Producer, songwriter, DJ, and actor extraordinaire Questlove is not short of accomplishments. As the frontman and drummer of the band, The Roots, you may know Ahmir Thompson from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Night after night, his personality shines through, leading his band and cracking jokes with the host himself. Questlove has become such an industry stand-out his fans hang onto his every word- whether it be waiting for his quips with Jimmy, listening to his podcast, Questlove Supreme, or through his music.
The Philadelphia native's prolific career includes six GRAMMY awards, a BAFTA, and an Academy Award...producing for the likes of Amy Winehouse, John Legend, and Elvis Costello. Questlove is an enigma- a vat of knowledge in the music industry that can provide unique insights and witty commentary without bias.
Now, Questlove sits inside Electric Lady Studios- the studio commissioned by Jimi Hendrix where David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and Led Zeppelin have recorded- alongside a glass of The Balvenie Scotch whisky to talk with some of the greatest in the entertainment industry for his digital series, "Quest For Craft."
Available exclusively on The Balvenie's YouTube, Questlove brings a refreshing take on creativity. He talks to stars in their industries to delve into how they got to where they are today. Running since 2021, "Quest For Craft" has hosted an impressive crowd: Mark Ronson, Michael Che, Misty Copeland, and many more. Questlove says,
“I’ve been an obsessive student of creativity my whole life,” explained Questlove. “I’m interested in how people make things, how creators move from one medium to another, what makes work better -- and what allows creators to hold onto the passion that inspired them in the first place. And surprisingly, it turns out I have a lot in common with a 131-year-old whisky based in rural Scotland."
It's continually exciting to watch how Questlove wiggles into the mind of some of our favorites in the entertainment industry. You can watch the trailer below:
Here's a preview of some of Questlove's iconic digital series, "Quest For Craft", out now!
Chapter 9, Craft and Joy with 8-time GRAMMY Award-Winning Artist, Songwriter, and Record Producer AndersonPaak - The musical duo explores how they each bring happiness to their fans through their craft and creativity.
Chapter 10, Craft and Connection with American Cellist Yo-Yo Ma - Questlove and Yo-Yo Ma discuss how seeking to make a genuine connection with their audience affects the act of creation.
Chapter 11, Craft and Voice with Emmy Award-Winning Writer, Actress, and Producer Lena Waithe - The history-making creator and Questlove delve deep into the topic of infusing their work with their individual perspectives and points of view.
Chapter 12, Craft and Commitment with Actor and Peabody Award-Winning Comedian Fred Armisen - Fred Armisen and Questlove explore the comedian’s commitment to the surprising, unexpected characters he has crafted throughout his career.
An artificial intelligence software called Google Magenta has composed a collection of songs by iconic artists who passed away too soon.
Featuring "new" songs by artists including Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and others who died at the age of 27, the digitally engineered group of songs was released on April 5th as part of an album called Drowned in the Sun – Lost Tapes of the 27 Club.
The album was created by a Toronto-based organization called Over the Bridge, which is working to combat mental illness in the music industry. It is being branded as an effort to counter fetishization of artistic suffering and raise awareness about mental health.
"What if all these musicians that we love had mental health support?" Sean O'Connor, a member of the board of directors for Over the Bridge, told Rolling Stone. "Somehow in the music industry, [depression] is normalised and romanticised … Their music is seen as authentic suffering."
"To show the world what's been lost to this mental health crisis, Over the Bridge, an organization that empowers musicians and to reclaim their lives from their mental health struggles, used artificial intelligence to create the album the 27 Club never had the chance to," reads the album's description on YouTube.
"Through this album, we're encouraging more music industry insiders to get the mental health support they need, so they can continue making the music we all love for years to come. Because," it adds pointedly, "even AI will never replace the real thing."
The AI program behind it all, Google Magenta, builds its tracks based on artists' previous output. Powered by Google's open-source TensorFlow system, the AI has generated a variety of other intriguing contributions to the growing field of artificially enhanced music.
For example, the program's "Lo-Fi Player" lets you play music by clicking on various objects in an onscreen room; it also includes a live YouTube chat where users can type in commands and change the appearance of the room (and thus the sound of the music emanating from it).
Always, Google Magenta's creators and users seem to insist that they are not working to replace music — only to enhance it. "The design goal is not to replace existing Lo-Fi Hip Hop producers or streams," said Vibert Thio, the project's designer. "Think of it more as a prototype for an interactive music piece or an interactive introduction to the genre to help people appreciate the art even more."
