Category: Music

Shania Twain wants to ‘forget’ music she made with ex-husband

Shania Twain is moving on from the sound created by her ex-husband and former producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange.

The country star, 51, has not released a studio record since 2002, a delay that in part is down to the turmoil in her professional and personal life caused by her break-up from her husband Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, who doubled as the producer of all her albums.

The couple’s 2010 divorce came after Robert admitted an affair with Shania’s best friend Marie-Anne Thiebaud. Shania ended up getting close with Marie-Anne’s betrayed husband Frederic Thiebaud, and the pair wed in 2011.

She is planning to release a new album this spring, and says she told those working on her record, including One Direction producer Jake Gosling and Bruce Springsteen collaborator Ron Aniello, to erase all her previous work from their minds.

“I told anyone getting involved musically to forget about my other records,” the musician tells Rolling Stone. “I didn’t want it to be related to Mutt’s productions at all. I wanted a more organic approach.”

When Robert was her producer Shania sold 85 million records and became country music’s biggest pop crossover star, but she now wants to move away from her pop roots.

“Most of them started off quite melancholy and a lot darker,” she explains of her new songs.

However she’s philosophical about how her split from the man she shared her life and music with has affected her.

“I’m a different singer now,” she shares. “There was a lot of coming to terms with that. It’s been one of the obstacles in my life I’ve just had to learn to live with.”

The country veteran’s new album is yet to receive an official title, but tracks include Swinging With My Eyes Closed, and Who’s Gonna Be Your Girl?, a ballad about the breakdown of her marriage.

Prince’s Digital Catalog Returning to Streaming Music

Prince’s digital catalog is heading back to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music after over 18 months as an exclusive to Tidal, multiple sources have confirmed.

A majority of the musician’s catalog will be available on Sunday to coincide with the Grammys’ tribute to the singer, though it is unclear exactly when the catalog will be available.

Prince pulled his music from the major streaming services in June 2015. A month later, he aligned with Jay Z’s Tidal, offering the service his “Baltimore” and then-upcoming LP Hit n Run, as well as the exclusive streaming rights of his back catalog and other goodies from his legendary vaults. A surprise second new LP, Hit n Run Phase Two, arrived in December 2015.

“After one meeting, it was obvious that Jay Z and the team he has assembled at Tidal recognize and applaud the effort that real musicians put in2 their craft 2 achieve the very best they can at this pivotal time in the music industry,” Prince said of his Tidal deal.

However, four months after Hit N Run Phase Two landed, Prince died unexpectedly at his Paisley Park compound, leaving his estate without specified heirs or an appointed executor. Placed under the administration of a Minnesota bank as well as Prince’s siblings, the estate would later establish a publishing deal with Universal Music for Prince’s catalog, a pact that threatened Prince’s Tidal agreement.

The fissure in the relationship between the Prince estate and Jay Z’s Tidal and parent company Roc Nation was further exposed in November, when the two sides went to court to determine whether Tidal held the exclusive rights to Prince’s digital catalog following the late icon’s death; in a separate action, the Prince estate sued Tidal for streaming 15 Prince albums without permission.

The estate also argued that Tidal never had an exclusivity deal with Prince in writing, and that the streaming service didn’t make good on a $750,000 advance owed to the singer. In Tidal’s suit, the service accused the Prince estate of secretly negotiating with other streaming services.

While the lawsuits continue to play out in court, a judge subsequently ruled on January 30th that Tidal and Roc Nation did in fact pay $3 million to Prince as part of his initial deal with the streaming service, including the $750,000 that the estate called into question.

Following Universal’s acquisition of Prince’s publishing rights, the estate reopened dialogue with services like Spotify and Apple Music, with a target of reintroducing the catalog in time for the Grammys. Amazon Music and IHeartRadio also confirmed that music from Prince’s catalog will be available on their services, with the latter offering the catalog on new subscription services iHeartRadio Plus and iHeartRadio All Access.

