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Sam Fender has announced he’ll embark on a run of huge stadium shows in the U.K. next summer.
After selling out his U.K. and Ireland arena tour slated for December, the 30-year-old will next year perform at London Stadium (June 6) and Newcastle’s St. James Park (June 12 and 14). The former will mark Fender’s first stadium show outside of his home city, and the biggest headline show of his career thus far with a venue capacity of 75,000.
The new dates will also mark the third and fourth time the North Shields musician has performed at St James’ Park, meanwhile, having sold-out two nights there back in 2022. Fender first teased the dates yesterday (Nov. 20), sharing a clip to his Instagram account of a saxophone player performing in the media area of St James Park.
Support for all three shows will come from Mercury Prize-nominated singer CMAT, while Philadelphia rockers The War On Drugs – who produced Fender’s new single “People Watching” – will appear at the London date and night two of the Newcastle leg.
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Details of a special fan presale will be shared with those signed up to Fender’s newsletter, while remaining tickets will go live at 9.30 a.m (GMT) on Nov. 29. Further ticket sale information can be found via Fender’s official website.
Last week (Nov. 15), Fender confirmed news of his third LP People Watching (due Feb. 21 via Polydor Records) alongside sharing its eponymous lead single. The track is on course to debut inside of the Top 10 of the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart later today (Nov. 22).
Following his upcoming arena trek, Fender will then head to New York’s Webster Hall for a show on Feb. 11, before continuing the second leg of the tour in Europe through March 2025. The following month, he’ll return to North America for a further seven dates. He is also confirmed to appear at Germany’s Rock Werchter in early July, fuelling rumors that he may return to Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, south-west England, the week prior (June 25-29).
Fender released his second record, Seventeen Going Under, in 2021, which saw him top the U.K. Official Album Charts and put out a live album of his massive gig at London’s Finsbury Park. Earlier this year, he collaborated with Noah Kahan on joint single “Homesick.”
Sam Fender U.K 2025 tour dates:
June 6 – London, England @ London StadiumJune 12 – Newcastle, England @ St. James’ ParkJune 14 – Newcastle, England @ St. James’ Park
In November 2019, Michael Kiwanuka released his third album Kiwanuka at what felt like the edge of the world; the decade was coming to a close, and the pandemic that sent the globe into lockdown was just months away. He sings of such a place on the LP’s highlight “Solid Ground,” ruminating on how “it feels to be on your own” away from all the noise and bluster, imagining himself standing at the precipice of “where there’ll be no one around.” It was a moment and message that proved prescient.
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Kiwanuka was, by design, the singer-songwriter’s magnum opus. The record charted at No. 2 on the U.K.’s Official Album Charts and The Guardian named it “one of the greatest albums of the decade” right at the buzzer. It soon landed a Grammy nomination for best rock album, and won the prestigious Mercury Prize in the U.K.. How does one follow up an album with such acclaim?
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You don’t, Kiwanuka tells Billboard in the offices of Universal Music in London, where he is signed to Polydor Records: “All I knew is that I wanted to do something different, so that it was harder to compare. It was a good impetus to choose another direction creatively without losing who I am.”
That switch-up is his fourth album Small Changes, released Nov. 22. The London-born, Southampton-based artist retains his signature sound, blending sweet soulful grooves and melodies with elements of psych music and funk, but pares things back a touch.
He deliberately focused on making his vocals more of a presence, something he had been reluctant to do over his decade-long career. Hear it on “Rest of Me,” where his rich voice sits atop a lolling bassline and shuffling beats; in the past, additional production flushes would have guided the listener’s ears elsewhere, but here his voice stands central to the success of the song.
“I’ve got this obsession now with the idea that if a busker can play the song, and it sounds good going through a really sh-tty amp and their voice is through a bad mic,” he says. “If the song and the lyrics still move you, you’ve done the hardest thing.”
Michael Kiwanuka
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Kiwanuka signed to Polydor in 2011 and a year later won BBC’s Sound of… poll, a new music-focused list which has also been won by Adele, Haim, Sam Smith and PinkPantheress. He released his debut Home Again in 2012, and then topped the U.K. Albums Chart with 2016’s sophomore LP Love & Hate. His song “Cold Little Heart” appeared on the latter, and was selected by HBO to be the opening theme to hit TV drama Big Little Lies, starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The song now sits at over 307 million streams on Spotify.
It was at this time that Kiwanuka formed a formidable relationship. It came with super-producer Danger Mouse, one half of pop group Gnarls Barkley, and London-based producer Inflo, the mastermind behind mysterious project Sault, which Kiwanuka has briefly performed as part of. The triumvirate have since worked together on what Kiwanuka is calling a “trilogy” of records, across Love & Hate, Kiwanuka and Small Changes.
“In 20 years time, this will still be the most poignant creative relationship that I’ll ever have,” Kiwanuka says. He feels that the trio all met each other “right at the time when we needed it.” Danger Mouse – whose production credits include Adele’s 25, Gorillaz’ Demon Days and U2’s Songs of Innocence – found a “passion for producing records again,” and was drawn to Kiwanuka and Inflo as “two young Black guys trying to prove ourselves” in the music industry. “I had this double-whammy of my mind being opened by two different people at the same time, in different ways.”
The comfortability and confidence in that relationship has enabled Kiwanuka to make his most authentic record, and usher in a stylish new era. Small Changes’ accompanying visuals are arresting in their simplicity: the video for single “Lowdown” makes six minutes out of a lone bike rider at dusk. During his performance at Glastonbury Festival in June, Kiwanuka paid homage to his upbringing by wearing a Kanzu robe, a traditional outfit in Uganda where his parents emigrated from prior to his birth.
Kiwanuka has spoken before about his feeling of “imposter syndrome,” but that the shifting sands that the music industry is built upon now provide artists with opportunities. “They’re [major labels] nowhere near as powerful as they once were when I was starting out, running the shop and telling people what to do. It felt like everything they said was gospel. It affected how you made music, or at least affected your confidence.”
Kiwanuka points to Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. and rising U.S. guitarist and producer Mk.gee as examples of artists who have pushed past the noise to release strikingly original LPs in recent months.
“The volatile relationship of the industry has actually made it artist-friendly, because no-one knows what to do,” he says. “So they let you create and let you make records and experiment because they don’t know what to say… which is fantastic!”
