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Willie Nelson will release his 153rd album, Last Leaf on the Tree, on Nov. 1. The Legacy Recordings LP features a mix of the country icon’s interpretations of songs by Tom Waits, Keith Richards, Beck, the Flaming Lips, Neil Young, and Nina Simone, among others, as well as a handful of tracks written by the singer and his son, Micah Nelson, who also produced the album.
The first single from the collection is a cover of Tom Waits’ “Last Leaf,” a melancholy meditation from Waits’ 2011 Bad As Me album about the autumn of life that speaks to the 91-year-old country icon’s legendarily indefatigable spirit and boundless energy well into his six decade as a performer. “I’m the last leaf on the tree/ The autumn took the rest/ But they won’t take me/ I’m the last leaf on the tree,” Nelson sings in a hushed voice over his signature nylon string guitar strumming in the song that confronts the vicissitudes of aging.
The collection, Nelson’s 76th solo studio album, marks the first time Micah — who performs and produces under the name Particle Kid — has produced one of his dad’s albums, though they have appeared together on family LPs such as 2017’s Willie and the Boys and 2021’s The Willie Nelson Family.
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“It’s an approach that I really love and have used a lot over the years — just throwing the clay down and stepping back, then maybe adding a little more, and then maybe shaving down here, and kind of building the tracks that way,” said Micah, 34, who said he used a “sculptor’s approach” to working on the album on which he played more than a dozen instruments, including guitar, piano and “sticks and branches, logs and dead leaves” according to a press release.
Micah also created the album’s cover illustration and made the animation for the “Last Leaf” video, as well as illustrating the album cover and creating the animation for the “Last Leaf” video along with his wife, Alexandra Dascalu Nelson; in addition to digital, CD and LP versions, Nelson’s webstore will also sell an exclusive, limited-edition version with a lithograph created by Micah.
The choice of “Last Leaf” was fitting according to Micah Nelson, as his dad has not shied away from addressing the unstoppable march of time before as well as facing his own mortality via a series of health scares, including on the title track of his 2018 album Last Man Standing, on which he lamented watching “my pals check out.” Micah said, “there are little side-quests, but that became the through-line — facing death with grace.”
That vibe makes sense given such song selections as Warren Zevon’s bittersweet ode to everlasting love “Keep Me In Your Heart,” as well as another haunting Waits song, “House Where Nobody Lives” and the Lips’ joyful meditation on the preciousness of life, “Do You Realize??” Another track that fits the theme of the fading of the light was chosen by Nelson’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, jazz giant Nina Simone’s 1967 song “Come Ye.”
In addition to the Nelsons and Raphael, the album also features guest musicians Daniel Lanois on pedal steel, former Doors drummer John Densmore and Senegalese percussionist Magatte Sow.
Listen to Nelson’s “Last Leaf on the Tree” and see the album’s track list below.
[embedded content]
Last Leaf on the Tree track list:
1. “Last Leaf” (written by Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennan)
2. “If It Wasn’t Broken” (written by Sydney Lyndella Ward)
3. “Lost Cause” (written by Beck David Hansen)
4. “Come Ye” (written by Nina Simone)
5. “Keep Me In Your Heart” (written by Warren Zevon & Jorge Calderon)
6. “Robbed Blind” (written by Keith Richards)
7. “House Where Nobody Lives” (written by Tom Waits)
8. “Are You Ready For The Country?” (written by Neil Young)
9. “Do You Realize??” (written by Wayne Coyne/Steven Drozd/Michael Ivins/David Fridmann)
10. “Wheels” (written by Micah Nelson)
11. “Broken Arrow” (written by Neil Young)
12. “Color Of Sound” (written by Willie Nelson & Micah Nelson)
13. “The Ghost” (written by Willie Nelson)
They say if you can remember the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair from 1969, you probably weren’t there. But some of the musicians who played the festival beg to differ.
