Rock
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“Embarrassment,” offers Trent Reznor when asked for his take on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.
The Nine Inch Nails frontman and Oscar-winning composer (with longtime partner Atticus Ross) has a sizable 1.6 million following, even if he doesn’t tweet all that much. Nonetheless, he’s ready to say goodbye for good.
“I’m about to depart. We don’t need the arrogance of the billionaire class to feel like they can just come in and solve everything. Even without him involved, I just find that it has become such a toxic environment. For my mental health, I need to tune out. I don’t feel good being there anymore.”
He’s not alone in weighing his future on the platform. Stars who have logged off for good in the days since Musk’s Oct. 28 acquisition of the company include Alex Winter, David Dastmalchian, Laura Benanti, Gigi Hadid and Whoopi Goldberg, while others have signaled their intentions to stop using Twitter though their accounts have not yet been deleted. Those include Ariana DeBose, Brian Koppelman, Toni Braxton, Ken Olin and others.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Reznor and Ross during a joint interview on the red carpet outside TCL Chinese Theater where there was plenty to talk about aside from social media platforms. Specifically, the pair was keen to discuss their collaborations with Bones and All director Luca Guadagnino before heading in to catch the AFI Fest premiere.
Apparently, the gig working with the Italian auteur went so well that they are already months-in on a second collaboration on his tennis film Challengers starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.
“It couldn’t have been better,” Reznor said of working on the cannibal love story. “We went from not knowing him going into this to meeting a genuine, authentic, respectful collaborator who has become a friend. We were able to work on material that, in every iteration, we were amazed by how it blossomed into something beyond our expectation. I know that sounds ridiculous, you can say, but it really was a magical experience.”
Later, during the post-screening Q&A moderated by Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang, Reznor revealed that he and Ross started working on the music long before Guadagnino picked up any cameras. And it was the filmmaker who suggested an acoustic guitar as the anchor for a “simple, melodic component” that plays throughout the film.
“That started us on our process of approaching this as a love story,” he continued, referring to the flesh-eating couple at the center of the story, played by Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell. Months later, Guadagnino sent a rough cut of the film, four and a half hours in length.
“We sat bound watching that,” Reznor recalled. “To see these characters come to life with such skill and humanity and frailty, it really was a crazy experience. It really was one of those things. We’ll always remember how, wow, the genius, the choice of shots, the art direction. … It really struck us in a way.”
Bones and All opens in theaters on Nov. 18.
This story first appeared in the Nov. 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Landon Barker opened up about his relationship with Travis Barker in a new interview on Friday (Nov. 18).
“He’s always in my corner,” the 19-year-old told E! News. “He’s always there for me as I am for him.” That support naturally extending to the younger Barker’s budding rock music career, with his famous dad making a surprise appearance during his show at The Roxy in L.A. last month to perform a yet-to-be-released collaboration together.
Landon also commented on what it’s like seeing his dad reunite with his Blink-182 bandmates for their upcoming reunion tour and new musical era, saying, “I guess the best way to say it is he’s making s–t happen and doing things that he genuinely enjoys. If that’s putting Blink back together, if that’s being in the studio, whatever it is, I feel like he’s prioritizing what he wants and people are impressed by it and people enjoy it. I feel like he’s really just doing what makes him happy.”
Most recently, the famed drummer has been spending time in the studio with The Veronicas as the Australian sibling duo charts a new course under John Feldmann’s label Big Noise. Earlier this week, he rang in his 47th birthday with sweet well wishes from wife Kourtney Kardashian, her sisters Kim and Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner and more.
Barker and the other two-thirds of Blink-182 are slated to kick off their hotly anticipated world tour next March with stops in North America, South America, Mexico, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The international trek will also include headlining slots at 2023 Lollapaloozas in Chile, Argentina and Brazil as well as next year’s iteration of When We Were Young.
One day after the estate of Isaac Hayes threatened legal action against twice-impeached one-term president Donald Trump for unauthorized use of a song, one of the former reality TV star’s most vocal supporters got a similar do not play request.
“The Tom Petty estate and our partners were shocked to find out that Tom’s song ‘I Won’t Back Down’ was stolen and used without permission or a license to promote Kari Lake’s failed campaign,” the estate of the late rock icon tweeted on Thursday night (Nov. 17) after Lake released a campaign video cued to the beloved 1989 single.
Lake, one of a raft of prominent Trump-endorsed election deniers who failed in their bids in the midterm elections, dropped the ad on Wednesday. The two-minute spot features a montage of Lake posing with Trump, wielding a rifle while hunting, smashing TVs playing CNN and speaking to Arizonans with no voice-over or sound beyond Petty’s track.
