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Sam Fender has shared that he once turned down the opportunity to perform alongside Joni Mitchell.
In a new interview at Coachella with radio station KROQ, the North Shields songwriter revealed that he was once offered the chance to perform with the seminal folk artist as part of her “Joni Jams” series, but turned down the slot down due to nerves.
Fender went on to explain that Mitchell — who has a long history of hosting jam sessions in her living room with musicians — invited him to perform at her home in California. “Can I tell you something mental? I got offered to go to a ‘Joni Jam.’ You know how people were going to Joni’s house, and I didn’t go,” he told KROQ.
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“Honestly, it was nerves. I was like, ‘There’s no way I can sit next to Joni Mitchell and be like do you want to listen to this?’” he added. “I was like, ‘Does she even want these people around?’ Obviously, she did, but yeah, I got offered the chance to go, and I bottled it. I completely bottled it. It’s one of my great regrets, it really plays on my mind.”
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The Joni Jams began as an intimate performance series after Mitchell suffered a stroke in 2015. Organized by fellow singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile, close friends and collaborators would play her music for Mitchell as she recovered, with everyone from Elton John, to Paul McCartney, Harry Styles and others rumored to have been involved over the years.
The sessions later expanded to include public performances. In 2023, the 27,000-capacity Gorge Amphitheater in Quincy, Washington, played host to a Jam featuring appearances from Mitchell and Carlile, plus a star-studded guest list including Marcus Mumford, Annie Lennox, Allison Russell, Sarah McLachlan and Lucius.
At the time, it had been 20 years since the “Blue” singer had performed live due to several health issues that plagued the 81-year-old icon, leading to her staying out of the public eye for nearly two decades.
Mitchell made headlines again earlier this year when she took to the stage as part of the LA FireAid charitybenefit show. She was joined by Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, Lucius, Taylor MacKall, Blake Mills and Abe Rounds, following a moving set at the 2024 Grammy Awards ceremony.
Fender, meanwhile, has enjoyed a banner year. The singer and guitarist shared his third LP, People Watching, in February, which Billboard U.K. described as “as a grand, emotional record which has the potential to become an instant British classic.”
According to data from the Official Charts Company, the record landed the biggest U.K. opening week for a British solo act since Harry Styles‘ Harry’s House in 2022. It also marked Fender’s biggest-ever opening week, selling more units than his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles and 2021’s Mercury Prize-nominated Seventeen Going Under combined.
In recent months, Fender has gone on to win a BRIT award for alternative/rock act, and has taken People Watching on tour across Europe and the U.S., including his debut appearance at Coachella over the weekend (Apr. 12).
This summer, he will perform a string of headline stadium shows in the U.K., with dates in London and Newcastle. £1 from every ticket sold on the run will be donated to select cultural organizations such as Youth Music and Sunday for Sammy to support the arts in the North East of England.
Check out the KROQ interview below.
Shirley Manson is pushing back against media commentary about her appearance, calling out what she describes as “weaponised” language used to diminish women in music as they age. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news On Saturday (April 13), the Garbage frontwoman took to Instagram to share a […]
Duo Soft Palms has returned with new single “Radio” from their upcoming sophomore album. The track marks the first new music from the wife and husband pair of Julia Kugel (The Coathangers, Julia Julia) and Scott Montoya (former member of The Growlers) since their debut self-titled album in 2020.
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“Radio” kicks off with Montoya on the drums before Kugel joins in a boisterous guitar riff that drives the track. The song is about the divisive nature of media and the alienation that results from the echo chamber of negativity, hearing secondhand information and the perception of persecution.
The track’s release is accompanied by a music video featuring the duo in night vision and serves as a reflection of the lyrics’ sentiment with surveillance cameras and projected messages that reflect the idea of being watched and judged.
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The Southern California couple have been making music together and separately for decades, and have decided to take their careers to what Montoya calls the “next logical step” of attempting to win a Grammy.
