‘The vocals were on another level’: how Counting Crows made Mr Jones

Our first four records had been mostly made in houses in the hills above Los Angeles. August and Everything After was our first major label album, so it was a pretty big deal. Our advance was $3,000 each; I bought a 1971 cherry red VW Karmann Ghia convertible and drove it to LA.I would get up every morning and listen to Pickin’ Up the Pieces by Poco, which is like the Beatles doing country music. I also had this Benny Goodman album that I was listening to a lot – my dad had picked it up as a free giveaway at a Texaco station when I was a kid

‘A palette unlike anything in the west’: Ben Okri, Yinka Shonibare and more on how Nigerian art revived Britain’s cultural landscape

To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stageSome primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context

Perfume Genius: ‘I really like body hair! I like a bush. I didn’t even notice Jimmy Fallon censored mine’

The singer on looking like Amelia Earhart, the time he set his mother’s house on fire and his beef with the Octopus Teacher guyEveryone was talking about your pubic hair after it was censored on The Tonight Show. Should we all be showing more or less bush?More! I really like body hair. I like a bush. I like the whole deal. I’m sure if I didn’t have a bush, they wouldn’t have censored it

My cultural awakening: ‘Kate Bush helped me come out as a trans woman’

As a not-yet-out trans teen, The Sensual World – the singer’s rejection of masculine influence – felt like an invocation of everything I was feelingIt wasn’t safe for me to discover The Sensual World, the eponymous track on what Kate Bush described as her “most female album”. The song was intended to be a rejection of the masculine influence that had unwittingly shaped the artist’s previous work, and an ode to something taboo within the female experience. Based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses – a stream of consciousness in which the character reflects on her experiences of nature, sex and love – Bush wanted to celebrate the experience of life inside a woman’s body, and the ways it gives her spiritual and sexual pleasure. I knew that, for someone like me, who was already being bullied, to openly love a song like this could make me an even more obvious target to those who saw femininity as a sign of weakness. More daunting than that, it might force me to confront my own repressed desires

From Tron: Ares to Riot Women: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

Tron: AresOut now Perhaps the most exciting thing for many about this new Tron film is that it has a score from Nine Inch Nails. It also stars Jared Leto as the embodiment of a super-advanced AI program sent into the real world on a high-stakes mission. (Just try not to notice that Ares is an anagram of arse, because you won’t be able to unsee it.)I SwearOut nowRobert Aramayo gives a rousing turn as Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, whose experience of the condition in the 1980s (before it was widely acknowledged to exist in the UK) led him to become one of the first people to try to raise awareness, leading to the presentation of an MBE during which he duly shouted “Fuck the queen”.Terence Davies retrospectiveCinemas nationwide, to 30 NovemberA major director, but not necessarily a household name, Terence Davies, who died two years ago, is now being honoured with a retrospective by the BFI in London, plus a UK-wide re-release of his acclaimed Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth, starring Gillian Anderson

The Guide #212: The Taylor Swift backlash has me asking: how much good music can one artist really produce?

Amid the flood of discourse around Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, one recurring sentiment jumped out: that the album – which many critics have declared a misstep in Swift’s otherwise consistently solid discography – felt hurried, hasty, rushed. “The Life of a Showgirl Is 40 Minutes of Elevator Music Rushed Out to Break a Beatles Record”, read the particularly savage headline of a piece on Collider. In the Guardian music desk’s excellent round table on the album, just about every panellist expressed a wish that Swift would take a break from the constant churn of releasing records, in order to recapture a lost spark.And it has been quite the churn. Since 2019 Swift has on average released an album a year, and that’s not counting the Taylor’s Version re-records of her older albums