romance was predicted by teenage fan-fiction: ‘You’re either going to find this adorable, or you’re going to run screaming into the night’”

Six years ago, smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, teen siblings Matt and Issey Cartlidge began busking in London — doing Kinks and Libertines covers “out of necessity,” because there was nowhere else to play due to lockdown restrictions.

“We’d go out to Brixton, Soho, around Oxford Street, and there was a load of protests at the time, either anti-lockdown ones or anti-ID,” Issey, now age 20, tells Licorice Pizza’s LPTV. “We’d go out on the street and play all the rallies, like play ‘I Predict a Riot’ by the Kaiser Chiefs or [the Sex Pistols’] ‘Anarchy in the U.K.,’ things were fitting. And then as soon as everything opened up again, we just said yes to every opportunity. And everything led to something else.”

That journey has ultimately led the Cartlidges, now better known as punk revivalists the Molotovs, from the streets of London Town to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip — where they’ve immediately acclimated to the rock ‘n’ roll city by visiting the Chateau Marmont, Viper Room, and Rainbow Bar & Grill before their big show at the Roxy — and over the hill to Studio City’s famous Licorice Pizza record store, for their big LPTV interview.

And along the way, they’ve won the respect and praise of many of their heroes — including the actual Sex Pistols, with whom they played Royal Albert Hall at a Teen Cancer Trust benefit (the day before Matt’s 17th birthday), and Teen Cancer Trust co-founder Roger Daltrey, who wrote the Molotovs a personal thank-you letter. Later, Pete Townsnend even gave Matt the best birthday present ever: a Rickenbacker guitar.

The massive buzz about the Molotovs being punk’s great blonde hope and Britpop’s new saviors has — as is often the case with the U.K.’s mercurial music press — generated an inevitable backlash. (“Get a Life,” the opening track on the band’s spunky, punky debut album Wasted on Youth, is seemingly an open letter to their haters.) Matt, bristling with all the confidence of a now-18-year-old rock star, claims, “I don’t feel the weight of past heroes on my shoulders” when asked about the pressure that comes with endorsements from rock icons like not only the Pistols and the Who, but also Debbie Harry, Paul Weller, Iggy Pop, Yungblud, and the Damned. However, he admits that a well-meaning Channel 4 feature hyping up the Molotovs as “bringing back gigging in real life” for Generation Z “did loads of bad, actually. People spun it like we’d said that, and they were like, ‘What the fuck do they think they are?’”

photo: Nick Benoy

While Channel 4’s headline was obviously an exaggeration, the Molotovs do deserve some of that credit. In an age of algorithms, they have built their fanbase the good old-fashioned way, through relentless touring, with more than 600 gigs already under their studded belts. And their early busking days helped them hone their live skills. “It was a really good test, because you’ve got to grab people’s attention really quickly; you’ve got maybe about five seconds when they’re walking past,” explains Matt.

“We got rid of a lot of fear as well,” says Issey. “You’re not on a stage, you’re not on a pedestal — you’re at the same physical level with people. To make fools of yourself out on the street, you had to be completely delusional and so into it at the time. And I think that’s kind of translated to how we perform now. There really are no inhibitions when we play.”

“We’re not delusional anymore,” Matt grins.

As London’s stay-at-home orders eased a few years ago, the Molotovs began to build a buzz on the club circuit — Issey smilingly recalls impressionable young fans turning up to their gigs dressed in the band’s signature Mod style, which was a promising sign. Eventually, the siblings used their platform and launched an initiative called Youth Explosion to support struggling post-pandemic venues.

“We wanted to set up these all-ages gigs, really accessible with £3 tickets, just to get a kind of new generation into music, because they weren’t exposed to it. They’d never been to a gig before,” Issey explains. “We’d curate the lineup with other bands on the scene, which there were a lot of and still are; there’s some great guitar bands in London at the moment.”

“We got a lot of younger fans because they were at the right age when lockdown was [happening], where they weren’t doing much anyway. They didn’t go out, and they weren’t of pub-going age,” says Matt. “So, now that they’re out of [lockdown] and they’ve seen us coming up, they’re of that age where they can go see gigs. And I’m really proud of that, because I’ve been in their shoes at that age. … It’s a nice feeling, because I’ve always been the baby of all the bands that I’ve seen or been around or been on a bill with; I’ve always been the youngest one. And for the first time in history, I’m not the youngest one anymore! And I feel like such nonce even being around them.” (Matt, still clearly too young, too stubborn, or too punk-rock to be media-trained, then adds quickly: “I’m not, by the way. I feel a bit weird having to clear that up.”)

“I think part of our success has been because people have really taken to us as individuals, through the gigs and feeling a kind of loyalty, and from the people that they meet in those [rock venues’] rooms. You can’t get that kind of sense of community through online and social media,” says Issey. “And that can’t die, those sort of third spaces.”

It was at one all-ages benefit gig at a historic West London third space, Bush Hall — with all proceeds going to the struggling grassroots music venue, which was in danger of having to close — that the Molotovs made their first connection with the Sex Pistols, when Pistols drummer Paul Cook hopped onstage for an impromptu jam.

“I saw him in the crowd while the support band were playing, and I just said to him, ‘Oh right, Paul, are you getting up for a tune?’” Matt chucklingly recalls. “And he was like, ‘Nah, I’ll leave this to the kids.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, all right, everyone’s got to be a punter sometimes.’ But towards the end of the set… I just saw that he missed it, that he missed this feeling of all these young people jumping and going mad, that excitement and unity in a room of youth and arrogance. And he just went, ‘Yeah, we’ll do “God said the Queen.’” I mean, he knew it!”

The Molotovs’ rise comes at a troubled time in British history, a post-Brexit age, that has obvious parallels to the bleak period of unemployment and unrest that fired up the Pistols in the late 1970s — so the connection between the two bands, despite their generation gap, makes sense. The Molotovs have “a “bit more hope” than the Pistols, who once famously declared that England had no future — “I mean, we think there is a future, and we think we can contribute to that,” Matt stresses — but Matt also acknowledges that “we’re in a sort of weird time in the U.K. at the moment, and I think in the world. … We’re definitely in a decline at the moment, but always in history, I think great art and great music comes out of that.”

When the Cartlidges — who, perhaps unsurprisingly considering their impeccably peroxided style, are the children of hairdressers, and resent how blue-collar jobs are still “frowned upon” and seen as “stupid” and “lesser-than” in Britain’s “entrenched” class system — are asked about the greatest concern about their young fanbase, Issey answers: “Everyone wants the same thing, which is stability. Young people want job stability. They want to be financially independent. They want to have friends and a community identity. This is all the sort of stuff that no matter where you are politically, it rings true. We want to champion that through our songs and through our gigs as well, and give people that kind of space and find something to energize them.”

“I think just money. Money more than anything,” Matt answers more bluntly.

“And isolation as well,” Issey adds, as she and her brother reflect on the challenges that Gen Z, who came of age during COVID, face today. “I think a lot of people are isolated and feel hopeless and helpless. … There is definitely a pessimism at the moment and that kind of same [’70 punk-era] nihilism, and you see that in voter turnout, especially for young people. But I think there’s some great movements at the moment in the U.K., and I think music is driving it forward and providing hope to people that they do have a power. And it’s [up to] them to start enacting it, having agency to go and do things.”

photo: Derek Bremner

“But there is a whole lot of [apathetic young people who think] ‘what’s the point?’ as well. “What’s the point in registering to vote?’ or whatever,” Matt interjects. “My best mate doesn’t vote… and I think that’s such a lazy view to have. It’s like, you might not have much faith in the system, but you’ve gotta have fucking some, because otherwise, what else have you got? What else are you doing to make it better? … At least believe in bad and worse.”

“Totally,” Issey agrees. “That laziness will be the killer of us all.”

Matt and Issey are obviously the polar opposite of lazy. And while not all of Wasted on Youth (which draws from the old-school influences gleaned from their stylish father’s record collection, like the Jam, Boomtown Rats, Buzzcocks, Squeeze, Elvis Costello, Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Specials, and Small Faces, but also brings to mind NME-championed “the” bands of the indie aughts, like the Fratellis, Subways, Futureheads, Wombats, Kooks, and Cribs) is overtly political, they do audaciously describe the album as a “youth manifesto.”

For instance, one Wasted on Youth track, “Daydreaming,” blasts Britain’s education system and the myth being sold to Gen Z that getting a “flashy degree” will guarantee a bright future. (Matt found Career Day “fucking useless” when he was in school, because counselors always advised him to attend university in case his Plan A, music, didn’t work out. “What about all these people that go to university? Do you tell them, ‘Maybe you should learn an instrument, just in fucking case’?”) However, “Newsflash,” a protest song that dates back to the Molotov’s circa-2020 roots, is the album’s boldest statement.

“It’s actually not a song that really gets talked about a lot on the album, so I’m glad you brought it up — a lot of people just talk about the singles and ‘Geraldine’ really, because they go, ‘Who’s Geraldine?’” says Matt, the band’s primary songwriter. “‘Newsflash,’ that’s a sort of anti-lockdown song. … When I was writing it, it was so scary to realize how compliant people were, and how they’ll go forth with anything that the government says.”

“[That song is about] how disproportionate [Britain’s pandemic stay-at-home policies were] on young people,” Issey elaborates. “They were left out of the conversation, and now they’ve been left behind.”

“I mean, in your formative social years, that’s when you learn to actually interact with people,” says Matt. “So many young people are starved of that experience and those teachings, and they won’t recover from that, never will, because they’re too far gone and they’re socially inept now.”

Going back to the Molotovs’ origin story, obviously the COVID-19 pandemic was a creative and productive time for the siblings. But when they took to the streets to perform, Matt recalls, “We had trouble with the police. … We had neighbors calling the police on us for playing music and things like that. Once we got asked [to pay] a 10,000 pound fine by these police officers — they said we were ‘inciting a social gathering.’”

“We showed up and played, but we were going to pack up and go and then we did one last song, and [the cops] got really arsey because we said to the crowd, ‘This is our police! This is what they’re focusing on!’” Issey explains. “And they did the fucking Colombo, came back and were like, “Oh, we’re going to give you a fine.’” (Matt jokes that he instead offered to give the officers the 50 quid’s worth of tips in his guitar case; in true punk-rock style, the Molotovs never actually ponied up the £10,000.)

The Molotovs have maintained that rebellious sprit throughout their burgeoning career. Another track on Wasted on Youth, an album released not on a major label but through Marshall Amplifications’ independently distributed imprint, is “Rhythm of Yourself” — which is about how industry big-wigs once advised the band to tweak their image and sound to better fit in with the pop marketplace.

“It was a medium-wig, I think. …. ‘Cunt’ is a good word for him,” Matt quips of the song’s shady “small man” who tried to sign the Molotovs. “He presented us with a contract which was so fucking insulting and scary; it was like, ‘You’re mad if you ever thought we’d agree to anything like that!’ It was a really eye-opening experience, that this is what the music industry can be like when you’re so young. I must have been 14 or 13 when I wrote that song, and it was like, ‘Is that really what you can do to a pair of kids?’

“The fact that they’d happily tie you off in a contract for 15 years, but they don’t like anything about what you do. They just think you’re good models for it, which I think is so insulting,” Matt continues, getting more riled up. “It was like, ‘Change your clothes, change your face and hair, change the guitars you play and what you sound like.’ They were trying to get us to get all grungy, getting baggy jeans and saying, ‘Oh, we’ll get you a sponsorship with Vans.’ I don’t want a fucking sponsorship with Vans!”

“It’s a song about a personal experience, or inspired by Matthew’s personal experience in the music industry, but it’s also just a wider claim — for people to march the beat of their own drum, dance to the rhythm of yourself,” adds Issey.

And so, the Molotovs have continued to defy expectations and the odds. They’re especially proud that they went to No. 3 in the U.K. charts with a physical, vinyl release. “It just shows that there’s still the consumer base there for this sort of stuff, and people are still very much interested in vinyl; it’s not dead yet, and we should acknowledge that,” Issey declares. “We love to champion physical media. This is what cultivates a scene. This is what brings people together.”

photo: Derek Bremner

The Molotovs have already begun work on their sophomore album, but as they continue to draw accolades from both their peers and predecessors, they have a few dream collaborations in mind. Matt says he’d love to work with fellow bottle-blonde Sabrina Carpenter (with his wry and dry British sense of humor, it’s unclear if he’s joking, but that would probably be awesome), and Issey wants to work with The The’s Matt Johnson, one of her favorite songwriters that she think would be “a very interesting person to just even just talk with.” But the collab that seems most likely to happen one day is with Matt’s early hero, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, who is reportedly already a big Molotovs fan.

Matt almost got his chance years ago, when security guards at a Green Day concert almost picked him to come onstage to jam on guitar, but instead invited another audience member with (hard as this may be to believe) a “better haircut.” Matt was “gutted at the time” and found it “hard to enjoy the rest of the gig,” but is now relieved to not be known as the viral kid who “got picked by Billy Joe to come onstage and play one cover song. … I’d never get fucking away from it!” And now, as a rock star in his own right, with a fantastic coiffure, he seems ready for the opportunity.

“The closest we got is [Armstrong] played a pub in Covent Garden called the Marquee, which we’re at all the time. You can see in all the videos, Matt’s bleached-blond head just outside the window, bobbing up and down, just wishing to get in, pressed right up against the glass,” laughs Issey. “And while [Green Day] were coming in, [Armstrong] gave [Matt] a little nod of acknowledgement. He definitely saw him.”

“Yeah, that’s about it. He sort of pointed, like he knew who he were,” Matt chuckles. “If he sees this [interview], hopefully he can make it happen.”

Regardless, the future is obviously bright for the Molotovs, who are going to keep calm and carry on with their vision. “I’m not going to tailor [my music] to an American audience; I can only write about what I see and my environment,” Matt asserts.

“As long as we make something we’re extremely proud of… if we can make something that we think is extremely poignant or touching on our feelings about the times we’re in now, and people relate to that and connect with it, then I think we’ve done our job,” Issey states proudly. “It doesn’t matter what then the press says about it, because we know that we’ve done what we’re here to do.”

Watch Matt and Issey Cartlidge’s full LPTV interview in the video at the top of this page.

Two years ago, Daniel Valoff recorded his deeply personal survivor’s anthem, “There’s Still a Light in the Sky,” for the first time in his home studio. Today, he’s revisiting that emotional track under very different and much happier circumstances, enjoying the “best day of his life” at Los Angeles’s legendary Village Studios.

