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When Faye Webster is back home in Atlanta, she likes to visit Oakland Cemetery. “I always go there when I’m home from a tour and just walk around by myself,” she says.
It’s not that the cemetery is the final resting place of any of her loved ones, or that Webster enjoys checking out the tombstones of Atlanta’s rich and famous, like musician Kenny Rogers or golfer Bobby Jones, who are both buried there. She just sees it as “a peaceful, safe space” to find silence amid her increasingly chaotic life.
Last year, Webster, 27, released her fifth album, Underdressed at the Symphony, and played 77 shows to support it — a lot by anyone’s measure, but a touring itinerary that was particularly challenging for Webster. Despite her fast-growing success, the soft-spoken homebody has never loved the spotlight. “Navigating it is tough, but I had a friend give me the advice to call someone I love after the show every day to remind myself of what’s real,” she says. “So I asked my mom, ‘Hey, can I call you at 10:10 every night?’ Now we always do it.”
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She has other ways of making the road feel like home — like the added comfort of having her older brother Jack as her guitar tech; her best friend, Noor Kahn, on bass; and her bandmates of many years by her side. (Her other elder brother, Luke, handles her merchandise and graphic design.) She also has a go-to warmup routine for shows. “I always get everyone together and we recite the battle of the bands prayer from School of Rock: ‘Let’s rock, let’s rock today!’ Then we go onstage,” she says.
Originally, Webster had asked to meet at the cemetery for this interview, but with heavy rain projected in the forecast, we decide to talk over matcha and baked goods at a nearby café instead. Between bites of a guava pastry, Webster says that when she gets the rare opportunity to be at home, she spends time with friends and family or tends to her many hobbies, which include — but are not limited to — yo-yo, tennis, Pokémon, the Atlanta Braves and Animal Crossing. And, she says with a laugh, “I have so many collections of so many different things. So many dumb things.” Her house is littered with it all. “I was collecting alarm clocks for a while, then I filled a full shelf and I was like, ‘OK, there’s no more space.’ I did my yo-yo shelf, too. I have tons of vinyl. Now I need something new to collect, so I’m buying CDs,” she explains. Her latest purchase? A copy of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s Raising Sand from Criminal Records in Atlanta.
“I remember the first time I heard her sing when I was a kid. I thought, ‘I didn’t know people could sing like this,’ ” Webster recalls of Krauss. “She has this very soft, angelic, pristine voice. When I first heard her sing I thought, ‘I want to be her.’ ”
Faye Webster
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Webster self-released her debut, Run and Tell, an earnest and straightforward Americana record, in 2013 when she was just 16. Back then, her voice was still developing and didn’t yet have the bell-like clarity and melancholic whine that she is beloved for now. Soon after, Webster’s path crossed with the Atlanta hip-hop scene when she started photographing and hanging out with the young rappers signed to tastemaking indie label Awful Records. Around this time, she also grew closer to another emerging local rapper, Lil Yachty — whom she ultimately collaborated with on Underdressed single “Lego Ring.” With Awful, “It started as just a friendship for months, and then it grew to me signing there,” says Webster, who was an oddball addition to the label as its first non-rap artist.
But for Webster, it didn’t feel strange at all — she was just putting out music with help from her friends. “I loved my experience with Awful. I think, to this day, what I learned there was about creating this sense of family and community. I still hold those values today,” she says.
After releasing 2017’s Faye Webster with Awful, she moved to indie powerhouse Secretly Group and its Secretly Canadian label. There, she steadily accumulated millions of fans as she released 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club, 2022’s I Know I’m Funny haha and Underdressed. (Secretly also now distributes her self-titled album.)
Her career hit hyper-speed about two years ago when she scored surprise TikTok hits with “I Know You” and “Kingston” — which were about 7 and 5 years old, respectively, when they took off. Those viral moments shifted her audience away from indie-loving Pitchfork dudes and toward a younger, more female crowd; her recent shows have been marked by throngs of adoring fangirls. Ironically, Webster isn’t even on TikTok — and she barely posts on social media in general.