Kiwanuka
Marco Grey
Building confidence in his creative output and vocals has been a journey that has been hard-won. He credits the move away from London as giving him additional conviction in his capabilities: “You hear your own voice a bit louder, but you have to have a bit more conviction because you have no choice. You don’t have as much to compare it to.”
What would he tell his younger self, the one eager to please the public, his label and to meet his own personal standards? “There’s strength in your voice. People always try to tell you but you don’t hear it,” he says. “You’re always accepting advice from other people so you always think the validation is going to come from outside, and then one day you realize it’s not.”
He adds, “I was always trying to sound like my favorite singers, or [thinking] that [my vocals] weren’t good enough. But now I think I just want to sound like me.”
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Collision Course, the six-song collaborative project from Jay-Z and Linkin Park. A landmark release between two superstar artists, Collision Course debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart following its release on Nov. 30, 2004, and spawned a Grammy-winning smash in “Numb/Encore.”
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To celebrate the anniversary, below is an excerpt about the genesis and impact of Collision Course from It Starts With One: The Legend and Legacy of Linkin Park, a new book from Billboard executive director of music Jason Lipshutz, published in October through Hachette Books.
Projects like Collision Course were not ordinary in popular music in 2004, so when it was first announced, it sounded like a fever dream. Jay-Z and Linkin Park collaborating on an official multi-song project?
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Two artists at the peak of their commercial power combining their biggest hits, Voltron-style, into new megahits? It was unfathomable, but somehow, it was happening.
Jay-Z had worked with rock artists before 2004, and Reanimation proved Linkin Park’s bona fides as hip-hop interlopers. Yet even so — Collision Course was something different. This was Godzilla versus King Kong, a mega-wattage showdown that, worst- case scenario, would be a publicity stunt guaranteed to move a lot of units. Best case? It could upend the way listeners thought of popular music.
Timing is everything when the world’s biggest rapper calls to collaborate on an extended project. In 2004, Jay-Z was the 34-year-old king of popular hip-hop: the coolest artist in any room, on a years-long hot streak that had transformed him from a rap headliner into a crossover pop star. While mega- selling albums like 1996’s Reasonable Doubt and 1998’s Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life were met with critical acclaim and produced multiple videos in MTV’s hip-hop blocks, Jay turned into a Top 40 hit-maker in the early 2000s with singles like “Big Pimpin’,” “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me),” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).”
In 2003, a few months after Linkin Park topped the Billboard 200 album chart for the first time with Meteora, Jay- Z hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 alongside his girlfriend, Destiny’s Child breakout Beyoncé, on the summer-ruling pop smash “Crazy in Love.” Then, in November, Jay released The Black Album, a record stuffed with more hits as well as fond-farewell messaging. The Black Album was positioned as Jay- Z’s final album: he was going to go out on top, relinquishing his throne to become president of Def Jam Recordings so that he could develop other artists (like his producer pal Kanye West and newly signed upstarts named Rihanna and Young Jeezy) into stars.
Jay- Z’s “retirement” was always tenuous, a sentence that ended with an ellipsis instead of a period. That’s because Jay didn’t really go anywhere after The Black Album. He was making moves in the Def Jam boardroom but would still pop up on remixes and as a guest artist on songs by Mariah Carey, Snoop Dogg, Lenny Kravitz, and Mary J. Blige, among others. Jay- Z even released Unfinished Business, a second collaborative album with R. Kelly following 2002’s The Best of Both Worlds, less than a year after supposedly hanging it up. So it was clear that, even though Jay- Z wouldn’t be working on a new solo album imminently, he wanted to remain active in the recording studio as a complementary voice and collaborator.
As luck would have it, that period was exactly when executives at MTV called him up with a new show idea.
MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups was pitched as a taped concert series in which a rap artist and rock artist would jump onstage and rearrange at least one song together in front of a live audience — think MTV Unplugged, but as a genre-splicing jam session. Jay-Z, who had worked with The Roots on an actual MTV Unplugged in 2001, was one of the network’s first calls, and they asked him point-blank which rock act he’d want to work with for the show.
At that moment, Linkin Park was headlining more North American arenas as “Numb” kept climbing the Hot 100 and Meteora trailed The Black Album on the Billboard 200. Jay pointed at them.
For the band, the call from Jay-Z’s management not only came at a fortuitous time — nearly a year into the Meteora campaign, around the same moment during the Hybrid Theory album cycle that Mike began to plot Reanimation — but also came from the right artist. “There are six guys in our band who all grew up listening to different things,” Mike explained. “There are very few artists I can say that we all like. Jay is one of them.”
While the whole band were fans, Mike was the one who had worshiped Jay-Z growing up, an adoring teenaged producer as the MC ascended the NYC hip-hop scene. Prior to joining Xero, Mike had mashed up Reasonable Doubt songs with tracks by Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails in his bedroom; the Meteora track “Nobody’s Listening” opens with an adult Mike paying homage to Jay with a lyrical callback to his track “Brooklyn’s Finest.” So when Linkin Park received the offer to work with Jay, Mike wanted to ensure that — whatever this MTV show would eventually become — the collaboration would become more meaningful than a cable series one-off. “I didn’t just want to say, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it.’ I wanted to show him what it might sound like if we did it,” Mike said.
The work itself was second nature to Mike. He had grown up watching artists like Public Enemy and Anthrax mash up their sounds into formative records, as well as literally making Jay-Z mash-ups himself! So, before any deal was agreed on, he slipped into the recording studio in the back of Linkin Park’s tour bus and fired up his laptop. Mike synced up Jay- Z’s vocals from a few songs on The Black Album with Linkin Park instrumentals by matching the beats per minute (BPMs) of each: the hater- shedding anthem “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” aligned with the Meteora wall-rattler “Lying from You,” and Jay’s self-mythologizing curtain call “Encore” paired perfectly with “Numb.”
For the latter, Mike chopped up his band’s still-rising hit and reorganized the instrumental into a repeating pattern, similar to a DJ sampling part of an old rock song for a new rap track. He then added in the flourishes of “Numb” — the keyboard hook, the guitar, the piano, the bass — in ways that would support Jay’s flow, before turning the back half of the song into a modified version of Chester’s vulnerable showcase.
