Katy Perry California Dreams 2011 tour gains Robyn as support

Robyn isn’t technically a California girl, but that hasn’t kept Katy Perry from inviting the Swedish pop star along for twenty U.S. dates on her California Dreams 2011 tour. Katy Perry is touring in support of last year’s mammoth success of an album known as Teenage Dream, which has spawned hit singles including Firework, California Gurls, and the title track. Robyn has seen success with her Body Talk trilogy of releases.

For those Katy Perry fans who want to take a trip into the distant past, here’s our early 2008 interview with her.

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.

Styx interview: Tommy Shaw talks Pieces of Eight – Grand Illusion tour

Styx is Beatweek’s Artist of the Month for 2010

After connecting with live audiences for four decades, music legends Styx are taking a new approach with their latest tour which sees them going authentic old school: their setlist consists simply of their two most popular albums, The Grand Illusion and Pieces Of Eight, played back to back in their entirety. Styx guitarist and vocalist Tommy Shaw talks with Beatweek about where the idea came from, where Styx is as a band in 2010, new Styx studio songs, and a few other projects up his sleeve.

I love this idea of touring and performing the two albums in their entirety. Where did the idea come from?

Our drummer Todd Sucherman had brought this up a couple years ago, and we were were like eh, I don’t know. He wanted to do the Grand Illusion album, which was a great idea but album are short and we were thinking so we’ve got to do that and then we go play another set after that, and it just didn’t seem right. But our manager came up with the idea of why don’t you do two albums, and suddenly it seemed like this whole evening. It seemed to take shape a lot better in our minds.

So it was a great idea to begin with, and then it suddenly became an idea we wanted to actually pull off, because you’re gonna see all of the history of the band in its early years, at least early years for me being in the band, and you get to see what an album is like. For those of us who were there for the whole ride, from making albums and eight tracks and cassettes and all that whole business down to the MP3, you’re gonna be reminded of the artistry of making an album and the arc from the beginning of side one, the middle and the end of side one, there’s an arc. And so it’s gonna be like a four act play, in a way, or like a movie with four big scenes.

Some of these songs have never been performed live. Thirty-something years these albums have been out, and some of the songs have never been performed once?

The one we actually dreaded the most, because we could never pull it off live, is a song called Superstars. It’s a kind of simple little song, but it was hard to pull off because of all the vocals, and we never had enough guys singing that could pull it off, and we now. That particular one, even though we dreaded it, it wound up not being that difficult to do, and it’s actually one of the more powerful songs and one of the best sounding of those new songs.

We added a guitar solo that’s right for the era at the end of it to kind of deal with the fade, and that one’s turned out great. Actually we’re enjoying all of them. Castle Walls we only played a couple of times when it first came out. It doesn’t really lend itself for all concert situations, cause it’s so slow and kind of dark, but in this setting it’s gonna be incredible.

Dealing with fade ins and fade outs, just that alone makes songs a little bit different live, but beyond that, is there a thought that you want to keep these really faithful to the originals, on the account of the way you’re presenting it?

Yeah, we are being as faithful as we can to the originals, except for in cases where we think a little modification is gonna help the presentation of it. So we just take it on a song by song basis. I’m with you. I really want it where let’s don’t talk in between, let’s go song by song, but we’re gonna see how that works because there’s opportunities to do a little bit of storytelling and add some context to the whole thing.

If this ends up being something where it all sells out and everyone loves it, are you open to the idea of continuing to do this on a longer stretch?

If it’s successful and there’s demand for it, then we certainly have to look at that, but right now we’re not putting any more shows on sale until after the first of the year and then we’ll make that decision. But our tour calendar is starting to fill up already. One thing about the way the band is now, we’ve all decided that we just want to keep playing. There’s so many places to play in America, the way we do it, we can go out and play a hundred and ten shows every year and not really burn ourselves out in any of those places, because you don’t play the same places every year. Some places we’ll go back to almost every year like Detroit and Chicago and certain places like that. But there’s other places that we’ll only get to once every two, three, four, five years. And we love to play, so the way the industry has worked out, it’s worked out in a way that we couldn’t be happier with.

I take it you guys must be getting along with each other pretty well if you’re this eager to go out and play all these shows every year. Styx is a harmonious band at this point, right?

Yeah, it has been since 1999. You know, we’re all older, and you get a little different perspective as you get older. When you go through some things in your life that really are serious, then a lot of times arguments and things on the road, we don’t even really get into arguments anymore. People are tired sometimes and will get grumpy, but we love and respect each other and we’re all kind of out here for the same purpose and that’s to make the best possible performance performance every night as we can.

We’re constantly working on details, and it never gets perfect. We keep chipping away at it, and every once in awhile, like Suite Madame Blue, we’re so close to playing that perfect, but there’s no such thing as a perfect performance. There’s humans doing it every night, so it ebbs and flows. But we just keep trying to make it as good as we can, so we’re all a band who has a united purpose. So a lot of the things that divided us in the past really don’t come into play anymore.