“Faye is amazing — and somewhat of a contradiction as an artist,” says Secretly Group vp of A&R Jon Coombs, who, with his team, signed Webster to Secretly. “She bucks industry trends by not being online that much, but she still has great social media success. She’s someone who is so impossibly cool, yet she likes traditionally uncool things like yo-yoing and gaming. All of these things combined make her a really compelling and singular artist.”
To connect her whimsical hobbies to her much more serious music career, Webster introduced custom yo-yos as merch in collaboration with Brain Dead Studios, which is run by her friend and creative director Kyle Ng. (“Individuality and being her own character adds so much to her as a musician,” he says.) She also incorporated Bob Baker Marionettes into the Ng-directed “But Not Kiss” music video; founded an annual yo-yo invitational in Berkeley, Calif.; started an active Discord server with a dedicated channel to all things Minions; and has repeatedly covered the Animal Crossing theme at her gigs.
“I look out at shows now and see people dressed up like Minions and having fun and singing and I think, ‘This is so beautiful. This is why I do it,’ ” Webster says. “I really appreciate that my music can resonate with anybody. That’s all I’ve ever wanted — for somebody to feel they can relate to my work.”
Faye Webster
Christian Cody
Her hobbies also seep into her songs, like Underdressed’s “eBay Purchase History” or Funny’s “A Dream With a Baseball Player,” which is about her lasting crush on Atlanta Braves star Ronald Acuña Jr.
“She has this ability to pack a short story into a single line,” Coombs says of her lyricism. From “The day that I met you I started dreaming” (“Kingston”) to “You make me want to cry in a good way” (“In a Good Way”) and “Are you doing the same things? I doubt it” (“Underdressed at the Symphony”), Webster’s economical songwriting often repeats phrases on a loop, each refrain cutting to a deeper emotional core. Her expertly crafted productions — Wurlitzer keys, smooth Southern-rock guitar and plenty of pedal steel — seal the deal.
For Webster, “initial reactions” and “gut feelings” are the anchors of the songwriting and recording process. “To me, I’m just like, ‘Oh, that sounded good! Let me say it again…’ However the song plays out is sometimes just the way it’s supposed to happen,” she says.
As part of that instinctive approach, Webster has historically recorded songs soon after writing them. “I just like to do things in the moment,” she says. “When writing a song, I’ve often texted my friends, my band, and tried to get everyone together while it’s still fresh.” She typically self-records her vocals at home and the rest in nearby Athens. Most recently, however, she tried recording Underdressed at famed West Texas studio Sonic Ranch.
“That was our first experience going somewhere new,” she says. “My producer [Drew Vandenberg] was like, ‘What if we go somewhere else?’ And I was like, ‘OK, if it’s you and it’s me and it’s Pistol [pedal steel player Matt Stoessel] and all the band, it shouldn’t matter where we go.’ ”
Now, as she works on her next album, Webster is taking another leap of faith: signing her first major-label deal with Columbia Records, where she’ll join a roster that includes Beyoncé, Vampire Weekend and Tyler, The Creator (whose Camp Flog Gnaw festival she performed at last year). When asked why she signed there, she pauses, taking a sip of matcha as she thinks. “It comes back to that initial gut, that initial intuition,” she finally answers. “[Columbia] feels like where I belong right now and that’s where I’m supposed to exist.”
Faye Webster
Christian Cody
Perhaps it’s thanks to the flexibility her time on indie labels offered, or the support system it allowed her to build — but so far, Webster has deftly navigated the music business without sacrificing her personality, her community or her privacy, and she doesn’t see that changing under Columbia. “I think throughout this process [of signing the new deal], I’ve been very up front and honest. I was like, ‘Don’t be surprised if I say no to a lot of things.’ I think being honest and having an understanding of each other is really important in any relationship.”