Stitched together, the mash-up of Jay’s braggadocio and Chester’s bare emotion isn’t lyrically coherent, but somehow the tones make sense together. Jay-Z sounds more reflective spitting “As fate would have it, Jay’s status appears / To be at an all-time high, perfect time to say goodbye,” over brooding piano and splintered guitar chords, while the introduction of Chester’s verse with “I’m tired of being what you want me to be” acts as a dramatic shift into the song’s back half, his words driving comfortably over accented hip-hop beats.
Mike finished the demos for “Numb/Encore” and “Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Lying from You” in less than two days on the tour bus, then sent them to Jay-Z to see what he thought of the direction for the songs. “His reply was, ‘Oh shit!’” Mike recalled. “Needless to say, we were off on the right foot.”
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When Jay-Z hosted listening sessions for The Black Album prior to its release, he often looked around the room and realized that some of his lyrics weren’t connecting with listeners, his lines getting lost in the production. The solution was simple enough: he asked his main engineer, Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, to play the songs a cappella.
As Jay watched the rooms absorb his unadorned words, he liked what he saw. So he asked Roc-a-Fella and Def Jam to release a full a cappella version of The Black Album, and it hit stores one month after the original. It was an outrageous request, but Jay wielded enough star power that the labels quickly acquiesced.
Mike had downloaded that a cappella album while making the demos to send to Jay-Z; without it, he couldn’t have made such clean mash-ups and may not have gotten such a strong response from Jay. But then again, without the a cappella version of The Black Album, MTV might not have come up with the mash-up show idea in the first place.
Jay’s secondary motivation for the a cappella edition of The Black Album was for other producers to “remix the hell out of it,” according to Young Guru — to place Jay’s voice over other instrumentals, share them online, play them at clubs, and help his legend grow during his “retirement.” This was a stroke of marketing genius, and plenty of producers were happy to oblige. Producer Kevin Brown created a funk- and jazz-based remix album titled The Brown Album, for instance, and Minnesota DJ Cheap Cologne placed Jay-Z’s vocals over Metallica’s own Black Album for . . . wait for it . . . The Double Black Album.
Most famous of all was The Grey Album, which fused Jay- Z’s Black Album vocals with The Beatles’ landmark 1968 self-titled double LP (aka the White Album), by the LA producer Brian Burton, who went by the moniker Danger Mouse. The concept was, at once, deceptively simple and musically brilliant: Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” smacked even harder over The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” freakout, and “Public Service Announcement” became oddly blissed-out above the looped folk of “Long, Long, Long.” Created over two and a half weeks in December 2003 immediately after the a cappella Black Album was released, The Grey Album became internet lore in early 2004, with bootlegged CDs selling like hotcakes and file-sharing sites swarmed with its twelve songs.
Mash-ups had existed for decades before The Grey Album as an integral part of DJ culture, but they became even more commonplace at the turn of the century. Chalk it up to the proliferation of music-swapping platforms and production software, like the Pro Tools that Mike favored or the Acid Pro that Danger Mouse used for The Grey Album. Artists like Richard X, Soulwax (with their 2 Many DJs project), and Freelance Hellraiser rethought the remix in the early 2000s by jamming songs together with creative panache and lighting up the early blogosphere.
Yet The Grey Album represented a critical turning point for the medium: the project was the sort of underground sensation that functioned like a viral YouTube video before YouTube even existed. Suddenly, Danger Mouse became one of the most in-demand producers of the mid-2000s — helming albums from Gorillaz, Beck, and The Black Keys, among others — but not before entering a legal quagmire over The Grey Album, as EMI, The Beatles’ copyright holder, shut down distribution of the project. Obviously, the White Album samples hadn’t been cleared; then again, Danger Mouse had never intended to get rich off of The Grey Album, only to make something cool.
Jay-Z, for his part, liked The Grey Album — which made sense, since he was the one pushing for his a cappella vocals to become natural resources for producers like Danger Mouse. “I champion any form of creativity,” he said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “And that was a genius idea to do, and it sparked so many others like it.”
Although The Grey Album wasn’t legally sanctioned, MTV clearly saw the commercial potential of mashing up Jay-Z’s rapping with the familiar sounds of a famous rock band. So, presumably, did Jay-Z, he of the “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” credo. The music industry generally facilitates collaboration between artists, producers, and songwriters regardless of label or publishing info — it’s how chart-topping duets and cross-affiliate tour pairings are born. But a mash-up album is different, with more legal obstacles involving rights clearances, even when both artists are on board. As Mike and Jay traded demos over email and realized that this collaboration could become more significant than an MTV special, both camps pushed to make sure that, whatever was created, it was able to go on sale. Then, after Linkin Park worked on the rearranged production, Jay and the band logged a total of four days together at NRG in West Hollywood in July 2004, rerecording the vocals of their existing songs to better fit the deconstructed tracks.
The result: a retail-ready EP, featuring thirteen songs combined into six mash-ups, with all label partners— Def Jam, Roc- A- Fella, Warner Bros., and the Linkin Park imprint Machine Shop — on board and an “MTV Ultimate Mash- Ups Presents” sticker slapped on the cover.
At the end of that week, on July 19, 2004, the two artists took over the Roxy in Los Angeles for a special joint performance that would double as the pilot of MTV’s mash-ups show. Some fans at the Roxy sported LP tees, others held up the Roc for Jay symbol, and plenty did both. The mash-up project aired on MTV and showed up in big-box retailers by November, just in time for holiday shopping.
“To me, Collision Course is a landmark album,” Mike said later that year, “because it’s a first: two multiplatinum artists getting together, using their original masters and new performances and production to create an album of mash-ups — that’s something that has never been done before.”
Within a year of The Grey Album going viral, Jay-Z and Linkin Park had elevated its concept, jumped through all the necessary legal hoops, and primed it for big business. A couple years later, when Linkin Park and Jay-Z were standing on the Grammys stage together to collect a trophy for “Numb/Encore,” Mike made sure to thank “everybody in management and legal teams that made this record possible, because it was a nightmare!”
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What stands out most today about Collision Course, in both Linkin Park’s and Jay-Z’s respective discographies, is how fun it sounds.
Jay has made plenty of party hits over the years, but he’s never been a party rapper, his flow authoritative and grounded in gritty come-up stories even as catchy melodies float around it. Meanwhile, Linkin Park’s most uptempo singles still focused on heavier themes, and their first two albums had been laboriously fine-tuned by Don Gilmore. When set up side by side without a perfectionist producer lurking in the studio, however, both aesthetics relax, the lyrics freed of their intensity when placed in fresh, buoy-ant atmospheres.
