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in Palm Beach, Montreal, and Cologne, trailing him to better understand his routine—his vocal exercises, his preshow preparations—and I also talked to Keith, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood to find out what they would ask him. In our interviews, he went through the classic Stones albums track by track for the first time, he talked about his childhood, and he discussed the rewards and difficulties of his longtime partnership with Keith, whom he’s known since childhood. “When Keith was taking heroin, it was very difficult to work. He still was creative, but it took a long time. And everyone else was taking drugs and drinking a tremendous amount, too. And it affected everyone in certain ways. But I’ve never really talked to Keith about this stuff. So I have no idea what he feels. . . . I’m always second-guessing. I tell you something, I probably read it in Rolling Stone.”

In October of 2005, I went to Cancún, Mexico, to conduct the Rolling Stone Interview with Bono. I’d spent weeks preparing, speaking with the Edge and U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, to get their insights into Bono’s character, meeting with the editors here to hone my list of questions, going back through past interviews. In Cancún, in the bedroom of a house Bono and his wife, Ali, had rented with their family for a weeklong break from touring, we talked for ten hours. We talked about his faith and religious practice. We talked about how he’d developed as a performer. We went back and forth over his progress in debt relief for the third world and his campaign against AIDS in Africa, which had aligned him with the Bush administration. And I pushed him hard on his relationship with his father, a strong man with whom he’d clashed during his childhood. “Do you ever feel guilty about how you treated him?” I asked him. “No,” he said. “Not until I fucking met you!” Later, he would remember it as a moment of personal revelation. Bono is, without doubt, one of the most articulate and passionate figures in rock & roll. Still, he wasn’t content with his answers on some matters, so he came by the office two weeks later when U2 was in New York to play Madison Square Garden, and we spent two more hours going over details. The result was one of the finest interviews we’ve ever printed.

The Rolling Stone Interview does not confine itself to music. Over the years, Rolling Stone has earned a reputation for its innovative and in-depth coverage of politics, which I’m proud to say is both deeply informed and fervently committed. We’ve opposed America’s misguided wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, and long stood for gun control, protecting the environment, a sane and responsible drug policy and economic justice. When we interview politicians, we avoid the news cycle and gotcha questions. We deliver what the political press never has time for: an attempt to discover who these people are, what they’re like, and what were the experiences and beliefs that shaped their thinking. There have been three Rolling Stone Interviews with Bill Clinton, the first in 1992 during his first presidential campaign. It was informal—the candidate wore khakis and met Hunter S. Thompson, P. J. O’Rourke, William Greider and me at one of his favorite Little Rock spots, Doe’s Eat Place. The second took place in the White House dining room, and Clinton lost his temper, exploding over what he characterized as the “knee-jerk liberal press” continually questioning his commitment to his own ideals. “I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article,” he shouted. We did, and many others picked up the thundering rebuke in articles of their own. I asked Clinton about his temper in 2000, when I conducted the third interview (which you’ll find here) in the private residence at the White House and on Air Force One as the president was on his way to a campaign stop on behalf of Al Gore. “One of the things I had to learn,” Clinton said, “it took me almost my whole first term to learn it—was that, at some point, presidents are not permitted to have personal feelings. When you manifest your anger in public, it should