Devon Ivie

Devon Ivie is a staff writer at Vulture and New York Magazine who covers the music industry with a particular focus on contemporary and classic rock, using interviews, columns, and reported features to connect artists’ catalogs with the stories and institutions around them. Her coverage stands out for the way she treats songs and careers as narrative arcs, asking artists to revisit their own histories while she digs into the lore, power structures, and archival material that shape rock and pop culture.

Rock-and-roll column work and musical lore

Ivie writes a recurring rock-and-roll-centered column, On That Note, which is described as diving into the big stories and trends around the genre. The column gives her room to tackle eccentric questions and long-running bits of music-world lore, such as her piece about Daryl Hall and John Oates that asks, in detail, “But Did Daryl Hall Get John Oates’s Kidney?”, using a single strange anecdote as an entry point into the duo’s shared history and image. Across this work she uses reported narrative rather than simple news updates, following threads through past interviews, industry context, and fan memory to explain how myths and rumors take hold around major rock figures. The emphasis is on explaining how the rock canon is built and maintained, and on showing that behind familiar names there are unresolved stories, contradictions, and human relationships that continue to shape how audiences hear the music.

Career-spanning conversations with artists

A major part of Ivie’s music beat is a series of long-form conversations in which artists evaluate the best, worst, and most misunderstood music of their careers. In her interview with Dolly Parton on “the Most Prolific and Invigorating Music of Her Career,” she has Parton walk through key albums and songs, stressing where creative breakthroughs happened and what phases still feel vital to her. Similar pieces with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes, Paul Stanley of Kiss, and “Weird Al” Yankovic ask each artist to single out the most vindicating, misunderstood, or formative work in their catalogs, framing the discussion around artistic pride, missed connections with audiences, and the tension between commercial success and personal favorites.

These interviews often highlight deep cuts or unexpected choices alongside obvious hits, which lets Ivie move a conversation away from standard promotional talking points and into craft, regret, and long-term perspective. She applies the same approach to bands with evolving sounds, as in her piece with Haim about where they think the future of rock is going, using their own singles and albums as examples of how younger artists ingest classic rock and pop influences. Through these features she positions herself as an interlocutor who understands discographies and fan cultures well enough to ask specific, catalog-driven questions, while still leaving space for artists to narrate their own development and internal debates.

Respecting the classics and digging into archives

Ivie also writes about legacy acts and the people around them, often under Vulture’s “Respect the Classics” umbrella. Her story on Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager, focuses on the forthcoming publication of his archives and the circumstances of his tragic death, using his life to explore how nonperformers shape legendary bands’ day-to-day existence and recorded history. Pieces like this emphasize archival documents, long-delayed releases, and the way materials left behind—notes, tapes, photographs—can change or deepen the way listeners understand canonical artists.

She brings a similar sensibility to work on figures like Warren Zevon, where she has written about “The Best and Funniest of Warren Zevon, According to David Letterman,” highlighting how one prominent fan curates Zevon’s catalog and public persona. In other features on acts such as Blue Öyster Cult and R.E.M., she engages front people and close observers on specific songs and performances that have become cult favorites or recurring touchstones, framing them as essential to the emotional and cultural life of the bands even when they are not their biggest hits. Taken together, these stories show Ivie’s interest in the infrastructure of rock history—managers, archivists, talk-show hosts, and critics—alongside the artists themselves.

Institutions, television, and broader pop culture

Beyond individual artists, Ivie covers music institutions, especially the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, where she is one of the people with a vote on inductees and discusses her ballot and its implications in broadcast interviews and panel conversations. Her participation in Rock Hall-focused programming, where she talks through who should be inducted in future years and why, underscores an interest in how official recognition intersects with genre, influence, and commercial success. She approaches these debates with the same detailed attention to catalog and history that appears in her artist interviews, treating induction arguments as a way to talk about what “rock and roll” means in different eras.

Ivie’s bylines also extend into television and narrative pop culture. She has written critically about fictional portrayals of journalism, including a piece on Rory Gilmore’s career in a revival series that uses the character’s arc to argue for better depictions of reporting on screen. She has covered live events such as Vulture Festival conversations with Rachel Bloom, blending coverage of TV comedy with discussion of creative process and fan engagement. Her television writing is cataloged as reviews and previews on platforms that aggregate criticism, reflecting a parallel strand of work where she applies her narrative and industry-focused style to screen stories as well as music.

Across these different formats—columns, interviews, archival features, and institutional coverage—Devon Ivie’s work is defined by a consistent attention to how stories and reputations are made: in the studio, on stage, in rumor, and through the decisions of gatekeepers and fans over time.