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The Jeff Buckley documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, will be released in theaters on August 8. The Amy Berg-directed feature about the mesmerizing musician who tragically died at 30 when he accidentally drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River in 1997 will be released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures and then premiere on HBO and stream on HBO Max this winter as part of Bill Simmons’ Music Box series, according to Deadline.
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“Told through never-before-seen footage from Buckley’s archives and intimate accounts from his mother Mary Guibert, former partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, Jeff’s former bandmates, including Michael Tighe and Parker Kindred, and luminaries like Ben Harper and Aimee Mann, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley illuminates one of modern music’s most influential and enigmatic figures,” reads a release about the film.
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“His only studio album, Grace, was released to astounding reviews and challenged conventional ideas of genre and gender. His intimate and influential cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ further catapulted him to fame,” it continues. “Still, under pressure to produce his second album, he retreated to Memphis to escape the spotlight and the ever-growing glare of the public eye. In a tragic accident, Buckley drowned in the Wolf River in Memphis in 1997, leaving behind an unfinished second album and a legion of devastated family, friends and fans.”
A number attempts at making a film about Buckley have fizzled out to date, including one backed by Brad Pitt. In January at the doc’s premiere at the Sundance film festival, Buckley’s mother, Guibert, said the actor first floated the idea of a movie about the singer in 2000 after befriending her, but she eventually soured on his pitch. “We’re going to dye your hair, put brown contact lenses on those baby blues, and you’re going to open your mouth and Jeff’s voice is going to come out?” Guibert said she asked Pitt.
That idea never took off, but when Oscar-nominated Deliver Us From Evil director Berg pitched Guibert granted her access to Buckley’s archive and the movie moved forward with Pitt as an executive producer.
“I’ve spent practically my entire career trying to make this film, which takes a very intimate look at one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time,” Berg, who also directed the 2015 Janis Joplin doc Janis: Little Girl Blue, said in a statement. “I’m so excited Magnolia and HBO have come on board to share this film with the world and give old fans and new audiences a chance to experience Jeff from this unique vantage point. I couldn’t imagine a better team to roll this into the world!”
Buckley was the son of Guibert and late folk musician Tim Buckley and after gaining notice as a session musician and captivating performer in Manhattan’s East Village he signed to Columbia in 1994 and released his debut LP, Grace. It initially got mixed reviews and only reached No. 149 on the Billboard 200 album chart, but the album is now considered a classic, one that Buckley would never follow up.
Though he never completed a second album, Guibert helped compile some of her son’s demos for 1998’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which reached No. 64 on the Billboard 200 and received a Grammy nomination for best male rock vocal performance for the single “Everybody Here Wants You.”
Though Billy Joel might be sidelined with health issues currently, directors of the new documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, have shared a positive message from the singer.
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Joel, who recently canceled all live performances due to a health issue affecting his ability to perform, had initially planned to be in attendance at the Tribeca Festival for the premiere of the new documentary about his life.
In his absence though, director Susan Lacy shared a message to the audience, with Variety noting Lacy told those in attendance that, “He will be back.”
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“Billy wishes he were here tonight, and he asked us to convey his greetings to you all,” Lacy added (via Deadline). “He said ‘getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated.’”
Lacy was in attendance with producer Jessica Levin at New York City’s Beacon Theatre on Wednesday (June 4) for the premiere of the first part of the two-part documentary. Alongside attendees such as Tom Hanks and Whoopi Goldberg, Tribeca Festival co-founder Robert De Niro echoed the impact Joel has had upon the city.
“Billy may be considered the poet laureate of New York,” De Niro claimed. “You feel the essence of our city in his lyrics.”
The Billy Joel: And So It Goes documentary – which will air on HBO over the summer – aims to provide “an expansive portrait of the life and music of Billy Joel,” while focusing on the love, loss, and personal struggles that have informed his creative process.
Last month, Joel announced the cancellation of his forthcoming performances due to his recent diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus – a condition that occurs when cerebrospinal fluid builds up inside the skull, pressing on the brain.
In a social media post, a statement claimed that Joel’s condition has been “exacerbated by recent concert performances, leading to problems with hearing, vision and balance.”
It continued; “Under his doctor’s instructions, Billy is undergoing specific physical therapy and has been advised to refrain from performing during this recovery period. Billy is thankful for the excellent care he is receiving and is fully committed to prioritizing his health”
On Tuesday (June 3), radio host Howard Stern told his listeners that he recently had dinner with Joel, who offered a message to be shared with the general public. “He said, ‘Yeah, you can tell people: I’m not dying,’” Stern said. “He wants people to know that. He’s just got to deal with some medical stuff.”
