David Cook unveils The Last Goodbye ahead of new album, American Idol spot

David Cook has posted the official lead single for his sophomore album to his website. The Last Goodbye is currently streaming from davidcookofficial.com ahead of his scheduled appearance on American Idol this week to perform the song live. Cook’s new album This Loud Morning is set for June 28th release. The up tempo rocker offers an upbeat-sounding take on the end of a relationship with “If you hear this on the radio, then we’ve already said our last goodbye.” The Last Goodbye gets the official Beatweek thumbs up. Expect to hear it blasting out of radios all summer.

The rocker is preparing for a homecoming to Idol on April 21st after winning the show’s seventh season and then releasing his self titled major label debut album in 2008. According to his site, the album will be available on the site for preorder starting tomorrow. However, the single has not yet arrived in iTunes; new music typically arrives on Tuesdays, so keep a hopeful eye out for it tomorrow. The Last Goodbye was co-written by David Cook and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder. Of the forthcoming album, Cook has offered “This album is the culmination of one of the loftiest endeavors I’ve ever undertaken. The end result is an album that I cannot wait to share with everyone.”

David Cook beat out fellow David, David Archuleta, to take the American Idol crown three years ago. This week he’ll he facing an almost entirely new judging panel upon his return to Idol, as only Randy Jackson remains after the departures of Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul.

Ke$ha reveals her next album title: Spandex on the Distant Horizon

The next full length album from Ke$ha won’t come until sometime in the future, well after her new dance remix album is out the door. But she already has some sense of what direction she might go in with her next record. Sort of. “Maybe it will be rock and roll or maybe it will be something else,” Ke$ha reveals in the cover story interview for the March 15th issue of Beatweek Magazine. “It could end up being a spoken word record or polka death metal.” But while the musical direction of the followup to her Animal album and Cannibal EP is still clearly up in the air, she’s already chosen a name for it: “The title of my next record will be Spandex on the Distant Horizon.”

Elsewhere in the Beatweek cover story she discusses he current single Blow, whether or not seeing her name written as ‘Kesha’ bothers her, why her longtime fan favorite song ‘Fuck Him He’s a DJ’ is finally seeing release on her I Am The Dance Commander + I Command You To Dance remix EP (due out March 22nd), the surprises she has in store for her upcoming sold U.S. headlining tour. Look for the full interview with Ke$ha in the March 15th issue of Beatweek Magazine as well as on Beatweek.com.

Matisyahu tells Beatweek the secrets behind his new album – and his beard

by Linda Domingo

A musical anomaly, Matisyahu broke into the mainstream in 2005, making crowds to jump and sway to reggae sounds, all while wearing a yarmulke. Twisting, bending, and dismantling genres, Matisyahu’s sound is a mix of reggae, hip-hop and rock, which he uses to convey spiritual messages to the masses. His new live album and DVD, “Live at Stubb’s Vol. II,” will be on sale February 1. Currently working on new material for an album with an expected release date later this year, Matisyahu talks to Beatweek about writing, performing, beat boxing, tweeting, and growing a healthy beard.

What’s your writing process like? Do you have to be locked away somewhere?

I would say that to this day when I write lyrics, I write in one of two ways. I either write lyrics just based out of my life experience, or I write them from text, based on where my inspiration is coming from in that moment. Being that Judaism is such a fundamental part of who I am and how I’ve chosen to live my life, and the lens through which I see life, it’s inseparable between Judaism and my lyrics; it’s one thing. Judaism is not just some small religion. Judaism is a universal concept, that’s the basis for Christianity, Islam, you know, so many religions.

I kind of go through different processes. For example, there was one specific idea I was dealing with for my new record, the record that I’m writing now. It’s an idea based in the Torah, called “the Akedah”, which is when Abraham goes to sacrifice his son on the mountain and instead ends up sacrificing the animal. This idea became a central theme. There’s a rabbi that I really wanted to study more called the Baal Shem Tov. So we went to his grave in the Ukraine, me and my co-writer, and we sat and we developed ideas and lyrics in a very isolated, tiny, tiny town in the middle of nowhere. But now as I’m writing the music, I’m working with musicians and producers, and it’s just me with whoever I’m working with at the time.

On your new live record, there’s obviously a lot of energy coming from you, your band, and the audience. Do you prefer being in the studio recording or performing live?

I really enjoy both things. For me though, music started with the live. Me performing in front of people. That’s kind of how I started making music, as a street performer and performing at open mikes and with bands, and stuff like that. So for me it was always kind of about the live performance. It comes relatively natural to me.

Do you have a favorite song to perform?

Not in particular. It really depends on the night and what’s happening with the band, and myself, and the crowd, and all those little pieces that come together and create a certain vibe. When I’m performing, I’m always going after that. I’m trying to find a place where you really just become completely immersed in the music, and completely focused on what’s happening.

How did you come to start making music with your band, Dub Trio?

Well we both lived in Brooklyn and we both were playing similar venues at the time. I knew their music because I had one of their records, and really fell in love with it. I went to see them perform once and just felt like they were such an amazing, unique band and there was no one doing what they can do. They’re very, very unique in terms of the styles that they can play, and their sound. It was very much in line with my sound and the music I wanted to make, so we hooked up and played a show together – sort of just an improv show where we didn’t really play many of my songs, but it went really, really well, and that was the start.

You have a really large reggae and hip-hop following. How were you first introduced to these styles of music?

Well I grew up in a suburb of New York City in the nineties. So, hip-hop music was really starting to break into the mainstream, and was becoming something that we were listening to all the time, whether you liked it or not. The first, I guess, element of hip-hop that I got into was beat boxing, because my friends all freestyled and that was kind of what we did when we hung out. I was always trying to find some way to really express myself. I found that through beat boxing I could really express that sound. That became the first kind of element of hip hop that I got into…Freestyling with my friends and beat boxing. And then I started listening to a lot of the early nineties, conscious hip-hop stuff like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, and those bands.

Reggae music was through two ways. I have cousins that grew up in Barbados. They used to come every summer and we would go to camp together, and they would play me all their music from the island. It was a lot of early dancehall music, like Tony Rebel, or Barrington Levy, that kind of stuff. And then I got into Bob Marley, and I was really taken with his music.

Some kids figured out your hotel before your show at Stubb’s from a picture you posted on Twitter. They asked if they could come by and say hello, and you agreed. What is your relationship with social media? How do you feel about that whole movement?

