U2 reportedly set to release new album ‘before the end of the year’

U2 will reportedly release their new album in November, with the band said to be “very confident” ahead of their long-awaited comeback.

The group are due to release their first album since 2009’s ‘No Line On The Horizon’ and have been recording with producers including Danger Mouse in recent months. A spokesperson for U2 recently denied that the band have pushed back the release date of their 13th studio album to 2015.

Taking this further, a report in The Sun today (July 22) sees the tabloid report that “the new album will drop before the end of the year, most likely in November” while also suggesting that the band could perform at London’s Roundhouse in September as part of this year’s iTunes Festival.

“The U2 comeback is very much on for this year,” said a source. “This album has been a real struggle for them to make. It’s taken a long time and Bono didn’t find it easy. But they’re very confident now and are convinced the wait has been worth it.”

In addition to a new U2 album, Bono and The Edge are also working with Once director John Carney on a new musical film based on the filmmaker’s childhood.

U2 won a Golden Globe earlier this year for their song ‘Ordinary Love’, taken from Nelson Mandela biopic Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom.

David Bowie says he’ll “soon” release new music

David Bowie has revealed that he’s working on new music. As NME reports, Bowie revealed his upcoming plans in a statement issued to the Terrance Higgins Trust, which recently held a charity event honoring the musician.

The statement reads: “[London] is even better than the one you were in last year, so remember to dance, dance, dance. And then sit down for a minute, knit something, then get up and run all over the place. Do it. Love on ya. More music soon. David”

A spokesman for Bowie confirmed to NME that the statement is indeed from the musician.

In March 2013, Bowie released The Next Day, his first new studio album in 10 years. The album earned a Grammy for Best Rock Album and also placed at No. 40 on Consequence of Sound’s list of the Top 50 Albums of 2013.

Did Pink Floyd just casually announce their new album?

Polly Samson, the wife of Pink Floyd’s lead singer-guitarist, David Gilmour, nonchalantly tweeted this over the weekend:

“BTW Pink Floyd album out in October is called “The Endless River”. Based on 1994 sessions is Rick Wright’s swansong and very beautiful.”

Yep. Twenty years after Pink Floyd’s last studio album, The Division Bell, it seems the band is coming out with The Endless River.

Pink Floyd’s longtime back-up singer, Durga McBroom-Hudson, confirmed the news in a Facebook post: “YES. THERE IS A NEW PINK FLOYD ALBUM COMING OUT. AND I’M ON IT.”

Gerry Goffin, Carole King’s writing partner and ex-husband, dead at 75

Lyricist Gerry Goffin, who with his then-wife and songwriting partner Carole King wrote such 1960s hits as Will You Love Me Tomorrow and Natural Woman, has died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 75.

He and King also were behind Halfway to Paradise and The Loco-Motion.

His wife, Michelle Goffin, says he died Wednesday of natural causes.

Goffin married King in 1959 while they were in their teens. He penned more than 50 top 40 hits, including Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees, Crying in the Rain by the Everly Brothers, Take Good Care of My Baby by Bobby Vee and You’ve Got a Friend by James Taylor.

King said in a statement that Goffin was her “first love” and had a “profound impact” on her life.

“Gerry was a good man with a dynamic force, whose words and creative influence will resonate for generations to come,” King said. “His legacy to me is our two daughters, four grandchildren, and our songs that have touched millions and millions of people, as well as a lifelong friendship.”

The Goffin-King love affair is the subject of the Tony Award-nominated musical Beautiful: The Carole King Musical on Broadway. King, while backing the project, had avoided seeing it for months because it dredged up sad memories. She finally sat through it in April.

The musical shows the two composing their songs at Aldon Music, the Brill Building publishing company in Manhattan that also employed Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield and Carole Bayer Sager. The show ends just as King is enjoying fame for her groundbreaking solo album Tapestry. It also alleges Goffin’s womanizing and depression were causes of the breakup.

After their divorce, Goffin garnered an Academy Award nomination with Michael Masser for the theme to the 1975 film Mahogany for Diana Ross. He also earned a Golden Globe nomination for So Sad the Song in 1977 from the film Pipe Dreams.

Goffin and King were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three years later.

Goffin was born in Brooklyn in 1939 and was working as a chemist who loved music when he met King at Queens College.

“She was interested in writing rock ‘n’ roll, and I was interested in writing this Broadway play,” Goffin told Vanity Fair in 2001. “So we had an agreement where she would write [music] to the play if I would write [lyrics] to some of her rock ‘n’ roll melodies. And eventually it came to be a boy-and-girl relationship. Eventually I began to lose heart in my play, and we stuck to writing rock ‘n’ roll.”

A whirlwind romance led to a marriage and their first hit, when she was only 17, Will You Love Me Tomorrow for the Shirelles, which a pregnant King helped write while suffering morning sickness.

Both quit their day jobs to focus on music, and other songs followed, including Up on the Roof for the Drifters, One Fine Day for the Chiffons and Chains, which was later covered by the Beatles. Goffin also collaborated with another Aldon composer, Barry Mann, on the hit Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp Bomp Bomp Bomp).

Goffin continued co-writing songs, including I’ve Got to Use My Imagination recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips, and It’s Not the Spotlight, recorded by Rod Stewart. In the 1980s and ’90s, he co-wrote Tonight I Celebrate My Love, a duet recorded by Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack, and the Whitney Houston mega-hit Savin’ All My Love for You.

He is survived by his five children and his wife.

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.”

Jack White records song, releases it on vinyl within hours

Jack White played his new single “Lazaretto” for a couple of hundred fans on Record Store Day and four hours later a copy of the performance was available on a limited run of vinyl.

The singer and guitarist called it the “world’s fastest-released record.”

But don’t look for it in the Guinness World Record Book, as White admitted he doesn’t know if anyone else has attempted the feat. The stunt was a promotion for Record Store Day and his upcoming album, Lazaretto.

White performed Saturday morning at his Third Man Records label. As he was playing, fans could watch on television the acetate record being cut in a room behind the stage. After the title song from the upcoming album, he also recorded a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Power of My Love,” which was the B-side on the record. The master was then hustled over to the United Record Pressing plant, also in Nashville.

After the recording was finished, White played a short set of fan favorites, including “Hotel Yorba,” along with songs from his new album, which will be released in June. White will be touring this summer, including headlining gigs at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee, and the Glastonbury Festival in England.

White said he was worried about so many things that could have gone wrong in the recording or pressing process that would have stalled the record.

“We had a horrible moment last night about 11 p.m. where the record cutter, the cutting mechanism blew up,” White said. “So the only other cutter we had that we could use that was in town was a mono head, so we actually cut this single in mono, which I think is actually even cooler than the way we were gonna do it.”

Three hours and fifty-five minutes after the performance, White was back at the store, waving high over his head the first copies of the vinyl, which were sold to eager fans who were waiting in line.

“I think for a while there a few years ago it was starting to become a joke in music that record stores don’t exist anymore,” White said. “But I think the people that have always been real music lovers have always been there.”

White, who is behind such bands as The White Stripes, The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs, also works as a producer and heads Third Man Records label. He said people are coming back around to buying music from record stores.

“Thank the mom-and-pop, brick-and-mortar record stores all these years for staying alive, the ones that could,” White said. “Now it’s bigger than ever. Every neighborhood wants to have one.”

Prince Gains His Catalog in Landmark Deal With Warner Bros.; New Album Coming

The legendary artist returns to Warner Bros. Records, will re-release “Purple Rain” and “other planned projects”