Huey Lewis has reflected on his life with severe hearing loss, asserting determination that he’s “not going to give up” hope of returning to performing and recording.
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Lewis, who rose to fame as a member of Clover and the frontman of Huey Lewis and the News, has been absent from the stage since 2018, when he cancelled all tour dates due to his diagnosis with Meniere’s disease.
The disease, which affects the inner ear and prompts vertigo and other disorienting symptoms, saw Lewis experiencing hearing loss during rehearsals and prompted his retirement from live performances until an improvement was observed. “I haven’t come to grips with the fact that I may never sing again,” Lewis told Today in 2018.
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In a new interview with People, Lewis spoke about his life with the disease, explaining that he has since been fitted with a cochlear implant that allows him to hear speech “much better.”
“I lost bilaterally, my hearing … the intense vertigo — knock on wood — I have kind of outgrown,” he explained. “I’m mildly dizzy all the time, and my hearing just went to zero. And now I have a cochlear implant, so I’m much better that way, but I can’t hear music.”
“The worst part is that means it’s bad enough not to be able to perform and sing and play, but it’s really bad not to even be able to enjoy music,” he added.
Despite Lewis’ being unable to perform, his eponymous group did, however release a new album in 2020, with Weather consisting of seven tracks recorded shortly before his diagnosis. However, Lewis notes he’s hopeful yet realistic about his chances of experiencing performing and recording again, calling it “the best feeling in the world.”
“But I’m never going to get there,” he conceded. “I mean, I might get to where I can try to, and I’m not going to give up. I’m going to try. But geez, that kind of fun, that kind of great ride. I doubt I’m ever going to see that … feel that again.”
Despite his inability to perform or record as part of Huey Lewis and the News, the singer has remained active in the world of music. While the jukebox musical based on the band’s music, The Heart of Rock and Roll, has been staged in San Diego and on Broadway in recent years, Lewis was this week named in the ongoing search for the guitar Michael J. Fox played in Back to the Future.
As the 2025 Stanley Cup Final kicks off with Wednesday night’s (June 4) Game 1 showdown between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers, players and fans alike have no choice but to rock out to the NHL‘s brand-new promo starring and soundtracked by Linkin Park. The promo — which opened the TNT broadcast of […]
In recent weeks, The All-American Rejects have been going viral for performances at small house parties. And now, frontman Tyson Ritter is taking his talents to an even more intimate space: OnlyFans.
As revealed Wednesday (June 4) through an interview with GQ, the rock singer has decided to set up an account on the creator-focused online subscription platform, which has become known for its NSFW content. According to Ritter, he’s more focused on using the website to build a closer, more direct relationship with fans — but they might be able to expect a little bit of the risqué on top of it.
“I don’t think anybody would have expected the All-American Rejects to make a ripple in the water ever again,” began Ritter of his band, which dominated the pop-rock landscape in the 2000s before fading from the mainstream in the 2010s. “So the excitement behind this whole thing is like, ‘Where else can we be disruptive?’”
“We’ve always been a band who’s got a tongue bursting through the cheek when it comes to our music,” he continued. “So why not, you know, do a little peen bursting through a zipper?”
The musician remained vague about what his subscribers are in for, divulging only that they “can expect full-frontal rock n’ roll with all access.” Adding that he doesn’t plan on making fans pay very much to access his content — “If anything, maybe you’ll pay 69 cents, just because we’re little cheeky cats,” he quipped — Ritter said that bandmates Nick Wheeler, Mike Kennerty and Chris Gaylor are totally supportive of his new venture.
At press time, Ritter’s OnlyFans account did not appear to have launched yet.
The band’s latest “disruptive” move comes as the All-American Rejects have been experiencing a renaissance online thanks to their string of viral house-party performances. According to Ritter, the streak (of smaller shows, not the other kind) began about a month prior to the interview, when the band somewhat spontaneously accepted an offer to perform at a college rager near the University of Southern California. One of their recent performances at a house party near the University of Missouri was shut down by police — but not before the responding officers stopped to listen to a few more songs, per CNN.
Ritter is far from the only star to have joined OnlyFans, with several other musicians having turned to the platform as an additional source of income — or as a way of engaging more personally with listeners — over the years. Cardi B, Rico Nasty and The-Dream have all created accounts on the platform, while Lily Allen joined the platform last year to sell pictures of her feet.
“I think most people don’t realize that OnlyFans was a product of the pandemic that started as a Patreon for artists,” Ritter added to GQ of the site. “And then it was infiltrated by a genre that made it become a bit of a trope. It’s a platform that is offering an experience where the artist can set the price, and it’s artists-to-fans. There’s no middleman.”
