My SiriusXM show: Interviews with Melissa Auf der Maur, to talk life after Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins, plus her new book. I’m also catching up with Fuel and rising alt-pop voice LØLØ, and Craig Martin stops by to talk bringing iconic records to life on stage with Classic Albums Live. Sat 8am + 2pm + 7pm, Sun 12pm, Wed 2pm (all ET), Channel 167 + on the app anytime!
My SiriusXM Show This Week: Melissa Auf der Maur, Fuel, LØLØ, and Craig Martin from Classic Albums Live
18 Songs That Bring Generations Together
18 Songs That Stop Every Generation in Their Tracks and Make Them Sing Together
There’s a moment at every wedding, every backyard party, every bar with a decent jukebox, when a song comes on and something shifts. The age gap evaporates. The phone goes in the pocket. Grandparents and grandchildren are suddenly in the same room in the same way, and nobody planned it. These are the songs that do that. Consistently, reliably, every single time.
“September” — Earth, Wind and Fire
This’s a song that exists outside of time. Nobody knows what happened on the 21st of September and nobody cares. The brass hits and Maurice White’s vocal reach into the room and pull everyone to their feet. Scientists have actually studied why this song triggers universal joy. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that it just does.
“Don’t Stop Believin'” — Journey
This shouldn’t work as well as it does in 2026. It’s a song about strangers on a midnight train going anywhere, built on a piano riff and Steve Perry’s impossible vocal. It works because it’s about hope and it never pretends otherwise. Every generation needs a song about holding on, and this one’s been doing that job for forty-five years without breaking a sweat.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” — Queen
Six minutes of operatic rock theatre that violated every rule of commercial radio and became one of the best-selling singles in history. Freddie Mercury built something that shouldn’t have worked at any level, and instead it works at every level, for every age group, in every room it enters. The air guitar starts automatically. You can’t stop it.
“Sweet Caroline” — Neil Diamond
Neil Diamond wrote this in 1969 and it’s been a stadium singalong ever since. The “bah bah bah” is one of the great crowd participation moments in popular music, and it belongs to everyone who’s ever been in a room when it comes on. Boston’s Fenway Park made it a tradition. The rest of the world followed.
“Stand by Me” — Ben E. King
One of the most perfectly constructed songs ever recorded. The bass line, the strings, the vocal, the lyric. It’s a song about loyalty and fear and finding someone to stand with you anyway. It resonates at eight years old and at eighty, which is the definition of a song that transcends everything.
“Dancing Queen” — ABBA
ABBA spent years being considered unfashionable by people who were wrong. “Dancing Queen” was never unfashionable. It’s a song about a specific feeling, being young and free and on a dance floor with everything ahead of you, and it delivers that feeling to anyone willing to accept it. The generations don’t need to negotiate with this one. They just dance.
“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” — Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston’s vocal on this track remains one of the most purely joyful performances ever committed to record. The production’s unmistakably 1987 and somehow completely timeless. Every generation that encounters this song for the first time has the same reaction: immediate, involuntary movement toward the nearest open space.
“Signed, Sealed, Delivered” — Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder’s got an entire catalog of songs that could appear on this list, which tells you something about what genius actually looks like. This one wins because of the horns, the groove, and the sheer unstoppable momentum of it. It’s been in films, commercials, political rallies, and wedding receptions for fifty years. It’ll be there for fifty more.
“Footloose” — Kenny Loggins
This’s a song that exists to make people move and it doesn’t apologize for that. The opening guitar riff is one of the most immediately recognizable sounds in American pop music. It soundtracked a generation’s rebellion against small-town conformity and became, somewhat ironically, a song everyone agrees on.
“Respect” — Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin didn’t record a cover of an Otis Redding song. She rewrote it from the inside out and turned it into one of the defining statements in the history of popular music. “Respect” isn’t a feel-good song. It’s a demand. The fact that it makes every generation feel good anyway says everything about the power of the performance.
“Twist and Shout” — The Beatles
John Lennon recorded this vocal in one take at the end of a long session, with a throat already wrecked from the day’s work. What came out was one of the rawest, most electric performances in rock and roll history. Every generation that hears it feels the urgency. Nobody sits still.