I’ve heard that Chuck Panozzo might make some appearances on this tour.

Well, it depends on how good the hotels are (laughs). I’m kidding. Chuck, he’s gonna come out as much as he feels comfortable with, and the door’s always open for that. We love Chuck, and one of my favorite parts of the night is introducing Chuck. There have been a couple of times when I started introducing him and I’m realizing, aw shit, he’s not here. And so there’ll be a little tap on the shoulder, J.Y. going “Chuck’s not here.”

You’ve re-recorded some of your greatest hits, and you’re selling it as an EP called Regeneration at your shows. But there’s a new song on there called Difference In The World. Did you intend to make a new song when you started making the EP?

We’re always writing and creating stuff, there’s just not this big appetite or demand for seventy minutes of new Styx music out there. Honestly, seventy minutes of anybody’s music anymore is kind of too much for me. That’s a lot of demand on songs to have seventeen or twenty killer songs back to back. I don’t know if our fans want that kind of commitment to have to sit down and listen to that sort of thing.

I know for us, we just haven’t had the desire to go sit down and do that so far. This was something that was fun and easy to do. So the idea is, with each Regeneration volume, with volume two, there’s some new song that we’re working on to have an extra song on that one. So once they’re all done, there’ll be a collection of new songs that go with the old stuff.

What else is going on in the world of Tommy Shaw? I take it Shaw-Blades is still with us?

Well we’ve got an album started, and some great songs like California by Led Zeppelin, we’ve got an awesome version of that done. Tiny Dancer is just heartbreaking with steel guitar on it. So we got started on it, it’s just we all got a little sidetracked. Jack was producing an album for Vince Neil, and I’ve been working on this bluegrass project, a song here and a song there, for a couple years with a friend of mine named Brad Davis. So when Shaw-Blades got put on hold, I said well here’s the opportunity to do that. So that’s what I’ve been doing on the side.

interview by Bill Palmer

StyxWorld.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Ingrid Michaelson interview: Parachute, 2010 tour, and indie life

“You’re weirding me out,” Ingrid Michaelson jokes when I point out that she’s the indie artist whose success other indie artists tell me they’re trying to emulate. But her status as the most commercially successful indie artist of her generation has never been more apparent than when she released the one-off digital single “Parachute” last month and saw it immediately climb into the top twenty on the iTunes pop chart. She’s between albums now, building her audience through the age-old method of touring the country even as she also continues to build her audience through the decidedly twenty-first century method of getting her songs used on television (including a double digit number of episodes of Grey’s Anatomy).

Parachute, as it turns out, has been in the making for awhile. The glasses in the photo, for those wondering, are for real. And Ingrid’s next album, while slated for release in less than a year, is still up in the air as far as the direction it might take. But first thing first.

The short story of Parachute is you wrote it awhile ago, and then Cheryl Cole sang it in the UK, and you’re singing it now. Is that the gist of it?

Pretty much. I wrote the chorus like two years ago, and then I finished it with my friend Marshall in LA last year, a year and a half ago. Then Cheryl Cole picked it up, and I was like you know what, I’m not gonna put this out. It’s a little bit too poppy, the way it was produced, the way our demo was produced was a little too poppy for me. And then my producer Dan Romer from my last album, he made this really funky cool version of it, and I was like you know what, the song is so cool and I really think this production is more me. I felt like it just fit me better. So I went in and recorded vocals and we all really liked it, and we decided to see what happens.

I have a lot of new material, I just haven’t been able to get back into the studio and record it because I was touring pretty extensively this year on my last record which came out a year ago. And so I haven’t really had time to do a new album, but in this day and age people want things all the time. So I figured let’s just put this out digitally and see what happens, and then plan on a next full album sometime mid 2011.

Is there a distinction between writing something you think you’re going to use, and just writing something? Do you ever sit down and say okay, I’m going to write something that I wouldn’t use?

Initially, this song, I was writing it for somebody else. Not anybody in particular. But the lyrics were different. The lyrics and the verses were completely different. Then when I kind of was like wait a minute, this is really good, I like this, I completely rewrote all the verses to fit me. But then I still was like, you know what, I’m not sure. And then Cheryl Cole did the version that I wrote for me, basically, not the version that I wrote for somebody else. But there is a difference when writing for other people, because I have done it before, and it becomes more of, like, a project.

Is it that you’ve always stubbornly wanted to remain indie, or has it just sort of happened that way?

It kind of happened that way in the beginning, because I had all this success from TV and commercials without any major label. And so the labels kind of came around late to the game. They were like “Oh, now let’s do stuff together.” And it’s like, well, we kind of already did all this stuff on our own, so basically you’d just be coming in and taking credit and money for things that you didn’t work to do. So that’s why we never went full on. We did another joint venture with a label called Original Signal, and they have upstream capabilities to Universal Motown, so I could call on their radio stuff and their marketing people if we needed, or if they felt like doing it, that kind of a thing. It was very loose. So I had access to things, sort of, but I’ve never had a cut and dry record deal. I don’t think I ever will. There’s no need.

