Rock

Jake Shimabukuro is still pinching himself. And Mick Fleetwood is smiling ear to ear.
That’s how the two are feeling as they bring out Blues Experience, a collaborative album that finds the ukulele virtuoso and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer exploring the blues over nine tracks – one of which is a moving tribute to Fleetwood’s late Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Christine McVie.

“I’m really excited about this project,” Shimabukuro tells Billboard via Zoom from Hawaii, where he lives (and where he met Fleetwood, another Hawaii resident). “It’s such a departure from anything I’ve ever done, but I love that because it really feels like I learned a lot from this experience. In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that this album would exist someday. And I love those kinds of things…the most unlikely collaborations or combinations coming together to do something very different and unique.”

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Fleetwood — who has some 40 ukuleles hanging on the walls of his home as decorations — adds that the appeal for him was to work with someone he calls “an explorer. He’s fascinated with music. He comes from a very traditional musical background, but he’s done an extraordinary amount of projects with anyone from Neil Young to Bette Midler, all this strange, bizarre, super-eclectic stuff that’s obviously intrigued him on his journey. That’s what led to, ‘What can a funny old drummer — me — do with someone like this?’”

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Fleetwood and Shimabukuro had met a number of times over the years, establishing a friendly relationship. “We basically were passing in the night for years, always saying, ‘We’ve got to do something together,’” recalls Fleetwood. Meeting up again at a Shimabukuro show in Maui during early 2023 put the idea on the front-burner for both, and by March they were in a studio Fleetwood has near his home, with “no pressure, no agenda, just to get in there to see what happens.” Four songs in four days — “recording everything live and just experimenting and having a lot of fun,” according to Shimabukuro — proved they were creatively in sync. Shimabukuro was even happy to plug into a vintage Fender Princeton amplifier that helped him craft a sound that “really seemed to work nicely for this genre and this style.”

Playing blues was a no-brainer, even if it’s something Shimabukuro had not done to a great extent before. “First, Mick’s the iconic blues drummer,” he explains. “I’ve always loved that style of music, that style of playing the guitar, that kind of phrasing. I mean, one of my all-time favorite Jimi Hendrix tunes is his version of ‘Red House’ when I was young. So it was in me.”

Shimabukuro also acknowledges the influence on his playing of “Uncle” Joseph Kekuku, the 19th century acknowledged inventor of the steel guitar. “I’m not playing slide on my ukulele, but this album kind of brings it back to what he did and what I learned from that. It’s kind of a throwback but at the same time is progressive.”

Fleetwood says that his cohort “was very privy to the pedigree of early Fleetwood Mac and Peter Green. So that became sort of the template of the conversation, or at least the overview. He’s very passionate about what he does, and anything with passion in it, in my quiet opinion, is connected to the blues. He’s an incredibly, technically capable player, period, and he has a whole other world of looking at things in a different way, where you actually pay attention to where the blues come from. So this album ended up being a combination of his natural self, which is a huge catalog of technical ability, and what it is that I do.”

Blues Experience isn’t strictly blues, mind you; there are renditions of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” for instance, as well as Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” But the bulk of the set hews that way, including the Shimabukuro original “Kula Blues,” and the Stevie Wonder-written, Jeff Beck-popularized “‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” a personal favorite of Shimabukuro’s that features Sonny Landreth on slide guitar. Keyboardist Mark Johnstone from the Mick Fleetwood Blues Band plays on a couple of tracks, while bassist Jackson Waldhoff and keyboardist Michael Grande play throughout the album.

The album’s most stunning moment, however, is its closing, a rendering of Christine McVie’s Fleetwood Mac signature song “Songbird” followed by a spoken word coda by Fleetwood, mourning McVie’s death on Nov. 30, 2022. It’s a three-hanky musical elegy, even though Fleetwood says “that wasn’t the intention.”

“‘Songbird’ came out of the blue, and we couldn’t not include it,” Fleetwood says. “It was around the time when Christine had passed, and we found ourselves doing that song, which was not predetermined. To me that was very poignant. I was very pregnant with the loss of Christine, and the fact that we were singing it but not singing it reminded me of Peter Green; he had a great natural voice, but he also sang through his instrument. It was very emotional and also in those moments was a prayer, for sure. Christine was a huge loss for me and for millions and millions of people.”