“I was spitting up blood, and you could hear that on my demo recording,” the Orange County-based musician, who is currently battling Stage 4 thyroid cancer, forthrightly recalls of his initial attempt to record his poignant ballad. “My vocals are kind of breaking up a bit, because there was blood on my vocal cords. I was singing the song and it just kind of came really, really quick, because it was really from the heart about how I felt.”

But today, Valoff is working with Cancer Can Rock, a nonprofit that gives musicians facing aggressive cancer the chance to preserve their musical legacies, on an updated recording of “There’s Still a Light in the Sky” with a stellar cast of music luminaries — among them, notably, Rufus Wainwright. And Wainwright isn’t just lending his iconic background vocals to the Village Studios production. FOLK CANCER: The Kate McGarrigle Project — an organization founded by Rufus and his sister Martha in honor of their folk-singer mother, who died of sarcoma in 2010 — is also funding the recording, which premieres June 23 via the countdown YouTube player below:

Rufus witnessed up-close the healing power of music during his mother’s cancer journey. As he sits with Valoff at the Village right before the afternoon’s first-ever Cancer Can Rock/FOLK CANCER recording session, he fondly recalls how McGarrigle gave her final public performance at an all-star Royal Albert Hall holiday concert just six weeks before her death.

“There was a definite kind of magical moment, some magical moments for her, with her last Christmas show,” Wainwright marvels. “She wasn’t doing particularly well health-wise, but every time she came out onstage to perform, she just put it out there. It was like 20 years had just been [rolled back], and she was just right back to where she started. The life force that music imbues is profound.

“When she was going through her treatments and stuff, it was such an incredible outlet and release for her, to just forget about the world for a second and focus on art. So, we just wanted to help continue that process for people who were going through treatment,” Wainwright continues. “And luckily, we found Cancer Can Rock and decided to join forces. And this is my first kind of venture into this new world, today.”

left to right: producer Jim Ebert, engineer Gabe Burch, Rufus Wainwright, Daniel Valoff (photo by Erik Nielsen)

Valoff can relate to McGarrigle’s experience. “I noticed when I was doing these home recordings, it was kind of the only time all the noise in my head stopped and I was just focused on singing and recording and getting lost in it — just having a moment of shutting everything off and kind of finding the sanctuary and music,” he reflects.

By the time Valoff was finally diagnosed with thyroid cancer, after he started coughing up blood while out for run and “it took a few months [for various specialists] to figure out what was going on,” a tumor had already grown around his laryngeal nerve and into his trachea. Doctors advised him to have surgery that would “pretty much remove my voice” and a render him unable to sing, but that, understandably, was not an option. “I said, ‘No, there’s got to be a different way,’” says Valoff, who’s been undergoing alternative treatments to shrink the tumor instead.

“When I got this diagnosis, a lot of thoughts that come into your head, and it kind of gets overwhelming. And one of my thoughts was, ‘I have all these songs I’ve written and I’ll never be able to sing them, possibly.’ And the other thought was, ‘If the worst happens and I’m not here much longer, I feel like songs live a lot longer than we do and could touch a lot of people.’ And I kind of wanted to leave behind a legacy.” Valoff explains. “So, I started recording all these songs urgently, at home —  home recordings of all these songs I’d written in the past that I never got around to recording, while I still had a voice. And on top of that, I kept on writing new songs. And the song we’re doing today is one of the songs about this journey I’ve been on.”

photo by Erik Nielsen

Valoff recalls writing “There’s Still a Light in the Sky” in a sudden flash of inspiration, as he envisioned a murky, moonlit seascape and thought, “It doesn’t matter how dark it gets — as long as there’s one star or a moon, you can always chart your course and be guided. There’s always something, as long as there’s one light in the sky. And for me, that light is my faith in Jesus.” (The song’s bridge references the Bible verse 1 Corinthians 15:55, as Valoff croons, “O death, where is thy sting?”)

Valoff says he wouldn’t be able to get through his cancer ordeal without his two “anchors”: his music and his faith, which are closely intertwined. And Wainwright, while “not a particularly religious person,” understands.

“I do believe in spirit, and I love Jesus too — what’s not to love, in a lot of ways? I believe in spirituality, and we need it now,” says Wainwright, who last year released Dream Requiem, an orchestral work featuring text from the Latin Mass for the Dead. “And one thing I actually say about music is: It chooses you. You need to a certain degree to be receptive to it, and you have to work at it, but it is this calling. It’s a sacred event.”

Daniel Valoff & Rufus Wainwright (photo by Marguerite Chan)

“I keep my faith. I know that I’m not alone in this,” Valoff asserts. “If I was going through this and I felt like God wasn’t aware of what was going on, I would feel really alone. But He is aware. … I’ve never questioned my faith. I just know we live in a fallen world, and I know that God didn’t do this to me. We weren’t designed to die. I have a spirit that will live eternally, forever. … I’m believing I’m going to get through this and be healed, but even if I don’t, Jesus promises if you believe in Him, it’ll give you eternal life. So, I have hope beyond this world that I’ll have an eternal life — which starts now.”

Fate and faith have figured greatly in Valoff’s Cancer Can Rock story. After applying to be a Cancer Can Rock featured artist — “I just couldn’t believe there were other [musicians with cancer] who had the same situation; I thought I was having a unique experience,” he says, recalling how excited he was to learn of the organization — he’d just received his invitation from Cancer Can Rock when, serendipitously, he had chance encounter with the always charity-minded Wainwright at a wildfire relief benefit in Pasadena.

“A couple hours later, I happened to run into Rufus Wainwright, and I showed him my email: ‘You won’t believe this!’” Valoff laughs. “And he was gracious enough to say, ‘Well, let me know. I want to be there when you do it.’”

In another seemingly fateful moment, as Valoff joins Wainwright today at the Village, his gifts Wainwright and the session musicians with candles. And as Wainwright points out, “There’s a song that I wrote, actually around my mother’s death, called ‘Candles.’ … I lit a lot of candles during my mother’s illness and it did help me, just that ritual.”

And now Valoff is at the candlelit Village with not only Wainwright, but with producer/mixer Jim Ebert (CCR’s founder, who has worked with Ice Cube, Madonna, Butch Walker, Jason Falkner, and Meredith Brooks); engineer JC LeResche (Kendrick Lamar, the Strokes, Weezer, Tyler, the Creator); bassist Jon Button (the Who, Michelle Branch, Shakira, Sheryl Crow); guitarist Dory Lobel (Backstreet Boys, Hilary Duff, Enrique Iglesias, The Voice); keyboardist Bill Appleberry (Stone Temple Pilots, Walsh, Fugees, Macy Gray, 311, Hole); and seasoned tribute-band drummer Rolly DeVore.

photo by Marguerite Chan

“I’m excited to be working with Jim Ebert today and Rufus and all the great musicians downstairs, revisiting the song,” Valoff enthuses. “I recently wrote a string arrangement for my demo, so I’ve spent a lot of time listening to it. It was very meticulous. So, I’m ready to record today, and then move on to a different song. Because when you work on a song so much… I’m not revisiting past thoughts that I had a long time ago. They’re thoughts I’m currently battling right now.”

Wainwright has faced his own battles and demons, and he quips, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to write so much music, because it can be painful! … I wouldn’t mind a little less heartache and falling in love with the wrong person and all of that stuff. I wish I didn’t have to write those songs sometimes.” Then he adds more seriously, “But in the case with my mother, when you’re really up against the biggest challenges in life, that is when music really matches it. … When push comes to shove and everything’s really going down, music is there. It’s always there.”

Daniel Valoff and Rufus Wainwright’s Cancer Can Rock recording of “There’s Still a Light in the Sky” will be available via YouTube as well as streaming services on June 23. An audio preview of the track is below, along with its full lyrics.

LISTEN HERE:

There’s still a light in the sky
There’s still a light in the sky
The night is coming on, my love,
but there’s, still a way to get by

My feet are still on the ground
My feet are still on the ground
The waves are crashing over my head
but, I will not be knocked down

It’s not the kind of thing
you get to rehearse
You only do it once
for better or worse
I still don’t know
which way I’ll land
But, I’m doing my best
with the cards in my hand
And there’s still a light in the sky

They tried to bury me
They tried to bury me
They tried to put me in the ground
But I grew up like a tree

They swung their sickle in vain
They swung their sickle in vain
The more they tried to cut me down
new branches grew from the pain

It’s not the kind of thing
you get to rehearse
You only do it once
for better or worse
I’m just trying to do
the best that I can
with the cards that were dealt
into my own hand
And there’s still a light in the sky

O death where is thy sting?
A new life began in me
No grave holds victory
For I have been redeemed
And I’m ready
But, I don’t want to say goodbye
But, there’s always
a light in the sky 

There’s still a light in the sky
There’s still a light in the sky
The night is coming on,
but there’s, still a way to get by

Steve Stevens is a loyal man. He’s been working with Godin Guitars for a quarter-century — a collaboration being commemorated with the launch of his new Godin 25th-anniversary signature guitar — and he’s been with his wife, Josie, for more than 25years. But the guitar legend’s longest relationship has actually been with his musical soulmate, Billy Idol. It’s a four-decade partnership so enduring and fruitful, in fact, that when Idol enters the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, he won’t be alone: Stevens will be inducted into the Class of 2026 right alongside him. Stevens and Idol will also be jointly inducted into Hollywood’s Guitar Center Rockwalk on June 23.

It’s a match that, on paper, shouldn’t have worked: Stevens, a Brooklynite raised on prog rock, flamenco, glam, and ‘60s folk, and William Broad, a Londoner from the ‘70s British punk movement, brought together by KISS’s manager and Donna Summer’s producer. But because of their “chemistry, collaborative efforts, and mutual respect,” as well as an egalitarian publishing deal that Stevens calls “punk-rock,” it most definitely worked. Stevens ended up co-writing all of Idol’s 1983 breakthrough album, Rebel Yell, which featured the pop-crossover hits “Eyes Without a Face,” “Flesh for Fantasy,” “Catch My Fall,” and the fist-pumping title track. And the rest was rock ‘n’ roll history.

Stevens stresses, “When [Idol and I] work together is when we’re both at our best,” but he is Hall-induction-worthy on his own. His career has also spanned collaborations with Michael Jackson, Robert Palmer, Joni Mitchell, Ozzy Osbourne, and, perhaps most notably, Harold Faltermeyer on “Top Gun Anthem,” which beat Stanley Clarke, David Foster, Genesis, and even The Tonight Show band’s “Johnny’s Theme” to win Best Pop Instrumental Performance at the 1987 Grammy Awards.

In a Q&A that is as wide-ranging as Stevens’s discography, he reflects on his history with Idol and feeling like an “idiot” for parting with Idol for several years; getting sober right around the time he reunited with Idol in the early 2000s; the 40th anniversary of the Top Gun soundtrack; designer suit-shopping and martini-sipping in Milan with Palmer; impressing the famously steely Mitchell with his deep Laurel Canyon knowledge; who he’d like to see enter the Rock Hall next; the surprising song he hopes to perform at November’s Rock Hall ceremony; signing up for the bizarre, Housewives-style E! reality show Married to Rock that also starred Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, and the Cult’s Billy Duffy; and even meeting Bubbles the chimp and witnessing Jackson’s spot-on David Lee Roth impersonation on the set of the “Dirty Diana” music video.

Sadly, according to Stevens, a remake of the “Dirty Diana” video shoot didn’t make it in Michael Jackson’s recent biopic. But with stories like this, Stevens clearly needs a biopic of his own.

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LYNDSANITY: Congratulations on everything, especially getting into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame! I don’t think a lot of people realize that it’s not just Billy Idol being inducted, but you as well. That’s somewhat unusual. How did it come to be that you and Billy are a package deal?

STEVE STEVENS: Well, I think it’s the fact that I have been there from the beginning, have contributed musically to some of the biggest hits, and we continue to work together. It’s not up to me to say how it works with some bands, but I think it’s pretty obvious when it’s a key musician that’s been part of the key musical contributions. That’s the only way I can think of it. … It’s great that they’re including me, and I’m really happy for Billy. I think that he’s an important figure, certainly for our generation, and the music is held up over time. And to me, that’s all the rewards that I need.

I know that Billy came to New York after his punk band Generation X split up. His solo career started being handled by KISS’s manager, Bill Aucoin, and Aucoin kind of set you two up on a blind date. And it became a marriage made in rock ‘n’ roll heaven. Tell me about that first meeting, because your backgrounds are different. You’re from Queens, he’s from London; he was punk, you were more hard rock. How did it all start?

Well, actually I’m proud to say I’m born in Brooklyn! I grew up in Queens, but I grew up in Rockaway, which is very different from Queens. Rockaway was… I mean, my dad had a boat and we went fishing. When you say you’re from “New York City,” they don’t think of my brother having a surfboard and things like that. But yeah, as a guitarist, I was really influenced by the early-’70s English rock stuff. I was a real Anglophile, and a lot of that stuff included progressive rock and glam-rock and Sweet and Bowie and all that stuff. And my band came to the attention of Bill Aucoin. This is before Billy came to New York. I needed other musicians; I needed people to work with that were songwriters. I had the facility on the guitar, but hadn’t really gotten the songwriting thing together. So, I left the band, continued to be managed by Aucoin, and we were going to put a band together around me.

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What was the name of your old band?

It was a horrible name, the Fine Malibus. And actually, consequentially, our ill-fated record, which was never released, was produced by Jimmy Miller, who is being inducted this year into the Hall of Fame as well! So, serendipity there. So, I continued to have a kind of development deal with Aucoin, and three months later, Bill calls me and says, “Do you know who Billy Idol is?” By then, “Dancing With Myself” was being played in every club in New York, and also I was aware of him through Rock Scene magazine. I’d seen Generation X, and [music journalist] Lisa Robinson would go over [to England] and profile those bands. And Bill said, “Well, he’s moved to New York. We’re managing him. You guys should meet. See if there’s anything there.” And we did.

I think that what really clicked for us is Billy loved the New York stuff: Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, the Dolls. I went to the High School Performing Arts, but I dropped out at the time when CBGB was happening — because I felt that was my education. What I was learning in school really didn’t resonate with me. So, I knew all those [New York] bands, and one of my favorite musicians, Robert Fripp, had moved to New York and was hanging out with Debbie Harry and all of what was called “new wave.” And I thought, “Wow, my prog hero is now in New York and part of this!” And then Billy and I started to talk and he said, “Do you like Lou Reed?” And I said, “I know the whole solo from ‘Coney Island Baby’!” I think that got me the gig. … And then when his producer Keith Forsey came to New York, he heard us rehearse and told Billy, “It’s better to have a guitar player who’s got the capabilities, because what you want to do is not what you did in Generation X. … Steve could play anything that we needed, rather than having to push someone to the height of their capabilities. And hey, he might play too many notes, but we could always ask him to play less!”

