A few weeks ago I had to wake up at an ungodly hour for a flight to a gig in London, and due to lack of sleep I was struck by the same sense of anxiety that I used to feel almost every single day, for years.  It was a feeling of deep dread, of not wanting to face the world, a wish to curl up in a ball and ignore the day ahead.  Feeling this again made me reflect and consider my own experience as an artist who has battled depression and anxiety.  I now look back on this dark period in my life as more than merely that; while I withdrew from society, I went into an inner world that fomented my development as an artist and musician.  However it is very hard to see the forest for the trees when you're going through it—it's only on reflection that I can look back and see how it may have benefited me. 

Back in June, I saw the Long Beach, Calif. rapper Vince Staples open for Pusha T. Staples is a charismatic live rapper; he was almost giddy as he performed a medley of then-unreleased tracks from his forthcoming debut, Summertime '06.  Yet what was most remarkable was how he ended the show.  Closing with "Nate", a song about his father’s drug abuse, he raps "black bandana on his arm/ needle in his hand/ momma trying to wake him up/ young so I ain't understand why she wouldn't let my daddy sleep."  That contrast between the severity of his father’s addiction and Staples’ still-innocent view gives the song its tragic levity.  My excitement for "Nate" quickly drained as I couldn’t remember why I’d felt so eager to hear it; it felt strange hearing such sordid details performed to a crowd of hundreds.  As Staples’ origin story, "Nate" is incredibly effective.  Staples left the audience swimming in pathos, reflecting. 

Staples’ casting of black experience through his music is powerful.  His lyrics ring in my head like his story is my own, even though my middle-class upbringing is not present within Summertime '06.  That evening watching him perform "Hands Up", a song of pent up frustration at racialized police violence and the lack of responsibility cops are held to for it, Staples invoked the phrase in earnest.  He wanted the crowd with him and as the second verse began: "Deangelo Lopez and Tyler Woods/ Just a couple they gunned down around the ‘hood."  The outreach attempt felt muddled in its appeal.  I felt a connection to that song, but here it was broken. 

Last year, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 2, one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws, that ultimately resulted in the closure of more than half of the state’s abortion clinics.  At present, there are between 12 abortion clinics to serve a reproductive age population of more than 27 million people.  Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a stay of an appellate court’s ruling that would have forced even more clinics to close, offering a brief bit of hope to activists.  At the front lines of this fight for abortion access in Texas is Nan Little Kirkpatrick. 

Kirkpatrick is the executive director of the TEA Fund, a Dallas-based abortion fund.  Like dozens of other funds across the country, Kirkpatrick’s organization provides small grants to pregnant people who cannot afford to pay for an abortion.  A few of years ago, she picked up the bass and formed Frauen with local guitarist Mila Hamilton and drummer Brad Barker.  For Kirkpatrick, the routine and outlet of making music provides necessary counterbalance to the uncertainty she wrangles with all day at work.  While the content of Frauen’s music isn’t overtly political, it’s fundamentally rooted in the frustration and joys that come from Kirkpatrick’s work in the reproductive justice movement. " It feels like society is trying to take away the ability to just be a person in the world, and the lyrics are my way trying to resolve the anger that comes up around that." 

Chicago got a Dark Star, though not in the expected fashion.  In the very first hours of the 4th of July, the Grateful Dead’s most exploratory song was performed by a makeshift band of indie stars, three miles west of Soldier Field.  Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo pulled long, screeching scrapes on his guitar with a frayed violin bow, while Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan sat near the front of the stage, twirling pedal knobs in reply.  Behind them, Real Estate bassist Alex Bleeker’s side project, the Freaks, provided the lengthy jam’s foundation, as they did for an ambitious two-hour set of 20 Dead songs. 

Not too long ago, the Grateful Dead might have been forbidden territory for this scene.  The image surrounding the Dead for much of their later years—a traveling drug-fueled circus of '60s nostalgia, soundtracked by lengthy, solo-filled jams—was the antithesis of the punk/alternative/indie ethos.  In the identity-sorting ceremony of high school, many rock music fans chose and still choose one strain or the other, even if it was by proxy, picking between Pavement and DMB, or Coachella and Bonnaroo. 

Most people wouldn’t want to spend their birthday waiting in a line, but when Lisa Saari turned 50 last Thursday she spent hers parked in a lawnchair on a sidewalk on Chicago’s Northwest Side.  Saari drove up from Joliet that morning in order to gift her teen daughters with the chance to meet Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz.  On July 6 the supersized pop-punk group announced it’d host a two-day pop-up shop in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood before its co-headlining tour with Wiz Khalifa pulled into town: The first 50 people in line each day would receive wristbands to meet Wentz. " I planned on sleeping on the sidewalk and everything," Lisa said. " I made a big adventure to kick off turning 50." 

