Zola Jesus
Teenage Zola Jesus Read Cooler Books Than Any of Us
Book Club is a new monthly series from Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, exploring the literature that inspires some of our favorite musicians. Whether it’s a music biography that got them through the slog of tour, the poetry collection that eked into their most poignant lyrics, or the novel that sparked a rock opera, we’ll get to the bottom of it so you can add it to the top of your book stack. This month, we speak to Nika Roza Danilova, the songwriter and producer behind Zola Jesus. Over her 14-year musical career, Zola Jesus’ Nika Roza Danilova has recorded and toured six ethereal albums touching on baroque pop, industrial goth, and art rock, including this June’s Arkhon. As I discovered while researching for our conversation, almost every interview she’s given along the way has included a h...
Beyond the Algorithm: Artists Imagine a World Beyond Spotify
Spotify is designed to make itself indispensable. It offers up endless choices. It keeps playing when the track or album you’ve clicked on is over. It tries to predict your tastes, so you keep consuming content—er, music—for as long as possible. But at the end of the day, it’s just a format. And Spotify may not be the right format for everybody. That became clear recently when Spotify CEO Daniel Ek shared a disturbingly narrow vision of how music and musicians should work. In an interview with the website Music Ally, the tech billionaire responded to criticisms that Spotify doesn’t pay artists enough by pointing to the artists themselves. “[S]ome artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years an...
