Grayson Haver Currin

TL;DR: I profiled a musician named Paul McCartney for the cover story of the new Mojo. He told me about the first time he met Dolly Parton, so I also interviewed Dolly Parton about Paul McCartney. I find it hard to believe those last two sentences are true. Please laugh at this absurd screenshot. When I was 12, there was a miracle on the television. For three nights in late November, just before Thanksgiving 1995, ABC broadcast a series of two-hour specials about the Beatles. My parents let me stay up late to watch the shows, I suppose because they had grown up with this music and felt it important to have the chance to pass it on. I was hooked immediately—the story of these poor British kids becoming friends and becoming idols, the songs, the pandemonium that ensued. Sitting on the floor of my childhood living room and watching the first installment remains one of my most vivid memories, as bright in my mind’s eye as Christian Laettner’s shot three years earlier. My parents, graciously, did not wait until Christmas to buy me the accompanying two-CD set, Anthology 1. I believe we bought it the week it came out, at a Rose’s department store in Fuquay-Varina. I obsessed over it. A few weeks later, just before Christmas, our family went on one of those holiday-lights driving tours, at Walnut Creek Amphitheater in Raleigh. I believe my childhood crush was there, but I didn’t care. I sat in the back of a van and listened to Anthology 1 again and again, oblivious to almost everything else. That was the first night my older brother convinced me to try chewing tobacco, and I remember demanding that the van pull over, so that I could puke in the middle of the Christmas lights. I remember “Jingle Bells” playing. Three decades later, and I can still see that Beatles CD set from where I’m sitting right now. A good investment, a life-changer. (Cont'd)

TL;DR: I went to Los Angeles and Knoxville and Zoom to profile the great Jeff Parker for Pitchfork. Interviewed his mom and sister and Flea and Jay Bellerose and Jeremiah Chiu about what makes Jeff so fascinating and magnetic. Back in February, when I went to Los Angeles to interview Kid Harpoon for the Times, I knew I would have most of the next day free until my flight left for Denver. I thought about all the things I could do with that spare time—maybe go hike out in the mountains or run a long distance along the beach or go digging for records. But what I really wanted to do, honestly, was interview the guitarist Jeff Parker. I sent an email and asked if he was free. My time was suddenly accounted for. Jeff is one of the most remarkable, versatile, and distinct guitarists of his generation. He first came to attention in the late ’90s as a new member of Tortoise and for his wider participation in Chicago’s creative music scene. But after he left Chicago for Los Angeles in 2013, he seemed to find this new and fertile scene of collaborators and improvisers and started making an astounding series of records. His run of albums during the last decade—Forfolks, Slight Freedom, The New Breed, his three LPs with the otherworldly ETA IVTet, including the new “Happy Today”—is an incredible feat that sounds like little else going. (Cont'd)

TL;DR: It’s kind of wild that Can and The Durutti Column were big influences on the new Harry Styles album, right? I flew to Los Angeles to spend a day with its producer and big Can fan, Kid Harpoon, and had a grand old time, for The New York Times. 📸by @advli Here is a little story about the glamorous life of music writing: Maybe two weeks ago, my great editor at The New York Times asked me if I could potentially be in Los Angeles at the end of February. Harry Styles had a new record coming out on March 6, which is now today, and the producer of his last three albums, Kid Harpoon, had agreed to an interview in his home studio in Laurel Canyon. One of my favorite things about being a full-time freelancer is saying yes to things that sound like an adventure, especially when the territory seems somewhat novel to me. I am not a person who writes regularly about the world’s biggest pop stars and the records they make, so I said yes. We had to wait for a few things to shake out with scheduling, so I waited until last Sunday to book the plane ticket for a Thursday afternoon. Given that, of course, the flights were not cheap, so I went with the most affordable option—flying out of Denver very late Wednesday night, stopping in Las Vegas for a six-hour layover, and then continuing on to Los Angeles. In walking across the United States several times now, I reckoned that I had slept in settings far stranger than the Las Vegas airport, so it seemed OK. (Cont'd)

TL;DR: It is Tina’s birthday. She is 39. She is cooler than everyone else you and I know. Tell her happy birthday. Here’s a year of Tina photos! Back in August, I had to go to Los Angeles to report two stories. All summer long, Tina had been going out on scouting expeditions in the Indian Peaks Wilderness—the eastern edge of the Rockies in what is essentially our backyard, above 10,000 feet. Her goal for the summer was to complete something called the LA Freeway, connecting Longs Peak at one end of the range to Arapahoe at the other. It’s named for a Guy Clark song, contains 20 or so summits, includes about 35,000 feet of elevation gain, and has been known to, as the Guy Clark song has it, kill several people. Tina was going out and practicing the most dangerous and strenuous sections repeatedly, preparing to string them together in one continuous push. But summer was closing fast, and it seemed like she had only one really good weather window in which she could try to make it happen. It coincided, of course, with my trip to LA, and neither Geese nor Tame Impala had flexibility in their schedule. We talked about trying to shift one of our plans, so that I could be home when Tina did the most dangerous thing she’s ever done. That conversation didn’t last long. I knew she would do it. She knew she would do it. She did it. (Cont'd)

