Sam Smith reveals the person we were first introduced to was not who they truly were. Instead, it marked a time when they tried to fit in.
Speaking toRolling Stone UK, the singer says fans are now seeing a more authentic version of who they are.
Sam revealed they “wore all-female clothing and full makeup” through their teenage years and “was even more dressed up than I would be now.”
So, what changed?
“People would stare at me. I became exhausted with that,” the singer said, so they began “exploring a more masculine wardrobe and setting … It just so happened that as I started to explore that, my music started to get picked up.”
Sam acknowledges their debut album, The Lonely Hour, arrived at “a time when I wanted to take a break and fit in.” The singer is now reversing course with their next album, Gloria, because they “got fed up with fitting in and wanted to go back to how I was when I was younger.”
Gloria also marks an emotional turning point in Sam’s career, because they’re able “to express certain things” in their music, such as their sexuality and happiness. “Those themes were sometimes incredibly private and I felt more comfortable showing other sides of me,” Sam said of their initial decision to sing about yearning and heartache.
Sam noted the change of the direction is because “I was just sick of being heartbroken.”
Sam came out as non-binary and genderqueer in 2019, and is happy to be experimenting with fashion and makeup once again. The singer added, “Self-love is not a destination — it’s a daily commitment to accept yourself.”
Incubus is linking up with Coheed and Cambria for a trio of tour dates this spring.
The shows will take place May 23 in Wilmington, North Carolina, May 24 in Columbia, South Carolina, and May 26 in Rogers, Arkansas. Tickets go on sale this Friday, January 20, at 10 a.m. ET.
Both Incubus and Coheed will also be performing at the 2023 Welcome to Rockville festival in Florida, while Brandon Boyd and company are lined up for Las Vegas’ Sick New World nu metal revival fest, as well.
Incubus’ most recent release is their 2020 EP Trust Fall (Side B), while Coheed dropped a new album, Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind, last June.
Over the years, Rihanna has collaborated with many other artists, from Jay-Z and Maroon 5 to Coldplay, Eminem and Drake. But a new survey reveals that the surprise guest most fans want to see Rihanna bring onstage during her halftime performance is someone who hasn’t graced the Super Bowl stage since 2001.
VegasInsider.com polled just over 1,100 people to find out who they’d most want to see Rihanna collaborate with at the big game. The winner, with 22.6% of the vote, was Britney Spears. The two teamed up back in 2011 for a remix of Ri-Ri’s single “S&M,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The second-most-wanted guest was Eminem, followed by Rihanna’s baby daddy, A$AP Rocky.
Shockingly, Chris Brown tied for fifth place with 11.48% of the vote.
As for the song most people want to hear Rihanna perform, her 2012 number-one hit “Diamonds” topped the list, followed by “Don’t Stop the Music,” the Kanye West collab “All of the Lights” and, oddly, her 2015 patriotic single “American Oxygen.”
As previously reported, one of the musical directors of the show, Adam Blackstone, told Rolling Stone that the halftime show will “be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before,” adding that Rihanna “can do no wrong with the set list because she has massive, massive, massive hits … it’s just going to be [about] how we execute them.”
We’ll have to wait until February 12 to find out what Rihanna has up her designer sleeve for Super Bowl LVII. It airs live from Glendale, Arizona, on Fox.
In a new interview with Goldmine magazine, KISS’ Gene Simmons is revealing the 10 albums that changed his life. And folks may be a bit surprised by some of the records that made the list.
“As a preamble, when I first came to America (from Israel) as an eight-and-a-half-year-old boy, this was pre-Beatles. I came to America with my mother in 1958, and I had never heard of rock and roll, and I actually had never seen a television set,” he tells the mag. “The first music I heard in America was Chuck Berry and Little Richard and all that.”
Albums on Gene’s list include greatest hits albums by Ray Charles, Dave Clark Five, Patsy Cline, James Brown and ABBA; 1968’s The Beatles aka The White Album;Jeff Beck Group‘sTruth/Beck-Ola; Led Zeppelin’s 1969 self-titled debut; and The Who’s Tommy.
Of course one of his band’s albums had to make the list, as well, with Gene picking KISS’ 1979 release, Destroyer, noting, “Some of those songs have survived the test of time. It was a strange period. It was the beginning of the end, really. The band started to fall to pieces way back in ’76.”
As for people who may be surprised that ABBA’s Greatest Hits made the list, Gene notes that what he loves “is the ability to craft songs that are forever.” He adds, “So if I’m riding in my car and ABBA music comes on, I turn it up and that’s the sign of greatness. Undeniable songwriting. You just can’t touch it.”
What’s the best parenting style? That’s the main question at the center of the new ABC show The Parent Test.
In the show, host Ali Wentworth and expert Dr. Adolph Brown explore different ways to raise kids.
“There’s helicopter parents, there’s free range, there’s high achievement. And basically these groups of parents are voting on themselves so that we can, at the end of the season, finally show you the most effective parenting style,” Wentworth tells ABC Audio.
According to Doc Brown, a clinical psychologist and parenting expert, the most effective style is any style that “has fun, which is an authentic part of learning…firmness, which is consistency, structure, limits and boundaries…fairness, understanding that…rearing a child today is different from rearing a child in the seventies, eighties and the nineties…The last part is making sure that every single child you believe in them.”
But it’s not a one-size fits all.
“To say a best style, you would have to say that every child is the same,” says Brown. “It’s important to have the aspects of what makes a great parenting style more so than oftentimes what you use as the umbrella definition or name for the style.”
Wentworth, who’s married to Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos, says the show inspired them to have some “very frank conversations” about parenting.
“I parent through humor and I think it’s something that in the future will become a parenting style. But that’s about avoiding confrontation and having them listen in a different way,” she says. “But I realized, George and I have a lot of traditional parenting in our parenting style that I never realized until we sort of went in depth with that family.”
The Parent Test airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
(NEW YORK) — Two U.S. citizens and two permanent U.S. residents were among those killed in the plane crash in Nepal earlier this week, State Department spokesman Ned Price said during a briefing Wednesday.
“We are deeply saddened to hear of the tragic Yeti Airlines crash over the weekend, which killed 72 people, including two U.S. citizens and two lawful permanent residents,” Price said. “Our thoughts are with the families of those on board.”
“The United States stands ready to support Nepal in any way we can at this difficult hour,” Price added.
The Yeti Airlines flight from Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, to Pokhara crashed near Pokhara International Airport on Sunday. All 72 people, including 68 passengers and four crew, died as it plunged into a 300-meter-deep gorge. There were three children and three infants on the flight.
In the initial list of nationalities of those on board the flight, there was no mention of any Americans. Of the 68 passengers on board the twin-engine plane, 15 were Nepali, according to a flight manifest shared by Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority on Sunday. Officials said the remaining passengers were from India, Russia, South Korea, Ireland, Australia, Argentina and France.
The plane’s two black boxes — the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — were both recovered on Monday. The data recorder will be sent to France for it to be analyzed, authorities said.
Authorities have not said what they believe doomed the airliner.
Monday was declared a national day of mourning in the country.
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Atlanta 130, Dallas 122
Washington 116, New York 105
Charlotte 122, Houston 117
Oklahoma City 126, Indiana 106
Miami 124, New Orleans 98
Memphis 115, Cleveland 114
Utah 126, LA Clippers 103
Denver 122, Minnesota 118
Sacramento 116, LA Lakers 111
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Ottawa 5, Pittsburgh 4 (OT)
Boston 4, NY Islanders 1
Colorado 4, Calgary 1
San Jose 4, Dallas 3
Tampa Bay 5, Vancouver 2
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Seton Hall 67, Connecticut 66
Virginia 78, Virginia Tech 68
Auburn 67, LSU 49
West Virginia 74, TCU 65
DePaul 73, Xavier 72
Missouri 79, Arkansas 76
Marquette 83, Providence 75
(NEW YORK) — A 12-year-old boy from Massachusetts caught a great white shark while on a fishing charter in Florida.
Campbell Keenan spent 45 minutes fighting to reel in the fish before it was close enough for him to see what kind it was.
“We realized it was a shark when it was like 20 feet away, probably, and we had to get it in. We put this, like, buoy on it to make it not go under,” Campbell told ABC News in an interview.
When it was close enough, the captain said it was a great white shark and everyone on the boat was “ecstatic,” Campbell said.
“When you pull the rod up, it was like lifting a 50-pound weight,” Campbell said. “It was so hard to pull up.”
The fish turned out to be an 11-foot-long shark estimated to be between 400 to 700 pounds, Keenan’s mother Colleen Keenan, told ABC News in an interview.
“Campbell was doing the reeling and then the first mate was guiding him and telling him how to let the rod go down and then pull it back up and reel as he’s pulling up. And then I was holding on to Campbell because he wasn’t strapped in anything and the great white could have easily just taken him for a ride,” Colleen Keenan said.