“Livin’ on a Prayer” — Bon Jovi
Tommy and Gina have been holding on for forty years and they’re not stopping now. The key change three quarters of the way through this song is one of the great communal moments in rock history. Every person in every room instinctively raises their fist. It’s a reflex. Bon Jovi didn’t write a song. They wrote a ritual.
“Uptown Funk” — Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars
This arrived in 2014 and immediately felt like it’d always existed. Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars built something so deeply rooted in the DNA of funk and soul that every generation recognized it instantly, even those hearing it for the first time. It hasn’t left a single playlist since the day it dropped.
“Hey Ya!” — Outkast
Andre 3000 wrote a song about relationship dysfunction and disguised it as the most infectious pop record of the early 2000s. The shake it like a Polaroid picture moment belongs to every generation equally. Nobody needs context. Nobody needs an explanation. They just shake it.
“Shut Up and Dance” — Walk the Moon
This’s the newest kind of classic, a song that arrived knowing exactly what it wanted to be and became it completely. It’s a love song dressed as a dance track, with a chorus that lodges itself in the brain and refuses to leave. Grandparents and teenagers hear the same thing when it comes on. That’s the whole point.
“Mr. Brightside” — The Killers
Brandon Flowers wrote this about jealousy and heartbreak and somehow made it feel like triumph. “Mr. Brightside” has spent more cumulative weeks on the UK singles chart than almost any song in history. It connects across generations because the feeling it captures isn’t specific to any age. Jealousy doesn’t card you at the door.
“Happy” — Pharrell Williams
Pharrell built a song out of pure forward momentum and called it exactly what it was. “Happy’s” the rare track that does what it says on the label, delivering the feeling its title promises every single time. Children hear it and move. Adults hear it and move. Nobody’s immune.
“Wannabe” — Spice Girls
The Spice Girls told the world what they wanted, what they really really wanted, in the summer of 1996, and the world’s been answering ever since. “Wannabe’s” a generational handshake disguised as a pop song. The opening rap’s a rite of passage. Every generation learns it. Every generation owns it.
Harm’s Way Guitarist and HardLore Co-Host Bo Lueders Dead at 38
Bo Lueders built something real. As a founding guitarist of Chicago industrial-hardcore outfit Harm’s Way and co-host of the HardLore podcast, he spent nearly two decades pouring himself into a scene that gave everything back to those willing to show up for it. Lueders died on April 2nd at the age of 38. His band and podcast announced the news jointly on Instagram, and the post included the number for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: 988.
The statement from Harm’s Way and HardLore was direct and full of love: “He will be remembered for his unwavering empathy and compassion for his friends and family and his magnetic, inimitable presence on and off the stage.” That combination, genuine warmth inside one of heavy music’s most uncompromising environments, is not something you manufacture. It is who you are.
Lueders co-founded Harm’s Way in 2006 and stayed the course through the band’s entire evolution, from toughened hardcore roots toward the rough-edged, industrial-metal heaviness that earned them a place among the genre’s most respected acts. Five studio albums. A series of EPs. A trajectory that never stopped pushing. Their 2018 record ‘Posthuman’ was named one of that year’s best metal and hardcore albums, and their most recent full-length, ‘Common Suffering’, arrived in 2023.
In 2022, Lueders launched HardLore alongside Twitching Tongues frontman Colin Young, a podcast built around one simple and powerful idea: let hardcore musicians tell their touring stories. It became something much larger than that. Lueders and Young brought in Madball’s Freddy Cricien, Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm, and many others, building an archive of the scene’s living history one conversation at a time.
Young’s tribute said everything that needed to be said. He called HardLore the greatest honor of his life, and wrote that his only solace was knowing they had documented a lifetime of memories, now preserved as a record of Lueders’ warm and kind soul. “Every song is about you now,” he wrote.
Harm’s Way had tour dates scheduled for July. The scene they helped build is feeling this loss deeply and collectively. Bo Lueders was 38 years old.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.
What Makes a Song “Work” on Radio — And Why the Rules Keep Breaking
Radio music directors do not have the luxury of being wrong. Their job is to keep people from changing the station, and they make that call in the first few seconds of every song they audition. Understanding what they are listening for is not a formula. It is a framework, and it has been bent, broken, and rebuilt enough times to make the exceptions just as instructive as the rules.
