Category: Music

Rare Prince album getting reissue

Prince’s rare The Versace Experience album is getting a full release, three years after the singer’s death.

The project was first released on numbered cassettes and handed out to people who attended the Versace display at Paris Fashion Week in July, 1995. Back then, the record was intended as a preview of Prince’s then-new album Gold, and featured exclusive remixes of Eye Hate U, Gold and P Control, as well as rare music by his band The New Power Generation.

Now, fans will be able to get their own copy, along with two other albums that are being reissued — Emancipation and Chaos And Disorder, which was the final album of new music Prince released as part of his contract with Warner Bros in 1996.

Before his death, Prince had refused to reissue the album because it marked the end of his contentious relationship with the label.

Meanwhile, triple album Emancipation was released in November 1996, just four months after Chaos And Disorder. Both albums are being released on vinyl for the first time.

All three albums will be available to fans on Sept. 20.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ movie makes magic for Queen as music sales soar

British rock band Queen sold more albums in North America than any other artist in the first half of 2019, as music featured in movies and television sent streaming and downloads soaring.

A midyear report by Nielsen Music released on Thursday said the soundtrack to the musical Bohemian Rhapsody, which won four Oscars in February, was the best-selling rock title of the first six months of 2019, with Queen’s Greatest Hits 1 compilation coming in second.

Queen sold more than 731,000 albums — more than any other artist — as well as the most digital songs with more than 1.3 million downloads, Nielsen said.

Queen in February became the first rock band to open the Oscars when it kicked off the annual ceremony in Hollywood with a live performance of We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions.

Lady Gaga and actor-director Bradley Cooper’s steamy performance on the Oscars stage of their winning duet Shallow from A Star is Born also sent sales soaring. The romantic ballad has seen some 648,000 digital song downloads so far this year, the report said.

The Elton John biopic Rocketman fueled a 138% gain in album sales for the British singer-songwriter in the first week after the movie’s release on May 31.

Rapper Post Malone’s collaboration with Swae Lee on the song Sunflower shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts in January after being featured in the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

The song saw a 170% increase in radio play, and the video had been viewed more than 642 million times on YouTube.

Whitney Houston is coming for your summer playlist with her new (yes, new!) song of the summer

If you listen close to the music wafting off the beach this summer, you may hear a voice you haven’t heard in a while: Whitney Houston.

The singer, who died seven years ago, will grace our lives once again with a remix of her 1990 cover “Higher Love” — fitting right in with all of the best dance bops of the summer.

Houston’s cover of Steve Winwood’s 1986 hit track was released as a bonus cut on the Japan release of her third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight.
Legendary music producer Clive Davis told Rolling Stone he didn’t want Houston ” being a cover artist at that time.”
“The only place it was released was as a bonus cut in Japan,” he said.

Her version of the song wasn’t widely heard.

But now, with a collaboration between Houston’s estate and Kygo, both the song and Whitney are back, and, some might say, better than ever.

In May, Houston’s estate announced a new hologram tour , as well as a new deal with Primary Wave Publishing, which could also mean new projects like a new album and maybe even a musical. If you weren’t planning on having a hot girl summer before, you’re definitely having one now.

WHY DID JEFF LYNNE ADD ‘BRUCE’ TO ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA’S ‘DON’T BRING ME DOWN’?

You’ve probably listened to the Electric Light Orchestra’s Top 5 1979 hit “Don’t Bring Me Down” and thought: So, who’s Bruce? After all, singer-songwriter Jeff Lynne calls out his name right after the song’s title line.
But there was no Bruce. Lynne used a made-up place-keeper word when the song was still unfinished, only learning later that it perhaps had an actual translation in another language.

“When I was singing it, there was gap in the vocals, so I just shouted out ‘groose,'” Jeff Lynne told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It was a word that came to my head.”

