The toxicology tests were released this week, and the Houston Chronicle reported on the results Thursday night on its Web site. The newspaper also reported that Navaira was arrested for driving while intoxicated in September 2000.
Navaira was driving his tour bus March 23 when it slammed into the freeway barrels, throwing him through the windshield. Doctors performed two brain surgeries and repaired an aneurysm on his right lung.
Beginning Thursday, anyone can cast a vote for entertainer nominees Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, George Strait, Keith Urban or Rascal Flatts at http://www.voteacm.com.
All five will perform during the show, which CBS will be broadcast live from Las Vegas at 8 p.m. Eastern.
Two couples found tattered halves of the inflatable swine in their yards, a few miles from festival grounds in the Southern California desert.
Concert organizers had offered a $10,000 reward for the pig’s return. On Tuesday, pieces of the plastic carcass were examined.
“The first day was really difficult for her. She really has caught her breath,” her management consultant, John Dotson, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “She did vocals yesterday and will do vocals today.
McCready told The New York Daily News on Monday that she “cannot refute anything” in the newspaper’s original report posted Sunday night on its Web site. The story said Clemens and McCready met in a Florida karaoke bar when she was a 15-year-old aspiring singer and he was a 28-year-old pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and a married father of two.
The chart-topping group has allowed the international music network to produce a video set to "All I Need" from its latest hit album "In Rainbows" which MTV will air from Thursday and make available to broadcasters.
The MTV EXIT (End Exploitation and Trafficking) Campaign (http://www.mtvexit.org) has made a video shown in split screen, one side depicting a day in the life of an affluent young child and the other of a child forced to work in a sweatshop.
The outdoor Glastonbury festival is a cornerstone of Britain's music calendar. But this year's festival has yet to sell out, in contrast to past years when tickets were snapped up within hours.
Gallagher, whose band headlined the festival in 1995 and 2004, said rap was to blame.
The 70-year-old has recorded a hip-hop album set for release next month. “Cosby Narratives Vol. 1: State of Emergency” blends the comedian’s concepts and stories with a hip-hop, pop and jazz soundtrack.
“I do not rap on any of these things,” Cosby said Monday. “I wouldn’t know how to fix my mouth to say some of the words.”
“I wrote that song in the 9th grade for a talent show,” said the 18-year-old Swift, who won the night’s top honor over Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley and Sugarland. “I never thought it would be on an album, never thought I’d record it, never thought it would be a single, never thought it would be No. 1 and certainly never thought it would win video and female video of the year.”
The Flamingo Las Vegas says Braxton’s show will remain dark this week while the 40-year-old Grammy winner has more medical tests following her April 7 hospitalization for chest pain. Braxton was released the following day, but last week’s shows were canceled.
Flamingo President Don Marrandino said her Tuesday-through-Saturday shows are also off, and Braxton will take advantage of a previously scheduled two-week break.
The U.S. Coast Guard rescued Irioska María Nodarse, Elvis Manuel’s mother, who manages his musical group, and 13 other people in the Florida Straits on Wednesday, two weeks after they left Pinar Del Rio seeking to make the passage to Florida. Five others, including Elvis Manuel, 19, one of Cuba’s biggest musical stars, could not be found and were presumed dead after rescue efforts were called off over the weekend.
Twelve of the 14 survivors, including Irioska María Nodarse, were returned to Cuba on Saturday; the two others, believed to have been the group’s U.S.-based smugglers, were in custody.
But then the onstage DJ spins “Crazy Bitch,” the signature hit from resurgent rock band Buckcherry’s third album, “15.” For three minutes and 22 seconds, the Kid Rock partisans have only Buckcherry on the brain, singing every word while dancing and pumping fists with such ferocity you’d think the band itself was onstage.
It’s a moment of pure rock ‘n’ roll transcendence — and a clear illustration of the transcendence Buckcherry has made from what manager Allen Kovac calls “beyond dead” to a return-to-platinum status with 2006’s “15.”
The joint venture with be called Tag Records, a nod to Procter & Gamble's's Tag body sprays. It will be run by Island Urban president Jermaine Dupri, who helped produce the latest sales disappointment by his girlfriend, Janet Jackson.