“I know it’s a buzzword, but Faye is just so relentlessly authentic,” says her manager, Look Out Kid founder and partner Nick O’Byrne. “Over the years, I’ve seen she’s not interested in doing anything that feels unnatural to her, and from talking to fans, I know that they’re smart and they see that in her, too.”
When I ask Webster if this signing is an indication that she is more comfortable in the spotlight now, she quickly replies “no” with a laugh. “I think I’m just always going to be this way.”
This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.
As the 2025 Stanley Cup Final kicks off with Wednesday night’s (June 4) Game 1 showdown between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers, players and fans alike have no choice but to rock out to the NHL‘s brand-new promo starring and soundtracked by Linkin Park. The promo — which opened the TNT broadcast of […]
If you were a fan of Pavement in the 1990s then it probably won’t surprise you that when time came to make a biopic of the quintessential indie slacker rock band director Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) took a hard turn away from the typical hagiographic, soft-focus treatment.
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In fact, unless you were a fan of the “Cut Your Hair” band back then, chances are Perry’s film, Pavements, will mostly just confuse you. Hell, even the band members aren’t totally sure how it all works. “We were informed via email things we needed to know, but for most of the process we didn’t know what was going on, because we didn’t have to,” multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich tells Billboard about of the film in select theaters now and opening wide on Friday (June 6).
Addressing the project’s oddball format, which is part mockumentary, part documentary and includes footage from the fake Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, as well as a movie-within-a-movie via the fake biopic Range Life: A Pavement Story, Nastanovich says, “if we wanted to have known more we would have. Our general attitude was: ‘lets see what happens.’”
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Stranger Things star Joe Keery takes on the role of singer Stephen Malkmus (but also plays himself), while the band’s members play themselves alongside a passel of young actors who also take on their personas. In a three-way call from Cincinnati — where bassist Mark Ibold was born and spent many of his summers — and Kentucky — where former Louisville native Nastanovich was visiting a friend — the two men describe their feelings about the film and get pumped about a gig throwing out the first pitch at a Cincinnati Reds game on Wednesday (June 4).
Nastanovich, 57, says he was thrilled to meet “delightful” actor Fred Hechinger, adding as far as he’s concerned the 25-year-old White Lotus star is “spitting image of me and an extremely good-looking young man.” That said, after Ibold, 62, ran into Escape Room star Logan Miller, 33, at the restaurant where the bassist works, he went to visit the New York set of the film to see what was up. Describing entering a room where various actors were playing Pavement, Ibold says he thought, “‘whoa, this is really tripped out,’” even though he couldn’t tell who was playing whom.
“[Director] Alex explained the concept to me and he interviewed us before he started to get an idea of what he wanted to do, but even when you see the film it can be somewhat confusing what is real and what isn’t… the concept is pretty wild and he presented it to the band in a way that he said would be very different from other rock documentaries,” says Ibold of the movie’s unusual take in the wake of more straight-ahead recent biopics of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Bob Dylan. He describes going to the Taipei Film Festival last year and having to explain what was going on to the perplexed audience during a post-screening Q&A after they seemed confused by the entertainingly disjointed nature of Perry’s approach.
While Ibold jokes that his takeaway was that “we’re all more handsome than we really are,” Nastanovich says that he honestly saw some things he didn’t know about before, including shots of Malkmus’ original lyric drafts and real memorabilia sent in by band archivist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg, which appear in the movie’s fake museum.
In addition to the film, the band recorded their first new song in 25 years, a cover of Jim Pepper’s 1969 track “Witchitai-To,” which is on the sprawling, 41-track Pavements soundtrack. The song came together during rehearsals for one of the band’s 2022 reunion shows and it’s the first fresh recording from the group since their 1999 Major Leagues EP.
Speaking of the major leagues, Ibold is excited to be back in Cincinnati, where he was born and spent many summers attending Reds baseball games with his family during the team’s late 1970s heyday. “My brother almost got hit by a car while getting Pete Rose’s autograph a block from where I am,” he says of the late, disgraced Cincinnati legend and all-time MLB hits leader who recently saw his lifetime ban end earlier this year when he was posthumously reinstated and made eligible for the Hall of Fame.
