Rock
This section gathers album stories, birthdays, and anniversaries tied to the artists and bands who shaped rock, along with notes on new vinyl reissues as they surface. Rock grew up alongside the LP: gatefold sleeves and a running order built around two sides of a record were part of how the genre presented itself from the start, and a large share of its catalog keeps coming back through official reissue programs. Expect the human side of the records here: the sessions, the lineup changes, the decisions that turned into landmark albums, and why particular pressings matter to collectors.
521 STORIES
Neil Peart: Why Rush's Drummer Was Called The Professor
Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for Rush, built a career on precision and discipline, from a conditional drum kit at 13 to his death in 2020.
· 4 min read
Wish You Were Here: The Album Recorded While Syd Barrett Watched
A band at the height of its powers records an album about absence, and the absent man walks through the door. That is the paradox at the center of Wish You Were…
· 4 min read
Carol Decker: How She Named Her Band T'Pau
Before Carol Decker fronted T'Pau in sold-out arenas, she was cutting hair in Shrewsbury. A US jeans commercial became the detour that forced Britain to listen.
· 3 min read
When a 'Rollin' Stone' Call Gave Rock Its Greatest Outlaws
A 19-year-old manager sculpted the Rolling Stones as the 'dirty, unpredictable, and animal' antithesis of The Beatles. The group outpolled the Fab Four in two UK band surveys within a single year.
· 5 min read
David Bowie: Why a Berlin Session on 11 September 1977 Mattered
Bowie's Berlin session on 11 September 1977 at Hansa Studio fed into Blackstar, his final album released just before his death in January 2016.
· 4 min read
Why Did Jethro Tull Beat Metallica at the 1989 Grammys?
In 1989, Jethro Tull's Crest of a Knave won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, beating Metallica's ...And Justice for All in one of the decade's most talked-about upsets.
· 4 min read
Richard Ashcroft: Britpop's believer in magic
Richard Ashcroft, the Verve frontman born in Wigan in 1971, turns 55 on September 11, 2026. His career rewired British rock's emotional vocabulary.
· 3 min read
Peter Gabriel: Why Sledgehammer Swept the 1987 MTV Awards
Peter Gabriel carried off nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987 for 'Sledgehammer'. The clip's stop-motion spectacle set a new standard for music videos.
· 5 min read
Catfish Rising Brought Three Keyboardists Into Jethro Tull
The session sheet for Catfish Rising reads like a game of musical chairs, with three keyboardists rotating across a single album.
· 4 min read
How Kiss Turned a Failing Studio Career Into Alive!
Twelve thousand people packed a Detroit arena on a raw March night in 1975, and the band on stage knew something the record executives didn't. Kiss had been ble…
· 4 min read
Aqualung Live Was Never Meant To Sound Like This
Jethro Tull spent decades denying Aqualung was a concept album. Then they released a full live version on Fuel 2000 in 2005 that made the argument audible all over again.
· 4 min read
Bob Dylan: The Nursery Rhyme That Divided a Fanbase
In 1990, Bob Dylan assembled one of the most star-studded casts of his career — Slash, Elton John, George Harrison, Stevie Ray Vaughan — and then handed them so…
· 4 min read
Roxy & Elsewhere: The Stitched-Together Live Album
A live album recorded in a Hollywood club, then surgically altered in the studio — except for the tracks that weren't. Frank Zappa's Roxy & Elsewhere landed on …
· 5 min read
The Beatles Hit No. 1 Twice in One Day — With a B-Side
On September 9, 1963, The Beatles' "She Loves You" hit No.1 on the UK singles chart the same day "Please Please Me" sat at No.1 on the album chart—a dual coronation that had never happened before.
· 4 min read
The Sky Blue Album That Took Lennon Beyond the Beatles
John Lennon's second solo album Imagine arrived on September 9, 1971. With a sky-blue Andy Warhol portrait on the cover, it took him beyond the Beatles.
· 3 min read
Why Did Jethro Tull Hide a New Song on a Best-Of?
Repeat – The Best of Jethro Tull – Vol II arrived in 1977 as a retrospective that quietly smuggled one previously unreleased track past its own title. That song, Glory Row, had spent years as a ghost.
· 5 min read
The Beatles in Mono: 17 Years of One Speaker
In September 2009, Apple Records and EMI released The Beatles in Mono — a CD box set dedicated entirely to monophonic sound. It arrived at the height of the surround-sound era.
· 5 min read
The 3 AM Riff That Redefined The Rolling Stones
One of the most recognizable guitar riffs in history was almost thrown away as an unfinished demo. Keith Richards captured the fuzz-drenched skeleton of '(I Can…
· 5 min read
Aimee Mann: The Grammy She Won Was Called 'Mental Illness'
A major label once shelved an entire album, and the artist simply bought it back. That quiet act of defiance reshaped Aimee Mann’s career and, in a way, predict…
· 4 min read
Jethro Tull's Minstrel in the Gallery: A Studio on Wheels
A band with a decade of road-worn muscle retreated not to some pastoral English manor, but to a Mediterranean tax haven, hauling a custom-built recording truck …
· 4 min read
The Curious Case of Jay 'Cone' McCaslin and Sum 41
Three numbers trail this story like a half-remembered chord progression: 3, 9, and 41. The last one sits in the band's name, Sum 41, a rock act whose catalog de…
· 4 min read
Mike Wengren: The Drummer Who Turned Silence Into a Grammy Nod
Mike Wengren spent over three decades as the rhythmic backbone of Disturbed. A Simon & Garfunkel cover on 2015's 'Immortalized' earned the band a Grammy nomination.
· 4 min read
Gary Wright: The Synth Dream That Never Faded
Gary Wright spent a lifetime refusing to be just one thing, but the paradox of his career is that one shimmering track from 1975 ultimately defined him.
· 4 min read
Roll the Bones: The Rush Album That Dared to Rap
Rush's fourteenth album Roll the Bones arrived on September 3, 1991. It cracked the Billboard top five and went platinum despite a rap interlude no sensible band would attempt.
· 3 min read