JOHN HIATT At 60, the master singer-songwriter still follows wherever the music leads After 40 years and 21 studio albums, John Hiatt knows a thing or two about songcraft. On his new album,  Mystic Pinball, he even manages to make a grocery list interesting, wrapping it up in the grisly story-song, “Wood Chipper.” “It’s a bit of an homage to the Coen Brothers and the wood-chipper scene in Fargo,” he explains. “I started playing the... 

JOHN HIATT Have a little faith in him—this prolific elder statesman is still cranking it up John Hiatt just can’t understand the way some acts make albums. “You get a group like U2, who rent a place in Berlin for 10 grand a week,” he says. “You can’t write songs somewhere else? You’re gonna get the flavor of Berlin? What is that?” By contrast, the veteran singer-songwriter chose to record his new Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns at Ben... 

JOHN HIATT The Open Road [New West] From 1986’s Bring the Family forward, John Hiatt had a reputation for being rock’s poet laureate of complex contentedness, singularly gifted at chronicling the joys of family and sobriety in a way that still sounded complicated, messy, poetic and greasy. Even so, there were a few of us longtime fans who hankered for Hiatt to get back in touch with the more malcontented side he showed early in his career, and...