And thus was born another mondegreen — the word given to misheard lyrics that perhaps make sense but are, in fact, completely wrong. (“Mondegreen,” by the way, is itself a mondegreen: The American writer Sylvia Wright misheard a line of 18th-century poetry as “Lady Mondegreen,” when it was actually “laid him on the green.”) The term was created in the ’50s, and then popularized more recently by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll.

Released on 1979’s Discovery, “Don’t Bring Me Down” made its own kind of history as the first Electric Light Orchestra song without any strings. Lynne did more than ad lib this one line; in fact, he improvised the whole thing.

“I made up [‘Don’t Bring Me Down’] in the studio, and I play all the instruments,” Lynne told Rolling Stone. It starts with a drum loop from another song” — “On the Run,” also from Discovery — “that I sped up. I then compressed the shit out of it.”

As usual, Lynne didn’t present the lyrics until the end. Everything else — even some background singing — was typically recorded before the lead vocal, which was the last thing added.

So, why keep a lyric that was never meant to stay? “The engineer was German and he said, ‘How did you know that word?'” Lynne recalled during a 2001 episode of VH1’s Storytellers. “And I said: ‘What word?’ And he said, ‘Gruss. It means “greetings” in German.’ I said, ‘That’s good. I’ll leave it in.'”

Only ELO engineer Reinhold Mack remembers it quite differently.

“As there was a plan for ELO to start a concert tour in Australia, the song was originally titled ‘Don’t Bring Me Down, Bruce,’ Mack told Sound on Sound in 2013. “This was meant to be a joke, referring to how many Australian guys are called Bruce.”

Mack says a new word was actually added later. “We couldn’t leave it like that, so eventually we replaced it with ‘gruss,’ based on the Bavarian greeting Grüß Gott — ‘greet God.’ Gruss, not Bruce, is what you hear in the song immediately following the title line. A bit like Freddie Mercury joking around at the end of Queen’s [1985 single] ‘One Vision,’ singing ‘fried chicken.'”

After getting a complete take, Lynne typically set about adding a punishing series of overdubs, but this song was different. “It was pretty much done in a day,” Mack noted. “That’s because it’s a very simple, straightforward track — especially compared to the complexity that Jeff usually went for, and clearly people liked it.”

“Don’t Bring Me Down” became the biggest hit ELO ever had on their own in the U.S., topped only by a collaborative single with Olivia Newton-John on “Xanadu,” from the 1980 movie of the same name.

By the time ELO got out on the road in support of Discovery, a new phenomenon was sweeping through the audience — and not just in Australia. “When I went onstage with it,” Lynne told Rolling Stone, “everyone would sing ‘Bruce.'” At first, Lynne stuck to his guns, singing his once-thought-invented, now-maybe-German word instead.

Eventually, however, he caved. “I said ‘Ah, fuck it,'” Lynne told VH1, “I’ll sing ‘Bruce’ as well!”

Netflix expected to premiere Beyoncé special shrouded in secrecy

It took just one word for Netflix to send Beyoncé fans into a full-on freak out.

The streaming giant on Sunday posted on its social media channels a yellow image with the word Homecoming across it. The only other information was a date: April 17.

That’s when Netflix is expected to premiere a Beyoncé special that may feature her performances at last year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Though Netflix declined to share any more information, the font and colour and of the announcement was the same as Beyoncé’s was for her Coachella appearance.

Beyonce also last year launched a scholarship program dubbed the Homecoming Scholars Award Program.

The singer is known for debuting new work shrouded in secrecy. No details were announced before her 2016 HBO special Lemonade.

Rihanna Confirms Her New Album Will Be Out in 2019

It’s been almost three years since Rihanna fans have been graced with an album by the singer, and it looks as though the wait for a follow-up to Anti may soon be over.

On Friday (Dec. 21) she responded to a fan who commented on an Instagram post of a new Fenty product asking “But when is the album dropping Robyn? Can we have a release date for that?” with a simple “2019.”

No further details were released.