I have two very different pieces out today about two very different songwriters. First, I lived another dream, interviewing Willie Nelson—one of the greatest singers, songwriters, activists, and humans this country has ever seen—for GQ. At age 92, he has become a new model for Canada Goose, which was the reason for the interview. But we did not talk about jackets. We talked about writing a new song with Bob Dylan, growing up on a farm, and the music that always makes us cry. Willie is an icon and iconoclast, but, more than that, he is a supreme artist. It felt great to talk to him about exactly that.   On the other hand, I do not consider the wildly popular “protest” songs of Jesse Welles to be art at all. They are only shareable content and hollow grievance, completely devoid of empathy or imagination or any real songwriting skill other than simple end-rhyming and textbook picking. He is a posterboy of posting convenience, but I’d be happy to go on a run with him someday? His music, contrary to the obsequious comments, has almost nothing to do with Bob Dylan. I wrote about that, rather intensely, on Out + Back, my new little writing project that’s very fun so far. I’ll link to them both in my stories. Willie photo by Tim Eklaïm/Jesse illustration by @matthewjsage lol

TL;DR: I—late for every game I have ever played—am launching a newsletter tomorrow. It’s called Out & Back, and it will include archival interviews, plus thoughts on records and bands I love or maybe don’t like at all, hiking, eating, and living. If that is of interest, please sign up at currincy.substack.com, and please share. The first post, which goes out tomorrow, will include my interview with the great Benmont Tench and some thoughts about the Thanksgiving standby The Last Waltz. It’s free, or you can send money, whatever works for you. I realized this morning that the day I registered for Substack, more than two years ago now, was one day before I almost died. It was early October 2023, and we had just a little more than one state to go before we’d walked from Canada to Mexico on the Continental Divide Trail, thereby completing the Triple Crown of American Hiking. Tina and I were in the south of Colorado, the very state in which we’d bought a house while hiking, and an early snowstorm had slammed into the San Juans. I have written at length about this before, so to truncate a long story: We accidentally took different routes through rather rough country, got separated without a tent or a way to communicate for 36 hours, and shivered through a very difficult night. We were fine, and, also, I now had a Substack that would sit fallow for two more years. I have thought an embarrassing amount about launching this thing since October 2023. I have written entries that I have never posted and have had interviews transcribed that I have never used. Somewhere there’s a grandiloquent intro from a year ago, which will now remain buried in whatever folder into which it was stillborn. Every music writer had a newsletter, after all, so what did I have to add to that deluge? And, man, I have been busy. A friend and editor asked me a few days ago how many words I had published this year, guessing 200,000. I think that number may be low, but the true answer, in any case, is “too many.” I am fortunate and grateful, though, to be this busy as a music writer in 2025. (Cont'd)

TL;DR: Here are a bunch of recent stories I forgot to post, from a very long piece about Korn for Pitchfork to profiles of Cat Stevens, William Basinski, and SML for The New York Times. Oh, also, Jake Lenderman as a GQ Man of the Year, which will never not make me laugh. On Wednesday night, I turned in what might be the last long piece of this long year. I was so tired that I could barely hold my eyes open as I did my last read, trying to finish up 5,000 words so that they made it to England by morning. It’s been a very, very rad year of work, and it’s also been a lot. Endlessly grateful to say that as a music writer in 2025. Anyway, yesterday, a friend joshed me for not posting about my recent 4,000-word review of Korn’s self-titled review at Pitchfork, which I have been too busy to mention. So here are 8 recent stories and a little tale about each; I’ll post links to ’em all in my stories. 1: I profiled William Basinski—and, really, The Disintegration Loops, which I physically held in my grubby little hands—for The New York Times. In the summer of 2002, I was working construction with my dad. I am pretty bad at physical labor, to be honest, so I was almost exclusively in charge of tarring foundations and keeping job sites clean. These were the things I was deemed worthy to do. It was a very hot summer, and I was probably a very whiney person. The only real respite was driving around in my Ford F-150, listening to my summer jams—Sonic Youth’s Murray Street and William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, two records with some serious 9/11 baggage. I am a fun person. Anyway, The Loops remain some of the world’s most mysterious and beautiful music to me, so, in advance of a new box set reissue of them, I interviewed Billy. I went to his house in L.A. I met his cats. I marveled at his mustache. I saw the tapes and the recorders and the Andy Warhol prints he salvaged from Salvation Army stores in New York. He told me I had nice skin. He smoked a god-level number of American Spirits. It was a great time. Did I tell you I love The Disintegration Loops? (Cont'd)