“Julia and I have over 40 years combined experience in music. ‘Radio’ will be our combined 352nd track on our combined 46th release, but it’s the first time we’ve ever thought to submit our work to the Recording Academy for Grammy consideration,” Montoya tells Billboard. Coming from the independent side of the music industry, he explains, the Grammys have “a stigma of being specifically for pop artists and for mainstream music, but it’s really not the case.”
The duo has also spent years strengthening their local music scene through their free annual festival, Happy Sundays, in Long Beach, Calif. The three-day event is scheduled to return this summer to several locations in the city between Aug. 23-25.
They also run non-profit Studios for Schools that provides equipment and funding for building recording/production studios in schools.
“Radio” was recorded and mixed by Kugel and Montoya at their home studio Centre of Mental Arts (COMA) in Long Beach, Calif., and mastered by BAFTA winner Mick Boggis. The entirety of the record is expected out later this year via Everloving Records.
Check out the video below.
Bon Iver‘s Justin Vernon has always done things his way, and the roll-out of the singer’s latest album, Sable, Fable, is no exception. In addition to the LP that dropped on Friday (April 11), Vernon has lined up dozens of unique product tie-ins ranging from bespoke pink cashmere hoodies and beanies from designer Todd Snyder to fragrances, notebooks, signature cocktails, ice cream and more.
The exhaustive list of products includes the Allpress Espresso “SABLE, fABLE Spritz” cold brew (featuring San Bitters, citrus, orange bitters and soda), as well as the Billy Van Creamy SABLE SORBET featuring vegan salted olive oil and grapefruit sorbet with vegan sour jube, as well as a non-vegan option that will be served with salmon roe.
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You can also check out Canyon Coffee’s SABLE Black Sesame Hojicha Latte (with hojicha tea, black sesame, pistachio milk and Japanese brown sugar), the fABLE Hibiscus Milk Tea (with hibiscus tea, strawberry simple syrup and your choice of milk) and Courage Bagels’ bon iver salmon SABLE plate with wild hot smoke salmon, cream cheese, capeberries, onion, dill, tomato and olive oil.
The collabs are are available at his partners’ retail outlets on Friday, including a special Earl of East “immersive” scent inspired by sound, the Fables Bar & Cafe walk home hot chocolate, Fell + Cole SABLE whiskey ice cream, Field Notes SABLE, fABLE notebooks, Fishwife’s SABLE, fABLE smoked salmon duo and the Gravely Brewing Co.’s SABLE dark cream ale brew.
The exhaustive list of items inspired by the new album also includes listening lounges, signature cocktails, sourdough salmon pastries, a fresh peach puree matcha, a different stacked bagel sandwich, a gravlax pizza, smoothie bowl, salmon colored roses and bouquets, coffee blends, flash temporary tattoos (salmon and double hearts), a “Short Story Shortcake” and more unique offers inspired by the album’s color scheme and title.
All of Friday’s experiences will be available while supplies last at outlets stretching from Manchester, U.K. to Melbourne, Australia, L.A., Wisconsin, South Korea, Detroit, Louisville, Jakarta, Amsterdam, Malaysia, Chicago, Singapore, India and Mexico City, among many other spots; click here for the full list of collaborations and locations.
In addition to the avalanche of tie-ins, Vernon also released a cabin-core-to-coast video for “There’s a Rhythm/ Au Revoir” on Friday. In addition to all that, Vernon will hit L.A.’s Terasaki Budokan sports/community center on Saturday (April 12) for the “Live Inside This State Fair” event featuring the three-game SABLES vs. fABLES basketball tournament, art displays, games, vinyl and food and drink from his collab partners.
Check out the “There’s a Rhythm” video, as well as pictures and a full list of the collabs here and below.