From the picture of the bus. Yeah. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a great way to take your own promotion and marketing into your own hands as an artist. The whole industry is becoming more centered around the artist kind of making things happen for themselves rather than depending on a big company to do it. Twitter…I got involved with it early, and I’ve had a lot of great experiences through that. I’ve done things like I’ve been in Colorado, and I ride motorcycles, so I tweeted and asked if anyone had an extra motorcycle. And I had someone show up with a bike and let me take it for a few hours into the mountains. It’s a good way for the artist, for myself, to be able to have experiences with fans that aren’t typical.

When are you expecting to release your new album?

We’re not sure yet. We’re hoping maybe the summer or the fall.

Can you tell me a little bit about what’s on the album?

I’ve been working writing with a lot of different people and the sound is very different. I’m trying to figure out which direction to go in. I’ve been recording with the Dub Trio as a band, so it will be more of a band record, as opposed to my last record, “Light,” which was really a mixture of programmed drums and different musicians playing, but this will have more of an actual, like, live band feel to it. And I’ve been doing work with a producer named Kojak, who is kind of more pop. So, I’m not sure exactly what direction the record’s going to go.

The beard. Do you have any special maintenance? Any special products?

The beard kind of just grows. It goes through different stages of growth. Sometimes…for like, several years it didn’t really grow much, and then it started growing again. Now it’s turning gray. There’s no real special shampoo or whatever. There’s no real tricks. You just wash your beard like you wash your hair.

MatisyahuWorld.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Paramore – No Doubt tour in 2011? Which band says they want it…

A series of exclamation points was all Paramore singer Hayley Williams could come up with in response to her bass player’s idea that their band should team up with No Doubt for a 2011 tour. The notion came about when Paramore bassist Jeremy Davis expressed his approval via Twitter of the news that Gwen Stefani and company are in the studio working on the next No Doubt record, which has been a long time in coming.

While it’s all just tweets and giggles at the moment, it’ll be interesting to see whether the two bands manage to find their way onto the same touring bill later in the year, and if Davis’ tweet-aloud was indeed the catalyst for it. No Doubt and Paramore are notable in that they have two of the most notable front-women in rock, in Stefani and Williams.

Colbie Caillat and Common record Ryan Tedder-penned song

Grammy winners Colbie Caillat and Common have come together in the studio, as the pop singer and rapper have combined forces to record a song they co-wrote with OneRepublic bandleader Ryan Tedder. Caillat announced the news via Twitter, but didn’t reveal the song’s name, saying only that it’ll appear on her third album in March of 2011. No word on what stylistic flavor the collaboration is expected to take on. The two also performed Common’s song The Light last night for the Virgin Unite Foundation.

Colbie Caillat’s second album Breakthrough was released in August of last year, and she additionally netted a pair of Grammy awards earlier this year for her collaborations with Taylor Swift and Jason Mraz. Common’s next album, entitled The Believer, is set for 2011.

Josh Groban interview: new album, new musical territory, new decade

Josh Groban’s twenty-first century take on classical music takes a new turn with Illuminations, his new album which, while staying true to the kind of music he’s known for, saw his sound evolve as he paired up with, of all people, Metallica’s producer and the guy who once sang Closing Time. As Josh closes in on thirty, he talks about his new record, where he’s at in life, and his surprising touring plans for the rest of 2010.

Good music is good music, but Rick Rubin is Metallica’s producer. When the idea of working with him first came up, what was your first thought?

It happened really naturally. We were put in a room together by a mutual friend Guy Oseary, and we just met, basically. We just said hey, you wanna get lunch? So I had lunch with him at his house, and was quite nervous just because I was a fan of all his rock records, and just figured he would not even slightly be interested in what I do. We just started talking about music, we started talking about life, we talked about the philosophy of making music, and realized we had way more in common than we thought. And he was intrigued. He likes great melodies and he likes great singing. He just doesn’t like a lot of fluff.

And so when I started playing him stuff that I was writing, he was really intrigued by the melodies and he was intrigued by the idea of a fine art kind of classical type of record. So he said “Look, I don’t do anything halfway, let’s give this thing a try and let’s find our formula and let’s make a record that will blow your fans away, and let’s just have fun making some great songs.”

So he really kind of put me on a quest, and it took a long time, and a lot of it was very frustrating. But when we found our groove, we found our groove, and we didn’t turn back.

When you found that groove, was it a lightbulb kind of moment where something clicked and you said okay, now I know this is going to turn out well?

I think we both had different things that were one and the same but were separate as far as what we wanted to get out of the record. I think Rick was excited about standing in the room with an orchestra, which he’d never really done. And I was excited about the idea of incorporating more of a world music or folk sound into my orchestral songs. So for him, I think he was more inspired from day one just because we really started with a sound that I was used to for my whole career.

And my kind of aha moment was when we I got to sit in the room with some of these musicians that Rick brought in, Matt Sweeney and Smokey Hormel and Spooner Oldham, and I got to play piano, which is something he didn’t originally want me to do. Eventually I was kind of filling in, and teaching some of the guys what to play so much that he eventually said alright, go ahead and play. And then I wound up playing for the whole record. So I think for me, the moment was sitting down and when we did Hidden Away and Higher Window, basically both were just one take with the guys in the room. And I walked out of there going, now this is the kind of music making that I really wanted to experience on this record.

And so it wound up being a very, very healthy combination of the more classical style, standing in the room with the orchestra and just singing your lungs out, and the more loose, just kind of jamming with a bunch of guys in a room until you get it right. I really liked balancing between those two worlds on this record.

You’re from LA, so what inspired you to write a song like Bells Of New York City?

It was really about my inspiration in the city. I was talking to Dan Wilson about the city. We both are equally as inspired when we get here, and I live in New York now. We were just talking about it, and talking about the melancholy feel of a certain time of year in this city really makes us feel kind of happy. And so he went to the bathroom and I sat down at the piano and started playing this bell thing that you hear at the beginning of the song, and he came out of the bathroom and said “What is that?” I said I don’t know, I’m messing around. And he said “Well, it sounds like bells. Let’s try something with that.”

And so we just kept with that rolling feel of it, and just for whatever reason it made me think of fall and winter time in New York. And then we were talking about the idea that everything about the city, the noises, the people, the experiences you’ve shared, just keep drawing you back. I’ve had a fling with New York for fifteen years now. Every time I’ve landed here, it’s felt like home even though LA is my “home” home. I’ve just felt like I belonged. And so I can’t explain it. I’ve been all over the world, I’ve traveled to a lot of cities, and this is the city that I’ve always felt that when I touched ground. And so plain and simple, we just wrote a song about that feeling of magnetism.