Before any deals between the streaming services and the estate were officially announced, Spotify not-so-subtly began trumpeting the arrival of Prince’s catalog in late January with a series of purple billboards in New York’s Union Square subway station.

Last October, Warner Bros. and NPG Records announced the releases of a remastered version of Purple Rain and the greatest hits collection Prince 4Ever. The latter, released last November, included “Moonbeam Levels,” a previously unreleased song recorded in 1982 during the 1999 sessions.

On Thursday, the singer’s estate announced an agreement with Universal Music Group to release his music recorded after 1995 alongside music from his vault, including outtakes, demos and live recordings.

The story of ‘Drinking in L.A.,’ 20 years later

Back in the 1990s, after a heavy night of drinking, James Di Salvio found himself one morning groggily coming to consciousness, face-down on a pristinely green West Hollywood lawn and, with his head throbbing angrily, he quietly reprimanded himself: “What the hell am I doing, drinking in L.A.?”

Two decades later, it’s the hangover that keeps on giving. At the time, Di Salvio was a filmmaker at the once-estimable music-video production company Propaganda Films — where he counted Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze as colleagues — with a side career as a DJ that wasn’t his primary focus.

He could never have known then that he would soon return to Montreal to craft an album with a cavalry of collaborators under the gibberish name Bran Van 3000, or that he would always remember that self-admonishment from that woozy morning until it became the irrepressible hook for one of the quirkiest and best-loved hits of the ’90s. Life would soon be for the taking and he wised up and took it quick.

“It’s really strange that the song took us around the world,” Di Salvio recalled recently from, yes, L.A. “These days, I find it more and more strange.

“It’s just been a crazy ride.”

It’s been 20 years since “Drinking in L.A.” and Bran Van 3000’s eclectic debut Glee dropped back in February 1997, when the group’s hip, kitschy, kitchen-sink esthetic and genre-defying mixtape intoxication were so en vogue that even Madonna was drawn into the bidding war.

But Bran Van 3000’s unlikely story starts earlier than that, when Di Salvio was strolling through New York’s Washington Square Park with his mind on money and money on his mind.

In 1994, Di Salvio had been enduring some stress around his ever-inflating credit-card bill. When a royalty cheque finally arrived for a remix he had done for Quebec songwriter Jean Leloup’s “1990,” it felt like a monsoon in a southern California summer. Conservation wasn’t in the cards; Di Salvio wanted to set up a studio. E.P. Bergen, an old buddy of Di Salvio’s from the Montreal club scene, recalls his friend inviting him to “come help him spend the money.”

During Bergen’s ensuing trip to New York, the duo named the group during a walk through the park (“we just came up with those words and didn’t even know what they meant,” Di Salvio recalls) and bought sampling equipment at Sam Ash in Times Square.

Di Salvio and Bergen then returned to Mile End in Montreal and work on Glee began — if it can be called work.

Really, it seems like the duo hosted the musical equivalent of a pickup basketball game, with a cast of collaborators including Stéphane Moraille, Sara Johnston, Liquid, producer Haig Vartzbedian, Adam Chaki and Raymond Akira Betts contributing. It wasn’t an exclusive club. Bergen recalls that they once heard a Montreal street performer capably trilling a clarinet; days later he was performing on “Couch Surfer” and “Supermodel.”

The sprightly and spritzy Glee seems to treat the idea of cohesiveness as a quaint relic from the buttoned-up past, cramming in as many ideas, performers and styles as possible and trusting the listener to keep up, or at least to dance.

It’s the kind of giddily eclectic genre mélange that seemed especially exciting in the days just before the internet became ubiquitous. From the deadpan indie-pop yarn “Couch Surfer” to the gritty hip-hop of “Afrodiziak” (which boasted an appearance from Gravediggaz’s Poetic, made possible by a field trip to the Wu Tang Clan’s hotel headquarters in Manhattan) or the ambient beauty of “Problems,” the record seemed impossible to pin down.