Take “Big Pimpin’/Papercut”: Mike’s words about paranoia and stress from “Papercut” remain intact, but his rhyming is slightly slowed down and placed atop the opulent island boom of Timbaland’s “Pimpin’” production. On “Jigga What/Faint,” Jay re-creates the knuckle-bruising threats of 1998’s “N—a What, N—a Who” — but really, the main attraction of that song is the introduction of the “Faint” strings under his rhyming around the thirty-second mark, which becomes the EP’s purest rush of adrenaline.
By design, Collision Course is a stunt release, and the mash-ups can’t possibly hold the artistic power of the original tracks. Yet the inherent looseness of those moments — the playful energy of two giant artists in their prime, tinkering together in the same room — makes Collision Course worth returning to in the years since its release.
Ultimately, it was the shared studio time, with Jay-Z arriving at NRG and dapping up the band before laying down his verses one-on-one with Mike, that proved crucial to manufacturing the chemistry at the core of the EP. Collision Course gave Mike the opportunity to share space with, and produce, a childhood hero who had become a peer. Jay-Z had been a star for years before Linkin Park took off; it could have easily been a classic never-meet-your-heroes moment for Mike. But the recording sessions were full of bro-hugs and easy feedback, Chester clowning on Mike for working too hard and Jay uttering “That transition’s mean!” while scrunching his face behind the boards.
“I like this shit — I like to do different things,” an animated Jay-Z exclaims at one point on the Collision Course making-of DVD. He’s speaking to Chester while huddled in the corner of a studio room, gesturing and breathlessly trying to keep up with his thoughts. “You just bring what you do to the table, I bring what I do to the table, uncompromising — you’re not trying to be me, and I’m not trying to be you, that fusion, and just whatever happens happens. I love that!”
The casual tone provoked plenty of ad-libs that can be heard on the final cut of the EP: Chester muttering, “I ordered a Frappuccino, where’s my fucking Frappuccino?” and garnering a Jay-Z belly laugh; Jay quipping, “You’re wasting your talent, Randy!” to some guy in the studio Reddit users are still trying to identify. Even the decision to combine “Numb” and “Encore” was partially due to Mike just wanting to hear Chester bellow the “What the hell are you waiting fo-o-o-r-r-r?” line. Again: fun.
“There was no ego at all working with Jay,” Mike reflected later. “If I asked him to perform something a certain way or put a vocal line here or there, he was happy to do it. He’s really easy to work with.”
As they were finishing up in the studio and preparing to perform at the Roxy, a goal formed in Mike’s mind: he wanted the mash-up collection to be so good, so immediately effective, that MTV would never be able to make another one. And that’s exactly what happened. MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups transformed from a series into a one- off concert show that aired on November 10, 2004, with the CD and behind- the- scenes DVD hitting stores three weeks later. To this day, no follow-up episode has ever been executed.
Collision Course debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — a rarity for a six-song EP, in any era — but its true legacy is “Numb/Encore,” which rose to No. 20 on the Hot 100 as the project’s lead single and gave alternative programmers an excuse to sneak Jay-Z onto their airwaves. Beyond that early radio play, “Numb/Encore” has endured as an immaculate equilibrium of rap and rock — its melodies joined logically and wholly, soul-mates that made their way to each other from different parts of the world. Although “Numb” has now crossed one billion Spotify plays on its own, “Numb/Encore” is not far behind it; rather astonishingly, the mash-up remains one of the five most-streamed songs on the platform across Jay-Z’s legendary career.
“‘Numb’s’ other dimension is ‘Numb/Encore,’” Brad asserted. “You could love just one. However, I think about them in tandem. And when you think of Meteora, you think of Collision Course — that moment in collaboration with Jay-Z, which is really special.”
Ultimately, Collision Course did not change popular music in a literal sense — officially released mash-up albums remain a rarity to this day, primarily because of the legal red tape. On a more abstract level, though, the project did foretell a future in which amateur and professional producers crashed songs into one another.
Soon after the release of Collision Course, hip-hop’s mixtape era exploded: artists like Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, and Clipse spent the mid- aughts hijacking other rappers’ beats, freestyling over them, and releasing compilations for free online, one-upping the original artist and favoring internet buzz over commercial sales. Meanwhile, the release of mash-up songs and albums — from DJ Earworm’s annual “United State of Pop” singles, featuring the twenty-five biggest songs of the year rolled into one, to Girl Talk’s full-length pastiches of hundreds of samples, to a 2022 mash-up of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and Ginuwine’s “Pony” that charted as “Toxic Pony” — became more commonplace in the years after the album’s release.
And the advent of social media and streaming platforms further delivered that mash-up power into users’ hands, with multimedia mash-ups constantly concocted and posted in ways that helped artists gain more listens — even today. Want to know why Lady Gaga’s 2011 song “Bloody Mary” suddenly became a Hot 100 hit in 2023? That’s because TikTok users synced up the song with a dance sequence from the Netflix series Wednesday, and the mash-up went viral enough to make “Bloody Mary” a belated sensation.
Collision Course was like a star-studded summer blockbuster that lived up to the hype upon its release, then proved sneakily influential in the years since. Its mainstream impact still reverberates today with every new spin of “Numb/Encore,” but perhaps most importantly, Collision Course further legitimized Linkin Park in the moment. Jay-Z is widely considered the greatest rapper of all time — and he picked this band, out of any artist, to reimagine his biggest hits.
Linkin Park had entered rarefied air, the type of rock stratosphere that’s reserved for only a few bands per generation. But they wanted more.
Excerpted from It Starts With One by Jason Lipshutz. Copyright © 2024. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
As Miley Cyrus lays down the bricks on her next album, one iconic LP has stuck out to her as a source of inspiration: Pink Floyd‘s The Wall. In her Harper’s Bazaar cover story published Wednesday (Nov. 20), the 31-year-old pop star opened up about her forthcoming ninth studio album — tentatively titled Something Beautiful […]
The Oasis reunion rolls on. Following the recent roll-out of tour dates being across the U.K. and Ireland, North America, South America and Australia, there is now hope on the horizon for Britpop fans in Asia.
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On Tuesday night (Nov. 19), the band’s official Instagram account shared images of billboards that have popped up in Tokyo, Japan and Seoul, South Korea, which appear to be teasing a major announcement on Friday (Nov. 22). Check out images of the billboards below.
