The Interrupters have premiered a new song called “Anything Was Better,” a track off the band’s upcoming album, In the Wild.
“This song is the story of my escape from not necessarily a location but from the pain and trauma of my upbringing,” says frontwoman Aimee Interrupter. “It’s also a story of hope and seeking refuge in the unknown. I said goodbye to everyone and everything I ever knew because in my mind anything was better than where I was from.”
You can listen to “Anything Was Better” now via digital outlets. An accompanying lyric video is streaming now on YouTube.
“Anything Was Better” is the second song to be released off In the Wild, following lead single “In the Mirror.” The album arrives in full on August 5.
The Interrupters will be supporting In the Wild on a co-headlining tour with Flogging Molly, which launches June 7 in Indianapolis.
A dream come true is how Laverne Cox describes the news of a new Tribute Collection Barbie Doll created in her likeness. In celebration of Cox’s 50th birthday on May 29 and to continue their commitment to increasing diversity across their collections, Barbie worked closely with the award-winning LGBTQ+ advocate to create a doll reflective of her appearance and style.
To help bring the doll to life, available for purchase May 25, Barbie’s design team researched her red carpet looks, and utilized skin tone and body sculpts samples that got Cox’s mark of approval.
“We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate award-winning actress, producer, writer and LGBTQ+ rights trailblazer Laverne Cox with a doll,” said Lisa McKnight, executive vice president and global head of Barbie and Dolls, Mattel. “We are proud to highlight the importance of inclusion and acceptance at every age and to recognize Laverne’s significant impact on culture with a Tribute Collection Barbie.”
Cox said Wednesday she’s been waiting for this moment for many years.
“It’s been a dream for years to work with Barbie to create my own doll,” she said.“I can’t wait for fans to find my doll on shelves and have the opportunity to add a Barbie doll modeled after a transgender person to their collection. I hope that people can look at this Barbie and dream big like I have in my career. The space of dreaming and manifesting is such a powerful source and leads you to achieve more than what you originally thought was possible.”
As part of the launch, Barbie is also making a donation in Cox’s name to TransFamilySOS, a nonprofit close to Laverne’s heart dedicated to creating a more gender affirming and accepting community.
The new Tribute Collection Laverne Cox Barbie Doll is available online.
Maren Morris, Tim McGraw and Mickey Guyton are among the celebrities who turned to social media to share their shock and horror following a mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school Tuesday. The shooting claimed the lives of 19 children and two adults.
“Imagine you walk down a hall & an entire class…GONE,” wrote Maren, adding that the number of child fatalities amounted to the size of a small school class. “I’ve already lost track of which shooting happened even a year ago. The victim’s families haven’t and never will.”
“There are no words. I’m broken and terrified,” Mickey wrote. “As a mother, when is enough enough.” Mickey and Maren hail from the state where the shooting took place.
Tim posted a lengthy message to his social media, expressing his sorrow for the families who lost children and sharing some of his thoughts on the prevalence of mass shootings in America.
“Divisive rhetoric has done zero to help this problem — it’s only made it worse,” he wrote. “For one minute, let’s set aside our idealistic views and concentrate on the kind of world we want our children to grow up in.”
He added, “This shouldn’t have been acceptable 20 years ago, 4 years ago or one week ago. This SHOULD NOT be acceptable. This is not normal.”
The shooting took place at Robb Elementary School. The 18-year-old suspect, identified by law enforcement sources and Gov. Greg Abbott as Salvador Ramos, a student at Uvalde High School, is also dead.
Blink-182‘s Mark Hoppus and Fall Out Boy‘s Pete Wentz are part of a team launching a new “venture capital music startup” called Verswire.
Founded by Sherry Saeedi, who previously co-founded the streaming platform Veeps, Verswire was conceived as a “development incubator” rather than a traditional record label.
“Using the ‘Shark Tank’ ideology, Verswire acts as a venture capital fund that views artists as entrepreneurs, tailoring each with a custom investment that includes funding, resources, tools, A-list mentoring, support from prominent music executives, and an ecosystem to own and operate their businesses within while allowing them to keep majority ownership of their masters,” a press release reads.
Hoppus is Verswire’s partner of A&R and is also among the mentors who will be partnered with each Verswire signee. Wentz, meanwhile, is a “strategic advisor.”
“I am very excited to help build a new way for bands and artists to create music for communities, while retaining ownership of their work,” Hoppus says.
Wentz adds, “I’ve been a fan of Sherry and the work she’s done for years, and look forward to being part of Verswire’s journey.”
Verswire’s first signing is a band called Beauty School Dropout, who just released a new song called “Assassin.” Hoppus, who mentored the group, appears in the track’s accompanying video, along with Wentz and Paris Jackson.
The viral music collective Rockin’1000 has shared a rendition of the Foo Fighters classic “My Hero” in honor of the band’s late drummer, Taylor Hawkins.
The performance, which featured 1,000 musicians playing together simultaneously, took place during a Rockin’1000 concert in Paris earlier this month. You can watch it streaming now on YouTube.
Rockin’1000, of course, has a special connection to Foo Fighters. The project made its debut in 2015 by gathering 1,000 musicians to play the Foos song “Learn to Fly” in an effort to convince Dave Grohl and company to perform a concert in founder Fabio Zaffagnini‘s hometown of Cesena, Italy.
Video of the performance — which now has over 60 million views on YouTube — soon went viral and caught the attention of the Foos themselves; they played a show in Cesena later in 2015.
Rockin’1000 has continued over the past seven years performing concerts around the world and has collaborated with musicians including Courtney Love.
Hawkins passed away on March 25. He was 50 years old.
Paula Abdul turns the big 6-0 on June 19 and, ahead of her milestone birthday, the Grammy winner teased how she plans to ring in her special day.
“I’m gonna do something big,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “Maybe charter a yacht or go somewhere exotic [and] take some friends.” Although she has lofty goals for her 60th birthday, Paula joked, “Knowing me, I’ll stay home [and] be with my dogs.”
The “Straight Up” singer continued, “I wanna do something fun and something spectacular … Every day we [should] celebrate ourselves. We are above ground. We are living. We are healthy. You know what? We’re celebrating really important things in life.”
Paula also spoke about getting to do something just as fun as celebrating a big birthday — serving as judge on ABC’s upcoming competition series The American Rescue Dog Show. The singer, along with fellow judges Yvette Nicole Brown and Leslie Jordan, will determine which rescue pooch is top dog in categories such as “Best in Snoring.”
“My heart’s gonna be melting [over] the cute factor, of course, and the sweet factor,” she gushed. “I wish I could take all of these dogs home … We will be aww-ing and ooh-ing and oh my God-ing.”
Paula added the show is all the more special to her because she has “rescued dogs for decades” and thinks rescue pets are “so special.”
“I hope that this show actually makes everyone tune in and that everyone adopts a dog. They’re magical. They’re so sensitive to our human feelings and they make everything better,” she raved. “I can’t imagine life without rescuing dogs. I really can’t. I have the coolest rescue dogs.”
Denise Truscello/BSLV/Getty Images for Brandcasting, Inc
Britney Spears, like many people, is an outspoken fan of Euphoria, and a since-deleted Instagram post has fans buzzing that she could make a cameo on the popular HBO drama.
Sharing a short video of her hanging out with The Weeknd and Euphoria director Sam Levinson, the Grammy winner revealed, “Here’s me today meeting the director of @euphoria today and @theweeknd,” which has fans scrambling over the possibility of Britney’s return to acting.
Britney’s fiancé, Sam Asghari, further fueled rumors by commenting, “New character in Euphoria?” In addition, The Weeknd commented with a single red heart emoji.
While the “Toxic” singer spent much of her post focusing on Euphoria, fans also pointed out The Weeknd is currently working on a music-industry drama series called The Idol, which he co-wrote with Levinson. The series follows a female pop star who falls in love with a Los Angeles club owner who is also a cult leader.
That series is currently going under a “new creative direction,” which means the show’s “adjusting its cast and crew accordingly,” according to an HBO spokesperson. It is currently unknown how or if Britney fits into the equation.
Also in Britney’s post, she spoke about having clarity in her life and opened up about being forced into “840 hours” of therapy against her will. She also revealed that, seven months prior to being committed against her will, she had been meeting with charities to help Hillary Clinton “cut the red string for the key to Las Vegas,” but the opportunity never arose. “That’s Hollywood for you,” she remarked.
Scotty McCreery was a baseball player in high school, but his focus has since shifted to a more mellow sport: golf.
When he’s not on the road entertaining his legion of fans, you can find Scotty on a golf course, who plays about two or three times a week when he’s at home. The singer has been playing golf since he was six years old and said he ended up with a score of 74 in his best round of golf. “I was pretty pumped,” he tells PGATour.
As for his favorite course in the country, Scotty cites Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. “It’s like walking into the Land of Oz, it’s unbelievable,” he describes, adding that Tiger Woods is his favorite player of all time.
While he plays golf for fun, the North Carolina native says that being onstage is where he feels most comfortable, noting that the similarity between golf and singing is the pressure.
“In golf, you got to hit the shot. When people are watching onstage, thousands of folks out there watching, you got to make sure you deliver. I enjoy the pressure when I’m singing, golf wise probably not so much,” Scotty laughs. “I don’t mind the pressure onstage.”
Among the many other golf fans in the country community are Darius Rucker, Charles Kelley of Lady A and Jake Owen.
A star-studded environmental-themed festival called Atlantis Concert for Earth that will feature live and virtual performances will be held July 22 and 23.
The live show will take place on the rim of a volcano crater on Sete Cidades in Portugal’s Azores islands. The concert will include a virtual performance by Sting, and the lineup also features Julian Lennon, Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, Black Eyed Peas, Pitbull, Nicole Scherzinger, Mod Sun and others. Scherzinger also will serve as host.
Atlantis Concert for Earth is a nonprofit event that will celebrate global conservation. In addition to the music performances, the show will highlight the work of a variety of conservationists and organizations focused on the environment, including Lennon’s White Feather Foundation.
On July 23, the event will be streamed for free at the Veeps platform, and viewers will be encouraged to donate money, 100 percent of which will benefit the organizations showcased by the festival.
The event was conceptualized in part by Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, who was born in the Azores and who recently collaborated with Julian on a cover of his late dad John Lennon‘s classic peace anthem, “Imagine.”
“These days, words Climate and Climate Crisis trigger so many different emotions from all walks of life,” said Bettencourt.
He adds, “[T]ogether during Concert for Earth we are taking our universal language and power of music to celebrate the Conservationists and Entrepreneurs from around the world who are game changers leading the way with real, tangible solutions to flip the current narrative of climate and conservation from blame, anger, and doom; to positivity and hope by shining a light on inspirational SOLUTIONS to get us back in balance with our planet.”
Ever since Kelly Clarkson started doing fan-voted cover songs in her live shows, people have asked for her to release those covers. The call intensified after Kelly made cover songs, aka “Kellyoke,” a daily feature of her talk show. In other words, we’ve been waiting a lifetime for a moment like this — and now we’re finally getting it.
Kelly has announced that a six-song EP titled Kellyoke will arrive June 9. It’ll feature Kelly’s takes on Linda Ronstadt‘s “Blue Bayou,” The Weeknd‘s “Call Out My Name,” Radiohead‘s “Fake Plastic Trees,” Whitney Houston‘s “Queen of the Night” and Billie Eilish‘s “Happier Than Ever,” the latter of which is out now on all digital platforms.
Kelly originally performed “Happier Than Ever” on her show September 30 of last year. In this studio version, she definitely does not shy away from the profanity in the song.
“Music is in the DNA of everything I do, so when The Kelly Clarkson Show started we knew it was the perfect way to kick off every episode,” Kelly says in a statement. “Over 500 songs later, and we’re still not running out of amazing artists to pay tribute to. Picking just six was near-impossible, but these songs have been some of my favorites. Thanks for singing along with me, y’all!”