“This is illegal,” Petty’s camp continued. “We are exploring all of our legal options to stop this unauthorized use and to prohibit future misappropriations of Tom’s beloved anthem. Thank you to all of the fans who brought this to our attention and who help us protect his legacy every day.”
Former local Fox news anchor Lake lost her bid for the Arizona governorship to democrat Katie Hobbs, but in keeping with her election denialism stance has so far refused to concede the race while offering up baseless, unproven allegations of voter fraud. Petty’s estate had a similar reaction when then-president Trump used “Won’t Back Down” at a June 2020 campaign rally.
Over the five years of his campaigns and presidency, artists ranging from Adele to Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, R.E.M., Aerosmith, Panic! at the Disco, Guns N’ Roses, The Rolling Stones, Rihanna and the estates of Leonard Cohen, Petty and Prince vociferously objected to Trump playing their music at his rallies. At press time a spokesperson for Lake could not be reached for comment on the Petty estate’s tweet.
Hayes’ estate said it was exploring all legal options after Trump played Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Coming” — co-written by Hayes — at his Tuesday campaign event, in which the legally embattled real estate developer announced his third bid for the White House.
See the Petty estate’s statement below.
The Tom Petty estate and our partners were shocked to find out that Tom’s song “I Won’t Back Down” was stolen and used without permission or a license to promote Kari Lake’s failed campaign. pic.twitter.com/DoT71whO43— Tom Petty (@tompetty) November 18, 2022
Bad Omens ride TikTok virality to their first No. 1 on a multi-metric Billboard songs chart, jumping to the top of the Hot Hard Rock Songs list dated Nov. 19 with “Just Pretend.”
In the Nov. 4-10 tracking week, the song earned 2.8 million official U.S. streams, up 26%, according to Luminate. It also garnered 538,000 audience impressions on radio and sold 1,000 downloads.
Bad Omens’ first Hot Hard Rock Songs No. 1 follows the band’s “Like a Villain,” which hit No. 17 in March. The other song that the band has placed on the chart, “The Death of Peace of Mind,” re-enters the latest tally at No. 19, a new high (689,000 streams).
“Just Pretend” also appears at Nos. 22, a new best, and 32 on Hot Rock Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs, respectively. The TikTok trend for the song largely finds users lip syncing the lyrics, particularly a portion directly before and during the chorus, with some videos also addressing mental health.
The track concurrently rules Hard Rock Digital Song Sales for a third week (after debuting on the Oct. 22 survey) and leaps 24-11 in its second week on Hard Rock Streaming Songs. The song — the band’s current radio single — climbs 22-17 on Mainstream Rock Airplay and it marks Bad Omens’ third top 20 hit, following the aforementioned “Villain” (No. 10, June) and “Limits” (No. 19, 2020).
“Just Pretend” is the second single from the album The Death of Peace of Mind, which zooms 25-13 on Top Hard Rock Albums with 5,000 equivalent album units earned, up 20%. The set premiered at its No. 11 peak in March with 6,000 units and has earned 93,000 units to date.
If things had gone to plan, Anthrax would be back home by now basking in the glow of their first major European tour since 2019. But instead the group were forced to cancel 20 dates on their 40th anniversary Euro jaunt, instead playing just 8 gigs in the UK before packing things up.
“When I saw the numbers, they were literally triple what they originally started at,” bassist Frank Bello told TotalRock‘s Neil Jones about the scotched shows. “We would be coming home at such a loss. You don’t mind a little bit of a loss just to play to the fans, but such a loss — we would have been really bad off for a while. So it didn’t make sense.”
When Jones asked if it was a “Brexit thing” that forced the cancellations, Bello said, “it’s a human thing at this point, my God. I mean, it’s a budgetary thing.” Bello explained that the group were excited to play for their “great big” overseas fanbase, but once they did the budget before the shows went on sale things were totally upended by the global pandemic. “After COVID, when everything went crazy, money-wise, financially it wasn’t feasible to do it anymore,” he said.
“When [we] looked at it, we said, ‘All right. There’s better times ahead.’ And that’s the way to look at it now. Look, heating costs and everybody’s gotta put food on the table. I get it right now. So it’s just a really hard time for everybody.”
Bello said he can’t wait to return to Europe “the next time around,” but at this point no new dates have been announced for the run that was slated to run from Oct. 11-Nov. 5. Anthrax played a run of UK dates from Sept. 27-Oct. 8 after announcing on Aug. 31 that, “sadly due to ongoing logistical issues and 2022 costs that are out of our control, we have no other option but to cancel the European leg of our upcoming 2022 tour.”
