Month: May 2014

Queen to Release New Album, Unreleased Freddie Mercury Songs

In an interview Friday with BBC Wales, Queen guitarist Brian May revealed the iconic rock band would be releasing a new collection of music later this year that will include previously unreleased songs sung by Freddie Mercury.

“We found a few more tracks with Freddie singing and all of us playing and they are quite beautiful,” May said, speaking with radio host Wynne Evans. “It is a compilation but will have this material that nobody in the world has ever heard. I think people will really enjoy it.”

May said the album’s title will probably be “Queen Forever” and should see release towards the end of the year.

“Most of it comes from the ’80s when we were in full flight,” May continued. “It is quite emotional. It is the big, big ballads and the big, big epic sound. It wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t have done this restoration job. We had to start from scratch because we only had scraps. But knowing how it would have happened if we had finished it, I can sit there and make it happen with modern technology.”

Last year, May revealed news on released Mercury and Michael Jackson collaborations that would see the light of day. No word whether that material will make it on this “Queen Forever” collection.

Queen will hit the road for its first full North American tour in nearly a decade, fronted by singer Adam Lambert. The tour starts June 19 in Chicago and ends July 28 in Toronto before the band heads to Australia for dates there.

Bon Jovi Celebrate Three Decades With Extensive ‘New Jersey’ Reissue

Bon Jovi will celebrate 30 years of living in sin with a massive catalog reissue campaign that kicks off July 1st with a remastered edition of their 1988 album, New Jersey. That record, which reached Number One on the Top 200, contained five singles, including the “Bad Medicine,” “I’ll Be There for You,” “Lay Your Hands on Me” and “Living in Sin.” The new version of the record will appear in three iterations, a single disc reissue, a two disc deluxe edition, and two CD, or a two CD/one DVD super deluxe edition, the latter two packed with bonus material.

The two-disc deluxe edition will feature three bonus cuts initially released as B sides, as well as 13 previously unreleased demos from the New Jersey recording sessions that were originally intended to appear on a double-LP titled Sons of Beaches. The deluxe edition will also come with a 32-page booklet filled with insider commentary on the bonus cuts and rare photos from the New Jersey recording sessions and ensuing world tour.

Meanwhile, the super deluxe edition includes a 60-page softcover book and the behind-the-scenes documentary, Access All Areas: A Rock & Roll Odyssey, directed by Wayne Isham, who chronicled Bon Jovi’s 16-month, 26-country New Jersey world tour, including their legendary show at Lenin Stadium in Moscow. The footage was initially released in 1990 on VHS, and this marks the first time it will appear on DVD. It includes the seven music videos Isham directed for New Jersey as extras.

While Bon Jovi continue to tour the world and record — they released their 12th studio album What About Now last year, and even saw their hit “Livin’ on a Prayer” return to the Billboard charts — they’ve promised to release more 30th anniversary material this year, including new collections of studio and live recordings.

R.E.M. Issue Massive Compilations of More Than 150 Rarities

Following the release of R.E.M.’s “complete” Unplugged performances, the now defunct group has gone deep into its archives to offer “complete” packages of their discography for digital release, including over 150 rare songs. In addition to bundles of the albums they released on both I.R.S. Records and Warner Bros. on iTunes, the alt-rock trailblazers have compiled two complementary packages of hard-to-find recordings. The Complete Rarities: I.R.S. 1982-1987 offers 25 non-album tracks from their early days, while The Complete Rarities: Warner Bros: 1988-2011 contains 131. Both are available on Amazon as well as iTunes.

The I.R.S. set features studio B sides like “White Tornado” and “Voice of Harold,” in-studio covers of bands like the Velvet Underground (“There She Goes Again,” “Pale Blue Eyes”) and their contribution to the Bachelor Party soundtrack (“Windout”). Meanwhile, the Warner Bros. collection features live and studio covers (from Iggy Pop to the Ohio Players), live tracks (“Losing My Religion” in Rome from 1992 and “Bang and Blame” on Saturday Night Live), alternate mixes (a “Dance to the Music” take on “Shiny Happy People”), non-album tracks (“Fretless,” “Arms of Love”), instrumental versions (“Orange Crush”), soundchecks and more.

All of the releases, including the regular album bundles, are “Mastered for iTunes” editions. Also notable is the fact that the new digital offerings include the group’s debut EP, Chronic Town, which remains unavailable on CD.

