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The Hurricane Dora-fueled wildfires that have killed at least 55 people and destroyed the town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui have transfixed the nation as the out-of-control flames have burned 2,000 acres and forced the evacuation of more than 11,000 people. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts […]
The organizer of a Malaysian music festival is seeking 12.3 million ringgit ($2.7 million) in losses from British band The 1975, after its lead singer’s on-stage protest of the country’s anti-gay laws prompted authorities to shut down the festival, the company’s lawyer said Friday (Aug. 11).
Future Sound Asia sent a letter to the band on Monday demanding compensation over a breach of contract, said FSA lawyer David Dinesh Mathew.
During the July 21 performance, Matty Healy used profanities in his speech criticizing the Malaysian government’s stance against homosexuality, before kissing bassist Ross MacDonald during the opening show at the Good Vibes Festival in Kuala Lumpur. Footage of the performance was posted on social media and sparked backlash in the predominantly Muslim country.
In Malaysia, homosexuality is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison and caning.
The government slammed Healy’s conduct, blacklist the band from the country and cut short the three-day festival. Some in the LGBTQ+ community also took to social media to criticize the band, saying Healy had disrupted the work of activists pushing for change and also endangered the community.
In the letter, Mathew said the band had given a written pledge before the show that it would adhere to all local guidelines and regulations. Instead, Healy’s “use of abusive language, equipment damage, and indecent stage behaviour” caused financial losses to FSA.
“Unfortunately, the assurance was ignored,” Mathew said Friday in a written statement to The Associated Press. “Their actions have had repercussions on local artists and small businesses, who relied on the festival for creative opportunities and their livelihoods.”
As such, he said FSA demanded that The 1975 acknowledge their liability and pay 12.3 million ringgit in compensation for damages incurred. On its website, FSA said it is in the midst of accommodating all refund requests.
The lawyer said FSA will take legal action in the courts of England if the band fails to respond by Monday, a week after the legal letter of claim was sent.
The band canceled its shows in Taiwan and Jakarta, Indonesia, after the fiasco in the Malaysian capital. It wasn’t the first such provocative on-stage display by Healy in the name of LGBTQ+ rights: In 2019, he kissed a male fan during a concert in the United Arab Emirates, which outlaws same-sex sexual activity.
08/10/2023
Here’s a quick guide to Robertson’s 10 best songs & performances that are either obscure or where his involvement is obscure.
08/10/2023
Lenny Kravitz is showing off his summer bod! The rocker took to Instagram on Thursday (Aug. 10) to share a series of snaps in which seen strutting down a city street wearing a pair of brown bell bottom pants, white boots and an open button-down shirt with his abs on full display. “6:56pm,” he captioned […]
The Band Camino are in their healing era, whether they actively realize it or not. When it comes to romantic relationships, the Nashville-based trio have been known in their music to be self-deprecating and even admit to unhealthy patterns for the sake of love.
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But their sophomore album, The Dark, despite its title, looks different. On “Same Page,” singer and guitarist Jeffery Jordan lets go of a relationship that seems perfect on paper, but things aren’t as they seem. On “Novocaine,” Spencer Stewart (vocals, guitar) allows himself to open back up to love — even if he feels like he needs something to numb the fear. On “Let It Happen,” the boys do as they say and let life come to them as it will.
“This album feels more mature,” Jordan tells Billboard, with Stewart agreeing and adding, “It’s another year of life and we’ve been trusting ourselves a lot more.”
And while the romantic and psychological themes of the album come from a more mature headspace, so does the music. The group took the emotion-filled lyricism and infectious hooks that fans love and “refined it,” as Jordan notes, with the final result diving deep into what a healing heart feels like, encompassed with sleek guitar riffs and swelling drum beats to help dance through the emotional rollercoaster of musical therapy. The Dark paints the picture of a band who is in fact the same page, as the aforementioned song title seeks.