Tag Records will unveil its first signing in May, and is promising a marketing budget 10 times the going rate of $1 million or so for most artists.
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: “‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. ‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”
Keys, 27, said she’s read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck “to symbolize strength, power and killing ’em dead,” according to an interview in the magazine’s May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.
Backed by music mogul Clive Davis, the budding British diva has already drawn endless comparisons to Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston for her booming voice. No less than Oprah Winfrey fawned over her talents on a recent show. She even managed to win over Simon Cowell, who fell in love with her talent when she won “The X Factor,” the British version of “American Idol.” Cowell and Davis both executive-produced her debut album, “Spirit,” which was released in the U.S. this week.
“It was blindingly obvious when this girl came on the show that this wasn’t just someone who had the potential to be a good singer, this was someone who had a potential to be a star,” Cowell said.
That decision tells you a lot about Cloud Cult, a ragtag crew of musicians and painters who put more value on their unique brand of DIY environmentalism than on record sales; and who fill their records with painfully sincere songs about grief and loss, and then set them to raging hard rock guitars, soaring strings and weird studio trickery.
Somehow, it all works. While still far off the mainstream radar, Cloud Cult has earned acclaim and a growing audience for their passionate rock. They did show up at this year’s recent South by Southwest, and staged several well-attended performances for their sprawling live show (which features two artists painting onstage the entire time). An anticipated new album will be released April 8.
She quickly found some possibilities, and set out on what she figured would be a two-week vacation.
Instead, it turned into an adventure of more than three months that refreshed her personally and professionally. The results can be heard on her new disc, “Another Country,” made up of songs written on a piano in a Paris apartment.
"I've had an idea for a long time, which might sound a little crazy, but I really want to look into holographic touring," Tankian told Billboard.
"I think we could reduce our need to travel if we could project ourselves into meetings and concerts. We have the technology, and we're not using it right now."
The Purple One will be the featured act on day two of the giant summer music festival, a three-day affair that runs April 25-27 in Indio, Calif.
He joins a lineup that includes Jack Johnson and Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd singer-songwriter who will close the festival.
On Monday, they celebrated their upcoming 65-city North American tour, which starts May 17, with a private performance at the famed Houdini House in the Hollywood Hills. The Grammy-winning band performed a tight, 30-minute set, and it felt like the ’90s as they rocked hits including “Plush,” “Vasoline” and “Big Empty.”
The quartet — singer Scott Weiland, guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo and drummer Eric Kretz — each took on solo projects during the band’s split. Weiland’s group, Velvet Revolver, was arguably the most successful. That group, which includes former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, announced on April 1 that Weiland was no longer a member: Slash claimed Weiland’s “increasingly erratic on-stage behavior and personal problems have forced us to move on.”
“We’re going to go ahead and cancel her shows tonight and for the rest of the week,” Flamingo Las Vegas hotel-casino and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. spokeswoman Deanna Pettit said Wednesday. “We expect she’ll return to the stage next Tuesday.”
Pettit says the 40-year-old Grammy winner is recovering at home following her release Tuesday afternoon after precautionary tests at a Las Vegas area hospital.
The singer made the announcement in a big-screen broadcast at the Boston Red Sox home opener Tuesday, during the traditional eighth-inning sing-along of his “Sweet Caroline,” which has become an anthem for Boston fans.
The Red Sox unveiled a new scoreboard video of Diamond in a Red Sox jacket singing his 1969 hit. Red Sox owner Tom Werner also appeared in the video.
Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.
The festival will open Aug. 1 in Chicago’s Grant Park, near Lake Michigan.
Festival founder Perry Farrell calls this year’s lineup “a gorgeous array of talent.”
“Eyeeeeee feel Good!” Dora Morrow shouts into a microphone, then growls her best James Brown. "Like I knew that I would …”
If it’s not loud enough to wake the dead, it's loud enough to show that she isn’t among them, even though Dora and her 25 friends in this rehearsal hall have a combined age of 2,000 years.
The late tenor’s manager said Monday the bitter cold made a live performance impossible at the 2006 Winter Games.