Similarly, this new effort by Over the Bridge seems to be an effort to get people to appreciate the lives of some of the musicians we lost too soon.
According to O'Connor, the AI program essentially writes lyrics by picking out words from artists' previous songs, analyzing their typical song structures, and then fleshing out lyrics through a "trial and error" process that imitates the artists' usual cadences and rhythms.
Apparently, the Nirvana song posed an extra challenge for the AI. "You tended to get a wall of sound," O'Connor told Rolling Stone. "There's less of an identifiable common thread throughout all their songs to give you this big chunk of catalog that the machine could just learn from and create something new."
Still, the Nirvana track has the approval of Eric Hogan, who provided the vocals for it. Hogan also sings in a Nirvana cover band called Nevermind, and he seems to feel that the song fits with Cobain's approach.
"['Drowned in the Sun'] is accurate enough to give you that [Nirvana] vibe, but not so accurate to where someone's going to get a cease-and-desist letter," Hogan said. "If you look at the last quote-unquote Nirvana release, which was 'You Know You're Right,' this has the same type of vibe. Kurt would just sort of write whatever the hell he felt like writing. And if he liked it, then that was a Nirvana song. I can hear certain things in the arrangement of ['Drowned in the Sun'] like, 'OK, that's kind of an In Utero vibe right here or a Nevermind vibe right here.'… I really understood the AI of it."
There's something moving about the concept of bringing musicians back to life in order to lament what they could have created, if they hadn't left us too soon. But the intersections between art and AI are always riddled with questions about ethics and integrity, and this project — for all its good intentions — is not free from those concerns.
This isn't the first time artists have been brought back from the dead through the strange imitation game that is artificial intelligence. Musicians have headlined concerts as holographs before, and posthumous albums are also popular — in an eternally controversial way. In every case, people seem to have found the practice of reviving artists through algorithms somewhat disturbing.
There's definitely something disconcerting about the Lost Tapes project. "The biggest ethical concern here is not so much the completion of unfinished music or even dead stars on stage as holograms singing their old songs, but rather the fact that words are, figuratively and literally, being put in their mouths," writes Eamonn Ford for Forbes.
"For someone like Kurt Cobain, however, his appeal and why he has resonated so powerfully down the decades, is because his lyrics are inextricably linked to him as a person, where his art reflects his life. The biggest cause of fan discomfort here is that the emotions and the feelings expressed in a musician's words and delivery become seen as infinitely replicable."
It is disturbing to think about Cobain — someone whose music is a completely raw distillation of raw human emotion — being imitated and mass-reproduced by lines of code. Then again, Nirvana itself did generate whole legions of imitators, none of whom ever reached the band's distinct level of electric synergy.
Like those cover bands, this AI's effort to imitate Cobain fails to remotely imitate the burning life at the core of Nirvana's music, and the same goes for its attempts to reproduce the work of its other great, gone-too-soon icons. Perhaps that's a blessing in disguise; perhaps the song's terribleness is its saving grace. If AI were able to successfully imitate and mass reproduce Kurt Cobain, that could mean something terrible for artists who are trying to make authentic names for themselves in their own rights.
Thank god for AI's stodgy and slow-moving musical abilities, and thank god for the uniqueness of human emotion and the irreplaceable chaos of our disconcerting consciousness. The day AI taps into its inner Cobain will likely be the day of the singularity. Until then, we'll be here on the broken Earth we made, spinning old Nirvana records and avoiding the inevitable encroachment of the future.
It was reported on Saturday that rock legend Little Richard had died in Tennessee at the age of 87.
Born Richard Penniman, Little Richard became famous as a pioneer of rock music in the 1950s, with a series of hits from "Tutti Frutti" to "Long Tall Sally" and "Good Golly Miss Molly." His gospel-inflected singing with energetic piano and gibberish lyrics became emblematic of the era's music, and the iconic rasp of his versatile voice has been emulated by many, but never matched.
Beyond his music, his flamboyant, gender-bending style (originally intended to make him non-threatening to white men) would go on to be a foundation of the Rock aesthetic, inspiring musicians from Prince to Elton John, David Bowie, and beyond.