Were you already fan of, or familiar with, the first-wave U.K. punk scene that Generation X came from?

I was in a cover band. I played the same circuit as Twisted Sister, played all those clubs, four nights a week, and there was a cover band that had short hair, which was unheard of! And they played “God Save the Queen,” and I went, “What the f*** is that?” The guitar player goes, “This is a new band out of England, the Sex Pistols.” I went out and bought the Sex Pistols’ album, and then I discovered the Jam, who I loved, and then things that soon followed that I became a big fan of, like XTC. And then Billy turned me on to things like Siouxsie and the Banshees and John McGeogh, the brilliant guitar player in that band, who’d also played on the Gen X album. And then I remember reading that Keith Levene from Public Image said his favorite guitar player was Steve Howe from Yes. And I said to Billy, “Hey, the guy in Public Image likes prog too!”

Billy is the most successful artist to come from that early wave of U.K. punk, in terms of record sales, charts, radio, and MTV play. I don’t know if you consider yourself the throughline here, but unlike most of his peers, he took his career to this whole stadium, mainstream rock level. Do you feel like he got on that path because you connected the punk and hard rock worlds for him?

Well, also, our producer came from doing Donna Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder, so we had the dance side of things as well — Keith Forsey knew how to do remixes and groove. That’s the thing about the Billy Idol records. They have groove to them and a certain warmth to the bass and drums, which are locked in — which the rock records really didn’t have. I think that amongst the rock bands, maybe Def Leppard had that emphasis on locked-in-ness and sonic capabilities that could sit against dance records, and even some Depeche Mode and the Cure had this kind of warmth to their music. Whereas a lot of the heavy rock records, they didn’t sound that great; the musicianship was fantastic, but they didn’t have that thing that dance records had. And I think Keith was really instrumental in that. So, you had three guys, different specialties, that respected each other and knew that the end gumbo or whatever was going to be something unique.

The musicianship angle is interesting too, because in early punk it was not “cool” to know more than three chords. But you know a lot more than three chords, and I think it’s safe to call you a guitar hero. It’s very interesting that you were working with Billy, who was coming from this world where being a virtuoso was actually considered uncool.

Yeah, we used to call it the” punk police”! … But you have to believe in the song first and foremost, and you have to believe in the artist you’re working with. And I had no problem taking direction. As an example, Billy always felt that the first guitar solo that I played was going to be the best one, because it’s instinctive. You can hear me discovering. There might be bad notes in there, might be some mistakes, but anytime I’d always say, “Oh, I can do it better” and I’d go back and maybe “perfect” it, we’d go back and listen to the first one and all go, “Yeah, there’s something about that one.” … It’s good to have an objective person who can recognize what the best element of that is, and that’s really served me well. And also, here’s the thing: Billy has always been fair with me as a songwriter. We co-wrote the songs, and we split everything evenly as far as the publishing. So, he’s honest — and that’s punk-rock, because I know a lot of musicians in the metal world who got screwed out of their publishing. Billy always thought, if you’re in the room — and we’re still like this, if we cowrite with people — we split everything. Because that’s punk-rock. And how can you not want to be part of that team?

Given the nature of how your unique partnership turned out, was there ever any discussion about you having a band name, like Loggins & Messina, but like “Idol & Stevens” or “Stevens & Idol”?

No. I mean, from the moment I met him, it was his record deal. But in some ways, being the sideman made me approachable to other people, so I was able to work on other projects. Like, I remember reading that David Lee Roth really had a problem with Eddie Van Halen doing [Michael Jackson’s] “Beat It.” But when I won a Grammy for Top Gun, Billy was proud of that! There was never any animosity.

What was the first song that you and Billy wrote together?

I think it was “Dead on Arrival” on the first [self-titled] record.

Did you know in that moment that you guys were on to something?

Maybe not in that moment, but I think by the time we got to “Hall in the Wall” and “Shooting Stars,” we really had something with that first record. It was really when he played me the demo of “White Wedding” that it just took everything to the next level. Because we didn’t have a single — everything else was written, and Keith locked Billy away in the studio in L.A. and said, “You gotta come up with a single!” And he came up with “White Wedding” and knocked on my hotel room door at whatever time it was, 6 in the morning, with a boombox. He put the cassette in and said, “I think I got it!”  And it was all there. I went, “That’s the starting point. That may be the single from this record. But the next record has to be at that level for the whole record.”

You and Billy parted ways for a while, and reunited about 25 years ago. It’s been going strong ever since; in fact, your second time together has been much longer than the first run. Why did you take that break from each other?

Well, first of all, Whiplash Smile was a difficult record to make. We wanted to embrace the technology at the time, so it was a lot of time for me spent programming synths and drum machines, and it was very hard to marry my guitars with those machines. Now you can do it with ProTools, you can press one keystroke and everything lines up, but back then it was really difficult. And there was a fair amount of drugs and alcohol thrown into it. The pressure of following up a big record was certainly there.

Drugs and alcohol on both your parts?

Yeah. I was no angel, certainly not. But one saving grace is that I’m useless if I’m stoned; I can’t play guitar. So, I’d have to wait till after the session most times. So, at the end of the Whiplash Smile tour, he decided to move to Los Angeles. I still had family in New York, I had just bought my first apartment, and I didn’t want to move to L.A. I was approached by Warner Bros. by Ted Templeman, who was the head of A&R, who was also Van Halen’s producer as well as for the Doobie Brothers. I was signed to a solo deal and just thought I should give this a shot. And there was some outside influence. … I’m sure people were saying to Billy, “If Steve stays in New York, you don’t need him!” And people saying to me that I don’t need Billy, that I can do my own thing. And you start to believe the hype. But at the end of the day, you go, “What an idiot!”

 I mean, Billy did have hits after you left, but not at the same level. I must ask what you thought of Billy’s ahead-of-its-time, rather misunderstood, and not-well-received Cyberpunk album from 1993. That was a huge departure for him.

I liked it. It’s funny because I’m always the first one to say, “Hey, we should pull out some of these kind of more obscure tracks to play for people,” and I really enjoy playing the [Cyberpunk] stuff. We did “Shock to the System” off that record. Look, I’m a Billy Idol fan, whether it’s got my guitar-playing or not. I think the guy’s fantastic, and he’s made great records with me and without me. I love what I bring. I bring a sense of drama to the music — I almost approach it like a film score. I really try and delve into, first of all, the words. I probably drive him crazy with, “What are you trying to say here? This line, what is it?” Because that’s my roadmap. That tells me everything that I need to know about how I should approach guitar, whether it’s going to be really over-the-top rockin’, or if it should be sensitive. So, I think when we work together is when we’re both at our best.

How did you come back together?

He called me. He had the motorcycle accident and I had heard about that, and even after I was no longer in the band, I came to his son’s baby shower. So, we kept our friendship up. He had his motorcycle accident [in 1990] and I said, “Hey, do you need me to come out? What the f*** are you doing? What’s going on?” So, the door was open. We never slagged each other off. We didn’t have to make amends when we got back together. And I think he felt that he missed my musical contributions. I came out to L.A., and I had gotten sober when I came back to work with him. Actually, [Sex Pistols guitarist] Steve Jones drove me to my first AA meeting! And I said, “You know what? I could live here. I think this is kind of cool.” So, I think that was a great influence. All the people that I knew in New York were dying. They were continuing to live that crazy lifestyle after the ‘80s and they no longer had careers. They were just drug addicts at that point. They weren’t being creative. And I thought, “Well, if I come out to L.A., I get to work with Billy again.”

How did you get sober? What inspired you to do so?

Probably a combination of things. Reigniting the love of the music and feeling that I’m very fortunate to do this. I’m very fortunate to still have relationships with people. And I’ve been with my wife now for over 25 years, and I don’t want to f*** that up. Drugs and alcohol would just get in the way of my relationships with everybody. I really value my friends and my work, and you just reach a point where you go, “Yeah, it’s no longer fun.” It was no longer fun.

Since you mentioned your wife, Josie, I was a big fan of Married to Rock, your E! reality show from 2010. The musicians in it were you, Duff McKagan, Billy Duffy, and Perry Ferrell, and it was like my fever dream of reality TV. I especially loved the Hello Kitty episode, when Josie redecorated your tour bus with girly, pink Hello Kitty merchandise and your bandmates got mad.

[Hello Kitty company Sanrio] came down on her about that! They thought that she was besmirching the image of Hello Kitty! The way that show happened was someone from the production company came to [a gig by] Camp Freddy, an all-star band, and they saw us four knuckleheads onstage with our girlfriends and wives hanging out and went, “Hmm, there’s a reality show here somewhere.” So, they approached us and we were already together as friends, so it was just a matter of documenting, putting cameras in our houses.

I’m kind of surprised that you all agreed to do it. There might have been some people in the rock world who would’ve sneered at such a thing. What made you sign up?

I always felt my wife was larger-than-life. She should be on TV! She’s a character. I just thought it was a great opportunity for all the women. And also, it didn’t require a lot of work on my part because I was on the road. She did all the work, really.

I think you should have kept the Hello Kitty bus.

I know! A mistake! And the poor Jeremy [Coulson], our drummer, E! told him: “You’ve got to be the guy to say, ‘What the hell is all this stuff?’” And in real life, he’s the sweetest guy. He loved the Hello Kitty stuff.

OK, let’s jump from the small screen to the big screen. You mentioned your Grammy-winning work on “Top Gun Anthem,” and we just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Top Gun soundtrack a few weeks ago. “Top Gun Anthem” is so over-the-top-‘80s in the best way. It really sets the tone for this high-octane movie. How did you come to do that track?

Harold and Keith Forsey has worked together in Germany with Giorgio Moroder on the Donna Summers records, so Harold came in as the keyboard player for Whiplash Smile. And he mentioned to me, “I’m working on this movie about a fighter-pilot school with Tom Cruise.” I think I’d seen Risky Business; that’s all I knew about [Cruise]. And then Harold showed me some footage, and at that time, even though there was no CGI back then, it was kind of state-of-the-art. He said, “I’ve got this theme and we need this historic guitar thing.” I think we finished the Idol session on a Saturday at about 7 o’clock, and Harold put the multi-track on for Top Gun and it took about three hours, all told. I played the solo and the whole thing. And then lo and behold, I kind of forgot about it afterwards because we were back out on the road with Billy Idol, and then Harold called and said, “Hey, we’re nominated for a Grammy!” I was like, “Cool, but we’ll never win.” And Harold goes, “We’re going to win.” As it turned out, I was already going to be at the Grammys in Los Angeles because we were performing with Billy doing “To Be a Lover,” so our category for Top Gun was announced in the afternoon. And I went over, and we won. I came back to the hotel and said, “I just won a Grammy!”

You say when you recorded with Billy, even if you did multiple takes, your first solo was usually always the best. Do you know which one made “Top Gun Anthem?”

Well, the melody was the first take. … My hands were warmed up from playing the session with Billy that day, so it was just like shifting into another gear. I was already revved up and ready to go. I believe most of the solo for that is the first take. Maybe the tapping part at the end was something I had to kind of perfect. That’s not my area of proficiency, but this is the ‘80s, so I gotta to have some tapping guitar in it!

You’ve played with so many other people. It’s funny that you say David Lee Roth didn’t like it when Eddie Van Halen played with Michael Jackson, but you were on Michael’s “Dirty Diana.” And I have heard that you got to meet [Jackson’s pet chimpanzee] Bubbles at that time. Is that true?

I did! We did the video, which was an all-day shoot, and I drove up and I’m at the soundstage parking lot, and I see this tricked-out minivan with swings and all this stuff and toys. And I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s really cool that they have some place for their kids to play.” But no — it was the Bubblesmobile. It was for Bubbles. So, then I get in and we’re hanging out and Michael says, “Oh, do you want to meet Bubbles?” I go, “That’s what I’m here for, Michael. I’ve gotta meet Bubbles!”

I would be a little scared, because you hear stories about chimps snapping and tearing someone’s face off or going on the attack. But I assume Bubbles was pretty domesticated.

Yeah. The wildest thing was they had sprayed Bubbles with Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion perfume. Make of that what you will.

What other memories do you have of that session? I haven’t seen the new Michael biopic yet, but I feel like there should be a bonus scene with you meeting Bubbles in the movie.

So, evidently there was shot for the movie a remake of the video that we did for “Dirty Diana”! But it’s not included in the film. I haven’t seen anything, but that’s where the film ends, evidently. What Michael and I talked about mostly was he was getting ready to do his first big [solo] tour, and he wanted it to be a rock-style tour. He mentioned that he had seen Queen, he had seen Mötley Crüe, and was asking me about sound and lights. So, I said, “I’ll put you in touch with our lighting company, our sound company. This is who we use. They’re really state-of-the-art.” And what was really funny though, is he goes, “Oh, I like Van Halen,” and then he proceeded to imitate David Lee Roth. Now, imagine Michael Jackson doing David Lee Roth: “Look at all the people here tonight!”

Was it a good impression? Did he get it right?

Yeah, he got it right.

That is absolutely hilarious. What other work have you done, outside of your work with Billy and the other projects we’ve already discussed?

My nylon string record, Flamenco a Go-Go, was really important for me, because it was a way of reigniting the spark of why I picked up the instrument to begin with. I had finished the Vince Neil tour and it was the height of excess and that’s when I decided to get sober. … And then working with Robert Palmer. I met Robert probably two years before Billy; the band I was in [ the Fine Malibus] went down to the Bahamas to record, and Robert lived across the street from the studio and we became friends. And when he’d come through New York, we’d go to the guitar shops together and hang out. … I spent a lot of time just hanging with Robert, and when I went to Italy and was in Milan with him to record [“You’re Amazing,” off Palmer’s 1990 album Don’t Explain], he took me suit-shopping at Versace or something.

Please tell me you still have those suits!

I don’t think I do. But he did take me to a hotel where he claimed it was the best martini in the world. Now, Robert was a world-traveler, and he liked to drink a bit, so I trusted him that this was going to be the best martini in the world. I didn’t like martinis, but I will tell you, it was a damn good martini.

You also played with Joni Mitchell. What was that like?

She had contacted Billy to duet on a song [1988’s “Dancin’ Clown”]. .. Billy was in the studio with her and must have suggested, “You’ve got to get Steve on this song. He’d be perfect.” So, my phone rang at about 1 in the morning: “Hey, I’m in the studio with Joni Mitchell. She wants you to come down and play.” I said, “Yeah, absolutely. I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

Were you intimidated by her?