In fact, when he takes the mound on Wednesday at Great American Ballpark, Ibold says he plans to wear a jersey with Rose’s No. 14 on it when he tosses to catcher Nastanovich, for whom he made a custom “Nast” jersey honoring late Reds first baseman Dan Driessen’s No. 22, despite Nastanovich being a lifelong fan of longtime Red rivals the Pittsburgh Pirates.
“We’re extremely excited about it,” says Nastanovich, who says the team reached out to the baseball-loving band to see who would be interested in the honor, a query he and Ibold immediately raised their hands for. He says he’s seen video of Ibold practicing and predicted that his bandmate’s arc is so “sweet” that he might not even need a glove at all.
The gig also comes naturally to Ibold because his great great uncle started the iconic Ibold Cigars company in Cincinnati in the late 1800s. “When we came in from the airport to go to my grandparent’s house we’d see all these Ibold ads on warehouse walls and old brick buildings,” he says of the stogie maker that used to occupy a 13,000-square-foot, five-story building downtown, where it pumped out more than one million cigars a month in the 1940s.
Heart is offering a reward for the safe return of two custom instruments that were stolen on the eve of the veteran band’s launch of their 2025 summer An Evening With Heart tour. “Members of the legendary rock band Heart were devastated to discover that two irreplaceable instruments were stolen from the venue, where gear […]
It is a mere 30 days until Oasis take the stage at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales to kick off their first tour in more than 16 years. The anticipation for the long-awaited reunion of formerly battling brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher has been slowly building as images of band members arriving for rehearsals have leaked out over the past week.
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And on Tuesday morning (June 3), singer Liam weighed in and gave a very positive assessment of how things are going. “We have LIFT OFF Rastas sounded f–king FILTHY,” he wrote on X. “I’ll tell thee that there for hardly anything.” When a fan asked if he was nervous to step to the mic, the singer brushed off the question, responding “Dont be ridiculous.”
When another commenter wondered “did you sound amazing?,” the cheeky vocalist said, “Cmon,” telling a different fan that rehearsing with the band again was “SPIRITUAL” and that rehearsals so far were “BIBLICAL.” Not one to get misty about much, Gallagher told an inquiring mind who wanted to know if it was “emotional playing with everyone” for the first time in 16 years, “no time to get emotional we have a lot of catching up to do.”
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By Wednesday morning (June 4), Gallagher was already seemingly getting a bit punchy, inexplicably posting “MOISTIFICATION for the NATION,” and replying to a question about his “greatest asset” with the blunt “My arse.” A follow-up query about how many songs the band rehearsed the day before got the answer “69.”
So far, the band is planning to spend most of July in the U.K. before jumping over to North America in August for shows in Toronto, Chicago, New Jersey, Pasadena and Mexico City, then hitting Asia and Australia in the fall and winding down with shows in Argentina, Chile and Brazil in November.
For now, there are no festival dates or non-headlining shows, but a persistent fan asked Liam if it’s possible that Oasis would make a triumphant return to the Knebworth Festival, where they played to more than 250,000 fans over two nights in 1996. “Let’s see how this tour goes if we still love each other after it,” Liam replied.
And while there is some trepidation that the internal strife that split the family band up in 2009 might rear its ugly head again, when a fan wondered if Tuesday’s rehearsal made it feel like the band had “never split up,” Gallagher affirmed, “Yeah like it never happened very spiritual.”
Some things never change, though. “How many hours do you rehearse every day,” one commenter wondered. “I do the set once then I scarper,” Liam said.
So far, longtime bassist Andy Bell has confirmed that he’s back in the band for the tour and a March report suggested that the Gallaghers could be joined by former guitarist Gem Archer, as well as Oasis co-founder and rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs and drummer Joey Waronker (Beck, R.E.M.). Liam rubbished the report, writing, “NME tell me who your source pots are that keep giving you info about OASIS and I’ll give you an exclusive interview about up n coming OASIS tour. You can have it all but how much do you want it.”
