“I grew up listening to Edith Piaf, Barbara, Jacques Brel, Lara Fabian, Patricia Kaas. The pared-down French classicism of their songs was what I always wanted my own music to be about” - 26-year-old Parisian singer Yseult tells the Guardian about her musical background. And about her intentions: “I want all the previously invisible minorities in France to become visible in the cultural landscape. Not for the sake of representation, but for what we can bring to the table. We want to be present in culture because we are present in society. We want to have our contributions credited.”

Northern California singer-songwriter Jenna Mammina began hosting twice-daily webcast/livestreaming events on March 23, 2020, and hasn’t missed a single day since she started, which amounts to 730 unique shows in one year. She calls these live-streams “11:11 with Jenna” - with a new episode debuting daily at 11:11 a.m. and a totally different one following at 11:11 p.m. (those are New York Times, meaning that's 4:11 PM and 4:11 AM in Rome, and in Singapore the 11:11 AM episode is at 11:11 PM and the 11:11 PM is at 11:11 AM). She hosts these shows via Zoom and people can join in by visiting Facebook.com/Jenna.Mammina. She plans to continue indefinitely, as she's told the Mercury News - "I never want to stop. I love the community that we have created, the inner connectivity with people all over the world. I’m ready to keep going for as long as it stays in line with my life".

An interesting interview with dr. Stephanie Doktor, music professor, with MJI about John Powell, who liked Black music but was a racist. To summarize it: "Powell was an American composer who initially based much of his music on ragtime, spirituals, minstrel tunes, and jazz in the 1900s and 1910s. But in the early 1920s, he became a politically active white supremacist... He continued to perform his Black-based music at the same time he was collaborating with Marcus Garvey to have Black Americans removed from the nation. Instead of interpreting his pre- and post-war agendas as radically oppositional or his musical and political careers as antithetical to one another, I consider how they are actually imbricated. Doing so helps problematize the structure of modernist concert music. Put differently, Powell was not an outlier but rather a product of American modernism".

A funny and intelligent interview by Music Journalism Insider with music critic and editor Kevin Williams from several Chicago newspapers; here's a snippet: "I reviewed everything from Kid Rock to Diana Krall, Cafe Tacuba to Wu-Tang, and was a constant annoyance for the copy desk. One review of Incubus was simply, 'Incubus? No, succubus'. Rewrite. I described Wu-Tang as like being at the 95th Street Red Line stop, just a bunch of smart brothas taking turns yelling at you. Rewrite. I had so much fun".

It wasn't really clear who exactly are the members of Detroit hardcore collective The Armed, who their apparent leader Dan Greene really is, and what the role of Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou entails. With their new album 'Ultrapop' they're losing the anonymity, and for the first time they've released a video showing eight musicians, who the band claims is them. The Quietus talked to their (probable) member Adam Vallely trying to clear things up. He says that band consists of "in terms of audio contributions, 25 to 30 people at any one time. Then that often boils down to the songs that we play being about six to nine people". On their new album they move away from their previous hard-core sound, adding pop and hip-hop elements - "we’re trying to truly be experimental and try to craft some sort of new experience for people... I’d rather be the band that doesn’t get all the way there but pushes the next person to be super great with something you were able to put forward". In general, Vallely says, "we’re setting these hilariously larger than life goals for ourselves, to create a new genre of Ultrapop, and eventually create something that is more Ultrapop than hardcore".

"We’ve sold six million albums for Epic Records, and they’ve made $50 million... We haven’t made any money off of record sales, album sales. It’s all gone to the major labels" - Chevelle's frontman Pete Loeffler said, adding "we just don’t make money the way the deals are structured". He explained that "contracts are a bitch, and we’ve signed some raw ones. And we need to start trying to make some money off of our catalog, which is 10 albums deep, plus all the side stuff", according to Blabbermouth. Chevelle have a new album 'Niratias' ('Nothing Is Real And This Is A Simulation') out.

A great talk with singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, a long time ago a member of Fairport Convention, in Guardian about his new book 'Beeswing: Fairport, Folk-Rock and Finding My Voice' about the start of his career. Thompson is a touring musician and misses playing now in the pandemic - live music needs to happen, he says, “otherwise, as a human race, we will go extinct. Music is so great for kids. It makes you cleverer at everything else, and also teaches you to go past a mistake. If you make one [when you play live], you can’t burst into tears and stop. You just have to carry on”.

“A whole lot of minds have to see something invisible. The act of making music - that could be spiritual. You’re taking something that’s not physically seen and you’re bringing it from nowhere, pulling it from thin air, so people can experience it” - folk-blues-soul singer Valerie June says beautifully in the New York Times interview about new album 'The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers', out now. The Times likes how it’s "rich, strange and mercifully free of the self-importance that infuses so much modern music", whereas RIFF declares it a "smart, adventurous and downright joyful listen".

"Ostensibly the story of Nick Cave’s formative years, it is so beautifully constructed that one is not just delivered besides the young Cave, but also next to the modern version" - The New Cue says recommending Mark Mordue's new book 'Boy on Fire'. The writer also describes the difficult path he took while writing it - "basically the project just got bigger and bigger as the range and the depth of Nick Cave’s output kept rolling on. I ended up in a situation where I had long ago spent my advance. If I was working on the book, I was not earning money to live and support a family. If I was doing freelance journalism and teaching writing at uni, I was not working on the book. So nothing was right with anyone anywhere. Eventually my former publisher got tired of me. My relationship collapsed. I had nowhere stable to live. Depression, chaos, drinking … it was the full disaster as I tried to hang on to myself and put it all back together again. That is the other side to the book when people say it took me ten years. Well, really, five years to write it, yeah, and another five years to learn how to live again". Nick Cave also likes it.

An interesting if somewhat controversial thought by music manager Lucas Keller in Out Magazine: “I think we’re seeing the death of the artist. Songs are fully alive. I think we’re hitting a point in time where it’s going to be more and more difficult to have follow-up hits for an artist. I see it happening. There’s so much music. There are so many songs. People listen to playlists and just because they fall in love with the song doesn’t mean [they fall in love with the artist]". Keller represents some of the most successful artists, songwriters, and DJs in the world.

"I look at Rage and go, like, 'Fuck, we rely on an audience.' You go to Rage shows to see the audience as much as to see the band, and we need that. We're one of those bands that need that" - Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford told TooFab. He added - "We'll never be one of these sellouts that's gonna go play a drive-in show or play a venue that holds a hundred thousand people and there's only ten thousand people there. That's bullshit. Rage will never do that. It's not a good show unless the audience is going off too. It's gotta be a shared experience". In other RATM-related news, band's guitarist Tom Morello recently discussed his friendship with Ted Nugent, "known in the world" as "this right-wing caricature", as opposed to "the guy who shredded on 'Cat Scratch Fever'". They're friends because “It’s going to be things that Tom Morello and Ted Nugent have in common. I went down this long list: free speech advocates, love of rock & roll, respect for black artists who’ve created rock and roll. And the second, was things Ted Nugent taught an adolescent Tom Morello about sex”.

Indie-rock foursome Cloud Nothings were touring eight months a year, so when the pandemic had shut it all down, they started releasing all the music they could. They set up a Netflix-like subscription service on Bandcamp where fans could access exclusive projects recorded in the past year, releasing dozens of live recordings, and making several full-length albums. Band's frontman Dylan Baldi was pleasantly surprised by the response, as he's told The Ringer: "If you keep providing good, interesting things that you would want as a fan of a band or a fan of music, people will respond to it".

"I’ve never been a careerist, especially in music. It’s always been something I live and breathe with my family. Maybe it’s also a combination of a fear of failure, or not wanting to commit myself fully because I don’t want to ruin the thing that I enjoy most in life" - Cassandra Jenkins tells in a Pitchfork interview about her latest album 'An Overview on Phenomenal Nature'. She adds: "It’s part of my mental health practice to make sure I’m always learning about other things and not getting absorbed in the narcissistic act of putting out my own music. This record is a great example. I really didn’t think anyone was gonna hear it. But I loved making it, and it really carried me through a difficult period in my life".

Last week, Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda became the first major-label artist to launch a single via NFT auction. A 75-second clip of 'Happy Endings' was sold in an edition of 10 on the online marketplace Zora (number 10 went for 4 WETH, around $6,600). Shinoda explains to Input: "If you buy an MP3 of a song as an NFT, you don’t own the song. It’s the equivalent of buying a print of a piece of artwork or buying an original piece of artwork... It’s not about the physical item. It’s about the concept of ownership. It’s the concept of what is valuable to a collector". Matty Karas of MusicREDEF has put it quite simply - “You’re basically getting a digitally autographed MP3”.

Filmmaker R.J. Cutler talks to Spin about his latest documentary 'Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry', which he started filming in 2018 and finished 2020 on the night of the Grammys (it's out today). While filming he got an insight into her family: "She and Finneas have this arrangement where, if they disagree, one of them will win and the other will lose... They believe that one of them should be right, one of them should be wrong and when the other one agrees to let the other one be right". About their parents: "And you see them living in denial. You just see them hoping that she’s never gonna grow up. Not because they don’t want Billie Eilish to grow up, but because parents don’t want their children to grow up".

"Athens was key in taking this punk idea that anybody can play and showing that anybody can do it anywhere. I think that Athens is the place that makes it clear—mostly through the career of R.E.M. but not entirely—that you can make music that reaches an underground or even a mainstream national audience anywhere. And that these kinds of cultural transformations and bohemian cultures we think of as really only occurring in certain urban spaces can actually flourish anywhere" - author Grace Elizabeth Hale tells in Please Kill Me interview about her latest book 'Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture'.

"America is a slavocracy: it is a nation founded on bigotry, and those principles continue today. People might think racism no longer exists because there is no longer a slave system, but they don’t realise the laws that enabled the slave system still put us in a position where we have to jump over insurmountable handicaps to just become equal” - composer Adrian Younge said to the Guardian, talking about his new album 'The American Negro', and a new podcast – 'Invisible Blackness'. There's an irony in the latter title - “I use the phrase of the show’s title to illustrate that we all have invisible blackness, this sense of ‘otherness’ inside us, because we are all descended from the first human being in Africa".

Writer Clover Hope released a new book 'The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop' which spans decades, and took her 2,5 years to write. In a Music Journalism Insider interview she explaines how she "wanted to write about what each of the women brought to hip-hop as a culture and rap as a genre... For Queen Latifah, I wanted to talk about her achieving longevity through film. For Eve, I decided to write about her bringing high fashion to hip-hop. For Cardi B, I wanted to write about her wielding the power of social media to star-making effect". Why 100? - "I wanted people to see the number and think about magnitude and impact".

1980s pop singer Glenn Medeiros was often asked for sex by music industry figures in return for help with his careers - as he has told the Celebrity Catch Up podcast. Medeiros said he saw these offers "everywhere", and he refused them all, but other artists, as he said, would accept them: "I had friends who specifically said, 'I am going to be moving in with this person because this person is going to be helping me with my recording career. The person's attractive and I like them anyway, so it's OK"". Medeiros now runs a school in Hawaii.

"I think that it's a good thing that you can be destructive in music without fucking things up too much. Whereas if you're destructive in the kitchen, you're just going to make yourself sad, because it'll taste terrible" - Sam Pillay of Virginia Wing told the Quietus about their chaotic new album. TheQ says that tracks on 'private LIFE' often feel like "performers stumbling groggily on stage, elegantly shooting themselves in the foot, then somehow pirouetting off, perfectly choreographed, in unison... It's paradoxically both chaotic and comforting, mirroring the way everyday life carries on during crises, wrestling just a little bit of order away from entropy".

An amazing and heartwarming segment from the Howard Stern Show with the Foo Fighters this week when former Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Pat Smear reminisced about Nirvana. Stern asked Smear whether he still listens to old Nirvana stuff to which he responded he doesn't need to because - "every once in a while, me and Krist and Dave get together and we do play as if we're Nirvana, so I don't have to miss it - we do it". Grohl added they even recorded some stuff. Foo Fighters frontman also talked about how his 11-year-old daughter had asked him about Nirvana for the first time, and how they listened to it together also for the first time. She wanted to know whether Kurt Cobain was shy.

A fun interview with actor Jason Momoa in Guitar World about his love of music and playing, bass in particular. It all started on the of 'Aquaman' where he had instruments, so his son was playing drums and his daughter was playing guitar. It was his assistant's birthday, "and she really loves Tool, so I borrowed a bass from my buddy and we all played 'Sober' for her", Momoa says, adding - "right then, my passion for bass really exploded". He says he likes Metallica, Pantera, Rage Against The Machine, Primus, Black Sabbath, Red Hot Chili Peppers, but there's also music outside the "hard" canon for him - "one of my gods in music is Tom Waits, but having said that, my goddess is probably Ani DiFranco. I was raised with Miles Davis and Janis Joplin, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor is one of my all-time favorites, too”.

Tom Moulton is one of the pioneers of remixes in disco music, the inventor of the breakdown section and the 12-inch single vinyl format, and in his 80s he decided it's time - to work. He is releasing mixes on his Bandcamp, five disco volumes since the pandemic began, made in his apartment while he avoids the coronavirus. All the music is new, drawn from his towers of authorised multitrack tapes. Guardian talked to the never-stopping producer...

T.J. Osborne, the singer of the Brothers Osborne, came out as gay in Time Magazine interview, which makes him the only openly gay artist signed to a major country label. “People will ask, ‘Why does this even need to be talked about?’ and personally, I agree with that. But for me to show up at an awards show with a man would be jaw-dropping to people. It wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, cool!'" - he told Time.

"Fundamentally WhoSampled is a music discovery service... The idea being that, if you came to the site and you’re a fan of say, Michael Jackson, for example, you’re only a few steps away from discovering Quincy Jones and then hip-hop records that sampled Quincy Jones" - WhoSampled's Chris Read says in Berklee Online interview. WhoSampled is the leading destination for sample-based music, covers, and remixes, housing the world’s most comprehensive database of music with more than 730,000 samples spanning more than 1,000 years.

"There’s this papering over the real ways in that things like bias and the social crises of our time actually exist in the real world, in this incredibly complex moral universe that’s driven by implicit and unacknowledged forms of hate and misunderstanding. To my mind, satirical and politicised music should be geared towards understanding these things in more complex and nuanced moral terms, economic terms and societal terms” -  Alastair Shuttleworth, the frontman of the UK post-punk band LICE says in the Quietus interview. Band's guitarist Silas Dilkes also believes that all the sounds the band makes should be made by one of the members - “I think there is virtue in going through the process of understanding how to harness sounds we were interested in and recreate them through a simple tool like a guitar. It gives you a better understanding I think of why you might want to make that sound in the first place". LICE's debut album 'WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear' is out now.

“Although joking about does play into the thing we are comfortable with musically we don’t intentionally make things funny... Unlike film, you can get away with being funny by accident in music” - Black Country, New Road tell the Quietus about the "funny" parts in their music. tQ describes them as "a gang of affable, witty, fun loving people" with a special bond between them - "we also don’t really care about how we look to the audience; the big connection for us is between ourselves". Their hyped-up debut album 'For the First Time' comes out this week on Ninja Tune.

The electronic art-pop duo The KLF are a subject of a new documentary 'Welcome To The Dark Ages', which shows them in the midst of their current project - 'The People’s Pyramid’, a monument built out of 34,952 bricks forged from the ashes of the dead. Filmmaker Paul Duane made a documentary about the project, and shared his thoughts about it with the Quietus: "It struck me as the most remarkable thing an ageing pop group could do. A lot of the things Bill and Jimmy do are incredibly funny. The idea of monetising their ageing fanbase by selling them a memorial of their own deaths is kind of hilarious. Their fans are all in their 50s now, so you’re thinking about death and the disposal of your remains. So building a pyramid and selling them a brick for £99 each that they will be memorialised in in the people’s pyramid, on one level is a hilarious ploy on an ageing fanbase". The KLF are no strangers to excess - they became the top-selling singles act in the world ('America: What Time Is Love', 'Justified & Ancient') and then left the music business, burned £1 million of their own money and signed a contract agreeing to a 23-year silence.

A great interview in the Guardian with Jon Bon Jovi after his band performed at the American president's inauguration. "Bon Jovi at 58 looks like a man who spent his youth on yoga retreats as opposed to hanging out with Aerosmith. But how did he resist when he was so young?" the G's journalist asked - "To be honest with you, I didn’t have the capacity to handle drugs. I didn’t find joy in it, and I didn’t need to bury myself emotionally, so what was the purpose?". He's married to his high-school sweetheart, and still lives in New Jersey - “I got the house in Malibu, saw the guys who are looking over your shoulder to see if they should go talk to someone else. That whole lifestyle was so vapid to me. I couldn’t wait to get away from it”. So, a regular Jon...

"I always liked things that most people didn't like" - Rick Rubin says in an interesting Stitcher podcast about his choice of artists he produced, and his creative process - "I've always been voraciously interesting in counter-culture. I'm just interested!". He says also how he guards his passion: "I try to be as true to my interests as possible. I don't listen to music to find out what's going on, I listen to music because I like music". Rubin also says how the creative moment isn't rational: "The magic doesn't happen in the head, the magic happens in the heart. The actual magic is not intellectual, it's faster than the intellect, it's much more primal, it's much more immediate, it's not to be figured out".