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Fifty-five years later, the performers’ memories are clear as mud — well, make that about mud, as most of them well recall the rain-soaked wallow that was Max Yasgur’s farm during those “Days of Peace & Music” from Aug. 15-18, 1969. Some of braver ones even slogged their way onto the grounds to experience Woodstock from their fans’ point of view. And they certainly remember being flown into the site by helicopter as well as the late-running performance schedule and a backstage area where most were warned not to consume anything that wasn’t in sealed bottles or packages — unless they wanted to be on another kind of trip than they one they’d taken to get there.
Ten Years After drummer Ric Lee has good reason to be clear in his recollections; not only is it a significant chapter in his 2019 memoir From Headstocks To Woodstock, but on Friday (Aug. 16) the group releases Woodstock 1969, its entire six-song performance from Sunday, Aug. 17, 1969 — including a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl” that had to be restarted when Alvin Lee’s guitar was out of tune. It was a ferocious hour on stage for the British blues-rock band, and the epic version of “I’m Going Home” — immortalized in the Woodstock concert documentary that came out the following year — elevated the quartet’s fortunes during the ensuing decade.
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“Crikey, we played as well as we could under the circumstances, I think,” Lee, the younger brother of late Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee, tells Billboard. “And ‘I’m Going Home,’ you can see it in the movie. When we went to see it a year later at a cinema on Wilshire Boulevard…a lot of the other acts were there, and when ‘I’m Going Home’ played everybody in the theater gave us a standing ovation, which was incredible from our peers. Alvin and I talked about it a few times; we wondered what it would have bene like if, for example, ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ had been used instead of ‘I’m Going Home’ — although it’s very different to speculate about those things.”
Lee says TYA was not aware of how significant Woodstock would be leading up to the festival. The group was on the road in the U.S. and was even resistant to adding it to the schedule, but its agent, the late Frank Barsalona, persisted. “Chris Wright, our manager, kept turning it down,” Lee says. “Frank kept saying, ‘You really ought to get on this. This is gonna be a big festival.’ He finally said, ‘Look, Janis (Joplin) has signed, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are gonna do it and (Jimi) Hendrix is doing it, so you’d be crazy not to do it.’ Finally Chris caved in, and we did it.”
That meant flying to New York at “some daft time” after a show the previous night in St. Louis, then taking cars to the Holiday Inn, aka “Tranquility Base,” in nearby Goshen, N.Y., where the musicians were lodging. “Janis and her band were in the room, a bunch of other people,” says Lee, who was traveling with his first wife. “I had a carry-on bag with me, a rucksack; I put that down on the floor (in the lobby) and was gonna use that as a pillow and get some sleep, but then they said, ‘You’ve got to go to the site.’” TYA was pushed off its initial helicopter site by Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, but the next one got the band to the site on time to watch Joe Cocker perform — and also to be warned “don’t eat anything that’s not been cooked ’cause we got hepatitis breaking out.” The musicians sheltered in trailers during the Sunday afternoon rainstorm that pushed TYA’s slot into the evening.
Despite the “Schoolgirl” snafu (the aborted attempt is also included on the Woodstock 1969 album), Lee says TYA was satisfied with its performance but was more than ready to get out of Bethel, N.Y. — which was an adventure in itself. Though the roads were blocked by cars abandoned by concert goers, Lee found a limousine driver who was ready to get out of Dodge, too. “We found a state trooper who was very helpful,” Lee recalls. “We said, ‘Can you find us a way out of here?’ ‘I can, but you’ve got to be very careful. You’re going to be driving between the tents, so you have to be careful not to hit the ropes — and there are people sleeping between the tents, so you’ve got to be careful not to run them over.’ So we did that and got out of there.”
The restaurant at Tranquility Base was closed, however, so the by-then famished band found a late-night diner down the road. “The waitress said, ‘What would you like?’ We said, ‘Everything!’” Lee says with a laugh. “So she went away and came back with food. Then we had to jump back in the limousines and leg it down to New York. When we got there they’d sold our rooms ’cause we were so late, so we managed to find another hotel that could put us up, then the next day we drove down to Baltimore to get back on our tour.”