See Liam’s comment below.
We have LIFT OFF Rastas sounded fucking FILTHY I’ll tell thee that there for hardly anything LG x— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 3, 2025
MOISTIFICATION for the NATION— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) June 4, 2025
For parents and priests back in the ‘80s worried about subliminal, evil messages in heavy metal music, Cold Slither was their worst nightmare. Or at least the four-piece hard rock band would have been if they’d been flesh-and-blood instead of a cartoon band from the iconic animated series G.I. JOE: A Real American Hero. But at San Diego Comic-Con, Cold Slither – the villainous metal band whose music was laden with subliminal messages from terrorist organization Cobra – is coming to life for the first time.
On July 24 at San Diego’s Brick by Brick, Cold Slither will take the stage for a one-night-only show presented by Hasbro and Reigning Phoenix Music. The evil (but honestly kind of doltish) band of swamp mercenaries working for Cobra Commander will be brought to life by Gus Rios (vocals/bass, portraying Zartan), Ross Sewage (guitar, portraying Torch), Matt Harvey (guitar, portraying Ripper) and Andy Selway (drums, portraying Buzzer).
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The day after the concert, Friday, July 25, Cold Slither’s debut album will drop. It features the “Cold Slither” song that appeared in the Dec. 2, 1985, episode of the series that introduced the band, as well as nine additional tracks, including “Thunder Machine,” which debuts today. Pre-orders are available now.
Soldiers and mercenaries who swing by the Hasbro and Reigning Phoenix Music booths can pick up the “Zartan Chameleon Blue” and “Blood Moon Red” vinyl variants, respectively, both exclusive to San Diego Comic-Con. Fans can also pick up limited-edition action figures of the hard-rocking Dreadnoks at the event.
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“This isn’t just an album – it’s a sonic strike straight from Cobra Command!” the band says. “We’re back, louder, heavier and deadlier than ever. We can’t wait for G.I. JOE fans and metalheads to experience the raw power of our music, culminating in our live debut at San Diego Comic-Con. Prepare your ears for total domination… Let’s Rock and Cobra Roll!”
Check out the Cold Slither album tracklist below.
Cold Slither1. Welcome to the Swamp (Intro)2. Cold Slither3. Knock ‘Em Dread4. Thunder Machine 5. Zartan’s Revenge 6. Snakes on the Bayou7. Torched8. Under the Dreadnok’s Spell9. Master of Disguise10. The Ballad of Buzzer11. These Fluffies Are Fatal
Shane Hawkins set the record straight on which Foo Fighters song was his late dad Taylor Hawkins‘ favorite to play during a recent drum clinic at the Dead Famous cocktail bar in Newquay, England. “All right, this is another one of my dad’s that I like to play,” Hawkins, 18, told the crowd at the […]
The hunt is on for an iconic but missing artifact from Robert Zemeckis’ classic 1985 film Back to the Future.
Gibson Guitars and Universal Home Entertainment, in conjunction with filmmaker Doc Crotzer, have launched Lost to the Future, a search for the Gibson ES-345 Cherry Red guitar that Michael J. Fox, as Marty McFly, played in the beloved film. As fans well know, Fox picked up the guitar during the movie’s Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance, where he performed the Penguins’ “Earth Angel” and then shredded Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
The guitar, which was rented as a prop from Norm’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana, Calif., has been missing for several decades. Now Gibson and Crotzer (Road House, Shotgun Wedding, Glee) have begun a “true crime search” for the instrument, and the filmmaker is planning to make a documentary about the endeavor.
“Back to the Future made me want to make movies as a kid, and made me want to pick up a guitar,” Crotzer tells Billboard. “I’m a guitar player but I’m just a hobbyist; I went on with my (filmmaking) career, but I had always wondered what happened to that guitar. Over the last however many years so many props from the movie have surfaced…but (the guitar) had never surfaced.”