Featuring a black and white photo brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, the electronic messages replicate the campaign that has been used in recent months to announce shows in other regions across the globe. Oasis last performed in Japan and South Korea in spring 2009, including gigs in Nagoya and Osaka, as well as a night at Seoul’s Olympic Gymnastics Arena. The shows will likely take place around the band’s forthcoming Australia dates, which are slated for November 2025.
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The Oasis Live ‘25 tour has 38 shows booked so far, and will commence on July 4 at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The band is slated to tour through fall 2025, with the run currently slated to wrap up with Nov. 22-23 stops at Estádio Morum BIS in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The band have not released any material since 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul. At present, Oasis have not officially confirmed that a new record is coming, or revealed a release date for what would be their eighth studio LP. In September, Liam replied to a fan’s question about whether there will be fresh music, responding “Yep it’s already finished,” without offering any additional details. Earlier this week (Nov. 16), however, Liam revoked these claims, telling fans “it was a laugh.”
Oasis endured a hostile split in 2009, after years of headlines related to the Gallagher siblings’ fierce rivalry. Principal songwriter, guitarist and occasional lead singer Noel quit the band after a backstage fight with vocalist Liam at a show in Paris that year. The brothers, now 57 and 51, haven’t performed live together since then, though they have continued to play Oasis songs during their solo gigs and with their side projects.
All the shows announced so far on the Oasis Live ‘25 tour have sold out. Cast and The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft will open in the U.K. and Ireland, and Cage the Elephant will support the reformed band for the North American leg. Special guests for the rest of the dates are yet to be revealed.
While Timothée Chalamet won’t say he went full method during the shoot for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, the 28-year-old Dune star literally says he lost sleep over fears that he would lose even a “moment of discovery of the character.”
In a new Rolling Stone cover story, Chalamet describes the five years of prep work he did to play the folk rock icon in the film due out on Dec. 25, which included subsuming his not insignificant Hollywood star reality in order to crawl into the enigmatic singer/songwriter’s skin as a young man on the cusp of greatness.
“Losing a moment of discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds — because I was on my phone or because of any distraction. I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him,” Chalamet told the magazinbe. “So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!”
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Instead of the four months of prep Chalamet was supposed to have for the shoot, he ended up getting nearly half a decade to ruminate over the part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s Hollywood strikes. In that time, he went from a hip-hop head who knew very little about Dylan to a self-proclaimed “devoted disciple in the Church of Bob,” working with vocal, harmonica, guitar and dialect coaches so that he could credibly sing and play entire songs live on set.
His co-stars in the film all attest to the intense focus Chalamet brought to the role, with Oscar nominee Edward Norton — who plays Dylan’s hero folk singer Pete Seeger — calling the star’s performance “off-the-charts great.” Elle Fanning, 26, a fellow child actor who’s been a Dylan fan since director Cameron Crowe introduced her to the Bard’s work when she was 13, said playing Dylan’s early love interest activist Sylvie Russo was an emotional experience.
“We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists,” she said about tearing up the first time she heard Chalamet sing on set. “[Director] Jim [Mangold] would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.”
The actress also recalled how after the gobsmacking performance she heard some extras having a debate about whether Chalamet was really singing or lip synching. “I tapped them on the shoulder and I was like, ‘He is singing. I know he’s singing!,’” she said. And though she knew Chalamet well after they played a couple in the 2019 film A Rainy Day in New York, Fanning said she was warned early on that her co-star might “keep to himself” on set except in scenes with her.
That might explain why Monica Barbaro, who plays another Dylan paramour, folk singer Joan Baez, wasn’t surprised when she met Chalamet a week before shooting began and he was already dressed in his character’s clothes. “I had a lot of friends who were like, ‘Have you met him yet? Have you met him?,’” she said. “But it just felt like the right thing to wait and just meet in the context of these characters… the way she saw Bob.”
Though Chalamet didn’t go so far as to insist the cast and crew refer to him as “Bob,” Barbaro said he did stay “in his own world” in the same way that the real Dylan seems to inhabit a different universe than the rest of us. “He was relentless,” said Norton of Chalamet’s focus on set. “No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people. And I agreed totally — it was like, we cannot have a f–king audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
Chalamet still has not met or talked to the real Dylan, but he’s well aware that playing the mythical musical hero who was considered the Chosen One of folk rock is in keeping with one of his other recent roles as the golden child Paul Atreides in two Dune films. “The massive difference in the framing is, for Paul Atreides, the destiny is preordained, and it’s part of his resentment for his status. He feels like it had nothing to do with him, in a sense. And it’s a great source of existential strain,” said Chalamet. “And for Bob, it’s the mischievous joy in knowing, yeah, your talent, your special ability is your own doing, your own gift from God in a sense. I think there’s probably always a pride in that for him.”
Okay, but why, then, is Chalamet drawn to these voice of a generation savior roles? “Hey, man,” he laughed, “they’re finding me. Not the other way around.”
The first trailer for the upcoming Beatles 64 documentary chronicling the band’s arrival on U.S. shores six decades ago captures the hysteria that greeted John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all those years ago.
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The nearly two-and-a-half-minute clip opens with black and white footage of the band doing bits on a train ride before cutting to footage of McCartney wailing on a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” The film directed by David Tedeschi (Personality Crisis: One Night Only) and produced by Martin Scorsese will premiere on Disney+ on Nov. 29.
The doc folds in footage shot by famed documentarians Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter), as well as new interviews with living members McCartney and Starr, as well as with Smokey Robinson, Motown founder Berry Gordy and the late Ronnie Spector. “We’re in America! America!,” Starr says enthusiastically to Scorsese at one point in describing the Beatles’ exuberance about making their trip across the Atlantic. Cue archival footage of Ringo raving about arriving in New York only to be told he’s actually in Washington, D.C.
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“It was like being in the eye of the hurricane. It was happening to us and it was hard to see,” Lennon says in voiceover in the film that includes footage of the band’s first American concert. The trip included, of course, the Fab Four’s historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, where more than 73 million people tuned in to what would be the big bang of Beatlemania in the U.S.
