Rock
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John Mayer is speaking out about one of his much talked-about songs. At a recent concert, the 45-year-old singer-guitarist conceded that his 2013 track “Paper Doll” — widely believed to have been written about Taylor Swift — may have come from a slightly angry place.
“I wonder if people don’t like it because it sounds a little pissed off,” he told his crowd at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, Calif., while nonchalantly strumming on his guitar during the stop on his Solo acoustic tour. “I don’t really like ‘pissed off’ as a song. I think it was more [about] hurt.”
“Is there something about it that’s a little b-tchy?” he continued. “There might be. I try not to give b-tchiness in the songs, it happens sometimes. I guess I don’t do it very well — sarcastic b-tch — but I didn’t really see it. I guess it is sort of a little bit like, ‘Meehhh.’”
Since its release, the public has generally believed that “Paper Doll” was written about the pop superstar. Swift and the “Your Body is Wonderland” singer dated briefly in 2009 when she was 19 years old, and afterward seemed to sing about the breakup in her Speak Now ballad “Dear John.”
“I’ll look back and regret how I ignored when they said ‘run as fast as you can,’” Swift sings on the track, which Mayer later called “cheap songwriting” in an interview.
So, when Mayer sang about someone who was “22 girls in one, and none of them know what they’re runnin’ from” on “Paper Doll,” fans thought he was shading Swift. And now that she and Joe Alwyn have reportedly split after six years, some Swifties think the timing of Mayer’s performance of the song might have been a little pointed.
“You know who the real enemy here is? John Mayer….Guy literally played Paper Doll on the day of the breakup rumours,” tweeted one Swiftie, while another wrote that his song choice was “filling me with rage.”
The “New Light” singer did, however, say in a 2019 Instagram Live that “Paper Doll” actually wasn’t about the person that “100% of people” believed to be the song’s inspiration. “The person they thought it was about brought a certain amount of superficial pop culture back-and-forth about it. But the song was not about that person, and I could never tell anybody that’s not true because then I would be breaking my rule that songwriters don’t say who their songs are about or not about.”
This isn’t the first time Mayer has turned heads by performing a song linked to Swift on his ongoing acoustic tour. In March, he performed “Half of My Heart,” a duet originally recorded with the 33-year-old singer-songwriter, for the first time in years that fans could recall.
Watch Mayer discuss “Paper Doll” in a fan-captured video below:
Paul Simon is preparing to follow-up 2018’s rarities collection In the Blue Light with a continuous seven-song musical suite entitled Seven Psalms. Intended to be listened to in its entirety, the 33-minute, seven-movement all-acoustic composition is slated for release on May 19.
According to a release, it is predominantly performed by Simon and it captures the legendary pop singer/songwriter’s “craft at its finest and most captivating, simply with his voice and guitar.”
In a preview trailer, Simon, 81, explains that in Jan. 2019 he had a dream that told him he was working on a piece called Seven Psalms. “The dream was so strong that I got up and I wrote it down, but I had no idea what that meant,” he says over gently picked acoustic guitars. “Gradually, information would come,” he adds, noting that he began waking up between 3:30 and 5 a.m. “and words would come. I’d write ’em down and start to put it together.”
The album is described as, “a stunning, intricately layered work” that establishes “an engaging and meditative, almost hymnal soundscape, with Paul’s lyrics providing the gravitational center for constellations of sound woven from guitar strings and other acoustic instrumentation.” In a nod to the origin of psalms — which the release notes were originally hymns meant to be sung rather than spoken — Seven Psalms represents a call-back to the genesis of folk music in King David’s Psalms.
Among the guests are the British vocal ensemble VOCES8 and Simon’s wife, singer Edie Brickell, who is seen in the video singing alongside the folk icon, holding hands as they harmonize. The album was produced by Simon and Kyle Crusham.
“People say, ‘why is it that you always want to change your sound?,’” Simon says of questions he gets about his restless musical heart. “I’m not thinking that way at all. I’m looking for the edge of what you can hear. I can just about hear it but I can’t quite. That’s the thing I want.”