It was a lot to go through, but like many of its Woodstock peers, TYA has no regrets about being part of the experience. “Especially when the film came out, we were suddenly on the world stage, and we started playing in Japan and all sorts of other places,” says Lee, who’s planning to publish an updated edition of his memoir. “Our U.K. and European audiences got larger. There was a definite shift that was the result of playing (at Woodstock).”
Seen, Felt, Touched, Healed
While The Who were already enjoying Stateside popularity when they brought the rock opera Tommy to Woodstock, Pete Townshend — who was also cajoled into accepting the gig — felt a boost from the festival and the film, too.
“I would have preferred not to have done it,” Townshend told us some years ago, “but it did actually cement our career in America. And then the film came out and it re-cemented it. Tommy was finished; it had sold maybe a million and a half copies. Woodstock put it back on the charts, and then the film came out and Tommy sold another four million copies. It was a huge part of our career, and I was very grateful we were there.”
But, Townshend added, “I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was chaos, wasn’t it? It was completely nuts. What was going on off the stage was just beyond comprehension — stretchers and dead bodies and people throwing up and people having bad trips. And all they could say was, ‘Isn’t this fantastic?! Isn’t this beautiful?!’ I thought the whole of America had gone mad at that moment.”
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, meanwhile, remembers a scene that “was muddy, smell, but great to see old friends.” Fifty-five years later, however, he has a different perspective on what made Woodstock great.
‘”I’ve always felt that the stars of Woodstock were the audience, never the bands,” he explains. “It was the audience that created a wave that…To me it was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, even though casualty-wise it got worse. But it was start of making the government realize that you’re gonna have to get to grips with this, ’cause they’re gonna have a rebellion on their hands. It was the Woodstock audience that did not, not the bands.”
Souls Sacrificed
Carlos Santana echoes Daltrey’s feelings about Woodstock’s impact beyond the music. The band that bore his surname was one of the unquestioned highlights of the festival, with a fiery, reputation-making Saturday performance that preceded the release of its debut album by a week — and also translated well to film with a galvanizing rendition of “Soul Sacrifice.”
“Woodstock is a spiritual frequency, a spiritual event,” says Santana, who’s used footage and sound from the film during his own shows for quite some time. “When you think of Jesus walking around on the mountain, passing out gluten-free bread and mercury-free fish — people made Woodstock sort of like that kind of event. It’s out of time. Woodstock was not a commercial, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola event. It was three days of unity, harmony, oneness to bring awareness to equality, fairness and justice. The people at Woodstock, if you look at them, they’re hippies who believe in something different than the corrupt corporations of religions and politicians. We believed then and we believe now that peace is possible in our lifetime, on this planet. That’s why Woodstock is still relevant. We still need peace.”
Santana, who also performed at Woodstock ’94, recalls arriving at the site and seeing the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia “already playing his guitar on the hill, with this beautiful, blissful smile on his face.” As for the crowd, he remembers “an ocean of flesh and hair and teeth and arms and eyes. Woodstock was like a living ocean of people. Then you could just feel the sound, which had a different kind of reverberation when it bounced of the people and came back to you.”‘
Long Time Gone
The four members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were admittedly nervous when they finally took the stage at 3 a.m. Monday for only their second performance as a quartet — including both acoustic and electric sets. As David Crosby noted years ago, “Everybody we knew or cared about in the music industry was there. They were heroes to us — The Band and Hendrix and The Who…They were all standing behind us in a circle, like, ‘OK, you’re the new kids on the block. Show us.’” Stills, in fact, told the crowd that the group was “scared sh-tless.”