Her vocal producer Kuk Harrell teased the new album earlier this week, promising it’s “incredible” and “amazing” before adding that “that’s all I’m going to say.”

Paul Williams on Creating the Music for ‘Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas’ as the Henson Special Moves to Theaters

A vintage holiday television program is getting the big screen treatment this Christmas season, as Fathom Events presents Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas as part of Jim Henson’s Holiday Special, set to be beamed into theaters across the country this Sunday (Dec. 16).

It is only the latest sign that the warm holiday tale, almost forgotten by the public at large, has become a word-of-mouth Christmas tradition that continues to grow in popularity each year.

It’s an odd turnaround in fortune that even the legendary names behind Emmet could never have predicted. Based on a book by Russell and Lillian Hoben, the tale of Emmet Otter — a poor, young critter who has recently lost his father, and hopes to win a talent contest in order to use the cash prize to buy a Christmas present for his mother — featured a fantastical cast of woodland puppets courtesy of Henson, with original music created by Oscar-winning songwriter Paul Williams.

While the outpouring of love that Williams has received for his work on Emmet in the past few years has stunned him, it was the recent success of the soundtrack album that truly floored him. Jim Henson’s Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (Varese Sarabande) finally saw its first proper release in any format this past November, including a limited vinyl pressing for Record Store Day that sold out nationally within two days, and was the top seller at Amoeba Music in Hollywood.

“I’m just amazed at how many people showed up to buy it nationally,” Williams tells Billboard with a laugh. “The remastering for the album was just brilliant, and they made a really well-balanced little record out of it.”

Points out Cheryl Henson, president of the Jim Henson Foundation, “The show was first broadcast on HBO in 1978 when not many people had [the cable channel] back then, so there are a lot of people who have only just discovered it many years later. There’s never really been a licensing program around it.”

“It’s funny, because if you were to put everything that’s happened with it — the vinyl selling out everywhere within two days; such a demand for it that another pressing has been ordered already — into a movie, people would call bullshit on it for being too corny,” Williams adds. “It’s a tribute to Jim Henson, a tribute to all the heart he put into this.”

Heart, yes, but also a willingness to allow other creative minds to follow their own muses while working on the project. The one-hour Christmas special was the first collaboration between Henson, who died in 1990, and Williams, a partnership that would go on to see the songwriter receive an Academy Award nomination for The Muppet Movie’s “Rainbow Connection” in 1980.

“He trusted the people he brought onto a project,” Williams states, “but he trusted his instincts, too. He felt that, if he brought a creative soul onto a project to work on it, he wanted that soul to be heard. It was a rare, beautiful experience to work with him.”

The songwriter rewarded that trust by writing songs for the Emmet soundtrack that could only be performed honestly when coming from an otter made of cloth. Tunes such as “Ain’t No Hole in the Washtub” and “The Bathing Suit That Grandma Wore” would have been a hard sell to another singer if Henson had turned them down, but Williams’ approach to creating the lyrics for his first project with Henson would go on to be the same that he took when writing for any film project.

“I wrote for the characters,” explains Williams. “It wasn’t like when I would write a song for the Carpenters, and if they turned it down, I would turn around and pitch it to Three Dog Night. When I would write for characters, I considered [Muppet Show member] Gonzo to be just as well-defined as Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born, with little difference when it came to writing the material. How it was sung is up to the [person] performing.”

That authenticity reverberates with viewers, according to Cheryl Henson.

“When people watch something like Emmet Otter, it’s something that they can actually imagine reaching out and touching,” she says. “The show itself is all handmade, so when looking at a little critter, you realize that someone actually hand sewed the little dress it’s wearing. My dad was born in Mississippi, and that whole Southern tradition of music was really tapped into by Paul, with the jug band music having such a great handmade quality to it also.”