Well, I started playing guitar at about 7 and a half years old, and it was all acoustic stuff. I went to three years of summer camp playing James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel. Those records were such a big part of my development as a guitar player. And also, if I could learn those songs, it was a way to meet girls! A lot of female acoustic guitar players [at summer camp] were influenced by Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, all the folk stuff. So, when I met Joni, I said, “You don’t understand. You are such a big part of the development of my guitar-playing — Ladies of the Canyon, ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ ‘For Free,’ and all this. I know I’m a rock guitar player, but I have this foundation of folk stuff.” … She was really surprised that I had that background, even though I was in Billy Idol’s band. I think I won her over by having that foundation.

Do you have any other pinch-me moments in your career where you got to work with a hero of yours?

I collaborated on the last two recordings of Ozzy Osbourne’s career. Actually, we recorded those in my living room when I was living in Los Angeles. Billy Morrison, the second guitarist in Billy Idol’s band, was Ozzy’s best friend and called me up and said, “Ozzy wants to record some tunes, can we come over to your studio?” I said, “Sure, come over. I’ll make coffee for you guys.” I didn’t expect anything and I had no expectations; it was like hanging with some friends. And lo and behold, we came up with some really good tunes. Obviously the minute that you put a microphone in front of [Ozzy] and you put the headphones on and you hear that voice, there’s nothing like that. It’s like with Billy — you hear that voice and you go, “There’s only one in this world.” I found them to be very similar in respects. They love history and that English sense of humor. I have to say, the Brits make the best rock stars. It’s that kind of androgynous thing they have, and maybe it’s to do with the English education system. They seem to have a lot of stuff to write about, references throughout history, that I find is lacking in some of the American artists — not the intelligent American artists, but the knuckleheads. And there was a lot of knucklehead music in the ‘80s.

And then you and Billy helped induct Ozzy into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024. Who are some other artists you’d like to see inducted?

I think Keith Emerson should be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. … He was the first to bring out a synthesizer on tour. He was the first to have a synth solo in a song. You can’t just look at Emerson, Lake & Palmer — I don’t really care if Emerson, Lake & Palmer are in the Hall of Fame, but I do care about Keith Emerson, because I think he’s an important figure and he was just a brilliant musician and an incredible showman. And Grand Funk Railroad… man, they sold out Shea Stadium faster than the Beatles! For me as a kid, they were such a huge band. I know the critics didn’t like them because they were really meat-and-potatoes, but they were a big band and they influenced a lot of people. They are one of the great American rock ‘n’ roll bands like Creedence, and I believe that Grand Funk should be in the Rock & Rall Hall of Fame.

Who would you like to have induct you and Billy at November’s Class of 2026 ceremony?

It’s really out of my hands, but Billy has the final say on that. I trust it’ll be somebody cool. But I will tell you one thing: We were very adamant that our band, members who have been with us for some 15 to 20 years, will be playing with us. It was very important that we have our band with us.

Have you given any thought to what songs you want to play at the ceremony?

I want to have a Generation X song in there. I’d throw in “Kiss Me Deadly.” To me, that’s an important song. Punk-rock bands weren’t doing songs like “Kiss Me Deadly” then. Wouldn’t it be great to play something like “Kiss Me Deadly” at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

From your lips to the Hall of Fame’s ears! I would be thrilled about that. And I’m so thrilled that you’re getting in, because you’ve had such a storied career yourself and clearly have many stories to tell. Have you considered writing an autobiography?

It’s been talked about. What would be interesting is that before I met Billy, I lived in Manhattan in a Music Building, 10 floors of musicians. I mean, [New York Dolls guitarist] Sylvain Sylvain gave me my stage name, and we used to see Johnny Thunders hanging out. Cyndi Lauper lived in the building. … Alan Vega from Suicide lived upstairs from us. I will tell you that on the weekends, it was a party — each floor specialized in a different substance! This is New York in 1977, ’78. You had Basquiat and the art world happening. And it was amazing. Nobody had any money, and it didn’t matter.

I feel like this interview could keep going, but maybe you should save some stories for that book. In the meantime, thanks for his conversation and congrats on your new Godin 25th anniversary guitar, and you can let the brass at Sanrio know that as a big Hello Kitty fan and collector, I in no way thought Hello Kitty was being dishonored on Married to Rock. I actually own a Hello Kitty guitar.

So do I! [laughs]

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Wow! I’ve love to see you play that at the Rock Hall’s Class of 2026 ceremony! But before I let you go, tell me about your 25th-anniversary model for Godin.

When I decided to do my Flamenco or Go-Go record, I went to the NAMM Show and introduced myself to Robert Godin and said, “I’m Steve Stevens. I’m going to do this kind of flamenco/modern mishmash, and I heard you have a guitar that does that.” And they sent me one, and that started it all. … They approached me [this year] and said, “Hey, our partnership has been going 25 years. What would you like to see in a guitar that we don’t currently have?” And I said, “Well, let’s make it purple and high-gloss! Let’s make the case all jet-black with a purple interior!” I asked for silly things, like purple tuning pegs. And I don’t know any other guitar that comes with purple tuning pegs.

This Q&A, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Steve Stevens’s thoroughly entertaining interview in full via the video at the top of this page.

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Haircut 100 may have been early-MTV darlings in America — frontman Nick Heyward chucklingly brags that “quite a few guys” have even told him that his iconic loincloth scene in the David Mallet-directed “Love Plus One” video marked “the moment they knew they were gay.” But that was nothing compared to Haircut 100’s impact in their native Britain, where the sophisti-pop pioneers’ funky and frothy debut, Pelican West, was the biggest-selling album of 1982.

However, that first whirlwind of success for the group — who, bafflingly, didn’t even have a manager at the time — was over as quickly as it had begun, as their career “went from one extreme to another.” Heyward, then barely 20 years old and serving as both the primary songwriter and pinup-ready face of the band, soon experienced burnout, and by late ‘82, when Haircut 100 were working on the rushed follow-up Paint and Paint (“I don’t see that as really a Haircut album, personally,” Heyward notes), he was barely participating.

Haircut 100 in 2026 (photo: Andrew Cotterill)

“My relationship with them, and their relationship with me, had completely disintegrated. … I think the final straw was in a rehearsal when they’d been rehearsing up and writing new songs without me, and [percussionist] Marc [Fox] was singing them, and it was a different band. It wasn’t our band. It wasn’t a team anymore, ” Heyward recalls. “And I felt like, ‘Um, what am I going to do? Merch?’ And so, that was it. That was the Spinal Tap moment.”

But, as it turns out… that wasn’t it. There was plenty of “unfinished business” after Heyward officially parted ways with Haircut 100 in January 1983. While he went on to a successful solo career, even scoring an alt-rock radio hit in America in 1993 with “Kite,” he always missed what he affectionately calls that “Haircut power” — that rare, special dynamic he shared with his teenhood bandmates Les Nemes and Graham Jones. “There’s just something about actually being in a band with the people you dreamt with in a rehearsal room in a garage in 1977,” he muses fondly.

Haircut 100 staged several brief reunions after they imploded — most notably on a memorable episode of VH1’s Bands Reunited in 2004 — and each time, that vibrant “Haircut energy” always remained. “Every time we get together, we just knock it out the park. Something magic happens and takes over, and the ingredients are right,” Heyward raves. “We can get together easily. It is staying together — that’s what hasn’t worked out! And that’s why this time is so different. Everything has been falling into place easily, unlike any other time.”

Heyward, still radiating that Haircut energy and looking like a boyishly handsome pop idol at age 65, is excitedly discussing his seminal band’s latest and seemingly much more serious reunion, which this time around includes “the missing ingredient”: a legitimate manager, Martin Hall, who also oversees the careers of Wet Leg and the Manic Street Preachers. The band made their all-important Glastonbury Festival debut in 2024, and toured the U.S. for the first time that same summer. (That was their first U.S. trek in almost 42 years; they’ll be back in America, doing both headlining shows and dates with Squeeze and Adam Ant, this fall.)

But most excitingly, Haircut 100 are finally releasing an excellent, return-to-form new album, Boxing The Compass — the proper follow-up to Pelican West, which 1984’s poorly received, Heyward-free Paint and Paint sadly wasn’t — with Coldplay producer/mixer Danton Supple. “We went in to do three songs… and we did 10!” reveals Heyward, an admitted perfectionist who laughingly says if it were up to him and his reconvened bandmates, the new Haircut 100 album probably wouldn’t have come out “until 2044.” Thankfully, it will be released on June 19, 2026.

And so, what could have been an especially bummer Haircut 100 episode of another VH1 series, Behind the Music, is instead getting a happy ending — and a new beginning. Heyward is initially reluctant to broach the subject of what exactly went wrong for the band more than four decades ago, stressing, “Whatever’s happening now, there’s nothing we can do about the past. We’re here. Now every time we play, it’s like total present. Every time I do ‘Fantastic Day,’ it’s like it’s the first time I’ve ever sung it, fresh as a daisy.” However, he eventually he opens up, almost as if discussing the past makes him appreciate this second (or third, or fourth…) act all the more.

“I know I worked the hardest. I did every interview, and I had a lot of pressure,” Heyward recalls of Haircut’s meteoric success after Pelican West dropped in February 1982. “I was just fumbling my way through it.” Heyward didn’t quite understand why all of the band’s “wildest dreams” had come true and he still wasn’t happy (“the reality of when it happens, it’s totally different”), and he was “really not dealing with it very well” because, once again, “the key thing was didn’t have was any kind of manager. We were dealing with this all ourselves, and it was a chaotic environment. Very chaotic, nothing stable.”

Heyward ultimately consulted a physician at Haircut 100’s label, Arista Records, “And I remember he said, ‘Have a cigarette!’ So, I did, and that started me smoking,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘OK, maybe this is my crutch.’ But it wasn’t. And then he gave me some pills that I found out had been struck off the [prescription] list — they weren’t supposed to be given to people — and my jaw locked. I have no idea what they were. I was just young, and I would take anything to not feel the way I was feeling. … I was at home going out of my mind, and I didn’t know why I felt like that. But it felt like the end of something.”

Life at home in the London suburb of Beckenham, where Heyward was still living with his mum and dad, was also chaotic, because his sudden fame had completely altered their once-healthy family dynamic. “My parents really changed out of it — and they [had been] my stability. They were my stable rock, and then they just became sycophantic,” he explains. “That was not the relationship we’d had before.” Eventually “the Arista doctor turned up at the doorstep” and Heyward was “carted off to this place that I think they sent Ozzy Osborne off to. But [other troubled celebrity patients were] in there normally alcohol or drugs or something, and I was just in there just due to pressure.”

But now, Heyward’s issues, any lingering resentment between him and his on/off Haircut 100 bandmates, and really “anything from the past has evaporated,” Heyward assures with a massive grin. “It just doesn’t mean anything.” And now his long-ago Beckenham garage-crafted hopes and dreams for the band are finally being realized, in a way that simply wasn’t possible in ‘82.

“It’s a dream come true, that the success in our wildest dreams is coming now, because we didn’t think it was going to happen at all. We’d all written it off, really,” a grateful Heyward confesses. “There were so many attempts. I suppose it’s that thing of when you do actually let go completely, maybe that’s when you get what you were looking for. … And here we are, the same three people, and we’ve still got the same dream.”

Watch Nick Heyward’s full interview (which took place in 2024) in the split-screen video above, in which he discusses how Haircut 100’s ska-adjacent, brass-tastic sound was “like Chicago on amphetamines,” how they came up with their preppy “jumpers band” look, what went on during the “Love Plus One” music video shoot, and more.

Instead, “with hours to spare” before his new single dropped (and less than two weeks after the exclusive Lyndsanity interview below, during which he spoke at length about the significance of “Pow!” and his connection to the formative grime/garage music of his youth), MNEK sprang in into action and “decided to swap out the audio, granting this an entirely original work.” However, the bold spirit and intent of “Reverse!!” remain intact.

The cheeky cover art for MNEK’s grime-influenced comeback single, “Reverse” (photo courtesy of Chaos Label)

British-Nigerian pop wunderkind MNEK (real name: Uzoechi Osisioma Emenike) is sitting backstage at West Hollywood’s 2026 Outloud Pride festival, getting ready to play his first U.S. concert since 2019. It has been even longer since the singer/rapper/songwriter/superproducer released his acclaimed debut album, Language (a top 10 album pick for in 2018), but he most certainly hasn’t been idle during that time.

On the contrary, MNEK’s career has exploded exponentially since then, as he’s worked behind the scenes with longtime collaborator Zara Larsson (co-writing every song on her recent breakthrough album Midnight Sun, and co-producing seven of its 10 tracks), FLO, Måneskin, Adam Lambert, Jade, Jax Jones, Craig David, Galantis and David Guetta, and many other pop, EDM, and R&B luminaries. He’s won multiple ASCAP Awards and garnered Grammy, BRIT, and BET nominations along the way, and he even got to guest-judge the greatest musical challenge in RuPaul’s Drag Race herstory, the U.K. series’ RuRuvision Song Contest, which would be a major career highlight for just about anyone.

But now that MNEK is finally putting himself back out there, centerstage, and gearing up to release his sophomore album, Bulldozer!!, on Sept. 18, he is admittedly feeling the pressure.

“This has been something that I’ve not done for a while,” he tells Lyndsanity, sitting at a West Hollywood Park picnic table with his highlighter-yellow buzzcut glowing in the afternoon sunlight. “This year in particular has been a lot of me being outside again. I feel like I’ve been a bit hiding and not really wanting to showcase myself, just out of fear of, I don’t know, not doing well or not being accepted. I think a lot of this album is about me breaking through that wall that I built up of fear and lack of confidence. If I fail, I fail, you know what I mean? But at the same time, I have to give it a shot.”

It’s downright shocking that an artist with such an impressive, multi-page CV would suffer from any sort of impostor syndrome or self-doubt. Years before MNEK broke out with Language at age 23, he’d already proven himself as an in-demand producer and songwriter — after being discovered via Myspace, landing his first publishing deal when he was just 14 years old, and collaborating with the likes of Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Dua Lipa, Diplo, and Julia Michaels. He even co-wrote “Hold Up” off Beyoncé’s landmark Lemonade album. His reputation is so solid by now that midway through his Lyndsanity interview, one of Outloud’s other Saturday performers, Cain Culto, excitedly approaches our table to tell him, “I love you! You’re an inspiration. I write too, and I just love your writing.”