But you do realize the position you’re in, or how you’re perceived. I’ve interviewed indie artists who’ve said to me they don’t want to sign with a major, and they say “I want to be like Ingrid Michaelson.” They’ll specifically invoke your name as the standard of what they want to pull off.

I really didn’t know that. That’s kind of funny. I don’t think about that really, I guess. You’re weirding me out (laughs).

Sometimes I see you wearing glasses, sometimes I don’t. What’s your relationship with your glasses?

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was in the fourth grade. Up until college I would only wear them when I would have to see the chalkboard at school, and then when I started to drive I had to wear them when I was driving. But I didn’t really wear them all that much growing up, even though I had to. Then I got into college and I discovered thick glasses, and I was like oh, I’m gonna be the cool nerdy girl. So I bought these glasses and then I never took them off. I got contacts but I never really wore them. I always wore my glasses. They’re just comfortable. I don’t like putting things in my eyes. I don’t trust surgery.

I need them to see, basically. My whole thing is when I first came out on the scene, everybody was saying that I sounded like Lisa Loeb. And that was just dumb to me, because while she’s great and lovely, I don’t sound anything like her. It’s just that I wore glasses and people were stuck on that. So I’ve kind of gone back and forth wearing them, not wearing them.

If Parachute brings you some new fans who are looking for more from you and they see there’s no new record coming out this year, I suspect they’re going to find their way back to Everybody. I know it’s a year old, but if someone is just discovering that album now, what do you want them to know about it?

That record is very dear to me. It’s very personal, and I feel like the first real record I made was called Girls And Boys, then I made a glorified EP called Be OK, and then I came out with Everybody. There was this string of singles that were released because they were on Grey’s Anatomy or something, so there were other little songs here and there that came out. Complicated way of saying that Everybody was really my second full length release. I felt at the time that I was kind of a little bit more of a fleshed out grown up, not grown up, but for me grown up sound. I was being very honest in my lyrics. I wasn’t masking it. I wasn’t storytelling. I was just basically saying things that had happened to me. So it’s a very honest, autobiographical piece of work.

I’m not reinventing the wheel. I don’t claim to be trying to impress anybody. I just like to sing, I like to make really pretty harmonies and melodies, and I like to say things in ways that maybe they haven’t been said before, because I’m saying the same things that everybody has said for thousands of years, but hopefully in a little bit of a different way.

Is Parachute any indication of where you might be headed for your next record, or do you think it’s more likely to pick up where Everybody left off.

It’s gonna be somewhere in between. I definitely don’t want to do the same thing I did on Everybody. I kind of am shying away from the singer-songwriter thing because I think I’ve done that so hard. I have more up my sleeve and I’m interested in other sounds, sonically and melodically. Not to say that I’ll abandon my ukelele, but I want to move into a little bit of, I don’t know, something else. I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m not gonna become a Britney Spears popped. I know Parachute’s really poppy, and I really like it. Actually I love it. But I don’t see it as defining my sound. I just think if I can make lots of different kinds of music, then why shouldn’t I, as long as I’m not confusing my fans.

With your current tour you’re playing not just New York and LA, but you’re playing places like Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho. Have you played those kinds of places before?

I’ve played every place you could think of in America. Salt Lake City was one of our best shows ever, on our last tour last year. There were fifteen hundred people and it felt like we were in an arena of twenty thousand people. They were the best audience ever. So you never know. The little pockets in the middle of our country are clamoring for attention, so when you go there, they’re just so receptive and wonderful.

interview by Bill Palmer

IngridMichaelson.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Heat’s LeBron James, Dwayne Wade turn up at Kris Allen concert in Miami (update: not really)

New teammates LeBron James and Dwayne Wade haven’t yet played a game together in a Miami Heat uniform, but that hasn’t stopped them from enjoying some quality time together in LeBron’s new hometown. So where did they surface on Thursday night? At a Kris Allen concert of all places. According to the 2009 American Idol winner, Wade and James turned up at his Thursday night show in Miami. Neither NBA star mentioned anything about the concert on their respective Twitter pages, but we’ll take Kris at his word that they were indeed there. Allen publicly thanked them for “a special one in Miami last night.” No word on whether Allen, who is originally from the NBA-less state of Arkansas is now a Miami Heat fan.

Update: Consider us officially duped by Mr. Allen. When pressed on his Twitter page by a follower, Kris has since admitted “shhhh. They weren’t. Hehehehe.” So yeah, nevermind. Move along, nothing to see here. Except that the talented Mr. Allen has a drier wit than we were expecting

Runner Runner: the 2010 concert experience

The beginning of August found me in Lancaster, PA, known for horse and buggies, Intercourse, and farmland for miles. But, I wasn’t there for the shoo fly pie and chicken corn soup, rather I was there for the up-and-coming pop-rock band, Runner Runner. They have been on tour with Secondhand Serenade, the White Tie Affair, and Go Radio since late July. Upon arriving at the small Chameleon Club in town, I was surprised to see how many people were already inside. For a Thursday night, there usually aren’t as many people. I can only hope that some of them were in attendance for the openers rather than just the main attraction, Secondhand Serenade.

