It’s time for more adventures with Lil Dicky and friends: the FXX comedy Dave is back Wednesday for season 3.
This season picks up where last season left off, with the gang out on tour — perfect for star and creator Dave Burd aka Lil Dicky. He tells ABC Audio what excited him most was being in different cities in the first episodes and having “all these different types of themes and short film vibes all around every single time, all while certainly having a cohesive story together throughout the season.”
It’s a life he and Davionte “GaTa” Ganter — Dicky’s real-life hype man — know well.
“Before any of the show, me and GaTa were touring musicians,” he explains. “Those experiences being so incredible, and interesting and enlightening … was such a light bulb moment in my brain to be like, ‘This is a TV show,’ you know?”
Season 2 premiered back in June 2021, and Burd shares why so much time passed between seasons: “I’m still just as active as a musician as ever … I have to be able to make my album, I have to be able to work on my music career.”
Besides, says Burd, “The idea of making a show about my life becomes almost false if you’re not living a life.”
Despite the show’s success, Burd says only about one in 10 people call him Dave rather than Dicky. But he notes, “Before the show, it was zero in 10 people. As much as that is my rap name, I don’t relate to being called [Lil Dicky] the same way I would be called Dave.”
Donald Glover‘s career went through a rough patch during his pre-Atlanta days. His request to perform at the BET Awards was turned down, as they wanted Kendrick Lamar, and he got booed while opening for Kid Cudi at New York’s Terminal 5. If there’s one door he’s happy closed, however, it’s his former desire to be on the cast of SNL.
“I dodged so many bullets,” Glover tells GQ. “Me being on SNL would’ve killed me. I got friends who made it on SNL and, at the time, I was like, damn. But if I got on SNL, my career wouldn’t have happened.”
“And thank God,” Glover continues. “Thank God I didn’t get some of those pilots. I wanted so desperately to be on Parks and Rec because it was the cool, hipster show. I am the bullet dodger. I feel like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. That wasn’t a mistake, you know? God did that.”
Glover says he heard his stint with stand-up was the reason he failed to secure a position on SNL, but chalks his comedy experience up to the fact that “everybody’s got to pay a price.”
“If I hadn’t done that stuff, I probably wouldn’t have been in The Daily Show’s writers room,” he says.
As bad as his stand-up was, Glover says he received some words of encouragement from a fellow comedian. “I was with Chris Rock, and he was like, ‘People aren’t good [at stand-up] until they’re your age. The only one who was better when he was younger was Eddie [Murphy]. Why aren’t you doing this s***?’”
Though he’s building his new production company/incubator/cultural library Gilga, Glover’s now down to take another stab at comedy.
The Revivalists‘ new single, “Kid,” has been climbing the charts, hitting the top three on Billboard‘s Alternative Airplay ranking. Though the band’s collective family has been expanding in recent years, the song isn’t addressed to one specific “kid.”
“In a non-condescending way, it’s being sort of paternalistic,” guitarist Zack Feinberg tells ABC Audio of “Kid’s” message. “If you’re talking to somebody, like, ‘Hey, kid,’ like, pat them on the back, in an encouraging way, in a really kind way.”
Frontman David Shaw feels that the openness of “Kid” allows listeners to “attach their own story a bit to it.”
“For me, for instance, it could be a letter to my past self,” Shaw explains. “It’s, like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna be OK just living your truth, live for the spirit of right now.'”
While that’s how Shaw may see the song now, that wasn’t exactly his original intention during the writing process.
“We don’t necessarily know where some of this comes from,” Shaw says. “It’s just an interesting thing that kinda just, like, happens.”
“Often times, I think, we figure some of this stuff out kind of, like, later, which is really interesting,” he adds. “It’s a part of the art I really cherish and love, I think.”
“Kid” is the lead single off The Revivalists’ upcoming album, Pour It Out into the Night, due out June 2.
The Beatles have influenced a lot over the years, including hairstyles, clothes and other musicians. And apparently that also includes comics.
A new exhibit at the Liverpool Beatles Museum, curated by former Spider-Man editor Tim Quinn, examines that influence on comics, including a variety of artwork featuring the legendary band from several world-famous cartoonists.
“The exhibition all started after I came across a comic which referenced the Beatles. Back in 1963, I was cutting these comics out and sticking them in a scrapbook as each Beatles reference came out,” Quinn tells the Liverpool Echo. “I then realized that the Beatles, as their fame grew, were just about everywhere in newspapers and magazines, and that somebody needed to compile this. I’ve been preparing for this exhibition for 60 years!”
The exhibit, which is now open to the public, plans to continuously add new artwork. In addition to Quinn, it will be curated by Roag Best, who is the brother of former Beatles drummer Pete Best.
Best shares, “We know about the movies, we know about the records, we know about all these different aspects, but we felt that the Beatles in comics had been overlooked.”
He adds, “After sitting with Tim and discussing the exhibition, it seemed like a no brainer that we should do something to represent the Beatles in comics.”
If you’re upset at having to pay 50 bucks for a Taylor Swift tour t-shirt, this’ll make you feel better: Some of Elton John‘s tour merchandise is going for more than $2,000 a pop.
For the current U.K. leg of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, Elton has teamed up with the upscale department store chain Selfridges for a special collection of merchandise. The items include regular stuff like t-shirts, mugs and socks, but those fans with deeper pockets can purchase a $300 candle shaped like a platform boot, a $400 Elton teddy bear, a $2300 suitcase, a $2500 polka-dot jacket, a $2200 clutch purse and a $2100 silk bathrobe.
Other Elton-branded items include boxer shorts, rugs, ceramic vases and plates, eyewear, and a yellow Snoopy figurine wearing Elton-style glasses that’ll set you back $425.
You can order all these items online from Selfridges if you’re not in the U.K. for the tour. Elton’s currently in the middle of a string of shows at London’s O2 Arena which runs through April 17.
Veruca Salt co-frontwoman Louise Post has announced her debut solo album.
The record is titled Sleepwalker and arrives June 2. You can listen to lead single “Guilty” now via digital outlets.
“Throughout it all, I felt like my higher purpose was screaming at me, trying to wake me up from my despair and setting me on a path of creativity,” Post says of the inspiration behind the album. “I had felt paralyzed and desolate as the pandemic set in and writing these songs helped snap me out of my stupor and reclaim a small part of the solution.”
Post will be playing a run of North American tour dates in June and July.
Veruca Salt put out a new album, Ghost Notes, in 2015 after the original lineup reunited in 2013. The alt-rockers are known for their ’90s singles, including “Seether,” which inspired the name of the band Seether.
As both the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Marvel Studios and the new co-CEO of DC Studios, James Gunn has a unique perspective on the superhero universe.
Gunn spoke to Rolling Stone about his new gig with Warner Bros., which he’s also writing and directing Superman: Legacy for, versus his time with Disney-owned Marvel Studios.
“I learned so much from making these movies,” he says. “But it’s not like Superman is going to have exactly the same vibe as a Guardians movie. It’s actually quite different.”
He also disagrees with presumed competition between the two studios. “To be frank, I think the better Marvel movies do, it’s better for DC, and the better DC movies do, it’s better for Marvel,” he expresses.
Gunn is mounting promotion of Guardians Vol. 3 and a 10-year plan for DC Studios just as box office returns for both DC’s Shazam: Fury of the Gods and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania suggest superhero fatigue.
Gunn agrees, to a point. “I think there is such a thing as superhero fatigue,” he says. “I think it doesn’t have anything to do with superheroes. It has to do with … if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character.”
He explains, “We love Superman. We love Batman. We love Iron Man. Because they’re these incredible characters … And if it becomes just a bunch of nonsense onscreen, it gets really boring. … It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they’re superhero movies or not. If [you’re] … just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are … it just gets fatiguing, and I think that’s very, very real.”
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens May 5.
Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, ABC News’ parent company.
In the new episode of his podcast Life is Short with Justin Longon Tuesday, the actor, known for his roles in the recent hit Barbarian and the classic Galaxy Quest, had a very special guest: his now-fiancée, Kate Bosworth.
He and his Straw Dogs star partner discussed why they decided to share the news about their engagement on the podcast.
“I think we’re both deciding to share this in this space because we’re probably gonna be asked about it and we thought, ‘Well, how can we talk about this in a way that makes us feel the best,'” Bosworth said. “And we thought, ‘Oh, I’d really like to just talk about it with you.'”
Long said he had unexpectedly popped the question before the special proposal that he had planned for Bosworth around her birthday. Bosworth explained that Long had talked about spending the rest of their lives together while speaking to a therapist after having gone through “this really hard thing” together.