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Gibson’s director of brand experience Mark Agnesi, who previously worked at Norm’s Rare Guitars before joining Gibson, also cites the “Johnny B. Goode” scene as one of his inspirations to play. “I’ve been searching for this thing for 16 years now,” he says. “I started searching everywhere. Norm’s has this big warehouse of guitars and occasionally I’d go in and look for certain things, and every time I’m in there I was always looking around for (the Back to the Future guitar), but to no avail.”
They aren’t the only ones who were inspired by the scene, of course. When Fox joined Coldplay at last year’s Glastonbury Festival in England, frontman Chris Martin told the crowd that, “The main reason why we’re in a band is because of watching Back to the Future,” adding that Fox is “our hero forever and one of the most amazing people on Earth.” In a new video announcing the Lost to the Future project, John Mayer notes that the scene “was a big Rocky moment for a lot of kids,” while Jason Isbell explains “that’s the most iconic guitar from a movie. I don’t think anything else comes close…That was a huge deal for me. The world needs to see that guitar.”
Those with leads about the guitar’s whereabouts are asked to call 1-888-345-1955 or send a message via www.LostToTheFuture.com.
The trail for the guitar is indeed cold. It was apparently sold, then sold back to Norm’s and then presumably resold again. “Back then there was no digital record of that stuff; it was all hand-written receipts and stuff,” Gibson’s Agnesi says. “We know it was returned to Norm’s. At that time in the mid ‘80s there was a Japanese vintage guitar boom; charter buses of Japanese tourists were pulling up and buying everything in sight. So it could be someone has it in Japan. We don’t know. The possibilities of where it could be are endless.”
The guitar’s serial number is not known, but there is a unique tell that will allow it to be authenticated, according to Agnesi; the inlay on its 12th fret is solid, not split like the others on the neck, which was standard for the ES-345 at the time. “That anomaly is the smoking gun we’re looking for, thank God,” Agnesi says. “That will not be on any other guitar. Either someone custom-ordered it that way or it would be marked a factory second on the back of the head stock. That’s how we’ll know we’ve found the guitar we’re looking for.”
Filmmaker Crotzer adds that the tell is “the most amazing coincidence. I personally believe it’s like some higher power giving us the opportunity to find the thing.”
An irony is that while Back to the Future is set in 1955, the ES-345 was not yet in production in 1958, and not made in cherry red until the following year. “Norm has publicly said he knew that guitar was wrong for the era,” Agnesi notes, adding that in ’55 Berry was playing a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster. But the filmmakers, he says, wanted something slimmer and more streamlined. “They wanted that Chuck Berry 345 look even though it wasn’t the right guitar for the time period,” Agnesi says. “They were willing to take some small liberties and have fun in the movie with it. If not for that guitar, the scene might not have been as impactful.”
It also dovetails with the fact that “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t released until 1958 — adding to Marty McFly’s future prognostication that, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it.”
Charles Berry says that his father was not bothered by those historical inaccuracies, however. “Dad was fairly laid back when it came to stuff like that,” he says, adding that the family didn’t know about the “Johnny B. Goode” scene “until maybe a month or two before. It’s just like (the 1987 documentary) Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll; he said, ‘Oh yeah, by the way, they want to make this movie about me.’ (Back to the Future) was the same type of thing; he comes to the house and says, ‘Yeah, there’s this movie coming out, in one of the scenes this kid’s playing ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ ‘Really?!”
Seeing the film, the younger Berry — who owns some of his father’s old guitars and administrates the loan or donation of others to museums — says, “We got a kick out of it. It’s a very good movie, a nice wholesome movie. Michael J. Fox did a really cool job. It may not be exactly the right guitar, but we’ll take it.”
The scene famously ends with one of the band members, ostensibly Berry’s cousin Marvin, calling the rock n’ roll pioneer and holding the phone up to hear what’s being played on stage. “Besides, ‘What’s it like to be Chuck Berry’s son?,’ after ’85 the most-asked question I get is, ‘Does your dad really have a cousin Marvin?’” says Charles Berry with a laugh. “No, it was just in the movie.”