TL;DR: I went on tour with the Mountain Goats in October and profiled John Darnielle for GQ. It’s 14,000 words, and it goes from God to death metal to having kids to tinnitus to Pakistani mangoes to the Geto Boys to, well, so many wild places, just like every conversation with John. A real pleasure and the most fun I’ve had telling a story in a second. And here is the tale of how John helped me get married. (Thanks to @pappademas for asking me to do this, and thanks to @lucky_cloud for the photo help and very strong coffee.) Here is a story I sometimes tell but that people oftentimes do not believe. In 2010, I was living with my best buds in Raleigh in a band house we called Brome, which is, of course, a portmanteau of bro and home. I looked like a very different person then, a large and hairy young man whose idea of “endurance” was seeing how many times he could listen to a Tony Conrad record on repeat. Much more importantly, I was a very unhealthy person, mentally and physically, always working or drinking and eating fast food most days and bar food most nights. I was running a new music festival, running a newspaper’s pretty robust music section, and attempting to build a freelance career. I didn’t sleep too much, and I would date whomever would date me. I was happy, in the sense that people who have found a way to extend their adolescence for a long time often are, but I was, and I repeat, not healthy in any substantive way. I was a small-town successful mess. (Cont'd)

TL;DR: A summer in the mountains. Tina set a speed record on an insane route, the L.A. Freeway. I did seven summits in a day, the Radical Slam, and got much better with high-mountain exposure. We did not die. “Take my picture,” Tina said, smiling as she balanced confidently on a thin rock ledge. “It may be the last time you ever see me.” It was July 1 of this year, and we’d left home that morning when friends we love were probably still at bars—up at 1:30, in the car at 2:30, at the trailhead by 3 a.m. Sometime late last year, I think, Tina started talking about something called the L.A. Freeway, a 35-mile high-mountain route along the Continental Divide that summits 24 mountains as it gains 20,000-plus feet and that connects Longs Peak to the north with the two Arapahoe peaks far to the south . There are maybe two-dozen free climbing moves that could kill you, and maybe a little more than a dozen people ever have done the full thing in one continuous push. (My math could be fuzzy in all cases here, so feel free to correct me.) Naturally, Tina became obsessed with it, and as the thaw of late spring neared, she began to talk about doing the entire L.A. Freeway not as some longshot summer goal but as a fait accompli, the thing she had to finish if she were going to have a good year. She started asking people about it, hunting down clues on every possible website, and got supported and spurned by two separate Boulder fellas who had been crucial to establishing the route. (Cont'd)

TL;DR: Geese is my favorite young rock band in the country, responsible for my favorite album of last year (Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal) and maybe my favorite of this year, too, their own great Getting Killed. I did my best to get to know a band that has done its best to not get known and wrote 12,000 words about the process and their history for @GQ . Seriously, if you don’t know this band, it’s time to check in. Seems like the start of something really special. As best I can tell so far, the key difference between me as a young adult and me as a 42-year-old quasi-adult is that I like to be wrong now. Back in my 20s and certainly slightly into my 30s, I had a confidence that comes with naivete or ignorance or whatever it is that inspires you to feel you already know everything about everything when you know next to nothing at all. If, for instance, you asked me about a band or a song or a book about which I’d never actually heard, I’d probably nod like it was indeed the greatest thing ever and of course I knew about it because didn’t everyone know about it, then make a mental note to find out more about it ASAP. I had an older coworker at a record store who liked to say that if he hadn’t heard of a band, they couldn’t be that good, because he knew all the cool stuff; I held onto that “philosophy” for an embarrassingly long time. I realize now that life is too short to pose and that any avenue to new information and insights is a god damn blessing. I wonder what that guy is listening to these days? (Cont'd)

Tina has been in Yellowstone for two weeks, so I decided to take a last-minute trip to see Phish’s tour opener at a massive festival in Kentucky and do some interviews while I was at it. (Coming soon!) I became, much to my surprise, a massive fan of this band almost exactly a year ago, and it remains an entirely joyous and life-affirming ride, not dissimilar to finishing the Appalachian Trail or something. Totally worth the trip, every time. Also, this was @treyanastasio ’s idea, because we wanted to troll our pal @amandapetrusich —and we successfully did.

TL;DR: I went to Los Angeles to spend a few days with Kevin Parker, or Tame Impala, for GQ. We went deep and heavy and wide into a family history that is pretty intense and that he’s not spoken about much before. I wrote 10,000 words about his life, how he works, and why he works. I was pretty nervous about meeting Kevin Parker, the Australian musician who has been known as Tame Impala for the last 16 years or so. I wasn’t nervous in some starstruck way; I’ve liked Kevin’s music in the past, and, though he’s been making records recently with the likes of Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga and Diana Fucking Ross, he’s always struck me as a mostly regular guy. And that’s why I was nervous: In reading more than a decade of interviews with him, I noticed that Kevin preferred to talk about gear more than meaning, more about process than the personal experiences that fueled the process. It seemed like a well-considered shield, meant to keep people like me at a slight distance. My job—or, more importantly, my real interest and enthusiasm in the work I do—is getting around that, to understand why it is people do what they do, why they make what they make, why they do it the way they do. I didn’t think Kevin would be into that or, worse still, that maybe there was nothing much to see back there behind the shield. (Cont'd)