“I feel the love in a way that I wasn’t able to receive in my twenties,” MNEK says with a grin, as Culto walks away and the interview continues. “I feel like I can receive the positive love that people give me, and see that they respect what I do, and that we can win together.” And that is what really matters to MNEK when it comes to his solo career, rather than trying to the compete with the astoronomical streaming and chart numbers of the A-listers he has worked with.

“The way I measure the success of my music has to be different. I’ve been blessed to see success in streams and global this and global that, and that’s one way of measuring success. But if I use that same metric with my own stuff, I will always be disappointed,” he reasons. “So, I have to measure my success in, OK, did people listen to it? Did people come to my show? Did people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you so much for making this album, and thank you for existing, and thank you for doing what you do’?”

When MNEK he first started putting out his own music, he “made a very conscious decision to be out,” and back in 2018 he caused a bit of a stir when he cast a male love interest in his sexy music video for “Tongue.” But the video’s largely positive response confirmed that he was on the right path. “That was the first time, I guess, that I saw lots of messages from Black gay kids saying, ‘Thank you for doing that,’ and ‘It’s helped me talk to my parents or talk to my friends about it,’ or ‘It’s been cool to see someone that I can relate to on that thing.’ And I think that I always wanted that,” he recalls. And now that he’s about to release his new single, “Reverse!!,” MNEK is pushing things even further.

“Reverse!!,” out June 19, is “a very British record” and MNEK’s “love letter” to U.K. dance music, and it samples 2004’s “Pow! (Forward)” by British MC Lethal Bizzle, “one of them records that people hold near and dear to their hearts as this pillar of grime.” While the grime and U.K. garage scenes have at times been known for deep-rooted homophobia and have “definitely had some challenging language and ideologies,” with “Reverse!!” and his other upcoming tracks, MNEK is flipping that script.

Some of the single’s bold lyrics include: “I could turn a bad boy to a bad bitch in seconds/I can make a thug really twerk/I can make a thug really switch… I can turn his duffel to a purse/He ain’t never been about the booty/But the booty go berserk.” And when MNEK performs “Reverse!!” on Outloud’s main-stage, the wall-sized video screens behind him depict tough guys posing stoically in tracksuits, parkas, and do-rags — black-and-white footage that bursts into rainbow-bright color when the chorus kicks in and the men begin twerking and gyrating all over each other.

“‘Reverse!!’ and a few other songs on Bulldozer!! touch on more grime and garage and that kind of world, and I think it’s a cool juxtaposition,” MNEK says. “You think of grime and garage as being very hyper-masc and very bro, so I wanted to add a bit of flair to it. I’m happy I just get to do my thing on it and bring people into this conversation on this album. This is a space that one would assume that I don’t belong in or I don’t exist in, but I grew up in Southeast London. I’m British-Nigerian. I grew up with grime and garage music all around me. It’s not something that I am a guest of. I grew up with Channel AKA/Channel U [a now-defunct British satellite TV channel that focused on the grime scene], and that was our community. That was us discovering underground music before there was peer-to-peer sharing and internet and pirate radio and all that stuff. So, I feel proud to get to share it with the world in this way.” (Side note: MNEK isn’t worried about his new sound being “too British,” because “we’re in a world now where music is global, so there’ll be someone who is the most Yankety Yank ever who’ll listen to it and be like, ‘Oh, this is my jam!’”)

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MNEK also grew up loving American ‘80s/‘90s R&B — like the Jam & Lewis, Rodney Jerkins, and Timbaland catalogs, and especially Mariah Carey, who still tops his wishlist of dream collaborators — and he’s grateful that his family fostered his creativity from an early age. “They’ve been a lot more supportive than I give them credit for. Music is all I ever wanted to do. It’s all I ever felt very good or skilled at. And they saw that it was something that whatever it is, if I’m able to apply myself and really give it my best, then that can’t be a bad thing,” he says. “I mean, I often make a joke about my parents, because I come from a Nigerian background and there’s a stereotype in the Nigerian community that all of us are gonna be doctors and lawyers and that’s just how it is. But upon reflection, my parents were always really supportive of me doing music. … My parents did a good job. They wanted me to win. They let me do all these things. If some old guy came to the house asking, ‘I want your kid to sign a contract,’ they were so open to it. I credit them loads.”

MNEK’s family has also been supportive of him living as an openly gay man, although he reveals that when he came out at age 19, the experience “had its challenges. … My mom has reacted well. My dad has reacted well. The thing is that it’s an ongoing thing. … There’s so many facets to this. It’s one thing coming out to [my father] one-to-one in our house, but then it’s different when I’m being open and showcasing parts of myself to the public. And so, it’s him dealing with that. It’s him reading a newspaper and me being like, ‘I want to be a Black gay role model.’ He wasn’t ready [years ago]. This is stuff that I’m aware he has to kind of grapple with, but at the same time, he is aware that I have to do this just for myself and that it’s important. He doesn’t disregard it.”

MNEK says he’s become “definitely more at peace” over the years with being a Black gay role model in the music space, although he admits he has mixed feelings about that, because his success is, sadly, still the exception to the rule. (One of the ways he has helped to expand opportunities for young, rising queer artists is his Proud Sound songwriting camp, in association with Warner Chappell and Pride in Music.)

“The idea that I’ve had impact and that I’m a rare case in a lot of ways, me being a Black, queer music person… if you ask a bunch of people to name a Black, gay, U.K. singer/songwriter/producer, I think a lot of people would pick me in some way. And that’s cool, but it’s also like not, in that I don’t think it should be that way,” MNEK muses. “I think there should be more of us who are at a certain level of success that we can all share. A lot of my peers are white, and I can be friends with everyone of course, but it’s always nice to see other people from disenfranchised groups be acknowledged and understood and see that level of success.

“I think there’s a level of responsibility that I have in a lot of ways, but also, I still want to have a good time,” he continues. “I still want to enjoy it and figure it out. I think that when I released Language, it was such a long time ago. And since then, Lil Nas X has come out and he did his thing, and there’s been a bunch of pieces of multimedia that have pushed the conversation along. This [new music] is me adding my part, at least from where I’m at right now in my life. And hopefully it does add to the conversation.”

Josh Klinghoffer may be best known for as the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers from 2007 to 2019, but he is also singularly known as the one-man band Pluralone. And his career has been (pardon the pun) more red-hot than ever. He’s been on a major creative tear since exiting the Peppers six years ago — touring and/or recording with Pearl Jam, Elton John and Brandi Carlile, Redd Kross, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Morrissey, and Jane’s Addiction, not to mention releasing three new Pluralone albums, including his latest and fourth overall, A Drop in the Ocean.

Even before Klinghoffer broke off on his own in 2019, he’d already accomplished more than most musicians could ever dream of, getting his start at age 17 in Bob Forrest’s band the Bicycle Thief, playing with Sparks and Gnarls Barkley, and becoming the youngest Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee (at the time of the 2012 ceremony) at age 32. But interestingly, as he drops A Drop in the Ocean, he feels like he no longer has all the time in the world to pursue his passion.

“I’m now closer to 50 than I ever have been. And that’s shocking to me,” the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter tells LPTV, sitting at Licorice Pizza Records in the San Fernando Valley where he grew up. “I feel like my life has always just been one upward slant toward creative mania. I beat myself up constantly about not getting enough done or not doing enough or not focusing enough on one thing and sort of diversifying my attention. I feel like it’s just I’m trying to focus and hone myself. I’m hoping it’s just going up and up and up. I hope I haven’t experienced a dip!”

On the contrary, while Klinghoffer still admittedly struggles with self-confidence and even hearing the sound of his own voice despite all his accomplishments, that newfound sense of urgency drove him to make his best and most personal Pluralone album yet — as he returned to his roots for A Drop in the Ocean, just himself and an acoustic guitar. One track on the record, “Give,” even dates way back to a “fork in the road” moment in his life, when he was “still just some kid” and considered pursuing a solo career more proactively, before his life obviously veered in another direction.

“There was a period where I stopped playing with Bob and something happened where I was able to record basically an album’s worth of stuff, uninterrupted. So, I have this [old, unreleased] record that I made on my eight-track, and with that music, I think I was planning on starting a whole new life,” Klinghoffer says of the long-ago sessions from which “Give,” a song he couldn’t “get out of his system” and recorded several times, originated. “If I could go back in time, now that I’ve experienced everything I experienced, I would perhaps go back to that moment and maybe just whisper into the ear of younger me or something. I don’t know. Or maybe I would just watch and get a real complete understanding of exactly why I didn’t pursue that harder, maybe.”

In the wildly entertaining and wide-ranging video above, and the edited-for-brevity-and-clarity Q&A below, Klinghoffer discusses Valley/Hollywood life in the ‘90s; the (unfortunately fleetingly) hopeful time in which A Drop in the Ocean was made; his love for Elliott Smith, T. Rex, and Gorillaz; the new song he wrote for dear departed friend Taylor Hawkins; and his various superstar collaborations, including Bonfire of Teenagers, the mythical lost Morrissey album that still has yet to come out.

LPTV: We’re very excited to have you visit Licorice Pizza Records, because you are L.A. and Valley adjacent royalty! We’re right by Laurel Canyon Blvd., the street that would lead us Valley kids “over the hill” to all the Hollywood clubs where you got your start. I wonder if you feel this way, but when I grew up in the 818, I did not think the Valley was cool. But now I have a bit of Valley pride. Do you feel the same way?

JOSH KLINGHOFFER: Exactly the same way! I certainly didn’t think it was cool growing up there, but mostly just because it was far. There was nothing going on.

How did you used to get over the hill to play your gigs, or shop on Melrose, or do all the other Hollywood fun stuff?

I got my driver’s license the very first second I was legally allowed to do that. I did it on my 16th birthday, the minute the DMV opened… and then I made it home in time on that October morning to see the O.J. verdict read. That was my 16th birthday.

Oh, wow. With your new driver’s license, you could have been on the same freeway next to that white Bronco! Although I guess that was a couple months before.

Yeah, the day [O.J. Simpson] was on that freeway being chased by the police, I had a gig at Mancini’s. Do you remember Mancini’s? There was deep Valley. … And I was late. I was like, “Who cares?” Something in me told myself, “This doesn’t matter. I got to watch this [car chase]. This is history.”

You have deep L.A. roots. I mentioned the Bicycle Thief — you were a teenager when you joined that band with Bob Forrest from Thelonious Monster. Was that your first band?

I had a band or two with friends in school or whatever, but they don’t really count. Actually, before that, my first music that I played outside of the Valley going into Hollywood was with Shepherd [Stevenson] from Pigmy Love Circus.

I remember Pigmy Love Circus. Didn’t they become Orgy? [Editor’s note: No, that was Electric Love Hogs.]

They could have been. Danny [Carey] from Tool played drums in Pigmy Love Circus, Green Jelly, and Tool at the time. So, through a friend of mine who was a bit older than me, he went to CSUN film school with Shepherd and he said, “Oh, there’s this guy, Shep.” I think Shepherd was his late thirties at the time. I was 15. I started playing with Bob when I was 17

We don’t need necessarily talk very much about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but what I remember from that era was when bands like Pigmy Love Circus started to become big in Hollywood, I kind of saw the RHCP effect. All the bands that had been dressed all hair-metal before were wearing cargos shorts and no shirts, and were starting to look a little more bro-y. And I remember being like, “They’re all trying to be like the Peppers!”

Yeah, I don’t know if it was one-sided or not, but there was maybe a little animosity between those two bands, anyway. Or there was a rude song written.

You’ve also played in Jane’s Addiction — you filled in for Dave Navarro recently. There was a time in L.A. when Jane’s, RHCP, Thelonious Monster, Fishbone, Mary’s Danish, and other bands were ushering in this changing of the guard. People talk about Nirvana as being the band that made the hair metal go away, but in L.A. it was those bands. Do you remember that transitional time?

Well, I was a little young to watch it happen firsthand, but I watched it happen on MTV and on the radio. Because I when I was younger, I was into some of those bands — Guns N’ Roses being an L.A. band. I was really into them. And then suddenly there was a cultural shift, and Motley Crue suddenly…

…started wearing shorts.

Yeah, I saw it happen sort of overnight. I missed all the amazing stuff that was going on here by a couple years, but I’ve been so lucky in my life to be able to jump on and somehow latch onto a few coattails, to the point where you’re calling me “Valley royalty”!

Since you mentioned Guns N’ Roses, it must have been a cool moment for you when were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the same night as GNR. At that time, you held the record for being the youngest inductee at. You’ve since been usurped.

Yes, by Ilan Rubin with Nine Inch Nails.

How many months or years did Ilan beat your record by?

Not much. I think he was 31 or something. … I think I was 32.

OK. But back to that Rock Hall night when RHCP and GNR got in, Axl Rose didn’t show up. It was before the Guns N’ Roses reunion.

They didn’t know if Axl was going to show right until the last minute. I remember being… somewhere in Cleveland. I went to a theater and watched — they didn’t want anybody to watch it, but we listened to GNR practice, because either they had another singer [Myles Kennedy] for a couple songs, or they thought Axl was going to show up. So, the whole band was ready to go and they were rehearsing, and me and [RHCP drummer] Chad [Smith] were listening.

From all the bands you’ve worked with, whether it’s the Peppers, Jane’s, or even Redd Kross, knowing how brothers be, you know firsthand that band situations can be fraught. It must be kind of nice way to do things on your own as Pluralone.

Yes. I definitely have the tendency sometimes to argue with myself and be indecisive, and then even rude to myself and abusive.

Aw, don’t be so hard on yourself!

Yeah, I know, but people are just completely ridiculous and unreasonable sometimes. But yeah, it’s fun to, at the end of the day, just have something to show for my choices.

The first time I interviewed you was when the 2020 Pluralone record came out. It was an interesting time. It was right before COVID, and very shortly after you had left the Chili Peppers. And you had just joined Pearl Jam and were supposed to go on tour with them, but then the pandemic happened. And Pearl Jam, to their credit, were one of the first bands to realize that touring was not a good idea then. So, then you were in lockdown for a while and you recorded I Don’t Feel Well. And that came out, I believe, during COVID. This is your fourth Pluralone album now, and each album has been made under very circumstances. What was going on during the making of this one? You’ve talked about how you made it during what seemed like a hopeful time, and now maybe it’s..

Less than? [laughs] For this one, a lot of these songs were born or written or begun during that sort of bright time towards right where we are now, spring of 2021, when we were sort of opening again and we thought maybe the pandemic [was over]. It was like pre-Omicron.

What was the other COVD variant? Delta?

Yeah. I think we got up pretty high in that alphabet! But there was this kind of sunny period. I went to New York. and some of the stuff was written there because it was like, “We’re opening again.” And I drove cross-country.