Considered one of the first black musicians to become a crossover success—appealing to white audiences as well as black—Little Richard worked with musicians like Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and he helped to launch the career of Jimi Hendrix—who played in his band, the Upsetters, and said, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice." Over multiple decades Penniman's Born Again Christianity—to which he converted in 1957—resulted in a complex relationship with music, drug use, and sexuality. At various points he defined himself as either gay or "omnisexual," while at other times he denounced homosexuality as "unnatural," and "contagious."
Through multiple departures and subsequent returns to the music world, Little Richard remained popular and influential and continued performing into his 80s. He was among the first group of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it opened in 1986, and his contributions to music will live on for generations, both in his memorable hits and in his massive influence on icons like Otis Redding and James Brown.
Responding to his death, Mick Jagger wrote on Twitter, "When we were on tour with him I would watch his moves every night and learn from him how to entertain and involve the audience and he was always so generous with advice to me. He contributed so much to popular music. I will miss you Richard, God bless." And fellow early-rock icon Jerry Lee Lewis said of Penniman's passing, "It is with a heavy heart that I ask for prayers for the family of my lifelong friend and fellow rocker 'Little Richard. He will live on always in my heart with his amazing talent and his friendship! He was one of a kind and I will miss him dearly."
The future, they say, is dark—not dark as in bad, just dark as in uncertain. But sometimes, people find ways to see in the darkness. Music seems to be one of those ways, and popular music in particular tends to be a harbinger of times to come.
Music's foremost clairvoyants include Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, and Kanye West, all of whom predicted the apocalyptic ennui and digitized realities that would define the future (or, our present). But other artists have had uncanny bursts of foresight inside their songs, envisioning distant political events and even predicting their own deaths. Here are some of music's strangest accurate predictions.
Jimi Hendrix Predicted Climate Change—and His Own Death
Hendrix was obviously endowed with supernatural abilities; anyone who's ever heard him play guitar can see that—but apparently clairvoyance was among his talents. Hendrix's song "Up from the Skies" was written in 1967, and it seems to describe an alien visitor coming back to Earth and seeing the devastation humans have wrought. The chorus features this chillingly foreboding line: "The smell of a world that has burned / Well, maybe, maybe it's just a change of climate."
JIMI HENDRIX - EXP / Up From The Skies (1968)www.youtube.com
Radiohead Predicted the Rise of Silicon Valley and Modern Technology
Radiohead are famously prophetic, and their songs are loaded with cryptic messages about the future—many of which have come true. According to Mic, their song "Pop Is Dead" predicted the rise of formulaic pop music; "No Surprises" saw the rise of suburban sprawl; "Fitter Happier" saw the invention of the Apple Watch and various self-help apps; "Palo Alto" saw Silicon Valley's rise before Google ever settled there; "Pyramid Song" envisioned the extreme consequences of rising sea levels back in 2006. Pitchfork recently did a massive expose entitled "The Radiohead Prophecies: How Ok Computer Predicted the Future."
"Each song actually yields a vivid premonition of life as it is lived now, when a volatile cocktail of unfettered consumerism, technological dependency, social disconnection, and paranoia has yielded a U.S. president with all the class and credibility of an infomercial huckster," Stuart Berman writes, before launching into a song-by-song expose.
Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounds like a mournful reflection on 9/11—except for the fact that it was released prior to 9/11. With lyrics that describe shaking buildings and people walking through flaming doors, it provided comfort to many people in the weeks after the disaster even though it was written before the towers ever fell.
Laurie Anderson's brilliant vocoder-centric epic, "O Superman," is about the onslaught of modernity. Eerily, she sings, "Here come the planes / they're American planes / so you better get ready / ready to go." It's a song about America's complicity in colonization, perhaps, but it also contained the seeds of that catastrophic event.
Laurie Anderson - O Superman [Official Music Video]www.youtube.com
Snoop Dogg's "Murder Was the Case" Predicted His Future Murder Conviction
Snoop Dogg was convicted of murder in 1993, but before any of that, he rapped the lyric "Murder, murder was the case that they gave me."
Tupac's death is shrouded in conspiracy theories, but part of the reason for this is that Shakur built up a mythology during his life—and predicted his life in song. "I been shot and murdered, can't tell you how it happened word for word. But best believe that n*ggas gon' get what they deserve," he raps in "N*ggaz Done Changed."
