Category: Music

Composer John Williams hints ‘Star Wars: Episode IX’ will be his last

The 86-year old composer who recently received his 51st Oscar-nomination for “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” admitted in a recent KUSC radio interview that after J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars: Episode IX,” he’s finished with writing music for “Star Wars” movies.

“We know J.J. Abrams is preparing one now for next year that I will hopefully do for him, and I look forward to it,” John Williams said. “It will round out a series of nine and be quite enough for me.”

The Oscar winner of such films as “Star Wars,” “Jaws,” “E.T.” and “Schindler’s List” said that when he wrote the music for the 1977 George Lucas movie, he never knew it would spawn sequels and sequels for decades to come. “It’s developed in the most amazing way,” said the composer.

As Disney has spun off new “Star Wars” titles outside of the Skywalker family episodic saga, other composers have gladly stepped to put their musical touches on the Lucasfilm franchise. Originally Alexandre Desplat was set to score “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” but his schedule didn’t permit him to do so. “Up” Oscar winner Michael Giacchino stepped in and delivered a robust epic score in just little over a month.

Oscar nominee John Powell is penning the music for Ron Howard’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story” complete with a guitar-brass-infused score.

Back in 2015 Williams hit the pause button on scoring for Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies” over health issues, the first time that the composer took a break from working with the blockbuster director during their 40-year-plus collaboration. Instead Thomas Newman took over. While Williams scored Spielberg’s last two movies, “The Post” and “The BFG,” Alan Silvestri penned musical notes for the director’s upcoming Easter release, “Ready Player One.”

On the Charts: Fall Out Boy Capture Number One With ‘Mania’

Fall Out Boy returned to the top of the Billboard 200 as the emo-pop band’s latest album Mania debuted at Number One with 130,000 copies.

Mania marks the third straight Fall Out Boy album to reach Number One – following 2013’s Save Rock and Roll and 2015’s American Beauty/American Psycho – and, with 2007’s Infinity High, the band’s fourth overall LP to hit the top spot on the Billboard 200, Billboard reports.

The Number One finish validated Fall Out Boy’s decision to scrap an earlier, near-finished version of the album and postpone its July 2017 release after deciding that the music didn’t “sound like Fall Out Boy,” Patrick Stump told Rolling Stone in November.

“It freaked me out,” Stump said, adding that bassist Pete Wentz agreed with his assessment. “I was like, ‘I don’t think this is something the four of us will like, I don’t think it’s something the label is going to like.”

Mania was the lone new release to enter the Top 10, with the Greatest Showman soundtrack leading the way among the returnees by capturing Number Two for the second straight week. Ed Sheeran’s Divide held at Number Three while Camila Cabello’s Camila, last week’s champ, dropped to Number Four and 43,000 copies.

Post Malone’s Stoney (Number Five), Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. (Six), G-Eazy’s The Beautiful & Damned (Seven), Lil Uzi Vert’s Luv Is Rage 2 (Eight), Taylor Swift’s Reputation (Nine) and Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic (Number 10) closed out the Top 10.

Next week on the Billboard 200, Rolling Stone cover stars Migos’ Culture II will compete against the Greatest Showman soundtrack – and the sales surge that usually follows the Grammys – for the Number One spot.

Pearl Jam Finally Reveal If They’re Making A New Album

Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament was recently interviewed on The Powell Movement, and he revealed that Pearl Jam are indeed hard at work on a new album, their first since 2013’s Lightning Bolt. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.

“We’ve sort of been in writing mode here in Seattle the last couple of months. A typical day is getting together with anywhere from one to four of the guys and making music.”

He also discussed dealing with newfound fame with Pearl Jam in the early 90’s.

“The challenge for me was, I grew up in a small town, everybody knew each other, but everybody sort of left everybody alone. There wasn’t a ton of energy around how people interact in a small town. Immediately you go to a big city, and I wanted that energy, but then when the energy comes with non anonymity, it’s a weird thing.