Most people know Dan Wilson from his Semisonic song Closing Time, and they don’t know much about him beyond that. What attracted you to him as a songwriting collaborator?

Well, people should know about him. He’s now one of the great co-writers in the business. He won a Grammy for Song of the Year for Dixie Chicks Not Ready To Make Nice. He’s probably one of, if not the most, sought after co-writer in the business. And Rick has produced his solo work as well, and so when Rick put us in the room together, he just thought you know, this is a guy that really doesn’t miss and has a wonderful spirit for getting the best out of each writer that he works with, whether it’s me or Adele or whoever.

Instead of coming to LA, I wanted to visit him. He lived in Minneapolis, and I wanted to get out of the LA bubble and go to a place that was just kind of out of the comfort zone because I’m distracted at home. It was nice to get to a place where we had nothing to do but drink coffee and sit at his piano and light a fire. And every time I’d come back to Rick with three more songs. One or two out of those three, Rick would like. Maybe one needed tweaking. And I just kept going back. I was in Minneapolis maybe six or seven times with Dan, just tweaking songs and writing new ones. Bells Of New York was one that came after Rick had said we’re done with songs. I brought that to him and I said I think we have one more. And he said well hot damn, I guess we do. And so now Dan is one of my best friends in the world, and I can’t imagine writing songs without him. We’re a really wonderful team.

You’ve added Portuguese to your repertoire on this album. Is that more about a passion for languages in general, or is there something specific about being able to sing in them that’s different from just being able to speak them?

I think I’ve always had an affinity for languages. I’ve always been very interested in the musicality of languages. I grew up listening to world music. I grew up listening to all different kinds of music. And for me, being a very audio kind of guy, I was always fascinated with the sounds of lyrics and how even as a kid, when I didn’t understand the lyrics, the emotion that I got from the sound of the words was really profound. I remember that, and I remember thinking to myself that certain music and certain languages go together like peas and carrots, and certain melodies lend themselves to different languages for the sheer sound of them.

And then you dive into the translation and you find the best lyric that you can, and so that was my first inspiration as a kid, just liking the sound of the lyrics. And then as I started getting more classical training, you start singing in French and Spanish and Italian mainly, and as I started writing, I started writing melodies that really lended themselves quite naturally to those languages.

So it started more of a classical “let’s find songs that fit my voice” and of course the Italian, Spanish, the Latin languages are more vowel oriented, so they fit really well with my kind of big voice. But I’d never sung in Portuguese, and it wasn’t something that I was planning on doing, I just wrote the song with Lester Mendez, and he said you know what, this sounds like Portuguese, it’s got a very Brazilian feel to it. And he said let’s send it to Carlinhos Brown. He’s a wonderful artist in Brazil. And he arranged the drums and recorded the drums in Brazil, and also wrote this wonderful lyric.

Awhile back on Twitter you said something about feeling like a seventy year old living in a twenty-nine year old’s body, and I see you’re almost about to turn thirty. Have you always felt like an old soul, or has that been accentuated by the fact that you’re about to turn thirty?

Actually, the thirty thing is kind of a relief just because I feel like I’m finally coming of age. I kind of feel like my twenties were the teenage years I never had, from being signed and having to be kind of Mr. Professional Guy at seventeen. So a lot of my twenties were pretty scattered, pretty all over the place. I’m actually kind of looking forward to the self confidence and modicum of wisdom that comes I think with thirty. And I’m curious to know what this whole “dirty thirty” thing is about too.

As far as an old soul, as a kid I always kind of felt like an old soul. I was always very mature, just kind of almost kind of to an annoying point. I was focused and I just wanted to, I was scattered but I was still very much felt like a little old man. I wore sweaters to my elementary school.

By choice?

By choice, yeah (laughs). No, exactly. Not as part of a morning parental regimen.

There are all kinds of stereotypes around the kind of music you make. With the classical elements, the opera elements, there’s a stereotype of stuffiness which I’m sure you’re well aware of. But I follow you on Twitter and you seem like a down to earth guy and you’re jokes. And you go on Glee and make fun of yourself. People who know you through your music but not as a person, are they surprised to find that out about you when they encounter you?

Just me being me, I don’t expect them to be surprised. But I think sometimes they are, based on the very nature of stereotypes in general. An actor gets to go on TV show, they get to yuck it up with the host, and then by way, here’s a clip. As a singer, you’ve got three minutes to basically sing your single and get out of there. And so you don’t get a lot of opportunities as a musician to show any kind of personality, to show any kind of who the other side is, what the light and dark is, and not just the thirteen tracks.

I think that if you’re a rock singer, people just assume you’re a cool dude who likes to get wild and have a good time. If you’re a classical singer or do classical type of music, people just kind of automatically assume. By the way, I know some rockers who are some of the most boring people you’ll ever meet in your life, and some of the most snotty as well. And I know some classical musicians who can party anybody under the table. So yeah, I think in any genre of music there’s a stereotype. But a lot of that stereotype comes from the pomp and circumstance of classical music, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. I mean I enjoy getting dressed up and going to the New York Phil. I enjoy the idea of the suit being the clothing of record. And there’s something to be said for showing respect for great art.

But at the same time, I like to show both sides. I’m very, very serious about what I do musically. I’m very, very serious about music, but I also feel like I’m nine the rest of the time. And that’s why it’s nice to be interviewed. It’s nice to talk to people, and it’s nice to have people see beyond the music.

Are you going to go out on tour before the year is over?

Yeah, the touring is going to be interesting this time around because I want to do some unexpected things. I’m looking forward to doing another big world tour, that’ll be sometime later next year. But in the mean time, this album was such a great live experience for me that I’d like to explore some interesting, kind of cut down, more intimate performances that relate to this record and relate to talking to the audience more.

And that very thing, the personality thing, I think so often you do a show and you’re on and you know from start to finish what that show is going to be like. I love improvising with the crowd. I love improvising on the piano. I love just going with the flow and staying with my toes. So I may decide to do just some piano shows somewhere. I don’t know any dates at the moment, but I’d like to just go out and see what happens.

interview by Bill Palmer

JoshGroban.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Lee DeWyze explains the Chicago references on Live It Up album

Lee DeWyze is from Chicago, as anyone who’s watched American Idol (or heard him speak in his native Chicagoan accent) can attest – and multiple references to his hometown appear in the lyrics to various songs on his upcoming major label debut album entitled Live It Up. Lee told Beatweek today that the references, rather than being planted, happened on account of truth-based storytelling: “The Chicago references were not planned necessarily,” DeWyze says. “It was more like I was writing about it and that’s where these things happened. Sometimes it’s easier to get an understanding of a song when put in that setting.”