A synopsis of the film reads: “On February 7, 1964, The Beatles arrived in New York City to unprecedented excitement and hysteria. From the instant they landed at Kennedy Airport, met by thousands of fans, Beatlemania swept New York and the entire country. Their thrilling debut performance on The Ed Sullivan Show captivated more than 73 million viewers, the most watched television event of its time. Beatles ’64 presents the spectacle, but also tells a more intimate behind the scenes story, capturing the camaraderie of John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they experienced unimaginable fame.”
Director Tedeschi told Rolling Stone that the doc features more than 17 minutes of never-seen-before footage — mostly from the Maysles — with the music produced by Giles Martin. He said the movie covers the three week period the Beatles were in America, from their arrival in New York, where they stay four four or five days, before moving on to Washington and then Miami. The Washington show at D.C. Coliseum was the Beatles’ first-ever arena concert, with Tedeschi promising that the Martin-restored sound on the D.C. gig has made it sound “better than it ever has.”
“There’s footage from the Maysleses all the way through, but there’s other stuff. We had a great researcher who found a lot of local Miami footage from local archives — a lot of footage was buried, and he really had to go digging in order to find it. So that’s exciting,” the director said of the cleaned-up tape that was remastered by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Studios, which did the same for Jackson’s Get Back Beatles series.
In a fresh interview, McCartney notes that the Beatles’ visit came shortly after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, speculating that “maybe American needed something like the Beatles to be lifted out of sorrow.”
Watch the Beatles 64 trailer below
For nearly 40 years, Kim Deal has maintained a formidable presence in the annals of rock n’ roll, first as the bassist for the Pixies and then as the leader of The Breeders.
Now, six years after the last Breeders LP All Nerve, Ms. Deal returns Nov. 22 with Nobody Loves You More (via 4AD Records), an album that showcases the talents of the self-proclaimed ‘70s rocker from Dayton, Ohio, in a different light from anything she’s done before. And while this isn’t her first time going solo — having released the magnificent Pacer in 1995 under the aegis The Amps as well as a 10-song white label 7-inch vinyl series in 2013 — this is the first proper album released in her own name. It’s something her fans have been clamoring for since she first emerged onto the scene in January 1986 after answering an ad in the Boston Phoenix to join the Pixies — or at least since fans first heard her sing lead on “Gigantic.” And she does not disappoint.
Produced by the late Steve Albini, with songs dating back as early as 2011, Nobody Loves You More finds Deal experimenting with different sounds and tones, including strings, a horn section, pedal steel guitar and even a ukulele. At times it feels almost like a Julie London record from the early ‘60s, as on songs such as the touching, personal “Are You Mine” (which addresses her mom’s Alzheimer’s disease), “Summerland” and the opening title track. Elsewhere, “Coast” finds her wasting away in her own private “Margaritaville,” while “Big Ben Beat” sees her getting industrial with Fay Milton and Ayse Hassan of Savages fame.
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But longtime fans need not worry, as the indelible loud softness that Deal has mastered over the decades remains firmly intact as well across such highlights as “Disobedience,” “I’ll Come Running” and “A Good Time Pushed.” Helping Kim along the way is a host of collaborators, including Breeders alum Mando Lopez, twin sister Kelley Deal, Jim Macpherson and Britt Walford, Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub.
Billboard caught up with Deal to discuss working with Albini on the new album, opening for Olivia Rodrigo and more.
Between JD Vance and “they’re eating the dogs,” your home state of Ohio has unfortunately been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. What do you think of what’s going on in the country?
I used to think, “Oh my God, what’s happening? Things are happening. It’s never been this bad.” And then I just look around and see, you know, women couldn’t get a credit card in 1974. Black folks couldn’t drink out of the same fountain in the ‘50s. And I think people have always been this s—ty, man, millennia after millennia. I think it’s just the human experience. There’s always been a warmongering, hate-filled group to reactivate people. It’s always been like this.
It must’ve been a thrill, however, for The Breeders to open up those shows for Olivia Rodrigo in New York and L.A. What was that experience like?
It was really fun to get to play with her. There was a part of the show where she sits at the piano, and she has a bit where she talks about the opening band — because she’s a professional — and she mentions how her life has a before “Cannonball,” and then it has an after “Cannonball.” She said she listened to the song and it blew her mind open, or it blew her world apart, or something like that, which is really cool to know that music does have the power to transform one’s experience, being able to listen to a song and have it just blast my perspective wide open. Like there’s something more.
Nowadays we can check out a song by going on the internet and just checking out where the artist is from. But it’s more than just about where someone is from, but rather using the imagination of what could be an adventurous idea of looking at what could possibly be out there that I’ve never seen before, a feeling that I’ve never felt before. It’s not something specific; it’s just a feeling.
It’s wild to think that the time between Guts and Last Splash is the same distance as the years between Last Splash and a lot of the surf music from three early ‘60s that’s inspired your sound through the years …
I love surf guitar music for sure. There were these gateway songs in my youth that pointed me there, like I’ll hear “Tequila” and I’ll start looking for similar songs. It’s a little different now than it was then, because you could look that song up online and you can have this vast encyclopedia of all surf music ever done.
One of the locales of your new album is Florida. Your parents used to rent a house in the Keys, and you’d go down there with them?
My family was getting old, but they liked to go down there. I didn’t. I’m not a Florida person. I’m not a beach person. I don’t like the sand. I don’t like the hot sun. I don’t like water sports. But since my family was getting older, we all loaded the cars together and we drove down and we would be there to help them. I stayed with them, and I did it year after year. And then when they got too old to go, I found I enjoyed going. I would bring guitars down. They would go back early, and I would stay back with my guitars, because I liked the view of the ocean.
“Are You Mine?” is such a touching song about your mom and her final years suffering from Alzheimer’s.
She passed away in 2020, right before COVID. Like the day before. We were happy, because it would have been horrible to go through COVID with an Alzheimer’s patient.
Do you think of her often?
When I think of my mother, she had been diagnosed in 2002, so she lasted for 18 years. So when I think of Mom, I think of her only as that person. And I don’t know if she was like that. Like, I can’t remember her as a thriving person. My dad, I remember him as a human being and he’s Dad. But my mom, I don’t have anything other than nothing. But she did love to eat ice cream, I’ll tell you that. Put a smile on her face.
It makes me think that maybe I wanna leave early, so people could remember who I was. But, at the same time, I like ice cream, too. So do I really care if they think I’m a muttering poopy butt? Hopefully I’ll live long enough to have some sort of dementia. Just maybe a little bit, anyway. My mom was 69 when it hit, so …
There’s one song in particular on the album, “Summerland,” that really seems to capture the beauty and grace of Nobody Loves You More. How did the ukulele come into play on this song?