The conductor, Leone Magiera, reveals in a book that the rousing rendition of “Nessun Dorma” (“Let No One Sleep”) was prerecorded because “it would have been too dangerous for him to give a live performance in that physical condition.”
Feist, who records by her last name, earned Junos for best artist and songwriter Saturday during a nontelevised industry awards show in Calgary.
The following night, she grabbed three more trophies for single (”1234”) and album and pop album (”The Reminder”) during a nationwide telecast on the CTV network.
The new material recently surfaced on Los Angeles-based music blog Pretty Much Amazing. The four songs — “Close Your Eyes,” “Ready,” “One Day,” and “With a Little Bit of Luck” — have varying sound quality, indicating that the tracks are in different stages of the recording process.
“I write all the time — lots of stuff not meant to ever be released, just working on ideas,” the inaugural “American Idol” champ told Billboard.com of the leaked work. “The fact that people have heard music that’s not ready yet sucks, but I hope they like it.”
“Exene (Cervenka) and I are talking about trying to write some X songs,” Doe tells Billboard.com. “We’re going to take it a step at a time, see how this (tour) goes, and if we’re all enjoying ourselves and feeling creative, then we’ll continue. We’ll just have to do it when we have the time.”
Doe says that even though the band — which also includes original guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake — sounds hot these days, the notion of new material, X’s first since “Hey Zeus!” in 1993, is still intimidating.
“Exene (Cervenka) and I are talking about trying to write some X songs,” Doe tells Billboard.com. “We’re going to take it a step at a time, see how this (tour) goes, and if we’re all enjoying ourselves and feeling creative, then we’ll continue. We’ll just have to do it when we have the time.”
Doe says that even though the band — which also includes original guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer DJ Bonebrake — sounds hot these days, the notion of new material, X’s first since “Hey Zeus!” in 1993, is still intimidating.
Best Buy Co. was ranked behind Wal-Mart and iTunes, with Amazon.com and Target tied for the fourth spot in January and February, according to consumer surveys conducted by The NPD Group.
The firm tabulated units sold, counting every 12 digital downloads as one CD. It did not count sales revenue, nor mobile music sales.
The announcement came two days after Weiland was ousted from Velvet Revolver, the all-star band he ditched Stone Temple Pilots for in 2003.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Velvet Revolver cited his “increasingly erratic on-stage behavior and personal problems.” Weiland angrily countered the next day that his bandmates were “discontents” engaged in a “a blatant and tired excuse to cover up the truth,” which was that the band had not been getting along for some time.
They’re no longer kids, and they were dressed more like very cool professionals than adolescent heartthrobs, but the reaction of the crowd showed that they haven’t lost any of the visceral appeal that launched the archetypal boy band to superstardom 20 years ago.
Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp. are participating in the new venture, dubbed MySpace Music, which will roll out gradually in coming months.
By the time all of this was done, it was just past noon. Her afternoon consisted of another radio interview, and in the evening she returned to the studio to work on mastering the album, “E-MC2” — due April 15 via Island Def Jam.
If “E-MC2” scores big, Carey could find herself in elite chart company. She’s currently tied at No. 2 with Elvis Presley for the most Hot 100 No. 1 singles, with 17. The Beatles hold the crown with 20.
R.E.M., “Accelerate”
R.E.M.’s first album in four years shoehorns 11 tracks of jagged guitars, quick and dirty drums, and Michael Stipe’s gruff keen into 34 minutes, rocking with a blacker, blunter edge than “Document,” “Green” or “Monster.” Armed with deadpan “wow’s” and “T-Rex moves” honed from 1996’s ”Wake-Up Bomb,” Stipe limns politics, the media and the velocity of modern life with gimlet eyes, from the strutting ”don’t turn your talking points on me” of “Living Well’s the Best Revenge” to the candid “uncertainty is suffocating” of the title track. A ’70s jukebox grit dominates “Mansized Wreath,” while Peter Buck’s cool riff for first single “Supernatural Superserious” strikes like a cartoon mallet. “Accelerate” may not stun on impact like some R.E.M. records, but it’s still habit-forming.