Following the opening act, Go Radio, it was Runner Runner’s turn to show off their chops. After a quick setup period, the boys started their set with “Breakup Song.” Lead vocalist, Ryan Ogren, reminded me of the All American Rejects’ Tyson Ritter based on how frenetic he was. His voice is well suited to the pop-rock genre, and occasionally his punk roots come out. His singing tends to be tinged with a little hardcore edge that you don’t really hear from bands like We the Kings and The Maine.

The energetic set continued through songs about girls and dating, like “Hey Alli” and “Kinda Girl.” When they got to “Papercuts,” however, it sounded like a very heartfelt ballad. It had more to do with the mushy feelings associated with relationships than the “passionate” feelings. You always know it’s time to take it down a notch when the acoustic guitars come out too.

It came to my attention following the slow jam that the crowd was not really feeling it, so to speak. When Secondhand Serenade was mentioned, they exploded with squeals of excitement. But, when it came to praising the song that was just played, their reaction was the equivalent of “cheer, clap, silence”. I imagine it just takes some time to build up your street cred with new audiences.

They played close to a minute’s worth of Drake’s hot summer single, “Find Your Love”, to no avail.  I can’t say that I was personally thrilled with this facet of the show.  On stage, there was a copy of the lyrics to the song fragment taped next to the set list.  Maybe it was just part of the show, but I feel like there are better ways that they can grasp the attention of the audience.

Despite the fact that the crowd may not have been picking up what they were laying down, the guys in RR made the best of it.  They did call the crowd out on their quietness, and followed the statement up with photographing everyone from the stage. That’s not a common practice for most bands, so it did get everyone’s attention for a while. When it comes right down it though, as good as these guys are, they don’t need the cover songs to prove to anyone that they’re music is worth paying attention to. It speaks for itself, and, if they are truly as into their music as they seem, they will have no trouble converting the masses.


To finish their speedy set, RR cranked out their latest single, “So Obvious.” Even though this is the song currently being pushed by the RR camp, I’m convinced that it isn’t going to be the best song on the debut. With their combination of skills, they are capable of so much more awesomeness, for lack of a better term. Their first album doesn’t come out until September 28th, but Ryan, Peter, Nick, Jon, and James rolled through the new songs like they’ve been playing them for much longer than they probably have.

Their set was short with only eight songs, and it felt even shorter because they were so obviously having so much fun (no pun intended). From start to finish, their onstage energy was undeniable. They sound like they aren’t taking themselves painstakingly serious.  They are passionate about the music they are making, but they seem to be having too much fun to care about what everybody thinks.  Though, if you are having doubts about this band, you need to go see them live. There is just no comparison to the over-production of their single releases. Put simply, their passion translates much better on the stage than on the plastic.

by Keri Franz

Tour dates at RunnerRunnerMusic.com

Steven Tyler American Idol rumors boost Aerosmith FM radio airplay

Time will tell what impact the rumors of Steven Tyler joining American Idol as a judge, if true, will have on the future of his band Aerosmith. But in the short team at least, the storyline appears to be having a positive effect on Aerosmith’s popularity and exposure – and not simply because the band’s name is being mentioned in the headlines so frequently of late. Aerosmith has seen its songs in rotation on FM radio for a generation, even though the band hasn’t had a new hit song (or even released a new album of mainstream material) for nearly a decade. But this past weekend, I spent a total of about six hours on the road, the majority of it tuned into various FM radio stations in the multiple markets that I passed through. And what I found was seemingly all Aerosmith, all the time.

Based on my own (admittedly fading) memory, I’d say that Aerosmith songs were easily being played three times as often this past week as they have been during any other time I’ve sunk myself into long-term radio listening in the recent past. As usual, the classic rock stations were playing the Sweet Emotion-era stuff, while the pop forty stations were more focused on Crying and What It Takes. But stations seemed to be digging deeper into the Aerosmith catalog, playing songs I hadn’t heard on the radio in years, and doing so with such frequency that if I weren’t a fan of the band, I might have even been annoyed by it (actually it’s the contrary; call me old-school, but when Aerosmith comes on, I crank it up).

It’s not as if every local DJ suddenly and independently got the idea to start playing more Aerosmith; most of these “local” stations are owned by the same handful of soul-destroying conglomerates, and so this is more about a few stiffs in suits deciding somewhere in a board room that more Aerosmith should be played on the radio across the country for as long as the names “Steven Tyler” and “American Idol” are appearing in the same headlines. But if it serves to help properly introduce Aerosmith to a younger generation, then so be it. After all, when I was in high school and Aerosmith had their (second) big comeback in the early nineties, we were only vaguely aware that they were an older “seventies” band making a comeback. If anything, we started with Get A Grip and then some of us worked our way backwards to the classic stuff. With Aerosmith not having made a radio-suitable album since about 2001 (Honkin’ on Bobo doesn’t count in that regard), there hasn’t been that new bridge to hook the younger generation – but perhaps the Idol tie-in is it.