It’s far worse now, now the average kid doesn’t have anonymity, because if he screws up, somebody’s got an iPhone on it, and all of a sudden it’s up on somebody’s Instagram account, and it’s forever. So in some ways, what I was going through in 1992 with the band and all of that is not that different than what a kid is dealing with.

It’s just the way technology has changed. I had a hard time with it, I think I always felt like I could sort of ride my bike around town and I could lurk around and do my thing, and nobodoy would bug me. I ended up going out to Montana to visit some friends, and there was something about that whole world where it seemed like there was less expectation on me.”

He mentioned that he fell in love with Montana, and he now lives there 3-6 months per year. He said if he didn’t have Pearl Jam obligations, he would live there permanently.

“I would probably be there full time if the band wasn’t going.”

People Paid for Music in 2017: Streaming Subscriptions and Vinyl Sales Rise

The numbers have arrived, and as it turns out, the music industry had a good year in 2017. Paid subscription streams rose 54 percent over last year and made up 80 percent of all streams in 2017, according to a new report on U.S. music consumption by data tracker BuzzAngle Music. Audio streams reached an overall record high of 376.9 billion, which is up 50% over 2016’s numbers. It was a good year for vinyl sales, too, which were up 20% over sales in 2016. Vinyl accounted for 10% of all physical album sales (which is up from 8% last year).

Downloads, however, are down once again. The daily average of 1.67 billion streams per day dwarves the number of song downloads for the entire year (563.7 million). Only two songs had more than two million downloads total (compared to five songs that surpassed that total in 2016 and 16 songs in 2015). Overall album and song sales continued to decline, as well, by 14.6% and 23.2% respectively.

It was a huge year for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito.” It was the most streamed song of the year and became the first to cross the one billion streams mark. Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” followed with 979.3 million streams overall. Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” was the most audio-streamed song of the year—a tally that excludes video streams—with over 555.2 million plays. Drake and Future were, respectively, the two most streamed artists of 2017.

Ed Sheeran’s ÷ was the top album of the year overall with 2,645,600 total project consumption units. Taylor Swift’s Reputation led in pure album sales with 1,899,772 sold. November 10, the day Reputation was released, was the biggest day for album sales in 2017. Sixteen songs were streamed more than 500 million times in 2017 (compared to six in 2016 and two in 2015).

Why Run-DMC didn’t want to make ‘Christmas in Hollis’

Shopping for the holidays is stressful enough to send anyone reaching for the eggnog, but for Darryl McDaniels, a k a DMC of Run-DMC, it’s especially taxing.

“At this time of year, I can’t walk five steps at the mall without someone shouting the lyrics to ‘Christmas in Hollis’ at me,” he tells The Post. “Just yesterday, I was at the grocery store, and a lady said, ‘Guess what’s on my playlist right now?’ I said, ‘Christmas in Hollis.’ She said, ‘How did you know?!’ It’s a beautiful thing, but I got to expect that for the rest of my life!”

That didn’t seem likely when the song was first released 30 years ago. In 1987, Run-DMC was invited to contribute a holiday song to “A Very Special Christmas,” a charity compilation benefiting the Special Olympics. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Whitney Houston and other artists recorded covers, but the New York rap trio went the extra mile and came up with the fun and funky “Christmas in Hollis.”

The song didn’t chart at the time, but over the years, it’s developed a cultural cachet as one of the few holiday songs that isn’t sappy. It’s also been featured in movies such as “Die Hard” (1988) and Seth Rogen’s 2015 comedy “The Night Before.” DMC’s just given it a 30th anniversary revamp to help promote the IFC network’s “Christmas in the ’80s” movie marathon over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

“We’re down with Christmas forever because of that record,” says the 53-year-old DMC, who recently released a four-track vinyl-only EP “Back From the Dead — The Legend Lives.”