George Strait, “Troubadour”
George Strait is one of music’s most consistent hitmakers for a reason — he knows a hit song when he hears one, and he sings it only if it fits him. “Troubadour” is chock-full of classic Strait. “I Saw God Today” is a perfect example of a track that speaks to the country core, while the title cut finds the singer reconciling his age with how old he feels. “When You’re in Love” cleverly equates romance with a vacation destination (“There’s so much to see and do when you’re in love”), and “River of Love” will have women swooning at King George’s invitation to a “stream of kissin’ about 10 miles long.” “House of Cash,” with Patty Loveless, is a powerful tribute to the Cash family home, lost to fire a year ago.
Sun Kil Moon, “April”
With a Modest Mouse covers collection out of his system, Mark Kozelek is back to sketching his signature tales of love poisoned by expectation on his second album as Sun Kil Moon. Evenly divided between the distorted guitar epics of the last two Red House Painters albums (“The Light”) and spartan voice-and-acoustic confessionals (“Lucky Man”), “April” is the aural equivalent of that heartbreak that never heals. “Moorestown” and “Blue Orchids” set the bar high, with Kozelek’s fixation on little details (“Her walls are Mediterranean blue / Her baby sister picked the hue”) setting crystalline scenes. Kozelek never sugarcoats; the sting is almost tangible when he chronicles a failed romance on “Tonight in Bilbao,” and the loss of a loved one is literally as haunting as a ghost on “Unlit Hallway,” the first of two ace pairings with Will Oldham. Throughout, Kozelek connects memory to emotion with masterful strokes.
Moby, “Last Night”
Madonna, Seal: Big pop stars who started as dance artists have circled back to the floor on their latest albums. But “Last Night,” Moby’s homage to/reconstruction of New York dance music over the course of his 42-year lifetime, is the only one that causes the desired effect: making you feel about the artist the way you did when you first heard him. The guy who sold millions of records by stretching gospel samples into lush sonic pastiches is still here — just listen to “Live Tomorrow.” But so is the one who created ’92 rave anthem “Go” — the frantic piano riff and snare rolls of “Stars” give him away. Then there’s the best ’80s-style radio-friendly house track since the ’80s (“Disco Lies”), and Kudu vocalist Sylvia Gordon closing it down with an apocalyptic torch song. Forget “Play.” This is the definitive Moby album.
Van Morrison, “Keep It Simple”
Forty years on, a new Van Morrison album is still welcome. “Keep It Simple” is his first collection of all-new material since 2005, and as the title hints, there’s not a lot of embellishment, just a kind of basic, rhythmic and melodic flow. “That’s Entrainment” is one of the better tunes, the title referring to Morrison’s word for hitting the sweet spot in a situation or performance. “How Can a Poor Boy” shows his streetwise side, with what sounds like a Hammond B-3 providing the muscle. “Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore,” a declaration of domestication, is either a brazen rewrite or affectionate tribute to Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” The album is front-loaded with these relatively energetic tracks. Much of the rest is resigned, reflective and spiritually attuned, but not always keenly focused.
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The Black Keys, “Attack and Release”
Throughout four proper albums, the Black Keys hewed to a no-nonsense formula: guitar, drums, vocals, period. It was so satisfyingly simple and raw, it’s likely that the duo could successfully have deployed it again. But, to paraphrase the old saying, you can’t know what you’ve been missing until you’ve had it, and on “Attack & Release,” we have it. Danger Mouse, the first producer to work with the Keys, takes on a role akin to gardener: He nurtures the duo’s innate musicality, allowing its elemental blues-rock to bloom into something far grander. Clever but tasteful arrangements and an impeccable shine make songs like “Same Old Thing” seem anything but. The heavy, dirge-like “Lies” and the playful, faux-spooky “Psychotic Girl,” which melds whimsical keyboard with earthy banjo and slide guitar, are but two of many highlights.
Akwid, “La Novela”
This sibling duo of brothers Sergio and Francisco Gmez broke ground nearly a decade ago by blending traditional banda beats with rap and hip-hop. Here, the brothers expand their sound by incorporating a broad variety of regional Mexican rhythms — from norteno to cumbias adorned with rippling accordions — as the basis for tales of growing up poor in the hood. This mix of grittiness and sophistication strikes just the right note, achieving cohesiveness despite a changing cast of guest acts that includes Fidel Rueda, Voces del Rancho, Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Jenni Rivera (on a clever English-language track). With its perpetual change of pace in music and lyrics, “La Novela” is riveting, and it works as a vehicle for singles and as a stand-alone piece of music. Equally important, it’s an example of on-target evolution within a niche genre.