After all, as crazy as it seems to someone who’s just old enough to remember back when Paula Abdul was the coolest, trendiest pop singer out there once upon a time, a lot of today’s younger audience had no idea who she was until she appeared on Idol. Of course by that time her pop career was officially over, whereas last I checked, Aerosmith is still selling out major concert venues as we speak. What effect Tyler’s twice-weekly appearances on American Idol would have on Aerosmith’s ability to go on tour, let alone finally make a new record, is unclear. But if it helps introduce one of the most important rock bands of all time to a bunch of teenagers in a positive way, them I’ll for Steven signing on as an Idol judge. After all, just the mere rumor of it has already helped improve FM radio.

Norah Jones: the 2010 concert experience

If the shift from her traditional seat on the piano bench to a more guitar-oriented approach on her latest album The Fall begged the question about what effect it would have on her live performances, Norah Jones wasted little in clearing up any any doubt as she took the concert stage with an electric guitar in hand. Accordingly, she opened the show with a rendition of the smoky “I Wouldn’t Need You” from the new record, and that guitar didn’t leave Norah’s hands for the first several songs. But no fear, old-school fans, as she found her way over to the electric keyboard eventually, then later over to a real piano on the other side of the stage, and then eventually to acoustic guitar by the encore.

But none of the shifts in instrumentation took away from the fact that Norah Jones is still Norah Jones, and that’s a good thing, of course. Her dreamy evening music is served up mid tempo, slow tempo, and even slower tempo – a fact that she herself couldn’t resist poking fun at midway through the set. In what might come as a total surprise to someone attending one of her concerts for the first time, Norah just can’t seem to resist cracking jokes and telling silly stories between songs, which only served to add to the humanity of it.

Of the fact that she had just attended a theme park the day before, Norah cracked that “I screamed a lot on the roller coasters, that was dumb” before she mocked choking on her own voice. Of the fact that Aerosmith has its own Disney rollercoaster, she quipped that if there were a Norah Jones roller coaster, it would be “the slowest ride in the world.” The quips kept coming, seemingly spurred on by the fact that various audience members worked up the courage to shout things to her in the hopes that she’d riff on them. And yet Norah being Norah, it somehow didn’t take away from the music itself.

The hit songs were there. New hit single Chasing Pirates. The classic Come Away With Me. And a beautiful rendition of her biggest hit Don’t Know Why, featuring nothing more than Norah on piano along with a pair of backing vocalists and no other instrumentation. But as if to balance it out, there was the absurdly funny song Man Of The Hour whose lyrics were directed at her dog but in such a way as to take one humorous backhanded jab after another at an ex.

Bottom line, though, is that the music sounded great live, with the six piece band often offering up live versions of songs that were arguably superior to the studio originals simply due to having that palpable live in-the-room feel.

Either you like the ever-mellow stylings of Norah Jones or you don’t. But if her kind of music is your cup of tea, then seeing her live in concert at least once is something you should consider mandatory.

Tour dates at NorahJones.com

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

Allison Iraheta interview

“I only know where I’m at because it’s a day off” she tells me, and even “day off” is a relative term in that it simply means there’s no Glam Nation concert for her that night; she’s just come from doing local radio press and now she’s chatting with me. Allison Iraheta hasn’t likely had a real day off since she tried out for American Idol when she was sixteen years old and then spent the season rising to fame while competing with fellow musicians as much as a a decade her senior. Since then she’s done the Idol tour, pushed out her debut album Just Like You, and has now embarked on the Glam Nation tour with former Idolmate Adam Lambert and Orianthi. The timing is good, as Allison has just released her new single Don’t Waste The Pretty, which not so coincidentally features the latter on guitar.

“It’s just a rocking song,” Allison says of Don’t Waste The Pretty. “The message is amazing. And then we talked about different choices and stuff, but also, we brought up the idea of having Ori play on it, and it was like the perfect song for her to rock out on. It just all worked out.”

The song, like her entire album, knowingly straddles the line between rock and pop: she’s a rocker at heart, but she understands that having just turned eighteen she’s in an age bracket that leans toward pop, as well as the fact that this is a pop-leaning era in general. “It’s definitely pop stuff that gets the attention of the listeners right now, you know what I’m saying? But I definitely wanted to stick to that rock edge. So it’s definitely the pop that is on the album, but I like I said, there’s definitely the rock edge to it.”

Those expectations give her a chance to catch people off guard if they might have been stereotypically expecting “poppy young innocent sort of thing” as opposed to the veteran rock that Idol viewers have come to know her for. “People that don’t know me from Idol, say they randomly see me out doing some live stuff and I’m doing some rocking stuff, like I’m doing Pat Benetar covers and all the stuff we do live from the album, even thought it’s a bit poppy tracked down, when we do it live it’s definitely rougher, it’s definitely edgier.”