“I still don’t know why he chose me to provide the songs for Emmet Otter,” Williams admits to Billboard, “because it certainly wasn’t typical of what I was doing at that time. I think between writing [Three Dog Night’s 1971 hit] ‘An Old Fashioned Love Song’ — which I know he loved — and the humorous appearances I was making across TV at that time, he just connected me with the project. He gave me the opportunity, and it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.”

Norah Jones on new song ‘Wintertime’ and her next chapter: ‘That whole album cycle push, I’m not up for it’

With over 50 million album sales and nine Grammys, Norah Jones knows she’s reached an autonomous point in her career where she can pretty much do whatever the hell she wants. And the 39-year-old mother of two tells EW she plans to write the next chapter in her professional songbook one track at a time.

“It was fun and I had a great time, but that whole album cycle push, I’m not up for it anymore,” the “Don’t Know Why” singer says of restructuring her creative output after releasing six solo LPs (each with a massive accompanying tour) since 2002. So, her husband suggested an alternate route: “Go in the studio” with an array of hand-selected musicians “for one to three days [and] put out a song per month,” Jones explains. So far, a collection of four singles — spanning Doveman-assisted experimental-electronic political anthems to soulful wallops of moody brass — made at her own pace with friends new and old serve as tokens brought back from her sonic travels.

“This is me finally figuring out who I want to play with,” says Jones, adding that the goal of the process is to just “see what happens” in the largely improvised sessions she quickly chucks online to savor the raw spontaneity of the process.

“It’s easy when you get into a record cycle to lose that a little bit… the magic of the song starts to dissipate,” she continues. “Waiting around, getting artwork together… it’s like, let’s just put out the important part and move on.”

For example, Jones’ sessions with Jeff Tweedy yielded four overall tracks, but “Wintertime” is the only one that originated prior to their collaboration.

“[Jeff had] already written a lot of the chords, the whole melody, and a lot of the words before I came in,” Jones says of the song, which speaks to longing and desire — aided by the song leaning into timely themes of seasonal depression. “I’m just drawn to warm instruments in general, and happy lyrics always sound cheesy coming off my tongue. [This song is] just what comes naturally.”

“Wintertime” also reunites Jones with her former engineer, Tom Schick, and features Tweedy’s son Spencer on percussion. But the tone was set by Jones and Tweedy finding a balance between their perspectives.

“His way of writing [and] the way he thinks about lyrics is a super different perspective from mine,” Jones observes. “It’s hard to describe a process like that, it just kind of goes back and forth until it finds its way.”

While she doesn’t broadcast her views on social media, Jones’ art has long registered political. In protest to George W. Bush’s re-election, Jones dinged the Republican president in her 2004 song “My Dear Country,” and she says the “current climate” under Donald Trump inspired this experimental electronic opus made with Doveman musician Thomas Bartlett. The song — in which Jones observes “people hurting” and wonders if society is “broken” — came together after she’d written a set of stream-of-consciousness lyrics Bartlett improvised moody organ riffs over.

“We got three very different songs,” Jones says of their sessions. “We have another song that’s stripped down, and is really orchestral and beautiful. It’s just piano and voice. And then we have another song that’s more electronic…. whatever happens sonically, I’m open.”

“It Was You” — a soul-driven stunner made with Jones’ bandmates Brian Blade and Chris Thomas — epitomizes the spontaneous, pliable spirit of Jones’ current endeavor.

“I came from a very dark place personally [and] wrote four songs on the piano. This was one of them. It started with a different vibe; It had no words and sounded like a happy, church piano song,” she recalls. “These guys are such great musicians [so] it totally changed because of the way they played it,” Jones says of the studio time that pushed the track into its final form. “It was beautiful the way they interpreted it…. the groove kicked in and it was amazing. That was a very live track. We added the horns and the organs, and that’s it.”

One of the best songs on Jones’ 2012 album Little Broken Hearts is the grim “Miriam,” for which she took on the embellished persona of a woman fantasizing about murdering an ex’s mistress. “A Song With No Name,” another fruit of Jones’ Tweedy sessions, kindles similar images as she croons of love, knives, and guns in the same breath to create an abstract tone poem about impulsive passion — which also explains how the song was recorded.

