Day in Pop Report for 10/17/2014
Now, the full song "Push (Feeling Good on a Wednesday)," from the Oct. 8 episode "The Cissy," is available online. The track was billed as "Lorde"'s new single at the end of the episode. Except it's not sung by Lorde - instead it's Randy Marsh, the South Park character who, it turned out, was behind Lorde all along. Sort of. Through production elements he's able to change his voice on his laptop to sound far more akin to the singer's actual voice, though there's obviously still a bit of a disconnect since Lorde herself didn't contribute her voice to the show. Via the full track, it suddenly seems plausible that the track was recorded by fellow down-under pop star Sia; the voice sounds very familiar to hers. Read more and find out where to download here.
It comes after Thug expressed quite the interest in working with a man he considers an idol, even to the point where he's said he'd like to continue the Carter series legacy once Lil Wayne reportedly completes it after a final release this year. Should that end up the case, then the young rapper is certainly a worthy inheritor, judging by his first track with Weezy. The duo raps back and forth on the song, trading off verses over a moody, piano-filled beat produced by London on Da Track. Both have more of a singsong flow on the song, especially in Wayne's case. But once the song gets toward its second half, both rappers ramp up the energy, sometimes in a nearly shouted cadence. Listen here.
The latest trailer for the Hunger Games: The Mockingjay - Part 1 is out and it features Lorde's new song "Yellow Flicker Beat," written specifically for the film. Lorde offers the perfect soundtrack for Katniss Everdeen's return to her home, District 12, which is now a desolate wasteland. Creepy, yet comforting Lorde seems like the right fit to get Katniss all riled up. This is not the first time Lorde's written a song for Katniss. She offered up a cover of Tears For Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" for last year's Catching Fire soundtrack, which also featured Sia and Coldplay. This time around Lorde is curating the soundtrack, so get ready for more moody, sparse ballads. Check out the trailer here.
"I had a contract on her, I have a contract on her.. in spite of her going to sign with a different label," Wine explained. "In spite of her lying that she's not signed [to me], I took the high road. Even though contractually I could have just stopped it from the very beginning." He additionally claimed she had "betrayed" him by allegedly lying about not being signed to major labels. Wine said that he and Iggy entered into a common-law marriage while living together in Texas, which Wine intimates was part of the singer's attempt to become an American citizen. At some point they may or may not have become legally wedded. "We were moving to the more traditional stage of marriage," claimed Wine. "I was kind of slow to do that." Read more here.
While introducing the AMP Radio premiere of her latest track, the country-gone-pop-star vowed to share more music very soon. Next Friday, Oct. 24 at CBS Radio's We Can Survive show at the Hollywood Bowl, Swift will take the stage alongside Pharrell, Gwen Stefani, Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalea, Sia, Paramore, Alicia Keys and Lady Antebellum, performing new songs from her 1989 album, which is out a few days later. "It's amazing to get to be a part of it," Swift said of the show. "I'm going to be playing some new music that night, so lots of exciting things happening and of course, the idea that we're doing something that benefits surviving past breast cancer is really exciting to me." Read more here.
Among the new titles: the inquisitive "Where Do Broken Hearts Go," the most likely to get confused for a Scandinavian shout-out, "Stockholm Syndrome," the abstract "Spaces," and the blasphemous "Girl Almighty." Still about a month to go until the twelve album cuts and four bonus tracks are revealed to the masses of faithful One Directioners, which is bound to seem like the longest of their relatively short lives. Check out the track list, and watch the video announcement here.
"He defaulted to form as an abuser; his immediate reaction is to not just to sue her but sue her mother and Jack Rovner, the only two people who protect her," Geragos told Billboard. Rovner represents Kesha with Vector Management. "She's made efforts [to take legal action, but] she is not a confrontational person," Geragos said, speaking to People about the case. "The efforts were always met with psychological warfare and things of that ilk. "She finally got to a place where she is surrounded by people that are supportive enough that she felt like she could finally do it, and felt like she needed to do it. She just couldn't go on this way. Getting out of the contract is really secondary to extricating herself from his control." Read more here.
The trek will include headlining sets at Madison Square Garden in New York and The Forum in Los Angeles before wrapping up on Feb. 4 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver. "It's been my dream to play some of these venues," Smith said in a press release. "I'm so appreciative of how American audiences have embraced my music. I'm thrilled to come back to the U.S. again. This is starting to feel like home!" More including the dates here.