Lisa showed up 24 hours before the pop-up would open for the shop’s first day last Friday at 10 a.m., more than enough time to secure the first spot in line—and the second and third for her daughters too.  They gathered sleeping bags, pillows, blankets, and chairs and planted themselves in front of Air Gordons, a shoe and streetwear boutique that served as the temporary home of Fall Out Boy’s IRL merch store.  Air Gordons sits on Fullerton Avenue, just one block east of the Fireside Bowl, the onetime hub of Chicago’s all-ages punk scene and one of the venues where Fall Out Boy got its start. 

"Indie rock" has come to encompass pop, R&B, and even overt major-label acts without much pushback.  Meanwhile, alternative rock stations are defined by their heavy rotation of the Neighbourhood, Imagine Dragons, Walk the Moon, and numerous other synth-heavy projects that resemble aged boybands after an H&M spending spree.  The guitar is seen as antithesis of youth culture rather than the embodiment of it, unless it’s within the perpetual arrested development of the Warped Tour.  In light of this state of affairs, producer Will Yip has presumably charted a phenomenally self-defeating career plan. 

At the age of 18, he turned down the Ivy League for the sole purpose of taking a class with producer Phil Nicolo at Temple University, often known as Philly’s commuter school.  As part of the Butcher Brothers duo, Nicolo had worked with Sting, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and Aerosmith, as well as '90s alt-rock staples Urge Overkill and Luscious Jackson, but his 21st century output includes a still-unreleased Lauryn Hill project and a Queen tribute from Keane.  After sweeping floors as an intern and working his way up, Yip went out of pocket to rent a storage room to record local punk bands and developed a reputation of working with rock music that rarely gets much mainstream press.  And now he’s taken out a very "stressful" five-year loan to partner in Conshohocken, Penn. ’s Studio 4, a venue that has seen Rock and Roll Hall of Famers pass through its doors, but is still firmly situated suburban Philadelphia.  Oh, and he’s going to start his own label. 

Fifteen years ago, Lauryn Hill became a music industry émigré, following what we've since presumed to be the height of her career.  Her solo debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill dropped in 1998, and Hill embarked on a worldwide tour the following year—with five Grammy Awards for the album in tow.  She appeared to have it all together: always all smiles on stage, her singing voice impeccable. 

By the year 2000, she was gone. 

The second iteration Lauryn Hill emerged a year later at the 2001 Essence Awards.  Something was very different.  Hill sat perched on a stool with her shaved head, awkwardly strumming her guitar.  She made no eye contact with the crowd, wore no smile, and her voice was losing its steam.  Hill seemed despondent as she strained to sing a song called "Adam Lives in Theory" about the present-day destruction from original sin.  It was an emotional moment for anyone connected to the 1.0 version of her, a person we seemingly never saw again. 

On Wednesday night, Huffington Post published The Lost Girls, a piece that investigated the 1975 rape of then fifteen-year-old Runaways bassist Jackie Fox (nee Fuchs), by the band's manager, Kim Fowley.  Among the many disturbing details revealed by journalist Jason Cherkis's report was that Fuch's then bandmates, including Joan Jett, were in the room and witnessed what happened to her.  Cherkis spoke with Pitchfork on Thursday, after the piece went viral. 

First of all, congratulations!  Opportunities such as this come but once every four years.  Sure, there are local elections in between but leave those minor controversies to the secondary market bands, the 1 p.m. at Warped Tour bands; you’re in the big leagues now.  Whether it be a No-Hope racist lunatic like Trump or a delusional racist frump like every candidate not named "Jeb Bush," having a Republican candidate for president use one of your songs without permission is a musician’s golden ticket into the candy factory of fame and self-aggrandizement.  If you play your cards right you could be playing golf with Billy Murray and Jenny Lewis at that middlebrow progressive country club of your dreams.  Worst-case scenario: a Rolling Stone Blog post.  Best Case Scenario?  You open for Springsteen without having to hire Weinberg’s son first. 

A trust fall naturally requires audacity, a degree of courage.  At a point in our interviews for "Fall Down Laughing: The Story of Majical Cloudz", vocalist Devon Welsh compared the project's essence to one of those drama class prompts—an exercise in unadulterated vulnerability, in making oneself totally seen.  Majical Cloudz's music on 2013's Impersonator and 2012's Turns Turns Turns EP suggests as much, but in my time with Welsh and Cloudz co-conspirator Matthew Otto for this Cover Story, it was affirmed: their openness and willingness to put themselves into situations of considerable uncertainity, in music as well as in life, is perhaps the most potent factor in what makes them great.  Majical Cloudz are radically honest. 

When I visited Montreal last August, to spend time with Majical Cloudz as they frantically prepared for an unlikely tour of North American arenas with Lorde, I had an illuminating conversation with one of Welsh's best and oldest friends, Neil Corcoran, at their shabby Mile End apartment.  Among walls lined with cut-out magazine collages, classic movie posters, and a sizable VHS collection, I noticed a sketched alien mural on the wall that Claire Boucher (aka Grimes) had made while living there—a relic from a time, some six or seven years ago, when the apartment was host to house shows and parties that had left a portion of the floor caving in.