Steve Albini’s wife is from Hawaii. So when they got married, they wanted to go to Hawaii. So they invited us, and they wanted me to do the music, the wedding march. So me and [twin sister] Kelley [Deal] got some ukuleles and we gave them as a gift to the whole wedding party too, because everybody there at the wedding is a musician. We got a bunch of ukuleles and we all played the wedding march and we also played a Dolly Parton song, “He’s Gonna Have to Marry Me Now.” And so as a gift, Steve and his wife gave us a ukulele. So I threw it in the car on the way down to Florida, and I just thought I’d mess around with it. And all of a sudden my fingers were making these four chord formations and I really liked it. So when I told [Josephine Wiggs], the Breeders’ bass player, “Jo, I got this ukulele song, let me play it for you,” she was like, “Absolutely not!” Because she’s a goth girl, big time. She’s old school goth. She didn’t want any ukulele on a Breeders record, so I knew it could be a solo song.
The strings on this album are stunning as well.
[Albini] was just so good at recording everything. You know, everybody thinks that Steve is just like these three man bands and he just sets them up. “I’m a plumber, this is what I do.” But he was really professional and he is gonna do the best job he can to make your band sound like your band. And record it in the best, most professional way. He did a Japanese band called Mono, which is like tons of strings. He also worked with Mucca Pazza, who is this huge horn conglomerate from Chicago and recorded all of them.
So for like that “Summerland” song, I called Steve and I said, “I’ve got a string section in my head. Every time I play this song, I hear it. I don’t know how many pieces it is.” And he would just let me know, like, “Okay, we can do a double string section, and when that happens they usually use a low-end phase so they can sound as one.” He was so knowledgeable about everything. Like Kelley says, he answers in paragraphs. He was thorough, and he had his wits about him. So then he made me realize it was a film score that I was hearing in my head.
So anyway, the players come, he knows who’s coming, and there’s like a dozen people. And every single headphone box works. Come on. When you go into the studio and you’ve got more than like five people, one of the headphone boxes isn’t gonna work, right? Not with Steve. Whatever you’re gonna do, everything’s gonna work. Everything is on point. And we’re going to tape, not digital, and all the microphones are set up. So this guy who I’m used to with this superseding reputation as just being this punk guy is just so prepared, so professional. The players all line up and come in and sit down, and there’s no harried fuss about what’s happening and what isn’t working. Everybody knows what they are doing. So me and the string arranger Susan Voelz, who was in Poi Dog Pondering, are in there. We look at Steve, and he goes, “Okay, well, it sounds great. We don’t need to do another one, right?” So we just did it in one take.
Strings can sort of be like guitar. You get too many on there, and then they sound weak and soft. More guitars don’t make something harder. And you know, the reason why I wanted strings was because every time I picked up my guitar and started singing the melodies, I just had it all in my head. I heard it all.
Was this album your final project with Steve?
I finished recording with him in the fall of 2022. This was the last thing I did with him. I can’t believe it. You know, his album, that Shellac album, they had been working on it for years, like a decade. He died on a Monday night, but I found out on Tuesday. Then the new Shellac record [To All Trains] was released that Friday. It was so close. They had tour schedules and everything. It’s still hard to believe.
That flamingo on the cover, is it real?
No, it’s CGI. We tried to get a real one. There’s a farm in West Virginia. [The label] called evidently, and they said, “We’d like to get one of those flamingos into a photo shoot.” And the people said, “You don’t know much about flamingos, do you? They are very aggressive animals. You would have to drug them within an inch of their life for them to be held or even reined in on the set.” We were like, OK then lol.
Next year marks the 35th anniversary of The Breeders’ first album. Any plans to tour?
I want to. We are supposed to do something in March and then maybe some other shows. So that’s why the Pod 35 is such a surprise to me.
Is there any plan for a commemoration?
I’m not sure! I’m shocked at how long it’s been. The Breeders just did three shows. We did Ohana, Pearl Jam’s festival in Dana Point in Orange County, Calif., which was a really cool festival. We came out and played all of Pod, and then we played Last Splash back to back.
Do you ever talk to your old Breeders partner Tanya Donnelly?
My gosh, Belly played shows with us last year. We did a run down the West Coast and they came out and played shows. She came up on stage and played with us every night that we played together. You know, Britt Walford, who also played on Pod, he plays on the new record. He plays on “Summerland” and he plays on “Nobody Loves You More.” He just lives in Kentucky, which is like an hour and a half away from me in Ohio.
Any plans to do a solo tour?
I want to. We are supposed to do something in March and then maybe some other shows. So that’s why Pod 35 is such a surprise to me.
Nothing More claims two straight No. 1s on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart for the first time, ruling the Nov. 23-dated ranking with “Angel Song” featuring David Draiman.
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The song follows the band’s two-week reign with prior single “If It Doesn’t Hurt” in June and July.
Nothing More now boasts three total Mainstream Rock Airplay No. 1s, having also led with “Go to War” in 2017.
As for Draiman, frontman of Disturbed, “Angel Song” is his second solo No. 1 on the chart, following “Dead Inside” with Nita Strauss in 2022. Disturbed has scored 12 rulers, while he made another trip to the top as the singer of the short-lived band Device (with “Vilify” in 2013).
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Concurrently, “Angel Song” bullets at its No. 11 high on the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart with 2.9 million audience impressions (up 14%), Nov. 8-14, according to Luminate. That’s the band’s second-best rank on the tally, following the No. 7 peak of “If It Doesn’t Hurt.”
On the most recently published multimetric Hot Hard Rock Songs chart (dated Nov. 16, reflecting data Nov. 1-7), “Angel Song” placed at a new No. 10 best, becoming Nothing More’s second top 10 dating to the ranking’s 2020 inception. (“If It Doesn’t Hurt” reached No. 8 in February.) In addition to its radio airplay, “Angel Song” earned 365,000 official U.S. streams, according to Luminate.
The track is the second single from Carnal, Nothing More’s seventh studio album. The set bowed at No. 9 on the Top Hard Rock Albums chart in July and has earned 48,000 equivalent album units to date.
All Billboard charts dated Nov. 23 will update on Billboard.com Tuesday, Nov. 19.