“We’re all vaccinated and the vaccination totally will work!”

Yeah, it was definitely around that time because I remember not being able to leave town until I got my second vaccination. So, there was a bit of a hopeful kind of feeling in the air. And then I flew back from that New York trip to play with Eddie [Vedder] at the “Vax Live” show [at SoFi Stadium on May 2, 2021].

That was the opening of SoFi, and I think one of the first really big shows in L.A., after all the stuff we’d been through.

It was the first live show at SoFi. It was myself and Eddie and these great brothers [White Reaper’s Nick and Sam Wilkerson], and it was like last-minute. I think I knew about it a week before, and I flew out and it was great.

Was it weird to be back onstage in a huge stadium after pretty much being in your house for like a year?

Yes. And everything was still a little funny; there was still probably some testing and some masks and whatever. I can’t remember how long after that everything kind of shut down again. I feel like that autumn, it got really intense again.

It was definitely weird time. So, I guess a lot of A Drop in the Ocean actually predates your second and third albums, in terms of when they were actually written. How does it feel to revisit songs that you made during a time when you were feeling like the world was a compassionate place, and to now release them in 2026?

Well, luckily, I always leave a bit sort of undone or unfinished until I really commit to it, until I put the vocal down. I’m sure I tweaked a little bit of the writing and sort of adapted them to whatever the world feels like now. I don’t know, I think the fact that there’s a hopefulness to these songs… well, I actually don’t know if it sounds like that, because after I played [the album] to someone recently, they were like, “Jesus!” So, I don’t know if it actually sounds hopeful! It was a hopeful time when a lot of the songs were born, but maybe I kind of dressed it up in 2026 clothing. It has my sort of overarching dichotomy, which is: I think this is a shitshow that we’re living amongst, but somehow there’s a hopefulness. Because if not, you can’t get out of bed, really.

I don’t think the record sounds hopeless. But there is a certain melancholy to it.

It’s a bit more direct. It’s a lot of acoustic songs. I think it’s just overall hard for me to sound happy and hopeful, really. But I think there’s a sweetness to some of it.

I assume you’re like a big Elliott Smith fan? Because I hear a lot of Elliott influence on this record.

Yeah. That’s very apparent on this. Sometimes I can’t even listen to him. I’ll have to go through long periods of not even putting him on, because it’ll just come out in my [music]. Like, everything I’m playing sounds like him.

I’m not saying in a way you’re ripping Elliott off or anything, just that I pick up on that vibe. Have you ever been told that your vocals sound like Marc Bolan, particularly In his Tyrannosaurus Rex folky era?

No, but that’s lovely. Chad and I made a T. Rex cover 7-inch where we did “Jeepster” for Record Store Day.

I’d never noticed it until this record, for some reason. There’s a certain trebly quality to your voice.

Well, I love that you caught that. I love [Bolan] and I love his singing. When we did that 7-inch, I was actually free to completely impersonate him. I’ve always had a hard time with my voice. There’s a lot of the times I can’t stand it, but I have a good ear and I’m a good mimic, so I can sound like lots of different people. But when it comes to sounding like myself, maybe this is a deeper personal philosophical kind of gap that I have, but sounding like myself sometimes is hard — and especially then liking what I hear back. I just sang karaoke the other night with some friends at a friend’s house. I went from Geto Boys to Nick Cave to Radiohead to the Beastie Boys. I was just doing impressions of all these people.

Did you ever play with Elliott Smith, by the way? He used to live in L.A.

Now that I think of it, this was a very Guinness-heavy time for me, but I think I played drums once at Largo with Jon Brion — I used to sort of weasel my way into Jon’s live shows once in a while — and I think Elliott was onstage with us once when I was playing drums. Did I make that up?

It’s kind of cool that you’ve had such a storied career that you can barely recall that. For some people being onstage with Elliott Smith would the highlight of their life, but for you, it’s just another night in L.A.! But to go back to something you just said, why don’t you like your voice?

It’s just always been the case.

Is that why you normally aren’t the frontman?

No, I think that’s just … Maybe, yeah. I mean, probably.

So, going back to this album, in your press release you said that for the first time in your life, you feel like you don’t have all the time in the world to make a record — that there was a sense of urgency to this.

Oh, I think I’m referring to the fact that I’m now closer to 50 than I ever have been. And that’s shocking to me. I mean, I still look like a child a lot of the time. And I still live very much like a child. So, for the first time, I’m sort of thinking about how many more records or how many more songs I get to record and release, and how much more of this I get to do. It’s the first time I ever thought of that.

Did that mindset affect any lyrics on A Drop in the Ocean?

Well, there’s one song where I’m talking about this very nostalgic lyrical content, “I Don’t Want to Let You Go.” And there’s many things that I don’t want to let go. The  last time I think you and spoke… I ran into you at a Gorillaz show. Thet played their full record [The Mountain] that night. I did a complete 180 on that record, and it was from how much I loved that show. And I listened to it nonstop for a couple weeks after that. I watched a bunch of press that [Gorillaz founders] Damon [Albarn] and Jamie [Hewlett] did, and they were talking about being anti-nostalgists or something like that. I can’t help a lot of time be nostalgic for a different time when life was less shit. And I mean that generally, just like when there was less social media and less distance between people, I think.

I think it’s OK to be nostalgic, as long as it doesn’t go to the extremes of that Boomer mentality, thinking everything sucks now and everything was better back in the day.

Which I’m guilty of, very much! [laughs]

If you could go back in a time machine to any year or age, any point within your lifetime, and freeze yourself in that halcyon era, what you would do?

It’s not even halcyon. There was a period where I stopped playing with Bob and something happened where I was able to record basically an album’s worth of stuff, uninterrupted. So, I have this record that I made on my eight-track, and with that music, I think I was planning on starting a whole new life. And it didn’t happen, because I started going on tour with people, which was an amazing experience. I can’t say that it’s something that I would’ve preferred to have done, but to answer your question, if I could go back in time, now that I’ve experienced everything I experienced, I would perhaps go back to that moment and maybe just whisper into the ear of younger me or something. I don’t know. Or maybe I would just watch and get a real complete understanding of exactly why I didn’t pursue that harder, maybe.

But you have your own thing now, so you did get to do it eventually.

Yes. And one of the songs on this album, “Give,” dates back to kind of that era. I mean, it’s so old. Every record I’ve made, I’ve always snuck one song on that’s just ancient for me that stuck around, that I can’t get out of my system. And this one was a funny one, because I recorded it four or five times — just made different demos of it, sang it with different lyrics. And finally, it exists.

Do you still have those eight-track recordings? Why not just put them out?

Well, they’re a little underconfident. When I hear them, I hear the potential. But especially vocally, I was really just being very un-enunciative, if that’s a word.

You had diction issues?

No, just confidence. It just sounds very underconfident. It was August of 2001 that I think I recorded this stuff. It was right before 9/11, because I had some lyric on there that was like “The towers you built, knocked over with pride,” or something like that. And I remember a couple of months after that, I was like, “Whoa.” … If I would’ve released my song in August of 2001 with that lyric, I would’ve seemed like a poetic genius.

Or conspiracy theorists might’ve had their way with you! Who knows? But I think it’s interesting that when I asked the time-machine question that there was this whole sliding-door thing — that maybe you could have had a different life. But because you didn’t do that, and you went on to have all these amazing adventures playing with not only the Chili Peppers, but with Pearl Jam, Elton John, Sparks, Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop. You’ve played with the biggest of the big, entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, played the world’s biggest stages. So, I am surprised that was your answer, because then none of that would’ve happened.

And it’s only because of that, because when one looks at their life and wonders if anything could have been different, I sort of pinpoint it to that moment, because I still have those recordings. That was the real fork in the road for me. None of the things you just mentioned had transpired. I was still just some kid.

We were talking about Gorillaz’ The Mountain, and that whole album is about loss and death. There’s a song on A Drop in the Ocean about Taylor Hawkins, who died in 2022. I know that Chad was very good friends with Taylor. I assume you knew him too.

I wouldn’t say I knew him well, but I knew him. I just realized when he left us that I had known him for a long time, because I met him in 2000 when I was playing in the Bicycle Thief and then the Foo Fighters were playing next and then the Chili Peppers. I did three weeks of touring like that, and I was around him every day on that tour and we would just always talk in the hall and stuff like that. Then as the years went on, and in particular the last couple of weeks before he died, Eddie Vedder’s band the Earthlings were on tour… the last show of our tour with Eddie in San Diego, Taylor was on FaceTime backstage and kind of laughing and joking with everybody. And that was not very long before [he died]. I had a couple of long phone conversations with him in the year or two before. Once he was gone, I just saw a lot of kind of weird stuff floating around, just like lots of accusations or darkness around something that was already kind of heartbreaking. … There was just a cloud around the whole thing. It kept amplifying the sadness around it. Obviously, when someone has such an ending, I just can’t help but wonder or hope beyond hope that they knew how much they were loved. So, I was sitting with the guitar one day, and it’s not like me to write a song so specifically about a person or about a topical thing that’s just happened. … Writing a song about a person that had just died felt kind of like new territory for me. But I kept on with it, and those lyrics kind of came pretty quickly.

The title of that song is “I Hope You Knew.” I assume you mean, “I hope you knew you were loved.” I think Taylor knew.

I hope so. I mean, it’s more for just that idea. I hope everybody knows that they’re loved in general, because they most likely are by someone. I mean, I hope he knew, but more broadly, I hope everyone knows that they’re loved by someone, and if they’re not, or if they don’t know, that they either learn that they are or find love. … That was my hope with the song. No matter how much you might be told that you are loved or experience warmth and love in your day-to-day, you may forget it briefly. I feel like if you know that and you really know that all the time, hopefully you don’t put yourself in those situations. Hopefully.

Do you believe in some kind of afterlife?

I would say probably not, because I feel like at the end of the day, once our brain shuts off, the whole system shuts down. But at the same time, our body and the impact that we’ve left on other people, or the work we’ve left behind or the music or anything, that lives on. I’m not sure if the dead live on in any way or come back in any way; if they did, I would love it, but I have no idea. But again, people really leave their mark on the people around them.

You were talking about feeling like you don’t have all the time in the world, but you’ve been on a real creative tear in the past six years. You’ve put out multiple Pluralone albums. You’ve played with so many big artists. Have you been feeling an artistic resurgence now that you’re kind of a free agent? You can play by yourself, you can play with whoever you want, and it seems like there’s a huge demand for your talents.

I hope so! … I feel like my life has always just been one upward kind of slant toward creative mania. I beat myself up constantly about not getting enough done or not doing enough or not focusing enough on one thing and sort of diversifying my attention. I feel like it’s just I’m trying to focus and hone myself. I’m hoping it’s just going up and up and up. I hope I haven’t experienced a dip!

Oh, I don’t think you are.

OK, good. Yeah, I’m trying to just do it nonstop. That’s all I do.

I’d love to do a little lightning round of all the other projects you’ve been a part of. You’re part of an unofficial new “Wrecking Crew” with Chad Smith, Duff McKagan, and Andrew Watt. This wrecking crew played on the last two Ozzy Osbourne records. I want to know about that experience, because when Ozzy passed last year, we all were devastated, but what a way to go — because that guy, unlike most rock stars, got his flowers. He got to perform for beloved fans in his hometown of Birmingham one last time, just 17 days before he died.

See, that song that I kind of wrote for Taylor [Hawkins], I wouldn’t necessarily write that song for Ozzy. Because he strikes me as someone who knew. ….Chad always just had new recordings from those sessions and he would them and he seemed very excited. That was when I was just getting to know Andrew, and I was just really excited for all those guys. There seemed to be a real energy to what they were doing. And then 2021 rolls around and I’m sure we could talk about it a little bit, but as you well know, the world hasn’t heard the Morrissey album that we did…

Oh, of course I was going to ask about that!

That was the first record that I did with Andrew and Chad.

You’re talking about the Morrissey album that still hasn’t come out, Bonfire of Teenagers. Morrissey skipped straight to Makeup Is a Lie and did not put out Bonfire of Teenagers. But there was a lot of hype about the Bonfire record because it had you, Flea, Chad, Miley Cyrus, Iggy Pop. I’ve heard snippets of it, and it was very rockin’, much more rockin’ than you would expect from him. Why was it shelved?

Well, you know the way the world is now. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say anything, but he has just begun a relationship with Sire Records and put out the Makeup Is a Lie album. And since he has a label now, we’ll see.

What was it like working with him?

He would come in at the end of the night. It was incredible for all of us, an incredible process, because we were sort of giving carte blanche to do with his songs whatever we wanted. He had demo versions, and because that was sort of during COVID still, no one was traveling to studios or flying in band members or whatever. So, it was this weird moment where him and Andrew sort of got together and he said, “OK, well, just see what you can do.” And basically, we started one by one recording these songs that he had demoed, and he would show up at sort of dinnertime, 6 or 7PM, and he would, for the first time, hear his songs kind of a different way than he had left them. He had a demo and we would sort of make the song.

I’m surprised by this, because I would imagine Morrissey to be a control freak.

He may very well be, I’m not sure, but because of how odd the world was at this time and because of how fast Andrew particularly works, this was the way this album happened. And because [Morrissey] liked the results, it just carried on happening like that, day after day. I remember Jan. 6, and we all know what happened that day — that was the day that we did the title track. I remember doing the piano to that song and someone coming down the stairs saying, “Sorry, but you guys have got to see what’s going on. This is insane.”

It’s very interesting to me that you have these references, like “that was the day of the OJ chase,” or 9/11, or Jan. 6. It’s interesting how you associate moments in your career with various shitshows that were going on in the world at the time.

Yeah, I’m kind of date-y. I’m good with dates. I think I’ve freaked the Pearl Jam guys out a little bit, because they’ll start talking about something or mention a gig or a story, and because when I was a kid I memorized their tour dates. I’ll be like, “Oh, that was June 24, 1995.” I think they’re a little worried.

Well, Pearl Jam have kept you around, so I guess they’ve gotten over that! But back to Bonfire of Teenagers, you say that was the first time that your “wrecking crew” worked together, but I guess Morrissey liked what he heard, because you made a whole album.

Yeah, and it was only after the album was finished that he was just between labels at that point. So, that was the reason it never came out, because he just had a hard time securing a deal.

Why didn’t he put it out himself?

That’s a good question.

Like I said, I’ve only heard snippets of it, but it was a surprising sound from him. It was a rock record. It still sounded like Morrissey, but there was an oomph to it.