“We’re part of the holidays, and I get paid a lot of money to do that song at parties this time of year.”

But the coolest Christmas song of all time almost didn’t happen. Kurtis Blow released the holiday track “Christmas Rappin’ ” in 1979, and the group worried about looking like copycats by releasing another. “In hip-hop culture, you can’t duplicate what’s already been done, so we weren’t sure about doing it,” says DMC.

But publicist Bill Adler convinced them otherwise. An avowed enthusiast and collector of lesser-heard Christmas music, Adler bought the group’s DJ Jam Master Jay (a k a Jason Mizell) a crate of festive records, hoping there would be something they could use to build a song. Eventually, Jay came across Clarence Carter’s 1968 R&B track “Back Door Santa,” and it immediately caught his ear.

“Run and DMC were in the next room and came in, as if they’d been drawn to the scent of a big Christmas pie or something,” Adler tells The Post. “They nodded at Jay, and everybody knew that was going to be the sample.”

Lyrically, the song followed Run-DMC’s established trope: writing about their native Queens. Joseph “Run” Simmons’ verse centers on spotting Santa Claus in Hollis, while DMC captures his own childhood Christmases, with his mom “cooking chicken and collard greens” at home.

“I ate that meal for 48 years before my mother passed away [in 2013], and I got tired of it,” says the rapper, who’s since left Queens for New Jersey.

“Now, I go out with my family on Christmas, because when you go to the city on Christmas, the whole city’s yours. You can get reservations in places you never would. The next Christmas song I do is gonna be about going out on Christmas to eat!”

U2 Achieves Sixth No. 1 Album In Canada

U2 has the No. 1 album in Canada this week with Songs of Experience generating 25,000 equivalent album units for the week ending Dec. 7, according to data provided by Nielsen Music Canada. Out of this total, 24,000 were generated from traditional album sales.

This is the Dublin band’s sixth chart-topper in the Nielsen SoundScan era, and first since No Line on the Horizon spent three weeks at No. 1 in ’09. U2’s last album, Songs of Innocence, peaked at 5 after digital copies were made available for free to iTunes subscribers (and not counted in the chart reckoning). A 2018 North American tour will further propel interest in the new song set, although the lone Canadian tour stop announced takes them to Montreal’s Bell Centre, on June 5-6.

Songs of Experience is the fourteenth studio album by the Irish rock band and is produced by Jacknife Lee and Ryan Tedder with Steve Lillywhite, Andy Barlow, Jolyon Thomas, Brent Kutzle, Paul Epworth, Danger Mouse, and Declan Gaffney.

The album is intended to be a companion piece to U2’s previous record, Songs of Innocence (2014). Whereas its predecessor explored the group members’ adolescence in Ireland in the 1970s, Songs of Experience thematically is a collection of letters written by lead vocalist Bono to people and places closest to his heart. The personal nature of the lyrics reflects a “brush with mortality” that he had following a 2014 bicycle accident.

Ed Sheeran’s Divide holds at 2, picking up a 30% consumption increase that blends sales of albums with track equivalents and on-demand streams. The boost in interest in the seven-month-old album is due to a new version of his current single, “Perfect,” featuring Beyoncé. The song bolts to No. 1 on the Streaming Songs chart–his second chart-topping streaming single, following “Shape of You” earlier this year. “Perfect” also holds at the top of the Digital Songs chart.

Taylor Swift’s Reputation drops to 3 after three weeks at No. 1. Helped by a ticket bundle campaign, Demi Lovato’s Tell Me You Love Me rockets into 4th place, matching the album’s peak in its first week of release back in October.

Chris Stapleton’s From a Room: Volume 2 debuts at 5. This is the alt-country superstar’s third straight top five album. Both of his previous albums return to the top 100 this week.