See the Seven Psalms tracklist and watch the preview trailer below.
Seven Psalms track list:
1. “The Lord”
2. “Love Is Like A Braid”
3. “My Professional Opinion”
4. “Your Forgiveness”
5. “Trail of Volcanoes”
6. “The Sacred Harp”
7. “Wait”
You know Lizzo loves to rock. The “About Damn Time” singer proved it this summer when she covered German metal maniacs Rammstein‘s signature hit “Du Hast” while on tour in Berlin. And on Monday night (April 11) Nickelback reminded us that she once heaped praise on them on Canadian network CBC Music’s “Jam or Not Jam” segment in 2020 in an Instagram post in which they thanked her for the kind words.
“Thank you @lizzobeating for the kind words!,” they wrote alongside of a clip from the show. “Open invite any show any time… maybe see you in Houston this summer?”
The bit’s conceit revolves around the artist listening to a series of songs while wearing headphones and proclaiming the song a “jam” or “not jam.” When the strains of Nickelback’s 2001 Silver Side Up rock anthem “How You Remind Me” bubble up, Lizzo wastes no time singing along to Chad Kroeger’s grunting vocals, proclaiming, “it has a beautiful climax.”
“Why do people not like Nickelback? I feel like Nickelback gets way too much s–t,” she says, alluding to the frequent scorn heaped on the Canadian band. “I think that this is a jam.”
“Here we go, five, six, seven, eight,” the classically trained flutist counts off as the song builds to said climax and she begins banging her head, even as she admits she doesn’t know all the lyrics. “I like you… sorry,” she sings in her best strained Kroeger impression, fumbling the words, but praising the inescapable melody. “The beat drop-out, b—h?”
So, why does Lizzo think Nickelback get so much s–t? “Because he [Kroeger] had a curly blond perm,” she opines. “That’s the only reason they get s–t, because this is an amazing song.”
In the rest of the segment, she freaks out over the slam-dunk jam, Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” gets hyped to hear BTS for the first time on their “ocean jam” collab with Halsey, “Boy With Love” and has to give it up to the Canadian pop queen Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” if only for the “whimsical” pan flute opening.
Watch Lizzo rock out to Nickelback below (“How You Remind Me” bit begins at the :30 second mark).
Metallica are still thundering along, cranking it up and to 11 and inciting headbanging everywhere they go.
The Bay Area metal legends are currently locked in for a residency on Jimmy Kimmel Live, a celebration of their forthcoming 12th studio album, 72 Seasons.
On Tuesday (April 11), the second of their four-night stand, the Rock And Roll Hall of Famers went large with a classic, “Holier Than Thou,” lifted from their self-titled 1991 album, better known as The Black Album.
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It was The Black Album that launched these monsters of rock into superstar territory, and saw them tagged as the most popular heavy band of them all. Metallica was the first of the awesome foursome’s six leaders on the Billboard 200 chart, logging four weeks at the summit.
If you want your rock tight, meaty and your guitar solos shredded, “Holier Than Thou” is for you.
On opening night, James Hetfield and Co. sat for a chat with Kimmel and performed “Lux Æterna,” lifted from 72 Seasons, due out this Friday (April 14).
When the conversation moved to the now-iconic placement of “Master of Puppets” in a pivotal scene in season four of Netflix’s Stranger Things, Hetfield said it was a no-brainer, and that he’s still “blown away” that people are still turned on by the high-octane speed metal cut. “It’s like a nine-minute heavy metal song from 1986 that probably predates most of these people by 25 30 years,” drummer Lars Ulrich added. “It’s just insane. Who would have thought?”
Metallica will perform “Master of Puppets” on Wednesday (April 12), which Kimmel reckons is the longest song ever performed on the show.
Watch the late-night performance of “Holier Than Thou” below.