Graham Nash concurred more recently that, “Stephen was pretty nervous that night, but I thought we did well. I didn’t give a sh-t how many people were there; I had already been through that with the Hollies for six or seven years before I had ever met David or Stephen. My fondest memory was playing ‘Guinnevere’ with David, just his guitar and the two voices trying to reach however many thousands of people were there.” Another good memory, he adds, was that “the first thing we did was go to John Sebastian’s tent and get high on weed. (Woodstock) was a brilliant piece of work. It should not have happened as well as it did, and I think that (co-producer) Michael Lang really put his all into it and pulled it off. It was a wonderful idea, and it came off really well.”
Brotherly Love
Edgar Winter got to experience Woodstock “from both sides,” as a performer and a fan. The former was playing three songs with his older brother Johnny Winter and his band on Sunday at midnight, after The Band. But Winter, who had yet to release his first solo album and launch his band White Trash, also spent time in the field, checking out the other performers.
“I loved Hendrix,” Winter reports. “I loved Sly. I loved Richie Havens, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Janis, of course; we knew her from back home (in Texas). There was so much great music. It was just an amazing diversity of music; I enjoy festivals that are organized like that as opposed to the ones that say, ‘OK, we’re gonna get three blues guitar players.…’”
Winter also recalls that, “There was no real schedule. It was just organized confusion, like whoever they could find that was capable of getting on stage and doing a performance was next. That was crazy.”
Winter also credits his own time on the Woodstock stage as putting his career into motion in earnest. “Johnny was the guy who had the ambition and the drive, much more than me,” Winter says. “I had been more interested in jazz and classical, but he had decided he was gonna be a star at a very early age. After Woodstock, that indelible moment of being on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people, this endless ease of humanity, that made me realize music can be so much more than just my personal world. It can reach out and transcend so many boundaries and bring people together. That’s when I thought about being an artist, writing songs and doing something in popular music, and the rest is history.”
Billie Eilish ties Imagine Dragons for the most No. 1s – five each – in the 15-year history of Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, as “Birds of a Feather” lifts to the top of the Aug. 17-dated survey.
“Birds of a Feather” reigns via 31.8 million radio audience impressions, 22.4 million official U.S. streams and 4,000 downloads sold in the week ending Aug. 8, according to Luminate.
The song follows “Lunch,” which ruled for a week in June, as Eilish’s second leader from her album Hit Me Hard and Soft, released in May.
Eilish first hit No. 1 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs with “My Future” in 2020 and returned to the top with “Happier Than Ever” in 2021 and “What Was I Made For?” in 2023.
Eilish now shares the record for the most leading titles despite often not being eligible for the tally at the onset of her career, as prior to June 2020, the ranking reflected songs specifically within the confines of the rock genre; since then, it has incorporated alternative music that may have roots in a genre other than rock, such as pop, dance and more.
Most No. 1s, Hot Rock & Alternative Songs:5, Billie Eilish5, Imagine Dragons4, Twenty One Pilots3, Zach Bryan3, Foo Fighters3, Linkin Park
Concurrently, “Birds of a Feather” lifts 2-1 on Hot Alternative Songs, likewise marking her fifth leader. Since the chart began in 2020, only Noah Kahan, Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift also boast more than one leader, with two apiece.
As previously reported, “Birds of a Feather” becomes Eilish’s first No. 1 on both the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts.
On the all-genre Billboard Hot 100, “Birds of a Feather” leaps 10-7 for a new high as the chart’s top Airplay Gainer.
“Birds of a Feather” debuted at No. 4 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs upon the chart arrival of Hit Me Hard and Soft. It has steadily risen since, with eight weeks at No. 2 prior to its coronation, thanks at first to attention on TikTok, followed by gains on radio, where it’s followed “Lunch” as the LP’s latest promoted single. It jumps 11-8 on the Pop Airplay list dated Aug. 17 and 25-16 on Adult Pop Airplay.
Hit Me Hard and Soft debuted at No. 1 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart dated June 1 and has reigned for eight weeks. It has earned 1.2 million equivalent album units to date.
The music world continues to line up in support of the presumptive democratic presidential ticket topped by Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The dynamic duo who have been barnstorming the country for the past two week since Harris swiftly swapped in to replace President Biden in their bid to deny former President Donald Trump a second term have been getting a boost from a series of music- and celebrity-oriented online fundraisers.
