B Sides for 10/09/2014
The show was the third stop of a 7-date theatre tour of North America for the singer as he launches his latest release, "lullaby and...The Ceaseless Roar." Plant's Booklyn sets included three songs from the project alongside a host of reworked Led Zeppelin classics. "lullaby..." recently landed a US Top 10 debut for the singer, as the project entered the Billboard 200 at No. 10 with opening week sales of 29,000 copies. The album marks Plant's third straight top 10, following 2010's "Band Of Joy" and 2007's "Raising Sand" (with Alison Krauss). Watch the video here.
The event marked the debut of Trixter guitarist Steve Brown in the band's lineup while Vivian Campbell undergoes a stem cell transplant this fall in his ongoing battle with cancer. Def Leppard performed "Animal", "Let's Get Rocked" and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" at Wembley as NFL cheerleaders danced around the field. Up next, the UK rockers will play three casino shows in California at the end of October. Watch the video footage here.
Godin recently stopped by Grantland contributor Brian Koppelman's "The Moment with Brian Koppelman" podcast, where he shared his thoughts on the two iconic artists in the hour-long episode, Dylan framed as an artist for whom the "search has never ended" in terms of taking risks by Koppelman. "Bob is a working artist, he's not Jim Morrison," Godin said. "Jim Morrison wasn't a professional, Jim Morrison was an amateur hack who a lot of people admired because he was willing to die in front of us, but he was not a professional. If he was a professional, he'd still be around." Godin was likely talking about Morrison's professional conduct rather than his output though because, on paper, the Doors were slightly more prolific than Bob Dylan during their active years. Read more here.
"That's a song I wrote as a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan, who I've always been a huge fan of," says Seger. "I remember the last time I saw Stevie: it was at an Eric Clapton concert and he traded solos with Eric on 'Before You Accuse Me', the old blues song - he did it for like 15 minutes - and it was probably my favorite guitar hero moment of all-time. They were playing so good." "So I went backstage," Seger continued. "I've known Stevie for a while and Eric� told him how much I loved it and then, unfortunately, three weeks later he died in a helicopter crash." "I really tried to write this song as if I was trying to channel Stevie," he added. "I was trying to write a song he might have written; that's the whole point of it." Check out the song preview here.
The band also manage to throw in snippets of two songs including "Something From Nothing," a gentle rocker previously teased in a previous trailer which has Grohl singing, "Here lies a city on fire / singing along / the arsonist choir / and I here I go." Later they tease a song called "Feast and the Famine," which transports Grohl back to his hardcore days in D.C. singing "Amen!" over and over. To watch the trailer you'll have to have an HBO Go log-in, or have a friend who will lend you theirs. Read more here.
Available on DVD, Blu-ray and CD, the event featured rock legends including Rick Wakeman, Micky Moody, Joe Brown and Alfie Boe. Lord passed away July 16, 2012 at the age of 71 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. With Purple, Lord co-wrote many of the group's legendary songs, including "Smoke On The Water," and played with many bands and musicians throughout his career. Jon's solo work was universally acclaimed when he eventually retired from Deep Purple in 2002. Watch the video here.
After stopping by The Tonight Show, Rivers Cuomo and co. brought their classic era sound to Jimmy Kimmel Live. Performing in front of a banner showing the album's yeti artwork, it felt like no time had passed since they released their classic Blue and Green self-titled albums. Not only did the band wear clothes that look like they came from the back of their closets, circa 1994, they also played a track that could have come from that time, "Ain't Got Nobody." Weezer will be taking their throwback album and look on the road soon, embarking on a handful of shows where they'll perform Everything Will Be Alright in the End in full. Watch it here.
Surrounding the success lurks something darker. In front of a packed house outside Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, singer Oliver Sykes took the mic and confessed he's been in rehab for a month combating a ketamine addiction. "I was on it for years. My band wanted to kill me, my parents wanted to kill me, my brother wanted to kill me, everyone wanted to take me to hell but they didn't. They stood by me, they supported me through all that s-t and we wrote Sempiternal because of it." Radio.com caught up with Sykes and the band's newest member, Jordan Fish, backstage before a performance at the historic Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The two were refreshingly opinionated and thought-provoking. Sykes explained the album's synth-heavy hit song "Can You Feel My Heart" started out as a much darker track. "We always wanted it to be the first track on the album," said Sykes. "We just kept going over and over and over." It wasn't until they added the "skippy vocals," that it started to take shape and stand apart from the rest. "That's when we said this is cool, this is different. We always dug the song and the direction but to get it to be the first song on the album it had to be perfect." One song that beckoned an explanation was "Antivist," a track in which Sykes demands the listener to question everything, and more importantly, think through heavy topics before choosing a point of view. "You can't tell people eating meat is wrong and eat it yourself," says Sykes. "You can't have a go at all the massive oil companies and then drive a car. I see people saying Apple is destroying the earth and yet they're tweeting it from their iPhone. We're just living in a mad world where people think they've got the right to say any old s-t without thinking twice." Read more and watch the interview here.