Paramore fans got a very rare treat this week when singer Hayley Williams performed “Teenagers,” her contribution to the super emo soundtrack to the 2009 Megan Fox horror comedy Jennifer’s Body live for the first time ever. Seated on the floor while strumming an acoustic guitar and rocking green shades, Williams, 36, sang, “I’m gonna go on like I never met you/ And it’ll feel wrong at first, but I think I can forget you/ Ignore the fact that we sleep no more than three feet apart/ I feel you now, you’re all around me, underneath me.”
Bobbing her head and clearly into it, she quick-strummed her way into the chorus: “Well, how was I to know that what we carved in stone/ Would be so temporary?/ Well, how was I to know that my first crack in love/ Would not be the last? It won’t be the last,” she sang.
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The caption to the performance read “#selfserenades wrote this for the jennifer’s body soundtrack when I was still a teenager,” adding to the tale in her Stories, writing, “lore behind this one is so ridiculous i cant tell if tellin it would make the song better or worse anyway, first self-serenade in years… hope its fine by you.”
In case you forgot, the soundtrack to the movie was a who’s who of emo at the time, including tracks from Panic! at the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, Cute Is What We Aim For, Cobra Starship, All Time Low and The Sword, as well as songs from Florence + the Machine, Little Boots, Screeching Weasel, Silversun Pickups and Lissy Trullie.
In addition to the performance, Williams also made an urgent call to action about the climate crisis, noting that the weather in Nashville when she recorded the performance was “glorious” after multiple tornado threats, flooding and “a sleepless night hiding in the basement. have come a little too close to multiple natural disasters this year. they continue to get worse and more frequent.”
Severe storms raked Nashville and Middle Tennessee last week, spawning multiple tornado warnings, one suspected tornado, as well as torrential rains and high winds that caused widespread flooding. Williams pulled no punches in describing the urgency she feels about climate change at a time when the Trump administration is touting efforts to revive the highly polluting coal industry and working to roll back many of the crucial green initiatives passed by the Biden administration to put the country on a path to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Climate crisis is definitely here and the ppl in power dont give a rats ass,” she wrote. The singer encouraged her fans to follow Mister Rogers’ sage advice to “look for the helpers,” with a shout-out to @supportandfeed, the organization founded by Billie Eilish’s mom, Maggie Baird, that is working to mitigate climate change and increase food security by promoting plant-based food options.
She also gave some love to @reverb_org, which has been striving for more than 20 years to green the touring industry.
Check out Williams’ performance below.
Lest you think of Dave Stewart’s Record Store Day project, Dave Does Dylan, as opportunistic, the hirsute male half of Eurythmics is quick to put the record straight.
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“I had no idea when I started doing this that the (A Complete Unknown) movie was coming out and the whole outburst of stuff about Timothée Chalamet and about (Bob) Dylan,” Stewart tells Billboard via Zoom from his studio in Nashville. “These (recordings) have been around before that, and I have had some real interesting, amazing times with (Dylan), so this wasn’t a great stretch for me.”
Dave Does Dylan — out Saturday (April 12) in limited edition and slated for wider release during the summer — features 14 solo acoustic recordings of Dylan tracks such as “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Forever Young,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Visions of Johanna” and more. They’re songs Stewart recorded on his iPhone over time — during breaks in the studio, in his hotel rooms on tour or backstage at gigs. “Whenever I was waiting in-between something, I just started to put an iPhone on a little stick and sing a Bob Dylan song. I was just doing it for fun, and then I would put one up on Instagram every now and then and people would say, ‘Oh, we love this! Why don’t you make an album of this?’
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“I didn’t take any of it seriously. Then my management company said, ‘We’d love to put this out on vinyl on Record Store Day.’ I had 24 songs, so then it was, ‘OK, we have to cut it down to fit on an album unless it’s a double album,’ which we didn’t want to do. So we picked these (14), and I think you can hear that I have a deep connection to the songs and you can hear every word, even though we couldn’t really mix them because the guitar and the voice are going down the same mics.”