The first thing a music director reaches for is the hook. Not the chorus necessarily, but the moment in the song that grabs. Research consistently shows that programmers decide within the first fifteen to thirty seconds whether a track has a future on their station. A song must communicate something felt before it communicates anything understood. If the opening thirty seconds do not deliver that signal, the track rarely makes it past the audition pile.
Tempo and energy placement matter enormously, and not always in the way artists expect. Radio programmers think in terms of flow, the way one song exits and another enters inside a carefully managed emotional arc across a two or three hour block. A mid-tempo track with a strong melodic identity can outperform a high-energy banger if it sits better in the clock. Listener tune-out spiked during energy mismatches, songs that either spiked too hard or dropped too low relative to what surrounded them. The song does not just have to work alone. It has to work inside a sequence.
Production clarity is another variable that gets underestimated by artists and overestimated by engineers. Radio has its own sonic signature, particularly in the compressed, limited environment of FM transmission or today’s streaming-adjacent digital audio. Songs that sound enormous in a studio can collapse on a car speaker at highway volume. Music directors frequently use what the industry calls “the car test,” auditioning tracks through cheap monitors or actual car audio systems to simulate the listening environment where most radio consumption happens. Production choices that obscure the vocal melody are among the fastest ways to lose a programmer’s attention. The voice carries the song into memory. Anything that competes with it is a problem.
Lyric accessibility matters, though not in the way that gets artists defensive. A song does not have to be simple. It has to be followable. Listeners in transit, at work, or in the background of daily life are not sitting with headphones and liner notes. They are catching fragments. The songs that work on radio tend to have a central emotional idea that survives partial listening, a chorus that means something even if you missed the verses. This is why Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” which is dense and literary and structurally ambitious, still worked: the central feeling is enormous and immediately legible. You do not need the whole song to feel it.
Song length remains a real consideration even in an era where streaming has loosened the constraints considerably. The traditional radio sweet spot of three to three and a half minutes was never arbitrary. It was calibrated to attention span, to commercial break scheduling, and to the psychology of repetition. Longer tracks can and do break through, but they carry an additional burden. Every extra thirty seconds is a programmer calculating whether the payoff justifies the clock time. The songs that earn that real estate tend to build rather than repeat, offering the listener something new at each stage.
And then there are the exceptions, which is where radio history gets genuinely interesting. “American Pie” ran over eight minutes and became one of the most requested songs in the history of the format. “Bohemian Rhapsody” violated nearly every production and structure rule in the book and became a standard. Billie Eilish’s “bad guy” arrived with a production aesthetic that should have been invisible on mainstream radio and instead defined a moment. What these exceptions share is not a workaround of the rules but an intensity of identity so strong that programmers had no choice. The track was so distinctly itself that ignoring it felt like the mistake.
That is the honest answer music directors will give you off the record: the rules exist because most songs need them. The exceptions exist because some songs don’t. The job of a music director is to know the difference in thirty seconds or less, and to be right enough of the time that nobody changes the station.
Suki Lahav, Violinist Who Opened “Jungleland” and Toured With Bruce Springsteen, Dead at 74
The violin note that opens “Jungleland” has haunted listeners for more than fifty years. The person who played it, Tzruya “Suki” Lahav, died on April 1st following a short battle with cancer. She was 74. Her son, Yonatan Lahav, confirmed the news, writing that his mother was “a special woman, smart, pure in heart and loving life.” The funeral was private.
Lahav came into Bruce Springsteen’s world through her husband, recording engineer Louis Lahav, who recorded Springsteen’s debut album ‘Greetings From Asbury Park’ in 1972. From there, her contribution to the music grew quietly but permanently. Her violin opens “Jungleland,” the closing track from ‘Born to Run’. Her vocals appear, uncredited, on “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “Incident on 57th Street” from ‘The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle’, where she stepped in as a one-woman choir after a children’s church choir failed to appear. She also contributed to a fan-favorite cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.”
She toured with Springsteen and the E Street Band from October 1974 through March 1975, a run of 38 shows during which the Boss’s star was rising fast. She was not entirely prepared for the scale of it. Recalling her first glimpse of the roaring crowd, she later said she hid behind Clarence Clemons, who, she noted warmly, was always big enough to hide behind. It is the kind of detail that says everything about who she was: gifted, grounded, and human in the middle of something enormous.