Lee continues, “All the songs are written from a very honest place. It’s me. Like in Dear Isabel, the Lake Michigan reference, or in Me And My Jealousy, ‘Chicago in the winter.’ If you’ve ever lived in Chicago, anyone who has, they know what a winter in Chicago is like. To be going through a tough time here in the winter would be just be all the more worse.”

Live It Up is set for a November 16th release in the United States, while lead single Sweet Serendipity is at iTunes and radio already. Lee DeWyze is set to appear on the cover of the November 16th issue of Beatweek Magazine in which he discusses the making of his new album, the songwriting process, his impending return to American Idol in 2011 and more.

Lady GaGa disappears for nearly two weeks

Lady GaGa finally surfaced today after disappearing from Twitter for nearly two weeks. There’s more likely time for a musician to go quiet than when new material is actively being worked on, which GaGa affirmed today when she returned to Twitter and told fans that she’d been “working so hard” for them on her new music, along with a linked photo of her sitting at a piano in a studio. GaGa released her debut album The Fame about two years ago, and then followed it up with The Fame Monster, a nearly full-length companion piece, about a year ago. GaGa has said that she won’t be releasing new material in 2010, but she’s clearly working on it.

Lady GaGa is the world’s most popular Twitter user, now approaching seven million followers. She doesn’t necessarily tweet every day, but disappearing from the social network for a full twelve days is a stretch by her standards. Of her still-in-progress album-to-be, GaGa, simply told fans that she “can’t wait for u to hear the new music.”

Kings of Leon sneaks back into instant dominance

On day in which some of the highest profile rock albums of fall 2010 saw their release, including Linkin Park (read the Beatweek Magazine cover story interview), Weezer, Robert Plant, and the solo debut of The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, another rock outfit quietly dropped a bomb that we all should have seen coming: despite not seeing release for another five weeks, the pre-order version of the new Kings Of Leon album Come Around Sundown, is (at the moment) the fourth best selling album in all of iTunes.

Remember them?

The Tennessee rockers, who’ve been quiet since winning the “record of the year” Grammy early this year, are back. If it seems like a quick turnaround from 2008′s Only By The Night, it’s only because the familial quartet’s last album remained in the public eye for as long as it did, based on the extended success of hit single Sex On Fire and then prolonged further by the success of Use Somebody. The new album’s huge advance sales are no doubt in part due to pure anticipation based on the previous one, but another part of that has to be the strength of the new single Radioactive. And no, it has nothing to do with the song of the same name from The Firm a generation ago. Kings of Leon’s take on the title is infectious in different manner, as the song’s urgent refrain “It’s in the water” is unlikely to leave your head again once you’ve heard it, making Radioactive arguably even catchier than either of the band’s previous two big hits.

So far I’ve only heard the single, but it sure makes me want to hear the rest. I had assumed all along that Taylor Swift’s new album would be the biggest release of October 2010. Now I’m starting to wonder if the Kings Of Leon followup (whoops, almost instinctively typed “Followill”) might be even bigger. What do you guys think? Will the rock or the country rule the month? Comments below. In the mean time, feel free to peruse our new Linkin Park cover story interview, as they’ve already claimed ownership of September.

Sara Bareilles talks Uncharted, Kaleidoscope Heart, King of Anything

After a three year wait, the new album from Sara Bareilles is less than two weeks away from seeing the light of day. Beatweek spoke with Sara this week about her new record entitled Kaleidoscope Heart and the song “Uncharted” which inspired not only the album title but also opened the floodgates to allow her to create the rest of the album after having been “stuck under this ceiling” as she described in it the lyrics of the song. “I sat down and, really, for the first time in a long time, had written a song that really meant something to me,” Bareilles told Beatweek while chatting from her tour bus. The song explores the uncharted territory she found herself in when she sat down to start work on this album knowing that any song she wrote was “most likely gonna end up being compared to Love Song,” her smash hit song from her previous record in 2007.

Sara also revealed to Beatweek who her new hit single “King of Anything” is really about – and you can read all about it (and much more) in the cover story interview with Sara Bareilles in the September 7th issue of Beatweek Magazine. Not coincidentally, that’s the same day Kaleidoscope Heart is set for release.

Secondhand Serenade interview

It started as a project in which John Vesely serenade his wife with music and then pass those songs secondhand to a broader audience (hence the name). With his third album, the band’s namesake is no longer in the picture, but Secondhand Serenade’s music is more popular than ever. John talks about how the mixed emotions his new album Hear Me Now are appropriate and more.

Your new album has its sadder moments, but there are some songs on it that are much, much upbeat than others. Is that a reflection of where you’ve been lately?

Yeah. It’s really important to be able to move forward, and I think that’s what this record is about. It’s about recognizing some mistakes that you’re down for and being able to move forward from it. Really, that’s what all this is about. It’s all therapeutic, it’s all about being able to get it out so I can be fine. I’m a really happy guy. Everyone may think I’m all depressed and shit, but absolutely not, I’m one of the happiest guys you’ll ever meet and I have a lot of fun. The reason I do write about some downer stuff is that I get it out. You don’t go to therapy and talk about happy shit. You go to therapy and talk about the shit that’s bothering you, and then you go about your life.

Singing is the same thing for me. I’m not trying to get people down by listening to my music. I’m trying to be realistic about things and talk about real things. It’s not in my nature to talk about California girls in bikinis. It’s in my nature to talk about this.

The title of the album is Hear Me Now. I know that’s the title of the last song on the album, but what motivated you to use that for the album title?

This album finally focuses more on me rather than telling stories about relationships. It’s just a more personal album dealing with my issues, my feelings, and my concerns, pretty much. I think it was time to do that. Before it was kind of a little bit more young. This is just a more mature record, in my opinion.

Your lead single is Something More. What’s going on in that song?