They knew right away that “Drinking in L.A.” was special. It was the last song finished for the record, a layered labour of love that combined a fuzzy dew of guitars, gorgeous harmonies and a knockout hook that would make Manny Pacquiao jealous.

“It was almost like one of those movies where an animated blue bird swings by over the real live footage,” Di Salvio said. “It’s cheesy, but I knew in my heart it was a hit.”

He wasn’t alone. From the beginning, record-company executives in the thriving ’90s saw dollars in Bran Van 3000.

Di Salvio recalls his first trip down to Texas for South by Southwest, when they brought a few dozen white-label cassettes with “Glee”on the cover in Helvetica along with his 514 phone number. On the last day of the festival, Di Salvio managed to get one of the tapes to Moby, who was participating in a panel discussing the electronic music boom.

Three weeks later, he got a call from a Geffen executive who had been searching for the mysterious group behind the tape. Di Salvio and friends were at the Montreal offices of their label Audiogram gathered around a speaker phone.

“We were all tripping. Then he asked the Mexican standoff question: ‘When can I see you live?’ I said six weeks,” Di Salvio remembered. “We didn’t have a band. The idea of a band did not exist.”

Still, they pulled together a touring group and the industry interest only intensified. Other electronic artists like the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy were throttling up the charts, and Bran Van’s “timing was crazy.” Labels including Madonna’s Maverick Records, A&M Records and Capitol were stopping at nothing to sign them, sending Bentleys to pick them up for evening-long schmoozes.

“It went from eating ramen to a Drake song in 15 minutes,” Di Salvio reflected. “I remember the MTV Awards. Everybody was there and it was like all eyes on me.”

He remembers rubbing shoulders with Anthony Kiedis, Marilyn Manson, Billy Corgan and the Beastie Boys’ Mike D, who hosted Di Salvio for a jam session at his house. He remembers Bran Van members knocking a soccer ball around with Massive Attack in Amsterdam, comparing samplers with Prodigy after a festival set and hearing “Drinking in L.A.” booming full-throated from the crowd at the historic Tibetan Freedom Concert.

“When people started buying us drinks everywhere we went, I knew there was something going on,” Bergen said.

“It was a very Hollywood, very surreal time,” Di Salvio added.

Ultimately, it’s still “Drinking in L.A.” that people most remember. The song hit the Top 10 in the U.K., Sweden, Norway and Italy, and seems to have only accumulated affection over the years. Its appeal is intangible, though Di Salvio credits its female voices: “I’m a big fan of the girls. Sara and Jayne (Hill) sing those harmonies so perfectly, and Stéphane just owns the chorus.”

Three more Bran Van albums came afterward, and Di Salvio’s career as a composer/DJ was launched. But you only get one once-in-a-lifetime hit. He hears it frequently still, living as he now does in the City of Angels, blaring from car stereo systems, bar jukeboxes and even supermarkets. Even during this conversation, a woman overhears Di Salvio reminiscing and stops by his table to wish him a happy anniversary.

“I’m not a conventional musician by any means, so the story of Bran Van is ‘with a little help from my friends,’ ” he reflected. “This thing was about family in so many ways. It’s like looking back at your family photo album. I’m so proud.

“It’s just nice to be told happy anniversary, all these years later.”

The Story of John Fogerty’s Lengthy Path to ‘Centerfield’

On January 16th, 1985, roughly a decade after he’d last released an album of new material, former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty returned with his fourth solo LP, Centerfield. Happy as fans were to hear from him, everyone wanted to know the same thing: Where had he been?

As with anything that takes 10 years, Fogerty’s hiatus was due to a number of things – the first of which was the rejection of what was supposed to be his fourth solo outing, then titled Hoodoo, in 1976. Instead of leaning on him to deliver something better, Elektra chief Joe Smith told Fogerty to take his time and come back when he was ready – a stunning turn of events for a performer who’d always felt pressure, both internal and from his label, to churn out hit product on a regular basis.