"We're country to the core but we like to incorporate our influences, have a good time and keep it fresh," Brian Kelley tells Radio.com. "It's that FGL sound, it's who we are." After they released their debut album, 2012's Here's to the Good Times, the duo were already thinking about their next album. Title track "Anything Goes" came to them just as they released Here's to the Good Times and they had it on hold for two years before they cut it for the new record. "We had been bumpin' that demo for so long, just fell in love with it. It was different, it was fresh, it was going to set the tone for this record," Kelley explains. "Throughout every song meeting it kept making it to the top of the list. It was a brand thing for us. It's just been the way we approach writing, our live show: 'Hey, anything goes. There's no rules. Let's make it as much fun as we can. A little weird here, a little crazy here.' That's our life; anything goes. It is just a bold statement of 'Hey, let's have a good time on tour.'" The energetic "Anything Goes," which was written by Felix McTeigue, Chris Tompkins and Craig Wiseman, fittingly kicks off the album and follows suit with new single "Sun Daze." The song, which has an island vibe reminiscent to something Kenny Chesney would cut, was written while FGL were on tour with Nelly and came together rather organically. "It just fell out of the sky," Hubbard admits. "We had just finished writing another song called 'Good Good' that is a song on the album. We were just messing around with this different beat [and] all of a sudden it just started happening. It's just one of those songs that BK says it best, 'You gotta thank the songwriting gods for that one.' It hit us and we wrote it real quick, finished it on Sunday. Just one of those songs we can't stop listening to." Read more here.
Now they're teaming up again, hoping to recapture the magic by working with a striking shade of "Electric Blue." The-Dream also appears on the slinky track, lending a few words to the chorus: "bring your a** over here, come and see about it," he murmurs. While the song's buzzy synths capture both artists' mid-'00s energy, the relaxed ambience and cooler chords indicate a late-career move towards maturation from both Scherzinger and T.I.P. That's not say they've slowed down. The Rubber Band Man's flow remains elastic as ever, slipping and sliding around the beat like a gymnast. Listen here.
All of the above, it seems, in the case of Nelly. The trailer for a new reality show about the life and times of Nelly has emerged, in the form of a 15-second snippet showing the St. Louis rapper waking up. It will be called Nelly Ville, a throwback to Nelly's second album Nellyville, the 14th best-selling rap album of all time. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the show will involve the rapper's attempts to balance his careers as a rap artist and a co-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats with his duties as a father. We will also watch Nelly navigate the treacherous waters of love with Miss Jackson, who, according to the press release, is Floyd Mayweather's ex-girlfriend. Watch the trailer here.
Dressed in jeans, a black shirt and his signature shades, Church reminisces about the "summer before the real world started" on the slower ballad. "We were laughing and living, drinking and wishing and thinking as that checkered flag was waving / Sure like to stay in Talladega," he sings alongside acoustic guitar. Church told Billboard.biz that the song has nothing to do with auto-racing. "It's really about life," he told the publication. "What you see on TV there has nothing to do really with racing. It's about that experience, whatever that is: the experience with the person next to you, and knowing that that's probably a finite time in your life. It's not gonna last forever." Watch the Tonight Show performance here.
Now she's switching it up and introducing the famous nae-nae to her routine, as she explained to presenters on an Australian TV show. "Twerking seems so yesterday," remarks her middle-aged interviewer, something with which Cyrus seems to agree. "I'm glad you know that, because some people are living in the past," she said, followed by an introduction to the nae nae, a dance based on raising one's arms and shimmying forward. She learned of the dance, whic was popularized on Vine by Atlanta dance crew #WeAreToonz, through her backup dancers, the L.A. Bakers. Read more here.
To celebrate, Fallon has now shared a YouTube supercut of fan covers. Wednesday night, after learning that he made the Billboard Hot 100, Fallon joked on The Tonight Show, "That means Ryan Seacrest has to play it on his radio show; he's forced to do it," before sharing his supercut of fans. A couple of seconds shorter, the supercut rendition consists of different fans singing a verse of the song. Ironically or not, many of them are teens - the demographic Fallon and will.i.am were making fun of in the original. Just like the original, the supercut has gone viral in its own right - in less than 24 hours, the supercut has racked up over 58,000 views. Watch it here.
The track, which also features OVO upstart ILoveMakonnen, is a wacky one-off about exactly what the title states - most of the lines are repetitions of "Syrup in My Soda." Riff Raff carries much of the track with self-praising verses like "Diamond grill / My face known in Nashville," before both he and ILoveMakonnen duet on the chorus. ILoveMakonnen finishes off the track strong with a long verse where he flexes his off-kilter voice. Listen here.
"The joke's on me and it ain't funny," Farr sings on the track, his new single off his currently untitled new album. "Everybody but me can see the punchline coming a mile away." The song comes to life in the video, where Farr first appears in the back room of a bar when he spots a beautiful blonde. As the video develops, we see Farr, who turns out to be the bartender, get behind the bar where he approaches the girl to see if she wants another beer. Throughout the video, the location changes back and forth where Farr is seen at the mic singing the song outside. As he heads back to do his job at the bar, which includes breaking up fights, the girl disappears only to be spotted in the corner talking to another guy. Read more here.
