PREVIOUSLY: We’d been traversing the spine of Tornado Alley for the last two hours when the stewardess announced that we would be landing in Oklahoma City in a few minutes, and that we should fasten our seatbelts and return our minds to the upright position, when the drugs took hold. We are, as the saying goes, off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Odd—or, if you prefer, the Wizard of OK, a.k.a. Wayne Coyne, frizzy-brained mainman of the Flaming Lips, the P.T. Barnum Of The Stoned, a.k.a. The Man Who Had A Headache And Accidentally Saved The World. […]

  EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published in 2014 in the pages of MAGNET MAGAZINE. We are reprising it now on the occasion of a string of East Coast solo dates. He play the Queen in Wilmington last night and he plays a sold out show @ The Iridium in NYC tonight. Enjoy. NEW DAY RISING Bob Mould has survived the rise and fall of Husker Du in the 80s, Sugar going supernova in the 90s, a premature retirement in the late 90s, a detour into DJ culture during the twilight of the alt-rock gods in the early aughts and […]

In the last year Tame Impala auteur Kevin Parker has gone from trippy bedroom Lonerist to beloved global psych savant. MAGNET journeys to the Land of Oz to press an ear up to his inner speaker. BY JONATHAN VALANIA Kevin Parker, the one-man-band psych-rock wunderkind who records under the name Tame Impala, lives across the street from a professional magician (and sword swallower) in a quaint cul-de-sac of houses ringed with lemon trees in Freemantle, a charming seaside town of 25,000 in Western Australia. He shares a granny flat with Melody Prochet, his beautiful and cool French girlfriend, who is […]

Illustration by RACHEL WADA EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third and final installment of my 2013 MAGNET cover story. Part 1 is HERE. Part 2 is HERE. Misty Mountain Hop If Father John Misty’s life was a Hollywood movie, it would be a metaphysical jail-break thriller about a wrongly convicted man escaping the prison of belief thanks to the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelic drugs. MAGNET goes to the mountain to help write the script. BY JONATHAN VALANIA III In Seattle, Tillman befriended Damien Jurado, whose CDs, with their Christian subtext, had gotten past the gatekeepers at […]

Illustration by RACHEL WADA Misty Mountain Hop If Father John Misty’s life was a Hollywood movie, it would be a metaphysical jail-break thriller about a wrongly convicted man escaping the prison of belief thanks to the liberating power of rock ‘n’ roll and psychedelic drugs. MAGNET goes to the mountain to help write the script. BY JONATHAN VALANIA I Father John Misty lives in a red-clay adobe pueblo on top of a low mountain in Echo Park. Good luck trying to find it without GPS and a helicopter. Down below the cloud line, the hazy glittering grid of Greater Los […]

Artwork by CRAIG HORKY BY JONATHAN VALANIA When Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn was growing up in suburban Minneapolis in the shag-carpeted ’70s, there was nothing musical about the family Finn, nothing at all. Nobody played an instrument. Nobody played records on the stereo. They did not even sing show tunes on long car rides. But when he was eight years old Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham choked to death on his own vomit, and that’s when he discovered the all-consuming, spell-casting, mood-altering, prayer-answering, life-taking power of rock n’ roll. Up until this point he’d thought of rock n’ roll […]