In 1975, following a personal tragedy, Lahav returned to Israel. She never looked back in bitterness. Her time with Springsteen remained a part of her, she said in a 2007 Jerusalem Post interview, something that would never fade, even if it was not the main thing. What came after was a full and decorated life: songwriter, poet, novelist (two award-winning books), and screenwriter. In Israel she was a major cultural figure, a recipient of the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award and the Erik Einstein Prize.
She remembered the early Springsteen years with clarity and affection. “The music was incredible,” she said. “The lyrics were so rich; some of the most beautiful lyrics didn’t ever make it onto record.” She also recalled that everyone around Springsteen at the time knew he was going to be something extraordinary, even as they were all, in her words, completely poor and completely into it.
That is the thing about Suki Lahav. Her contribution to some of the most beloved rock recordings ever made was brief, often uncredited, and entirely irreplaceable. Every time “Jungleland” begins, she is there.
U2 Release Deeply Personal Six-Track ‘Easter Lily EP’ Featuring Brian Eno and a Tribute to Hal Willner
U2 are not waiting for the album. The Easter Lily EP, a six-track standalone collection out now via Island Records, arrives as the band continues recording their next studio record, and it is something distinctly apart from whatever comes next. Where last month’s ‘Days of Ash EP’ responded to chaos in the outside world, ‘Easter Lily’ turns inward, exploring friendship, loss, hope, and renewal from a much more private place.
The track list carries real emotional range. “Song for Hal” is a COVID-19 lockdown lament with The Edge on lead vocals, written for the band’s friend and music-maker Hal Willner, who would have turned 70 on Easter Monday and passed away nearly six years ago to the day. “In a Life” celebrates friendship. “Scars” offers encouragement and acceptance. “Resurrection Song” is a road trip into the unknown. “Easter Parade” is a devotional celebration of rebirth. Closing the EP, “COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)” is a lullaby for parents of children caught up in war, built around a new soundscape from Brian Eno.
Bono’s statement with the release is characteristically generous and searching. He describes the EP as deeply personal, born from questions about relationships, faith, friendship, and the ceremonies and rituals that might be missing from modern life. The title itself is a nod to Patti Smith’s 1978 album ‘Easter’, which Bono credits as a source of hope when he was not yet 18.
The EP is accompanied by a special digital e-zine edition of Propaganda, the band’s legendary fan magazine now marking its 40th anniversary. This edition features sleeve notes from The Edge, Adam Clayton on art and recovery, a conversation between Bono and Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, in-the-studio photographs shot by Larry Mullen Jr., a piece on producer Jacknife Lee, and Gavin Friday’s tribute to Hal Willner.
‘Easter Lily EP’ is available now on all digital platforms. The noisy, messy, unreasonably colourful album Bono promises is still on its way.
The Wonder Licks Turn a Brooklyn Closet and a Broken Heart Into Sweeping New Ballad “There’s A Place I Go”
The Wonder Licks know how to make a small space feel enormous. Their new single “There’s A Place I Go” began in a 5×5 rented room in Brooklyn that frontman Jacob Wunderlich used as a creative refuge, and it carries that intimacy into something genuinely cinematic. This is the fourth single from their upcoming album ‘Simping For Big Toilet’, and it is their most sweeping statement yet.
The song sits in the fragile space between heartbreak and acceptance, told from the perspective of the one left behind. It does not rush toward resolution. It lingers in the in-between, where memories still have weight but something that might be healing is quietly taking hold. Wunderlich’s writing here is deceptively simple, which is exactly what makes it work.
Built on a chord progression that moves from intimate verses into a soaring C-F-G chorus, the arrangement is where the song truly opens up. Pablo Leira Filgueira delivers a standout electric guitar and pedal steel performance, while lush violin arrangements, piano flourishes, and layered background vocals push the minimalist structure into full cinematic territory. Wunderlich calls it his “Purple Rain-adjacent ballad,” and that reference earns its keep.
The Wonder Licks have been building toward something with this run of singles, and “There’s A Place I Go” makes the clearest case yet for what ‘Simping For Big Toilet’ could deliver. Four singles in, the album cannot arrive soon enough.
London Singer-Songwriter Liya Shapiro Confronts the Ache of Unrequited Love on Chamber Rock Single “Another Woman”
Liya Shapiro thought she had already healed. Then she found out the person she once loved had moved on, and “Another Woman” arrived from that specific, irrational sting. The title track from her upcoming EP is out now, a chamber rock meditation on the contradiction of feeling something you know you no longer have the right to feel.