“I feel like when we first started out and we got our record deal, we were so immersed in the whole whirlwind of it,” drummer Garrison Burgess recalls, “But we figure out how we work together better as time goes on because we’ve gotten to know each other and longer. We can go through hard things in our own lives, and get to live together through each other’s individual hardships.”
Jordan playfully adds, “If we didn’t like each other, this would be a lot harder.” He then takes a more serious tone, continuing, “We lucked out with compatibility, for sure. It’s hard to find it with people whom you’re touring with, creating with and in the studio with all the time.”
Stewart offers that the trio “communicate really well,” as can be seen on the most basic level in how coherent their albums always sound. “When you know, you know,” he says of his bond with his bandmates.
While chatting with The Band Camino, one topic that comes up frequently is the pressure of a sophomore slump after a successful 2021 self-titled debut that featured lasting hits including “I Think I Like You” and “Song About You.”
“If you start thinking about a sophomore album in the wrong way, it can f— you up,” Jordan admits, before Stewart chimes in to comfort his longtime friend and musical collaborator, marking yet another indication of the group’s emotional synchronicity.
“Growth is never linear ever,” Stewart assures Jordan, adding, “It can be tough to have that pressure to make sure you always succeed in order. You don’t want to fail and fall out of people’s eyes and then go on to make your best work on the third one but it’s too late.”
Jordan quickly finds grounding in the conversation, once more proving his mental and emotional growth over the last few years. “The pressure does force me to think about why I love doing what I’m doing,” he concludes. “It pulls me out of the numbers game and the success game and the Instagram attention game. I think about the fact that I started this because I was in my bedroom, playing my piano and it made me feel something.”
As we wrap our conversation, it became abundantly clear how much digging into The Dark stepped the Band Camino directly into the light. The Dark is out August 11 via DBLBLK Records/Elektra Records.
The Album
The Window, out August 25 on Topshelf
The Origin
For Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan, college started paying off before taking a single class. “Dave and I met during freshman orientation” at Notre Dame, Steiner tells Billboard. “We were both music nerds in a sea of – in a student body that isn’t full of music nerds. We showed up to college and neither of us had plans to start a band or to seek out people to play music with. We just kind of found each other really quickly.”
Before long, Steiner and Sagan were posting their recordings online and playing regional DIY shows. “The first community that we found ourselves in was in the south suburbs of Chicago, which is where Dave and [bassist] Sean [Neumann] grew up,” Steiner says. “I immediately got welcomed into this community of bands and music freaks down there that loved every type of music and were really passionate about having house shows with a million different types of bands.”
In the mid-’10s, Ratboys went from Chicago upstarts to Windy City rock fixtures, cementing their reputation with Topshelf releases AOID in 2015 and GN in 2017. That year, the quartet solidified its current lineup with the additions of Nuemann and drummer Marcus Nuccio; all four played on Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ critical breakthrough that arrived just before the pandemic in early 2020.
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The Sound
Years ago, Steiner referred to Ratboys as “post-country” – riffing on an inside joke with Sagan about the vagueness of terms like “post-hardcore” and “post-rock” – and the descriptor has followed the project, thanks to its vivid lyricism and natural fusion of sounds. Sagan’s description today is more direct: “We’re like Tom Petty,” he says. “We’re just a tight rock band.” (Steiner chimes in, “How humble of you, Dave!”)
Tongue-in-cheek or not, Steiner’s description has proven prescient for both Ratboys and their peers. “I think you were kind of ahead of your time there a little, Julia,” Nuccio says. “I mean, look at the landscape of indie-rock right now. So many bands, like Big Thief and Wednesday and Florry and all amazing bands, it kind of is like post-country, right? In the way that post-rock or post-hardcore is taking a genre and then adding a little modern twist to it.”
“Some of the tunes that we make are within – or at least paying homage to – that country tradition,” Steiner concludes.
The Record
While on tour with Foxing in 2018, Ratboys met Chris Walla, who had produced their tourmates’ acclaimed album Nearer My God out of his Seattle recording studio. In 2021, with a stable of new songs penned in quarantine, Ratboys cold-called Walla, best known for his time in Death Cab For Cutie, to helm the boards for what would become The Window.