If you were a fan of Pavement in the 1990s then it probably won’t surprise you that when time came to make a biopic of the quintessential indie slacker rock band director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) took a hard turn away from the typical hagiographic, soft-focus treatment.
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In fact, unless you were a fan of the “Cut Your Hair” band back then, chances are Perry’s film, Pavements, will mostly just confuse you. Hell, even the band members aren’t totally sure how it all works. “We were informed via email things we needed to know, but for most of the process we didn’t know what was going on, because we didn’t have to,” multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich tells Billboard about of the film in select theaters now and opening wide on Friday (June 6).
Addressing the project’s oddball format, which is part mockumentary, part documentary and includes footage from the fake Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, as well as a movie-within-a-movie via the fake biopic Range Life: A Pavement Story, Nastanovich says, “if we wanted to have known more we would have. Our general attitude was: ‘lets see what happens.’”
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Stranger Things star Joe Keery takes on the role of singer Stephen Malkmus (but also plays himself), while the band’s members play themselves alongside a passel of young actors who also take on their personas. In a three-way call from Cincinnati — where bassist Mark Ibold was born and spent many of his summers — and Kentucky — where former Louisville native Nastanovich was visiting a friend — the two men describe their feelings about the film and get pumped about a gig throwing out the first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds game on Wednesday (June 4).
Nastanovich, 57, says he was thrilled to meet “delightful” actor Fred Hechinger, adding as far as he’s concerned the 25-year-old White Lotus star is “spitting image of me and an extremely good-looking young man.” That said, after Ibold, 62, ran into Escape Room star Logan Miller, 33, at the restaurant where the bassist works, he went to visit the New York set of the film to see what was up. Describing entering a room where various actors were playing Pavement, Ibold says he thought, “‘whoa, this is really tripped out,’” even though he couldn’t tell who was playing whom.
“[Director] Alex explained the concept to me and he interviewed us before he started to get an idea of what he wanted to do, but even when you see the film it can be somewhat confusing what is real and what isn’t… the concept is pretty wild and he presented it to the band in a way that he said would be very different from other rock documentaries,” says Ibold of the movie’s unusual take in the wake of more straight-ahead recent biopics of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Bob Dylan. He describes going to the Taipei Film Festival last year and having to explain what was going on to the perplexed audience during a post-screening Q&A after they seemed confused by the entertainingly disjointed nature of Perry’s approach.
While Ibold jokes that his takeaway was that “we’re all more handsome than we really are,” Nastanovich says that he honestly saw some things he didn’t know about before, including shots of Malkmus’ original lyric drafts and real memorabilia sent in by band archivist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, which appear in the movie’s fake museum.
In addition to the film, the band recorded their first new song in 25 years, a cover of Jim Pepper’s 1969 track “Witchitai-To,” which is on the sprawling, 41-track Pavements soundtrack. The song came together during rehearsals for one of the band’s 2022 reunion shows and it’s the first fresh recording from the group since their 1999 Major Leagues EP.
Speaking of the major leagues, Ibold is excited to be back in Cincinnati, where he was born and spent many summers attending Reds baseball games with his family during the team’s late 1970s heyday. “My brother almost got hit by a car while getting Pete Rose’s autograph a block from where I am,” he says of the late, disgraced Cincinnati legend and all-time MLB hits leader who recently saw his lifetime ban end earlier this year when he was posthumously reinstated and made eligible for the Hall of Fame.
In fact, when he takes the mound on Wednesday at Great American Ballpark, Ibold says he plans to wear a jersey with Rose’s No. 14 on it when he tosses to catcher Nastanovich, for whom he made a custom “Nast” jersey honoring late Reds first baseman Dan Driessen’s No. 22, despite Nastanovich being a lifelong fan of longtime Red rivals the Pittsburgh Pirates.
“We’re extremely excited about it,” says Nastanovich, who says the team reached out to the baseball-loving band to see who would be interested in the honor, a query he and Ibold immediately raised their hands for. He says he’s seen video of Ibold practicing and predicted that his bandmate’s arc is so “sweet” that he might not even need a glove at all.
The gig also comes naturally to Ibold because his great great uncle started the iconic Ibold Cigars company in Cincinnati in the late 1800s. “When we came in from the airport to go to my grandparent’s house we’d see all these Ibold ads on warehouse walls and old brick buildings,” he says of the stogie maker that used to occupy a 13,000-square-foot, five-story building downtown, where it pumped out more than one million cigars a month in the 1940s.