The set pays tribute to Dylan beyond the music, too. The cover is literally a tip of the cap, with Stewart striking a pose similar to Dylan’s on his 1969 album Nashville Skyline — hat and acoustic guitar included. The package also includes a photo of Stewart and Dylan together during the filming of the latter’s “Blood In My Eyes” video during 1993.
Dylan voiced his support of the project in a statement announcing the album: “Captain Dave is a dreamer and a fearless innovator, a visionary of high order, very delicately tractable on the surface but beneath that, he’s a slamming, thumping, battering ram, very mystical but rational and sensitive when it comes to the hot irons of art forms. An explosive musician, deft guitar player, innately recognizes the genius in other people and puts it into play without being manipulative. With him, there’s mercifully no reality to yesterday. He is incredibly gracious and soulful, can command the ship and steer the course, dragger, trawler or man of war, Captain Dave.”
Stewart’s connection to Dylan’s music is long, as well as deeply felt.
He came to it as a teenager in Sunderland, England, at a time when a broken leg sidelined him from his serious pursuit of soccer. His mother had left the family and his beloved older brother had gone to college. Salvation of sorts came from a package sent by a cousin who’d moved to Memphis; it included pairs of Levi corduroy jeans and a couple of blues albums that Stewart, laid up and “bored out of my mind,” began to play incessantly — followed by Dylan.
“I think it was (1964’s) Another Side of Bob Dylan or something around that,” Stewart recalls. “And it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. And then I realized he obviously was influenced by the blues-type records I had. There’s certain moments in time when you know something happened to you, and that was one of them. I would smoke Thai sticks and lie on my back on the floor and put on Blonde On Blonde or something. All those songs were imprinted on my brain. The general public would probably think, like, ‘Dave Stewart, Eurythmics, singing Bob Dylan songs? Really?’ But when I was a kid, I was singing those songs in folk clubs. I knew them by heart, so on (Dave Does Dylan) I’m playing them like I was in a folk club again.”
Stewart connected with Dylan around 1985, when he was producing the self-titled debut album for former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey. “The phone rang and it was the receptionist in the studio, and she said, ‘Bob Dylan’s on the phone for Dave Stewart,’” he recalls. “I thought it was (Sharkey) just messing about, ’cause he knew I was a massive Bob Dylan fan. So I picked up the phone and went, ‘Feargal….’ And then (Dylan) started talking, and nobody could imitate that voice.”
Dylan proposed a meet-up and that evening he joined Stewart at nearby Thai restaurant for food and sake, then took him to a private Mexican club south of Los Angeles. “We sat there and we were talking in there for ages, and then Bob suggested, ‘Why don’t we make a (video) tomorrow?’” Stewart says with a laugh. “It was already, like, one in the morning, but I rang some people and pulled a thing together at a church right on Highland and we shot ‘Emotionally Yours.’ And then we did another one and we became friends.”
Stewart went on to film other videos for Dylan and also played on 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded. “We had jam sessions,” Stewart explains. “I have recordings of me and him around the kitchen table in my house in London, at one in the morning or something. To get to witness that happening, making up words on the spot and playing acoustic guitar and drinking tequila or whatever, those are experiences I’ll never forget — especially to have been a kid listening to (Dylan’s) record with a broken leg and my mom leaving home, there was a particularly sort of poignant feeling about it, and so I feel very privileged.
“I don’t know why or how it happened,” Stewart continues. “For some reason people find (Dylan) quite sort of reserved or whatever…but he wasn’t with me at all. At the time you think, ‘Oh, this is wild,’ but now, looking back as I’m older…you go, ‘God, yeah, I had that experience, and many other kinds of experiences with these incredible talents, and I’ll never forget them.’”