“That was the greatest thing that ever happened,” Fogerty told BAM in 1985, acknowledging that Smith’s gentle rejection helped him get past what he deemed “a lot of problems.” As he put it, “The first thing I decided was I could take the time to have taste again, you know, the way it was before, when nothing came out until it was ready.”

Meanwhile, Fogerty found himself embroiled in a nasty, drawn-out legal war over Creedence Clearwater Revival’s legacy and the disbursement of contested royalties – a parade of lawyers and divided royalties that he admitted sent him spiraling into a terrible case of writer’s block.

“I would see these people’s faces in front of me, holding big bags of money they’d gotten from us, like a spectre, a hallucination,” he recalled. And although he ended up spending untold hours practicing in the studio – time he said helped him sharpen his chops considerably – he wasn’t sure where all that work would ever lead. “It was getting worse, more and more depressed, and further away from the center of John Fogerty. I could play but I didn’t know what to play. … A blind man in a fog, just flitting around.”

The song that ultimately snapped John Fogerty’s dry streak was ‘I Saw It on TV,’ a track that became a cornerstone of the nine-song Centerfield. Recalling that he’d “thought about this song for three or four years, with just a verse, and a smattering of melody,” he traced its watershed moment to a fishing trip that left him with a day of nothing but drifting and thinking on his hands.

“I quit about six o’clock in the evening and walked back to the car with maybe a verse-and-a-half and a chorus. I was starting to feel a little confident. And I got my fishing gear straight and shut the door in the car and CLICK – my brain said ‘Hey, I can do this!’ It felt like before, when I’d give myself that certain space and write ‘Proud Mary’ or whatever,” he continued. “I had jumped over the hurdle. I was a songwriter again. It was a great moment for me.”

That moment helped launch John Fogerty past a crucible that nearly warped his childhood dream beyond repair. “Our goal was to be like Elvis [Presley] or Little Richard in eighth and ninth grade, and we came up from El Cerrito and we succeeded, and we’re traveling around the world in Lear jets,” he pointed out. “And then suddenly I found myself chained to the dungeon wall, and I was cranking out little gems to pay for the cost of keeping a guard on my door.”

With “I Saw It on TV” under his belt, Fogerty was back in business as a songwriter, but that didn’t mean he was back to cranking out classics at the same speed he had during Creedence Clearwater Revival’s glory days. The album that would eventually become Centerfield came together slowly – partly due to Fogerty’s commitment to detail, and partly because he simply wasn’t sure what he should sound like anymore.

Finally, after toying with various approaches, he “drop-kicked the keyboards out the window” and more or less made his way back to where he started. Many critics pointed out that ‘Centerfield’ sounded a lot like a Creedence record. It’s a similarity that might have seemed like a cynical cop-out, if CCR’s rootsy approach was still paying dividends on the synth-coated Top 40 of the mid-’80s. But it actually served as a sign that after years of struggling to put it behind him, one of rock’s greatest songwriters was starting to come to terms with his past.

It was a slow process, however. “I knew it sounded like Creedence, and I wondered if Warners thought they were getting Michael Jackson or some modern synth-rock,” Fogerty later admitted. “I had to find out if I was working on the right thing. It was like in The Shining, when you think the guy is working on a book, but all he’s been doing is typing the same line over and over. I thought maybe I was out there somewhere, lost.”

If the label’s enthusiasm reinforced those first steps, then the public’s response to Centerfield took John Fogerty the rest of the way. A hit beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, the album rose all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, and sent leadoff single “The Old Man Down the Road” to No. 10 on the Hot 100. A follow-up, “Rock and Roll Girls,” hit No. 20; the title track, a No. 4 rock hit, stalled just outside the pop Top 40.

Initially, it seemed like the success of Centerfield might have signaled the opening of a creative logjam that could trigger a flood of new material approaching Fogerty’s legendarily prolific pace with Creedence Clearwater Revival; the following October, he followed it up with another solo effort, Eye of the Zombie. Unfortunately, that album led into another lengthy break that lasted nearly as long as the one before Centerfield – but this time, Fogerty had really started to make peace with his turbulent creative past, and begun to appreciate his own place in the rock firmament.