Allison Iraheta is the future of rock and roll whether she knows it yet or not, which means that with the lack of an established blueprint she gets to make up her own rules. But those suspecting intentional symmetry in the fact that her backing band consists of two girls and two guys may be surprised to learn that it just worked out that way. “We went through some auditions with musicians, and then my girls kicked some ass,” she says with a seeming bit of pride. “So we decided to stick with my girl drummer and my girl bassist. And now it’s working out, it’s really cool, I’ve got two girls and two guys in my band and it definitely attracts people.”

If the pink-red-purple hair is Allison’s visual signature (asked if she plans to keep the crazy hair colors forever, she teases that “I just might shave my head for the rest of the shows”), it’s her husky “I can’t believe this voice is coming from a teenage girl” singing voice that makes her instantly recognizable. But she admits to having been unwittingly using her instrument wrong until recently: “I’ve actually changed the way I used to sing from the show to now, because I actually just learned how to sing properly. I was more of like the screamer and not really taking care of my voice, but now being on the road and doing this every night, I’ve learned. I get sick a lot, and I lose my voice very easily. And I think it’s maybe cause I sound like a man.”

If the world learned how to pronounce Allison Iraheta’s last name from Idol host Ryan Seacrest then they’re apparently saying it wrong, as she finally broke the news to him that he had been botching it all along when she appeared on his radio show after the season had ended. So I asked her for the correct pronunciation, just so I would never again say it wrong one way or the other, which is when she admitted that “there’s like two versions of it,” the original Spanish pronunciation of “EAR-uh-HAY-tuh” which she grew up with, along with what she says is now the “correct” pronunciation, anglicized along the lines of “I-ruh-HEE-tuh” – a version she’s adopted because it’s a pronunciation that “everyone is cool with saying.”

Over the past seventy-five issues, Beatweek Magazine has interviewed some of the most famous musicians on the planet. But of all the times we’ve opened things up for our readers and Twitter followers to submit questions in advance for possible use, we’ve never previously received even a fraction of the overwhelming number of questions that Allison’s army of fans submitted to us (we stopped counting after receiving more than a hundred in the first several minutes). So that in itself begs the question that every artist fears having to answer: why do your fans like you so darned much?

“Geez, I hate talking about myself,” she half-jokes before coming up with an entirely logical answer. “I think it might because I put myself up to like me being young and all, a lot of my fans out there are about my age or younger, and they really point out the fact that I’ve gone through a lot of things that they’ve gone through themselves. They can really relate to me and I can really relate to them.”

Of those hundreds of questions we picked the most popular and the most intriguing, the former being what dozens of her fans want to know: will there be a music video for Don’t Waste The Pretty? “Maybe up ahead. We’re gonna see. Right now we’ve got the whole tour going on, we’re just waiting on how it does.”

The other reader-submitted question focuses on the future. Allison has already said that she plans to take a larger songwriting role on her next record (she’s said that for her debut album there simply wasn’t the time). So once she sits down to start writing lyrics for album number two, what topics will she be looking to focus on? “Maybe more personal stuff. More on what has actually happened in the past few years of my life. All those songs that were written on this one were more overall, not so personal. So I think I’m gonna get more personal when I start writing.”

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

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

Deftones to launch U.S. headlining tour on August 6th

Deftones, who are currently amidst a European tour, have officially announced their U.S. headlining tour dates which will kick off August 6th in Ventura, California and will run through mid September. The band is touring on the strength of the release of new album Diamond Eyes which was released last month. After their headlining dates, Deftones will join up with Alice in Chains and Mastodon for the BlackDiamondSkye tour in late 2010. Deftones full list of U.S.headlining dates:

8/6/10              Ventura, CA                 Ventura Theatre          
8/7/10              Fresno, CA                  Woodward Park         
8/8/10              Sacramento, CA           Memorial Auditorium   
8/10/10            Reno, NV                    Grand Sierra Resort   
8/11/10            Medford, OR               Medford Armory       
8/12/10            Spokane, WA              Knitting Factory             
8/14/10            Salt Lake City, UT       Rail Event Center        
8/18/10            Lubbock, TX               The Pavilion           
8/19/10            Tulsa, OK                    Brady Theatre            
8/20/10            Little Rock, AR            Robinson Center Music Hall
8/21/10            San Antonio, TX          AT&T Center                
8/22/10            New Orleans, LA         House of Blues              
8/25/10            Miami Beach, FL          Fillmore Miami Beach    
8/27/10            Orlando, FL                 House of Blues               
8/29/10            Myrtle Beach, SC         House of Blues               
8/30/10            Fayetteville, NC           Rock Shop Music Hall 
8/31/10            Richmond, VA             The National                  
9/2/10              Norfolk, VA                 The Norva                     
9/3/10              Charlotte, NC              The Fillmore                  
9/5/10              Goose Creek, SC         The USN Dive Pavilion
9/7/10              Knoxville, TN               Valarium                       
9/8/10              Cincinnati, OH  Bogart’s                                   
9/10/10            Columbus, OH Newport Music Hal                   
9/11/10            Niagara Falls, NY        Rapids Theater             
9/12/10            Allentown, PA  Crocodile Rock Café               
913/10             Pittsburgh, PA              Club Zoo                       
9/14/10            Cleveland, OH             House of Blues    