Stewart — who filmed an episode of Recorded Live at Analog that will premiere during July on PBS — says there’s a possibility of the other 10 Dylan songs he recorded turning into a second volume of Dave Sings Dylan, perhaps adding more to the pile. “It wasn’t very difficult to record, so, yeah, I may do that,” he says. “With an artist like Bob Dylan people say, ‘What’s your favorite song?’ and it’s impossible. I’ve got, like 99 favorite songs, so it wouldn’t be very hard to do more.”
As for A Complete Unknown, Stewart says that “Timothée Chalamet did a great performance along with the rest of the cast. For me, I felt that it only scratches the surface of Dylan as a songwriter — the spark that set the world on fire, and to this day, has not been equaled in his influence. Nothing since The Canterbury Tales has created such a paradigm shift in people’s idea of what songwriting can or could be.”
Depeche Mode are gearing up to release a full-length feature film chronicling the band’s massive 2023 shows in Mexico City on their Memento Mori tour. Depeche Mode: M, directed by award-winning Mexican filmmaker Fernando Frias (I’m No Longer Here, Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me), is due out later this year. Explore Explore See latest […]
Britpop legends Pulp have shared news of their first album in 24 years. The new LP, More, will be released on June 6 via Rough Trade, and will end their fan’s long wait for a follow-up to 2001’s We Love Life.
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The Jarvis Cocker-led band made the announcement on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music show on Thursday morning (Apr. 10) and shared the first taster in lead single “Spike Island.” Take a listen below.
Rumours of a new album had swirled in recent years following their reunion shows in 2023. The band split for the first time a year after 2002’s We Love Life, then reunited for a string of shows between 2011 and 2013, before another decade-long hiatus. During the tour they began playing new songs titled “Hymn of the North,” “Background Noise,” “Spike Island,” “My Sex,” and “Farmer’s Market,” all of which will appear on More.
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In late 2024, the band announced they had signed a record deal with Rough Trade, following their time on Island Records. The group released a standalone single, “After You,” in 2013.
In an accompanying statement, Cocker said, “Well: when we started touring again in 2023, we practiced a new song called ‘Hymn of the North’ during soundchecks & eventually played it at the end of our second night at Sheffield Arena. This seemed to open the floodgates: we came up with the rest of the songs on this album during the first half of 2024. A couple are revivals of ideas from the last century.”
He added, “The music for one song was written by [former Pulp member] Richard Hawley. The music for another was written by [All Seeing I band member] Jason Buckle. The Eno family sings backing vocals on a song. There are string arrangements written by Richard Jones and played by the Elysian Collective.
“The album was recorded over 3 weeks by James Ford in Walthamstow, London starting on November 18 2024. This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.” He added in a closing note that “no A.I. was involved during the process.”
The band is currently made up of Cocker, Candida Doyle (keyboards), Nick Banks (drums) and Mark Webber (guitar). Longstanding bass player Steve Mackey, who performed on their hit albums His N Hers (1994) and Different Class (1995), died in 2023 following a short illness.
In the coming months Pulp will play a number of shows in the U.K. including arenas in Glasgow, London, Birmingham and Manchester. They will co-headline a number of shows with LCD Soundsystem later this year in North America.
Pulp’s More tracklist
“Spike Island”“Tina”“Grown Ups”“Slow Jam”“Farmers Market”“My Sex”“Got to Have Love”“Background Noise”“Partial Eclipse”“The Hymn of the North”“A Sunset”
Machine Gun Kelly will see your jokes and raise you more jokes. The rap/rocker took to his Instagram Story on Tuesday (April 8) to double-down on an Onion headline tweaking the new dad just weeks after MGK’s former fiancée, actress Megan Fox, gave birth to the couple’s first child together.
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“Megan Fox Confirms She and New Baby Will Co-Parent Machine Gun Kelly,” read the lightly teasing headline, which MGK re-posted along with three laughing crying emoji. That same reel featured a re-post of footage of the rapper performing his 2024 Trippie Redd collab “Beauty,” with a caption that paid tribute to his first-born, 15-year-old daughter Casie Colson Baker. “the girl dad was performing his rap song ‘beauty’ at his birthday party on April 22, 2024, and his daughter casie was vibing to it. she knows it’s a bop,” it read.