Three holiday albums remain in the top ten with consumption increases this week. Mario Pelchat avec Les Pretres’ Noel Ensemble (featuring eight priests and seminarians of the archdiocese of Quebec on the Christmas praise album) falls to 6, with a 25% gain; Michael Buble’s Christmas slips one position, to 7, with a 31% gain; and Pentatonix’s A Pentatonix Christmas edges 9-8, with a 45% increase.

Other debuts in the top 50 include Brampton, ON-rapper Roy Woods’ Say Less, at 26; LA electro-R&B singer Miguel’s War & Leisure, lands at 28; Vegas metal band Five Finger Death Punch’s A Decade Of Destruction, at 30; and Neil Young’s The Visitor, at 43.

New Jimi Hendrix album with unreleased songs coming in March

Unreleased songs recorded by Jimi Hendrix between 1968 and 1970 will be released next year.

Experience Hendrix and Legacy Recordings announced Wednesday that they will release Hendrix’s Both Sides of the Sky on March 9, 2018. The 13-track album includes 10 songs that have never been released.

Hendrix died in 1970 at age 27. The new album is the third volume in a trilogy from the guitar hero’s archive. Valleys of Neptune was released in 2010, followed by People, Hell and Angels, released in 2013. The 1960s guitar legend has an extensive posthumous discography, starting with Cry of Love, an album released in early 1971, less than half a year after his death.

Eddie Kramer, who worked as recording engineer on every Hendrix album made during the artist’s life, said in an interview that 1969 was “a very experimental year” for Hendrix, and that he was blown away as he worked on the new album.

“The first thing is you put the tape on and you listen to it and the hairs just stand up right on the back of your neck and you go, ‘Oh my God. This is too (expletive) incredible,” said Kramer. “It’s an incredible thing. Forty, 50 years later here we are and I’m listening to these tapes going, ‘Oh my God, that’s an amazing performance.’”

Many of the album’s tracks were recorded by Band of Gypsys, Hendrix’s trio with Buddy Miles and Billy Cox. Stephen Stills appears on two songs: “$20 Fine” and “Woodstock.”

“It sounds like Crosby, Stills & Nash except it’s on acid, you know,” Kramer, laughing, said of “$20 Fine.”

“Jimi is just rocking it,” he added. “It’s an amazing thing.”

Johnny Winter appears on “Things I Used to Do”; original Jimi Hendrix Experience members Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding are featured on “Hear My Train A Comin’ ”; and Lonnie Youngblood is on “Georgia Blues.”

Kramer produced the album alongside John McDermott and Janie Hendrix, the legend’s sister and president of Experience Hendrix. Kramer said though Both Sides of the Sky is the last of the trilogy, someone could find new Hendrix music in an attic or a basement, which could be re-worked.

He also said they have live footage of Hendrix, some just audio and some in video, which they plan to release.

“It was amazing just to watch him in the studio or live. The brain kicks off the thought process — it goes through his brain through his heart and through his hands and onto the guitar, and it’s a seamless process,” Kramer said. “It’s like a lead guitar and a rhythm guitar at the same time, and it’s scary. There’s never been another Jimi Hendrix, at least in my mind.”

Neil Young’s Huge Online Archival Project Is Now Open

Something truly wild and crazy has come to the Internet, at least if you’re a serious Neil Young fan. The legendary singer-songwriter has, after years of development, unleashed the Neil Young Archives, a sprawling website and streaming platform featuring everything Young has recorded as a soloist and bandleader, as well as with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and listings regarding Young-related films and books. Unreleased Young albums and recordings such as Chrome Dreams, Homegrown, and Freedom Live are listed but not yet available to stream, as Pitchfork notes.

The kitschy interface of the site is designed to look like a combination of an old stereo and a filing cabinet; the net result is reminiscent of a late-’90s Carmen Sandiego computer game. That being said, the site, under ideal conditions, will allow you to systematically work your way through Young’s entire recorded catalogue, in high quality audio provided by Young’s own Xstream streaming plugin. (Should the higher quality audio be too much to handle, there’s a toggle switch at the top of the page to get it down to 320kbs).