Sting‘s 2023 world tour is finally getting ready to touch down in North America. The Police singer announced on Tuesday (April 11) that he will be playing a series of dates across the United States and Canada starting in September.
The My Songs World Tour — which previously traveled to Asia, Africa and Australia earlier this year — will kick off in Toronto at the Budweiser Stage on Sept. 5, and will make stops in Boston, Phoenix, Vancouver, Los Angeles and more before concluding in Rogers, Ark., at the Walmart AMP on Oct. 12.
Members of Sting’s official fan club will be one of the first to score presale access to the tour starting on April 12 by visiting his website. Additional fan presale will roll out later through the week, with the tour’s general onsale starting on Friday, April 14, at 10 a.m. local time.
See the full list of North American concert dates for the My Songs tour below.
STING: MY SONGS 2023 NORTH AMERICA LEG 1 TOUR DATES
Sept. 5 – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage
Sept. 7 – Boston, Mass. – MGM Music Hall at Fenway
Sept. 20 – Morrison, Colo. – Red Rocks Amphitheatre
Sept. 23 – West Valley City, Utah – USANA Amphitheatre
Sept. 29 – Vancouver, BC – Rogers Arena
Oct. 2 – Concord, Calif. – Concord Pavilion
Oct. 4 – San Diego, Calif. – Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU
Oct. 7 – Los Angeles, Calif. – Hollywood Bowl
Oct. 9 – Phoenix, Ariz. – Arizona Financial Theatre
Oct. 12 – Rogers, Ark. – Walmart AMP
Metallica kicked off their week-long Jimmy Kimmel Live! residency in style on Monday night (April 10), joking that they were the world’s oldest boy band before tearing through their news ingle about eternal light. When Kimmel noted that some of the fans hanging around outside his studio were the same age that the late 50s/early 60s members were when they started, drummer Lars Ulrich asked the audience to keep their real ages a secret.
Part of the youth wave, Kimmel suggested, was the by-now-iconic placement of “Master of Puppets” in a pivotal scene in the most recent season of Netflix’s Stranger Things. “We wrote that song for Stranger Things in, what, 1980-something?,” singer/guitarist James Hetfield joked during their couch time. “We knew it was gonna happen!”
Hetfield said it was a no-brainer to allow the use of the song in the hit show, saying he’s still “blown away” that people are attracted to the relentless speed metal anthem. “It’s like a nine-minute heavy metal song from 1986 that probably predates most of these people by 25 30 years,” Ulrich said. “It’s just insane. Who would have thought?”
Considering bassist Robert Trujillo’s son played the solo on the show — with tutoring from lead guitarist Kirk Hammett — the guitarist suggested that it might not be too soon to consider tutoring some understudies to take their places at some point. And, because all their children are involved in music in some fashion, Kimmel wondered if they were happy that their offspring are in the family business.
“No, my son’s a drummer,” Hetfield said in a bid to poke Ulrich, who put his hand on James’ arm as he smiled at his pal’s gentle ribbing. “I’m not happy about that at all!” Hetfield doubled down. When Kimmel asked if they’d like it if their kids were in a band together, Ulrich said that might be “pushing it a little bit.” The band also discussed their “For Whom the Band Tolls” marching band competition, their new vinyl pressing plant and Ulrich’s obsession with coming up with different set lists for the two-night stands the band is doing on their upcoming tour.
“The challenge is to figure out how to structure the two sets, no songs can be played twice,” Lars explained. “So there’s a completely blank canvas so that’s always fun.” Tweaking his lifelong pal again, Hetfield said that “somebody sitting here is somewhat obsessed with setlists and putting things together… it’s gonna be okay buddy!”
The band then tore through the blazing first single from 72 Seasons, “Lux Æterna,” to cap off the first night of four-night stand. Metallica will be on Kimmel! through Thursday night (April 13) and will perform “Master of Puppets” on Wednesday, which Kimmel noted is the longest song ever performed on the show. Check out Metallica’s performance and couch chat below.
