Bands Stories
-
The Strokes - Ryan Adams
Ryan Adams (musician): One night I was hanging with the Strokes guys and Ryan [Gentles, the band’s manager]. We were really stoned because we were basically always smoking pot. It was very late. Fab would always play me a song that he had written, some beautiful, romantic song. So one night, jokingly, I’m almost certain, Fabby said, “Dude, what if John Mayer was playing that guitar right now?” And I said, “I can make that happen.” Now, I lived down the block from John Mayer, and he’d been talking to me about his new song for a while. So I texted him, because he was always up late back then. I said, “Come to this apartment. Bring an acoustic guitar. I really want to hear your new song.” I didn’t tell them that I’d done it. So everyone is sitting there and I was like, “Let’s all take bong hits.” I really wanted it to get crazy. We smoked some bong hits; I probably did some blow. The doorbell buzzer rings, and I open the door, and John Mayer walks in with his fucking acoustic guitar, and they were all slack-jawed. John sat down and played the fucking acoustic guitar — three or four songs that probably have gone on to be huge — while those guys just sat there staring at me like, Oh my God, you’re a witch.
-
Florence Welch
f the "10 Florence commandments" once pinned to the wall of a recording studio by Florence Welch (this list of rules-for-living drawn up by the musician when she was still a precocious teen, teasing out demos), number eight was pragmatic. Appreciate your feet, it ordered in boxy handwriting – a bit of self-counsel from an accident-prone girl who'd too often gone to casualty bleeding into her shoes. Today, descending the central staircase at Observer headquarters, I can see the 25-year-old has entirely failed to follow her old edict.
-
Hozier
A little less than two years ago, Andrew Hozier-Byrne sat down at the piano in his parents’ home near Dublin to work on a song called “Take Me to Church.” Hozier-Byrne was a struggling musician, often seen at open mics around town. In front of him was a notebook full of lyrics, some of which expressed his frustration with organized religion — and particularly the Catholic Church’s history of mistreating gays and covering up child sexual abuse. “I was just fumbling around and I came upon the idea for a chorus,” says the singer-songwriter, 24, who performs as Hozier. “Then I went up into the attic and made a little demo.”