Well, there was also an oomph to it because we literally were doing a song a day and we were like, “Let’s just throw it down.” I mean, working with Andrew, especially in the studio he had at the time, which was the basement to a house in Benedict Canyon, for a couple of those songs in particular, I played bass, and I was this far from the drums. I was this far from Chad. I would feel the wind of the symbol. One of the greatest things about working with Andrew is that he really prizes live playing, and especially since I have such a relationship with Chad, it was so second- nature for me to be right there. I think my hearing has suffered from standing so close to Chad Smith, just because it’s almost like I can’t get close enough, because he’s so much fun to play with. And onstage we had such a jovial kind of smiley relationship, because Chad never plays the same thing twice. There’s always a new accent or fill. I started as a drummer, so I can’t stop looking at him and giving him winks and smiles.

I’m glad that the two of you have kept up not just your friendship, but also your working relationship. Was Morrissey nice, by the way?

Oh yeah, he was great. He was fantastic. He’s always been such a hero of mine, so at first I would just kind of hang in the back. He came in one time when I was in the vocal booth doing an acoustic guitar part, so we needed isolation — so I’m in there and from the vantage point I had, I could see that there was a new entry, and I go, “Shit! I’m not done yet! He’s going to be here when I’m throwing this down!” It was just an amazing moment to be working with him like that.

You worked on Elton John’s Who Believes in Angels? record last year that he did with Brandi Carlile. That was another surprising album. It was a very funky and skronky. The opening song was so glam-rock. A lot of that album hearkened back to what people think of as classic ’70s Elton. It had a lot of oomph to it too.

And the intro of the album is supposed to be kind of “Funeral for a Friend”-y, like the beginning of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. … I was given the task to make an intro, and I took a couple days and I wrote something that was like five minutes long. And then suddenly out of blue, Andrew said, “Oh, we’re coming over. Elton wants to hear what you’re doing.” I was like, “It’s not done. It’s not done!” And we listened to it and then [Elton] walked out and he told Andrew, “Oh, it’s great, but it’s too long” — which is like, of course it is! But I was given the assignment to do a “Funeral for a Friend” thing. … The experience doing that record was, again, was sort of a last-minute thing. Andrew said, “Hey, come down, bring your synth stuff.” Little did I know that I’d be doing it for a month, or however long we worked on it. It was such an incredible experience.

Your wrecking crew also worked on Iggy Pop’s Every Loser.

I can’t remember whose idea it was, but I know that I helped get Iggy’s contact info through a friend of mine who had worked with him. The idea came up to have Iggy’s voice on a song or at the end of a song, and it worked out perfectly. But in doing so, Andrew and Iggy developed a quick friendship over the phone and then he sent him some music. And then before you know it, we were doing an Iggy record, or Andrew’s doing one.

Did you tour in the band with Andrew, Chad, and Duff for the Iggy tour?

I was working with Pearl Jam, so I couldn’t do the tour, but I was able to do Jimmy Kimmel. And then we had a sort of celebration dinner at Andrew’s house.

Was Iggy wearing a shirt?

I don’t remember. But he was certainly not wearing a shirt when he came barreling onto the stage for the Jimmy Kimmel performance and he was like, “Fucking go!” He psyches everyone out for the song as it’s counted off, and it was incredible. He’s so rabid. But I gave his manager a note. I wrote [Iggy] a real sweet note, because he’s the hero of mine and I didn’t get a ton of time with him, because I couldn’t do the tour. I felt badly that I couldn’t give the tour. I don’t even know if he knows who I am or if he gives a shit … I don’t know if he knew like, “Oh, the guitar player over there can’t do it. ” But I wrote a note. It was heartbreaking to me that I couldn’t do the tour.

I have to ask what the note said!

I could actually pull it up. I could read it to you. I’m sure I could find it in my phone. But it just basically said, “It’s beyond an honor to be involved in this record. And luckily I’ve gotten to play with you today. I’m so sorry I can’t tour. You mean a lot to me.”

That’s very wholesome.

And that day and the previous night at dinner, he was just so genuinely sweet and kind of open. He seems like a real, special person. He has a very hard past, but I think a lot of people that I am drawn to, you can really tell that there’s a really big heart there and a really deep sort of human feeling.

I think Iggy is an amazing example of aging in rock, gracefully or ungracefully. Proudly ungracefully! You’ve worked with Sparks, who are on that new Gorillaz record, and they’re in their eighties. And they’re having the biggest moment of their career in decades. You played with Sparks for a couple years.

Yes, that was an amazing experience. And that was sort of [Redd Kross’s] Steve McDonald’s fault. He pulled me into that, and that was the universe opening up in this crazy way. They had a guitar player, Dean Menta, who played with Faith No More for a while. He was the guitar player, but they wanted a rhythm player. And Steve said, “Come on, you don’t have to learn. Just do the rhythm. It’ll be easy for you.”

I can’t imagine playing Sparks songs is easy, though!

No, not easy, but I didn’t have to learn solos. It was just the chords. And I think I knew most of the songs already! That’s what I mean by easy. I didn’t have a lot of responsibility.

Why weren’t you in the Sparks Brothers documentary?

That was pure scheduling. I was back and forth with [director] Edgar Wright’s team about that a few times, and it was just from my touring schedule. It was heartbreaking to me that I missed it.

So many people were in that doc — from Beck to Jack Antonoff off to Vince Clarke to Duran Duran to Weird Al — all talking about how great Sparks are. What would you have said if you’d been in the film?

That they’re the sort of epitome of creative dedication and nonstop drive and a sort of beautifully obsessive, uncompromising work ethic. And that is above all, to me, just the greatest thing. They’re clearly driven by a passion for what they do, and you just can’t say that about everybody. And it’s is own thing with the love between brothers. I mean, for people to do the amount of great work that they’ve done, over the span of time that they’ve done it, it’s unrivaled.

And there are the Red Kross brothers. They also had a great documentary, Born Innocent, and you are in that one, billed as their “82nd drummer” or something like that.

It’s some unrealistic number.

They’ve had a lot of drummers, and you drummed on their The Redd Album, the self-titled double-album they put out in 2024. You produced it too. You have a friendship that obviously goes way back, particularly with Steve, but how did that collaboration come about?

That came about at a Sparks show, actually! I went with Steve to see Sparks at the Hollywood Bowl. Steve bought tickets because we were convinced their guest list would be nuts. And then somehow we were sat right behind their manager and their close friends, so it was like this very sweet, loving, familial experience. And then [Redd Kross’s] Jeff [McDonald] came. ,,, Once we were there together, me and Jeff and Steve together, in Steve’s mind it was solidified. I actually had to push them back two weeks because of the Elton record. I didn’t trust anybody with all the synthesizer equipment I’d brought to that [Elton] session, so I was loading it, let’s say, on a Tuesday —I spent the whole day moving out of Sunset Sound where we did [Elton’s album] back to my space —and we started [the Redd Kross album] on a Wednesday. Literally the next day, I started with Redd Kross. And as I have said to them and to anyone who brings it up, it was the easiest production job probably on Earth or in the history of music, because the songs were so damn good. … It was so much fun to do and just so easy to do. Just the amount of brilliance in those songs was unquestionable. I didn’t have to do anything.

What would be your dream collaboration, someone you have not worked with yet?

Let’s put it out there. Since we talked about him… come on, Damon! Let’s do this!

Damon Albarn?

Yes. I went to Ethiopia with him. Right when I joined the Chili Peppers, Flea was asked to go to Ethiopia because he had done one of their Africa Express trips already and Chad and Anthony couldn’t just drop everything on a dime. I was like, “Let’s go!” So, Flea and I went. I think three days after he got the call, we were on a plane to London to meet up with the Africa Express [musical collective] group, which is an amazing thing that Damon and a couple other guys started. And next thing you know, we were in Addis Ababa and basically on a sort of a musical field trip. Every day, we had a new musical excursion. … And then on the last night, we all had a big jam at a bar. It was amazing.

Wow. What a life you’ve led!

One of my greatest talents has been weaseling my way into different things. But for some reason, [Damon] hasn’t taken the bait.

Well, I’m glad you weaseled your way into Licorice Pizza for this fascinating conversation. But in terms of Pluralone and whatever else you have planned for your career, what’s next for you?

Well, I started album number five last week. [A Drop in the Ocean] is 2022, all the stuff I started to record in 2022, and then there is the pile from 2023. I was trying to get them both out this year, because I need to empty the bin.

Will your new stuff be more reflective of the shitshow of our current dark times?

Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s mostly about the darkest of the dark.

This year’s Emmy contenders for Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentary include John Candy: I Like Me, AKA Charlie Sheen, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Martin Short’s Marty, Life Is Short… and then there’s Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – The Untold Story. Once again, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan is fighting a battle in a male-dominated field.

But McLachlan is used to that. She’s been doing just that since 1997, when she co-founded the all-women Lilith Fair music festival and proved all doubters and haters — who’d ludicrously claimed that so-called “pussy package” concerts could never sell tickets – very, very wrong. The inaugural Lilith Fair earned $16 million, making it the top-grossing of any touring festival that year.

Named after Adam’s mythical first wife – who, according to Mesopotamian and Jewish folklore, fled from the Garden of Eden because she refused to submit to her biblical husband — Lilith Fair was its own real-life utopia, built for and by women. A-list acts like Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Bonnie Raitt, Liz Phair, Shawn Colvin, Jewel, the Indigo Girls, and Natalie Merchant, all of whom appear in Building a Mystery, joined fierce forces with McLachlan to create what was one of the live music industry’s first truly safe spaces. McLachlan then responded to criticism that the first “Lily-White Fair” lineup wasn’t diverse enough by bringing on legends like Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Neneh Cherry, and even rising hip-hop superstar Missy Elliott (who’d never performed live publicly before appearing at Lilith Fair ’98), and the feminine phenomenon became even more massive — taking in $25 million in its second year, and $21 million in 1999. The festival also raised $10 million for various local charities during its historic, or herstoric, three-year run.

However, all was not well in McLachlan’s garden. As Lilith Fair became bigger, so did the backlash. Grumpy, rockist music critics (surprisingly even some female ones, like Gina Arnold and Ann Powers, although Powers eventually came around and actually appears in the Lilith documentary) blasted the festival for being overly earnest and unhip. Shock-jocks, SNL sketches, and late-night TV hosts made nasty jokes about Cole’s armpit hair or the stereotypical lesbian cat ladies who supposedly comprised Lilith’s audience. Pro-life protesters picketed Lilith Fair due to its support for Planned Parenthood and other feminist organizations. McLachlan and other Lilith acts fielded shockingly sexist, homophobic, or just plain ignorant questions at the tour’s daily press conferences. (McLachlan says she still gets “PTSD” when watching that excruciating footage in Building a Mystery.) And even at the 1998 Grammys, when three prominent Lilith Fair artists received multiple nominations — Best New Artist winner Cole; Best Female Pop Vocal Performance winner McLachlan; and Colvin, who received one the night’s top awards, for Record of the Year — they were lumped together for a tokenistic, Lilith-themed group number, rather than given their own performance slots during the ceremony. (McLachlan reveals in the Lilith documentary that she, Cole, and Colvin very seriously considered boycotting the Grammys that year.)

“Honestly, I think I always said to the people who shit on us or said we were all the negative things: ‘Show up. We will change your mind,’” McLachlan says with a sly smile. And despite all the above-mentioned backlash — and the fact that McLachlan decided to end the festival “on a high note” in 1999, just as the industry was shifting to shiny TRL pop and hypermasculine nu-metal, although she does “wonder what would’ve happened if we had done a fourth year of Lilith” — the festival’s impact was massive for Generation X and Xennials.

For instance, 45-year-old Brandi Carlile, who for the past eight years has hosted her own all-female Girls Just Wanna Weekend fest, gushes in Building a Mystery about how attending Lilith Fair as a teenager changed her life. And even if some female Gen Z musicians and their fans are unaware of the Lilith lore, they do walk the trail that McLachlan and her peers blazed for them: In Building a Mystery, an incredulous Olivia Rodrigo, age 23, confesses that she never even knew about Lilith Fair until recently, but she obviously has no problem selling tickets when she tours with female/female-fronted openers like the Last Dinner Party, Wolf Alice, Die Spitz, Remi Wolf, and the Breeders.

“Sarah started that and opened people’s eyes to that thinking, specifically in music,” declares Building a Mystery director Ally Pankiw. “I think that’s a huge thing that she needs to be applauded for.” In the Q&A below, Pankiw and McLachlan open up about Lilith’s legacy and their documentary — an Emmy-worthy story that, much like Lilith Fair itself, is female-driven in front of and behind the scenes.

LYNDSANITY: The first thing that surprised me at the beginning of this film was younger people saying they did not know about Lillith Fair. So, I think it’s interesting to see this film through the lens of today. Maybe young music fans, who see Taylor Swift touring with Boygenius and Hayley Williams, would be shocked to know that the idea of a multi-female-artist tour was once unheard-of in the music business. What stuck out to you when making this film about how the industry has changed, or sadly maybe not changed, since ‘97?

SARAH MCLACHLAN: I think the industry has changed a lot. I think that there are way more women in successful positions, who are using their platforms amazingly. That being said, the greater world is shifting in a very different direction. And as women gain more power, the old guys in the positions of power are trying to claw back, hold onto their power. So, there’s going to be this push and pull. But I love seeing what’s happening in music right now, and women and artists using their platforms to talk about this stuff and continue to push forward. That being said, there’s a long way to go.

ALLY PANKIW: Looking at it from a 2026 perspective, I can speak more to the entertainment industry at large. We’re kind of in a contraction point, where there has been a bit of a little punitive backswing of progress in terms of diversity, in basically who’s invested in the arts and in entertainment. I kind of put that together as I was making the doc. It was an interesting parallel of what I was experiencing in the industry today, and what was going on then and immediately after Lilith. I think that it all kind of lands under the same theme that no matter what era you look at, there’s going to be periods of time where there’s sort of a lie or a myth put in place to keep other people where they’re at, and not giving them the tools to lift themselves up or gain more privilege or power.

And so, I think what’s really remarkable about this doc. And to your point, young people might not know that that was the culture at the time, and they also might not know more widely how just incredibly misogynistic and homophobic and racist that time period was in pop culture and what the sort of prominent voice was in that time. But I think what’s so remarkable about Sarah’s story, and why I wanted to tell the story: She did the very brave but simple thing of just going, “I think that’s a lie. I just don’t believe it about myself, about my peers.” And so, she did this really remarkable thing, but from this very simple place of like, “I’m seeing the opposite be true with my own eyes, so I’m going to stand up against that existing sort of monolithic thinking,” at that time. I feel like we’re there again.