The video announcing the search also features Back to the Future co-screenwriter Bob Gale, co-stars Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd, and Huey Lewis, who had an uncredited bit part and, with his band the News, scored a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit with “The Power of Love” from the soundtrack. “Back to the Future, it keeps growing; it’s like a Wizard of Oz for a new generation,” says Lewis, adding that, “it’s fascinating (the guitar) has not turned up. It’s a very distinctive one. Whoever has this guitar must not have heard that they’re searching for it yet. Once the word is out, if you’ve got a 345, you’re going to look and see if that’s the one.”
The search is part of a number of Gibson initiatives related to the film and the guitar’s legacy in it. An episode of Gibson TV: The Collection that premieres in October features Fox talking about his own history of guitar playing and his collection of 40-some instruments. The same month, Gibson and Epiphone will release new custom models of the ES-345 as well as Back to the Future-themed apparel, and Gibson Gives will announce a partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
“I just wanted to be a rock n’ roll guitarist,” Fox says in The Collection. “That’s all I wanted to do. I became an actor instead of a guitarist…It’s always been a passion of mine, rock n’ roll — especially the guitar.” He adds that the ES-345 in the film “was such a good guitar. It’s like Excalibur…. Being 23 years old and that scene, I was having the f–king best time. But I didn’t realize the influence it had on people. It’s just expressing my love for the guitar and all the great players.”
Crotzer says all of that will be part of the Lost to the Future documentary. A happy ending is hoped for, but Crotzer is also out to tell the greater story surrounding it.
“We’ve realized (the story) is bigger than we thought,” he says. “The through-line is the true crime search for this guitar, but the emotional core of it is tracking how it inspired a generation of kids, whether they went on to become Chris Martin or went off to do completely other things. There’s a collective experience here that we really want to capture.”
Faster Pussycat singer Taime Downe has opened up for the first time about the tragic death of fiancée Kimberly Burch, 56, who was presumed dead in March after what officials believe was a fall from a cruise ship. Speaking to Eddie Trunk on his SiriusXM Faction talk show on Friday, Downe, 60, said the past few months have been a “roller coaster.”
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According to Blabbermouth, Downe talked about missing Burch and attempting to heal on the band’s current U.S. tour. “I’m hanging in there. I’m just taking it a day at a time. And everybody thought going out on the road and doing what I do and being with my family in my band would be good for me,” he said. “So I’ve taken their advice and [I’m] doing this. We’re going out with some cool bands,” he added of support from Vain, the Supersuckers, The Rumours and The Lonely Ones.
“I think it’ll be therapeutic, and [I’ll] get to see a bunch of fans and a bunch of friends across the country,” Downe said. “So I think it’ll be helpful… this is just heavy s–t, and I’m just looking forward to playing shows and having fun.”
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Asked if he’d rather not talk about Burch’s death, Downe said it’s fine to ask him and “it’s good to talk about it with my friends, my close-knit friends. But I don’t really wanna talk about it with strangers, ’cause it doesn’t seem appropriate. It is what it is.”
Reacting to concerns that Burch’s tragic death might impact his sobriety, Downe said there’s no chance he’d start drinking again after suffering such a tragic loss. “What happened with Kimberly too, it was alcohol and prescription related,” he said. “So I blame alcohol and pills on it. There’s no way I’d touch booze. For me, that’s just completely disgusting in my brain, you know what I mean? So I’ve got some hatred for booze, ’cause I loved the hell out of Kimberly, and it was just hard to deal with. We spent basically nine years together.”
According to reports, Burch died after going overboard on the Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas on the first night of the 80s Cruise, which, in addition to 1980s glam rock stalwarts Faster Pussycat, featured sets from Warrant, Dokken, Firehouse, Squeeze, Adam Ant, Tiffany and Men at Work. Officials launched a search operation, but Burch’s body was never found. A U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson said the ship was around 20 miles from Freeport, Bahamas when the incident took place.