It’s a song about owning up to some of the bad decisions that I’ve made in the past, and some of the crummy ways that I’ve acted, and trying to figure out why I did that, and what I can do to move forward from that, and why I make the decisions that I make. Is there a reason behind it? It’s kind of about figuring out why I’m doing what I’m doing, pretty much, and just searching for a reason and trying to better myself. It’s one of those songs that came about in a weird time, because I’d just finished the record, and it came down like, we could use a few more songs. I was uncertain about my career, and all this stuff was going on, so I did this song. And it turned out to be a single.

You’ve been asked to death about the meaning of the name “Secondhand Serenade” and you’ve answered that a thousand times. What I’m more interested in is the cadence of that phrase. It’s a pair of three syllable words, they both start with S, they both have the primary accent on the first syllable. It’s almost like the name of your band is in a 6/8 time signature. Was that intentional?

Definitely, and that’s the first time I’ve actually been asked that question. Ironically, most of that first album is in 6/8, so yeah, I guess I was in like a little bit of a phase there. But yeah, it rolled off the tongue really well. I definitely was looking for something that as well as having meaning, also had a certain catchiness to it.

Do you have anything planned for the album date? You’re on tour and you’ve got a show that night, you’ll probably be on the bus all day. But what does August 3rd mean to you, do you spend all day in iTunes staring at the charts, do you pop champagne on the bus?

I’m probably gonna pop a little bit of champagne, and not take a look at the charts. I try not to worry about that stuff. Especially with this kind of act, it’s not all about first day and first week. Fall For You took like eight months to level on the charts. So I’m just gonna let whatever happens happen and work as hard as I can.

I noticed that right before you called me, you spent like an hour straight on Twitter replying to everyone who had written anything to you. All artists do that to an extent, but you’re spending a ton of time on that. Why is that so important.

I’ve done it since the beginning with MySpace, and it showed really good results. And I think it’s very important to have a personal connection to your fans, because they won’t abandon you as easily. I mean they’re as much of this success as I am. And I think it’s important to make them feel that way.

And you follow everyone back on Twitter.

Yeah. You see some crazy shit if you follow people.

You’re going to turn thirty in a year or two. Is that something you’ve thought about?

Not until now (laughs). Yeah, it has crossed my mind. I’m trying to get as much in as possible. None of us are getting any younger, but yeah, I’m trying to do what I can while I’m still young.

Learn more at SecondhandSerenade.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

The Black Crowes interview: Croweology and why they’re calling it quits – for now

When The Black Crowes broke up in 2002 it was because they were burnt out and because they were unable to stop fighting with each other like children. After a successful comeback in 2005 and a five year reunion, The Crowes are now parting ways again – but this time it has more to do with the fact that three of the band members just had children. But while founding brothers Chris and Rich Robinson both told me that it’s unlikely they’ll never get back together as The Black Crowes, they’ve nonetheless offered fans a parting gift in the form of Croweology, an acoustic double album which spans their twenty year career and includes new versions of their biggest hits. And they’re not done yet, as they’re touring through at least the end of 2010 before hanging it up. But with the past few years having been a second renaissance for the Crowes, including enjoying all the benefits of a stable lineup of band members who’ve figured out how to live with each other, and the band’s newfound ability to find major chart success without needing a major label, why why shut it down now, in the middle of an upswing?

“I think that’s the main reason to do it,” says Chris Robinson from his home in Los Angeles, which he moved to sixteen years ago after leaving behind the band’s Atlanta-area origins. “We called what we did before a hiatus, but that was really more of breaking up the band. Like anything, there was reasons to do it, personal reasons, soulful reasons, mental health reasons. But I think now, it’s more like okay, we’ve been working fucking hard for five years as well. Let’s step away from this.”

For a pair of brothers whose in-fighting is so legendary that they once had to scrap an album after having taken turns spitefully recording over each other’s mutually disapproved-of work, the Brothers Robinson are surprisingly on the same page when it comes to why they’re putting the Crowes on the shelf after 2010. Or as Rich tells me from the other side of the country on that same day (he moved to New England years ago), “everyone’s happy with the band, and we don’t really want to mess it up this time. We don’t want to push it too much. So we felt like five years is a good amount of time since we’ve been back, and we’ve been on tour every year since then and making records and doing stuff. So we just felt like it was time to take a break before we sort of run ourselves out again.”
The new Croweology album comes out of a desire to mark the twentieth anniversary of the band’s debut album Shake Your Money Maker, a straight ahead rock record from an obviously southern band who nonetheless managed to be anything but a “southern rock” band while also managing to bear little resemblance to their Seattle-based contemporaries of the day. “I didn’t really have that working man Skynyrd kind of hardass thing,” says Chris of why the band’s music has never quite matched up with the band members’ accents. “We were like failed art school people more than rednecky kind of dudes.”

After briefly chewing on the idea of simply making a straight-through acoustic re-recording of Shake Your Money Maker, they then “realized that it’s been twenty years, and there’s a whole array of songs that we wanted to touch on,” Rich says, which then led to a twenty song acoustic collection spanning the band’s first six albums. Croweology includes classic hits like Jealous Again and Remedy along with tour favorites like Wiser Time and My Morning Song. Remarkably, after Chris, Rich, and founding drummer Steve Gorman each sat down and came up with their own preferred tracklist, “There was about eighty percent agreement right off the bat.”

The name “Croweology” is play on the word “anthology” which Chris came up with after first kicking around the title “Music To Get Your Shit Together By” and then thinking better of it. He’s quick to point out that it’s not quite an anthology, however, as “we did a lot of arrangemental things and changed a lot of things. Not on any design, but just because that’s the nature of it. I don’t think we were just gonna go into the studio and record our songs the way they’ve been, because that’s been the progression of this band, is they always are changing anyway. So I think to take the idea of an anthology and just to turn it into our own world or our own word. I mean we kind of did that with Amorica as well. If there’s not a word, make one up.”

Amorica, the band’s third record from 1994, is perhaps most notable for having delivered the “road song” Wiser Time, which to this day remains one of the most popular live songs with fans. Rich, who wrote the music for it, says the song “emotes a feeling. People who listen to it get a feeling from it, and that’s what music is. It’s visceral. It’s supposed to create this feeling. Some of it excited, some of it down, some of it sort of peaceful, almost to transport someone through a feeling. It puts you in a car, it puts you in a sort of place. To me, all great music does that.”