Paramore’s Hayley Williams joins Deftones for “Passenger”

Just weeks after publicly praising the new Deftones album Diamond Eyes, Paramore singer Hayley Williams had the opportunity today to perform with Deftones on an older song of theirs that was released back when she was still in grade school. The classic “Passenger” from the 2000 Deftones album White Pony was the subject of the on-stage collaboration, with both bands being on tour in Europe at the same time. Of the opportunity to perform with Deftones, Williams jokingly tweeted “Suck it” while expressing hope that someone in the audience had captured video of the footage (thus far it hasn’t).

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.

Dweezil Zappa interview: Frank Zappa and more

Dweezil Zappa is doing more to keep the memory of his late father’s music alive than merely talking about it – he’s been traveling the world for years and performing it. As he releases “Return Of The Son Of” today, Dweezil talks about the importance of exposing new audiences to all of Frank’s music and not just the oft-recalled novelties, along with his own musical legacy.

I guess just by association over the years, I thought I knew the music of Frank Zappa, but when I listen to your new album, I realize I don’t know it as well as I thought I did. Was that your goal?

Well yeah, I think too many people have only really a casual exposure to the music and they don’t really know what they’re missing in the music. Some people think if they’ve heard two or three songs, that they know Frank’s music. He made over eighty albums, and if you’ve heard “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow” and “Dancing Fool” and “Valley Girl” and you think you know Frank’s music, you’re mistaken. I meet people all the time who say “I have all your dad’s records” and I say “really, how many do you have?” and they say “I have about four.” Well you’re not even close to having all the records.

So there is a common misperception out there. They think that they’re a big fan and that they know everything about it, but they don’t. So my goal is to present a broader variety and perspective when people come to the show, so they hear music from different eras and are able to get a better understanding of what I think makes up the most iconic things about Frank’s music. So a lot of the instrumental things that we choose to learn are things that I think really make him stand out as a composer.

I can’t help but notice that you keep referring to your dad as “Frank” – is that something you’ve always done, or is that just because we’re in an interview setting?

No, we always call our parents by their first names for the most part. It just was a natural thing for us to do in our family, I guess. We never thought about it. That’s just how it was [laughs].

Was this a sudden epiphany to do the Zappa Plays Zappa project, or was it something that evolved in your head?

It was something I thought about for a long time. To take something like this on required a lot of forethought, because you can’t just wake up and say “Yeah, I’m gonna put a band together and go play Frank’s music starting tomorrow.” It’s too hard to play, and you need people that you can rely on who can execute this stuff and respect the music. So the real inspiration to do it came from the fact that I felt like there were, as we were talking about, people that didn’t really know the music, especially that younger generation, and that I didn’t want to see Frank’s music fade away in my lifetime. So I thought if there was a chance to expose it to people in a live situation, now would be a good time to do it.

About seven years ago I started studying his music, glistening ideas as I listened to every record that he has ever made, in chronological order so I could get a sense of his work in its totality and really find where all of the things are connected. There’s thematic coherence in music, different things come and go, and a lot of people don’t know, even after years of listening to his music, that certain themes present themselves in one song and then become a whole other song on a whole other composition.

There’s plenty of examples of it. Something like the song “Wild Love” for example off of Shake Your Booty has an instrumental section that appears a few times in that song, and then a few records later you hear a whole other fully orchestrated version of that and it’s called “Sinister Footwear.” Frank would constantly be writing, and he would insert things that he wanted people to hear into other songs. So that became something that was very visible when you check it out over the course of his whole career.

Ultimately, for me, I wanted to know as much about the music as possible so I could focus on the right things that I wanted people to see, as opposed to continuing that thing that people make the mistake of doing, which is to say “Oh yeah, he’s that comedy music guy, he’s the guy that had the kids with the crazy names, and he has a couple of songs that were on Dr. Demento, Titties and Beer, yeah I know Frank Zappa.” that to me is such a disservice to all the music that he created. I just wanted to level the playing field and have people given a chance to have the music speak for itself. So I had to study the music for two years and train. As a a guitar player I had to completely change how I play, which was no small feat. You take something that you’ve been doing for nearly thirty years.

The way that you’ve retrained yourself to be able to play his stuff, I guess your newfound skills will impact the music that you make of your own, going forward.

Yeah. I haven’t had a chance to even work on any of that, but I definitely agree with you, it will make an impact for sure.

In one of your dad’s final interviews, how he wanted to be remembered, and he said it wasn’t important to him. If he didn’t feel it was important, why is it important to you?