“This song was very much improvised, lyrically and musically. I thought it was a throwaway, and we revisited it…. and [Jeff and I] both loved it,” Jones remembers. “There are some things about it that don’t connect in my head. If I could rewrite the lyrics, there are a few I’d change to make a story connect a little more…. but I like the way it is. Guns are everywhere, and the word was on the tip of my tongue; don’t worry about me.”

Jones admits she has “a hard time playing ‘Miriam’ now,” alluding to the cycle of violence that has played out in national headlines in recent years. “Even though I know what that song is, [because] it’s a mood; in no way am I advocating anything like that, and I never would.”

“We’re all aware of what’s going on [in this country] and that can inform certain things, but some of these are just songs about how you feel,” she says. “There’s no real thread tying these songs together; I think I’m the only thread.”

Miranda Lambert’s Pistol Annies have never been more important than they are right now

For the Pistol Annies, sometimes a song arrives whether or not all three members of this country-music supergroup are ready for it.

One example? “Best Years of My Life,” a casually devastating account of adult-onset disappointment that begins with Ashley Monroe delivering this instant classic of an opener: “I picked a good day for a recreational Percocet.”

“That was her line, and she likes to get up real early in the morning and start writing songs, which we hate,” Monroe’s bandmate Angaleena Presley said with a laugh, recalling a sleepover writing session at the home of the group’s third member, Miranda Lambert. “But she was sitting out on the balcony and woke us up with that, and we were both like — ”

“‘Damn it,’” Lambert chimed in.

“We had to get up,” Presley added. “We knew immediately.”

Commitment to the tune — that’s what has defined the Pistol Annies since 2010, when Lambert briefly paused her hugely successful solo career to form the trio with her old friend Monroe, herself an acclaimed singer, and a then-struggling Nashville songwriter whose work had impressed her.

You could hear it on the band’s hit debut, 2011’s “Hell on Heels,” with its clever ditties about struggling to make ends meet. And it was there on “Annie Up,” from 2013, in a perfectly realized lament like “Unhappily Married.” (“You’re going bald and I’m getting fat,” it goes, “I hate your mom and you hate my dad.”)

Yet the Pistol Annies’ craft has never run deeper, nor felt more important, than it does on their latest album, “Interstate Gospel,” which debuted this week atop Billboard’s country chart.

On Wednesday night the trio will celebrate with a performance at the Country Music Assn. Awards, where Lambert is also up for several prizes, including female vocalist of the year and single of the year for “Drowns the Whiskey,” her No. 1 duet with Jason Aldean.

Like the earlier records, “Interstate Gospel” has some great laughs, as in the cheeky “Sugar Daddy” and the rowdy (and self-explanatory) “Stop, Drop and Roll One.”

But the record is also full of poignant, unsparing dispatches from women’s lives at a moment when male artists outnumber female on country radio by about 10 to 1.

“Milkman” explores the complicated relationship between a daughter and a mother who disapproves of her lifestyle. “Commissary” recounts an older sister’s visit to a younger brother behind bars.

Then there’s the handful of tunes seemingly inspired by Lambert’s widely publicized divorce from fellow country star Blake Shelton. In the anguished “Masterpiece,” the singer compares a failing marriage to a painting “up there on the wall for all to see,” then wonders, “Who’s brave enough to take it down?”

And though “Got My Name Changed Back” is funnier and more revved up, it’s still giving voice to an underrepresented perspective in rhymes as expertly phrased as “Spent an afternoon at the DMV” and “Now who I was ain’t who I be.”

Over lunch by their hotel pool during a recent trip to Los Angeles, the women — Presley is 42, Lambert is 35 and Monroe is 32 — told me they hadn’t gone into making “Interstate Gospel” with an eye toward correcting country music’s gender imbalance.