The Welsh-born Canadian bluesman recently said: "In some ways I went full circle since my parents played Clapton and Dire Straits when I was growing up. I heard nothing but the best then - and that's what I'm trying to do today." Sayce last month released a video for his track Fade Into You. He tours the UK in November. You can find those tour dates and watch the track by track video here.
Frontman Josh McMorran says of the album: "From a musical perspective it has been a completely natural progression. We haven't become more melodic or more brutal - we've enhanced all aspects of the sound we had built up on the first album. "It's a huge step up in technical ability and songwriting prowess without changing the music enough to alienate our current fans. The album is all about beating your demons and making something of the time you have on Earth while battling the ever-lasting struggles and trials that come with being human." Check out the video here.
Radio.com: Your book Hell: My Life in the Squirrel Nut Zippers, about your time in the band and the aftermath of "Hell" just came out. Is there any stone left unturned? Tom Maxwell: Of course there is. There's the stuff that I don't want to tell anybody, and there's the stuff that I don't want to tell anybody and the stuff that I don't remember or wasn't there for, really good stories I have no doubt. Then there's my memory of the stuff and I don't even know if that's�it's like a Fellini film. And then there's all the stuff that happened after I ended the book. So we're in a field of stones, my friend! [laughs] Have you heard from former bandmates at all? [Zippers guitarist/saxophonist] Ken Mosher called me and said it made him cry. In a good way! He said he really liked it. You underline several times that you had no idea it would be singled out to be a hit. Was that true even from a novelty standpoint? Oh yeah, that's probably the truest thing I've ever written. For one thing, just given where radio was at that time�.we didn't even think like that. If you looked over the playlist from KROQ at that time, there was no room for us. We weren't really capable of sitting around and calculating, um, the degree to which we'd be able to write a novelty song. I wrote it because we needed a closer. We needed an uptempo songs to close our sets. Crowds really liked it�but crowds really liked us! And I was happy for them to like it. Other than record people telling you that's the song they were pushing, there was no insight into- Oh no, the record label didn't push it! That was never released as a single. What happened was the label rep in California went to KROQ and wouldn't stop bugging them about it. Tom Osborn was the guy's name. And he was just, "Please play this. Please play this. Please play this." And he just knew it. He knew it. The label tried to work "Put a Lid on It" as a single, and I don't think it did super awesome. But this guy Osborn goes on his own and harangues these people, and they go all right, all right, and they play it as a joke, on like, the lunch show. And then the phones go crazy. And we're like, what? I don't think the label imagined in their most fervent prayers, that we would go top 20. What did you clear up the most with this book? Oh my god, I have no idea. I don't know if there's anything to clear up. I think it's just, who are these people, how did this whole thing get started, what were the mechanics of it? And how improbable the whole thing was. We recorded the Hot record in New Orleans in six days. And it did pretty well and I think we sold scores of thousands of copies. And for us, that was better than the first record, so everything was groovy were happy. And we were in the middle of recording our third record when "Hell" broke as a single. It got all these great reviews. Pitchfork! Read more here.
Waiting has a few different inspirations. I started writing it about 6 months after I had released my last album, Little Red Box. I was looking to go in a slightly different direction from where it was at. I was listening to more alternative rock and alt pop music. So musically it has a bit of that influence. I came up with the drums first then added a mixture of jazz rock and pop in the chord voicings. I also used an Arp 2600 synth from the 70s, along with an electric piano. For the bass, I called my ConFunkShun band mate, Eric EQ Young, who is an amazing funk bass player. He seemed to know exactly what I wanted and what the song needed. So he introduced that heavy melodic solid bass part. Of course, I had to add some tasty percussion because I'm a percussionist and it's my goal to re-introduce real percussion to popular music. At least in all of MY music! There's also a hint of country music too. I grew up listening to all this stuff and it just came out while writing this song. The story of writing the lyrics came from when I used to rent DVDs from my local video store, before it closed sadly. I would rent ones I had never seen before but weren't current. One day I rented August Rush and it inspired the lyrics to Waiting. Just like the movie, Waiting is about someone trying to find their light in the world, their success. In an autobiographical sense, it's about a person who has been trying to make it but for one reason or another hasn't found their stride, mainly because of themselves. It tells a story of someone who has decided to stop letting their inhibitions get in the way of living life to the fullest. That was me several years ago. The first lyric line of the song "There's a burning ember deep down in my soul, it's better late and found than never at all" is a combination of the way I feel and the way the main character in the movie felt. The song in a way tells the story of me searching for my groove in life and finally finding my path, my voice. While I am still growing and learning, I feel like I'm really hitting my stride in my career and that things are really happening because I've found my voice. Anyway, I hope that Waiting inspires the listener to find their voice and not let fear keep them from living their full potential. I hope you enjoy the rest of my "Love Is" album. Thanks so much for asking me to tell this story. Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album right here!
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