Saluting McVie on a blues album was also appropriate, Fleetwood adds. “She was a blues player,” he says. “She came up through the ranks, playing with Freddie King. And she was an extraordinarily passionate songwriter; just when you thought she was on a journey into the pop world she’ll go out and lay something on you like ‘Songbird’ that really is a lament…which is of course connective to the blues.

“Before we lost Christine there were some intentions that Fleetwood Mac would’ve found a way to say goodbye…but we didn’t. It was unthinkable for (the band) to do any more. Stevie (Nicks) has been able to do that in many ways on the big excursion that she’s doing; she’s been able to do what Fleetwood Mac was not. All of that was like a sort of tsunami of feeling as we did that song. But it was also very healing, and a kind of closure.”

Fleetwood and Shimabukuro played some of the Blues Experience songs live at We Are Friends — A Maui Wildfire Benefit Concert on the island last year, and they both voice a desire to perform together again. They’re also up to collaborate more, though Shimabukuro claims that “I would never want to get greedy and ask for another project like this from him — but if he brought it up and said, ‘Man, let’s do another one,’ are you kidding me? Oh my goodness, that would be a dream come true, like winning the lottery twice.”

The odds are better than that, however. “If Jake knocked on the door and said, ‘I’m actually not on the road,’ I would always be open to doing something,” Fleetwood affirms. In the meantime, he’s working on an album of his own, collaborating with an “interesting” corps of other artists (he mentions Girl In Red specifically) and even employing some of those ukuleles from the wall.

“It’s petrifying,” Fleetwood acknowledges, “but it’s actually turning out to be really interesting. I’m having a lot of fun doing that, and my heart is saying ‘you need to do more.’ Doing this (album) with Jake did me a lot of good. It was really the trigger of ‘you can do this.’ It’s very therapeutic, and I’ve actually learned to express myself in little areas I never knew was there, and to whatever avail doesn’t really matter. It’s just about doing it, and then we’ll see what it leads to.”

L.S. Dunes, the post-hardcore supergroup led by Circa Survive and Saosin frontman Anthony Green, will return at the top of 2025 with its sophomore full-length, Violet, Billboard can exclusively reveal. “Machines,” the first track released from the album, will be unveiled tonight at midnight ET. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest […]

Two days after being shot multiple times while walking his dog in Las Vegas, former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee said he was “one lucky motherf–ker.” In a text exchange with former Guns N’ Roses and Sixx:A.M. guitarist D.J. Ashba shared on the latter’s Instagram Stories, Lee said he was on the mend after the shock attack.
“Yooooo! Please tell me you’re okay??” Ashba texted his friend. “Doing surprisingly well. I am one lucky mother f–ker,” Lee responded. “Just make sure your bday bash is wheelchair accessible! Just jestin’. Ashba was glad t hear the good news, writing, “So fn thankful you’re ok! Haha! U got it bro!”

Lee, 67, was shot three times in an attack that took place early Tuesday morning at his home about 10 miles from the Las Vegas strip. According to TMZ reporting at the time, Lee was shot around 2:40 a.m. while walking his dog and was hospitalized and was reported to be fully conscious while being treated in the intensive care unit.

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Police said they did not believe Lee was targeted, chalking the shooting to random street crime; the incident is under investigation with no arrests reported so far.

“Lee is fully conscious and doing well in an intensive care unit at a Las Vegas hospital. He is expected to fully recover,” a publicist for Lee told Billboard. “Las Vegas authorities believe the shooting was completely random and occurred while Lee took his dog out for a walk in the early morning hours. As the incident is under police investigation, no further comments will be forthcoming. Lee and his family appreciate respecting their privacy at this time.”

Osbourne expressed sympathy for his former guitarist in a statement to TMZ, telling the outlet, “It’s been 37 years since I’ve seen Jake E. Lee, but that still doesn’t take away from the shock of hearing what happened to him today. It’s just another senseless act of gun violence. I send my thoughts to him and his beautiful daughter, Jade. I just hope he’ll be ok.”