"No Better Blues" finds the young Chicago rapper particularly contemplative, unleashing a laundry list of things he hates: festivals, crowds, bars, most everything else you could think of. It is hard to say if Atmosphere's "Scapegoat" is a direct influence here, but there are definite parallels between the songs, with both coming off as much as spoken-word performance pieces than actual "rap." Chance's conclusion on this track is that "it don't get better," a truth we hope is set up for dramatic purposes, and not speaking directly to the artist's state of mind. He sure seems to love life when he's on stage. Check of "No Better Blues" here.
As you might expect for an album that's landing eight EPs later, there's a lot of fanfare surrounding it. Money Sucks, Friends Rule is a guest-heavy affair with contributions from Martin Garrix, Twista, Major Lazer, The Presets, and more - and today brings the first look at Francis' collaboration with the lead vocalist of Panic! At the Disco, Brendon Urie. "Love in the Middle of a Firefight" is a love-can-conquer-all kind of song, set to an electro-rock beat that's not far off from the kind of music Urie makes in his band. "This song was a dream come true to make w/ Brendon Urie from Panic! At The Disco�it's definitely one of my favorite songs on the album and I'm so happy I finally get to share it with the world!!!" Francis wrote on the song's YouTube page. "I hope this shows you how diverse all of my album is going to be!" Listen here.
"I got introduced to the world as Holler Annie with these two blondes beside me," she tells Radio.com of her bandmates Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe. "I feel like I had to get in a band, make history and kick down a door so I could walk through it as a solo artist�I'm an older artist and I could sit there and be like, 'Oh this should have happened.' No. If it didn't happen like this, you wouldn't have had this story to write or this song that so many people connect with. I feel like everything happened the way it was supposed to happen for me." Presley has no trouble speaking her mind and American Middle Class makes that clear. On each of the 12 tracks, she gives an honest portrayal of her life covering the moments that others may want to forget. On "Drunk," which Presley wrote with Sarah Siskind (who has written for Alison Krauss), she details the hurdles she faced during the "most horrific, tumultuous, part of my marriage," "I had gotten pregnant three months after knowing my ex-husband," she recalls. "We were both wild, living the artist lifestyle and I got pregnant and I grew up and he really struggled with it. He just couldn't do it. I went to write that day and I just started venting to [Siskind] because a lot of times writing appointments that's like our therapy. We can't really afford therapy at that stage in our career so we are literally each others' therapists." This writing session had Presley venting about her no-good drunk ex with exact words from her complaint finding their way into the song. "I'm in there and I'm going, 'I don't know. I've read all these books and I bought a nightgown.' He was a drinker. He loved his beer and he just couldn't figure out how to not do it," she explains. "'I buy the groceries, I wear my lipstick.' And [Siskind's] sitting there going, 'You know that's our song.' And I'm like, 'I'm not writing a song, I just came here to talk.'" While it felt good to get these things off her chest, Presley admits that she's worried to play the song for her seven-year-old son being that it's a "laundry list of how my marriage ended." "It's so scary to think about the day that he puts two and two together and he's like, 'Oh, daddy did that?'" she says. "I've always tried to be really honest with him." While sitting with Presley at a French bakery in the heart of Midtown, she even tells a "TMI" story about how she had to explain menstruation to her son after he found a tampon in her car. "He's like, 'What is this?' and I explained to him a woman's cycle," she says. "So I feel like that's how I'm going to handle it. 'Mommy and Daddy were young and wild and you were in Mommy's tummy and Daddy didn't have a baby in his tummy and it took him longer to be a grownup.' I think I just figured it out in this interview. That sounded pretty good to me." Another song that strikes a chord is "Pain Pills," which Presley says is a protest song about the struggle coal mining communities face with prescription medication, specifically Oxycontin. It's something that hits close to home for the singer. "I started [that song] as I was on my way home from a funeral," she says. "A friend of mine from high school OD'd [and] at the funeral the mom was walking in going, 'Oh they had a heart problem. It was a heart issue.' We knew what was going on. This is when I realized, this is starting to become a problem." Presley gets emotional when she talks of the song and the "hush-hush culture" that surrounds prescription drug addiction in her small hometown of Beauty, K.Y., where she says the problem is worse than most other places in the country. It took her four years to finish writing "Pain Pills" and once she did she learned of a family member who was suffering with the same pills she's singing about. "Addiction has really changed the face of my personal life and a lot of things in my family. That song just haunts me," she says. "If there's anything I would get up on a soapbox for, it's prescription medication. I just think it's a travesty how careless doctors are with that stuff. It still happens. You don't hand a 16-year-old a bottle of heroin and say, 'Here you go. Just quit taking these after 12.' Let's start talking about it, let's get some resources, let's get some help." Husband, manager and co-producer Jordan Powell says American Middle Class is a project where it feels like they "caught lighting in a bottle." While tracks like "Grocery Store" talk about real life and how "everybody's got something that they're searching for," others like "Surrender" showcase Presley's vulnerability. "I'm hardheaded and it's hard for me to ask for help," she sings on the album closer where she speaks of hitting rock bottom and finally accepting personal weakness, a vulnerability similar to which Powell finds in the Pistol Annies'. Read more here.
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