The Game Predicted Obama Would Kill Osama Bin Laden
Rapper The Game released the song "Hard Times" in 2007, the year before Obama was elected for the first time. "I'm feeling like a black Democrat, Barack Obama, the only n*gga that can catch Osama," he rapped, an incredibly prescient lyric if there ever was one.
The Game & Lil Wayne- Hard Times (CDQ) [LYRICS] 1080p HDwww.youtube.com
Nicki Minaj's song "We Miss You" appeared shortly after her cousin Nicholas Telemaque was shot in 2011, but it was recorded beforehand. It features the lyrics "Why'd you have to leave in July? Why would they take you from me? Why the doctors could not stop the bleeding? I could've told you all about my intuition, I could've even brought the extra ammunition."
Jedi Mind Tricks Predicted Miley Cyrus's Chaotic Reinvention
In 2008, when Miley Cyrus was still mostly Hannah Montana, the group Jedi Mind Tricks released a song called "Trail of Lies" that features the lyric, "When Hannah Montana turned into Britney Spears, they chew you up and spit you out cause no-one really cares. Where the parents at cousin this is really bad, is this the mother****ing manager or really dad. Is he concerned about his daughter or his silly pad?" Of course, now Miley seems to have calmed down and Britney Spears is a socialist hero, but you get the drift.
Jedi Mind Tricks (Vinnie Paz + Stoupe + Jus Allah) - "Trail Of Lies" [Official Audio]www.youtube.com
John Lennon Predicted His Death
Lennon mentioned dying by gunshot several times, in interviews and songs. At the beginning of Come Together, he whispers, "Shoot me," and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" involves similar themes. As early as 1965, Lennon allegedly told a reporter, "We'll either go in a plane crash or we'll be popped off by some loony." His last solo album contains a song called "Borrowed Time," which he was in the process of finishing when he was shot.
Borrowed Time - John Lennon (official music video HD)www.youtube.com
David Bowie May Have Predicted the Rise of Kanye West (and Also Climate Change)
Bowie predicted the rise of streaming and social networking.
"I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said in 2002.
"The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen… You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."
David Bowie was a visionary in many ways, particularly in terms of his sonic and visual creations. The album cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars features a sign that reads "K. West." Here's a wild conspiracy theory: On this Bowie album is a song called "Five Years" that states that we have five years until the end of the world. Five years and two days after The Rise and Fall of Ziggy was released, one Kanye West was born.
The David Bowie & Kanye West Conspiracy Theory, Explainedwww.youtube.com
Bowie also predicted climate change — but, to be fair, he also predicted the arrival of an alien saviour in his song "Starman."
Grunge rock icon Kurt Cobain would have been 53 today.
When the iconic musician died at the age of 27, Nirvana was labeled as the "flagship band" of Generation X. Cobain himself was hailed as the voice of a generation. The now Diamond-certified album Nevermind sent the previously relatively-obscure group into the stratosphere, and made them an international sensation. The album debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and kickstarted a massive Grunge movement across the country. At its height, Nevermind was selling over 300,000 copies a week, and it's now one of the highest-selling albums of all time. "If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it," Cobain told Rolling Stone at the height of his career. "It might have helped me." While Nevermind spawned one of the greatest rock songs of all time, it's important to remember on Cobain's birthday that he and his bandmates penned other amazing songs, songs that true Nirvana fans might even argue are better than the legendary "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Here are a few of Nirvana's other amazing songs in honor of Kurt Cobain's birthday.
All Apologies (MTV Unplugged Version)
Every true Nirvana fan knows that the band's MTV Unplugged session was one of the greatest moments in rock history. Every performance from that session showed that even with the electrics stripped away, Cobain and his band had natural raw energy that cut through the noise. "All Apologies" was already a standout on 1993's In Utero, but here, the raw emotion is palpable in Cobain's voice. "I wish I was like you," he calls out to his audience. "Easily amused." In hindsight, it's hard to hear "All Apologies" as anything other than a desperate cry for help.
In Bloom
"In Bloom" remains one of those songs that perfectly conveyed the core values of Nirvana. Originally penned as a hardcore punk rock track, Cobain softened up the single significantly before release. Cobain, despite his reputation among Boomers, was all about love and mutual respect, and strongly resented fans who used his music to justify ignorance. "He's the one, who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun," he says condescendingly of Nirvana fans. It's undisputed that Cobain had a complicated relationship with mainstream recognition, and he resented the way fans used his music to justify bad behavior. But it's equally as ironic, in hindsight, how many fans were spawned by this track, regardless of its message.