The song does not flinch from that paradox. Shapiro sings about not loving someone anymore while still feeling the hurt of watching them move on, and the honesty in that framing is what makes it land. This is not a breakup song. It is something more complicated and more human than that, a portrait of self-worth struggling against emotion that refuses to follow logic.
Sonically, “Another Woman” is built to carry that weight. Soft, melancholic verses swell into a raw, frustrated crescendo, the chamber rock instrumentation recorded live and given real visceral texture. Shapiro’s vocals are effortless and theatrical at once, full of character, the kind of performance that makes a song feel lived-in from the first listen.
Shapiro came to music through an unusual path, studying art history, fashion, and anthropology, and all three disciplines show in how she builds her world. Art shapes how she hears sound. Fashion drives her visual identity. Anthropology gives her a framework for examining the human condition. The result is an artist whose work feels considered at every level.
The momentum behind her is real. Since her 2021 debut single “Mirror,” she has crossed 150,000 Spotify streams, earned press and playlist support, and headlined a sold-out show at The Troubadour. “Another Woman” is her most fully realized statement yet, and the EP promises more of both the closure and transformation she is building toward.
Darkwave Phenomenon Artemas Takes His Moody Alt-Pop Universe on a 38-Date Global Tour
Artemas just mapped out the rest of his year and it covers the globe. The darkwave alt-pop phenomenon has announced a 38-date world tour, his biggest live run to date, kicking off September 8 in Vancouver and closing December 14 at the legendary O2 Academy Brixton in London. Support comes from Henry Morris across the run.
The tour follows the release of his new mixtape ‘getting up to no good’ and the close of his LOVERCORE Tour across North America. Artemas has been building momentum at a pace that is hard to ignore, and this run scales that vision to its largest audience yet. His live shows are known for being fully immersive, deeply atmospheric experiences that translate his moody, addictive sound into something that hits differently in a room full of people.
The numbers behind Artemas tell the story of an artist whose moment has fully arrived. Over 3.6 billion global artist streams, including more than 2 billion on his RIAA 3x Platinum breakout “i like the way you kiss me.” With ‘getting up to no good’ marking a new creative peak, the demand for this tour is real and the venues reflect it, from amphitheaters in Austin to storied rooms across Europe and the UK.
VIP and presale tickets go on sale Tuesday, April 7 at 10am local time. General on-sale follows Wednesday, April 8 at 10am local time.
2026 Tour Dates:
North America:
September 8: Vancouver, BC @ Malkin Bowl
September 10: Sacramento, CA @ Channel 24
September 11: Las Vegas, NV @ Brooklyn Bowl
September 13: Tucson, AZ @ Rialto Theatre
September 16: Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall
September 18: San Antonio, TX @ The Aztec Theatre
September 19: Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater
September 22: Dallas, TX @ The Bomb Factory
September 24: Kansas City, MO @ Uptown Theater
September 26: Oklahoma City, OK @ The Criterion
September 29: Minneapolis, MN @ The Fillmore
October 1: Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave
October 2: Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre
October 3: Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues
October 5: Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore Charlotte
October 7: Atlanta, GA @ The Tabernacle
October 8: Nashville, TN @ Marathon Music Works
October 10: Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall
October 11: New Haven, CT @ Toad’s Place
Europe + UK:
November 12: Paris, FR @ Le Bataclan
November 14: Esch-sur-Alzette, LU @ Rockhal
November 15: Cologne, DE @ E-Werk
November 16: Zurich, CH @ X-Tra
November 18: Barcelona, ES @ Sala Apolo
November 20: Milan, IT @ Fabrique
November 22: Prague, CZ @ SaSaZu
November 23: Warsaw, PL @ Progresja
November 25: Hamburg, DE @ Docks
November 26: Berlin, DE @ Huxleys Neue Welt
November 29: Stockholm, SE @ Fallen
November 30: Oslo, NO @ Rockefeller Music Hall
December 1: Copenhagen, DK @ Vega
December 3: Brussels, BE @ La Madeleine
December 7: Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg
December 10: Edinburgh, UK @ Edinburgh Corn Exchange
December 12: Manchester, UK @ O2 Victoria Warehouse
December 13: Birmingham, UK @ O2 Academy
December 14: London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton