If you need a guitar to help tell the story of your life, look no further than the Mike Ness 1976 Les Paul Deluxe.
The Social Distortion frontman has teamed up with Gibson to create a new signature guitar, inspired by his own beloved 1976 Les Paul Deluxe Goldtop.
The Ness Les Paul, which will set you back $8,999, replicates the original’s gold and “aged” finish, and even comes complete with Ness’ signature stickers. For more info, visit Gibson.com.
Ness will be bringing his Les Paul on the road with him on Social Distortion’s upcoming European tour, kicking off in May. The band will be back in the U.S. in November to play the 2022 Outlaw Country West concert cruise.
Charli XCX:Alone Togetherwas released today on Hulu, giving the world an intimate glance at how the “Boom Clap” singer and her fans struggled through the pandemic.
The documentary-style film provides a raw, unflinching glimpse at Charli’s own mental health battles that lockdown exacerbated because she was cut off from her main line of support — her fanbase. But, the movie is also a story of triumph because it also follows the Grammy nominee making her socially distanced new album, how i’m feeling now. In addition, it documents how Charli connected with her followers and how their input helped shape her 2020 studio work and her understanding of her own mental health issues.
The film’s directors, Pablo Jones-Soler and Bradley Bell said in a statement, “We hope that audiences walk away seeing the value of human connection and the importance of community. We live in a highly individualized society but we have seen that as human beings we thrive when we work, talk, move, love and support collectively. For both Charli and the fans, we see the power of togetherness to heal and creatively push boundaries during an incredibly difficult time period.”
Charli XCX: Alone Together is available now in theaters and on Hulu. In addition, she recently released her new single “Good Ones,” which is the lead single off her upcoming fifth studio album, Crash, that’s due out March 18.
Luke Combs just keeps rolling out peeks and hints into his next album. The singer shared rough mixes of two as-yet-unreleased songs this week on Twitter.
One, “Five-Leaf Clover,” is a gratitude-filled ballad that Luke’s been trying out live during his tour stops recently. The other is “Tomorrow Me,” a song he debuted with just his acoustic guitar on social media in summer 2021.
“Another little taste of something y’all may or may not have heard,” Luke wrote when he shared the snippets of the two songs.
Around New Year’s, Luke told fans he was hard at work on his third studio album, and in the weeks since, he’s been making good on his promise to get new music ready for fans’ ears. Meanwhile, his current single, “Doin’ This,” is inside country radio’s Top 30.
Luke shared exciting personal news with fans last week, too. He and his wife, Nicole, are expecting their first child, a baby boy.
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Interscope Records
Billie Eilish may have had the best of intentions when launching her new art contest with Adobe, where a grand prize winner would be the designer of her new tour t-shirt and get hooked up with $10,000, but the competition is falling flat among critics.
Professional artists have spoken out against the contest and are using their social media platforms to tell aspiring creatives not to enter Billie’s contest. Among the naysayers is TikTok user meganroseruiz, a popular illustrator, who shared a video Thursday — that’s already amassed over a million views — where she called the contest “exploitative and dangerous.”
There are two main criticisms about Billie’s contest — one being that people won’t be paid fairly for their work and the other being that artists will be giving Billie or Adobe the rights to their work, meaning they’ll be able to “take [your design] and put it on merchandise without paying you, even if you don’t win,” which meganroseruiz claims is laid out in the contest’s Terms of Service.
Other artists condemned Billie because the contest asks her fans to design an official piece of merchandise for free. These artists argue that, while fans may be tempted by the idea of working with Billie and gaining exposure by being featured on her platform, they should be paid fairly for their time and effort.
Billie nor Adobe have responded to the mounting criticism.
The Dirty Knobs, the band fronted by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, will release their second studio album, External Combustion, on March 4.
The album, a follow-up to 2020’s Wreckless Abandon, can be pre-ordered now, and will be available on CD, via digital formats, and as a vinyl LP pressed on standard black vinyl or limited-edition green translucent vinyl.
The 11-track collection features guest appearances by Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople fame and acclaimed alt-country artist Margo Price on the respective songs “Dirty Job” and “State of Mind.” In addition, Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench plays piano on a tune titled “Lightning Boogie.”
Campbell wrote most of the songs on External Combustion during the past year, although two tunes date back to the 1990s, and were recently rediscovered in Mike’s vault of unreleased tracks.
The album’s lead track, “Wicked Mind,” has been released as an advance digital single, and a companion music video has premiered on Campbell’s official YouTube channel.
The amusing clip begins with Mike in a coffin that an alluring yet sinister woman is preparing to bury. Before she gets the chance, Campbell wakes up and flees his captor, making his way to a bar where his fellow Dirty Knobs are playing. He joins the band onstage, but the woman has followed him into the watering hole, where she proceeds to do a threatening dance in front of the stage. Mike then flees the bar with the woman in pursuit. Watch the full video to find out Campbell’s fate.
After multiple delays because of COVID-19, Campbell and The Dirty Knobs finally will hit the road on a U.S. tour launching March 9 in Tampa, Florida. Visit TheDirtyKnobs.com for the band’s full schedule.
Here’s the full External Combustion track list:
“Wicked Mind”
“Brigitte Bardot”
“Cheap Talk”
“External Combustion”
“Dirty Job” — featuring Ian Hunter
“State of Mind” — featuring Margo Price
“Lightning Boogie”
“Rat City”
“In This Lifetime”
“It Is Written”
“Electric Gypsy”
It’ll be a little bit longer before you hear the new Megadeth album.
In an interview with Forbes, frontman Dave Mustaine shares that the long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia is now expected to arrive this summer.
“I know that our actual official record release date had gotten moved back again with all of the distribution stuff, and all of these issues with getting product from one place to the next with record plants making vinyl,” Mustaine explains. “We’re not reliant on vinyl so much but just the whole process has been delayed, so it’s just gotten moved back again.”
“I believe at the time when the record comes out this summer we’ll be on a tour that we’re going to be announcing,” he adds. “But I can’t really get into that right now because I don’t know for sure the dates.”
Mustaine previously told American Songwriter that the record, titled The Sick, the Dying…and the Dead!, was set for release this spring.
While you wait for the record to arrive, you can replay the 12-second clip of the new song “Life in Hell,” which Mustaine shared in a recent Cameo video.
You can also catch Megadeth live on the 2022 leg of the Metal Tour of the Year, kicking off in April. The bill also includes Lamb of God, Trivium and In Flames.
Dashboard Confessional has released a new song called “Burning Heart,” a track off the band’s upcoming album, All the Truth That I Can Tell.
“In the song, there’s this sense of, ‘OK, here we go! Are you ready? Because it’s starting!'” says frontman Chris Carrabba. “This was the first one I wrote for the new album and it’s the one outlier of the bunch.”
“In this setting, the conceit of the song is between two people in a relationship — well, you only hear one side,” he adds. “That’s the bigger part of the conceit: what if you only heard the one side of the conversation?”
You can download “Burning Heart” now via digital outlets. Its accompanying video premieres Friday at noon ET.
“Burning Heart” is the second track to be released from All the Truth That I Can Tell, following lead single “Here’s to Moving On.” The whole album arrives February 25.
Dashboard will hit the road in support of All the Truth on a co-headlining tour with Jimmy Eat World launching February 27 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Prior to that, Carrabba will play a pair of solo acoustic shows taking place February 22 in New York City and February 25 in Los Angeles. Tickets to those dates go on sale Friday at 2 p.m. ET.
When Betty White died on December 31, just weeks shy of her 100th birthday, Cher was one of the celebrities who took to social media to mourn her loss. Now she’ll be joining many other stars in helping to celebrate the award-winning TV icon in a new NBC special.
Celebrating Betty White, America’s Golden Girlairs this Monday, January 31, at 10 p.m. ET and will stream the next day on Peacock. Along with Cher, those who’ll be sharing their favorite memories and stories of White include President Joe Biden, Tina Fey, Ted Danson, Valerie Bertinelli, Jimmy Fallon, Goldie Hawn, Jay Leno, Bryan Cranson, Ellen DeGeneres, Jean Smart and more.
When White died, Cher tweeted, “I Watched Her on her first TV Show Life With Elizabeth When I Was 7 Yrs Old. When She Did [the] Sonny & Cher [show], I Got a Chance To Tell Her. I Was Embarrassed cause tears came to my eyes. She put her arms around me, & I Felt 7 again.
“Some Ppl Are Called ICONS, BETTY IS A TRUE ICON,” Cher continued. She also posted a GIF of Betty shimmying, and wrote, “BELOVED ICON…YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.”
Cher also directed fans to a YouTube clip of Betty and her Golden Girls co-stars performing the Sonny & Cher hit “I Got You Babe” on season five on that sitcom, while fans shared a clip of Betty and Cher performing together on the Sonny & Cher Show.
On January 21, Cher apparently spilled the beans about the NBC special, which was just announced yesterday, by tweeting, “I’m So Relieved & Happy That there Will Be A Program Where We Will Talk About Betty. My one fear is…. I may cry.”
Michael Bublé is definitely reaching new heights on his eagerly anticipated new album Higher, due out March 25. The album’s now available for pre-order, and the first single, “I’ll Never Not Love You,” is out now.
The new album features a duet with country music icon Willie Nelson on Willie’s classic song “Crazy,” plus Michael’s versions of Bob Dylan‘s “Make You Feel My Love,” Sam Cooke‘s “Bring It On Home to Me” and the standards “Smile” — accompanied by a gospel choir — and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”
One unexpected track is Michael’s version of “My Valentine,” which was written by Paul McCartney and appears on McCartney’s 2012 album Kisses on the Bottom. The Beatles legend himself produced the track.
“This time out, I opened myself up completely to trying new things. I dug deeper while working and surrounding myself with the greatest music makers on the planet with gigantic imaginations,” Michael says of the album, adding, “Every moment felt magical or that the universe was conspiring to bring me to this moment in time 20 years into this amazing ride I’ve been on. I have never been more excited after completing an album.”
Famed producer Bob Rock, who also worked on the album, adds, “This was the most focused and inspired Michael has been. He understood the record he wanted to make. He had a clear vision. As soon as we started, he stuck his neck out to make each song get to the place that he was hearing it in his head.”
As previously reported, Michael will do a limited engagement at Resorts World Las Vegas from April 27 to May 7.
Here’s the track listing for Higher:
“I’ll Never Not Love You”
“My Valentine”
“A Nightingale Sang In Berkley Square”
“Make You Feel My Love”
“Baby, I’ll Wait”
“Higher”
“Crazy” (with Willie Nelson)
“Bring It On Home To Me”
“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”
“Mother”
“Don’t Take Your Love From Me”
“You’re The First, The Last, My Everything”
“Smile” (bonus track)
Jethro Tull‘s latest album, The Zealot Gene, the veteran prog-rock band’s first new studio effort in over 18 years, was released today.
Frontman Ian Anderson tells ABC Audio that he considers the 12-track collection something of a concept album, because the songs are based on a list of positive and negative “extreme human emotions” he compiled, that he then recognized as “words that I remember reading in the Bible.”
Anderson explains that the list included “nice stuff, like love, fraternal love, erotic love, spiritual love, compassion, loyalty,” as well as “bad stuff, like anger and rage and jealousy and vengeance.”
Ian notes that he felt the song “The Zealot Gene” was a good choice for the album’s title track because it’s “about that extreme of emotion, the degree to which things are polarized into black and white, and opposites, especially in the populist world of politics today.”
The singer/flutist/guitarist says he began work on the album in 2017 and had recorded seven of the songs with his band in the studio before the COVID-19 pandemic started. After the pandemic began, Anderson recorded the basic tracks for the other five tunes by himself, then enlisted the group’s other members to add their parts remotely.
Ian says this resulted in an album with “a little bit more dynamic range,” because the last five songs wound up being more sparse and acoustic-based than the first seven.
Anderson made The Zealot Gene with the members of his longtime solo band, but says he decided to release the record under the Jethro Tull moniker because “it seemed appropriate to recognize the, on average, 15 years of long service that the members of the band have had playing with me over the years.”
Here’s The Zealot Gene‘s full track list:
“Mrs. Tibbets”
“Jacob’s Tales”
“Mine Is the Mountain”
“The Zealot Gene”
“Shoshana Sleeping”
“Sad City Sisters”
“Barren Beth, Wild Desert John”
“The Betrayal of Joshua Kynde”
“Where Did Saturday Go?”
“Three Loves, Three”
“In Brief Visitation”
“The Fisherman of Ephesus”