“There’s this guy buried there, and maybe some guy named Morris Stealum of Cheatem, Beatem & Whatever owns [his] songs in some big building in Manhattan,” Fogerty later mused in an interview with Rolling Stone, recounting a visit to Robert Johnson’s grave. Reminded of his own fight with Fantasy Records boss Saul Zaentz for control of his earlier songs, he couldn’t resist drawing a parallel – and a line in the sand.

“It’s Robert [Johnson] who owns those songs; he’s the spiritual owner of those songs. Muddy [Waters] owns his songs; Howlin’ Wolf owns his songs,” Fogerty pointed out. “And someday, somebody is gonna be standing where I’m buried, and they won’t know about Saul Zaentz – screw him. What they’ll know is if they thought the life’s work was valuable or not. Standing among all those giants, I went, ‘That’s the deal here. It’s time to jump back into your own stream.’”

George Michael’s music gets 3,000% sales boost following his death

Sales of George Michael’s music have risen by nearly 3,000% in the days following his death on Christmas Day.

According to Nielsen Music, Michael sold around 477,000 albums and songs in the week ending 29 December compared to 17,000 the week before – an increase of 2,678 per cent.

Of those sales, solo sales accounted for 429,000 – an increase from 16,000 the previous week.

The singer’s music with Wham! sold 103,000 units the same week, up from 5,000 the week before.

Michael was found dead at his home in Oxfordshire, England, on Christmas Day aged 53. A host of stars came forward to pay tribute to the icon following his tragic passing, with chat show host James Corden the latest to remember the music veteran.

“I feel like I’ve loved George Michael as long as I’ve loved music, in a way, and I know so many of his fans feel the same,” he said on his show The Late Late Show with James Corden on Tuesday night. “I can remember so many specific times in my life where I might have felt on my own, and George’s music would feel like, you would listen to a song and he would reach his hand out and tell you that you weren’t on your own and that these feelings were not particular to you.”

Corden has a lot to thank Michael for as well, considering a 2011 charity sketch with the singer inspired the comedian’s Carpool Karaoke segment, now one of the favourite parts of his nightly show that frequently goes viral.

“It was the first time I’d ever sung in a car with anybody, and it’s become quite a big part of my life now, and he really inspired it,” he said.

That sketch was also responsible for convincing Mariah Carey to sign up as the first participant of Carpool Karaoke.

“Her words were, ‘If it’s good enough for George, then it’s good enough for me. I’ll do it.’ So we all have so much to thank him for, for the music that he’s given that will last forever, but we personally, here at this show, we owe him so much,” he concluded.

Singles soundtrack to receive expanded reissue and vinyl box set for 25th anniversary

Pretty much everything about the breakthrough of grunge music in the early ’90s can be boiled down to one movie: Cameron Crowe’s 1992 classic Singles. I mean, Pearl Jam was actually in the movie and Matt Dillion’s wardrobe consisted mainly of Jeff Amnet’s actual clothing. But nothing sums up the cultural significance better than the film’s soundtrack, which featured the likes of Chris Cornell, Alice in Chains, Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, and yes, Pearl Jam. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the OST, and it looks as if Sony Music will be celebrating with an expanded reissue.

Pre-orders for a double-CD and triple-LP box set of the Singles Soundtrack (Deluxe Edition) have appeared online. Both editions feature the original 13 tracks plus 18 new ones including demos, instrumentals, and “Touch Me I’m Dick” by Dillion’s fictional band in the film, Citizen Dick, which featured Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament. (It should be noted that the way the tracklist is listed out makes it seem as if the vinyl box set will actually feature the original OST on double-vinyl and include the 18 bonus tracks on CD.)