“I don’t ever want to come across as preachy,” Presley said.

But Monroe acknowledged she takes pride in fans telling her they can relate to songs not delivered from the point of view of a dude in a beat-up ball cap.

“I think it’s about people feeling understood,” Lambert said. “This song’s about your day sucking or divorce or somebody you love being put in prison. We’re not preaching to you — we’re talking to you because it happened to us too.”

“It’s the honesty,” Monroe said, a familiar talking point among country stars that nonetheless rings true with an act as frank as this one.

Asked whether the tabloid scrutiny of her marriage tempted her to put her guard up this time, Lambert scoffed.

“I don’t care what they write,” she said, adding that once you’re famous, “you could walk down the street and pick up a piece of trash and they’re gonna talk about it.”

If anything, she went on, the mistruths in gossip columns only made her double down on record.

“We sing the truth. Take from it what you will,” she said.
Lambert’s overall attitude toward her own celebrity is refreshingly unimpressed. And yet she admits to playing the game when necessary, as when she puts on a smile when the camera finds her in her seat at an awards show.

“That’s hard,” Presley said, “especially when you already suffer from resting bitch face, which I do.”

“Oh, me too,” Lambert agreed. “But I’ve gotten better at it.”

With the CMA Awards in mind — along with Nashville’s persistent man problem — I wondered aloud what the Pistol Annies thought of one tune nominated for song of the year: Chris Janson’s very iffy “Drunk Girl,” in which the singer is basically asking to be congratulated for not assaulting a woman he takes home from a bar.

“Leave her keys on the counter, your number by the phone / Pick up her life she threw on the floor,” Janson sings, “Leave the hall lights on, walk out and lock the door / That’s how she knows the difference between a boy and a man.”

At first the women said they didn’t know the song. Then Monroe began shaking her head silently.

“Well, clearly Ashley doesn’t want to talk about it,” Lambert said, which seemed to change Presley’s mind on the subject.

“I’m lying. I do know the song, and I’ll say one thing about it,” she said. “We don’t need to be rescued. We can get as drunk as we want, and we can get cabs.”

Lambert, who insisted again that she hadn’t heard “Drunk Girl,” asked if that’s really what the song is about.

“Seriously?” she said. “Everyone should try harder. There’s better ways to write songs.”

Are we living in something of a low-effort era?

“Uh-huh,” Lambert replied, nodding. “It’s a cop-out, all of it.”

At that, Monroe flashed a pained-looking expression. “I don’t care,” Lambert told her. “Why are you worried about it?”

“I’m not,” Monroe said. “I just don’t want to talk about Chris Janson. It’s not relevant to our music.”

Yet “Drunk Girl” is relevant, I said, as a demonstration of the blinkered thinking that the Pistol Annies are working against. As happened earlier, the women seemed to back away from a position of protest.

“We’re not on a soapbox,” Presley said. “We’re doing dishes and writing songs about it.”

Lambert said there’s room for all kinds in Nashville, even if most current country music leaves her cold compared with the “timeless” stuff she was raised on.

Some of the veterans she reveres — Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Reba McEntire — are admirers of the Pistol Annies, which Lambert said means “everything” to her and her bandmates.

Indeed, Presley said she was blown away when Yearwood — whose music she “used to sing so hard into my hairbrush that I knocked my tooth out one time” — visited the group backstage after a recent taping for a CMT special.

But then that was just one of many places Presley can’t believe her songwriting has taken her over the past eight years.

“My house was getting repossessed when this band started,” she said, adding that “Housewife’s Prayer,” from the Pistol Annies’ debut, was “literally me thinking about burning it down so I could get the insurance money before they took it away from me.”

“That’s why we love her,” Lambert said.

“How you like me now?” Presley went on, waving at her glossy surroundings. “Sitting by a coffin-shaped pool in California, eating manchego cheese.”

It sounded like the first line of a new song.