Drain You
One of Cobain's personal favorites, "Drain You" was written on the spot at Sound City Studios during the early moments of recording Nevermind, and is allegedly about Courtney Love. "I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it," Cobain told Rolling Stone. The lyrics are...romantic...I guess, but only in a way a rocker like Courtney Love would find endearing. "Chew my meat for you, pass it back and forth in a passionate kiss," he sings. "From my mouth to yours, I like you."
Come As You Are
Chances are, you can't even read the song title without singing along in your head. "Come As You Are" was a monumental song for Nirvana. Nevrmind's second single, the song dominated radio stations and secured their spot as one of the biggest bands on the planet. Once again, the MTV Unplugged is the superior version of the song.
Something In The Way
For a late-90's emo kid, "Something In The Way" was a very special song. It served as a call to action for many and offered empathy to those who felt like outsiders or loners. "'Something in the Way' tugged at a troubled psyche that was all too real," wrote NPR. With its minimalist song-writing and haunting chord progression, the Nevermind closer has since become a timeless anthem, reminding misunderstood teens everywhere that it's okay–actually, that it's super-duper cool–to be different and to rebel against the mainstream.
Lithium
The chilling narration of this song follows a man who desperately turns to religion after the death of his girlfriend, and finds that a higher power comforts him as Lithium would. Cobain was very open about religion and often spoke on his understanding that some people need it in order to find purpose. "If it's going to save someone, it's OK," he told Rolling Stone.This song once again showed the general public who Cobain actually was, a man that knew what it was like to be lost and need guidance, and who unfortunately never found peace.
The story of psychedelics is intertwined with the story of music, and tracing their relationship can feel like going in circles.
For thousands of years, artists have been using naturally-grown herbs to open their minds and enhance their creative processes. Since LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman in 1938, psychedelics have experienced a reemergence, blooming into a revolution in the 1960s, launching dozens of genres and sounds that focused on acid, shrooms, and all of the portals they opened. Around the 1960s, scientists also began studying the relationship between psychedelics and music, and even back then, researchers found that, when combined, music and psychedelics could have therapeutic effects on patients.
More modern studies have discovered that LSD, specifically, links a portion of the brain called the parahippocampal—which specializes in personal memory—to the visual cortex, which means that memories take on more autobiographical and visual dimensions. Other studies have found that LSD can make the timbres and sounds of music feel more meaningful and emotionally powerful. Today, psychedelic music still thrives, and you can hear flickers of those early trip-inspired experiences all across today's modern musical landscape.
"There is a message intrinsically carried in music, and under the effects of psychedelics, people seem to become more responsive to this," said the psychedelic researcher Mendel Kaelen. "Emotion can be processed more deeply. It's a beautiful narrative. It's like a snake biting itself in the tail."
All that said, psychedelics can be as dangerous as the archetypal live-fast-die-young rock and roller's average lifestyle. They can destabilize already fragile minds and can encourage further drug abuse and reckless behavior. Often, psychedelic revolutions have coincided with colonialist fetishizations, apocalyptic visions, and appropriations of Eastern culture.
However, sometimes psychedelics and musical talent can come together in a synergy so perfect that it can literally create transcendent and healing experiences. Hallucinogens affected each of these following musicians in a unique way, but their experiences with hallucinogens produced some of the greatest music of all time.
Harry Styles — She
In his revelatory Rolling Stone profile, Harry Styles spoke out about how magic mushrooms inspired his most recent album, Fine Line. Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the 25-year-old apparently spent a lot of time at Shangri-La Studios in Los Angeles tripping and listening to the old psychedelic greats.
"Ah, yes. Did a lot of mushrooms here," he said in the interview during a tour of the studio. "We'd do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney's Ram in the sunshine."
Things even got a little violent, as they often can when dealing with hallucinogens. "This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place," he reminisced affectionately.
Kacey Musgraves' dreamy song "Slow Burn" was apparently inspired by an acid trip. Listening to the lyrics, you can hear the influence of psychedelics twining with country and singer-songwriter tropes. "I was sitting on the porch, you know, having a good, easy, zen time," she said of the songwriting experience, which she said happened out on her porch one evening. "I wrote it down on my phone, and then wrote the songs the next day with a sober mind."