There’s a February 17th release date listed, but it might be worth holding off to place your pre-order. A previous listing on Acoustic Sounds from May 2015 listed a August 2016 release date, and obviously that never occurred. Still, this new listing comes from Amazon, so it seems a bit more legit. Find the tracklist below.

Singles Soundtrack (Deluxe Edition) CD Tracklist:
Disc 1:
01. Alice in Chains – Would?
02. Pearl Jam – Breath
03. Chris Cornell – Seasons
04. Paul Westerberg – Dyslexic Heart
05. The Lovemongers – Battle of Evermore
06. Mother Love Bone – Chloe Dancer / Crown of Thorns
07. Soundgarden – Birth Ritual
08. Pearl Jam – State of Love and Trust
09. Mudhoney – Overblown
10. Paul Westerberg – Waiting for Somebody
11. Jimi Hendrix – May This Be Love
12. Screaming Trees – Nearly Lost You
13. The Smashing Pumpkins – Drown

Disc 2:
01. Citizen Dick – Touch Me I’m Dick
02. Chris Cornell – Nowhere But You
03. Chris Cornell- Spoonman
04. Chris Cornell – Flutter Girl
05. Chris Cornell – Missing
06. Alice in Chains – Would?
07. Alice in Chains – It Ain’t Like That
08. Soundgarden – Birth Ritual
09. Paul Westerberg – Dyslexic Heart
10. Paul Westerberg – Waiting for Somebody
11. Mudhoney – Overblown
12. Truly – Heart and Lungs
13. Blood Circus – Six Foot Under
14. Mike McCready – Singles Blues 1
15. Paul Westerberg – Blue Heart
16. Paul Westerberg – Lost in Emily’s Woods
17. Chris Cornell – Ferry Boat #3
18. Chris Cornell – Score Piece #4

Foo Fighters to spend 2017 recording new album

It looks like every aspect of Foo Fighters’ short-lived hiatus is over. Not only are the prolific rockers scheduled to return to the stage to headline BottleRock Napa Valley Festival in May, but they’ve also got plans to work on a brand new album, their first since 2014’s Sonic Highways.

News of the album was revealed by Dave Graham, CEO of Latitude 38, the entertainment company behind BottleRock. “The Foo Fighters are in the studio all next year recording a new album and BottleRock may be their only show in 2017 in North America,” he recently told writer David Kerns of the Napa Valley Register, in an interview discussing the steps Latitude 38 took to nab the much-coveted, Grammy-winning outfit. (Kerns confirmed to Consequence of Sound that “next year” means 2017.)

The forthcoming full-length would mark the Foos’ ninth overall and follows their two 2015 EPs, Songs from the Laundry Room and Saint Cecilia. In November, drummer Taylor Hawkins put out his debut solo album, KOTA.

The three-day BottleRock Festival goes down May 26th – 28th in Napa Valley, California. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Modest Mouse, The Roots, and Mavis Staples are also expected to perform.

U2 to Celebrate ‘Joshua Tree’ 30th Anniversary, Release New Album in 2017

2017 is looking to be a big year for U2, according to a video that they posted to their YouTube page yesterday.

In the video, all four guys are in a dark room decorating a “joshua tree” with Christmas lights, as the Edge plays “Little Drummer Boy” on guitar.

“Happy Christmas, everyone.” Bono says. “Next year’s gonna be a big year for the U2 group. We have Songs of Experience coming,” which is the follow up to their 2014 album Songs of Innocence. “And to honor the 30th anniversary of Joshua Tree, we have some very special shows. Very special.”

And then as the lights go out and the guys walk away, Bono whispers, “Joshua Tree.”

Billboard is speculating that U2 is planning a stadium tour this summer, and that they will headline Bonnaroo.

Ronnie Wood wants to keep The Rolling Stones to keep rocking until they drop

Ronnie Wood hopes The Rolling Stones will keep playing gigs until they die.

The veteran rockers released their first album in a decade on Friday, and guitarist Wood, 69, believes the band can keep going despite their advancing years.