“We were trying to move through things at the time and she gave us a really great piece of advice, which was: Make sure that you’re pretty consistently asking the other [for] what you need, or asking the other what they need,” Bosworth recalled.
She continued, “I remember, I smiled at you and I said, ‘What do you need?’ And he, like, really looked at me and said, ‘To spend my life with you.'”
“And I smiled and I said, ‘Well, yeah, you have that. Oh my gosh, you have that,'” Bosworth added. “And he said, ‘No, I mean I really want to spend my life with you.'”
When Long did officially pop the question, he described, “It was the easiest. The words just came out, like, so naturally.”
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump was formally charged in New York City Tuesday with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to 2016 hush money payments, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, paid $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about an affair she claimed to have had with Trump, which Trump has long denied.
Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office say that Trump illegally falsified business records when his reimbursement of the funds to Cohen was logged in the Trump Organization’s books as a “monthly retainer” for Cohen’s legal services.
The former president, who has denied all wrongdoing, entered a plea of not guilty to all charges.
In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that Trump was accused of “falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.”
“During the election, TRUMP and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. TRUMP then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws,” the statement said. “TRUMP is charged in a New York State Supreme Court indictment with 34 counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree.”
“According to court documents and statements made on the record in court, from August 2015 to December 2017, TRUMP orchestrated his ‘catch and kill’ scheme through a series of payments that he then concealed through months of false business entries,” the statement said. “In one instance, American Media Inc. (‘AMI’), paid $30,000 to a former Trump Tower doorman, who claimed to have a story about a child TRUMP had out of wedlock.”
“In a second instance, AMI paid $150,000 to a woman who alleged she had a sexual relationship with TRUMP. When TRUMP explicitly directed a lawyer who then worked for the Trump Organization as TRUMP’s Special Counsel to reimburse AMI in cash, the Special Counsel indicated to TRUMP that the payment should be made via a shell company and not by cash. AMI ultimately declined to accept reimbursement after consulting their counsel. AMI, which later admitted its conduct was unlawful in an agreement with federal prosecutors, made false entries in its business records concerning the true purpose of the $150,000 payment,” according to the statement.
“In a third instance — 12 days before the presidential general election — the Special Counsel wired $130,000 to an attorney for an adult film actress. The Special Counsel, who has since pleaded guilty and served time in prison for making the illegal campaign contribution, made the payment through a shell corporation funded through a bank in Manhattan,” the statement said.
“After winning the election, TRUMP reimbursed the Special Counsel through a series of monthly checks, first from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust — created in New York to hold the Trump Organization’s assets during TRUMP’s presidency — and later from TRUMP’s bank account. In total, 11 checks were issued for a phony purpose. Nine of those checks were signed by TRUMP. Each check was processed by the Trump Organization and illegally disguised as a payment for legal services rendered pursuant to a non-existent retainer agreement. In total, 34 false entries were made in New York business records to conceal the initial covert $130,000 payment. Further, participants in the scheme took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the reimbursements,” said the statement.
Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, was indicted on the charges on Thursday, becoming the first current or former U.S. president to be indicted for criminal conduct.
Kelly Clarksonrevealed the title and release date of the first song off her new album, Chemistry. It’s called “Mine” and is out April 14. Kelly also shared a video of herself recording the song in the studio. “Someone’s gonna show you/ How a heart can be used/ Like you did mine,” she sings on the track.
Lizzo, BTS, Selena Gomez and Harry Styles are among the music stars nominated for 2023 Webby Awards, which recognize excellent work on the internet. Other nominees include Megan Thee Stallion, Christina Aguilera, Doja Cat and Blackpink. Voting kicks off Tuesday.
Sam Smith announced on their Instagram Tuesday that “Unholy” featuring Kim Petras just reached an impressive milestone. “Unholy has hit 1 Billion streams,” Sam wrote. “Watching you all embrace this song has been so special and WILD, thank you sailors.”
Jax shared a sweet video to Instagram of the moment she met one of her idols, Pink. “I got to meet my childhood hero and she was even sweeter and more down to earth than I imagined,” she captioned the clip. “P!NK, if you see this, thank you for taking the time to say hi and hug me. You are such a huge part of why I sing and this was one of the coolest moments of my life.”
BTS has joined The Beatles and The Supremes as the only groups to have at least six Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers and at least one member with a solo number one, Billboard reports. BTS as a group has tallied six Hot 100 number ones, and this week Jimin scored his first solo number one on the chart.