He always had a self deprecating sense of humor, so when somebody asked him “How would you like to be remembered?” he said “I wouldn’t.” To me, I could see that humor in that, but at the same time I thought that was upsetting because I felt like there were so many thing that he accomplished that were not recognized and should be recognized, maybe in his lifetime he was so frustrated by the fact that he was just ahead of his time in so many ways. People just didn’t get what he was doing, so it was an uphill battle.

Everything was a superhuman task for him, like you’re always pushing the rock up the hill and always having somebody say “No I don’t think that’s going to work” and then you get there. He did stuff that nobody else would ever have taken on, and he did it in his own way and self financed it. So it was just an amazing amount of stuff that he was able to accomplish. And so for me it was important to say let’s look at this and let’s respect the fact that because he has done some of these things, other people have been able to benefit from some of this stuff. Musically, production wise, a lot of the things that he did were so ahead of his time that other people then caught onto doing.

You yourself has had an unusual career, the first time I saw you was when you were seventeen and you were hosting MTV, and you’ve been an artist and a composer, and now you’re doing this. Do you care how you’re remembered?

I never even think about it, you know? I think it’s evolving as to what people think of me or what I do. Prior to playing Zappa Plays Zappa, most people knew that I played guitar but didn’t have any real familiarity with any of my own music. So it wasn’t really until Zappa Plays Zappa that they could put it in a context that they understood. And the funny thing is, now more than ever, more people are saying, “Now I’m really curious to hear your own music and hear what you’re doing, I want to hear this band play new music that you’ve written.” And that was something that I didn’t even really take into account when the thing started, because the goal was to give people an opportunity to hear Frank’s music, and I wasn’t interested in putting my music into the show, because I thought for sure that everybody would be thinking “Oh, he’s just using this as a platform to cash in on a name.”

That kind of thing has been done by other people, but I was not concerned about that in the long run, because I knew that how we were doing the music would speak for itself.

What’s the setlist for the tour? Is it these same fourteen songs from the album or does it vary?

Every night we play a different setlist, different songs from different eras.

Learn more at ZappaPlaysZappa.com • MySpace • Facebook

Lights to release acoustic EP “Lights. Acoustic.” in July

Lights, the Canadian synth pop star who released her debut album The Listening in 2009, will release an acoustic EP appropriately entitled “Lights. Acoustic.” on July 20th. The five song acoustic set will include her biggest hits like February Air and Saviour along with River, a cover of Rancid’s Fall Back Down, and new song Romance Is…, the latter two of which were not a part of The Listening. A solo acoustic tour of six major cities in late July and August will come after Lights participates in four Lilith Fair dates in July. Lights will also be appearing on the MTV show “The City” on June 29th, a show which stars Whitney Port, Roxy Olin, Olivia Palermo and Erin Kaplan.

Lights (real name Valerie Poxleitner) discussed The Listening with Beatweek in an October interview.

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

David Cook, David Archuleta meet at SLC airport

American Idol finalists David Archuleta and David Cook managed to cross paths by apparent coincidence at the Salt Lake City airport this week as Cook was arriving in town for a gig and Archuleta was headed out of his hometown for a stint with the Children’s Miracle Network. On Idol’s seventh season the two had competed with each other as the top finalists for the season’s title, which ultimately went to Cook. Both stars tweeted of the encounter, which Cook referring to it as “awesome sauce” and Archuleta publicly plugging Cook’s Salt Lake City concert.

Goo Goo Dolls new single “Home” tomorrow, new album August 31st

Goo Goo Dolls will release their ninth album entitled Something For The Rest Of Us on August 31st, and will release new single “Home” tomorrow June 8th in iTunes. The album is produced by Tim Palmer and is the first Goo Goo Dolls record since 2006. According to lead singer Johnny Rzeznik, “I wanted some of the material on this album to address the disillusionment of the difficult period we live in; I wanted to give a voice to the emotional uncertainty that accompanies hard times. “So many people are struggling to keep it together through tough economic conditions and two wars that seem to have no end in sight. The ones who bear the brunt of these burdens are everyday people. That’s who I want to speak to.”

In the mean time, Goo Goo Dolls are currently on a U.S. tour which will run through August.

The full track listing for Something For The Rest Of Us, according to Warner Bros Records:

“Sweetest Lie”
“As I Am”
“Home”
“Notbroken”
“One Night”
“Nothing Is Real”
“Now I Hear”
“Still Your Song”
“Something For The Rest Of Us”
“Say You’re Free”
“Hey Ya”
“Soldier”

Lady GaGa defends her fans’ wardrobe rights

Lady GaGa took the UK’s MEN Arena to task last night when fans in Manchester weren’t being allowed into the venue with cans in their hair. After learning of the controversy, GaGa tweeted that she was “outraged” at the manner in which her fans (which she refers to as “little monsters”) were being treated, and a bit later announced that fans should “feel free to wear your coke cans proud in hair. Security has been reprimanded for censoring little monster freedoms.” GaGa has one more UK show tonight at the Sheffield Arena before her Monster Ball tour returns to North America.

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