Over the past two weeks a series of cash-cow Zoom fundraisers by “Women for Harris,” a celebrity-studded “White dudes for Harris,” “Latino men for Harris,” “Comics for Harris,” “Cat ladies for Harris,” “VCs for Harris,” as well as Tuesday’s (August 13) “Deadheads for Harris” have raised tens of million; there is also an upcoming (August 27) Zoom organized by Swifties4Kamala.
Now Hoboken, N.J.’s finest, indie pop power trio Yo La Tengo, are making it personal. As in offering to play a private show at the location of your choice to raise funds for the democratic ticket that has injected a dose of joy and energy into a campaign that was seen by many as a grim choice between a struggling sitting president and a divisive former one.
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“In 40 years of touring, Yo La Tengo have brought their music to a wide array of venues: clubs of all sizes, festival stages, minor league baseball stadiums, festival side-stages, an amusement park, the odd pavilion, and a zoo, as well as the occasional empty room, including once by design (see Hanukkah 2020),” the band wrote in a pitch to superfans.
“They have, however, performed only a small handful of ‘house shows.’ Until now!,” they added. “Yo La Tengo would like to announce their availability for a series of intimate acoustic concerts for individuals willing to make a sizable donation to the Harris / Walz U.S. presidential ticket.”
Proposals for the shows will be prioritized by the band based on the amount of the intended contribution, location and trio’s availability, with the bidder in charge of corralling an audience. No filming will be allowed at the shows, though non-performance photos are allowed.
“The other details are up to you, Mx. Big $pender,” they said. “Bring Georgia [Hubley, drums/vocals], Ira [Kaplan, vocals/guitar], and James [McNew, bass/vocals] to your backyard for a quiet get-together with your closest friends! Book them in your living room, basement, barn, or local VFW hall for an audience of people you’ve never met in your life! The logistics are (mostly) your problem, but if you’re willing to spend big to support the Democratic ticket in 2024, Yo La Tengo will come to you.”
Interested fans can fill out a form here, with the band noting that it would be helpful, but not mandatory, for the proposed events to line up with the group’s upcoming tour dates.
If you weren’t lucky enough to attend last September’s all-star tribute to Bruce Springsteen‘s beloved 1982 solo album Nebraska in Nashville, you’re in luck. The show, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska: A Celebration in Words and Music will air on PBS on August 31. The first trailer for the special — which is available now on the […]
Jack White never does things the typical way. Take, for instance, the idiosyncratic roll-out of his latest solo album, No Name, which initially was secretly released on July 19 as a free, unlabeled vinyl to unsuspecting customers at his Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville and London. Though he did release it commercially on August 1 as a blue-colored vinyl LP exclusively to independent record stores, and then as a digital download on August 2, his plan to promote the sneak-attack album is just as unconventional.
In an Instagram post on Tuesday (August 13), White explained his plan for an equally sneaky tour in support of the LP, which will take him to small clubs, back yard BBQs and a few festivals to pay the bills. In another surprise, the tour has already begun, but you won’t know if he’s coming to your town because shows will be announced with little advance notice.
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“Hello, and love to all the peoples of the world out there. Lotta folk asking about when we are going to announce ‘tour dates,’ well, we don’t know what to tell you but the tour already started at the Legion a couple of weeks ago,” White wrote of a gig he played at the cozy American Legion Post 82 in Nashville to raise money for a new sound system for the venue. “People keep saying that these are ‘Pop up shows’ we’ve been playing, well, you can call them whatever you want, but we are on tour right now. These are the ‘shows.’”
White and his current band also played a 1,000-capacity show at Detroit’s Saint Andrew’s Hall in his native town on August 5 that served as a kind of album release show for No Name.