Parts of the site are very confusing (the practical use of the filing cabinet section, mostly), but that seems to be in the interest of promoting spontaneous discovery. If you’re confused, there’s a video tutorial by Young available on the home page, as well as a written explanation of the purpose and methodology of the Archives. A good way to start: go to the “Timeline” section and scroll through the 50-year-plus run of Young’s career, and click around the albums linked there. Fans can also look forward to updates from Young in the “NYA News” section of the site. Again, this is all free if you give an email address.

Sorry, Christmas music might be bad for your health

Stressing before Christmas? Listening to the cheerful, jolly music will not help you relax, a British psychologist said.

In fact, listening to Christmas music could harm a person’s mental health, clinical psychologist Linda Blair told Sky News.

Blair said the continuous playing of Christmas music in the car or at stores reminds people of all the things they need to do before the holiday arrives.

“You’re simply spending all of your energy trying not to hear what you’re hearing,” Blair told Sky News.

Blair said store workers were “more at risk” of being mentally drained by the array of cheerful music. The same songs being played constantly makes it hard for employees to “tune it out” and “unable to focus on anything else.”

“Christmas music is likely to irritate people if it’s played too loudly and too early,” Blair told Sky News.

The Tampa Bay Times reported Best Buy began playing holiday music on Oct. 22, making the electronic store the first to stream the songs. A few days later, other stores such as Sears, Ulta and Michaels followed suit.

Mood Media’s programming executive, Danny Turner, told the Tampa Bay Times that he urges stores to stop playing novelty music because it could annoy customers.

“The one I have in mind is ‘The 12 Days of Christmas,’” Turner told the Tampa Bay Times. “Once I’m at the third day, I’m counting how many days are left. You don’t want any songs that feel like they last for 12 days.”

The newspaper also conducted a poll about the most appropriate time to start playing Christmas music. More than half of the participants said it was best to begin listening to holiday music after Thanksgiving.

Taylor Swift in Trouble With the ACLU After Threatening Critic

Taylor Swift’s album rollout is not going as planned. On Monday, the ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Swift’s attorney stating that her camp had tried to silence and intimidate a critic. The story is incredible and bizarre: Apparently, Swift’s attorney threatened a writer at the little-known leftist culture blog PopFront over a blog post about the alt-right’s embrace of Swift’s music. How Swift’s camp found the article in the first place, and why they decided to use threatening legal tactics to suppress it, remains unclear. The writer, however, is facing Swift head-on: PopFront’s Megan Herning said in a statement Monday, “The press should not be bullied by high-paid lawyers or frightened into submission by legal jargon. These scare tactics may have worked for Taylor in the past, but I am not backing down.”

According to a press release from the ACLU, Swift’s attorney William J. Briggs, II, sent Herning a letter last month instructing her to retract her article titled, “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation.” Briggs wrote that the post was “provably false and defamatory” and that Herning should remove it from all sources, including social media. He added that Herning could not publicize his letter because of copyright law, and that if Herning did not comply with his requests, “Ms. Swift is prepared to proceed with litigation.”

The ACLU says Swift has no case: Herning’s post simply states her opinions, and it is not defamatory. ACLU attorney Michael Risher said in a statement, “This is a completely unsupported attempt to suppress constitutionally protected speech.” Another ACLU attorney, Matt Cagle, added, “Intimidation tactics like these are unacceptable. Not in her wildest dreams can Ms. Swift use copyright law to suppress this exposure of a threat to constitutionally protected speech.” In a letter to Swift’s attorney, the ACLU had more fun with Swift’s lyrics: “Criticism is never pleasant, but a celebrity has to shake it off, even if the critique may damage her reputation.”

Swift’s new album, Reputation, is set to be released on Friday. This is probably not how she wanted to start a big press week. We have reached out to her for comment and will update if we hear back.