When a tour later that year took Ratboys through Seattle, the band met with Walla; he asked them about their vision for their next album during on a walk back from a grocery store in the pouring rain. “We immediately dove into the details as if we’d known each other forever,” Steiner says. “He’s just a very easy person to spend time with.”
Soon, the band was sending demos to Walla for creative guidance, and in early 2022, Ratboys returned to Seattle to for a month to record, marking their first sessions outside of Chicago. Neumann says Ratboys cherished the opportunity to immerse and “make a record without thinking about the outside world,” comparing the sessions to staying over at a friend’s house. “There was one couch in there, and everybody had their preferred spot on the couch,” Sagan adds. “By the end of it, everybody had their own, like, perfectly formed butt groove.” (“That was the provisional title of the record, actually,” Steiner quips.)
Walla helped the band record live-to-tape for the first time, and also proved an empathetic sounding board for The Window‘s lyrical content. “I told him, ‘A lot of the songs are more personal, more real, more honest than some of the things we’ve made before – like, I just want it to be very real, unflinchingly so,’” Steiner recalls. “He was game for that. We really looked at everything in the face and [were] full-steam ahead with some of these ideas.”
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The Breakthrough
In January 2020, Ratboys received an unlikely boost. Organizers for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign contacted the band to open for one of the senator’s Iowa rallies, and Steiner and Sagan braved a blizzard to play the gig. When Sanders took the stage for his speech, he thanked Ratboys – but Steiner’s phone died as she tried to film the moment for posterity.
“I was like, ‘Well, bummer, I guess I’ll never get to share that with anyone,’” she says. Luckily, a friend captured the moment – and endearing footage of Sanders saying “Let me thank the Ratboys for their music” went viral.
The episode dovetailed with the rollout for Printer’s Devil, Ratboys’ most accomplished set of songs yet, which arrived that February to rave reviews. The pandemic disrupted the band’s planned headline tour, which was to begin March 14, 2020, but Ratboys made lemonade from lemons, diving into livestreaming and writing. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Ratboys re-recorded several early songs – and a new one, the instant quarantine classic “Go Outside” – for the 2021 full-length Happy Birthday, Ratboy!; the project coincided with Ratboys’ first overtures to Walla.
Two years after Happy Birthday, Ratboys returned with the longest song of its career, the eight-and-half-minute “Black Earth, WI.” The expansive rocker – along with other new singles “It’s Alive!,” “The Window,” “Crossed That Line,” and “Morning Zoo” (out today) – flashed the band’s recent lyrical and musical growth.
The Future
Ratboys co-headlined a tour with Wild Pink in 2021, but the band is excited to finally make good on its nixed 2020 touring plans and head out on a headline run of its own next month. “We’ve never had the opportunity to do a real, ticketed headline tour,” Steiner says with excitement. “It’s finally happening!”
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The Piece of Studio Equipment They Cannot Live Without
Steiner: “A roll of gaffe tape. Very useful to have around, not just for cymbal-dampening purposes – which I know nothing about, that’s like black magic to me – but I found a very, very important lesson while vocal tracking on this record: sometimes in order to unlock the best vocal performance, you need some sort of physical object to interact with while you’re singing. At one point, I grabbed this heavy-ass roll of gaffe tape that we had and just the weight of it in my hands, I was able to sing better. That was indispensable to me throughout the session.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Neumann cites Chicago pal Nnamdï, and Nuccio teases “a secret Nnamdï surprise coming in the Ratboys world, for any of the vinyl heads out there” who buy The Window on wax.
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Sagan: “Play a show before you start thinking about any Spotify listeners. Don’t worry about how people receive your music – just play it first.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
Steiner: “The music industry today kind of treats music like a public utility, and I really fear that there’s no way to go back from that entirely. The value of a song, the value of an artistic idea has kind of been washed away. If there’s some way that we could reframe the way we look at music… honestly, we’ve talked about this in the band: Spotify should be $100 a month. It’s so cheap. It’s just a matter of finding that tipping point where people will agree that this has value and be willing to pay more for it.”
The Boss paid tribute to the leader of The Band on Wednesday night (Aug. 9) at the kick-off of the E Street Band’s North American stadium/arena tour at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Just hours after the world learned that legendary singer/songwriter/composer Robbie Robertson of The Band had passed away at age 80 following a long illness, Bruce Springsteen dedicated a song to his fellow hard core troubadour.
“To my good friend Robbie Robertson,” Springsteen said before the band kicked into the emotional ballad “I’ll See You In My Dreams” from the E Street Band’s 2020 album Letter to You according to the Asbury Park Press. The sentimental track is an a tribute to a lost loved one in which Springsteen takes solace in a dream world reunion as he surrounds himself with the departed’s books and records.
“The road is long and seeming without end/ The days go on, I remember you my friend/ And though you’re gone and my heart’s been emptied it seems/ I’ll see you in my dreams,” Springsteen sings before hitting the hope-filled chorus on the song that closed out the 26-song, three-hour setlist for Wednesday night’s show. “I’ll see you in my dreams/ When all our summers have come to an end/ I’ll see you in my dreams/ We’ll meet and live and laugh again/ I’ll see you in my dreams,” Springsteen manifests on the chorus.
Earlier in the day, E Street Band guitarist “Little” Steven Van Zandt called Robertson “good friend and a genius. The Band’s music shocked the excess out of the Renaissance and were an essential part of the final back-to-the-roots trend of ‘60s. He was an underrated brilliant guitar player adding greatly to Bob Dylan’s best tour & best album,” he wrote on Twitter.
The APP noted that, like Springsteen, 73, Toronto native Robertson worked the boards on the New Jersey shore in the mid-1960s, working at clubs such as the former Tony Marts in Somers Point, NJ with The Band.
Robertson had just wrapped work on Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon, the 14th collaboration with the man the legendary director called “one of my closest friends, a constant in my life and work.” He was one of the dozens of musicians, friends and admirers who paid tribute to Robertson, whose career spanned more than 65 years as a band member, solo star, actor and film composer.
From his beginnings as a teenage guitarist in Little Caesar and the Consuls to his stint in Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks in the early 1960s, a fruitful run with Bob Dylan in the mid-to-late 1960s and then the formation of Americana progenitors The Band, Robertson was a beloved, deeply soulful and thoughtful artist who former President Bill Clinton referred to as a “brilliant songwriter, guitarist and composer whose gifts changed music forever.”
Check out fan footage of the performance below.
Paramore have been forced to cancel the final two dates on their U.S. tour due to singer Hayley Williams’ ongoing health issues. The singer announced the news in an Instagram Story on Thursday morning (Aug. 10) in which she revealed that the band’s shows at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Portland tonight and the Delta Center […]
Robbie Robertson, who died Wednesday (Aug. 9) at the age of 80, was a road warrior, songwriter and guitar hero who helped shape rock’s late-sixties golden age in The Band, provided or curated music for many of Martin Scorsese’s films and made several important solo albums. Over the years, he also emerged as one of rock’s most influential storytellers — myth-maker might be a better word, although he told true stories with dramatic resonance — first in Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz, later in the book Testimony: A Memoir and the Band documentary Once Were Brothers, and throughout his career as one of the most compelling raconteurs in the history of popular music.
Robertson spent the first part of his career backing up Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan and then, with The Band, writing and playing songs rooted in American mythology. The stories were his, but the characters seemed so entrenched in the landscape that it sounded like they had been waiting for him to sing about them — Carmen and the Devil, Virgil Caine, the man with the stage fright. Many of these songs sketch out whole stories in small details — if you need to ask why Carmen and the Devil are walking side by side, you’re missing the point, but you can see it’s bad news from a mile away.
Over the course of his time in The Band, Robertson seemed to age into a kind of mythic character in his own right, and in The Last Waltz, made about The Band’s farewell to the touring life and the star-studded concert they played to commemorate it, he started to examine rock’s own myths. “The road has taken a lot of the great ones,” he says in the movie. “It’s a goddamn impossible way of life.” Along with his bandmates, Robertson turned barstool stories about highway hotels and dodgy dive bars into widescreen epics. “Sixteen years on the road is long enough,” he says elsewhere in the movie, all of 33 at the time. “Twenty years is unthinkable.”
More than any other work of the time, The Last Waltz gives the main characters of rock’s second chapter the chance to take a bow just as punk and disco took the stage. The concert, famously held at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 — complete with a turkey dinner and an orchestra for formal dancing — featured not only Band collaborator Bob Dylan, but also a Beatle (Ringo Starr), a Rolling Stone (Ron Wood), a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter (Joni Mitchell), a New Orleans pianist (Dr. John), a blues great (Muddy Waters) and a rock star who may have been celebrating the seventies in an eighties style (Neil Young, who according to unconfirmed legend had a visible particle of cocaine in his nose that had to be edited out). The film recounted the story of rock, right up to the point when it splintered into sub-genres.
Robertson understood this vision better than his bandmates, who seemed to have found his concept pretentious. (The fact that he had a magnetic onscreen charisma that they lacked probably didn’t help, either.) “We were in the moment — we were playing songs we had hardly played before with people from Joni Mitchell to Muddy Waters — and all we could think about was trying to rise to the occasion,” Robertson told me in a 2016 interview. Over the years, the movie became its own myth, to the point that there have been tribute concerts commemorating what was essentially meant to be its own kind of tribute concert. (The film resonated so much with me that in 1998 I bought the movie poster, which has followed me to every apartment or office I’ve had since — a reminder of the music I grew up listening to that by then had come to seem a bit old-fashioned.)
Robertson’s first solo album, released in 1987, also seemed shrouded in myth — both figuratively in songs like “Somewhere Down that Crazy River” and literally in co-producer Daniel Lanois’ haunted, reverb-heavy production. At a time when mainstream rock was growing slicker, Robertson found a way to maintain some mystery, partly thanks to a list of guest musicians that included U2, Peter Gabriel, Maria McKee and two former members of The Band. He followed that with the New Orleans-themed Storyville (in 1991), projects that explored Native American music and what was then called electronica (Music for The Native Americans in 1994 and Contact from the Underworld of Redboy in 1998), and much later two more solo albums (How to Become Clairivoyant in 2011 and Sinematic in 2019).
In between those last two solo albums, Robertson published one of the best-ever music memoirs, Testimony, partly because he was there more than anyone else who remembers and he remembered more than anyone else who was there. Even this decision he cast in terms that loomed larger than life. “I just couldn’t carry around all of these stories anymore,” he told me in the 2016 interview. “There were too many and they got too heavy.” This sounds true enough, but it’s an unusually dramatic way to talk — you can practically picture the man weighed down by his memories, like a character out of one of the Scorsese movies for which he provided music.
In the book, Robertson tells his story with the same eye for detail and epic sweep he used in his songwriting. “It’s a cinematic piece of work and I had to structure the scenes so they fold into one another; as opposed to, then in February this happened, and in March that happened,” he said in 2016. When we spoke, he talked about writing a second book, devoted to his later career — and it’s hard not to wish he had lived to complete it.
Robertson has an incredible memory, and it says a lot about who he was that he even has a mythic — and true — explanation for it. In Testimony, he writes about how his birth father’s mother was a bootlegger who kept addresses and phone numbers in her head for safety. “My birth father,” he told me, “went on to become a gambler and won because he was a card counter.” You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried — and Robertson never needed to.
Billie Eilish’s Barbie soundtrack contribution “What Was I Made For?” rises to No. 1 for the first time on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart dated Aug. 12. “What Was I Made For?” reigns in its fourth week on the survey. It concurrently leads Hot Alternative Songs for a third week in a row. […]