Now, Dr Pepper thinks it’s up to the challenge. The soft drink company says it will give a free can of Dr Pepper to “everyone in America” (excluding ex-Guns members Slash and Buckethead) if “Chinese Democracy” arrives anytime during the calendar year 2008.
Rose responded on his band’s web site (http://www.gunsnroses.com) that the band was “surprised and very happy to have the support of Dr Pepper.” But the offer did not prompt him to rise to the challenge.
When was the last time you made a mixtape? Until five minutes ago, the answer for me was, "It’s been so long, I don’t remember." But now, thanks to Muxtape.com the answer is, "Just five minutes ago. Want to hear it?"
Muxtape.com makes it easy to assemble a mixtape that’s as easy to share as sending someone a link. After an incredibly simple signup process, you’re able to upload MP3 files no larger than 10 megabytes each, up to a total of 12 songs. Once your muxtape is complete, you can send a link ([your login].muxtape.com) to anyone, who will be able to stream your muxtape in his or her browser.
In short: wow is this cool. I’m absolutely in love with the idea of the muxtape, and the site’s interface is clean, simple, and thoroughly functional. Almost everything works well (besides a minor bug or two). Everything looks great, and the concept is stellar.
The Roots, Ricky Skaggs, Los Lonely Boys, the Neville Brothers and Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead are among the headliners for eight simultaneous Earth Day festivals planned at major cities around the U.S. on April 20, organizers said Tuesday.
The free events will be staged at parks in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco. The flagship event will be the Earth Day 2008 celebration on the National Mall in Washington.
The “Toyota Concert Series on TODAY” will continue its tradition of bringing TODAY viewers the hottest artists in the industry continuing all the way into the fall. America’s favorite morning program will also feature some surprise guests and blasts-from-the-past performances, which will be announced throughout the series.
As Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills follow the first single’s edit-it-yourself video with the album’s launch on iLike and a worldwide tour, frontman Stipe spoke to Billboard.com about the set’s “really fast, really raw” take on politics, teenage geekdom and the media; and how he and his bandmates “worked really hard to try to upset the things we had gotten bogged down in.”
Known simply as Cachao, the Grammy-winning musician had fallen ill in the past week and died surrounded by family members at Coral Gables Hospital, spokesman Nelson Albareda said.
Cachao left communist Cuba and came to the United States in the early 1960s. He continued to perform into his late 80s, including a performance after the death of trombonist Generoso Jimenez in September 2007.
“The topsoil there has been destroyed,” he says, “and who knows what kind of damage all those bombs have caused to the ecosystems in the Middle East?”
Many bands these days are claiming the “green” label, but their concern often starts at the merchandise table and ends at the recycling bin. Not so for the System of a Down frontman-turned-solo artist, who sees beyond silos and realizes that issues like electoral reform, recognition of the Armenian genocide, poverty and the environment are all related.
Navaira, 45, known to his fans simply as Emilio, was behind the wheel of his tour bus before dawn Sunday following a weekend show when it slammed into an interchange barrier on a Houston-area freeway, propelling him through the windshield.
Police said while the crash remained under investigation, their preliminary probe showed Navaira was not licensed to drive the 26,000-pound bus. His agent said the singer loved to drive it and normally did.
The pop star is gearing up for his first tour of the United States and Canada in 17 years, opening a multi-city “25 Live” tour in San Diego on June 17, Michael announced Monday. The tour is scheduled to wrap in Sunrise, Fla., on Aug. 3,
Other stops include Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New York, Boston, Toronto and Montreal.
She already had gained fame for what some saw as a comic choice to cover Britney Spear’s “Toxic,” singing a soulful, poignant version of the commercial hit while playing piano.
But Naim, 29, whose self-titled new album was just released in the United States two months earlier than originally planned following the success of the Apple ad, says she’s not worried about being seen as too commercial.