LSD, she said, "opens your mind in a lot of ways. It doesn't have to be scary. People in the professional worlds are using it, and it's starting to become an option for therapy. Isn't that crazy?" Her affection for the drug also appears in her song "Oh What A World," which contains the lyric, "Plants that grow and open your mind."
A$AP Rocky — L$D
While A$AP Rocky's affection for LSD isn't a surprise given his propensity for writing about the drug, apparently the rapper has an intellectual approach to his psychedelic experimentation.
"We was all in London at my spot, Skeppy came through," he told Hot New Hip Hop about his experience writing LSD. "I have this psychedelic professor, he studies in LSD. I had him come through and kinda record and monitor us to actually test the product while being tested on. We did the rhymes all tripping balls."
Apparently his first acid trip happened in 2012. "Okay, without getting anyone in trouble, I was with my homeboy and some trippy celebrity chicks and…" he said in an interview with Time Out. When asked how long it lasted, he said, "Too long, man. Twenty-three hours. I was trippin' till the next day. When I woke up, I was like, Damn! I did that shit! That shit was dope. It was so amazing. It was a-ma-zing. Nothing was like that first time."
Acid changed his entire approach to music and success. "I never really gave a f*ck, man, but this time, I really don't give a f*ck," he said. "I don't care about making no f*cking hits." Instead, he focuses on creating. "It's so hard to be progressive when you're trippin' b*lls," he said. "You make some far-out shit!"
The Beatles' later music is essentially synonymous with LSD, and the band members often spoke out about their unique experiences with the drug. According to Rolling Stone, the first time that Lennon and Harrison took it was actually a complete accident. A friend put LSD in their coffee without their knowledge, and initially Lennon was furious. But after the horror and panic faded, things changed. "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours," said Harrison.
Paul McCartney had similar revelations. LSD "opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God," he said in 1967. "It is obvious that God isn't in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience." Of LSD's effect, he also said, "It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn't as many frontiers as we'd thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers."
Using the drug not only helped the band create some of the most legendary music of all time—it also brought them closer together. "After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship," said George Harrison. "That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, 'I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.' That is an illusion people are under. It's nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It's down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what's going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death."
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Remastered 2009)www.youtube.com
Ray Charles — My World
The soul music pioneer allegedly once described acid as his "eyes." Charles was blind, but LSD is said to have allowed him some version of sight. Though he struggled with addiction, Charles eventually got clean, though his music always bore some markers of his experiences with the subconscious mind.
Actually, blind people on LSD and hallucinogens can experience hallucinations of different kinds, though it's somewhat rare. According to a study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, this happens because during a trip, "the plasticity of the nervous system allows the recognition and translation of auditory or tactile patterns into visual experiences."
Clapton struggled with drug abuse throughout his life, and LSD certainly had an influence on him. While he was a part of Cream, he frequently played shows while tripping, and according to outontrip.com, he became "convinced that he could turn the audience into angels or devils according to the notes he played."
Before he was creating the ultimate dad rap, Chance the Rapper was an acidhead.
"None of the songs are really declarative statements; a lot of them are just things that make you wonder...a lot like LSD," said Chance the Rapper of his hallucinogen-inspired album, the aptly named Acid Rap. "[There] was a lot of acid involved in Acid Rap," he told MTV in 2013. "I mean, it wasn't too much — I'd say it was about 30 to 40 percent acid ... more so 30 percent acid."
But the album wasn't merely about acid; like much of the best psychedelic music, it was more about the imagery and symbolism associated with the drug than the actual drug itself. "It wasn't the biggest component at all. It was something that I was really interested in for a long time during the making of the tape, but it's not necessarily a huge faction at all. It was more so just a booster, a bit of fuel. It's an allegory to acid, more so than just a tape about acid," he said.
Jazz great John Coltrane was a regular LSD user who used the drug to create music and to have spiritual experiences. Though he struggled with addiction throughout his life, LSD was one drug that had a major artistic influence on him. While it's not known for sure if the album Om—which includes chanted verses of the Bhagavad Gita—was recorded while Coltrane was on LSD, many rumors theorize that it was.