They may not have had quite as bountiful of a vault as for the All Things Must Pass anniversary edition, but the George Harrison estate and Dark Horse Records had no shortage of, well, material in putting together the new 50th anniversary edition of George Harrison’s fourth solo (and second post-Beatles) album, Living in a Material World.
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The expanded two-disc set, which was curated by Harrison’s widow Olivia and son Dhani, is part of an expanded deal with BMG that Dark Horse signed last year. Out Friday (Nov. 15) with a new mix by Grammy Award-winning engineer Paul Hicks; in addition to the 11 original tracks that came out on May 30, 1973, a second disc (on LP and CD) includes an outtake of each song as well as two rarities, “Miss O’Dell” and, on CD only, the unreleased “Sunshine Life For Me (Sail Away Raymond)” (which Harrison contributed to Ringo Starr’s 1973 album, Ringo, and recorded with Starr and members of The Band). The package also includes a 60-page hardcover book featuring previously unseen images and memorabilia from the period.
“We’re going in chronological order,” Dhani Harrison, Dark Horse’s CEO, tells Billboard about the estate and label’s approach to reissuing his father’s catalog. “There was obviously (The Concert For) Bangladesh in-between but that’s a full concert movie, so that doesn’t affect the order as we release his solo studio albums.”
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Harrison adds that his father “really loved this album because of what it stood for. It was designed to help people living in the material world — it had a purpose. It always meant a lot to him. He named his charity after it, so it was also the beginning of the foundation, which still goes on today.” Royalties from the 50th anniversary edition will go to the Material World Foundation.
Living in the Material World was Harrison’s second consecutive No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified gold, spawning the Billboard Hot 100-topping single “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” It was also the first album Harrison recorded at the studio in his Friar Park estate in Henley-on-Thames, England, which he’d purchased in January 1970. Unlike All Things Must Pass’ legion of contributors, Living in a Material World was made with a small core band that included keyboardists Nicky Hopkins and Gary Wright, bassist Klaus Voormann, Starr and Jim Keltner on drums and Jim Horn on woodwinds.
“It was very cozy,” recalls Voormann, who was living in a cottage at Friar Park at the time. “It was a very personal atmosphere, very comfortable. It was a beautiful house, and the (studio) room itself was one end and very secluded and not really big, so it was very intimate. And George was in a very calm state. He was very happy with his meditation and his friends from India, so he was in a certain mood which made it into this wonderful atmosphere.”
Dhani Harrison, meanwhile, views the album as the start of a new era for his father, the first of “a long line of Friar Park albums that stretch all the way to the end of his career,” including albums by Ravi Shankar and the all-star Traveling Wilburys, whose debut album was mixed there. Having worked through a backlog of Beatles-era songs for All Things Must Pass, Living in the Material World offered a spate of brand-new songs, many reflecting Harrison’s spiritual focus at the time.
“He also produced this album all by himself,” Dhani notes. “It’s the first time we see him in his element in his home studio, producing and writing…. If you listen to the album that’s a real band on there, which is what makes it different from All Things Must Pass. They were really ripping as a band on those sessions. It was also coming off the back of Bangladesh, so there was a lot of synergy with the musicians from that on this album.”
Hicks, who’s also worked on reissue projects by the Beatles and John Lennon, says the streamlined process benefited the remixing as well. “I think in general my mission is to just start fresh and have a new sort of sonic take on the album,” he explains. “Timeless is the term I always use; we’re not trying to make things sound modern…although I think people maybe listen differently now — on their phones and headphones — so to me there’s a different sort of detail in what you’ve got to do.
“It’s obviously a lot simpler production than All Things Must Pass. Apart from a few songs, like the title track, it’s almost sort of like an acoustic album, but with some extra instruments. It doesn’t strike me as a rock album. So I kind of went into it emotionally mixing it and really trying to bring out the lyrics, because (Harrison) is saying some really fascinating things. I thought we should have a bit more focus on George on this one, and the Harrisons agreed.”
The vaults held plenty of options. The additional material ranges from a third take of “The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord)” to some takes in the 20s and even the 93rd take of “Who Can See It.” “We did that — but, you see, I don’t remember it,” Voormann says, with a laugh, about the process. “We were just playing the songs and going through them. We weren’t keeping count…George was very precise. John was more direct; if there were mistakes on the take it didn’t matter, the feeling had to be right and that was good enough for him. But with George…all the details had to be right.”
Dhani adds that, “the fact there was a take 93 shows how deep we went. Ultimately, we only put stuff in that makes the album stronger…what we’re looking for is the really worthy stuff, and if you have to go through 90 takes to find that one take, that’s what we do. It wasn’t just a ‘remaster’; we’ve gone back to every single master track. It’s really an ‘ultra remaster,’ as we went back to the original masters and remixed them without stepping on the original, which is what we did with All Things Must Pass. We did a deep, deep dive, and that’s what the fans deserve.”
George Harrison Box Set
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Despite the substantial number of takes, however, Hicks notes that “they’re all basically the same. George taught (the band) the songs, and then they did it. All Things Must Pass was kind of a treasure trove — that one’s loads slower, that one’s faster…. On this (album) they definitely seemed to have a plan. Maybe the title track outtake (take 31), that’s possibly one of the most different because it’s a much more square bit, not as swung as the (album version), so that’s quite interesting. But they didn’t really experiment with styles… they were just playing the songs until (Harrison) felt they’d done it enough.”
The Harrisons are already working on what’s next. The estate began working concurrently on The Concert for Bangladesh, with Peter Jackson helping to restore footage of the film “so it’s of the same quality as Get Back,” according to Dhani. “It’s just incredible when you see the show. It took it into another level, which is why you haven’t seen it yet as we’ve been taking our time with it. But when you de-grain it and up-res it, it becomes a whole new thing. With the level of musicians who are in that show, it deserves that attention.” Dark Horse is looking at doing something similar with Harrison’s 1974 tour as well.
“If there’s any way of doing Dark Horse (the album) and the Dark Horse ’74 tour in the same way as well, that’s my ultimate goal,” Dhani says. “The band is incredible, and the shows set the template for bringing classical Indian music and rock n’ roll together.
“All these releases require so much work. It took us five years to do the All Things Must Pass 50th anniversary. We started doing all this in 2001 — we’ve been at it for nearly 25 years and we’re only up to the second album.”