The proof is in the pudding, including another pop-up in Nashville on Tuesday night at the 575-capacity The Basement East club, where he tore it up, eliciting urgent questions from fans such as, “Can you perform in my basement, the sound will be absolutely s–tty [fire emoji].” The unorthodox outing is in keeping with White’s longtime allergy to following the rules, from the strict red, white and black color scheme for his previous band, the White Stripes, to the shortest concert ever — a single note — by the Stripes in Newfoundland, Canada in 2007 that consisted of a single note and a cymbal crash.
White continued, “We won’t really be announcing dates in advance so much, we will mostly be playing at small clubs, back yard fetes, and a few festivals here and there to help pay for expenses. Shows will be announced as close to the show date as possible, some shows we won’t even decide to do until that morning. I also want to walk through orchard fields and grab apples off of trees at will and fill my belly full of that fruit if the desire strikes me. I’m looking for that cool breeze you know? Lots of love and rock and roll to you all and you are blessed for giving that love to others, we hope that we see you out on the road soon, if not let’s get coffee and a slice of pie sometime? Music is sacred.”
At press time the only official date on White’s tour itinerary is an appearance at the Desert Daze festival in Rancho Las Perris, CA in October.
Check out the poster and footage from Tuesday night’s show below.
Jack White scores his seventh solo top 10-charting set on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart as his latest release, No Name, debuts at No. 8 on the chart dated Aug. 17. The effort was initially secretly released on July 19 as a free, unlabeled vinyl to unsuspecting customers at Third Man Records stores in Detroit, Nashville and London. It was then commercially released on Thursday, Aug. 1 as a blue-colored vinyl LP, exclusive to independent record stores, and then widely as a digital download album on August 2.
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In the tracking week of Aug. 2-8 (all Billboard album charts reflect a Friday-Thursday tracking week), No Name sold 7,000 copies – with nearly 4,500 on vinyl. (In the week ending Aug. 1, the album sold about 1,000 copies – all on vinyl.)
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No Name will garner a wider release on Sept. 13 when a standard black vinyl and a CD are due out.
Also in the top 10 of the new Top Album Sales chart, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department returns to No. 1 for a seventh nonconsecutive week, Ye (formerly Kanye West) and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures 2 debuts at No. 2, Red Velvet’s Cosmic starts at No. 6, Orville Peck’s Stampede gallops in at No. 9 and X’s Smoke & Fiction launches at No. 10.
Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album units and streaming equivalent album units. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both Twitter and Instagram.
The Tortured Poets Department jumps 6-1 on Top Album Sales with a 606% gain to 84,000 copies sold. The set’s sales were bolstered by a number of drivers during the tracking week. It was released in five new digital album variants via Swift’s official webstore for a limited time, each containing the standard album’s 16 songs, along with one exclusive bonus track for $4.99 each (one album contained a “first draft phone memo” version of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” while the other four contained one live track each from recent stops during her The Eras Tour). In addition, for a limited time, the store restocked three previously available digital album variants with exclusive bonus cuts, and a signed CD edition. Her store also staged a brief sale pricing promotion, whereby 16 previously available physical variants of the album were all discounted by 13% (as 13 is Swift’s favorite number).
At No. 2 on Top Album Sales, Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s delayed Vultures 2 lands with 60,500 sold in its first week. The set’s opening-week sales were aided by its availability across a widely available standard explicit edition, and a late-in-the-week-released clean edition (on Aug. 8), but no physical formats. Vultures 2 was originally slated for release on March 8, but was released with little advance warning on Saturday, Aug. 3.
Ye’s official webstore also issued five additional explicit digital album variants of Vultures 2 on Wednesday (Aug. 7) and Thursday (Aug. 8), each containing the standard album’s 16 tracks, along with one exclusive studio bonus track per album. All digital albums on Ye’s webstore sold for $5 each. The Vultures 2 album, both clean and explicit, was also discounted to $4.99 in the iTunes Store in the tracking week.