"Coltrane's LSD experiences confirmed spiritual insights he had already discovered rather than radically changing his perspective," wrote Eric Nisenson in Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. "After one early acid trip he said, 'I perceived the interrelationship of all life forms,' an idea he had found repeated in many of the books on Eastern theology that he had been reading for years. For Coltrane, who for years had been trying to relate mystical systems such as numerology and astrology, theories of modern physics and mathematics, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders, and advanced musical theory, and trying somehow to pull these threads into something he could play on his horn. The LSD experience gave him visceral evidence that his quest was on the right track."
Jenny Lewis — Acid Tongue
Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis wrote the song "Acid Tongue" about her first and only experience on LSD, which happened when she was fourteen. She told Rolling Stone, "It culminated in a scene not unlike something from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the scene where Hunter S. Thompson has to lock the lawyer in the bathroom. I sort of assumed the Hunter S. Thompson character and my friend – she had taken far too much – decided to pull a butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer and chase me around the house… At the end of that experience, my mom was out of town on a trip of her own and she returned to find me about 5 lbs lighter and I had—I was so desperate to get back to normal I decided to drink an entire gallon of orange juice. I saw that it was in the fridge and decided that this would sort of flush the LSD out of my system, but I didn't realize that it did exactly the opposite."
The Beach Boys' mastermind Brian Wilson was famously inspired by psychedelics, which both expanded and endangered his fragile and brilliant mind. After his first acid trip in 1965, an experience that he said "expanded his mind," Wilson wrote "California Gurls." After the trip, however, Wilson began suffering from auditory hallucinations and symptoms of schizophrenia, and though he discontinued use of the drug, he continued to hear voices; doctors eventually diagnosed him with the disease. Wilson later lamented his tragic experiences with LSD, stating that he wished he'd never done the drug.
Though it led Wilson on a downward spiral, LSD inspired some of his band's greatest work—namely the iconic Pet Sounds, which launched half a century of "acid-pop copycats."
The Flaming Lips — Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" is widely believed to be the product of lead singer Wayne Coyne's LSD experimentation. This theory is corroborated by the fact that the album's cover features the number 25 (and LSD is also known as LSD-25). They also frequently reference LSD in their music, which includes an album called Finally, the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid.
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Jimi Hendrix — Voodoo Child
While there is still some general contention on whether Jimi Hendrix hallucinated frequently, nobody really doubts that he did. According to rumors, the legendary musician even used to soak his bandanas in acid before going onstage so the drug would seep through his pores.
According to one source, Hendrix did more than just play music while tripping. He was also an expert at (of all things) the game of Risk.
"Jimi would play Risk on acid, and I never — and me personally — ever beat him at all," said Graham Nash in an interview. "He was unbelievable at it. He was a military man, you know, he's a paratrooper, and I don't know whether you know that about Jimi, but no one ever beat him at Risk."
The Doors — The End
Jim Morrison was a documented LSD user, and it eventually led him out of his mind. "The psychedelic Jim I knew just a year earlier, the one who was constantly coming up with colorful answers to universal questions, was being slowly tortured by something we didn't understand. But you don't question the universe before breakfast for years and not pay a price," said John Desmore in Riders on the Storm: My Life With the Doors.
Morrison used many different drugs during his lifetime, but apparently LSD had a special place and he avoided using it while working. "LSD was a sacred sacrament that was to be taken on the beach at Venice, under the warmth of the sun, with our father the sun and our mother the ocean close by, and you realised how divine you were," said Ray Manzarek. "It wasn't a drug for entertainment. You could smoke a joint and play your music, as most musicians did at the time. But as far as taking LSD, that had to be done in a natural setting."
Morrison himself—a visionary who was also a drug-addled narcissist—was kind of the prototypical 1960s LSD-addled rock star. Alive with visions about poetry and sex but lost in his own self-destruction, he perhaps touched on something of the sublime with his art, but in the end he went down a very human path towards misery and decay.
Like many of these artists' stories, Morrison's life reveals that perhaps instead of using hallucinogens and psychedelics as shortcuts to a spiritual experience, one should exercise extreme caution when exploring the outer reaches of the psyche. When it comes to actually engaging with potent hallucinogens, that might be best left to the shamans, or forgotten with the excesses of the 1960s.
On the other hand, we might do well to learn from the lessons that people have gleaned from hallucinogens over the years—lessons that reveal just how interconnected everything is, that shows us that music and memory and nature may just all stem from the same place.