In another slide, Kelly hangs with Casie and implores her not to read the comments on one of his performance videos. “Why? They’re not bad,” she says, as he frets, “I know but of them, just like, I see certain words and I’m like, ‘aaaahhh.’”
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In an Insta post titled “dad.,” Kelly, 34, appears in a series of selfies in which he wears all black outfits, goofs around with Casie, shows off his Rolls Royce and hangs with pals Travis Barker, Camila Cabello and Atlantic Records VP of A&R Keith “Keefa” Parker aka “Keefa Black.”
Fox gave birth to her fourth child — she has three others with former husband Brian Austin Green — on March 27. To date the formerly engaged pair have posted some face-obscured photos of their newborn daughter’s and not much else. But last month Kelly threw cold water on suggestions that they’d named their little girl “celestial seed.”
The confusion came after MGK announced in an Instagram post that he and Fox, 38, had welcomed their first child along with a picture of his daughter gripping his fingers, writing, “She’s finally here!! our little celestial seed. 3/27/25.” After headlines suggested that the baby’s name was actually “Celestial Seed,” MGK clarified in his Stories, “wait guys… her name isn’t ‘Celestial Seed’ [crying laughing emoji] her mom is gonna tell you the name when we’re ready.”
Metallica dropped the first trailer for their upcoming fan-focused documentary on Tuesday (April 8). Metallica Saved My Life, directed by the band’s longtime collaborator, Grammy-winner Jonas Åkerlund, will be screened in select cities on the band’s ongoing M72 world tour.
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In a statement, the group wrote, “Not quite finished yet, we want YOU to be among the first to see our latest film project by award-winning director Jonas Åkerlund, all about the lifeblood of this band: the fans. This documentary explores our world through the lives of fans who have supported each other through highs, lows, trials, and triumphs for over four decades.”
In the one-minute preview, drummer Lars Ulrich states, “Metallica is a state of mind” over mournful piano as the band’s other members begin the sentence “Metallica is…” as a series of fans offer up their thoughts on what the group means to them. “Unapologetically real, and vulnerable,” says one man, while a woman adds, “hope, freedom, escape.”
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A montage of long-time die-hards then open up about how the band gave them an identity as they describe themselves, variously, as a “dork… loner… a weirdo,” with one Black fan recalling how people would ask him, “why are you listening to this white people music?”
“I wanna hear ’em, I wanna hear ’em all,” singer/guitarist James Hetfield says of the variety of stories in the film directed by Åkerlund, who was also behind the camera for their 1998 video “Turn the Page,” as well as 1999’s “Whiskey in the Jar” and 2016’s “ManUNkind.” “Whatever you want to put on that… religion, cult, family, whatever label. I don’t care. It’s a gathering of like-minded people that are there to celebrate life.”
In a statement the band said, “As a few of you may know, we’ve been working behind the scenes the last couple of years on a new film that will be released later this year starring you guys! Metallica Saved My Life explores our world through the lives of fans who have supported each other through highs, lows, trials and triumphs for over four decades. And yeah, we’re in it a little bit too.” The full doc, which will feature all four band members as well as actor Jason Momoa, is slated for release later this year.
Click here to find out more details about the locations and dates for the North American screenings of the unfinished film from April through June, which will be phone-free and have a two ticket per person limit.
Metallica will get back on the road for the continuation of the M72 tour on April 19 at the JMA Wireless Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. This week the band also announced a collaboration with the American Red Cross for blood drives on their upcoming 2025 U.S. dates. Donors of all blood types are encouraged to make an appointment to give by clicking here; donors must be 17 in most states (or 16 with parental consent where allowed by state law) and weigh at least 110 pounds and be in general good health to be eligible to donate.
Check out the trailer for Metallica Saved My Life below.