Chris, who wrote the lyrics, sees Wiser Time from another angle, and shares the inspiration behind the song’s most memorable line. “I think people maybe identify with the idea, there’s a lyric in the song that says, and I used to get asked this question during interviews back in the early nineties a lot, it’s so cliche to write a song about the road, why do you write these kind of songs or use that as an image or whatever. The point is, I guess you never left home. It’s easy to say why would you write a song about this perpetual movement and travel that you’ve taken on to be able to play music, when you just sit at your house all day or you live in the same town you grew up in, and you go on vacation once a year. I don’t expect you, obviously, to understand a deep connection to the physical reality of my life. I think a lot of people identified with that feeling. A lot of us have left home. A lot of us have gone in the world to find life and love and loss and adventure and boredom.”

But as if to underline that the Crowes now understand how much they need each other, Chris adds that Wiser Time is more than just a lyrical journey: “We have the extended solo sections and things for the band to be able to have a musical conversation and tell how they feel about that as well, just as important as the lyric or the melody.”

Still, with the history of the band, some fans are going to assume that the new hiatus is also somehow, in some way, about in-fighting. But Rich has a plenty believable explanation, which is that the band reached a point in 2009 in which three of them (Rich, Chris, and guitarist Luther Dickinson) each learned that their wives were pregnant, which led them to conclude that “this is a good time to take a break.”

It’s not that the past five years have been strife-free. Rich says that they’ve learned to have “disagreements instead of fights” and Chris admits that the initial 2005 reunion was not as smooth as it could have been: “One part of it is, it did take us two and a half years when we got the band back together to get an album, Warpaint, together. We had worked on some demo sessions and we’d worked on some tracks here and there, and they didn’t go well at all. I think that’s why the summer of ’07 when we found ourselves up in Atlanta and Rich and I finally got on the same page in terms of the material and everything, that’s why that was such a big breakthrough in a sense for us. But those stupidly stubborn two and a half years there, I mean the fighting part, to be honest, it’s like I don’t have it in me to be that aggressive and angry over something that is so beautiful to me.”

Chris also says the fact that the internet now allows the two to actively collaborate from opposite sides of the country, rather than having to park themselves in the same room in order to accomplish anything creatively, has been a surprising blessing. “I’m not always that excited about technology, but maybe in this scenario it’s helped our relationship.”

If you haven’t caught The Black Crowes in concert in awhile, it’s not too late yet, as they have a series of tour dates which run through December 2010. The shows will be in the recent Crowes tradition of three hour live efforts, but in this case each show will be split into a pair of ninety minute sets, one electric, one fittingly acoustic. But just because a song appears acoustically on Croweology, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to hear it that way on any given night of the tour. “Some nights we’ll play Jealous Again acoustic, some nights we’ll play it electric,” Rich says. “Just kind of what we feel. Maybe there will be songs that weren’t on the album that we’ll try in this format or whatever. It’s really about delving into our catalog, playing songs that we’ve played over the years, playing songs that have been important to us over the years.”

Again, surprisingly on the same page, Chris offers that “we’re happy to play Thorn In My Pride acoustic one night, but then if we don’t get to that one, we can throw it in the electric set. I think the record itself is twenty songs. That for us looks like the bulk of both sets in a sense. That still gives us a lot of space to play a lot of our catalog and a lot of stuff.”

Just as some of the songs on Croweology stretch to nearly the ten minute mark despite being only half as long in their original rendition, the Crowes have a notable habit of turning even some of their tightest radio staples into extended jam sessions in concert. Don’t expect that to change, as it’s a point of pride for the band, even as Chris admits “I realize we can be self indulgent” but adds that “someone has to be in an age of pandering beggars of music. People will fucking do anything. American Idol has turned everything into a talent show. And a talent show, although it might be exciting for the pedestrian, is kind of sad because usually it’s just someone saying ‘Please like me!’”

While the band members do have various other musical endeavors and solo projects, Rich says the Crowes are not necessarily being set aside in favor of those other projects. “It’s what we do,” he says in terms of making music, but at the same time, he doesn’t see anyone taking their solo project out for a “six month tour” during the break. “This is like let’s take it easy, let’s be with ourselves.”

But with the band unwilling to put a timetable on when we might see them again after 2010, it does beg the question of whether it’s possible that this might indeed end up being the end of The Black Crowes for good.

“I’ve seen weirder things happen,” says Chris of the possibility that this might be the end of the road. “I think everyone feels personally involved of course with the last twenty years, and I would hope that everyone sees what we get to do as privilege and not our right, in terms of making your living as a musician and an artist without having to be in show business that much. It’s pretty fucking cool. I don’t know. The world keeps on turning. We’ll see where we get.”

Rich adds that “it’s unlikely that we would never get back together” and even hints that if the Croweology tour goes well, they may even extend it through the summer of 2011 before finally calling it a day.

These do not sound like two guys who think they’ve already made their final album together. Crowes fans have cast their vote today, buying Croweology in such volume in its first middle-of-the-night hours of digital availability that it’s already risen to the number two spot on the iTunes rock chart despite containing no newly written songs.

But as far as what the long term future holds for The Black Crowes, even as the Brothers Robinson both go out of their way to try to avoid committing to anything one way or the other during the course of separate conversations from opposite sides of the country, they appear to be on a sufficiently similar wavelength these days that they both settle on the same phrase to describe their band’s future: “You never know.”

Learn more at BlackCrowes.com • iTunes • Facebook

Dave Grohl sarcastically confirms new Foo Fighters album

Dave Grohl has sidehandedly confirmed that a new Foo Fighters album is on its way, after having spent the past year focusing on his other project Them Crooked Vultures. Using the official Foo Fighters Twitter account, Grohl tweeted this afternoon: “Dear Twitter, I take back everything I said before. I didn’t have a new album to promote. Love, Dave.” The remark is in apparent reference to the fact that Grohl has in the past dismissed social networking sites such as Twitter as being a waste of time.

The official Foo Fighters website has no mention of a new album. According to wikipedia (and we know it’s always right), the new album is supposedly set to be recorded in the fall of 2010. When we get our hands on more detailed information about the album – in other words, when Dave decides to tweet about it again – we’ll be sure to pass it along.

Jessie James reveals new album title: Daughter of a Gypsy

Country pop singer Jessie James has revealed the title of her forthcoming sophomore album to be Daughter of a Gypsy – the album is due out August 24th and has been preceded by lead single Boys In the Summer. Jessie shared the album title with Beatweek today, saying that “I’ve lived in fourteen different places my whole life due to my parents traveling. We’ve just always traveled, and sometimes for no reason at all, not even for a job. We just picked up and moved, and I’ve just kind of lived that way.” The title comes from the lyrics to the album track “What Am I Here For” which includes the line “Daughter of a gypsy, fourteen different homes.” Look for Beatweek’s full interview with Jessie James in August.