The group recorded the latter release in 1982, establishing its jangly college-rock style and frontman Michael Stipe’s idiosyncratic vocal approach. It is available to purchase individually on iTunes, as well as part of the Complete I.R.S. Studio Albums bundle (which also includes 1983’s Murmur, 1984’s Reckoning, 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, 1986’s Life’s Rich Pageant and the band’s double-platinum 1987 commercial breakout, Document).

A separate set of the band’s Warner Bros. era albums contains the band’s first five albums for that label: Green (1988), Out of Time (1991), Automatic for the People (1992), Monster (1994) and New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996). The five subsequent R.E.M. albums (including their 2011 swan song, Collapse Into Now) are available individually.

Earlier this week, bassist Mike Mills told Billboard that the band had “a lot of stuff in the vaults,” though because the interview was in the context of the Unplugged reissues, it’s unclear whether he was referring to the music released on the just-released rarity comps or further previously unreleased recordings. “We all want to do something with this stuff,” he said. “We know we’ve got some really good things hanging around. We just want to put them out in a way that makes them as special as possible, because they’re special to us. I mean, if we’ve been sitting on stuff for this long, why go cheap with it now? Let’s try to make it be special rather than just dumping out the vaults.”

R.E.M. Has a ‘Lot of Stuff in the Vaults’

The defunct band packages its complete “Unplugged” sessions, with plans to make future releases special. “I mean, if we’ve been sitting on stuff for this long, why go cheap with it now?” says Mike Mills

A continuing series of vault-trolling archival releases, with more on the horizon, have made it easier to cope with R.E.M.’s abrupt 2011 split, according to the group’s Mike Mills.

“It’s nice in the sense that it keeps our breakup from being a cold, hard ending,” Mills tells Billboard. “It softens the landing a little bit. It’s like, no, I don’t get to record with Peter (Buck), Bill (Berry) and Michael (Stipe) anymore, but we get to just remind ourselves of how much fun we had.”

R.E.M. has released deluxe editions of most of its albums, expanded to include unreleased studio and live material. The group’a latest project is “Unplugged: The Complete 1991 and 2001 Sessions,” taken from its two MTV “Unplugged” appearances. The 33-song set, which features 11 songs that were never broadcast, came out on vinyl for this year’s Record Store Day and will be released on CD and digital download on May 20.

“They’ve been sitting there for awhile, and I guess we just never thought there was a right time to release them until recently,” says Mills, who signed copies of the vinyl edition at Bull Moose Music Warehouse in Portland, Maine on Record Store Day. “We’ve always supported Record Store Day, and it just seemed like a perfect match-up of stuff that we had and stuff that they needed. And it’s good to put it out as we wish to let it out; bootlegs are great and I love ’em, but it’s nice to put your stuff out in a way that you would like to have it presented.”

Mills says going through the “Unplugged” material brought back good memories, though he says that preparing songs in that format “really wasn’t very difficult. The way we wrote…the songs can hold up to being done in a stripped-down manner, without all the volume or the studio bells and whistles. We just take all our instruments and make them acoustic; it was literally that simple. It didn’t take a whole lot of reworking, but we did see it as a challenge to take these songs that people pretty much knew only in an electric format and have them work acoustically.”

Mills says R.E.M. hasn’t decided yet what its next archival release will be, but he’s confident it won’t be long before the discussion starts.

“We have a lot of stuff in the vaults, a fair amount of stuff that’s never been released,” Mills confirms. “We all want to do something with this stuff. We know we’ve got some really good things hanging around. We just want to put them out in a way that makes them as special as possible, because they’re special to us. I mean, if we’ve been sitting on stuff for this long, why go cheap with it now? Let’s try to make it be special rather than just dumping out the vaults.”

Mills — who’s currently playing with the Baseball Project and the New Professionals and is planning a “combination of classical and rock ‘n’ roll” project — says he runs into Buck and Stipe “at all kinds of places” and stays in touch with Berry by phone. But, he assures us, R.E.M.’s resolve in being broken up has not wavered. “We’re all happy pretty much as clams,” Mills says. “Everybody’s busy and really having a great time. It’s a nice relief in a way; as much fun as it was, it’s nice to not have to be on the hamster wheel anymore.”