In fact, Ronnie hopes that group members Mick Jagger, 73, Keith Richards, 72, and Charlie Watts, 75, can emulate their hero, blues legend Howlin’ Wolf, and rock until they drop.

“Howlin’ Wolf almost died on stage, plugged into his kidney machine, so there’s no reason why we wouldn’t go exactly the same way,” Wood told The Guardian.

The musician has more to live for than just music, as in May his wife Sally Humphreys, 38, gave birth to twins.

He also hopes to follow in the footsteps of another one of his idols, John Lee Hooker, who died in 2001, by living life to the full right to the end.

“I saw John Lee Hooker not long before he died and he was showing me backstage,” Wood added. “Showing off his new CD and his new white hat and his new girlfriend – he was rocking right to the end.”

Although the rock veterans are past the age where they can draw a pension, they show no signs of slowing down having toured Latin America earlier this year.

Their new album, Blue & Lonesome also sees them return to their youth, as it consists of cover versions of the blues tunes they played together as young musicians.

Hamilton, remixed: Alicia Keys, Jimmy Fallon and other famous fans create ‘mixtape’ for Broadway hit

The Broadway megahit Hamilton has already spawned a bestselling cast album, a PBS documentary and a book about its creation. Now it’s spinning off a CD by fans who happen to be some of popular music’s biggest stars.

The 23-track Hamilton Mixtape, set for release Friday, features covers by such artists as Usher, Kelly Clarkson, Nas, Ben Folds, Alicia Keys, Ashanti, John Legend, Sia, Common, Wiz Khalifa, Queen Latifah, The Roots, Jill Scott and Busta Rhymes.

It was unveiled Thursday during a four-song performance at the Broadway home of Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, which was packed with those who had won an online lottery. A live stream also captured the event.

Tariq [Black Thought] Trotter of The Roots served as host, and he helped open the show with his version of My Shot. There were also performances by Ashanti and Ja Rule (Helpless), Andra Day (Burn) and Regina Spektor (Dear Theodosia).

The album features songs from the show that have been reworked with new arrangements and new lyrics, as well as demos that never made the show, remixes and new songs like Immigrants (We Get the Job Done).

Highlights include Legend reimagining History Has Its Eyes On You as a gospel anthem, Clarkson turning It’s Quiet Uptown into a power ballad and TV host Jimmy Fallon channeling his inner-Broadway with You’ll Be Back.

Joell Ortiz, a New York rapper who is featured on the mixtape, said he thinks the new album has more appeal to a non-Broadway audience.

“I have friends who have never been to Broadway,” he said. “I realized they’re just scared of it. The buildings seem big and the elevators seem like places they don’t belong.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-flavoured biography about the first U.S. treasury secretary has become a hot ticket on Broadway and has birthed a production in Chicago, with plans for others for San Francisco and London.

The mixtape is in many ways a return to the roots of the project, which began as a collection of songs inspired by hip-hop artists. When Miranda was writing Helpless, he admits he was thinking of Ashanti and Ja Rule singing it.

Ja Rule went to see the show without high expectations, fearful the mix of rap and Broadway wouldn’t work. He left “blown away” and a Miranda fan.

“This is the beauty of what he did: He took something so left and fused it with something so right and made it so right,” he said before hitting the stage.

The mixtape arrives after the cast album has sold more than two million copies and won a Grammy for best musical theatre album. It debuted at No. 12 on Billboard’s album charts — the highest for a cast album debut since 1963. The new mixtape is executive produced by Miranda and Questlove of The Roots.

Producer and DJ !llmind, who produced four tracks on the mixtape, said the biggest challenge of putting together the new album was maintaining the integrity of the original songs while also making them new and fresh.

“Trust me, it was definitely a challenge,” he said.

“Sometimes it was like ‘OK, we’re on our 15th revision’ and then we end up going back to the original one. That’s just the nature of music but it was a hell of a lot of fun doing this.”