Dee Snider isn’t gonna take it anymore. The Twisted Sister singer says the time has come to stand up to those who would use his band’s most famous song to promote conspiracy theories.
“QAnon uses it all the time as their battle cry,” Snider tells Billboard about the long-running conspiracy theory that posits that the world is run by a shadowy group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles that allegedly includes prominent Democrat politicians and Hollywood celebrities.
“And people are like, ‘Dee, you support QAnon?’ No I do not so I need to speak out,” he adds as an explanation for why he recently agreed to a fan’s request to use his band’s 1984 Billboard Hot 100 No. 21 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as their anthem in the decadeslong fight to ban the type of military-style assault weapons frequently used in mass shootings in the U.S.
So, when it came to tying the song to intelligent gun control, Snider, a proud gun owner, said the answer was simple: “Yeah, I support this cause. It’s an important one.” In fact, when the request came in, Snider’s exact words in an enthusiastic tweet were, “I am a gun owner… That said, HELL YEAH YOU CAN USE ‘WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT’ AS YOUR ANTHEM! Assault weapons were never meant for anything but combat!”
Asked if he made the decision in the wake of the recent mass shooting at Nashville’s Covent School in which the assailant killed three 9-year-old children and three adults, Snider said, “it goes on and on. In the wake of the one before that and the one before that. It’s just insane, it’s ridiculous and it’s something we just talk about forever.”
As Snider suggested, following the nation’s 132nd mass shooting so far this year — there was yet another one on Monday (April 10) in Louisville in which four people were killed and eight injured — gun rights advocates are afraid “to give an inch because people will take a mile. We’ve seen that with so many things before, but sometimes you have to say enough is enough.”
Snider — who was revealed last week as Doll on The Masked Singer — said that when he wrote “We’re Not Gonna Take It” he purposely left the meaning open to interpretation, even as he confirms that the underlying message is one about “everybody’s freedom and rights.” But, as he’s been vocal about in the past, he sometimes “disagrees strongly” with some of the people who’ve co-opted it and made it seem like he supports their cause.
Case in point, after initially giving his Celebrity Apprentice boss and friend Donald Trump permission to use his band’s signature rebel anthem on the campaign trail during the recently indicted one-term president’s first White House bid in 2016, Snider later asked The Donald to stop playing it at his rallies.
At the time he said, “It wasn’t an endorsement. We all have friends who have different views politically but you can go on vacation with them… But I had to ask him to stop using the song. I said, ‘I didn’t realize some of the things you were going to represent — the wall, banning Muslims. I can’t get behind some of these things,’ and he said ‘OK’ and stopped using it and that was it.”
Check out Snider’s tweets below.
I am a gun owner.. That said, HELL YEAH YOU CAN USE “WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT AS YOUR ANTHEM!Assault weapons were never meant for anything but combat! https://t.co/WdqvrWCbHW— Dee Snider🇺🇸🎤 (@deesnider) March 28, 2023
The Who may have played their last-ever U.S. dates. The veteran Rock and Roll Hall of Famers who’ve been taking their closing curtain calls since their “final” show in 1982 may actually be done playing shows in the U.S. according to singer Roger Daltrey.
While the band has some more Who Hits Back shows boked in Europe this summer, Daltrey, 79, told USA Today that another hop across the ocean might be out of the question. “Nothing at the moment. I don’t know if we’ll ever come back to tour America,” said Daltrey. “There is only one tour we could do, an orchestrated Quadrophenia to round out the catalog. But that’s one tall order to sing that piece of music, as I’ll be 80 next year. I never say never, but at the moment it’s very doubtful.”
As far as what might finally slow the band down, Daltrey said the chaos of the post-pandemic touring economy is a huge reason. “Touring has become very difficult since COVID. We cannot get insured and most of the big bands doing arena shows, by the time they do their first show and rehearsals and get the staging and crew together, all the buses and hotels, you’re upwards $600,000 to a million in the hole,” he said of the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns on touring.