Stray Kids’ ATE falls 1-3 on Top Album Sales in its third week after spending its first two weeks atop the chart. ATE sold a little more than 26,000 copies in the latest tracking frame (down 41%). ENHYPEN’s Romance: Untold is a non-mover at No. 4 with just over 12,000 sold (down 20%).
Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft climbs 11-5 with nearly 10,500 sold and a 35% increase – the set’s first weekly sales gain in its 12 weeks of release. (The gain is largely owed to sales generated by non-traditional retailers, inclusive of Internet-based sellers like Eilish’s official webstore.)
Red Velvet claims its first top 10-charting effort on Top Album Sales as Cosmic debuts at No. 6 with 8,500 sold – the group’s best sales week yet. The Korean pop ensemble previously got as high as No. 40 in 2020 with The Reve Festival: Finale. Cosmic was released as a digital download album, and through streaming services, on June 24. Its physical release, across five CDs, came on Aug. 2. The CD variants include collectible paper ephemera, including a photocard, sticker and a poster (some randomized).
Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess returns to the top 10 after three weeks, as the album bolts 17-7 with nearly 8,500 (up 34%). The album’s ascent comes after Roan’s rousing reception at Lollapalooza on Aug. 1.
Orville Peck notches his second top 10 on Top Album Sales as his new studio effort Stampede bows at No. 9 with 6,500 sold in its first week. The set’s sales were bolstered by its availability across eight vinyl variants, which collectively sold nearly 4,500 – enabling its debut at No. 4 on the Vinyl Albums chart.
Closing out the top 10 on the new Top Album Sales chart is X’s new studio album Smoke & Fiction, debuting at No. 10 with the veteran band’s best sales week in the modern era (since 1991, when Luminate began tracking sales), nearly 6,500 sold. It’s also the first top 10 for the act on the Top Album Sales chart. The new set is promoted as the final studio album from the band, which first dented a Billboard chart in 1981 when Wild Gift reached No. 165 in June of that year on the Billboard 200. Smoke & Fiction’s first-week sales were aided by the set’s availability across five vinyl variants, which collectively sold a little over 4,000 copies (enabling its debut at No. 6 on the Vinyl Albums chart).
Foo Fighters closed a two-date stand at Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium on Sunday night with a nearly three-hour set that would have threatened to blow the roof off the venue if it had one. From the high-octane opener “The Teacher” (which is typically part of the encore) to standard closer “Everlong,” Dave Grohl and bandmates […]
Perry Farrell is reclining with a vitamin IV inserted into his left arm, talking about the reunion of Jane’s Addiction, a band that redefined rock music the ‘80s and ‘90s, and offering a stream-of-thought commentary about his music and the state of the world.
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“I don’t want to talk badly about anybody, but I shouldn’t want to let people get away with murder and destroy this planet,” Farrell tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast when asked about his mindset regarding the intersection of music and commerce. “This planet is too precious to me, and my way of of combating that is to sing [and] to wisen myself. And then I try to get through [using] art and music. And then I build the party and I invite the best people I could invite. And they invite their friends, and they want to show up. And then the next thing you know, you’re standing next to people you’d never be standing next to, you know, and they’re all getting off, and they’re doing their thing, and they feel safe and they feel welcome.”
Jane’s Addiction has been through breakups, arguments and a rotating cast of visiting and semi-permanent members since their 1990 LP Ritual de lo Habitual. This time around, though, Farrell has gathered his original bandmates — guitarist Dave Navarro, bass player Eric Avery and drummer Stephen Perkins — for the first time since 2010.
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The foursome toured Europe from May to July and released a blistering new track, “Imminent Redemption,” on July 24 that harkens back to the group’s first two studio albums, 1988’s Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual. “It was wonderful to have us all together again,” Farrell admits.
Next comes a co-headlining tour with Love and Rockets that started on Aug. 9 and runs through Sept. 26. “The tour is centered around the the idea of redemption,” says Farrell. “And the era that we’re living in, the era of redemption, it’s going to be a bumpy road. But then there should be peace for 1,000 years. I’ve studied mysticism for a good 30 years. I’m looking forward to the future of the world.”