Anthrax are a month a raft of acts who’ve opened up about the financial and logistical hardships of touring right now. Recently Lorde said things are “at an almost unprecedented level of difficulty” out there on the road, while earlier this year a number of smaller and medium-sized acts told Billboard that “out of control” gas prices were seriously eating into profit margins.
Watch Bello’s interview below.
The Walkmen are reuniting for their first shows in nearly a decade. The beloved New York band whose initial 13-year run ended in 2013 will play a pair of hometown shows at New York’s Webster Hall on April 26 and 27.
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“Back in 2013, an unnamed Walkmen band member (bassist Peter Bauer) announced to the Washington Post that we were going on an ‘extreme hiatus.’ I assumed that meant there would be a lot of monster energy drinks and maybe that red-headed snowboarder guy would be hanging around a lot,” wrote singer Hamilton Leithauser in a statement announcing the get-back by the band that also features drummer Matt Barrick, guitarist Paul Maroon and multi-instrumentalist Walter Martin.
“But none of that actually happened,” he continued. “Instead, in the ensuing years we’ve all worked on a ton of different projects in a ton of different places. Recently, someone sent us a clip of us playing at Irving Plaza from 2003, and it just looked very exciting. So, we’ve decided we’d like to play together again.”
The official presale for the is open now through 10 p.m. ET on Thursday (Nov. 17); click here to register. The general on-sale will begin on Friday (Nov. 18) at 11 a.m. ET.
The garage rock-inspired band — whose members grew up in the Washington, D.C. area — formed in 2000 after the break-up of the groups Jonathan Fire*Eater and The Recoys. They released their full-length debut, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, in 2002, followed by Bows + Arrows (2004), A Hundred Miles Off (2006), a 2006 covers collection, You & Me (2008) and Lisbon (2010) before dropping their final full-length, Heaven, in 2012.
Check out a trailer for the Webster Hall shows below.
Neil Young got candid about why he asked that his music be removed from Spotify earlier this year on a Wednesday morning (Nov. 16) interview with SiriusXm’s Howard Stern. The rock icon who has staked his reputation on doing things his way explained to Stern that his objection to being on the streamer was two-fold: the famously exacting guitarist/singer thinks Spotify audio quality is not up to his standard, and he was angered by the COVID conspiracy theories spouted by Spotify’s allegedly $100 million podcast star Joe Rogan.
“I woke up one morning and I heard somebody saying there was some scientists saying something about COVID, or some doctors and they were saying something about COVID and how many people were dying in hospitals and misinformation,” Young said, adding that he immediately thought about the nurses and medical professionals who were “distressed” by what they’d heard on Spotify; Young never specifically mentioned Rogan by name in his comments.
“And I listened to it and they were saying he purposely is saying this stuff that he knows isn’t true about COVID and people were dying,” he said of the misinformation on Rogan’s show about medically dubious COVID therapies. “I just called up my management and said, ‘We’re out of there. Get me off.’ And we’ll be fine, and it was a little shocking because they know all the [streaming] numbers. Who cares? You know, who cares? What’s his name? [Spotify CEO] Daniel Ek? He cares about money.”
Young said he knew Ek initially had good intentions with his service, because they’d met and he [Ek] seemed to be “coming from a good place. But then it just turned into money, money, money, money,” he said. When Stern asked how much money Young left on the table by yanking his tunes from Spotify, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer said he didn’t know and didn’t care.
“I knew I was gonna do fine. There’s Amazon, there’s Apple, there QoBuz, those are three streaming services that play hi-res,” said Young, who has long fought against what he considers the low-quality fidelity of everything from CDs to digital files. “I think in the digital age we should be able to listen to great stuff, the best that we can get out of digital… Because you’re living off the music, why not pay it some respect and make it sound as great as it does.”
Young said he wasn’t surprised that more artists didn’t join his crusade against Spotify. After Young requested that his catalog be removed from Spotify in January — citing the spread of vaccine misinformation on the Joe Rogan Experience — he wasn’t entirely alone. A handful of artists including India.Arie, Nils Lofgren, Failure, his former CSNY bandmates Graham Nash, David Crosby and Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell eventually joined his leave-taking.
“The way I look at it, that just turned me off and I made an instant decision — I didn’t think about it at all — just take my music off, we don’t need it. We’ve got all these other places,” Young said of his request. “And it sounds better at the other places. Why would I want to keep it on Spotify when it sounds like a pixilated movie?”
When it came down to it, Young said, he made it very clear: you can have “that guy” or you can have me. “So they chose to have that guy because they’re making millions of dollars off of him and they’ve just given him a whole bunch of money and that I would just eventually roll over and be back,” he said of what he suspected the streamers’ fiscal calculus was. At press time Young’s music was not available on Spotify and he told Stern he’s “never going back there, or anywhere else like it. I don’t have to, I don’t want to. I don’t crave the airplay like that. I don’t really need it, I don’t want it.”