“To earn that back, if you’re doing a 12-show run, you don’t start to earn it back until the seventh or eighth show,” Daltrey explained. “That’s just how the business works. The trouble now is if you get COVID after the first show, you’ve (lost) that money.”
The Who just released the live collection The Who with Orchestra: Live at Wembley, a 20-song chronicle of their 2019 show at the iconic stadium, which marked their first headlining slot there in 40 years. And while Daltrey said the band was in perhaps its finest form ever at the moment, some of their signature bits don’t have quite the same pop as they did a half century ago.
“Pete can’t quite jump 10 foot in the air anymore. He can do 3 foot, so he’s not bad! (Laughs),” he said of the band’s guitarist and only remaining original member. “I don’t swing the microphone hardly at all now because it doesn’t matter to the sound anymore. Before, when all of those things used to work, it was a circus act. We’re more than that now. I’m proud that our music has come of age and I think you could say this is the most modern classical music out there.”
The Who will hit the road again on June 14 with a gig in Barcelona, Spain and on a Euro run that is currently slated to run through an August 28 show in Sandringham, England at the Royal Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.
Timothée Chalamet will sing in the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold.
During an interview with Collider at London’s Star Wars Celebration published on Friday (April 7), Mangold was asked whether the star who’s playing Dylan would sing for the Searchlight Pictures film, instead of dubbing Dylan’s voice in. The director replied, “Of course!”
Mangold said he thinks the project, based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric and a script from Jay Cocks, will begin filming in “August of this year.”
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“It’s such an amazing time in American culture,” Mangold — who also directed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, hitting theaters in June — said when asked what drew him to the Dylan film. “The story of a young, 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with like two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years — first being embraced into the family of folk music in New York and then, of course, kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief. It’s such an interesting true story and about such an interesting moment in the American scene.”
He added that Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez “all have a role to play in this movie,” though the actors cast for these roles have not yet been announced.
Watch the interview clip below.
Don’t let her last name deceive you. Courtney Love definitely didn’t “love” Molly Shannon’s impression of her on Saturday Night Live, according to the comedian.
Shannon reminisced on The Tonight Show Thursday (April 6) about the time the rocker tracked her down within minutes of a sketch airing live on Saturday Night Live, during which the former cast member stumbled around onstage and chain-smoked cigarettes to portray the Hole frontwoman. “The real Courtney Love showed up live, and she was mad,” Shannon said.
“She was like, ‘Where’s Molly?’” the A Good Person star snarled, sharing that she was still dressed up like Love when the real deal stormed in. “She was going around the studio hunting me down, ready to maybe punch me or something. I was like, ‘I’m scared.’ Maybe not punching, but definitely looking for me.”
Luckily, the situation ended without either star getting under the other’s “Celebrity Skin.” “She smelled like witchy oils and she was tall, she was tough,” continued Shannon, who is returning to host SNL on April 8. “She gave me a cigarette and then we smoked together. I told her why it’s such a compliment, you know when somebody does an impression of you, that’s, like, cool. She was really nice, we bonded. I’m a big fan of hers. She’s Courtney Love.”
Shannon’s story comes just two days shy of the 29th anniversary of when the outspoken singer’s husband, Kurt Cobain, was found dead. Love married the Nirvana rocker in 1992, and the two share daughter Frances Bean.
Now 30 years old, Frances posted a moving tribute to her father on Instagram Stories on April 5, the anniversary of his death. “Life is like a wave crashing upon the shore & death is like the wave returning back to the ocean, back to its most natural state,’” she wrote. “I forget exactly where I heard this quote but hearing it makes loss seem less scary and more like a return to the collective consciousness of loving awareness. Free from pain or human worry. Death serves a purpose. It is what makes life so precious, in the same way pain is purposeful because we wouldn’t know joy without it.”
Watch Molly Shannon recall the time Courtney Love confronted her above, and the comedian as the rocker on SNL below.