Shortly after the incident, The Hollywood Reporter reported that security footage appeared to show Burch jumping overboard, with Nassau police clearing Downe of any wrongdoing.
For a minute in the 1990s, Failure seemed destined for world domination. But the L.A. alt-rock band whose excesses superseded their successes and led to a crash out after less than a decade together will be re-born (again) in the upcoming documentary, Every Time You Lose Your Mind. The first trailer for the film that will premiere on Hulu/Disney+ on June 27 features testimonials from avowed superfan Paramore singer Hayley Williams, as well as Tool’s Maynard James Keenan and late producer/engineer Steve Albini.
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“Like a falling satellite blazing across the musical landscape, Failure flamed-out in the late ‘90s – their promising rise derailed by drug addiction and record company inertia,” reads a description of the doc, which was directed by singer/guitarist Ken Andrews. “But the pioneering trio left a profound imprint that transcended their affiliation with the LA alt-rock scene. Every Time You Lose Your Mind documents the origins, downfall and rebirth of a band that’s beloved by their peers and multiple generations of fans.”
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The shoegaze-y band formed in 1990 in L.A. by Andrews, bassist/keyboardist Greg Edwards and drummer Robert Gauss (who was replaced in 1993 by Kellii Scott) released their Albini-helmed debut album, Comfort, in 1992 and embarked on what would be the first of a series of tours opening up for Tool. Determined to find the sound they were looking for, Andrews and Edwards took over as producers for the trio’s second LP, 1994’s Magnified, which, like its predecessor, earned praise from peers, but failed to move the needle on radio or at MTV.
Tool’s Keenan recalls in the trailer that much of the music in Los Angeles during that early 1990s era was “formulaic, and Failure seemed to cut right up through the middle. They were just kind of their own unique presence.” Garbage drummer and Nirvana producer Butch Vig adds that Failure embraced “that darkness [and] dissonance,” while Paramore’s Williams notes that she’d “never really heard anything like that… it changed how I thought about music and it kind of just made me more than ever want to be in a band.”
The trio’s original run ended with 1996’s beloved album Fantastic Planet, which launched a modest Weezer-ish alt radio hit in “Stuck On You,” but again mostly fizzled on the charts. After a run on the final touring version of Lollapalooza — during which they did double duty when they got bumped from the second stage to main stage after Korn was forced to drop out, giving them both afternoon and evening slots — the band broke up in late 1997.
In the recent Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival oral history, Andrews talked about Tool getting the band on the tour and being nervous that so many other bands would come over to watch their sets. “Especially if you’re the low band on the totem pole and you haven’t really proven yourself with a lot of success or notoriety,” he said. Edwards admitted to being strung out at the time, saying, “I was flying through that period. I was heavily self-medicated, and Lollapalooza was the beginning of a steep slope to the bottom.”
“Our fans have connected with the themes of depression and addiction in our music,” Andrews said in a statement about the film. “The film crystallizes those connections and, ultimately, communicates hope. We’re a band that faced a specific set of challenges and somehow managed to survive and thrive. It’s a story about resilience, finding ways to cope, and not giving up.”
Andrews and Edwards went on to form a series of bands in the ensuing years and reunited in 2013 with Scott, once again hitting the road to open for Tool and release the 2014 album The Heart Is a Monster. They followed up in 2018 with the first in a series of EPs and the album In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing From Your Mind and 2021’s Wild Type Droid.
In the trailer, Edwards describes being on a “steady routine of uppers and downers, spinning around this spine of the heroin addiction” in a nod to the drug issues that sped the demise of the group. The preview also features snippets of interviews with actress/comedian Margaret Cho, former drummer and A Perfect Circle member Troy Van Leeuwen and actor/musician Jason Schwartzman.
Failure will celebrate the movie’s release on June 26 at the Harmony Gold Theater in L.A. with an acoustic set before the screening. The band is also booked to play at the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, KY on Sept. 20 and the Aftershock Festival in Sacramento on Oct. 3.
Watch the trailer for Every Time You Lose Your Mind below.