Lee played guitar in Osbourne’s band from 1982-1987 following the death of beloved guitarist Randy Rhoads, appearing on the former Black Sabbath singer’s solo albums Bark at the Moon (1983) and The Ultimate Sin (1986), as well as being a member of the heavy metal band Badlands. He released the solo albums Retraced and Guitar Warrior in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and after what he dubbed a “self-imposed exile from the music industry” he returned with a band called Red Dragon Cartel, who released a self-titled album in 2013 followed by 2018’s Patina.

The long-standing animus between former Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and band’s late guitar legend Eddie Van Halen was legendary, and apparently permanent. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the band’s retired drummer, Alex Van Halen, revealed that after Eddie’s death in 2020 at 65 due to complications from throat cancer, he approached Roth about a reunion tour that would pay tribute to his younger brother.
Following some rehearsals in 2022, Alex said the project fell apart over what he described as Roth’s refusal to include a segment paying homage to the rocker some consider the greatest guitarist of all time.

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“The thing that broke the camel’s back, and I can be honest about this now, was I said, ‘Dave, at some point, we have to have a very overt — not a bowing — but an acknowledgment of Ed in the gig,” he said of his get-back plans that began to go south when he felt numbness from peripheral neuropathy that he took as an “omen from above” that maybe things were not meant to be.

“If you look at how Queen does it, they show old footage,’” Alex said of that band’s hat-tipping to late singer Freddie Mercury on their recent tours with replacement singer Adam Lambert. “And the moment I said we gotta acknowledge Ed, Dave f–kin’ popped a fuse.… The vitriol that came out was unbelievable.”

Alex, in his first interview since Eddie’s death, said Roth adamantly refused the idea, finding it “offensive,” for reasons he still cannot understand and which raised his ire. “I’m from the street,” he told the magazine. “‘You talk to me like that, motherf–ker, I’m gonna beat your f–king brains out. You got it?’ And I mean that. And that’s how it ended… It’s just, my God. It’s like I didn’t know him anymore. I have nothing but the utmost respect for his work ethic and all that. But, Dave, you gotta work as a community, motherf–ker. It’s not you alone anymore”; RS said Roth declined to comment for the story.

The profile also runs down the other A-list rock icons who were discussed as potential frontmen for the band that has had three lead singers over the years. Founding vocalist Roth held the seat from 1974-1985, then again for a brief time in 1996 and once more from 2007-2020, while Sammy Hagar took over from 1985-1996 during the band’s chart peak, and again from 2003-2005, while Extreme’s Gary Cherone briefly kept the mic warm from 1996-1999 between the other two vocalist’s stints.

Around 2001, following Cherone’s exit and Hagar’s return, the Van Halens had a chat with Ozzy Osbourne and his wife, manager Sharon Osbourne, as they contemplated a plan to have the metal god take over as vocalist. “When you get a dog, you don’t expect it to be a cat,” Alex explained. “When you get an Ozzy, you get Ozzy. Play the music, he’ll sing, and it’s gonna be great.”

But, right before they were slated to get to in the studio, the Osbourne’s began working on their MTV reality show The Osbournes, which scotched the plan; Ozzy confirmed the talks and said if it had come to pass it would have been “phenomenal.”

Van Halen also noted that the brothers jammed with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell at one point — he couldn’t remember when — and when Eddie stepped out of the room for a bit Alex jammed alone with the singer. “Chris was in a very fragile part of his life, so to speak,” he said of the singer who died in 2017 at age 52. “I got behind the drums, and he started playing bass. We played for 45 minutes. This motherf–ker got so into it he started bleeding. I said, ‘This is the man you want.’ And then he died.”

Saying the demise of the original lineup was the “most disappointing thing” he’d experienced in his life until Eddie’s death, Alex said, for him, another brick in the wall of their demise was Eddie’s decision in 1982 to play his infamously spiraling guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” That led to Roth deciding to strike out on his own as a solo act which began what Alex said was a death spiral for the group. After asking his brother not to take the gig — suggesting that Jackson guest on a VH album instead — Eddie did it anyway and in 1984, Jackson’s monumental album Thriller blocked VH’s 1984 album from the No. 1 position on the Billboard 200 album chart.

“Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t f–king get it,” Alex told RS about the feud that went on for years. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”

Alex Van Halen’s memoir, Brothers, is slated for release on Oct. 22.