Carlos Santana, Rob Thomas to re-team on Guitar Heaven in September

Carlos Santana is releasing his latest collaborative album on September 21st, this time a collection of cover songs from rock gods ranging from Led Zeppelin to The Doors. Each song features a different prominent guest vocalist, and in once instance Santana will reteam with Matchbox Twenty lead singer Rob Thomas, who first paired up more than a decade ago for Smooth, which became one of the biggest hits of both their careers. This time the two will tackle Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” while the album will also see Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell take on “Whole Lotta Love” along with vocal contributions from Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots, Bush’s Gavin Rossdale, and Chris Daughtry among others.

Santana will also pay tribute to the late George Harrison on Guitar Heaven with a version of The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” featuring vocalist india.arie and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In our April 2009 interview with Carlos Santana, he told Beatweek that he wanted to work with Yo-Yo Ma.

At present, the official (though not finalized) tracklist is as such, with the original artist in parentheses:

“Whole Lotta Love” featuring Chris Cornell (Led Zeppelin)
“Sunshine Of Your Love” featuring Rob Thomas (Cream)
“Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’” featuring Scott Weiland (The Rolling Stones)
“Dance the Night Away” featuring Pat Monahan (Van Halen)
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” featuring india.arie and Yo-Yo Ma (The Beatles)
 “Bang A Gong” featuring Gavin Rossdale (T. Rex)
“Smoke On the Water” featuring Jacoby Shaddix (Deep Purple)
“Photograph” featuring Chris Daughtry (Def Leppard)
“Back In Black” featuring Nas (AC/DC)
“Little Wing” featuring Joe Cocker (Jimi Hendrix)
“Riders On the Storm” featuring Chester Bennington and Ray Manzarek (The Doors)
“I Ain’t Superstitious” featuring Jonny Lang (Howlin’ Wolf, Jeff Beck Group)
“Fortunate Son” featuring Scott Stapp (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Bush song “Afterlife” sounds just like 2010-era Bush should sound like

The new Bush single “Afterlife” won’t hit iTunes for another ten days, but Gavin Rossdale and the gang have posted a streaming version of the song to their website – which you have to log into with your Facebook account to hear. But fans of the band may find doing so to be well worth it, as Afterlife is instantly recognizable as being a Bush, but like Rossdale’s 2008 solo project, sounds like it belongs in the current century. Afterlife is also instantly catchy enough that it’s almost certain to become a major radio hit, no small feat for a band that packed it in nearly a decade ago. Bush’s reunion, however, is no surprise – Rossdale told Beatweek back in 2008 that his solo project was originally intended to be a Bush reunion album. If you want to hear Afterlife right now on Bush’s official website, it’s right here.

Iyaz on tourmate Justin Bieber: “that little dude is strong”

Iyaz, whose full length debut album is due in August on the strength of his current hit singles Replay and Solo, and a just released a new EP entitled So Big, is embarking on a tour with Justin Bieber and Sean Kingston – and he recently spoke with Beatweek about his plans for the tour: “I think the tour is going to be crazy. I just can’t wait. I’ve got some tricks planned up my sleeve for Sean and them.” Of the fact that he was recently seen on YouTube being sucked into a playful headlock by the diminutive Bieber, Iyaz told Beatweek “that little dude is strong. He caught me off guard last time. Fool me once, can’t fool me twice.”

Full list of upcoming tour dates:

• June 30thDes Moines, IA @ Wells Fargo Center
• July 5th Grand Prairie, TX @ Nokia Theatre at Grand Prairie
• July 6th Tulsa, OK @ BOK Center
• July 8th Broomfield, CO @ 1stBANK Center
• July 13th Everett, WA @ Comcast Arena at Everett
• July 14th Portland, OR @ Rose Garden
• July 17th Oakland, CA
• July 18th Reno, NV
• July 20th Los Angeles, CA @ Nokia Theatre LA Live
• July 21st Paso Robles, CA @ California Mid-State Fair
• July 28th Kansas City, MO @ Sprint Center
• July 29th N Little Rock, AR @ Verizon Arena
• July 31st Memphis, TN @ FedEx Forum
• August 1st Lafayette, LA @ Cajundome
• August 8th Charlotte, NC @ Time Warner Cable Arena
• August 9th Duluth, GA @ Arena at Gwinnett Center
• August 11th Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
• August 12th Indianapolis, IN @ Conesco Fieldhouse
• August 14th Columbus, OH @ Schottstein Center
• August 15th Auburn Hills, MI @ The Palace of Auburn Hills
• August 25th Albany, NY @ Times Union Center
• August 27th Providence, RI @ Dunkin Donuts Center
• August 28th Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center
• August 29th Syracuse, NY @ New York State Fair
• August 31st New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
• September 1st Manchester, NH @ Verizon Wireless Arena
• September 3rd Essex Junction, VT @ Coca Cola Grandstand
• September 4th Allentown, PA @ The Great Allentown Fair
• September 5thTimonium, MD @ Maryland State Fair

Bush is reuniting for new album, Gavin Rossdale makes it official

Frontman Gavin Rossdale has confirmed that his band Bush is reuniting, after having been on hiatus for most of the past decade. In addition to touring, the newly reconvened Bush will be releasing a new album entitled Everything Always Now in the fall, with a lead single entitled Afterlife. The return of Bush comes after Rossdale launched a successful solo career over the past two years. The reunion is not surprising, as Rossdale told Beatweek in 2008 that his solo album Wanderlust was originally intended to be a Bush album, but that he had had trouble getting other members of the band on board with the idea of touring.

In the mid-nineties, Bush spawned a number of hit singles including Everything Zen, Comedown, Glyrerine, Machinehead, Swallowed, and The Chemicals Between Us.

KT Tunstall returns with Tiger Suit new album (well not quite yet)

KT Tunstall will release her third album Tiger Suit on September 28th, which she recorded in the same Berlin studio as U2′s Achtung Baby twenty years earlier. Tunstall’s new album follows her first two releases, Eye To The Telescope which first put her ont the map and the chart topping Drastic Fantastic. Her new album is produced by Jim Abbiss and is said to be along the lines of “Nature Techno” (we don’t know what that means either, but we’re looking forward to hearing it). While KT Tunstall fans will have to wait a few months for Tiger Suit’s release, she is performing a pair of intimate solo shows in the mean time, on July 13th at the Hiro Ballroom in New York City and onJuly 15th at Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles.