Primary Wave has partnered with The Cars to acquire the rockers’ artist royalties, the company announced today (June 4). The deal, which encompasses classic rock staples such as “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl” and the Billboard Hot 100 top five hits “Shake It Up” (No. 4) and “Drive” (No. 3), follows Primary […]
Heart is offering a reward for the safe return of two custom instruments that were stolen on the eve of the veteran band’s launch of their 2025 summer An Evening With Heart tour. “Members of the legendary rock band Heart were devastated to discover that two irreplaceable instruments were stolen from the venue, where gear […]
It is a mere 30 days until Oasis take the stage at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales to kick off their first tour in more than 16 years. The anticipation for the long-awaited reunion of formerly battling brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher has been slowly building as images of band members arriving for rehearsals have leaked out over the past week.
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And on Tuesday morning (June 3), singer Liam weighed in and gave a very positive assessment of how things are going. “We have LIFT OFF Rastas sounded f–king FILTHY,” he wrote on X. “I’ll tell thee that there for hardly anything.” When a fan asked if he was nervous to step to the mic, the singer brushed off the question, responding “Dont be ridiculous.”
When another commenter wondered “did you sound amazing?,” the cheeky vocalist said, “Cmon,” telling a different fan that rehearsing with the band again was “SPIRITUAL” and that rehearsals so far were “BIBLICAL.” Not one to get misty about much, Gallagher told an inquiring mind who wanted to know if it was “emotional playing with everyone” for the first time in 16 years, “no time to get emotional we have a lot of catching up to do.”
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By Wednesday morning (June 4), Gallagher was already seemingly getting a bit punchy, inexplicably posting “MOISTIFICATION for the NATION,” and replying to a question about his “greatest asset” with the blunt “My arse.” A follow-up query about how many songs the band rehearsed the day before got the answer “69.”
So far, the band is planning to spend most of July in the U.K. before jumping over to North America in August for shows in Toronto, Chicago, New Jersey, Pasadena and Mexico City, then hitting Asia and Australia in the fall and winding down with shows in Argentina, Chile and Brazil in November.
For now, there are no festival dates or non-headlining shows, but a persistent fan asked Liam if it’s possible that Oasis would make a triumphant return to the Knebworth Festival, where they played to more than 250,000 fans over two nights in 1996. “Let’s see how this tour goes if we still love each other after it,” Liam replied.
And while there is some trepidation that the internal strife that split the family band up in 2009 might rear its ugly head again, when a fan wondered if Tuesday’s rehearsal made it feel like the band had “never split up,” Gallagher affirmed, “Yeah like it never happened very spiritual.”
Some things never change, though. “How many hours do you rehearse every day,” one commenter wondered. “I do the set once then I scarper,” Liam said.
So far, longtime bassist Andy Bell has confirmed that he’s back in the band for the tour and a March report suggested that the Gallaghers could be joined by former guitarist Gem Archer, as well as Oasis co-founder and rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs and drummer Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M.). Liam rubbished the report, writing, “NME tell me who your source pots are that keep giving you info about OASIS and I’ll give you an exclusive interview about up n coming OASIS tour. You can have it all but how much do you want it.”
See Liam’s comment below.
We have LIFT OFF Rastas sounded fucking FILTHY I’ll tell thee that there for hardly anything LG x— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 3, 2025
MOISTIFICATION for the NATION— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 4, 2025
More than three years on from their last studio record, New York trio Big Thief have detailed their sixth album, Double Infinity.
Set for release on Sept. 5 via 4AD, Double Infinity serves as the follow-up to the band’s Grammy-nominated album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. Recorded at New York City’s Power Station over the winter with longtime collaborator Dom Monks, the nine-track release arrived as the result of three weeks of marathon nine-hour sessions spent working with a tight-knit community of musicians.
The album’s announcement is also paired by the release of lead single ‘Incomprehensible,” a track which served as a staple of the band’s 2024 summer tour, and carried over into vocalist and guitarist Adrianne Lenker‘s solo shows that same year.
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The new record is also the first to be released by Big Thief as a trio, having announced the departure of longtime bassist Max Oleartchik in July 2024, citing “interpersonal reasons” for his exit.
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Double Infinity’s impending release is also the latest in a series of happenings for Big Thief and its associated members this year. In February, Big Thief unveiled a new L.A. wildfires benefit EP, with Passional Relations collecting some of their “favorite unreleased songs” to aid relief for those impacted by the fires in Los Angeles.
In late April, Lenker would release the Live at Revolution Hall album, while drummer James Krivchenia released the record Performing Belief in early May. Days later, the group would announce a run of North American tour dates, with the Somersault Slide 360 Tour set to launch in September.
Big Thief first formed in 2015 following two years of Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek performing as a duo. Their debut album arrived in 2016, with their third album – 2019’s U.F.O.F. – peaking at No. 142 on the Billboard 200. Their latest album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, would reach No. 31, and receive a Grammy nomination for best alternative album, and best alternative music performance for second single, “Certainty.”