Campbell said they did not pull the shark into the boat because there are regulations in the U.S. against taking great whites out of the water, as the captain advised them, but they pulled the shark in close enough for the captain to tag it, before releasing it.
“I didn’t get it closer than four feet to it. But the captain got right up there and tagged them,” Campbell Keenan said.
Campbell, who was in Florida for his sister’s hockey tournament said he goes fishing all the time and has been on two charter boats. His mom said they set out on the trip hoping to catch a sailfish or tuna.
This is the third great white shark Capt. Paul Paolucci has caught since 2003, he told ABC News in an interview.
Paolucci said he made a small puncture hole on the shark then used a 6-foot stick to attach the tag to the shark.
“It was very exciting for everybody involved. And for everybody else, it was their first great white,” Paolucci said.
Bush has announced a livestream of the band’s upcoming show in Los Angeles, taking place January 29.
You can tune in to watch beginning at 9:15 p.m. PT via the streaming platform Veeps. For more info, visit Bush.Veeps.com.
The LA concert is the second date on Bush’s headlining U.S. tour, which kicks off January 28 in Reno, Nevada. Gavin Rossdale and company will be supporting their new album, The Art of Survival, which features the single “More Than Machines.”
“We wanted to do some shows where we could get close to the die-hard Bush fans again,” Rossdale said of the tour.
The bill for the tour will also feature Alice in Chains‘ Jerry Cantrell, Silversun Pickups, Candlebox and Starcrawler on select dates.
(ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.) — A New Mexico man, who lost his bid for the state legislature as a Republican, continues to be held without bail after his first court appearance on Wednesday since being arrested for allegedly orchestrating recent attacks at the homes of four Democratic lawmakers.
Solomon Peña, 39, appeared remotely via video for an appearance in the Metropolitan Courthouse in downtown Albuquerque Wednesday afternoon, wearing a red jail uniform, shackles and a mask hanging off his left ear. He is being held on several charges, including multiple counts of shooting at a home and shooting from a motor vehicle, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
During the brief hearing, Peña’s attorney said they do not have any challenges to probable cause in the complaint against him. The judge ruled there is probable cause to hold Peña and set a hearing for Feb 1 to talk about the possibility of bail. For now, Peña will remain in custody without bail.
The district attorney’s office has 10 days to file official charges against Peña, which could differ from what he’s being held on currently.
“At this point, the charges against Mr. Peña are merely accusations that have not yet been tested by the full rigor of the judicial process,” Peña’s attorney, Roberta Yurcic, said in a statement to ABC News. “Mr. Peña is presumed innocent of the charges against him. Mr. Peña and I look forward to a full and fair investigation of these claims. I plan to fully defend Mr. Peña and fiercely safeguard his rights throughout this process.”
Peña is accused of paying four men to shoot at the residences of local Democratic officials, including Bernalillo County Commissioner Adriann Barboa on Dec. 4; New Mexico House Speaker Javier Martinez on Dec. 8; then-Bernalillo Commissioner Debbie O’Malley on Dec. 11; and state Sen. Linda Lopez on Jan. 3, according to a press release from the Albuquerque Police Department. No one was injured in the shootings, and police expect to file charges for the other men who were allegedly involved.
Police allege Peña “paid the men cash and sent text messages with addresses where he wanted them to shoot at the homes.” He also allegedly “went with the men and attempted to shoot at one of the homes, but the AR handgun he was using malfunctioned. Another shooter fired more than a dozen rounds from a separate handgun,” police said.
Peña was taken into custody on Monday, as detectives served search warrants at his apartment and at the home of two of the men he allegedly paid, according to police. An image of the suspect released by police shows him wearing a MAGA sweatshirt and standing in front of Trump flags.
Police credited detective work matching shell casings. A break in the case came when a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputy stopped a silver Nissan Maxima about 4 miles away from Lopez’s home on Jan. 3, just 40 minutes after the shooting. The driver, identified as Jose Trujillo, was arrested on an outstanding warrant. Deputies found more than 800 fentanyl-laced pills and two firearms inside the car, which was registered to Peña, according to police.
In November, Peña unsuccessfully ran against Democratic incumbent state Rep. Miguel P. Garcia for House District 14. Police said Garcia had sued Peña in August, arguing that the Republican candidate was not eligible to serve in the New Mexico House of Representatives because he is a convicted felon and was not pardoned by the governor. A judge ruled in September that Peña could remain on the ballot because the law is unconstitutional, according to police.
Police said Lopez and county commissioners told detectives that Peña “showed up uninvited at their homes in November after the election” and “provided them with documents that he said indicated fraud in the election results.”