KT Tunstall has a special place in Beatweek history, as she was the first female artist to appear on our cover, gracing the cover of Beatweek Magazine issue #4 all the way back in early 2008.

DEVO interview

Three decades ago DEVO informed us that society was regressing and the world was in search of a handbasket. And now that it’s seemingly happening, the band returns today with its first new album in twenty years to serve as, in the words of co-founder Gerald Casale, the house band on the Titanic. As DEVO now gears up for everything from a stint on the Colbert Report this week to a gig at Lollapalooza in August, Jerry explains how the band unapologetically used corporate market research to craft Something For Everybody, and how things operate these within his literal band of brothers…

You guys have been threatening to make a new DEVO album for so many years. Has it sunk in for you yet that it’s actually coming out now?

Well yeah, I would have one a long time ago had it been up to me. But DEVO is a collaboration, or like an eight cylinder Ferrari, and it’s not gonna run on four.

What strikes me about Something For Everybody is that I get ten seconds into the first track, and it’s immediately recognizable as being DEVO. A lot of veteran bands, when they make their first record in awhile, for some reason they just can’t pull that off. Was that something you had to work toward getting back to?

Not really. As soon as we actually started writing together, we just did what we do. You can’t not be who you are. It’s like every Jeff Koons painting looks like a Jeff Koons painting, every Andy Warhol looks like an Andy Warhol, they can never help it. They can keep reinventing pieces of it, but people wouldn’t like it if they quit being them (laughs). We had no reason to not be us. In fact I don’t see how we’d have a choice. You’d have to be counter intuitive and go well gee, let’s not do what I feel like doing, let me not write what I feel like writing.

This is an era where no one is sure what the fate is going to be of the big music corporations, and a lot of established bands are leaving their label, going indie. And yet here you guys are, you’re going more corporate. You’ve got a Chief Operating Officer now, you’re using market research for your tracklisting. What was your impetus for going with the grain at a time when others are going against it?

Well we investigated all our options and found out that in reality there were no viable options. These alternative ways of putting out music, avoiding a collaboration with a label, were in fact not there. All these ideas about hey, go to AEG or Live Nation and they’ll advance you money on a hundred shows and then that’ll give you the money to make your record and live, and you don’t need a label, you just make a deal with a digital distributor like Orchard and you get to keep eighty percent of your profit, well it was all hot air.

So was the sponsorship route. Corporate society has taken such a big hit. I know they’ve also been the cause of why they took the hit (laughs), but I mean we have financial meltdown. No sponsor or no corporate entity is putting big money into bands. It just isn’t happening. The ones that did went for the top acts and got burned, never got their money back.

So looking at all that, knowing that A) nobody wants to pay for music in this time, in this culture, B) music has been devalued because there’s so much of it and it’s not culturally significant like in the days when people would wait for the new Bob Dylan song to change the world, and C) with the implosion of the record business as it’s fairly reported, there is no way a new band can even be known without marketing. Marketing is the end all be all in this corporate society. Why do you know DEVO had a new record out? Why do you even care if you care about the music? Marketing. There’s ten thousand CDs a month coming out. There’s every new band making a record in their basement or bedroom, putting it out through MySpace, Facebook, high hoping that they can just rise to the top off the internet, American Idol style.

In fact, when you investigate the music played and what the hit songs are, none of it’s true. Not even close. So our only chance, after being debranded and forced to sit ice for twenty years, was to go to professionals and say, “How do you bring a band that everybody knows, and everybody knows iconically whether they bought a record or not, how do you bring them back?” And you couldn’t rely on a record company for that. We relied on a record company for one thing, the marketing money. And why would they give it to us? Because they own our back catalog of over a hundred and some songs from the old days. So their risk is minimal.

I honestly wasn’t sure whether to interpret the whole market research thing as a satire or whether you really truly went and did that.

It’s actually both. We really truly went and did it. And we really truly paid Mother to use the same techniques that they would use for a Dell XPS computer or Cheerios. Is it a satire? Well yeah. We feel that the way people go about things in corporate society for releasing new content is built-in satire. We didn’t have to have to put parentheses on it or put a wink on it, we just did it. And the fact of DEVO doing it, you see, almost makes it seem funny.

What happens to the songs that didn’t make the cut? Are they going to see the light of day at some point?

Oh sure, because that’s another thing, Amazon wants something special, Wal-Mart wants something different, iTunes demands that they have extra tracks. The demands of the marketplace mean that no song that you like disappears. There’s a use for it.

Talk to me about the concept of Devolution. Decades ago you guys predicted that the human race and the world would eventually go down the toilet. Are you starting to feel like Nostradamus now? You guys called this awhile ago.

Yeah well, we didn’t really want it to happen (laughs). It was a cautionary tale. But yeah it happened, alright.

Did you ever think it would get this crazy within your own lifetimes?

In the particular way that it’s gotten crazy, I’d have to say no, to be honest. I’m not as surprised as a lot of people. If you went back thirty years and somebody had a crystal joke back then, and they showed you the world in 2010 in the crystal ball, you certainly wouldn’t have believed it. You certainly wouldn’t have believed what you were seeing as events of the last ten years kind of played out in a montage. You would have thought it was a bad cheap B-level science fiction dystopia written by a hack writer. And here we are, for real.

A lot of bands, especially when they’ve got new material, after thirty years of performing their biggest hit song they 
just get tired of it. Are you guys still embracing Whip It?

We weren’t writing to try to write hits, that should be kind of obvious to everybody. We were writing from just an aesthetic point of view and we liked everything we put on our records. We weren’t having people and producers tell us what to do so that we were really puppets for somebody else’s sound, so we have no problem playing anything that we ever wrote, because we like it for real. We play Whip It, I think, better than we played it then. But we also enjoy playing the new songs. In fact by the time we’re doing a headline tour off this new record, we’ll probably be playing six songs off this new record in our set.

You guys are doing the talking head TV talk show circuit this month. Do you feel like that’s part of the devolution too?

Yeah, we’re part and parcel of what we speak.

So if you can’t stop the downfall of society, you’re willing to participate in it on the way down.

We’re willing to celebrate it. Like I’ve often said, we’re the house band on the Titanic now.

Learn more at ClubDEVO.com • iTunes • MySpace • Facebook • Twitter

Next Page »