A spokesperson for Spotify had not returned a request for comment at press time.
Megan Fox could not be more psyched for her fiancé Machine Gun Kelly. The actress gushed on Tuesday (Nov. 15) about MGK’s Grammy nomination for best rock album for his Mainstream Sellout album, writing in her Instagram Story, “WOW congratulations to my Grammy-nominated fiancé and hottest Edward Scissorhands cosplayer.”
Over a picture of the smiling rapper/rocker sporting a bunch of barrettes in his bleach blonde hair, she added, “You work harder than anyone I’ve ever known and are twice as talented. You deserve this.”
Kelly celebrated the moment on Instagram, writing, “Call me what you want as long as it starts with ‘grammy nominated’… I LOVE YOU,” he wrote along with a metal salute emoji. In a series of photos, MGK also posted the actual envelope with the rock album nominees, with his nom circled in red alongside albums by the Black Keys, Elvis Costello & the Imposters, Idles, Ozzy Osbourne and Spoon. The slides show also featured a short video of the moment the nomination was announced, in which Colson — holding hands with Fox — absolutely loses his mind and runs screaming across the room.
In another video, he called longtime collaborator Travis Barker and eagerly delivered the news: “Wake up birthday man, we’re nominated for a mother f–king Grammy!”
Some of his Baker’s pals commented on the good news as well, including Avril Lavigne, who wrote, “F–k yeah,” with another friend producer Blackbear adding, “WTF im on a grammy nominated album !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CONGRATSSSSSSS.” The 2023 Grammy Awards will take place on Feb. 5 at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena.
Check out MGK’s post below.
The Boss is back, again.
For the second consecutive night, Bruce Springsteen stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, this time to perform a cover of “Turn Back the Hands of Time.”
The song, originally recorded in 1970 by Tyrone Davis, and co-written by Jack Daniels and Bonnie Thompson, appears on Springsteen’s latest offering, Only the Strong Survive.
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Earlier, on Monday night (Nov. 14), the rock ‘n’ roll legend dished-up album track “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do),” and stuck around for a chat with Fallon on those pesky Taylor Swift tour rumors, misheard lyrics in “Thunder Road” and more.
Springsteen’s 21st studio album is a collection of 15 soul covers, including songs made famous by Jerry Butler, Dobie Gray, The Commodores, Diana Ross & the Supremes, The Four Tops, The Walker Brothers and others.
Based on midweek sales and streaming data, Only the Strong Survive is on track for a No. 2 debut on the U.K. chart. The Rock And Roll Hall of Famer currently has 22 U.K. top 10 albums, including 12 No. 1s — equal third-best among solo acts, after Robbie Williams (14) and Elvis Presley (13), respectively.
“I had so much fun recording this music,” he previously explained. “I fell back in love with all these great songs and great writers and great singers. All of them still underrated in my opinion. And through the project I rediscovered the power of my own voice.”
Survive is the followup to Western Stars (from 2019), and Letter to You (2020), both of which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Watch Springsteen’s latest late-night TV performance below.
Morrissey issued a statement on Monday (Nov. 14) informing fans that the release of his upcoming album is being pushed back.
“Bonfire of Teenagers is no longer scheduled for a February release, as stated by this site,” the singer shared in a note titled “Bonfire Unlit” on his official website. “Its fate is exclusively in the hands of Capitol Records (Los Angeles.).” Billboard reached out to Capitol for comment.
The long-gestating album is meant to serve as a follow-up to 2020’s I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. It was reportedly completed in mid-2021 and features production by Andrew Watt and musical assists from the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ drummer Chad Smith, bassist Flea and former RHCP guitarist Josh Klinghoffer. Miley Cyrus and Iggy Pop also guest.
Morrissey has already debuted numerous tracks from the yet-to-be-released studio set live at various tour stops this year, including “Rebels Without Applause,” “Sure Enough, the Telephone Rings,” “Kerouac’s Crack,” “I Am Veronica,” “I Live in Oblivion” and “Saint in a Stained Glass Window.”
Speaking of touring, the British alt-rocker’s latest stop at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles ended abruptly when, according to fans on Twitter, he played a few songs before wrapping things up on account of the unseasonably cold weather. (“So, #Morrissey just walked off the stage at @Greek_Theatre after 30 min. Apparently he was too cold. Meanwhile, it’s in the 50s,” one fan tweeted.)
In 2021, Morrissey’s manager took issue with his portrayal on an episode of The Simpsons, which he deemed “harshly hateful.” The animated series, however, doubled down by releasing a parody single titled “Everyone Is Horrid Except Me (And Possibly You).”