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With the original members reunited, Farrell says the concerts are featuring only songs they recorded together: the initial three albums — including the 1987, self-titled live album — and “Imminent Redemption.” That means nothing from 2003’s Strays, which features the band’s highest charting single, “Just Because,” nor 2011’s The Great Escape Artist. Strays featured bass player Chris Chaney in place of Avery. Chaney and Dave Sitek from the band TV on the Radio played bass on The Great Escape Artist.
“I wanted everybody to feel comfortable,” Farrell says about the decision not to play songs from other incarnations of Jane’s Addiction. “And I think that was the a good decision. In that regard, I like it. There are other songs that we could do with the original members. That I would like to see before everything is … I don’t want to say busted apart, but I don’t know the next time we’ll be touring again.”
The road to redemption hasn’t been without its bumps, though. Last year, Farrell told a journalist the band planned on entering the studio and recording a new album after a tour in Australia. One of those tracks was “True Love,” a song the band debuted on tour in 2023. But while “Imminent Redemption” reached the public, no album materialized.
“I’m sad to say we got those two songs out, and I thought we were going in a great direction, and all of a sudden, you know, arguing started happening again,” Farrell says with disappointment. “But we’ll still go forward,” he adds. “I’m not going to give up. Not giving up on this. I have to put my money where my mouth is. If I want to talk about freedom and redemption, I’ve gotta live it—and I’ve gotta be truthful too, about it. So, hang in there and pray, really pray for us. I’m praying for the world to to come together.”
Listen to the entire interview with Perry Farrell at the embedded Spotify player, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music or Everand.
An exhibition at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture has sparked a heated conversation about the real-life use of the slang term “un-alived,” which was spotted on a MoPOP placard that says Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain “un-alived himself at 27.”
Cobain died by suicide at age 27, on April 8, 1994. The Seattle museum shared this fact on an information card about the “27 Club” (a grouping of artists who all tragically passed away at the young age of 27), patrons have reported.
But in place of “died by suicide,” MoPOP printed the internet slang “un-alived.” The Museum of Popular Culture additionally put up a placard about the social context of the term’s usage in the digital age, also noting that “the Guest Curator has chosen to utilize the term as a gesture of respect towards those who have tragically lost their lives due to mental health struggles.”
On Saturday (Aug. 10), Stereogum pointed out many on social media were likening saying the word “un-alived” in real-life discussions regarding mental health — rather than using it only to circumvent censorship from algorithms on internet platforms like TikTok — to the dystopian world of George Orwell’s 1984, despite the museum’s explanation.
Orwell wrote of “Newspeak,” a simplified, government-directed language intended to limit critical thinking, in the novel. One element of the fictional Newspeak grammar included tagging the simple prefix “un” onto words, instead of developing an expanded vocabulary.
“this is what george orwell was warning us about with 1984,” read one comment on X (formerly Twitter) posted Friday about the museum exhibit material using the word “un-alived.”
“That moment when it wasn’t the government but youtube and social media which caused newspeak from 1984 to become a real thing lmfao,” another person on X added. “And people still say that ‘these are private companies, they don’t have to allow speech they don’t want!’ Yes they do, they are the town square now.”
Meanwhile, another user on the platform offered a different perspective: “It’s MOPop who cares. Their exhibits talk in internet lingo all the time because it’s about pop culture. It’s basically a glorified collection showcase. Twitter people saw the word ‘museum’ and lost their s—.”
Meanwhile, someone else quipped, “This will help them [the museum] go viral on tiktok.”
By Sunday evening, the conversation thread had a new reply with an updated photo — one that showed the wording on the placard has apparently been changed, with “un-alived” being edited to “died by suicide.”
There’s a placard next to it that talks about the social context of “unalive” in how people talk about mental health but this is still stupid pic.twitter.com/iKA30ECUW7— ブランドン (@burandon_sama) August 9, 2024