Speaking of lies or fallacies, in the mid ’90s, for the first time in history, more women were consuming more music than men were. Women were buying more CDs than men. And I’ve always thought that women and girls are predictors at the forefront of pop trends, driving the music market. So, where did this idea come from, that women can’t sell records, can’t sell tickets, or can’t sell radio ads if they’re played back-to-back on the radio? The statistics prove that’s not true.

MCLACHLAN: Those old-school attitudes prevailed in every industry. I mean, one of the crazy moments in the documentary is where [talent agent and Lilith Fair co-founder] Marty Diamond says, “We were trying to find corporate sponsors, and we went to a water company. and they said, ‘We’re marketing to guys.’” And like, it’s water!

Well, maybe women would like water if it was in a pink bottle…

PANKIW: Remember “Pens for Girls”? Bic did that and made pink pens. And everyone was like, “What?”

MCLACHLAN: We were dismissed on so many levels, consistently, and not taken seriously and put down. And if we had strong opinions, it was just like, “Oh, sweetie.” It just became really insulting, to a point where I would go to radio stations and they’d say, “We can’t add you this week because we added these other female artists.” And I thought, “We’re all different. Why are you allocating this tiny sliver of the pie to us and thinking that we’re going to be placated by this?” And same with promoters saying, “You can’t do this. You can’t put two women on the same bill.” Well, I’d already been doing that, to Ally’s point. I had been living in this world where it’s like, “This does work. It’s great. People like it. I know music. My tastes are not particular to a gender. It’s music.” I just thought that idea was ridiculous. And then of course, when men said, “You can’t do that, people won’t come,” all that did was put a fire under me to prove them wrong.

PANKIW: I think people have always underestimated young women’s taste and thought it wasn’t “cool.” But I really do think young women have great taste and are predictive in their taste, to your point. And I really do think one of my main goals with the doc was it made me the most upset that [Lilith Fair] was sort of misremembered as not being the coolest place to be those summers. And it was so cool and radical there! I wanted to show that side of it too. Sometimes it was trivialized or people said it was “too earnest,” but again, these are feminine qualities, so they’re put down in general pop culture. It’s like anything that women enjoy is kind of like a second-class thing.

Yes, people are always trying to yuck women’s yum. Like, what’s wrong with it if some women like pumpkin spice lattes? They’re delicious! Why is a beverage uncool because supposedly more women drink it?

PANKIW: Because it’s the myth that things we enjoy aren’t enjoyed also by men. And that also sucks for men. In the doc, Jewel was like, “Metalheads have to tell me secretly that they love my music. They don’t feel like they can announce it, but they’re like, ‘We’re big fans.’” That’s so sad too for all genders, for taste to be gatekept in this weird way.

What was interesting to me was a sort of internalized misogyny, because a lot of women also bashed Lilith Fair at the time. Female music critics like Gina Arnold put it down, and there were some female musicians who at least initially didn’t want to do Lilith Fair because they thought it was a bad look. I’ll even admit that maybe back in the day I thought that if you’re a “rock chick” you have to be one of the guys and not go see women play acoustic guitars. A powerful moment in your film is when Thao Nguyen, from Tao & the Get Down Stay Down, talks about this and actually starts to cry, like she feels really bad about bashing the festival when she was young.

MCLACHLAN: Well, that was survival at the time too. That was the myth that was normalized. Ann Powers as well — she kind of tore us apart.

Wait, she did? Ann is in your documentary, and it looks like she had a great time at Lilith Fair.

MCLACHLAN: No, she tore us apart [in the ‘90s], and I was heartbroken because I thought, “This is a woman!” But then a little while later I was thinking, “This is a woman who is existing in a system built by men, for men, and she’s one woman.” And if you want to get along and be part of that world, you kind of have to go along with the prevailing attitudes or you’re out. You’re out really quickly, because it’s very unforgiving to have those kind of attitudes. So, it took me a while to forgive her, because I sort of think women should know better.

So, Ann being in the doc, talking about how important and fun Lilith was, is a full-circle moment.

MCLACHLAN: She alluded gently to maybe not having … she didn’t own it in the same way [as Nguyen did].

PANKIW: She just felt “weird” there, but I think it just goes back to the unlearning that unfortunately a lot of women and other people spend decades, well into their adulthood — the unlearning of what you thought you liked, who you thought you were. And to Sarah’s point about survival, this project has been such a gift, because it’s really highlighted that unlearning that I’m already doing in my life, as a woman approaching 40 who was a young girl and a teenager in the ’90s and early 2000s. I did the exact same thing. All these things that I knew in this sort of ancient place of what I actually liked and what I thought was cool and what I thought was great art, I gave those things away. You have to hide those parts of yourself because earnestness and things that were sort of more traditionally feminine were not “cool.” They were not cool in the early 2000s, especially. And I think probably Ann Powers has spent a few decades unlearning as well some of the myths she believed about her own taste. … So, I don’t hold it against anyone who came up in that time, because it’s an impossible hill or place to climb out from. And I think some people never climb out from it and still are holding a lot of internalized misogyny. Probably being a lesbian helped me get over it faster!

MCLACHLAN: Honestly, I think I always said to the people who shit on us or said we were all the negative things: “Show up. We will change your mind.”

PANKIW: And you did.

MCLACHLAN: Come and be part of it. And yeah, I think Ann even alluded to that as well, where it’s just like, “Oh, yeah, dang it, this is kind of fun. It’s kind of cool. Oh, I’m not allowed to say that, but…”

We can all say it now!

MCLACHLAN: We were too busy just doing it. We were busy celebrating each other’s great music and having incredible times every night performing with each other and getting to know each other and creating this community that didn’t exist, and getting rid of the competition that existed to keep us apart. It was like, “No, we’re going to break down all those walls.” And so it was, for me, incredibly joyful. I mean, certainly there were some moments of PTSD watching some of the press conferences! But honestly, I glaze things over and I’m always looking for silver linings. I forgot how prevailing and pervasive that negativity and that bro culture really was back then. I had friends who were still in the closet because they didn’t feel comfortable coming out. And now I think about that, and that’s crazy. Back then, it didn’t seem so crazy. And it wasn’t that long ago.

A recurring theme throughout this film is, we didn’t really have the term “safe spaces” back then, but that Little Fair was a safe space. Even the film’s producer, Dan Levy, who was a closeted young gay boy in the ‘90s, said it’s an early memory of him feeling safe when he went to the festival. Women, in the audiences and onstage, felt safe, whether that was safe to be themselves and just have a good time, or physically safe, like safe from being groped or leered at or worse. Tell me about what it felt like to be there.

MCLACHLAN: I think that was one of the big desires in my mind, to create this safe space, this place where all these women can be together celebrating each other, getting to know each other, learning from each other, like having mothers and aunties there. That kind of community is so powerful and so important. I think we’ve really lost that as a society. I certainly didn’t have that. I grew up in isolation. My family were on the other side of the coast, so I just had my immediate family and I didn’t have a lot of friends and felt really lonely for most of my childhood. So, to come into this situation where you are instantly held and honored for who you are, without any pretense, on a very equal footing, it felt like coming home in a lot of ways. It took a bit for that to come out. I was a little bit shy and didn’t know that I could just come up to people and start talking to them. Honestly, when the Indigo Girls showed up, that was so amazing because they were just like, “OK, we’re going to play with everybody! Don’t you want to play together?” I’m like, “Yes, I so do! I don’t know how to do this.” I remember Jewel saying the same thing, like, “I didn’t know how to ask.” They really blew everything open, and then that’s when the floodgates sort of opened. And it was multi-generational too, because Emmylou Harris was there, Bonnie Raitt was there. Learning and witnessing women from a different generation, who had been through so much more than we had been through, and hearing their stories and feeling their respect and admiration and cheering us on, it felt really, really powerful.

In Vanity Fair’s Lilith Fair oral history, Bonnie Raitt actually said Lilith was the best live experience of her 50-plus-year entire career.

PANKIW: And imagine the generation that she came from and what the industry looked like. When you talk about Sarah creating a safe space and this sort of utopian ecosystem… I think this doc is a nice reminder that the systems built by women — not just in arts and entertainment, but if you broaden that out, it can apply to many places and many parts of our society — they’re safer, they’re more equitable, they’re more diverse, they run more smoothly, they protect people, they’re intergenerational. They don’t leave different generations behind. But I think this is an important thing to mention too, especially in the moment in time we’re in right now and all the sort of backsliding that we’re seeing everywhere: It wasn’t just a warm, fuzzy feeling. It was incredibly financially successful and commercially viable and this massive success, sold-out everywhere. … I think it’s also still the most successful financial touring festival. I think about that so often, like what a great example that women investing in their systems and ideas is not a risk. It’s a huge opportunity, and it’s not just to tick a box. Again, to go back to Taylor Swift and these massive [female] artists, no one would think of those people as business risks. But Sarah started that and opened people’s eyes to that thinking, specifically in music. And so, I think that’s a huge thing that she needs to be applauded for.

Sarah, did you feel at the time that you were doing something important or game-changing, or is that something you only realized in retrospect?

MCLACHLAN: All of the above! Yeah, in the midst of it, I was too busy to even know what we were doing. I didn’t really understand the larger ramifications of it until halfway through the first tour. Actually, in 1997, we did four test runs, which proved the model with the promoters that we had relationships with. And then we went into the greater world and said, “OK, we’re going to do this.” They were like, “You can’t do that,” and I’m like, “Well, we just did, and we sold out every time! So yes, we can!” But even then, with promoters, or many of them, we had to shoulder 100 percent of the guarantee. There was no underwriting it. They didn’t want to take the chance. It took us a while to prove ourselves, but we did. But in the middle of it, it’s very hard to have any kind of perspective other than, “This is amazing, this is so much fun, this is so much work, it’s so exhausting, it’s so all-encompassing.” This idea that we are moving the dial forward, I think that came over time with the success of it, with the second year, getting more diverse artists that initially said no because it was not cool enough or not proven, whatever reasons. I went, “Listen, just look at how many fans show up. Do you want to diversify your audiences? Do you want to get new fans?” It’s actually very simple, and it’s financially a smart choice to make, and a smart choice any manager should make for their young artist. It took a while for those things to build and to become understandable.

And now, having years of time in between, women who were there as young people are coming up to me over the years and saying, “I was there, and you showed me that I could do and be anything I wanted to be, to dream big! Now I’m the head of my law firm and I’m bringing along women to be my partners.” Hundreds of stories like that. So, that legacy of celebrating each other, of caring for each other, of supporting each other and bringing each other alongside, that has continued in the same way. That was the legacy, of giving. A big part of it for me was being able to leave a lasting impact, not just musically, but on the community. Like, how do we actually help the community? So, being able to give a dollar of every ticket sale, which is a nominal amount, but sometimes that was upwards of $30,000 and sometimes the biggest single check that any of these [local charitable] organizations [in ever tour stop] had ever received. That is what made the press conferences so much less painful, because they were generally very painful, but I got to be the lucky person at the end to give the check to the local charity. It’s amazing that all of us together built this thing that could go out and not only put on a great show and entertain people and bring people together and create a community, but could leave a lasting impact to continue to help women and marginalized citizens in that community. I took the money I made from Lilith and put it into foundation and started my music schools. And so, that legacy of giving continues, 25 years later.

PANKIW: If everyone could be Sarah McLachlan, the world would be a much better place.

I wish that were the case, but there’s only one Sarah McLachlan! We were talking about safe spaces, and the last year of the original Lilith Fair was also the year of the infamously violent Woodstock ’99, a festival that couldn’t have been more opposite to Lilith. It seemed to signify an abrupt culture shift, back to toxic masculinity or bro culture, that’s still very prevalent today. What happened?

PANKIW: That’s a big question, but I often reference a really brilliant book by this author named Sophie Gilbert called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. It talks about this shift from some of the power and autonomy from women in entertainment. The pendulum swings, and sometimes it is in response to progress. She has an interesting chapter about music transitioning from the ’90s to the 2000s. She says it did feel a bit like a punitive pendulum swing, and she has a line that is so chilling: “The women of the ’90s were replaced by the girls of the 2000s.” And I think that was not just in music but in pop culture in general, in terms of who was becoming a star and a celebrity. It felt like people with ownership over their own careers, and then there was then this push to have a lot of young people that didn’t have full ownership over their careers, where a lot of a bigger machine could own a piece of the money of these younger artists. I don’t think that fully answers your question, but I think it’s indicative of some of that shift into the early 2000s. As for how Woodstock ’99 plays into that, I mean, Sheryl Crow [who played both Lilith Fair and Woodstock ‘99] says it in the doc. She says [in a press conference scene], “I hope [Woodstock ‘99] is not an indication of where we’re headed as a country!” And you kind of go ugh when you watch that line, because for a moment it felt like this vulnerability and sentimentality and lyricism was front and center. And then different types of music and art and movies kind of rushed in to replace some of that in the early 2000s.

MCLACHLAN: I often wonder what would’ve happened if we had done a fourth year of Lilith. I was exhausted and I was done, and my record label was screaming for a new record. And I’m always of the mindset of “end on a high note.” I just had this feeling that by doing it another year, the success of it might start to wane, and that would be a real bummer. But it’s true that I felt by the next year, [pop music was dominated by] boy bands and girl bands and very fabricated, part of a larger machine typically run by men, created by men, to make a lot of money and be a very particular narrative. It did kind of feel like the door slammed closed a little bit. [The women of Lilith Fair] as individual artists all continued to make music and continued to be successful, but the media machine moved on to something else, as it does. There wasn’t massive focus. And so, it is cyclical in that way. But hindsight is everything.

@livieshq watch the #LilithFairDoc to hear how the women of the festival impacted our very own @Olivia Rodrigo “lilith fair: building a mystery – the untold story” is now streaming on @hulu and hulu on @Disney+ #OliviaRodrigo #LilithFair ♬ original sound – livies hq

It’s touched on very briefly in the film that you did try to revive Lilith Fair in 2010, but maybe it was a bit too early to do that, because it wasn’t as successful as it had been in the ‘90s. But next year is the 30th anniversary of the festival, and with everything we’re talking about, where society is at right now, plus there are many amazing female artists re dominating the pop space right now, is there a chance Lilith could be revived? Maybe even for just some kind of one-off anniversary event next year? I feel the world needs Lilith Fair right now.

PANKIW: And you’re like, “Can I get tickets?” [laughs]

MCLACHLAN: Actually, I didn’t even realize it was the 30th anniversary coming! Stay tuned. I have nothing in the plans, but there are always things brewing, moving forward.

This Q&A, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Sarah McLachlan & Ally Pankiw discuss full interview in the video at the top of this page.